Category Archives: Britain and Ireland

On the Fringes of the Empire

Outside the Lands that were Orthodox Christian, that is, holy, in the second millennium and indeed, sometimes for much of the first millennium also, we in the Isles of the North Atlantic live on the fringes of the Empire. We have our examples of holiness, but they are far in the past. So what happens in the third millennium when the double-headed eagle of the Orthodox Christian Empire once more flies above us, despite a near millennium of apostasy in England?

At first sight it seems that only compromise happens. However, although there may be a need for superficial compromise, for empty platitudes, there are also those who confess the Orthodox Faith despite diplomacy, despite the failure to witness of those who are quoted as witnesses, but who in fact compromised themselves with the Norman Establishment. They may be Jerusalem, but we are Galilee and, without us, they are but stones without living voices.

Who understands us? It is not the personalities who demanded guru-worship, not the philosophers who lived in their intellectual fantasies, not the administrators with piles of gold who have little understanding of pastoral reality. It is the little people in the poor and ignored places who live the Faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, our saints St Elizabeth the New Martyr and St John of Shanghai the New Confessor, who give us food for our souls.

Three Hundred Years of Russian Orthodoxy in the British Isles and Ireland

The 300-year old Russian Orthodox presence in the British Isles and Ireland was for 200 years of that time limited to that of an Embassy church in London. Although occasional interest would be shown by an individual or there would be an Anglo-Russian marriage, Non-Russians, especially outside London, never knew that such a church existed. However, with the Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance of the First World War, more and more Russians came to work in London for the war effort. By 1916 Metropolitan Pitirim (Oknov) of Saint Petersburg, who was then responsible for churches outside Russia, was drawing up plans to build a Russian Orthodox church in London. Translations of some Orthodox service books had already been made into English by Orlov and, in the USA, by Hapgood. This progress was all interrupted by the 1917 Revolution, but that in turn brought some 2,000 Russian refugee-émigrés to London and the surrounding area.

This resulted in the consecration of a bishop for the Russian community in London, Bishop Nicholas (Karpov). Sadly, he fell ill when very young and after only three years he reposed in 1932. The hopes of the first Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky), that he would be able to present the Russian Orthodox Faith to English people were unrealized. In 1937 the former English Tutor of the Tsarevich Aleksey, the Yorkshireman Sidney Gibbes, returned to England from the Far East. By then he had not only joined the Orthodox Church but had been ordained as Fr Nicholas Gibbes (+ 1963), the first 20th century English Orthodox priest, bearing the name of the martyred Tsar. An academic by temperament, he opened an Orthodox chapel in Oxford. After 1945 several thousand Russians, mainly from pre-war Poland, what is now the western Ukraine and Belarus, came to England and many settled in the north of England. A new chapter in our history had begun.

Archbishop (later St) John (Maximovich) (+ 1966), based on the Continent, looked after most of the faithful, but by 1954 those in the North had their own Bishop Nikodim (Nagaev) of Preston, who later became Archbishop in London (+ 1976). Meanwhile, in 1957 the small Patriarchal parish in London obtained a bishop in the future Metr Antony (Bloom) (+ 2003), who was to become well-known to Anglicans and others through his talks and books and also radio and TV appearances. By the 1960s, with the old certainties gone and doubts about everything, numbers of English people, mostly Anglicans, began to show an interest in the Russian Orthodox Church. This seemed to them to have far more continuity of Tradition than more recently-appeared varieties of Protestantism (including Anglicanism) or Roman Catholicism. Many Anglicans were attracted to the personality of the English-speaking Metr Antony, who set up a tiny network of communities, called the Sourozh Diocese. Witness was greatly helped by the fact that churches were then beginning to conduct services in English. At first this was only in London and Oxford, where the only permanent churches and chapels existed, but it has since spread.

