Meeting The Masters

No one can deny that the Queen's funeral was a magnificent spectacle of ceremony and ritual, deeply moving in its solemnity. One also has to admire the organisational skills that pulled it off so well even if plans for it will have been prepared long ago. It's the sort of event that the British like to say they still do better than anyone else and that is probably true.

But what does it all mean? On one level what it means is obvious. The monarch receives the right to rule from God. He or she derives power and authority from the creative centre of the universe which, ultimately, is the only place that power and authority reside. This is lent and must be returned as was symbolically demonstrated at the end of the ceremony in St George's Chapel when the royal crown, orb and sceptre were taken from the top of the Queen's coffin and placed on the High Altar. She then became an ordinary person and returns to God as just another soul to be judged according to her spiritual state. Her power and authority as monarch pass to her successor.

That's what it means. In the Western view of kingship as brought to a peak during the Middle Ages the king reigns because he has been chosen by God but this is not just a medieval tradition. Everywhere we see the same pattern repeated. From Egyptian Pharaohs to Chinese and Aztec Emperors the king rules because of divine right which means he reigns as God's Regent. Without God his power is maintained only by force or subterfuge or the will of the people who are notoriously fickle and easily manipulated.

Isn't that where we are now? Despite the religious ceremony being absolutely central to everything that has just taken place the great bulk of the crowds who thronged the streets of London over the last few days, and the even greater number of people who watched on television in their homes, do not believe in God except, possibly, in a vaguely sentimental manner. But they don't believe in a way that makes a fundamental difference to the manner in which they lead their lives or to their attitudes to everything else. Some of them might fit God in somewhere but for few of them is he all that really matters. But this is what the ceremony is saying. This is what the fact of a monarch means. The monarch is nothing without God.

Perhaps the people flocked to the funeral procession because they feel the absence of God. So runs a certain type of well-meaning opinion but frankly I am impatient with this line of thinking. If the people feel God's absence they don't feel it nearly enough or they wouldn't behave as they do the rest of the time, happily swallowing all the nostrums of secular materialism and turning their backs on God except when convenient. We are a society of God rejecters and indulging in a few emotions in the face of death does not change that or make us worthier people. It's no good pointing to the reaction of the crowds as proof that religious belief persists underneath it all. Something like it may come out at odd moments but it will be firmly put away again almost immediately.

The points I make here do not mean I am against monarchy, even a monarchy which, as now, has become to all practical purposes severed from its roots in God and absorbed by the System. The situation is similar to that of the Christian churches which have also lost touch with their divine source. Even if the monarchy, like the churches, has been infiltrated, if not taken over, by forces antithetical to true spiritual growth (though one might well say when was that not the case?) it is probably still better to have something that preserves an opening to higher power than one which does not which is the case with purely political forms of governance. 

That having been said, every once sacred institution in our world has  lost spiritual authority. Some survive even when their true animating principle is neglected. The British monarchy is one of these. Let all those who claim to have been moved by the life of the late Queen and the idea of monarchy over the last week look behind the spectacle to see where the roots of these things might lie. If you don't follow these roots to their source, which is in divine being, and then change your life accordingly ask yourself to what were you actually responding?

Added note: Although I do recognise the theoretical value of monarchy compared to materialistic political forms of governance it has to be said that there is no effective difference nowadays between a monarchy and a republic. How is the UK in any way different to anywhere else? It isn't. The fact is that the monarchy in Britain is simply decorative and hasn't prevented the takeover of society by materialistic, secular forces. It could even be said to enable that because it gives the pretence that it hasn't happened and that things are carrying on as they traditionally did. This may well be why the monarchy is permitted to continue in existence. 

 I sympathise with all those who are upset over the death of Queen Elizabeth II but, at the same time, look forward with optimism to the reign of the new King. The modern world has chased all magic and mystery away from life and we must take them where we can find them for the human soul is such that we need these things. They call to the essence of our being and when they are denied, as now, we feel their loss acutely even if we can't articulate just what it is that has been lost. What has really been lost is, of course, the sense of the reality of the spiritual. 

The British monarchy stretches back a thousand years into the distant past and provides a link to history and tradition in a world where nothing has deep roots or lasts long. The pageantry that defines the monarchy, its hierarchical dignity, the ceremony and ritual that surround it, all these can satisfy the soul in a world in which everything else is materialistic. Religion is meaningless for most people now and monarchy can fill the hole in the psyche that the absence of religion leaves behind. At least, it is one of the few things that might seem to do that. In truth it can only fill a tiny fraction of that hole.

