The Parallel Structure of Christian Romanticism

“The old Papacy lies in its grave."

First of all, I thought you might like to know about a couple of videos that popped up over the past week regarding me and my work.

The first is from my old friend Roger Buck. Roger and I have been corresponding for quite a few years and I even edited all three of his books. In the mammoth (almost 4 hours!) “Sophiology, Tomberg and Technocracy Rising,” Roger engages my work very deeply—including our differences. I am very fond of both Roger and his wife, Kim, so I am very honored that Roger would undertake such a gargantuan task.

Second, last April I was interviewed by Aaron Parker of the Mourning Talk Show podcast on the topic of “The Soul/Spirit Distinction.” This one is a little shorter (by three hours!). I had almost forgotten about it, but was pleasantly surprised when it appeared this week. As you can see, it was a very enjoyable conversation.

But to the matter at hand…

Last week, my Regeneration Podcast partner Mike Sauter and I had the great pleasure of interviewing Fr. Anthony Chadwick, a priest of the Anglican Catholic Church living in France. I met Fr. Anthony, as one does, on the internet after he stumbled over my blog and found that we have much in common. Like me, Fr. Anthony has embraced the notion of Christian Romanticism as an important—perhaps the only—opportunity for religious renewal in the Age of the Archons. Fr. Anthony is very wise and practical in matters related to the Christian life, so it was a delight to speak with him in real time at long last. You can see our interview here.

Fr. Anthony has not always been a member of the Anglican Catholic Church. He was raised in the Anglican tradition in his native England, but then converted to the Roman Catholic Church where he pursued Holy Orders, even being ordained a deacon, before he became disenchanted with ecclesiality and institutional Christianity (you never want to know how sausage is made), which he describes as being characterized as an environment in which narcissists prey on empaths to a profound degree. I would argue that’s a pretty ecumenical phenomenon. It certainly jibes with my knowledge and experience. This interview came right on the heels of my completing an introduction to an edition of Novalis’s essay Christendom or Europe due to appear from Angelico Press very soon. So I’ve had Romanticism on the brain—even more than usual.

The vision Novalis lays out in Christendom or Europe begins with what comes across as a valorization of medieval Christianity, what might be taken as a kind of nostalgia. Indeed, many critics have accused Novalis of reactionary politics masking as medieval Catholic fairy-tale in the essay. But that would be a mistake. His is not a retrograde proposal on behalf of a kind of religious and cultural infantilization, but of an honest appraisal of his current moment and an imagination of a Christian future. In that he is not unlike his English contemporary William Blake or his medieval forerunner Joachim of Fiore. He anticipates the arrival of a regenerated Christianity. He might very well have said with William Butler Yeats, “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

Novalis was not only an intuitive poet, but a perceptive thinker; and he saw the cultural decay already overshadowing Europe in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation (he was a cradle Protestant), of the Enlightenment, and the rise of the nation state. In Christendom or Europe, he describes this decay:

“Everywhere the sense for the holy suffered from the manifold persecutions of its previous form, its former personality. The end product of the modern manner of thinking was termed ‘philosophy,’ and under that head was reckoned everything that was opposed to the old, hence primarily every objection against religion. The initial personal hatred of the Catholic faith passed gradually over into hatred of the Bible, of the Christian faith, and finally of religion in general. Still further, the hatred of religion extended itself quite naturally and consistently to all objects of enthusiasm. It made imagination and emotion heretical, as well as morality and the love of art, the future and the past.”

Sound familiar?

But Novalis also envisions a new era on the horizon: a new era in which Sophia is restored to her place in the Christian imagination, in what is perhaps the real meaning of Joachim’s Age of the Holy Spirit:

“Whoever has felt it no longer doubts of the era’s coming, and with sweet pride in his contemporaneity steps forth even from among the multitude to the new band of disciples. He has made a new veil for the Holy One, which, clinging, betrays the heavenly mold of her limbs and yet conceals her more decorously than any other. The veil is to the virgin what the mind is to the body, its indispensable organ, whose folds are the letters of her sweet annunciation. The infinite play of the folds is a cipher-music, for speech is too wooden and too insolent for the virgin: her lips open only for song.”

As I said, Novalis’s imagination is not a return to the past; still less is it a hope for all to unite (as Vladimir Solovyov would later champion) under the banner of a Pope:

“The old Papacy lies in its grave and Rome for the second time has become a ruin. Shall Protestantism not cease at last and make way for a new, enduring Church? The other continents await Europe’s reconciliation and resurrection in order to join with it and become fellow-citizens of the heavenly kingdom.”