Today, fifty years on, there are Russian Orthodox churches all over the British Isles and Ireland, though only a few of them in permanent buildings that belong to Russian Orthodoxy and celebrating regular services. Moreover, a majority of Russian Orthodox clergy are natives of the British Isles. Long gone are the days when just to witness a Russian Orthodox service you had to go to one of the two London churches or to the chapel in Oxford, indeed the largest Russian Orthodox church building in the country is elsewhere. With the immigration of Russian Orthodox, mainly from the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, and the immigration of other Orthodox from Eastern Europe over the last fifteen years especially, we now need to expand rapidly. There remains a huge amount to do. In the meantime, a small but steady stream of native people from all four countries of the British Isles and Ireland, continues to come to our services and some join the Church, attracted by our faithfulness to the bimillennial Orthodox Christian Tradition.

Thus, we can see that our 300-year old history can be divided into three distinct periods. The first lasted 200 years – the period as an Embassy church in London. The second that lasted 50 years was a London-centred period of survival and consolidation and pastoral care for Russian speakers. The third which began after 250 years of presence and which has lasted 50 years so far, has been a period of openness to the surrounding world, a period of witness and expansion throughout these islands. Our future place and role in these islands is precisely to continue to expand and witness to the Orthodox Tradition and Faith, not just for our own people, whose children and descendants are English-speaking and locally educated, but for those who seek – and find – spiritual comfort in partaking of the roots and origins of Christianity in the Faith and Tradition of our worldwide, multinational and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church.

Patriarch Kyrill to Visit England

The visit of His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and All the Russias will be taking place this weekend and the week after, when he will have an audience with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. During the visit he will visit both Russian churches in London and will celebrate on Sunday at the Russian church in Ennismore Gardens, commemorating the 300th anniversary of the presence of the Russian Orthodox Church in these islands.

His visit comes at a time of immense international tension after the defeat by Russia of US-backed (‘moderate’) terrorists in Syria and the catastrophes for Western-backed forces in Libya and the Yemen as well as huge difficulties for the bankrupt Western puppet regimes in the Ukraine and France. The internet has been awash with the usual hysterical rumours of a looming ‘Third World War’ and imminent nuclear warfare between the USA and, simultaneously, the Russian Federation and China. Sadly, these rumours have been promoted by neocon generals and politicians in Washington, who are greatly disturbed that the Democratic/neocon candidate for the Presidential elections in the USA may be defeated, with the result that their budgets will be slashed.

It can only be hoped that the Patriarchal visit, though much attacked by the irrational and propagandist paid sections of the British corporate media (e.g. The Times of London and the BBC), will do something to defuse these absurd and unneeded tensions.

Memorial Service for King Harold Godwinesson and all his companions – 27 October 2016

We remind all that after the Patriarch’s visit to London on 16 October, on Thursday 27 October a pilgrimage to the village of Whatlington near Battle in Sussex has been organized. This will take place at 11 am to mark the 950th Anniversary of the so-called Battle of Hastings, with its thousands of victims. The venue is the Church of St Mary Magdelene, Whatlington, East Sussex, about three miles north of the battlefield. Whatlington was a Royal Manor and the place where King Harold stopped to pray on his way to the battle itself, and is therefore an eminently suitable place for the service.

Other Details

The present-day village, on Whatlington Road, is just to the west of the main Hastings road (A21) (car park at TN33 0ND). There is a rail connection to Battle and Whatlington can be reached from there by bus, it is a 2-hourly service at an inconvenient time, so if you are reliant on public transport, please let me know and we will try to arrange a lift from the railway station. All are welcome to attend.

Lunch

A lunch will then take place after the service at about midday at The Royal Oak, Whatlington.

Menus

Main course

1) Roast Lamb with Roast Potatoes, Vegetables (carrots, green beans & broccoli), Yorky & Gravy
2) Roast Chicken with Roast potatoes, Vegetables (carrots, green beans & broccoli), Yorky & Gravy
3) Chili con Carne with Rice

Desserts
1) Caramel Apple Pie
2) Sticky Toffee Pudding
3) Ice Cream Sundae (toffee)

All with tea/coffee to follow.
The cost of this will be £15 per head.

