STATE FREEDOM IN A POST-CHURCH WORLD
It is almost tragically ironic that the people
who most identified, through the symbolism of St George and the Dragon, with
the defeat of metachemical evil (free soma) by metaphysical
grace (free psyche), namely the English, should have unleashed the Dragon with
the apostasy of Henry VIII and the ensuing rejection, following his
excommunication, of Roman Catholicism in favour of a heresy that, in the guise
of Anglicanism, pays homage to state freedom from religious interference,
guaranteed by the fact that the reigning monarch is also head of the Anglican
Church (the Church of England), thereby tying the Church in question to the
royalist interests of the state.
This, unfortunately, is a repudiation of the
ethos symbolized by St George and the Dragon (even though the defeat of metachemistry cannot be directly achieved by metaphysics),
and the English have had to live with the metachemical
consequences ever since.
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Yet even they are false churches appertaining
to state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axial criteria which, even by Western
standards, have 'gone to the dogs' (decadence) of female dominion in the guise
of the legitimacy of female vicars - the nearest (bourgeois) equivalent to the
outright barbarism of feminist proletarianism within
the ensuring global context.
Since state-hegemonic axial criteria, rooted in
metachemistry, implies the dominion of what is
female, as of women, through the acceptance and even encouragement of somatic
licence, it is small wonder that male vicars are allowed to marry and
effectively commit to family life and values, which they do with evident relish
and few if any exceptions.
This invalidates any pretension to spiritual
leadership on their part. For you cannot be the victimized evidence of
female dominion through familial reproduction and represent those male-oriented
values at the heart of Christianity which have to do with the ability of the
male to live independently of women - and thus of female dominion - from a
standpoint centred in a rejection of the world and, hence, of worldly ties.
Only the Catholic priesthood, adhering to
celibacy in spiritual aloofness from familial ties, have traditionally
represented the essence of the Christian ethos to the lay, thereby serving as
exemplars of both worldly rejection and, correlatively, otherworldly
aspiration, an aspiration not incompatible with a love of heavenly 'things' or,
more correctly, values, including otherworldly symbols and the translucent
riches of the inner paradise.
That is another reason, quite apart from axial
orientation, why the Catholic Church can rightly be described, in relation to
the Western tradition, as the 'one true church', even if it leaves something to
be desired from a post-Western and, more specifically, more advanced global
standpoint, the standpoint of a church to end all churches, so to speak, in
'Kingdom Come'.
It is interesting to note the extent to which
'decadent' Protestant writers, from Huysmans and Wilde to Gide and Huxley, affirm
the otherworldly properties of gems, symbols, jewels, fabrics, vestments,
scents, drugs, etc., in what could be described as a pro-Catholic about-face
from puritanical rejection of the otherworldly which, incidentally, should not
be confused with any netherworldly affinity having
largely cosmic implications, not least in respect of stars and the perceived
role of stars in religion, as germane, I contend, to a disposition closer, like
Anglicanism, to the Judaic hinterland of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and
therefore axially at variance with what properly appertains, via transcendent
visionary experience, to the otherworldly.
