Category Archives: Degeneration

Cain’s Technology of Death and the Spiritual Decomposition of the Western World

Weapons Technology

After the Fall and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the next tragedy in the next generation of human history is the story of how Cain rose up and killed his brother Abel. It was the beginning of murder, with stones, clubs and axes, knives and spears, then bows with flint-tipped arrows. Much later, after the year 1000 AD, as the Western Middle Ages began, these ‘primitive’ weapons of death developed into sophisticated castles with armoured horsemen, crossbows and long bows. These were followed in the years before and after 1500 by the discovery of more killing technology, by artillery and muskets, leading in the nineteenth century to the invention of repeating rifles and powerful mortars, machine guns and semi-modern artillery, with an immense range and killing power. The battles of the Middle Ages which killed 5,000 became wars, like that in the USA only some 150 years ago, which killed 500,000 and more.

What happened after this, in the twentieth century, is well-known, with its battleships and submarines, aeroplanes and bombs, poison gas and howitzers, shells and rockets, chemical and biological weapons, atomic bombs and smart bombs, what are now called, ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The wars that had killed 500,000 became wars that killed 50,000,000 and more. For over fifty years now, evil people have been able to destroy all human life on the planet with such weapons in just a few hours. This is the ultimate suicide, called MAD, mutually assured destruction. This technology of killing is ‘Cainization’, the technology of Cain, the technology of murder, the technology of death. And it is absolutely clear that such revolting weapons, battles and wars, just as primitive as in ancient times in their ability to maim, mutilate and murder, but with 1,000,000 times the power, have been inspired only by Satan, who is the Father of Death.

The Degeneration of Christian Civilization in the West: 1000-1500

In 1000 AD provincial forms of the Christian Civilization still existed in the extreme western tip of Eurasia. They had not yet separated from its great centres radiating out around Asian Jerusalem, though it was sorely tempted to do so by Satan, who would inspire its technology of death and so its Might. And for it, Might was, and is, Right. It was this once Christian society that after c. 1000 became apostate and degenerated, self-justifyingly aggressive and attacking all others. Within a century the spiritual integrity of these extreme Western provinces had dissolved and what has been called ‘Western Civilization’ based on aggression and plunder formed. In its aggressive violence this Wild West ‘Civilization’ soon came to expand behind a border line of feudal castles and Gothic, inhabited by horsemen with their technology of death, from Finland to Estonia, Latvia to Lithuania, Poland to Slovakia and Hungary to Croatia.

Its violence and aggression began with the massacre of Jews in what is now northern France and western Germany soon after the start of the millennium, then the massacre of Muslims in Spain, southern Italy and the Middle East, then of Christians in England and the Eastern Mediterranean, all by the year 1100. However we may explain its origins, once this intolerant aggressiveness had been unleashed, it resulted in more genocidal massacres and semi-permanent wars, both internal to the various, ex-Christian tribes in this extreme Western tip of Eurasia and also carried outside it by violent and primitive horsemen (‘knights’) with their ever-developing technology of death. The violence of this post-Christian culture increased immensely after about 1500. However, its amoral violence and plunder had already become apparent in 1453, with the destruction and pillage of what was then the capital of the Christian Empire, in New Rome.

The Degeneration of ‘Western Civilization’: 1500-2000

Egged on by the opportunity to steal gold in ‘El Dorado’ outside their own world, in 1492, with the first voyage of the ruthless Italian gold-seeker Columbus, this aggressiveness and destruction were to be carried even outside Eurasia, to ‘New Worlds’. Their greed for conquest, justified only by religious and racial arrogance, had begun. In 1500 there had still existed many civilizations on the planet. There were those in China, those in South-East Asia, those in what is now Australia, those in the Pacific, the Hindu and Muslim ones in the Indian subcontinent, those in Africa, that in the centre of North America with its huge temple mounds, those in what is now Mexico and Central America with their pyramids, those in the Andes, that along the Amazon River, the Muslim and Ottoman, and also the remaining Christian Civilization from Jerusalem, restricted by violence to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Russian Lands.

These were to be largely destroyed over the next 500 years in an orgy of slavery, pillaging (‘asset-stripping’) by Western killing technology, camouflaged by words like ‘adventure’, ‘exploration’, ‘trading’, ‘imperialism’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘globalization’. The Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, the French, the Germans, the Belgians, the Italians and the Americans all took part in these plunderous genocides. The most ‘primitive’ civilizations, in South and Central America, were conquered first, followed by North America, large parts of Asia, Australasia, Japan and Africa. Their destruction was followed in the early twentieth century by Western machinations which destroyed Imperial China and, in 1917, the Russian Empire, which under Tsar Nicholas II had been the only protector of still independent (‘uncolonized’) countries like Siam (Thailand), Ethiopia and Tibet, and the defender of the Boers and exploited native peoples in Africa.

Hope in the New Millennium

However, China and Russia were never annihilated like the others and they survived by adopting Western technology. Thus, in the 1940s China defended itself from Western-developed Japan using the same technology and after 1941 the former Russian Empire defeated yet another Western invasion and onslaught with the same. In the 21st century the current and still fragile revival of Christian Civilization in what is left of the Russian Empire, now called the Russian Federation, 100 years after its Western-engineered collapse, may last, but that is not certain. As a revival, it has far to go and far to spread, for it has only just begun. The future here is still unclear. What, however, is clear is that if the revival of Christian Civilization under way in Russia falters, then the end of the world cannot be far. Cain’s technology of death has been so far developed and spread worldwide (‘globalized’) that the Russian Abel may not be strong enough to resist it.