If you are attending the service and would like to take advantage of this, please reply to

Eadmund Dunstall, 28 Quested Road, Cheriton, Folkestone, Kent CT19 4BY, E-mail: daysign@dunstall.plus.com,

enclosing the appropriate payment (cheques payable to Malcolm Dunstall please) and being careful to state the number of people in your party and their choice of menu before 30th September 2016.

Talk

A short talk will follow the luncheon at approximately 1 pm in the Function Room of The Royal Oak, on the subject of the battle and its aftermath, and there will be a brief meeting of The Guild of St Eadmund at the end of the talk.

We look forward to meeting you.

Archbishop Mark To Resign

It has been announced that Archbishop Mark of Berlin is ‘shortly’ to resign as bishop in charge of the ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland. The Diocese will temporarily become stavropegic under Metroplitan Hilarion. It is hoped that the Metropolitan will deal with the backlog of ordinations and other issues before a permanent resident English-speaking bishop is at last installed in London next year.

Memorial Service for King Harold Godwinesson and all his companions – 27 October 2016

A pilgrimage to the village of Whatlington near Sandlake [Battle] in Sussex has been organized by the Guild of St Eadmund. This will take place at 11 am on Thursday 27 October 2016, the 950th Anniversary of Sandlake Fight (now commonly known as The Battle of Hastings), at the Church of St Mary Magdelene, Whatlington, East Sussex, about three miles north of the battlefield. The Memorial Service will be celebrated by Fr Andrew Phillips.

Whatlington was a Royal Manor and the place where Harold stopped to pray on his way to the battle itself, and therefore is an eminently suitable place for the service. The present-day village, on Whatlington Road, is just to the west of the main Hastings road (A21) (car park at TN33 0ND). There is a rail connection to Battle and Whatlington can be reached from there by bus, it is a 2-hourly service at an inconvenient time, so if you are reliant on public transport, please let me know and I will try to arrange a lift from the railway station. All are welcome to attend.

Lunch

A lunch will then take place after the service at about midday at The Royal Oak, Whatlington.

Menus

Main course

1) Roast Lamb with Roast Potatoes, Vegetables (carrots, green beans & broccoli), Yorky & Gravy
2) Roast Chicken with Roast potatoes, Vegetables (carrots, green beans & broccoli), Yorky & Gravy
3) Chili con Carne with Rice

Desserts
1) Caramel Apple Pie
2) Sticky Toffee Pudding
3) Ice Cream Sundae (toffee)

All with tea/coffee to follow.

The cost of this will be £15 per head.

If you are attending the service and would like to take advantage of this, please reply to

Eadmund Dunstall, 28 Quested Road, Cheriton, Folkestone, Kent CT19 4BY,

E-mail: daysign@dunstall.plus.com,

enclosing the appropriate payment (cheques payable to Malcolm Dunstall please) and being careful to state the number of people in your party and their choice of menu before 30th September 2016.

Talk

A short talk will follow the luncheon at approximately 1 pm in the Function Room of The Royal Oak, on the subject of the battle and its aftermath, and there will be a brief meeting of The Guild of St Eadmund at the end of the talk.

We look forward to meeting you.

On Western Pride and the English Character

Introduction: Western Pride

There are two Europes, the Old Europe and the New Europe, that is, the Europe of the first millennium and the Europe of the second millennium, Orthodox Europe and Secular Europe. We belong to the First Europe, whose very existence is denied, deliberately buried and hidden beneath the Second. Whereas the main characteristic of the First Europe is humility, that of the Second Europe is pride. This came about from the millennial delusion that Western European peoples are superior to other races, as is expressed by the filioque – the boasting Western statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from their human nature. Its consequences were first seen when the introducer of the filioque, the eighth-century Frankish barbarian kinglet Charlemagne (Charles the Tall – he measured six feet 3 inches), slaughtered thousands of Saxons when they refused baptism.