So I do sympathise with the many people who express their support for the monarchy in the wake of the Queen's death. But I can't share their emotions and for two reasons. The first is that monarchy is fairly meaningless without God above it to back it up and give it its fundamental raison d'être. All the ritual is centred in the reality of God. Take him away and it is just theatricals. But he is not taken away, you might protest. He is right there with the altar and the archbishop and the services and the cathedrals. No, he is not there. The words are there, the outer form is there but the spirit is not there. Some of the participants in these ceremonies may be believers according to their own lights, as the Queen is said to have been, but in what do they actually believe? A tradition, an historical idea, a set of ethics, the doctrines of an official religion? Or do they believe in the living God who animates their own soul and do they demonstrate that belief in everything they say and do? Believing in God is not enough. You must love God which means love truth. I know no one can judge the state of another's soul and I do not pretend to do such but the evidence indicates that most religious people accept the world on its own terms and that to me makes them unbelievers. You cannot believe in God and accept the world. You cannot serve two masters.

The second cause for my reservations concerns the personalities of the deceased Queen and her son Charles. The Queen cannot be faulted. She served her country faithfully for 70 years. She never put a foot wrong. Her moral character cannot be questioned. This is what people say and I don't dispute it. But I would say that despite her obvious qualities she appeared to be entirely passive in the face of massive spiritual degradation. Maybe she said and did things behind the scenes but if so she was remarkably ineffective, given the spiritual situation in the UK today. Under her watch the Royal Family became all show and no substance. She went along with every change in the country including what amounts to a loss of sovereignty, the conversion of the Church of England into a branch of secular liberalism and the radical restructuring of the population. The fact that her nation and her Church are in a much worse state spiritually at her death than when she ascended the throne cannot be blamed on her personally but as far as the public is concerned she did nothing to arrest the slide downwards apart from carrying on behaving as she had been brought up to behave. On the credit side, her personal behaviour was impeccable. She did her duty to the end, acting with dignity at all times. She clearly impressed everyone who met her and not just because of her position. But how did the Queen use her role? To be brutal, as an opener of fetes. The purpose of the British Royal Family under the late Queen became simply to stay in business. It survives because most people agree that it is better than the alternative which is true enough as it does provide a link to a past rooted in God but when, in itself and as it is now, it really just seeks to be all things to all men what use is that? In reality, it has become just another arm, a traditionalist, anti-modern but really completely modernised arm, of the global elite basically used to absorb resistance to the more overt forms of globalism. King Charles claims to be a traditionalist (or even a Traditionalist) but he seems likely to go along with all the ongoing corruptions of the country and the West as a whole apart from some token opposition. Perhaps not. We shall see.

It's easy to criticise and I don't mean this as a personal attack. I recognise that the Queen had an impossible task and she was certainly a fair better monarch than her abdicating uncle would have been. But there is the sense that her main objective became to keep the family business running and if the soul of the country suffered in the meantime that was secondary. I am sure that personally she regretted many of the changes that came about during her reign but, even though she was only a constitutional monarch, she might have done a little more on the positive side to defend her nation from the depredations of the spiritual attack on it.

In 1965 on a gloomy day in January my father took my brother and me to line the streets in London for the funeral procession of Winston Churchill. I remember very little about it other than the grey clouds and the rain, both somehow fitting. My father felt this funeral marked something more than just the death of a man. It also signified the end of the British Empire and the ideals and beliefs that had governed that. This turned out to be the case. The death of Queen Elizabeth II can be taken as a similar marker of something. Despite what I say above, the Queen did at least hold the line, symbolically if in no other way. Now that she is gone we can expect, once the initial period of mourning is over, the last vestiges of the old ways to be swept away. If these were replaced by something better that would not be a problem for undoubtedly there is something better, but what these ways did at least have was a sense of the reality of something beyond this world, something to which this world should coordinate its being. The new ways are actively based on the rejection of that sense. The triumph of matter over spirit will continue and become even more entrenched in the human psyche. Whether there will eventually be a reaction to that remains to be seen but King Charles will have to go a lot further than he has if he is to be the figurehead of that reaction and not absorbed by the zeitgeist.