Thus, over a thousand years, we have witnessed the ‘Cainization’ of the Western World. Already in the nineteenth century the Russian thinker Dostoyevsky called his travels to Western Europe ‘visits to the cemetery of dear friends’. Although holy relics remain, corpses in cemeteries decompose. The decomposition of the once Orthodox Christian Western European world has come about because, having lost its beliefs and ideals, it has no inner life, no culture of its own, it is purely superficial. Now it is just an imitation of the new Wild West, the USA, which is marked by Cain’s desire for plunder, jealousy, futility and ugliness. Six virtues have left today’s Westernised world: depth, justice, dignity, nobility, beauty and elegance. All spring from Abel’s spiritual and moral values and so all depth, justice, dignity, nobility, beauty and elegance are fled away. This is why our hope amid this destruction is in Russia, where Christian Civilization is reviving.

An Intercepted Message: Victory is At Hand!

The following message has been sent to us, intercepted from the Dark Net.

Hell Headquarters
12 December 2014

To All the Disincarnate,

The one whose name we dare not mention describes Faith in what the humans call ‘The New Testament’, but we demons call ‘The Words of Death’. There he describes the words and acts of Faith and his struggle against the immoral institutionalism of Religion and the Pharisees and the amoral indifferentism of Pilate and the Saducees.

Over the last millennium we have seen our success in gradually creating our complete infestation of the Western world, bringing it back from Faith into the institutional religion of Phariseeism and the indifferentism of Saduceeism.

1. Phariseeism

As you will recall, our first success came when we created our structure of Command, when we invented feudalist Papalism 1,000 years ago. For some 500 years after that we worked very hard on corrupting the top, institutionalizing Faith by putting it under earthly command and so making it into mere Religion.

2. Saduceeism

As you will recall, our second success came when we created our structure of Control, when we invented individualist Lutheranism 500 years ago. For some 500 years after that we worked very hard on controlling the masses by reducing faith to mere moralism and the myths of individualism (freedom and democracy), so that we could exploit them in our industrial ‘civilization’.

3. Destructionism

Brothers! Now comes the moment of our triumph. Thanks to 1,000 years of OUR patience, they are now so brainwashed that they believe that they are free because we tell them that! At last, they are ripe for total repaganization by having their identities destroyed. Soon they will no longer be men and women, fathers and mothers, but transgender zombies who will do as they are told by our politically correct State. Our final victory is at hand!

There will no longer be any ladies and gentlewomen, because they have lost their souls. According to one of our greatest agents, Darwin, they now believe that they are, at best, intelligent apes, who are guided by us whom inspire the basest instincts in them. At worst, they now know that they are inconvenient and so deserve abortion or euthanasia and then incineration, of which our great friend Hitler, an admirer of Darwin, was the ideological forerunner.

However, on the verge of victory, we must be careful: despite our globalization of the West, there are still outposts of resistance outside and even inside the Western world. Beware of being expelled by them! Victory is at hand, but is still not yet quite ours. Remember that gradualism is the key to our success. Soon all Earth will be Hell. This will be our great prize. Remember it.

Who is the Traitor Now?

(Slightly edited with permission from a US reader’s blog).

The loudest Liberal Globalist haters of Russia are also haters of America under President Trump, a post-Brexit Britain and Europeans. These people hate Russia because under Putin they are thwarted from having complete domination of Eurasia over which they seek to impose the European Union (EU) and NATO, which they view as “stepping stones” to total global control. Putin stands in their way of this, and an independent Britain does the same, and any other “-exits.”

Trump has pledged to put American interests first, over those of these “Liberal” Globalists who seek the submergence of every European country and America with unending Third World and, especially in the case of the former, Muslim, immigration. Their hatred of Trump for seeking a thawing of relations with Putin makes sense in that both men are enemies to their dreams of their Global Empire, and these Globalists, through their ownership and control of the large corporate (i.e. “mainstream”) news media, are able to unendingly demonize both Putin and Trump. I believe that they will go, and indeed are going, so far as to promote civil wars in America and Europe and even world war with Russia. They are not thinking rationally or humanely, or prudently, in order to further their goals.

The fact that there are Conservatives who act as their objective allies under the guise of being “Never Trump” and Neo-Conservative is worse, for these people know better about the Globalists, yet, for their variously ideological reasons, personal embitterment, and perhaps, self-righteousness, are willing to surrender their country to Globalists in order to seek confrontation with Russia abroad and bring down a President whom they irrationally hate. Past, and present, American interference in the relations of other countries’ elections is never talked about, including that of Ukraine, whose pro-Russian, democratically elected government the Obama administration helped overthrow, right on Russia’s border, containing sizeable numbers of pro-Moscow Russians in eastern territories, and pro-Western Ukrainians in its far western territories (formerly Poland), has been the largest and most dangerous “bone of contention” between Western-based Globalists and Russia. Whatever one thinks about Ukraine’s proper borders, their borders are irrelevant to the question of America’s and the West’s survival. To put them, now especially, at the very apex of American and European interests is, in a sense, to adopt Ukrainian nationalism as one’s chief loyalty, or at least as being more useful to advancing Globalist objectives of expansion, while rejecting American or British or German nationalism as a retardant on Globalist objectives.

The EU, NATO, and Globalists and Republican NeoCons like Graham and McCain have SEMANTICALLY substituted obedience to their plans for Global control as being “loyalty to America and the West.” American patriots should recognize that the Globalists have made the hatred of Russia under Putin MORE important than actually having pro-American foreign AND domestic policies, and in fact their other policies, i.e. like immigration, actually harm Americans; they have made this rash foreign policy of confrontation with a country that does not threaten us their test of loyalty and treason, while actually sacrificing, willingly and in a calculated manner, the very defense and survival of America and the nations of Europe, while demonizing those seeking “detente,” or better, peaceful relations with Russia, whose public philosophy in morals is far closer than those of “our” godless, Globalist Establishments in the West.

