Page 32 - THE CHURCH BEFORE THE MOCKING WORLD

In short, Liberalism, demanded change to keep within the flow of culture. This was set against Roman Catholicism that wanted to draw the Anglican Church back to Rome. It was the Centralist Historic Anglicanism that wanted thenewto be built upon a restoration of theold, as seen in the belief and practice of the Early Church Fathers. ?Early?meant Ante-Nicene not medieval. This third-way movement is, in many senses, a model for us today and needs to be looked at carefully.
Within 50 years the overtly liberal Two Bottle Orthodoxy would have merged into a movement that cannot be recognised as anything other than post-Christian Pagan. It was to become a precursor of what is often spoken of as the ?post-modern of today?.
We need to switch gears here from the clearly religious to a less pious but no less spiritual environment. In Paris, in 1922, there was a famous dinner at which Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Proust, James Joyce and Ezra Pound met.
If one could create a Pantheon of the Pagan, apaganorum modernorum,this crowd would feature prominently.
James Joyce was drunk and all the earlier decorum of giving honour to cultural icons had collapsed when he was rude and disrespectful to Proust. In short, being rude to a man of literary stature simply was not done in these settings. Some commentators have said this evening was the end of an era.
Why the dinner was so important was that it was bringing together the artistic forces of the past and pushing them aside for the new libertine forces that would become the cultural norm within a short period of time.
A statement was made afterwards, some have attributed to Pound, that when James Joyce penned the last words on the last page of his novel Ulysses, the Christian era had come to an end.
As Andrew Marr commented, it was the year Proust died, Eliot?s ?The Wasteland?was published, and Charlie Chaplin became the most recognisable face on the planet.
Whatever Western civilisation had been before was now forever gone. Religious Liberalism, in short, had merged its post-pious life and practice into the form of secular artistic libertinism.
From that day we have been moving more and more towards a contemporary ?Two Bottle Orthodoxy?in which to understand, to tolerate, and to be relevant dominates the world of ideas, of religion and of economics. Anything older than ten years must, by default, be of no value.
The Battle continues.