This became even clearer at the end of the eleventh century, after the official adoption and defence of the filioque, with similar massacres in Southern Italy, in the British Isles after 1066, in Spain and during the First Crusade. We can clearly see the various forms of this pride in the negative traits common among European peoples. Thus, at worst, France can tend to suffer from vanity, megalomania – for example, the ‘Sun-King’ Louis XIV, Napoleon or Mitterrand – narcissism and therefore chauvinism (Chauvin was a Frenchman). At worst, Germany can tend to suffer from the thirst for control and domination over others, the striving for perfectionism – nothing is ever good enough if it is not German, as we have seen most recently in two World Wars and in the history of the EU. But what of the English, often called the British?

English Vices

Without doubt the English form of this Western pride is national pride, the love of national honour, as we can see in the history of the British Empire or in today’s cult of show-off cars and one-upmanship, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. ‘British is best’, they say, regardless of how awful it may actually be. This false assurance of natural superiority breeds not only jingoistic xenophobia (encouraged by living on an island), but also the spirit of ‘since it’s British, it’s good enough’, when in fact something is either good or bad, never ‘good enough’. This encourages amateurism, ‘muddling through’, ‘coping’, ‘managing’, rather than doing things properly. And that in turn breeds narrow-minded pragmatism and practicality: if it works, it is good enough, we don’t care about the rest. Which is how the British car industry with its shoddy products destroyed itself.

It is true that there are other national failings, but these were or are the result of the deformations of Protestantism and are shared by other peoples who also became Protestant. For instance, there is the national weakness of always compromising – a vice that grew up out of the Reformation, neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant. Indeed, it was on this unprincipledness of always compromising that the State Church was founded, with a Roman Catholic exterior but a Protestant interior. Now, compromise is no bad thing if it concerns secondary matters and being good neighbours. However, on matters of principle, this is the vice of amoralism. You cannot compromise between truth and lie, between good and bad. As the Gospel says, there can be no compromise between God and Belial. Thus, I have heard one (atheist) Anglican vicar saying that his ‘Church’ is ideal because it reconciles those who believe in God and those who do not!

Then there is the obsession with money, as seen in the multitude of words like calculating, stingy, frugal, prudent, tight, mean and the Dickensian scrooge. However, this characteristic is the result of narrow-minded, tedious, boring, thisworldly, money-grubbing Protestantism, and is shared by ex-Protestant and Calvinistic European peoples like the Dutch, the Swiss, the Scots and the Scandinavians, all of them founders of modern capitalism and accountancy and all notorious for their banking systems. There is also moral hypocrisy – this too was caused by puritanical Protestantism, with its high moral standards, but anti-ascetic, spiritual inability to meet them, resulting in Victorian London being the world centre of prostitution and very high rates of infection by syphilis. Today, it has resulted in fifty years of the free-for-all, ‘let it all hang out’ depravity that has come from the reaction to the old Puritanism and moral hypocrisy.

Conclusion: National Redemption?

Any vice can be turned round. Thus, French vanity can become positive, if it is turned into the quest for spiritual beauty and good taste and German perfectionism can be spiritualized as the path of repentance, the quest for self-perfection through humility. Similarly, the English sense of defending national honour can lead to the desire to do things well, to break records, to meet challenges, to declare that there are more important things than money. Triumphalist English people are not to be courted, for the English have always done best when their backs are to the wall, as at Trafalgar in 1805 and during the ‘finest hour’ during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Challenges bring out the best, enabling people to break the mould, to fight back, to think independently. If this can be spiritualized, then the English can still do great things.

Finally, there is the question of English humour. Its origin is in the absurd and even surreal contradictions in English society between the foreign, Norman Establishment and the English people, which is why this humour is so derisive of the Establishment and its class system, as in Monty Python. Unable to fight back against the Establishment, all the people could do in their frustration was to mock it and the situation that they found themselves in. On the one hand, this humour can be bitter and cynical, such as that in political satire, but on the other hand it can show the ability to mock oneself. Thus, the graffiti of Banksy can be bitterly satirical, but it can also be amusing and lead to thought. However, most English humour simply revels in the absurd and incompatible, and that can show humility.