The Globalists, it cannot be overstressed, hate Christianity and White people, what the historic West was, and both of which they seek to destroy, and in so doing really are the epitome of treason, but, through their control of the media, they have reapplied the names of “treason” and “traitor” to patriots like Trump and his supporters, who have the pragmatic desire for a more multipolar world, one that also will keep the Globalists from achieving their goals of world domination and keeping us out of needless wars. It is the Globalists and their Vichy Conservative allies who are the traitors, the former by principle and the latter by their spite, are cooperating with them. To the extent that American and European patriots are “pro-Russian,” it is because they see Russia as a bulwark, as allies, against the Western-based, but thoroughly anti-Western in substance, Globalists.

The Big Question of who and what is a traitor today revolves around the question of who is the biggest threat to the actual West: The Globalists inside the West whose goal is the destruction of the West and its peoples, and their lapdog “Conservative” allies whom the Globalists will reward with the sinecures of a castrated, “loyal opposition,” free to expound academic doctrines of purity in political economy in unread “position papers”, academic articles, and political “platforms” that double as tissue paper, or the national patriots who seek to end the Globalists’ domination and get out from under their wars of empire, and who see Putin as an ally in their patriotic struggle?

For American and European patriots to see support in Russia is not unlike the rebellious Protestant American colonists who sought an alliance with Catholic, Monarchical France in their struggle to break away from the British Empire in 1776. I can imagine that they were accused of being “pro French” and “pro Catholic” by some of their Loyalist neighbors, or at least “anti-British” in seeking this alliance, but their motives were to make American independent of Britain, not making America dependent on or even resembling France in religion and government. In a hierarchy of values, loyalty to nation and culture is the far truer test of who is a patriot and who is a traitor than seeking peaceful relations with foreign states which do not threaten us. The Globalists’ efforts to invert this priority, in order to subvert what is primary, is both cynical and dangerous, and if they persist in it, may do irreparable harm to America, the West, and indeed, the whole world.

Christ or Antichrist: There is No Room for Half-Christ

At the present time the politically-minded representatives of a minority of fewer than 20% of members of the Orthodox Church oppose the representatives of the majority of over 80%. This was clearly seen at the 2016 Inter-Orthodox forum in Crete, boycotted by representatives of over 80% of Orthodox and whose pre-written, ‘Halfodox’ documents respected Orthodox bishops refused to sign. The representatives of nearly 20% are from the Greek and EU parts of the Church that are US/Western run and influenced; the representatives of the 80% are the politically free, who are able to keep to the Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of the Church in the Christian Empire.

The 20% who in fact, consciously or unconsciously, betray the Church are composed of two groups.
The first group is formed of petty nationalists, who fall into idolatry by putting their national flag above the multi-national Church. The result of such nationalism is that those outside their nationalism are swiftly assimilated into surrounding groups. For example in the Diaspora, the descendants of such nationalists, speaking above all the local language and assimilating the local culture, are soon absorbed into the Non-Orthodox majority. Thus the churches of such nominal, nationalistic Orthodox rapidly die out, as the foreign nationalism of nationalist forebears has no relevance to descendants born in the Diaspora and they quit the Church.

The second group is formed of modernists, who have no deep love of the Church, no spiritual life or values, and tell you that it is irrelevant whether you belong to the Church or not – as ‘it is, after all, just another culture’. They are therefore inferiority-complex relativists and so ecumenists. Such people used to baptise their children (if they baptised them at all) into what they perceived to be the majority religion of the country where they lived. In other words, such modernists are relativists because they are conformists, who swim with the tide of the Establishment where they live, whatever it may be. Their Diaspora descendants also have little time for the Church and are quickly assimilated into the atheist masses.

As a result of the defection of one emigre group of such modernists, already dissident before the Revolution, which indeed they brought about, to the US-run, largely nationalist and modernist Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church has had to build a new Cathedral in Paris. This is a Cathedral for those Orthodox who are faithful to the integral Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of Christ and so of the Church in the Christian Empire. Only here, for example, is the Orthodox calendar adhered to, only here is the tradition of confession before communion adhered to, only here do women keep to the Christian Tradition of modest dress. In other words, only here are spiritual ties to the integrity of the Church kept.

After consecrating both the Russian Orthodox Cathedrals in London and Paris in the last two months, it is clear that the Russian Orthodox Patriarch is intent on witnessing to the integral Orthodox Christian Tradition before the Western world. This is a clear rejection of the watered down, modernist, relativist and ecumenist Cretan or Westernized version of Orthodoxy, created by the neocon sponsors of Greek Orthodoxy in Washington. This anti-dogmatic Halfodoxy is unable to witness anything to anyone except its inferiority as a merely exotic version of Western secularism.

Today, 100 years after the blood-soaked Revolution, the Church is returning to witness to the spiritually damaged Western world that the Western-developed, globalist atheism that persecuted it for three generations in the Soviet Union, in the greatest persecution seen in history but which is virtually ignored in the guilty West, is dead. Moreover, this clearly implies that if the Western world continues its adoption of that globalist atheism, then it too is dead. As in 2016 Western people after Western people re-assert their national identities, to the fury of their power-grasping, US/EU political and media establishments, the message of uncompromised Orthodox Christianity is at least being heeded.

On the Meaning of Destiny and the Future of Russia and the West

Introduction: Destiny

The word ‘destiny’ is vague because it has different meanings according to the three parallel universes which exist. The first-created universe is Heaven and here the word ‘destiny’ means God’s Will. The second universe is Earth, now fallen, aptly called in Old English ‘Middle-earth’ (a term more recently popularized by a former Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon, J.R.R. Tolkien). Here the word ‘destiny’ can have the pagan connotations of ‘the fates’, indicating fatalism and the buffetting of forces apparently beyond human control, called by the Ancient Greeks ‘the gods’, but by Christians ‘the demons’, but it can also have positive connotations, for on Middle-earth, people can also be inspired to do God’s Will, though this is not always understood. Finally, there is the third universe, which we call Hell, that provides a hellish destiny, what the demons want for us.

