Column

Culture

Politics

11 January 2024

4 min read

After Angela: why Christian Democracy still works

Feeling somewhat labelled, George Pitcher unpacks why Christian Democracy still appeals to him, even in the UK, and explores its philosophical roots in the breathless thought of Jacques Maritain.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A politician stands a labelled lectern speaking and gesticulating with a hand.

Angel Merkel, addresses her political party.

When I’m accused of being a “leftie” in the predominantly Conservative area of East Sussex in which we live – though there are signs of automatic Tory support fragmenting – I usually reply that actually I’m a Christian Democrat.

At one level, this is a case of simple literal determinism: I’m a Christian and a democrat. Tick. But Christian Democracy is more complicated than that – not least because its continental European iteration was built on the re-building of a pan-national concord after the Second World War and the establishment of the European Union, a narrative from which the UK has largely excluded itself.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was a paragon of this ideology, growing out of the re-unification of Germany that began in 1989. It’s unlikely that her political ideology would have prospered in Britain.

The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

It’s that ideology that appeals to me. Essentially, Christian Democracy is rooted in an attempt, since the 19th century, to reconcile Catholic social teaching with democracy and capitalism (tick, again). In that context, it combines left-wing economics with social conservatism.

I awoke with a start some years ago with the realisation that I’m socially conservative. My divergence from my socially liberal friends had been so gradual as to be imperceptible. But here I stand, I can do no other.

I oppose assisted suicide – a liberal standard – not, as I’m accused, because of some vague commitment to the sanctity of life but because I believe there’s extreme moral jeopardy in the state endorsing in its legislature that some lives are not worth living. I believe that same-sex unions should be blessed in Church (and I have done so), but I also believe that’s a definitional difference from marriage as celebrated in church.

The hard right uses woke as a term of abuse when all it really means to many of us is being "awake" or "quite nice". By this ascription, for instance, someone who holds that refugees should be treated with dignity can be described as woke. But I also believe that a male cannot become a woman – and be recognised by the state as such – simply by declaring that he is so. Nor do I think that history can be judged by contemporary mmores,and I find cancel culture abhorrent. That makes me anti-woke in some circles.

By these criteria, I’m socially conservative. So be it. The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

As for a social economy, I believe in a state big enough to provide free health care at the point of delivery, education as a right and not a privilege and a welfare state robust enough to support the marginalised and vulnerable – in scriptural terms, “the poor”. Again, that’s Christian Democracy, at least as Merkel might understand it.

But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied.

All of which will guide my vote this year’s general election. There won’t be a CDU on the ballot paper and, even if there were, our ridiculous first-past-the-post electoral system mocks our democracy. When the Liberal Democrats struggle to maintain a toehold in parliament, despite being a widely credible alternative in many Tory seats, what chance for a more esoteric political initiative?

An argument may be mounted that with the Church of England established in law, 26 bishops sitting in the legislature of the House of Lords as a consequence, and the head of state as the Church’s supreme governor, Christian Democracy is already pretty well served in the UK.

Wisely, British Christian Democrats have endeavoured over the past three decades and more to be a movement within politics, rather than a political party (though no disrespect is intended here to the Christian People’s Alliance). This is Christian Democracy as an idea, rather than a voting option.

For this idea to have traction, it needs a political ideology, which may or may not be along the lines of the one I’ve adumbrated. But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied. So it may be as well to look to a contemporary historical leader of thought.

The nearest thing that European Christian Democrats have to a uniting figure is the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who died in 1973. To read Maritain at length is to leave one breathless with anticipation for what could be.

An albeit dangerous summation of Maritain is that he calls the West to a “New Christendom” that defines the state not by Christian faith, but attempts to define our faith through a secular prism, to make it active in the public square.

I particularly like the way this is described by American theologian William T, Cavanagh: “[T]his means in effect that there is trash to be picked up, businesses to be run, wars to be fought. These things are not our ultimate end, but neither are they simply cut loose from any spiritual significance.”

If we’re able to unpack that sense of purpose, then just maybe we can approach an election with this unifying political slogan: Vote Christian Democrat.

Review

Art

Culture

26 July 2024

5 min read

Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d

Artist Richard Kenton Webb converses with the blind poet in his former home.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white illustration shows a man holding a walk stick standing among tomb-like structures.

The blind poet. Charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Richard Kenton Webb.

‘Waiting to Speak to Milton’ shows the artist Richard Kenton Webb on a rain-swept night waiting in a valley for a car whose headlights can just be seen at the crest of the hill. For this image he has imagined himself waiting for a lift from John Milton to discuss the poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As the opening image to Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles it is appropriately positioned in the porch by which visitors enter the cottage.

