Frank Wright's Moustache: The Loam which nourisheth and sustaineth.

 A really good, out-and-out "reactionary" journal is, at first, like a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this turbulent, pretentious, childish optimism. A royalist publication is worth its weight in gold. Catholicism, we feel, is essential to our health. We fly to the past — anywhere out of this suspended animation of the so smugly "revolutionary" present. Out of the detestable crowd of quacks — illumines, coueists, and psychologists — that the wealthy death-bed has attracted, and who throng these antechambers of defeat; from all the funeral-furnishers, catafalque-makers, house-agents, lawyers, moneylenders, with their eye on the Heir of all the Ages, we fly in despair.

But the "Reactionary" (a sort of highly respectable, genteel quack, as well, with military moustaches and an "aristocratic" bearing) is even more stupid — if that were possible — than the "Revolutionary." We listen to him for a moment, and he unfolds his barren, childish scheme with the muddleheaded emphasis of a very ferocious sheep. He lodges in the garret next to us at the inn, and is in arrears with the rent. The servants (who are all the reddest of revolutionists, of course) hate him. The Reactionary, in the long run, does not add to the cheerfulness of the scene.

(From ‘The Art of Being Ruled’ by Wyndham Lewis pub. 1926)

Lewis had a moustache and he was called a reactionary and a fascist so we may take the second paragraph as a piece of self mockery.  That flagrant item sported by Wright ends in points which demand wax.  I feel that he would repudiate gel as verging on the metrosexual.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that but when your aim is to bristle drooping fails to promote a sense of rigour.

Frank Wright Speaks

 There I was thinking I was a Traditionalist when according to Frank Wright I am in fact a Modernist and of course a heretic.  May I state once again that I admit to being a heretic but I am not an apostate.  What he means by Traditionalism is something quite different from that which I respect rather than adhere to if one can adhere to a general theory of the source of religions. 

traditionalism 

Who is Frank Wright when he’s at home?  Enter the name in the search box of youtube and be prepared for the deluge.  His political analysis of the march of Globalism is excellent and is delivered with witty asides, memes and serious foolery.  Essentially we are living in a constructed reality aimed at dissolving nation states into cupasoup bland uniformity at the behest of ‘stakeholders’.

Does Frank believe that outside the Catholic Church there is no redemption?  Though he has never uttered that precise phrase I think that his attitude is adjacent to that old time Catholicism.  Is that a bad thing?  On the whole it is not; most people are not prepared to wait for the answer to ‘what is truth’.  They want it straight and unequivocal and they also want eschatology not ecology.  Do I agree with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church?  Yes I do.  I realize that I may be going close to the Voltairean position that religion is good for the masses in that it gives them a definite moral path they can follow.  I think he recommended it for his butler.  The populace is safer without the bewilderment of comparative religion.  Who was it said that a little comparative religion leaves you with comparatively little religion? 

I’m a heretic so what I offer is in Frank Wright’s opinion entirely useless and proves that I am foundered in Modernism.  Is religion like sums in Arithmetic where there is only one right answer.  A certain simplistic view of religious truth would hold that this is so.  Atheists and agnostics agree with this.  ‘Look’, they say, ‘they all of them claim that their truth is the only one’. ‘They can’t all be true so it is rational to decline to believe any of them until the issue is decided’.

The Traditionalist (Perennialist) would argue that the outcome of multiple truths does not end in relativism.  The absolute is incapable of being expressed in direct language.  It is apophatic.  However to put everyone under ‘the cloud of unknowing’ is to risk them being drenched by uncertainty.  One should not do anything to weaken the ‘simple’ faith of others.  Say your own prayers.------------