The Parallel Universes

Those who listen out for and do God’s will have a heavenly destiny or calling. They follow their heavenly roots of the past and the future. Awaiting Divine inspiration, they can have a prophetic gift and become God’s seers, visionaries. They foresee a hellish destiny for mankind if there is no repentance and a heavenly destiny if there is. (Demons can only foresee the hellish destiny because they have renounced their freewill to do good. This is why demonic prophecies are very often wrong in their dire and depressing prophecies, as they are unable to see the possibility of good. And this is why secular media often depressingly imitate those hellish forecasts). Prophets have their eyes fixed on the future and are not too bothered by the details of the present, which can tie down to the quagmire of this world, and which scandalize the narrow-minded who cannot see long-term.

Christian Destiny

Those who listen to their Divine calling and so have a Christian Destiny, do not live according to the destiny of the Middle-earth, still less to hellish destiny, but according to heavenly destiny. Their prophecies lead heavenwards. Their destiny is, according to the logic of this world, seems strange, irrational, ironic, mysterious. In reality, none of this is true, for it is the logic of this world that is composed of fallen human rationalism and therefore is strange and ironic. God’s logic, heavenly destiny, is quite different, it leads heavenwards.

Men and Women

The general heavenly destiny of men is self-sacrifice, meaning tenderness. That of women is natural beauty, meaning beauty of soul. The general hellish destiny of men is egoism, meaning brutality. The general hellish destiny of women is artificial beauty, meaning vanity. Modern Western society has largely chosen a hellish destiny, so becoming a society of egoism and vanity, that is, the selfie society, a society of narcissism, the self-important, I-society of look-at-me Facebook and MySpace, of i-phone and i-pad, of I love me.

Russia

As regards the destiny of Russia, we can say the following:

The first shot of the so-called Russian Revolution, as stated by one of the assassins, Purishkevich, was fired on 30 December 1916. The countries of the former Russian Empire then went through three 25-year generations of horror, obscenity and hysteria, of turning their backs on their roots. After the bloodshed following 1916, came 1941 and yet another Western invasion, which was a call to repentance, then the abortion holocaust of the 1960s with the whole Soviet ABCD (alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce), the result of 50 years of rejection of pre-Revolutionary values and the demotivation, especially of men, who no longer had any role to fill, as the State had total control, and finally the horrors of perestroika after 1991, in which millions died premature deaths, especially through vodka and suicide, as people were unable to face the banditry of so-called ‘privatization’ and ‘the bright future’, promised for the huge sacrifices made for the Soviet Union, turned into a nightmare. The heaven on earth promised by the Communist ideologues had become hell on earth.

Today, the hangover and vestiges of the hellish destiny of the Soviet past are still alive, but the younger generations are now aware of their Christian roots, of their forgotten and rejected heavenly destiny. Hell stopped in 1991 and a great many stepped back from the brink. Hope sprang. A generation on, there is still uncertainty, but as time passes more and more Russians have not only stepped back from the brink, but are fleeing it as fast as possible.

The West

The same pattern of generational change, every 25 years, has gone on in the West. In 1914 the Western elite rejected Christ and slaughtered and maimed its youth in indescribable conditions. In 1939 it rejected the possibility of repentance and deepened its abysmal tragedy. In the 1960s it rejected inherent Christian cultural values. In 1989 it began to spread its evil to Eastern Europe and worldwide under the slogan of a ‘New World Order’ and the word ‘globalism’. Western Europe, since 1917 under US domination, now became nothing more than a laughable US vassal.

However, in 2016, with the events of Brexit, the election of a Non-establishment politician in the USA and the rejection by Italy of Brussels bureaucrats, there is hope that the Western world is also stepping back from the brink. Having peered over the precipice and seen hell, some at least are coming to their senses. What will 2017 bring? Of course, it may be that the events of 1916 are mere pauses before, lemming-like, the West continues its suicide, but it may be these events mark a sea-change. The West stands on the edge of the cliff, hesitantly. Political elites and their hireling-journalists, who obey hellish voices and destinies, are alarmed: they could lose their well-paid jobs Could the people be reclaiming their freedom despite their alleged manipulation into zombies by the Western media?

Conclusion

In Paris this weekend, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, Patriarch Kyrill consecrated the symbol of Holy Rus in the Western world, a new Christian Cathedral and spiritual centre. Jerusalem has come to Babylon. Will this help the Western world to come back to its senses and roots? By the grace of God, may it be so.

1916-2016: Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at His footstool; for He is holy.

Psalm 98, 5 (Septuagint)

Rus is the footstool of the Throne of the Lord.

St John of Kronstadt

Foreword: Personal

However absurd it may seem, including to myself, I have long felt and observed signposts to my destiny in my heritage and the life of Tsar Nicholas II. For example, the future Christian Emperor Tsar Nicholas II was born in the Alexander Palace in the Imperial Capital of Saint Petersburg on the feast-day of St Job the Much-Suffering in 1868. At the same time my great-grandfather Thomas was born in the poorest conditions of the workhouse in a provincial village in Eastern England. However, fifty years later, in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, whose emblem was the double-headed eagle uniting east and west, the Imperial Family and their faithful servants were murdered in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Urals on the confines of Europe and Asia, uniting east and west. As for my great-grandfather, he died in the same village as he was born in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands. That invasion ended four years later with the liberation of Vienna, where my father went in 1945, and of Berlin by those whose homeland had been so treacherously and bloodily attacked with death, rape, fire and pillage.

