Spiritual Problems of the Age: Part I

In this new age of the 21st century, the great triumph has been one of the material against the spirit. This began earlier, as Degrelle prophesied in The Burning Souls, where “the body is sick because the soul is sick,” yet even today there are many who entirely deny this problem altogether. I will therefore take it upon myself to explain how spirit has been trampled down by other forces, and the problems that have arisen because of it. 

If the great question of the 19th century was one of material, then the great questions of the 20th were of the spirit. The answer, however, was the denial of Spirit altogether. It should come as no surprise that the great counters to the now-ubiquitous liberal hegemony were Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism. Fascism promised to create the “New Fascist Man”, National Socialism idolized the “Übermensch”, and Communism attempted to build the “New Socialist Man”. All three are matters of spirit. Fascism was the most intellectually honest of them, directly embracing the Spirit and attempting to nurture it. Little wonder that the great proponents of Fascism were artists and poets! Even today their artistic legacy lives on. National Socialism, on the other hand, obscured the Spirit partially through pseudo-biological reasoning. While not necessarily the wrong approach, (for man is both body and Spirit) nonetheless it failed to synthesize the two properly. Communism was the most triumphant of the spiritual movements, most surprisingly because it pretended not to be so. Having dressed itself up in a veneer of Material, it still produced the outcomes of a deeply spiritual worldview, with a caste system, heresies, and attempted human transformation. No surprise then that it eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions; the house was built on sand. The sole survivor of the 20th century was material liberalism, which dominates today and directly denies the Spirit altogether.

Liberalism’s triumph has empowered it to dig its heels in, to further strengthen its claims to all final truth. Yet denial of the spiritual is fatal to any human civilization, so we see clearly how this gave rise to so many attempts to regain the Spirit. From the New Age religions, to the Jesus Movement, the Civil Rights Movement (ask yourself, why did it originate in churches, or give rise to religious impulse like Nation of Islam?), the LGBT movement, Women’s Liberation, the rise of “Trad Caths” or convert Orthodoxy (a nearly unprecedented phenomenon in the west), to the widespread use of SSRIs and other drugs to assuage human unhappiness, there is clear indication that the spiritual needs of people in the Liberal system are not being met. Most troubling, we now see the cracks in Liberalism forming, as it begins to embrace a particular kind of Spirit (that is, the Transgender movement) as legitimate and worth protecting and imposing. Transgenderism itself is an inherently spiritual claim, for the biological foundation is nonexistent; to be a “man trapped in a woman’s body” is an overtly spiritual statement. If Liberalism continues down this path, it will morph into something it is most definitely not, and will eventually go the way of Communism in the USSR, unable to bear the weight of its own contradictions.

Note: some have attempted to use reductionism to “solve” the questions of the age; I speak most clearly of Father Seraphim Rose. His assignment of “Nihilism” to every ill is unfortunate, for it requires an extremely simplified historical view and, most troublingly, declares the sole legitimacy of a political system that has only really existed in two places on earth, ever, and not at the same time. It inevitable gives rise to questions about why such systems did not appear in the West; taken to their logical conclusion, we will find whispers that Christianity in the West was always poisoned, as if to insult the memory of the first thousand years of Christian unity and the witness of the West’s saints! Such a view is too reductionist and leads to intellectual stagnation. Christianity itself was never reductionist, for even though theology does not attempt to claim’ novel truths, that which has been revealed over time is nonetheless development! Where there was truth in the Greek philosophers, Christianity accepted it; where there was truth in the Roman stoics, Christianity saw fit to adapt. Eastern triumphalism and static praxis are not the norm. The liturgy of St John Chrysostom is not the same today as it was 1500 years ago. Indeed, the existence of other rites, from the Latin Rite, the Sarum Rite, etc all witness that Christianity does not demand absolute uniformity in every material detail, but rather in matters of essential doctrine. Even today, hostility to the Western Rite demonstrates this poisonous attitude within the Church.  

With the problems demonstrated so clearly, we will return next time to explain in more detail what challenges face those who wish to ignite the Spirit once more.