This image of light appearing in the dark night of the soul symbolises the beginning of Webb’s journey with Milton and his late poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. This has been a 10-year journey that Webb began following a conversation with his son in front of John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost at the Tate. Following on from his son’s encouragement to begin work, over that period, Webb says Milton has been a companion like Virgil to Dante guiding him through the narrative of his own life including the dark nights of redundancy and lockdown. The result has been 128 drawings, 40 paintings and 12 relief prints forming A Conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost, a commission of 12 drawings in response to Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas, for the Milton Society of America, and the 13 drawings forming this exhibition, A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes.

Milton proved an effective companion because he, too, had passed through his own dark night of the soul. He arrived in Chalfont St Giles to escape the Great Plague of 1665 after the Republican cause to which he had dedicated more than a decade of his life - being Oliver Cromwell’s unofficial spin doctor - had collapsed around him with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. He had been lucky to escape with his life following imprisonment and the banning of his books. In addition, he had lost his sight, his beloved second wife, much of his money and all of his influence.

Despite these traumas, Milton was able to express his love for his Creator wonderfully in Paradise Lost, which was completed at the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, and Paradise Regain’d, which was inspired whilst there. In both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton deploys his rich verses and visions of spirituality and the forces of good and evil to reflect on the Restoration of the Monarchy and the loss of the English republic, doing so by means of Biblical stories concerning Jesus and Samson.

Browse Webb's exhibition

A black and white illustration show a person crouching in the corner and lifting as it was a stage drape.

Modes of Apprehension by Richard Kenton Webb – charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Inside a history cottage, black and white illustrations hang on the wall.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

A black and white illustration shows a two people close together on a pinnacle.

The Pinnacle by Richard Kenton Webb - charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

In Webb’s view, “Paradise Regain’d is about overcoming impossible situations” while, in Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Redeemer shows “Samson, the blind and foolish man”, “that we can always find hope in our living God even when society does not”. These poems moved Webb out of despair to discover hope because he knew they were heading towards redemption. As a result, he sees Milton as “a great English poet who gives hope, which in itself is a creative act for these difficult times”.

Although the story of Samson pre-dates that of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Webb’s painting series begins with images inspired by Paradise Regain’d, just as Samson Agonistes followed Paradise Regain’d when both were jointly published in 1671, because Jesus’ resistance of temptation ultimately redeems those, like Samson and Adam and Eve, who were unable to resist.

These are images set against a dark background with the exception of the final Paradise Regain’d image with its white sky depicting a paradise within as Jesus has overcome temptation, is in full communion with God and is about to begin his ministry by calling his first disciples. The images move from the trauma and test of temptation – whether involving hunger, greed, lust, threat, pride or ambition – to a calmness of mind that is equipoise and liberation and which also enables the destruction of false temples.

They are images in which movement is arrested in still moments which form theatrical tableaux. These, like medieval and early Tudor morality plays, involve the viewer in an epic struggle between good and evil, involving temptation, fall and redemption. Webb’s use of charcoal and white chalk on paper emphasises the binary nature of this struggle. Being formed of charcoal and chalk, despite his use of contemporary equivalents for the temptations, the look and feel of Webb’s images also accords well with their exhibition setting, in rooms of low ceilings, uneven white walls, dark beams and furniture.

Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own.

As Paradise Lost was the first illustrated poem in the English language, Milton’s poetry has, as Kelly O’Reilly, Director of Milton’s Cottage, has noted “inspired many of our greatest artists, from Blake to Turner, Dore to Dali”. Webb, who consciously works in the continuing tradition of Blake’s visionary art, is extending the tradition of illustrating Milton’s poems. It is appropriate, then, that, by exhibiting these drawings in Milton’s Cottage, they are placed alongside examples of illustrated editions of the poems, plus other paintings and prints relating to Milton.

Milton’s works are not only a repository of rich verse, which also gifted over 600 new words to the English language, but are also a conversation with scripture, its stories and their interpretation, plus the social and political ramifications of the Reformation in the British Isles. Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own and linking those powerfully to the themes of Milton’s poems.

The key image, in this regard, is the first in the Paradise Regain’d series (‘Modes of Apprehension’), which sees Jesus in the wilderness turning up the corner of the wilderness backdrop, as in a theatre, to reveal another dimension or reality to existence and experience behind it. Hope is discovered in the midst of desolation, resilience found in the face of temptation. In these ways, Webb achieves his own hope for these works, that, “by responding to Milton’s universal themes of creation, destruction, temptation, love and loss”, he “can help new audiences find fresh ways to engage in Milton’s legacy”.

A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Cottage, 3 July – 8 September 2024.

Visit the exhibition web site.