I was born on the 19th July, the day in 1918 on which the assassins of the Russian Imperial Family ritually finished destroying their earthly remains. As a child, I collected postage stamps: only one stood out from the 3,000 others – that with the face of Tsar Nicholas II seemingly calling to me to serve his cause. Almost exactly fifty years after the Tsar’s martyrdom, in 1968, 100 years after the birth of the martyred Tsar and 50 years after his sacrificial martyrdom, in a Scottish city almost on the same latitude as Saint Petersburg, I was called to learn Russian and three months later, in a message coming from the east, called to serve the Russian Orthodox Church. Then there was the tutor to the Tsarevich, Fr Nicholas Gibbes, the first English Orthodox priest in almost a millennium, like me a man from the provinces in an Orthodox country as a teacher and becoming a Russian Orthodox priest. Fr Nicholas served in Oxford, where I studied in the same college as Felix Yusupov, the murderer of Tsar Nicholas’ holy elder. And in darkest 1974, when there seemed no hope of it at all, I was called on to write of the coming resurrection of the Russian Church and Empire (1). I never sought any of this, and yet this has been my calling and my destiny.

1916-1981: The Fall of the Christian Empire and of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire

On 30 December 1916, Anglo-Zionist spies in Saint Petersburg, sent by those who by then had in 1916 taken control of the bankrupted British government and aided by decadent, anti-Christian, Russian aristocrats, carried out the assassination of a much-slandered Russian Orthodox holy man and spiritual counsellor to the Imperial Family. Exactly as foretold by its victim, this would begin the process that would lead to the overthrow in 1917 of the Tsar, then on the very point of victory and so of ending the vile and atrocious First World War that was slaughtering the flower of Europe. His overthrow would lead to almost two more years of vile war, millions more of victims, and unspeakable bloodshed throughout the Russian Empire, exactly as the Mother of God forewarned innocent peasant children in distant Portugal in 1917. This meant the collapse of the Christian Empire after 1600 years and its replacement by two false Empires, both founded on Western materialism by those who had engineered that collapse. These Empires were the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the Western Atheist Empire, the first centred in Moscow, the second in New York.

In 1981, 64 years after the 1917 coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg, the only remaining free part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that outside Russia and centred in New York, carried out a heroic act. This was under the leadership of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret (+ 1985), once an exile in China, who had been chosen as Metropolitan by Archbishop John of Shanghai, once also an exile in China (+ 1966). The Metropolitan’s surname was Voznesensky, also the name of the street of the Ipatiev House, where the Imperial Family was martyred in Ekaterinburg. (In 1998 the Metropolitan’s earthly remains were found incorrupt). As for Archbishop John, canonized a generation later (2), he had been slandered, persecuted and even taken to court by false Russian brethren in exile. This heroic 1981 act was when the Church of the emigration at long last canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors. At their head stood Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family and servants, faithful to the end. This act was an act of repentance on behalf of all Russian Orthodox and those Russian émigrés whose ancestors had vilified and betrayed Tsar Nicholas.

This repentance of part of the Russian emigration, living in apparent freedom, had taken a scandalously long 64 years. St John of Shanghai had called for it almost fifty years before. Nevertheless, it represented the long-awaited repentance by descendants of those in the emigration who by treason had abdicated from the Throne and brought about the February 1917 coup d’etat. They had then fled for their lives into an often impoverished and harsh exile, blaming the Tsar for their foolishness, treason and poverty. For that February coup had in turn led to the October 1917 seizure of power by satanic atheists who then ritually murdered the Tsar, his Family and faithful servants. This 1981 canonization led to the rapid deaths of three Soviet leaders from 1982 on, and to the end of stagnation. And in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after its founding act on 30 December 1916, the Bolshevik Atheist Empire, centred in Moscow and which had murdered the Tsar collapsed. Thus, the murders of the Tsar and Imperial Family, ordered from New York in 1918, were literally reversed by an act ordered in New York in 1981. The first part of the curse had been lifted.

In 1988 we wrote that what had begun in New York must be completed in Moscow, that is, by the vast majority of the Russian Orthodox Church, inside Russia. We did not know then that the Bolshevik Atheist Empire would, so painfully for its peoples, finally dissolve in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after the December 1916 assassination by British spies. This is what we wrote then: ‘Our hope is from the living and suffering faithful on Earth and in Heaven, the Martyrs and Confessors of Christ, the One Lord and Saviour. Is then the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of the Russian Church now coming to an end? As yet we cannot know for sure. We shall be certain only when all those many Martyrs and Confessors are venerated without exception, openly, officially and universally in the Russian lands, when the work begun in New York is brought to its fullness in Moscow; this will be the ‘True Pascha’ of which St Seraphim prophetically spoke…The canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors is a gift of God made through the Church for the spiritual enrichment of the whole Orthodox Church, of all the Orthodox Christian peoples…’.

ReChristianization and DeChristianization

When in June 1941 Nazi tanks invaded the Soviet Union, in the western Ukraine (formerly eastern Poland), naïve Ukrainian peasants greeted the Nazis as liberators from Bolshevism, because the peasants saw crosses on the Nazi tanks. They soon learned of the evil of the Nazis who sadistically slaughtered all who stood in their way. Paradoxically, the Nazi invasion brought about a measure of repentance in the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the reinvigoration of the implicit Christian values of pre-Revolutionary culture that had been preserved, in terms of the provision of social justice (in the Tsar’s Russia you received free health care for the payment of a stamp costing one rouble per year) and also of ‘socially conservative values’, of normal family life. There dawned on some the realization that the liberation from Nazism of Vienna and Berlin in 1945 could have happened in 1917 under Tsar Nicholas II. That would have been far less bloody, far more disciplined, like the Russian liberation of Paris in 1814, with concerts of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin in the main squares of those cities to celebrate Christian culture, as in Palmyra this year.