469: The Number of Island Destiny?

AD 128. The Roman invaders complete Hadrian’s Wall, marking the northern limit of their Imperialism. The Wall delineates the border between the future Scotland and the future England with Wales (Roman ‘Britain’) and also determines that the Roman Empire will not include Ireland. Ironically, it is thanks to the existence of the pagan Roman Empire that a limited Christianization spreads and Sts Ninian and Patrick will both be born in the neighbourhood of the Wall.

The Faith is adopted by the noble few of merchants, like Sts Julius and Aaron, soldiers like St Alban, officials like the forebears of St Ninian, St Patrick and St Gildas, and villa-owners and their servants, especially in what became South Wales. However, paganism, including in the semi-Christian forms of Pelagianism and nominalism, as recorded by Sts Bede, Patrick and Gildas, is far stronger. It will eventually dominate among the Celts who will make no attempt to convert the incoming English.

469 years pass.

AD 597. The Irish missionary Fr Columba, spreading the Faith of Jerusalem come via Egypt and Gaul as well as Roman Britain, reposes on Iona in the far north-west. His mission will spread throughout Scotland and all the northern half of England and further south. The Italian Fr Augustine arrives in Canterbury in the far south-east with his mission to the pagan English, with Cross and Icon of Christ. His mission will spread throughout the south of England and meet that of the Celts come from the north. The two missions will be combined into one great stream by the Greek Archbishop Theodore.

After their repose both St Columba and St Augustine are soon venerated as saints. This glorious age of shared Anglo-Celtic holiness blossoms and is weakened only under Viking attacks 200 years later, though these bring the glory of martyrdom to many. Only then can a great rebirth begin under the holy King Alfred the Great (+ 899) from the English capital in Winchester, which peters out 150 years later in the eleventh century, under the new, Frankish-barbarian, political order of feudalism. This has developed in North-Western Europe and will eventually isolate all Western and Central Europe from the Church for 900 years.

469 years pass.

AD 1066. The last Vikings, the aggressive semi-pagan Normans, invade England (and later the rest of the British Isles and Ireland) under William the Bastard, the illegitimate son of Robert the Devil. They bring violent invasion, genocide and plunder, and their ‘blessing’ from fallen Rome with its full-blown new religion, half-Christian and half-barbarian. With its concentration-camp feudal enslavement and village compounds, it is violently enforced by watchtower castles, ‘filled with devils’, and horsemen trained to intimidate and kill. Uniat-style, the new religion is outwardly similar to what went before, but inwardly totally different, as if reflecting the past in a distorting mirror.

This novel Frankish religion, a combination of pagan Roman Imperialism with heathen Teutonism, makes the peoples’ kings into remote tyrants, Christian peasants into oppressed feudal serfs, humble married priests into proud clericalist celibates and replaces monasteries and ascetic prayer with universities and abstract studies. This religious Normanization violently supplants the Old English Church and Faith. It brings its inherent spiritual deformation of the filioque, the anti-Incarnational division between Divine and human, clerical and lay, sacred and secular, which is the seed of its own destruction, for it results in ever-growing, humanist secularization.

469 years pass.

AD 1535. The bloodthirsty Tudor tyrant Henry VIII, the Hitler of his age, replaces splintering and much discredited institutional Roman Catholicism with his own new, desacralizing and secularizing, moralizing and hypocritical State religion. He imposes this anti-ascetic and anti-sacramental doctrine with the same Uniat-style deceit and Viking violent invasion, genocide and plunder as the Normans, murdering abbots and simple folk alike. In the following century the three Norman vices lead to a series of civil wars throughout the Isles, in which over a million people will die. The Hitler of that age, the new William, the Republican tyrant and mass-murderer Cromwell, is still feted outside Parliament in Norman London to this day.

