"Our situation today is totally different from this. Of course we still have to contend, as the desert fathers had to, with the forms of evil endemic to the fallen human state. But, as a consequence of choices made by individuals and increasingly tolerated when not actively supported and subscribed to by society as a whole, we are now forced to live in society, if not in the world at large, according to forms that not only do not correspond in any way to the reality of the divine, human, or natural order, but are themselves actively and positively evil to a degree that goes far beyond the evil inevitably endemic to the fallen human state or that is a “natural” consequence of the fall; "
Not necessarily "totally different". The Fathers also lived during the years of Roman decline, which had all sorts of evil, from rejoicing for human killings and torture in the arena (including killing of Christians themselves), to all kinds of perverted sex and indulegnces, and from extreme greed and cruelty, to worship of dark imported Gods and self-worshiping/god-hating gnostic religions and philosophies...
Neither I nor Sherrard would ever state that any ancient society was perfect. Even the greatest ancient society was still post-Fall. But, despite all the horrors of late-Roman civilization, there was still a sense of the Sacred. This is something we, collectively, in the modern world, no longer have. Evil, even the extreme evils you mentioned, have always existed, but there is something qualitatively different about the modern world, modern life, and modern science. Rather than simply being evil, the modern human is on a trajectory towards nothingness itself; pure nihilism. And worst of all, this nihilism is viewed as a virtue. The Romans could be evil and knew it; modern man is evil and thinks he is being virtuous.
Great idea for a guest post. Every word Sherrard wrote is freighted with gold. One of the greatest spiritual and cultural lights Britain has brought forth. Look at any photo of him. Class and nobility are etched on every line of his face. A sane, rightly orientated society (not the UK then!) would laud him from the eves - statues, buildings named after him and so forth. But he isn't. Not that I can see anyway.
His presence and proximity were crucial, I feel, in keeping Christianity on Kathleen Raine's radar. Without PS around, I think Temenos might have drifted away from the Faith and all its mystical depth altogether.
The artist Cecil Collins once said of him (to John Tavener), 'Philip's really hot on sex and really hot on Orthodoxy.' Oddly enough, though Lawrence wasn't a professing Christian, I think the same words apply equally to him. There were no barriers, for either man, between sexuality and the sacred. Why should there be? They were on the same level - cut from the same cloth. They both had such a sacramental, holistic view of man and the cosmos. They foresaw the ecological crisis and, more than that, the deep materialistic biases that cause it and also ensure its continuation. Two Sun Men if ever there were! Prophets of the coming transformation, perhaps.
Can I ask please - what are you referring to exactly when you mention 'a perverse form of conservatism' currently threatening Orthodoxy? Do you mean its alleged co-option by elements of the American right or the kind of nationalist church we see in Russia, say, or something else again?
I'm Roman Catholic fwiw.
Keep up the ennobling and enriching work you're engaged in. You're playing a big part in setting the tone for the world that's coming after the Machine.
Thank you! Sherrard is one of those rare authors whose every word is worth reading, from his earliest essays, to his translations, to his final articles. You are correct: a sane society would laud Sherrard as a hero, but we don't live in a sane world, and Britain has not been sane for a very long time. In fact, I came to the conclusion that becoming an exile from England is one of the stages on the way that many of the greatest men of the last century had to pass through. It put them through the fire and hardened their moral and spiritual resolve.
I also agree that Sherrard helped to keep Raine on point. Unlike Sherrard, she could sometimes veer off into Jungianism, syncretism, Vedanta, etc., etc. At any rate, I am still immensely thankful for her work on Blake.
It is interesting you mentioned Cecil Collins. I recently reread his The Vision of the Fool: and Other Writings" and it impressed me even more than it did the first time.
I wish Lawrence and Sherrard could have met. I think, if DHL lived a couple more decades they could have been friends. Certainly their views are amenable. Regarding Lawrence and Christianity: he never rejected its truths, and he constantly voiced his love for the Bible and early Catholicism. I think Lawrence's work towards a revival of ancient wisdom was the opposite of new age reconstruction, but was, instead, work like that of Plethon, which Sherrard speaks favorably of in "Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition". On the other hand, there are a shocking number of places in "Apocalypse," his poems, and other late works, where Lawrence is criticizing Christianity, yet espousing the exact doctrines of the Eastern Orthodox Church or the early Fathers! Of course DHL needed to criticize Christianity as he saw it, since the Christianity of the West, particularly Protestantism, had and has descended so far from its roots. Oh, and regards sex, I believe your comments are spot on. I would only add that most people who selectively read Lawrence, without taking his entire corpus into account think that his views on nature, metaphysics and such, come from his views on sex, but they actually have things upside-down. For Lawrence, the re-sanctification of the cosmos comes first, along with a new vital relationship with the Divine, and his views on the sanctity of love and sex follow from that.
