Thursday 13 November 2008

Radical Orthodoxy, Indeed

Quakerism, Primitive Methodism, and both the "Western Use" (Tridentinising, yet often Communist) and "English Use" (Mediaeval reconstructionist, yet association with which was one of the reasons given by the Communist Party of Great Britain for the expulsion of the Trotskyists) schools of Anglo-Catholicism were founded by and for people profoundly unsatisfied by the standard civic religion of the English.

All four were notable among opponents of the First World War, the Quakers entirely so.

And all but the Quakers (as a body rather than as individuals) were totally committed to the doctrinal and moral essentials of classical, historic, mainstream Christianity, and to the Augustinian patrimony of the West. (This makes both the Marxist and, from the Twenties onwards, Fascist tendencies within Anglo-Catholicism all the more tragic.)

Because, of course, that orthodoxy can never be reduced to civic religion of the English or anyone else. It is the most radical force in Western civilisation - literally so, since it constantly calls back that civilisation to its roots in and as the Biblical-Classical synthesis in Christ and His Church, including in the text of the Bible, at least the New Testament being as much Hellenistic and Roman as it is Hebrew, and vice versa. Indeed, it is the most radical force in the world. Or it is nothing.

And it was certainly something during the First World War. Truly a lesson for our own times.

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