The three vices of violent invasion, genocide and plunder characterize the worldwide Normanization which Henry’s dynasty undertakes under the name of British Imperialism. From the Viking piracy of Francis Drake to the enslavement of Africans in the New World, from genocide in Ireland to massacres in North America, from Clive in India to the poisoning of the Chinese with opium, from the invasion of Russia to that of Tibet, from the wiping out of the Tasmanians to Rhodes in Africa, from machine-gunning in the Sudan to concentration camps for Boer families, from the Bengal famine to the repression of the Kikuyu, violent invasion, genocide and plunder are the order of the age in a global Empire which justifies its wars and theft as ‘free trade’.

469 years pass.

AD 2004. Having rejected the hypocritical 1535 State religion and Imperialism, but replaced it with a humanistic form of paganism, the English, like the peoples in the other parts of the British Isles and Ireland, begin to awake. Though not recognized as such, this is a movement of Denormanization and fightback against the oppression of the pompous Norman Establishment of 1066. Resistance has been sparked by the disastrous invasion of Iraq of 2003, unleashed by the Unionist British Norman Establishment against the will of the people and their sense of justice. By 2016, the 950th anniversary of the Norman invasion and occupation, this popular, anti-Unionist resistance leads to freedom from the Roman Catholic structured-EU. This promises the gradual development of new sovereign relationships between the Four Nations of the Isles.

The whole centralist Norman Unionism of the UK Establishment in London, which the Normans (like the Imperialist Romans before them) had fixed as their Capital, is being challenged. Amid the reaction to the past which has given rise to the revival of tattooed paganism, a throwback to the pre-597 Pictish world, there are glimmers of hope for the restoration of the values of the pre-1066 world that came after paganism, but before oppression. In throwing out the post-1066 world, there is no need to reject the values of the 597-1066 world, no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The values of the Old English Church and Faith, which are in reality the values of the multinational Church of God, still alive in Russia and other faithful and uncompromised parts of the Orthodox world, may yet be reborn before the end.

Independence Day

Fooled, Europa! Ruled by such fools and knaves,
Britons never any longer shall be slaves.

The unexpected has happened and, after over forty years of the US-imposed EU straitjacket, more people in the UK have voted for principles than for self-interest. The electorate has rejected Project Fear of the Westminster elite. Failing to step outside the foreign country that is London into reality, the political elite, which all too often stuffed its pockets with EU cash, has lost the people. Foreign figures, President Obama, NATO Fascists, Angela Merkel, EU officials, the Pope of Rome (and his bishops in the UK), as well as bastions of the Establishment, Blair and Cameron (should that be Clair and Bameron?), the BBC, most of the Press, the Church of England, MI5 and MI6, all took part in Project Fear, and lost, underestimating the thirst for freedom of the people, so long ignored, so long neglected, so long despised. Even though they manipulated the shooting of a female MP (the conspiracy theorists at once saw in it an Establishment assassination) in their desperation to garner votes at the last minute, they still lost.

On the 950th anniversary of the enslavement of England, and soon after of the other peoples of these isles, to the European Superstate run by the then new Roman Papacy, the forerunner of the present Superstate, people have chosen freedom. Freedom here may also mean freedom for others. Scotland may leave the artificial UK and Ireland may at last be able to reunite. As for other European countries still enslaved to the US and German-run EU, they too may at last be allowed the chance to regain their sovereignty with the people being allowed freedom from the tyrannical EU elite. In the Netherlands, in Denmark, in Sweden, in France, in Italy, in the Czech Republic, and elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe, referenda for freedom may be held. The EU, merely a post-war model of Europe and reaction to the Second World War of long ago, may be dead. A Europe of Sovereign Nations, at peace because living in freedom, now seems possible at last. The UK has chosen the wide world to a political customs union in a narrow corner of the Eurasian Continent. 75 years ago Britain stood alone against the Third Reich; now it has happened against the Fourth Reich.