Spirit Rebels
Paul Cudenec's new book, Our Quest for Freedom and other essays
Paul Cudenec’s new collection of essays, Our Quest for Freedom and other essays (Winter Oak, 2024), is a powerful collection of writings on the human spirit in our times.
I had the privilege of writing a preface for the book, which I republish here:
PREFACE BY W.D. JAMES:
SPIRIT REBELS
Increasingly, the subject of Paul Cudenec’s thinking and writing is the human spirit. I suppose that has always been the case, but more recently it seems to have come into sharper focus and that is reflected in this collection of essays and other writings. Spirit rebels. That can be read as saying both that it is the nature of spirit to rebel and that those who follow the spirit become rebels. The human spirit, and the larger cosmic spirit of which it forms a part or in which it participates, has largely been absent in serious recent discourse. Cudenec is helping to correct that omission.
A recurring theme in these writings is the spirit’s sense of longing, nostalgia, and gut feeling that it was meant for a different sort of world than the one we inhabit where, he argues, that layers of physical, social, and psychological control have been erected to stifle the human spirit.
The Germans have a word for this sense: Sehnsucht. Anthony Esolen, in Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, suggests that this deep inner longing for the world we were meant to live in comes as a revelation and “spurs us on to the journey,” the quest, to discover that foreign land and the meaning it holds for our existence. It is as a memory lodged in the dim places of the human spirit that calls out to be recognized.
A second major theme is freedom. We are in danger of undervaluing freedom if we think of it as only a political value. It is of the nature of spirit to be free. “The spirit bloweth where it will.” The awakened spirit seeks to realize itself. To become who we are meant to be requires freedom. As Cudenec points out, the entire project of the regime of the “criminocrats” can be seen as a forestalling of this spiritual awakening.
The Christian existentialist Nicholas Berdyaev was one of the few other modern thinkers to understand this. He suggested that our lives, as persons (body-soul-spirit unities, as opposed to quantifiable individuals), are a constant striving. A striving for what? As spiritual beings we are capable of rising up above ourselves and the world as it currently is: we are “ecstatic” beings. In rising above our (current) selves, we create something new. That is the essence of the spirit’s work: creativity is its proper mode of being. He said: “The creative act is always the dominion of spirit over nature [in the sense of material determinism] and over soul, and it presupposes freedom.” He went on: “Such things as statism, nationalism, scientism, communism, etc., are always a transforming of person into a means and a tool…. For God the person is an end, and not a means.”
It is the spirit that dreams and creates poetry, art, music and myth. This is the language in which spirit speaks to spirit and calls forth a new, truer, community, culture and ethos.
It is also not wrong, I think, to express this awakening and beginning upon the journey in terms of conversion, though perhaps Cudenec would be hesitant there. According to Donald Attwater, in Modern Christian Revolutionaries, to come into unity with the spirit, to be converted, is also to be revolutionized. He notes that “in the first place it [revolution] is a matter of the mind and spirit.” Anyway, I think it is salutary to recover the spiritual vocabulary of radicalism as reflected in these essays.
Cudenec presents the “quest” in heroic and spiritual terms. It is the quest for the “grail”; that being the power to become what we are meant to be. That will take action. Not just utilitarian, calculating action. Action infused with spirit. In the concluding dialogue he calls for a “political-spiritual revolt.” In the title essay he teaches: “Your purpose is to play your part in the uprising against evil.” Against what he also calls “the death-entity.” In doing such, he accurately recognizes the nature of our situation. It is not merely against oligarchs and tyrants that we struggle but against what we should properly term dark spiritual forces.
A final theme that stands out is anti-industrialism. This may seem tangential to the other themes I have noted, but I think it is actually related. Cudenec himself notes that opposition to industrialism plays a central part in his overall attempt to articulate a holistic political philosophy. For Cudenec, industrialism is the material manifestation of artificiality, alienation, mechanism, materialism, and moral evils like usury. It is not, he is clear, a neutral technology.
In what follows, Cudenec, like a prophet, calls for us to become spirit rebels. In doing such, he situates himself in the radical tradition of Marguerite Porete, Thomas Müntzer, and Gerrard Winstanley. The return of the (human) spirit is what the times are calling for.
The whole book is available for free on Winter Oak or for purchase as a physical copy here. I hope you will check it out.