Saving the West

There are many online writings lamenting the destruction of the West and blaming the usual suspects of mass immigration, liberalism, feminism and materialism, and their by-products of sentimentality, self-hatred and so on. Some regret this but accept it as inevitable, others want to fight it and think it can be turned around while a few just shrug their shoulders and cultivate their garden which seems to them to be the only option left in a crumbling cultural wasteland. I sympathise with all these approaches but would like to ask a question here. What is the West for? Because only if we know what it is for can we know if it is worth saving. 

Any civilisation worth that name must be organised around spiritual principles. From ancient Egypt to Greece to India, and even Rome when it began, God or the gods were at the centre of life, formed the culture and gave meaning to the civilisation. For the West that organising principle was Christianity which was the greatest expression of spiritual understanding there has been. In fact, all the other expressions might be said to be from the outside looking in. Only Christianity really comes from the inside. That, of course, is the meaning of revelation. Christianity or, better put, Christ is the greatest revelation of and from the spiritual world. There really is no doubt about this. Christ is the only religious personality utterly without flaw or limitation.

The West existed for the expression of Christianity. That is what gave it its greatness. Not uniquely for there were many tributaries but the main river into which all these tributaries fed was Christianity. Some people think the West is defined by science and has reached its greatest state following that pursuit but even science arose in a Christian context with natural philosophers seeking to understand God's creation. And whether it has reached its apogee pursuing science or sunk to a spiritual nadir is a question worth pondering.

When the West started to abandon Christianity it lost sight of itself. Now, we can go into the reasons for that abandonment and say that some of them were actually based in truth because they were to do with the development of consciousness and an increased mental polarisation and intellectual comprehension of the creation. The outer expression of Christ's teachings followed by the West might be said to have been suitable for an earlier phase of consciousness, less so for the new phase. But the core remained eternally valid for the core is Christ himself. It is not true that a better grasp of the world leads to atheism. A superficial understanding may but not a deeper one. A little knowledge has proved to be a very dangerous thing for the West but it is not only this superficial knowledge that has caused the West to abandon God and Christ. This is fundamentally a moral problem. The creature has got too big for its boots. Its newly acquired powers have gone to its head for it has taken these to itself and decided they are aspects of its own self and belong to that self by right.

I regret the ongoing destruction of the West but it has brought this on itself through its own hubris. When it rejected Christ it signed its own death warrant and we live in the playing out of that process. I suppose that it could theoretically rediscover Christ but that looks very unlikely, so much have we succumbed to our own egotism and proved unable to resist the demonic influences which hasten the process of our downfall. Individually, we can and should turn back to reality which means for the West to Christ, but collectively things do not look promising. So be it. The West is only worth saving if it rededicates itself to Christ. Note I do not say spirituality which can mean a whole host of things, some positive, some just self-indulgent and shallow. Without the rediscovery of Christ we can fight the symptoms and secondary causes of decline as listed above all we like but it will not lead to any kind of true renaissance.