What I meant by 'a perverse form of conservatism' threatening Orthodoxy is both the infiltration of American Orthodox churches by Protestant converts who are unwilling to truly adopt the Orthodox mindset, and instead put on the Orthodox forms, but remain fundamentalists; and the hyper-nationalism of the state-entwined Orthodoxy of Russia. So, conservatism is a good thing if we just go by the meaning of the word, but I have to be careful, because at least in the USA, so-called conservatives are environment hating, big corporation loving people that are about as far from Lawrence and Sherrard as possible.
I think, overall, the Catholics have done a far better job of confronting modernity than the Orthodox. Think of Max Picard, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, Georges Bernanos, Romano Guardini, and (perhaps) Heidegger. I do believe that certain aspects of Scholasticism helped to precipitate the modern crisis and the Machine, but I also think that certain major Catholics of the last century, such as those just mentioned, and Maritain, became aware of that and tried to point the way out.
Thank you again. For the longest time I really debated whether to publish these essays online, worrying that I was compromising my principles. I still worry about that, but your kind and perspicacious words help to motivate me.
Yes, David Jones was another 20th century Catholic who perceived the scale and depth of our crisis. He called out The Machine - The Ram as he calls it - in those two seminal poems The Tribune's Visitation and The Tutelar of the Place. In many other works too. 'Levelling the world floor' as he put it. That's what the Ram/Machine does. That's what the Tribune stands for and the Tutelar stands against. Amazing that these poems were written during the mid-20th century and yet could have been written this morning given how bitingly relevant they are.
Another 'Lawrence' - Lawrence Durrell - also only really flourished as an artist and man once he left England. 'Pudding Island' he called it. I don't want to be too down on the place. Though my parents were Irish and I live now in Wales I was born in Manchester and lived there for most of my life. It's nurtured me well (kind of) but yes, there's something deeply inimical to the numinous at work in today's England. I like to think that it's a more modern, Whiggish overlay though. There's a latent spiritual energy one feels beneath the surface in England in both the landscape and the people. Peter Ackroyd conjures it well in his books. Blake is the great exemplar, of course. Lawrence is in that lineage too. Chesterton as well. A few others. It's all still there. A sleeping giant, you might say!
The essays of Jones are also worth reading: "[P]erfection in the cage of mediocrity, and the vulgarization of what once had the vitality of refinement, the disintegration of what was a unity, the emptying of being of what once was proudly full of being, the “signs” inadequate to what they signify, is most cause for “rage”—for perturbation."
By the way, if you haven't read it before, you definitely should check out Sherrard's "Extracts from a Journal written in Southern Spain." It is located on pp. 232-244 of Temenos 13. It is without a doubt the most Lawrencian thing Sherrard ever publicly published, and it is marvelous.
Thanks for this, Farasha. One small thing: in Sherrard's first paragraph, in the following sentence, there seems to something missing. Should it be "were it within", perhaps?
"They could be made sense of, were within the scope of human comprehension, and through a process of askesis leading to purification could be allayed or transcended."
Thank you. I just checked the original article and it is missing "it," but this article is one of the last things Sherrard wrote, and the journal it was published in is now defunct, so there may have been lapses in editing. Technically, both ways make sense, and Sherrard was such a precise writer I am cautious about changing anything, but your reading is compelling, so I added "it" in brackets.
Thank you. I noticed a few other small blips further down but they're not significant. I haven't yet read Kelley's book on Sherrard, but I'm curious about the role of 'godless' Bloomsbury. They were part of Sherrard's background and they were scorned by Lawrence too. And Schumacher went from being a great admirer of Keynes to viewing him as a promoter of greed and avarice. For all three, Bloomsbury appears to have been a significant point of reference.
Kelley's "book" is more of an article or pamphlet, and rather grossly misrepresents certain things. The best sources for the life of Sherrard are the two articles Metropolitan Kallistos wrote about him, and the obituaries from Kathleen Raine and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Sherrard's mother was deeply connected to Bloomsbury, and in some ways that helped Sherrard by being a point of reference to oppose. Lawrence abhorred the Bloomsbury crowd, and was sick for weeks after visiting Keynes in Cambridge. He said he had trouble removing the stench of corruption from his nose.