The story of the slow but gradual reChristianization of the Russian Lands after 1941, increasing especially rapidly fifty years later, after 1991, is the reverse of the Western story. If the red star of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire became ever more cross-like, the white star of the Western Atheist Empire became ever more satan-like. The two became like two trains on parallel tracks, but heading in opposite directions, to heaven and to hell. Unlike the Bolshevik Atheists, who did not reject their inheritance of social justice and socially conservative moral values from the Tsar’s Empire, Western Atheists have rejected Christian culture. True, anti-Christianity had been inherent in Western history from the Crusades to Wars of ‘Religion’, from Colonization to the French Revolution, from the French and British siding with Islam to invade Russia in 1854 or the German siding with Islam against Russia in 1914. But in the 1960s, 50 years after the Western-orchestrated ‘Russian Revolution’ of 1917, the West entered into a frenzy of deChristianization, rejecting all Christian values implicit in its culture, even male and female roles in the family, resulting in today’s gender hysteria.

1981-2016: The Fall of the Western Atheist Empire

So, in August 2000 the far greater part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that inside Russia, was at last freed, completing the work begun in New York 19 years earlier, canonizing the New Martyrs and Confessors, at their head Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family. This has led in turn to the process that is now reversing the second part of the blood-soaked pattern of catastrophic 20th century and early 21st century history. In other words, since 2000 Russia has been rising and the Western Atheist Empire, centred in New York, its myths of ‘freedom and democracy’ spread like tentacles throughout the world, has been falling. Just as New York freed Moscow between 1981 and 2000, so since 2000 Moscow has been freeing New York. This is the fall of the Empire founded on the ruins of the Christian Empire by traitors in 1917, bringing US troops into the Great War, just as demoralized Russian Imperial troops left it. That ensured 100 years of worldwide bloodshed, just as the Mother of God had warned peasant children in Fatima in Portugal in 1917, though those children would be bullied into silence and their revelation utterly deformed by men of the Vatican machine.

Thus, on the feast-day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, 11 September 2001, we witnessed the attack on the New York Twin Towers, the beheading of the Western Atheist Babylon. Engineered in secret by forces still unknown, though much suspected, this murderous attack with its 3,000 victims foretold the beginning of the collapse of the Western Atheist Empire that stretches throughout North America, Western Europe, Australasia and to vassal states like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. It had come to power by financing from New York and organizing the collapse of the Christian Empire eighty-four years before, in 1917. 1917 to 2001: 1984 had indeed come. For the collapse of the Twin Towers did not lead to repentance and the questions, ‘Why is this happening to us?, and, ‘What have we done to deserve this?, as did the collapse of the Tower of Siloam (Lk 13, 1-5), but to illegal, unjustifiable, vengeful, bloody and chaotic invasions of innocent Middle Eastern and Islamic countries. These have in turn bankrupted the indebted US branch of the Western Empire and led to unbearable anarchy and unspeakable misery for the peoples in those lands.

Why did these invasions take place? For oil and gas? For strategic advantage and to set up ever more US military bases? For the usual neo-colonial, Western bullying and asset-stripping of weaker countries, unable to defend themselves against sophisticated arms of ‘shock and awe’? Yes, superficially, all this was the case, but this was only a superficial reason, to keep greedy banksters and military industrialists quiet. In reality, these bloody invasions of Islamic countries, carried out by the neocon elite against the interests of ordinary, hoodwinked and now bankrupted Americans, zombified by their corporate media, took place for another reason. They were designed to weaken the Muslim world, so that the Temple in Jerusalem can be rebuilt by the Zionists in the place of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and there the representative of their chief, the prince of this world (Jn 14, 13), can be enthroned. This is why the possible election of the nationalist and populist Trump next month is feared as a huge setback to their plans by the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ neocons. For whatever he may be, he may at least put US internal affairs above meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.

These invasions are also causing the collapse of the European branch of the Western Empire, called the European Union, a weak group of vassal puppet-states controlled by the American Union and heir to the Soviet Union in terms of its tyranny. This absurd, overstretched and bankrupted Union, never wanted by its peoples but only by its moneyed elite, and used to extend a Fourth Reich of German political and economic hegemony over all Europe, is now being overwhelmed by the invasion of Islamic refugees, resulting in divisions everywhere. This leaves only a weakened Western German core, set up to lead Europe under US control at the end of the Second World War, when it was occupied and colonized by US troops. However, if the countries that make up the present EU can regain their freedom and sovereignty, Europe could be saved by returning to its cultural roots. It could return not to recent human and political manipulations and cheap surrogates like Protestantism and Catholicism, but to its real Christian first millennium roots, so long lost, forgotten, scorned and despised, to Orthodoxy Christianity, to the Church of God.

Afterword: The Christian Empire May Rise Again

Today the Russian Federation, once the centre of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire which was dissolved 25 years ago in great pain for its peoples, collapsed through treason and cynical lack of belief in anything except self-interest, so-called Communists becoming Capitalists overnight, is starting to save itself. The Soviet Union had to die if it were to turn its back, however hesitantly, on the Bolshevik heritage of alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce. Thus, the restoration by patriots of the Christian Empire after the 100-year long nightmare that began at the end of 1916 now actually looks possible. In this way the Russian Federation can start to save the ever more fragile European nations of the Western Atheist Empire, bringing them back to their senses, back to true freedom (not the ‘freedom’ to murder millions of children in the abortion holocaust or the freedom for sexual perversion), to true culture (not the Coca-Cola culture of feeble imitations of imported cowboy culture) and to their own national sovereignty (not national degradation). A spectre haunts Europe – the spectre of freedom, sovereignty and national restoration, which are spelled Brexit.

