Monthly Archives: December 2025

On the Rise and Fall of Empires

Introduction

Forty years ago I used to work for a well-known French company in Paris. Founded in 1900 by a very dynamic man, who had seen a market opportunity, it had become quite large. However, the son, profiting from his father’s success, had simply managed the company, resting on his father’s laurels. All went fairly well, but there was no innovation. The company had then passed on to the grandson. He did nothing and took out money for his expensive lifestyle. By the 1980s all was in decline and it was something of a ‘museum’ or ‘heritage’ company. As there was little investment in new equipment and ideas because the grandson was taking out the money, it was declining. A three-stage process similar to this one happens with empires.

Imperial Rise and Fall: The Three Stages

There are apparently some 200 theories to explain the fall of the old pagan Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. This clearly suggests that there was not one simple cause for it, but a combination of causes. Nevertheless, perhaps we can put forward three general stages associated with the rise and fall of empires, as did the British military hero Sir John Glubb (1897-1986) in his interesting analysis, The Fate of Empires. Here he suggested, controversially, that many empires seem to last about ten generations, 250 years, before they fall. He admitted that although this was a generalisation, his remarks did come purely from practical observations, not from some intellectual theorisation or ideology. We too suggest three stages in the rise and fall of empires:

  1. The first stage, that of the grandfather, in the rise of empires is the Age of Conquest, in which great self-belief, energy and courage, as well as great cruelty, greed and racist superiority are shown. (‘All others are barbarians’. ‘The West is Best’). We can see this with the aggressive expansion of the West in the eleventh century, which led at the end of that century to the official ‘First Crusade’ and to the accelerating expansion of settlement, colonisation and exploitation, starting in 1492, with a further drastic and global acceleration about 250 years ago with the conquest of India. This period is the age of the spirit of enterprise and positivity, of ‘we can do it’. We can clearly see this in the recent Victorian Imperial Age of Great Britain and then in the post-1945 Imperial American Age.
  2. This is followed by the second stage of profit-taking, the stage of the son, of affluence, arrogance, self-congratulation, complacency and hubris. ‘We will rule for ever’, as was expressed in the Edwardian British anthem Land of Hope and Glory, glorifying the Empire ‘on which the sun never set’. That ended with the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic and the suicide of 1914. This was also the slogan of the ‘thousand-year’ Third Empire (= ‘Reich’) of Hitler, which lasted for exactly twelve years. Complacency means that there is a refusal to learn from history and from mistakes, a lack of openness to others, to anything new. ‘We are the greatest, we have nothing to learn from others’. At this stage, empires fall into denial and cannot see how low they are sinking.
  3. The third stage in the fall of empires, the stage of the grandson, interests us most, since we believe that this is what the Western world is now going through.

Falls are marked by mismanaged crises, dissension, lack of cohesion and common goals. This produces a disparate society because of the lack of shared beliefs and values. As society pulls in different directions, there follow disintegration, negativity and pessimism. Immigration takes place, for there are few to do, or who are interested in doing, vital tasks, since those who were born into that society are interested in the selfish infantilism of ‘fun’. ‘Why bother?’ The lack of energy comes from the lack of self-belief, courage and so passivity. One of today’s phenomena is ‘snowflakes and wimps’, those who constantly suffer from ‘anxiety’ and ‘stress’. People say: ‘There is nothing in it for me’, which shows the selfishness that comes from their lack of aims and values.

Decline is also marked by loss of faith in any religious aim or belief. This creates personal and collective decadence. As Glubb remarked: Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving. This cynicism is the result of despair. In the case of Britain, no longer ‘Great’, this can be seen in the satire that has pervaded society since 1945. The spirit of mocking everything, especially the discredited Establishment, can be seen in many satires, such as Monty Python and Mr Bean. There is even a satirical show called Mock the Week.

Conclusion

This cynicism or, in English, world-weariness, can be seen everywhere in contemporary Britain, and in Western countries in general. The lack of self-belief can be seen in the young people, in fact beggars, who stand in the street and sing American songs or, at least, songs in an American accent. When you cannot even sing in your own language, that is the end. The result of the absence of any respect for God and for neighbour ends in a lack of self-respect. This nihilistic attitude to self is seen in poor dress and diet, tattoos, pieces of metal fixed in the face, and the use of drugs, whether vapes, tobacco, alcohol or harder drugs. The decline proceeds generation by generation until it results in nihilism. The cynicism is such that all alternatives are rejected. And so the fall comes.

On the Six Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Diaspora

In the twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church outside the borders of Russia split into six groups, three splits took place for ethnic reasons and three splits took place for political reasons.