"Our situation today is totally different from this. Of course we still have to contend, as the desert fathers had to, with the forms of evil endemic to the fallen human state. But, as a consequence of choices made by individuals and increasingly tolerated when not actively supported and subscribed to by society as a whole, we are now forced to live in society, if not in the world at large, according to forms that not only do not correspond in any way to the reality of the divine, human, or natural order, but are themselves actively and positively evil to a degree that goes far beyond the evil inevitably endemic to the fallen human state or that is a “natural” consequence of the fall; "
Not necessarily "totally different". The Fathers also lived during the years of Roman decline, which had all sorts of evil, from rejoicing for human killings and torture in the arena (including killing of Christians themselves), to all kinds of perverted sex and indulegnces, and from extreme greed and cruelty, to worship of dark imported Gods and self-worshiping/god-hating gnostic religions and philosophies...
Neither I nor Sherrard would ever state that any ancient society was perfect. Even the greatest ancient society was still post-Fall. But, despite all the horrors of late-Roman civilization, there was still a sense of the Sacred. This is something we, collectively, in the modern world, no longer have. Evil, even the extreme evils you mentioned, have always existed, but there is something qualitatively different about the modern world, modern life, and modern science. Rather than simply being evil, the modern human is on a trajectory towards nothingness itself; pure nihilism. And worst of all, this nihilism is viewed as a virtue. The Romans could be evil and knew it; modern man is evil and thinks he is being virtuous.
Great idea for a guest post. Every word Sherrard wrote is freighted with gold. One of the greatest spiritual and cultural lights Britain has brought forth. Look at any photo of him. Class and nobility are etched on every line of his face. A sane, rightly orientated society (not the UK then!) would laud him from the eves - statues, buildings named after him and so forth. But he isn't. Not that I can see anyway.
His presence and proximity were crucial, I feel, in keeping Christianity on Kathleen Raine's radar. Without PS around, I think Temenos might have drifted away from the Faith and all its mystical depth altogether.
The artist Cecil Collins once said of him (to John Tavener), 'Philip's really hot on sex and really hot on Orthodoxy.' Oddly enough, though Lawrence wasn't a professing Christian, I think the same words apply equally to him. There were no barriers, for either man, between sexuality and the sacred. Why should there be? They were on the same level - cut from the same cloth. They both had such a sacramental, holistic view of man and the cosmos. They foresaw the ecological crisis and, more than that, the deep materialistic biases that cause it and also ensure its continuation. Two Sun Men if ever there were! Prophets of the coming transformation, perhaps.
Can I ask please - what are you referring to exactly when you mention 'a perverse form of conservatism' currently threatening Orthodoxy? Do you mean its alleged co-option by elements of the American right or the kind of nationalist church we see in Russia, say, or something else again?
I'm Roman Catholic fwiw.
Keep up the ennobling and enriching work you're engaged in. You're playing a big part in setting the tone for the world that's coming after the Machine.
One love. Grace, peace and mercy,
John
Thank you! Sherrard is one of those rare authors whose every word is worth reading, from his earliest essays, to his translations, to his final articles. You are correct: a sane society would laud Sherrard as a hero, but we don't live in a sane world, and Britain has not been sane for a very long time. In fact, I came to the conclusion that becoming an exile from England is one of the stages on the way that many of the greatest men of the last century had to pass through. It put them through the fire and hardened their moral and spiritual resolve.
I also agree that Sherrard helped to keep Raine on point. Unlike Sherrard, she could sometimes veer off into Jungianism, syncretism, Vedanta, etc., etc. At any rate, I am still immensely thankful for her work on Blake.
It is interesting you mentioned Cecil Collins. I recently reread his The Vision of the Fool: and Other Writings" and it impressed me even more than it did the first time.
I wish Lawrence and Sherrard could have met. I think, if DHL lived a couple more decades they could have been friends. Certainly their views are amenable. Regarding Lawrence and Christianity: he never rejected its truths, and he constantly voiced his love for the Bible and early Catholicism. I think Lawrence's work towards a revival of ancient wisdom was the opposite of new age reconstruction, but was, instead, work like that of Plethon, which Sherrard speaks favorably of in "Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition". On the other hand, there are a shocking number of places in "Apocalypse," his poems, and other late works, where Lawrence is criticizing Christianity, yet espousing the exact doctrines of the Eastern Orthodox Church or the early Fathers! Of course DHL needed to criticize Christianity as he saw it, since the Christianity of the West, particularly Protestantism, had and has descended so far from its roots. Oh, and regards sex, I believe your comments are spot on. I would only add that most people who selectively read Lawrence, without taking his entire corpus into account think that his views on nature, metaphysics and such, come from his views on sex, but they actually have things upside-down. For Lawrence, the re-sanctification of the cosmos comes first, along with a new vital relationship with the Divine, and his views on the sanctity of love and sex follow from that.