But why is this process of salvation, which is now beginning, nowhere yet complete? Because nowhere is repentance yet complete. St Seraphim of Sarov said: ‘I will glorify the Tsar who glorifies me’. Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’. But for the Tsar to be glorified, we must first be brought together into Rus by full repentance, by understanding the sin of regicide and all that followed and by accepting the Christian values which he and his family incarnated. This will mean those in the dead Bolshevik Atheist Empire, and at least some in the Western Atheist Empire, which is also to die, overcoming their treason, lies and prejudices about the Christian Empire of the last Tsar. Only when this has been done can the Lord raise up the still unrevealed and unknown man who is to become the next Christian Emperor, the next and perhaps the last Tsar. He alone will resist him who is to be enthroned by our enemies in Jerusalem, as St John of Kronstadt prophesied. But the next and coming Christian Emperor will not appear until the masses are first ready to accept and glorify the last Christian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. Yea, come, Lord!

Notes:

1. ‘Beloved Land, soon to be made fragrant and all-holy, shone through and warmed by the love of so many martyrs’ blood, there is an unknown redolence and radiant light in thy still brightening churches; we neither ask why nor question how, but we know and feel and have Faith’. (From ‘Premonition’, Chapter I of ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’, English Orthodox Trust, 1995, 1997 and 2014).

2. St John was the first saint of the Church Outside Russia. Two others have since followed: Bishop Jonah of Hankou (Hangchow – also in China) (+ 1925) canonized in 1996, and Archbishop Seraphim of Sofia (+ 1950), canonized in 2016. Will Metropolitan Philaret be the fourth? His possible canonical canonization under discussion.

“This article also appeared on Katehon.com http://katehon.com/article/1916-2016-today-tsar-nicholas-ii-says-i-will-glorify-those-who-glorify-me”.

Whose Temple Are They Building?

Over the last two weeks France and Germany have been deeply troubled by revolting murders carried out by Islamist psychopaths. In the latest tragedy, a devout 86-year old priest, ordained 58 years ago in 1958, had his throat slit while celebrating the mass. One of his assailants had been encouraged by the campaign of the Western media and politicians not so long ago to go to Syria and fight against the government there – a campaign now recognized as an error, though still not apologized for by the culprits. Their unpunished irresponsibility has now brought terror to their very doorstep.

The Middle East from Afghanistan to Libya is indeed littered with failed ‘democratic governments’, built in the ruins of stable but undemocratic countries, as created by Western meddlers. As one Iraqi citizen put it recently: ‘Before there was one Saddam Hussein, now thanks to the West there is a thousand’. More than this, the slaughter of Christians, ultimately caused and tolerated by the West all through the Middle East, has now arrived in Western Europe. Tonight, atheist French politicians, many of them lapsed Jews, most of them freemasons, have attended mass at Notre Dame in Paris.

We can only hope that they may one day be brought to repentance for the refugee crisis that they have created. However, at present these selfsame leaders are still backing the daily and unreported terrorism of the Kiev Army against Ukrainian civilians in Donbass, so there is little realistic hope. These leaders belong to the Western world of smartphones and smartbombs, which they do not know how to use wisely, as their ‘smart civilization’ has failed to invent wisephones and wisebombs. Before they act, they should first think what they are building – the Church of God or the Temple of Antichrist. We fear that when they reflect, if they ever reflect, they will find that it is the latter.

Can Tony Blair’s Soul be Saved?

Dedicated to our Serbian Readers

This is not a subject that I ever thought of writing about. After all, I do not even know if my own soul can be saved. However, on Thomas Sunday, something happened to me that made me think.

After the children’s procession and the Easter parish meal which we have every year on Thomas Sunday, I was standing outside the Church, when a man came from the street outside and spoke to me. He was in his thirties and he asked me what our church was and what we believed. I quickly realized that he was an ex-soldier and had personal problems, perhaps linked with alcoholism or drugs. I should explain that our church is in the military town of Colchester, where there are 4,000 troops and thousands of ex-soldiers, many of whom have psychological problems. (1)

In any case, when I asked the man where he had served as a soldier, he answered Iraq. He then asked me if I believed in forgiveness. I answered yes. He asked me if I had ever seen my best friends blown apart by a bomb. I answered no, but that it had happened to my father at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942 when he had lost his two best friends on either side of him, but he himself had only suffered leg wounds. He asked me again if I could forgive those responsible for murdering his friends. I replied that in a war you have to look at it from the enemy’s viewpoint, that those who had killed his friends were also just obeying orders. He said that he understood perfectly the Iraqi soldiers and he could forgive them, they were simply defending their country against invading and occupying British forces. The problem was not forgiving them, it was forgiving Tony Blair, who had sent British forces to invade and occupy Iraq, ensuring that his friends had been killed. ‘How’, he repeated’. ‘can I ever forgive Tony Blair?’

I did not answer this unexpected question at once. Then I said: ‘Only if he repents’. He answered, ‘You mean, if he says sorry? That’s just words’. I explained to him that repentance does not mean words, but actions. He thought for a moment, grunted and we shook hands and he walked away, an embittered, twisted, distraught and traumatized soul, his life ruined by what he had seen. After this meeting, on Sunday evening I thought about this conversation and lay awake till after midnight, searching for an answer and this is what came to me.

