It is a mistake to think that freedom as mediation means negative mediation as in Hegel, or to read Schelling with this assumption. In Schelling freedom necessarily involves mediation and the other, but a positive mediation. Although von Baader is clearer on all this. This is complexly bound up with the way Von Baader rightly breaks with the LNC and so lets polar relations be truly paradoxical. By remaining too rationalist (LNC and sufficient reason) Schelling never quite achieves the coherence he implies.

Surely the European scientific-industrial revolution (for they were one) took off because the Christian reforming and eschatological spirit fused with the Hermetic will to spiritual-material creative and theurgic transformation. But this became demonic, bad magic, ironically because it was captured by the opponents of good magic, of theurgy, the mechanistic disenchanters and ultimately by an atheistic rejection of the original eschatological lure and Baconian desire to exercise a corporeal charity.

The hypocrisy of China and Russia’s critique of the liberal democratic West is shown in their total espousal of the very worst of the West: capitalism, bureaucracy, technocracy. Nevertheless both ‘civilisation states’ view their tussle with the West as ideological, while the West is still (in a compromised way) trying to defend constitutional mixed government, legal due process and the dignity of the person. For all the talk of realism and the multipolar

Moses is strange: he has an Egyptian name and he is neither a priest nor a prophet. In fact he is manifestly a magus: magician and shaman. He works with his rod Yahweh’s vastly superior cosmic magic which outplays the Egyptians at their own game. He also enters into the hidden divine reality wherein is revealed to him not just the basic moral law but equally (the separation of ‘ten commandments’ is not in the text of Exodus) a political and social constitution and rules for ritual and temple reflecting the celestial.

English philosophy has tended to empiricism, which readily inverts into idealism. German philosophy has tended to idealism which is a kind of empiricism of reason. Scottish and French philosophy, by attending to action, perception and the body, have tended to realism. Thus Alexander Hamilton and Maine de Biran somewhat converge, as noted by Ravaisson. Some later Scots like Ferrier knew about the French. Much earlier Malebranche is heavily present in Hume. The Auld Alliance in philosophy.

At his most radical de Lubac identified grace with spirit as such. If one does not do so, then pure nature is reinstated. Yet Balthasar tended to see this identification as a ‘Romantic’ confusion. I don’t think so. A lot of Balthasar’s misgivings about Schelling and Romanticism were somewhat misplaced: a strong linking of creation and revelation, monotheism as implying a certain monism and even ‘pantheism’ are both loyal to the best Patristic teaching.

Liberalism is not the only form of optimism. There can be an alternative communitarian optimism, or realistic hope. We are now in danger of forgetting that, in terms of a merely ‘realist’ reaction against liberalism. The ideals of Capitalist liberalism were not very ideal anyway. Realism can be as unbalanced as idealism. Yes, all kinds of nations compete for basic material resources, but nations themselves only exist in part as gathered round ideas. Where these ideas become deluded, material goals, ideologically magnified result in crazy actions as with

Everywhere in the US, but especially in the South, there’s this prevailing soporific hush: as if nothing was likely to happen and yet something overwhelming might happen at any instant. The prevailing hush

I largely agree with John Harris. Christianity is totally incompatible with nationalism as a central determining value and with overtones of racism. Excess immigration is a problem but must be questioned for the right reasons: especially wage depression and social viability.

https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1652665117140459520

Similarly traditional marriage and the family should be encouraged but without any suggestions of intolerance or suppression of different lifestyles and relative lack of support for single people. Tone is often everything.

This tells it as it distressingly is: Radio 2 evangelicalism and incompetent managerialism directed by not very bright ex-public schoolboys. It cannot possibly work in England since it lacks either the cultured or the folk and their crucial fusion. @SaveTheParish

https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1638158615063191552

I keep hearing of instances where vicars try to shut down perfectly thriving occasional lay congregations, sometimes including children. This is not a ‘mission strategy’ but the very opposite: a deliberate shutting down of rooted, local and lay Christianity on ideological grounds

For those who have enjoyed Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels I recommend Thomas F. O’Meara OP’s Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism (1982) for further insight into the religious dimension. O’Meara makes several things fascinatingly clear: 1. The overwhelming influence of Schelling above all in German Catholicism U.K. till 1848. 2. The way this anticipates 20thC theology way more than we think and 3. the sudden shock of the switch to neo-scholasticism.