What I meant by 'a perverse form of conservatism' threatening Orthodoxy is both the infiltration of American Orthodox churches by Protestant converts who are unwilling to truly adopt the Orthodox mindset, and instead put on the Orthodox forms, but remain fundamentalists; and the hyper-nationalism of the state-entwined Orthodoxy of Russia. So, conservatism is a good thing if we just go by the meaning of the word, but I have to be careful, because at least in the USA, so-called conservatives are environment hating, big corporation loving people that are about as far from Lawrence and Sherrard as possible.
I think, overall, the Catholics have done a far better job of confronting modernity than the Orthodox. Think of Max Picard, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, Georges Bernanos, Romano Guardini, and (perhaps) Heidegger. I do believe that certain aspects of Scholasticism helped to precipitate the modern crisis and the Machine, but I also think that certain major Catholics of the last century, such as those just mentioned, and Maritain, became aware of that and tried to point the way out.
Thank you again. For the longest time I really debated whether to publish these essays online, worrying that I was compromising my principles. I still worry about that, but your kind and perspicacious words help to motivate me.
Yes, David Jones was another 20th century Catholic who perceived the scale and depth of our crisis. He called out The Machine - The Ram as he calls it - in those two seminal poems The Tribune's Visitation and The Tutelar of the Place. In many other works too. 'Levelling the world floor' as he put it. That's what the Ram/Machine does. That's what the Tribune stands for and the Tutelar stands against. Amazing that these poems were written during the mid-20th century and yet could have been written this morning given how bitingly relevant they are.
Another 'Lawrence' - Lawrence Durrell - also only really flourished as an artist and man once he left England. 'Pudding Island' he called it. I don't want to be too down on the place. Though my parents were Irish and I live now in Wales I was born in Manchester and lived there for most of my life. It's nurtured me well (kind of) but yes, there's something deeply inimical to the numinous at work in today's England. I like to think that it's a more modern, Whiggish overlay though. There's a latent spiritual energy one feels beneath the surface in England in both the landscape and the people. Peter Ackroyd conjures it well in his books. Blake is the great exemplar, of course. Lawrence is in that lineage too. Chesterton as well. A few others. It's all still there. A sleeping giant, you might say!
The essays of Jones are also worth reading: "[P]erfection in the cage of mediocrity, and the vulgarization of what once had the vitality of refinement, the disintegration of what was a unity, the emptying of being of what once was proudly full of being, the “signs” inadequate to what they signify, is most cause for “rage”—for perturbation."
By the way, if you haven't read it before, you definitely should check out Sherrard's "Extracts from a Journal written in Southern Spain." It is located on pp. 232-244 of Temenos 13. It is without a doubt the most Lawrencian thing Sherrard ever publicly published, and it is marvelous.
I'll find it! Thanks Farasha.
Yes. 100%. It's remarkable. So many synergies between Sherarrd and Lawrence in this piece. Potent, bracing, restorative.
Thanks for this, Farasha. One small thing: in Sherrard's first paragraph, in the following sentence, there seems to something missing. Should it be "were it within", perhaps?
"They could be made sense of, were within the scope of human comprehension, and through a process of askesis leading to purification could be allayed or transcended."
As always, keep up your good work.
Robert
Thank you. I just checked the original article and it is missing "it," but this article is one of the last things Sherrard wrote, and the journal it was published in is now defunct, so there may have been lapses in editing. Technically, both ways make sense, and Sherrard was such a precise writer I am cautious about changing anything, but your reading is compelling, so I added "it" in brackets.
Thank you. I noticed a few other small blips further down but they're not significant. I haven't yet read Kelley's book on Sherrard, but I'm curious about the role of 'godless' Bloomsbury. They were part of Sherrard's background and they were scorned by Lawrence too. And Schumacher went from being a great admirer of Keynes to viewing him as a promoter of greed and avarice. For all three, Bloomsbury appears to have been a significant point of reference.
Kelley's "book" is more of an article or pamphlet, and rather grossly misrepresents certain things. The best sources for the life of Sherrard are the two articles Metropolitan Kallistos wrote about him, and the obituaries from Kathleen Raine and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Sherrard's mother was deeply connected to Bloomsbury, and in some ways that helped Sherrard by being a point of reference to oppose. Lawrence abhorred the Bloomsbury crowd, and was sick for weeks after visiting Keynes in Cambridge. He said he had trouble removing the stench of corruption from his nose.
I've read "Rape of Man and Nature multiple times" - every time it hammers deeper into my soul