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

Firstly, there was quite a large Carpatho-Rusyn group in the USA, founded by immigrants who had been forced into Uniatism. They had arrived in the US from 1880 on, not from the Russian Empire, but from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Once in freedom in the USA, most of them returned to Russian Orthodoxy (the strongly Uniatised did not and were called by the absurd term ‘Ruthenians’). The return was for two reasons. Firstly, an infamous Roman Catholic Archbishop in the USA, called John Ireland (1838-1918), refused to let the Carpatho-Rusyns have married clergy and, secondly, he tried to steal their churches from them. As a Roman Catholic bishop (just like ROCOR bishops today), he did not understand that Carpathian Orthodoxy is founded on churches built or paid for by the people for the people. In real and not clericalist Orthodoxy, the hierarchical principle is always balanced by the congregational principle.  Led by the future saint, Fr Alexis (Toth), most people returned to the Church. The People’s Orthodoxy always triumphs over greedy clericalist bishops, who have the State mentality and dreams of power and riches. The Carpatho-Rusyns came to form a group known as the Metropolia and then from 1971 on the OCA (Orthodox Church in America).

After 1945 there formed second and third groups, a small Belarussian group and a very large and also very nationalistic Ukrainian group, mainly in Northern America, but also to some extent in Western Europe and elsewhere. After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, most of the Ukrainian group, hating Russians, ended up under Constantinople. The small and weak Belarusian group more or less died out.

The Three Russian Political Divisions

As for the ethnic Russians in the Diaspora, after 1917 they too split into three. Initially, until the 1990s and renewed emigration, the smallest group was the Moscow Patriarchate group. This was at the centre of Soviet patriotism, which after 1991 transferred to Russian Federation patriotism. Many in this group never dared contradict whoever was in power in Moscow, whether they intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan or the Ukraine. A blind patriotic loyalty even to an atheist regime (!) prevailed among some in this Church. For them, the Russian Patriarch is an ethnarch, in the same way as the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople is an ethnarch. For example, when Orthodox in Latvia were recently obliged by the local government to stop commemorating the Russian Patriarch, many there stopped going to church. I was asked if people should continue to attend churches there. I answered: If churches there continue to commemorate Christ, then of course they should attend them. Clearly, for many, the commemoration of the Patriarch was much more important than the commemoration of Christ. This is a parallel to the Roman Catholic attitude to the Popes of Rome. For them too the Pope is the head of the Church. No Pope, no Church! And the same ‘phyletist’ disease is present among some in Constantinople, Moscow and elsewhere.

The second smallest group in the Diaspora after 1917 was the Paris-centred group. This was led by Westernised aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly from Saint Petersburg, who had betrayed the Tsar, organised the first ‘Revolution’ (palace coup) to overthrow him and showed loyalty to Western values such as liberalism, ecumenism etc. In general, they showed little interest in fasting, monasticism and piety. This is now an even smaller group, as it has largely died out.

The largest émigré group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, also Russian Orthodox Church Abroad or in Exile), was always anti-Communist. However, since being anti-Communist is not the same as Orthodox Christianity (to the amazement of some of them!), this led them into deviations and perversions, such as Nazism, then the CIA, NATO, the Republican Party and American Imperialism. The erroneous idea was that anyone who was anti-Communist was their friend. That hatred blinded many of them to the fact that all those movements embodied hatred for Russia. And yet these people were supposedly pro-Russian! After multiple scandals in ROCOR over the last decade, involving narcissists, homosexual and pedophile clergy, this group has also become very small. Many have left it in disgust at its anti-Christian ethos and so it has in recent years become a rather irrelevant fringe group and a very great embarrassment to its Mother-Church in Moscow.

As for us, we continue to confess our loyalty to Christ and His Saints, the New Martyrs and the New Confessors, in faithfulness to St John of Shanghai and his successor the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. In 1975, we were already venerating the still uncanonised (after some 50 years!) New Martyrs and Confessors. Moscow refused to canonise them, like the two other groups – refusals all from lack of spiritual freedom. Apart from some quite exceptional individuals such as St John of Shanghai, all three groups also refused to venerate the Saints of the first millennium West when it was still Orthodox.

After the long overdue reconciliations with Moscow and apparent unity of the three ethnic Russian groups between 2007 and 2018, in the 2020s, the situation worsened sharply, as nationalism, Russian, American or French, seized hold of the leadership of the three groups. Moreover, as a result of Soviet-style nationalist centralisation, the Russian Church began to suffer from further splits with Orthodox in Estonia, the Ukraine, Moldova and Latvia. These splits spread everywhere outside the borders of the Russian Federation, among all who felt they had been treated as second-class citizens by the Centre and its emissaries. This left the Russian Church drifting rudderless and heading for shipwreck, as we continually described at that time.

Although we ordinary clergy and people were left leaderless and abandoned by politicians instead of pastors, we shall never respond to lies with lies, to slanders with slanders, to hatred with hatred. But neither shall we remain silent in the face of lies, slander, hatred, schism and sect. We shall continue to defend our canonical communion with the mainstream, all the Local Churches of the Orthodox Faith, and defend the spiritual freedom of our clergy and parishioners to be in communion with the whole Conciliar Church, to guard our Catholicity, and to keep the memory of the Saints, who are the identity of our Church. And in our case they are the identity of our England, as also of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And no foreign sectarian and schismatic interloper from the USA has impeded us from so doing.