The often accurate Slavoj Zizek is too much going by second-hand reports here. The first Vladimir Soloviev (the greatest Russian thinker) is described as ‘20thC’. But he died in 1900! He was only somewhat somewhat influenced by Cosmism and his ‘free theocracy’ not autocratic.

https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1622149603297529856

Soloviev also broke with panslavism to pursue an ecumenical project. He believed strongly in reuniting eastern and western Christendom under the pope. One of his successors Lev Karsavin sustained this despite his eurasianism which largely concerned not despising Asian cultures.

Interesting for us today, rather as Florensky recommended blessing same-sex unions, Karsavin recognises gender fluidity and perhaps transgenderedness: ‘there exist “odd” or “empirically bi-unitary” people in various degrees. He even links this to vocational celibacy: the ‘odd’ are more ‘fulfilled’ in themselves and do not need to be married. The ‘odd’ virgins are at once ‘higher’ than majority ‘even’ people as embodying pre-Fallen androgyny (perhaps?) yet virgins are ‘limited and even at fault’ in not fulfilling still-standing OT law to procreate. And

Karsavin is extreme on apocatastasis: if the whole of creation is not perfect nothing within it can be because all is connected. Thus the fall is of the whole, of Sophia or the Ur-Adam and the redemption is of the whole. In consequence for him: All the angels fall; none of them fall; all of them are redeemed. All humans fall; none of them fall; all of them rescued. We must read ‘as in Adam all die as also applying to the angels; Adam’s fall was ‘first’: ‘If all the angels did not fall then the world is not an all-unity’

There’s a sense in which orthodox Christianity is *more gnostic* than Gnosticism: latter tries to rescue part of limit as needed for eternal fullness and sees that unredeemed limit is simply bad (not middling) but former says every limit can be (will be) totally transfigured. And orthodoxy agrees with Gnosticism that there is no ultimate semi-good daemonic realm as there is for Platonism/Neoplatonism. That’s to say, orthodoxy is also in a way dualistic, but this duality is eschatologically crossed out.

‘The act of the begetting of the Son by the Father is also the act of creation and of the revelation of God to the creature — not because the begetting of the Son “requires” the creation of the other, but because the begetting of the Son is the self-revelation of the All-Goodness ’ (Lev Karsavin. Aquinas says pretty much the same things.)

I think older liberals who defend free speech are beginning to realise they are not just liberals. For the point of free dialectic is to try to find the shared objective truth. A purer liberalism doubts that and so one has merely the sophistry of self-assertion without debate. The woke are pure liberals, pure sophists. There can be no argument: only the free assertion of identities, individual and collective ad infinitum. Of course this is fractal nihilistic madness. So in reality the power of some identities, like the more extreme trans lobby,triumphs

The establishment of the Church of England does not mean that the Church should conform to English politics and society but that English politics should conform to the Church. If you doubt this point, read Richard Hooker. The media constantly suggests that ‘society’ now has a settled view on matters like gay marriage. But this is just the settled view of the chattering classes. It is not necessarily the view of the working and lower middle classes, even if they are now often scared to express it.

In the last analysis exceptionally large numbers of people want to enter the U.K. paradoxically because it is a failing country that cannot rely on itself for work, family and offspring and is so insufficiently integrated that it is too easy to live a life in the shadows. The Christian and human duty of hospitality to the stranger does not imply a right to emigrate or settle where you like in the world. Pope Francis himself has made this clear.

Broadly speaking Christianity tends to dictate a Postliberal politics of economic radicalism and social conservatism. But it does *not* dictate either nationalism or *tough* attitudes on crime and punishment. In fact both those attitudes *are* rooted in liberalism, because the nation is the individual writ large and detached from a more primary international relationality and vengeful approaches to punishment in the name of the law and the general will derive from modern deontological ethics pivoted about the primacy of freedom. Rousseau, Kant. By

I don’t find this reassuring. Dharma is not quite our western (Platonic) good because it does not quite connect to the absolute which is indifferent to earthly duty that is relative. Thus the lack of a real just war doctrine or restrictions on making money. Indifference to both…

https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1586344207345590272

‘In Christianity the Gospels of Matthew and Luke say you cannot serve both God and Mammon. In Hinduism you can.’ Well the gospels are right and this is what the West has so far (and surely in reality many Hindus?) believed. How casual to think this can be casually dumped!