And neither is Novalis’s Christian Romanticism a surreptitious form of nationalism (a phenomenon that continues to plague Eastern Orthodox churches both inside and outside of their native countries). As he writes, “Christendom must come alive again and be effective, and, without regard to national boundaries, again form a visible Church which will take into its bosom all souls athirst for the supernatural, and willingly become the mediatrix between the old world and the new.”

In the essay, Novalis speculates about the structure such a regenerated Christendom might take and that a time might come in which “from a holy womb of a venerable European Council shall Christendom arise.” That certainly is not a far cry from the notion of the European Union. But the European Union is a far cry from the notion of a regenerated Christendom. In fact, I would call the EU in its present configuration a post-totalitarian nightmare. Indeed, it’s nothing a diabolical parody (Satan works by parody) of the idea of Christendom. As I write in my introduction,

“After the European Union was formed, one of the important tasks set before its leaders was to create a symbolic representation that accurately depicted the aims of this new allegiance. This may, on the surface, not appear as important as policy, but as imaginative act, as magical idealism, it is all-important. The seal, a blue field with a circle of twelve stars, is intended to represent unity, but it is not far in the language of symbolism from the ‘woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head’ (12:1). Clearly, the ghost of Christendom haunts the EU, but it can hardly be called a Christian federation. Nevertheless, the Charlemagne Prize, awarded by the EU for ‘Distinguished service on behalf of European unification’ is presented each year on the Feast of the Ascension, though among its many worthy recipients have appeared not a few war criminals. A man cannot serve two masters.”

It is only too clear that we are all of us—even those in the “Democratic West”— living in the latest iteration of the post-totalitarianism the great Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote about over fifty years ago in the important (and by “important” I mean IMPORTANT) essay “The Power of the Powerless.” And the institutional churches, as we saw only too nakedly during the pandemic, have been nothing but complicit in this post-totalitarianism—but this is to be expected of organizational structures (among which we can include the EU) characterized by narcissists preying on empaths. (For the ugly role of the Catholic Church in this New World Order, check out my friend Guido Preparata’s recently published Empire and Church: Anglo-America’s Buyout of the Vatican and the Hyper-Modern Demise of Catholicism. It’s an explosive.) Thus the absolute necessity of a Christianity of the Wild, a Romantic Christianity, a Christianity that lives in truth: a parallel Christianity to post-totalitarianism Christianity.

This parallel Church might take the form of house churches, or small independent movements, or any of a number of possibilities for people to live their Christianity in truth. But it’s clear, at least it’s clear to me, that shepherds of the institutional churches have let the wolves into the sheep pens, thereby abdicating their authority as shepherds. No synod can fix that. Indeed, that “Synod on Synodality” is, in my eyes, naught but a transparent and buffoonish attempt to subvert what the hierarchy knows is inevitable while scrambling for a way to secure their crumbling power base. The time has come for a Romantic/Sophianic Christianity. Maybe this is what Joachim meant.

Havel describes a parallel structure this way:

“These parallel structures, it may be said, represent the most articulated expression so far of ‘living within the truth’. One of the most important tasks the ‘dissident movements’ have set themselves is to support and develop them. Once again, it confirms the fact that all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the system have their essential beginnings in the pre-political area, For what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims? What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to live—as a society—within the truth, to rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in a post-totalitarian system? What else is it but a non-violent attempt by people to negate the system within themselves and to establish their lives on a new basis, that is their own proper identity? And does this tendency not confirm once more the principle of returning the focus to actual individuals? After all, the parallel structures do not grow a priori out of a theoretical vision of systemic changes (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people. In fact, all eventual changes in the system, changes we may observe here in their rudimentary forms, have come to us as it were de facto, from ‘below’, because life compelled them to, not because they came before life, somehow directing it or forcing some change on it.”

As I’ve mentioned before, our decision to begin house church was a result of life compelling us to, not because of a political project, theory, or ideology. We had no choice.

In this, I by no means disavow the Christian traditions to which I am an heir—from Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and the various flowerings of mystical insight found in Jacob Boehme, Marguerite Porete, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan, The Cloud of Unknowing, and Dionysius the Areopagite among many others. I claim them all. But I also claim the Christianity of the future, that is even now revealing itself in time. As Gianni Vattimo writes in After Christianity, a work that takes Christendom or Europe as its starting point, “One might say, against all narrowly lay expectations, that the renewal of civic life in the Western world in the epoch of multiculturalism is mainly a problem of the renewal of the religious life.” This renewal is long overdue. The old structures are falling away; and as they fall away those seeking to retain power scramble to buttress the collapsing walls. Others, out of fear generally, cling to the forms as a drowning man might cling to a board following a shipwreck. But the walls are collapsing and the ship is shattered into pieces.

Surely a new revelation is at hand.

The “Hail Mary” sung in Irish