Now Tony Blair is a very rich man. The USA gave him many millions of dollars for taking part in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to media reports, he is worth at least £50 million, his money stashed away in tax havens where he does not pay any tax. Yes, it is true that he dare not walk the streets in the UK. At best he would be insulted and have eggs and tomatoes thrown at him. At worst, he would be beaten up and perhaps lynched by people like the ex-soldier I met. Clearly he dare not show his face in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries which he helped invade and occupy, because he would be blown up or killed immediately. They are Islamic countries, without the concept of Christian forgiveness. They only know bitterness and revenge. However, there is a third country which he invaded and which has a Christian tradition. Could that become for him the place of his salvation?

I am speaking of course of Serbia. Every conscious human-being remembers the photograph of the mindless RAF serviceman chalking ‘Happy Easter’ on a bomb to kill and maim innocent civilians in Belgrade at Orthodox Easter 1999. Everybody remembers the ravages of NATO there, their uranium-tipped shells giving Serbian children cancer to this day. Everybody remembers the hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees, torn from their ancestral lands by Western-backed ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Everybody remembers how Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro were torn from unity with Serbia and how the US State Department created a purely political schism in the Serbian Church, notably in Kosovo, and how the new Serbian Patriarch was humiliated by being forced to visit a synagogue by the US/EU-appointed gauleiters of Serbia.

How could Tony Blair save his soul?

We suggest that if he were to give up his vast wealth and give it to the Serbian bishops in the Serbian Lands, perhaps especially in Kosovo, and then dedicate the rest of his life to working as an unpaid helper among the starving and deprived in Serbian refugee camps, doing the most menial tasks in kitchens and cleaning toilets, looking after and serving children and old people, maimed and traumatized Serbs in all the Serbian Lands, perhaps then he could save his soul. First of all, he could find forgiveness from the Serbian people, but, above all, he could find forgiveness from God for his war crimes, which must surely weigh so heavily on his conscience and haggard face.

We do not know how long Tony Blair has to live. Obviously, he has already had more than half his life. Obviously, every day that he lives he is a day nearer to his death. Obviously, every day that he lives without repentance is a day nearer to hell, the fires of which, judging by his awful appearance, he is already experiencing. Above, we have made a suggestion, that might bring him closer to salvation. It might also being an outraged and embittered soldier in Colchester closer to peace in his heart. And many others too.

We have suggested how Tony Blair could find salvation. We have expressed optimism. The question as to if he will find salvation remains open. Here we feel profound pessimism. None of us wants to stand at the Last Judgement. All of us tremble at the thought. But I would not like to be Tony Blair at the Last Judgement.

Note:

1. One elderly veteran, now dead, came to me in Colchester a few years ago and told me that as a Special Forces soldier he had been in Cyprus in the 1950s and had been ordered to assassinate Archbishop Makarios. The operation had failed and he told me that he was racked by guilt because he had been quite willing to follow British Establishment orders and murder a Christian Archbishop. I advised him to go into our church and light a candle for the Archbishop and pray for his soul every day for the rest of his life and ask for forgiveness for himself.

On Modernism

From Recent Correspondence on Modernism

Q: What is modernism?

A: Modernism, often called renovationism in Russian, is merely secularization, that is desacralization, under the camouflage of the word ‘modern’.

Q: How did you encounter modernism in the Orthodox Church?

A: Between 1973 and 1980, I met a great many modernists: Intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. First the Parisians living in England, then those in France itself, where Paris was the source of all the problems. In France in 1985 I also encountered freemasonry among such ‘Orthodox’ modernists. It was very widespread among them then and perhaps still is.

Q: So you met modernism very soon?

A: Yes, it was actually presented to me as the norm, as real Orthodoxy!

Q: But you rejected it?

A: I was seeking the source of the sacred, not the secular! So I instinctively and automatically felt that modernist Orthodoxy was a fake, not the real thing, but I also knew that from experience, my own and through having observed Church life, the real thing, in Russia.

Q: Which modernists did you meet?

A: The well-known names: in England, Nicholas Zernov, the then Fr Basil Osborne, Metr Antony Bloom, Fr Lev Gillet, Fr Sergei Hackel, Fr Nicholas Behr, and in France Fr Boris Bobrinsky, Fr Elie Melia, Olivier Clement, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Nikita Struve, Konstantin Andronikov, Fr Jean-Claude Roberti, Fr Jean Gueit, Fr Alexander Schmemann and many other lesser known names who simply followed the fashion that they set, including those active in Syndesmos.

I have to say that these figures are nearly all departed now, part of a generation that was deeply compromised by modernism. Indeed, I also met many who had personally known well those who had led modernism in the previous generation, for example Archbishop John (Shakhovskoy), Fr Nikolay Afanasyev, the former Marxists Fr Sergius Bulgakov and Berdyayev, Fr Paul Florensky, Yevdokimov, Fedotov, Zander, Zenkovsky, or Mother Maria Skobtsova. Many of them had relatives who disagreed with them completely.

Q: I notice that you have not mentioned two well-known members of modernist clergy in England.

A: There are two well-known exceptions because they are lesser, more subtle figures in modernism, shall we say, semi-modernist, that is, modernist under the cloak of traditional. One dead, one still alive, they belong to the ‘spiritual’ school of modernism, which is still popular and they are revered by naïve newcomers and all the Tradition-less.

It is important to distinguish between the different grades of modernism, from the primitive to the sophisticated. For example, I have seen Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) mentioned as a modernist. I can see where that comes from (his interest in St Simeon the New Theologian and his ecumenical contacts), but he cannot be compared to the above.

Q: Why are such ‘moderate modernists’ revered?

A: As they say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Q: Did you meet Metr John Zizioulas?

A: Not then. I only met him about eight years ago.

Q: And Fr John Meyendorff?

A: No, I never met him, but he was among the more moderate, except on fasting.

Q: What was your reaction to all these figures?

A: I instinctively knew that they were wrong but at the time I could not explain why, because I did not have the tools or arguments from experience and from theological study to answer them. For example, I understood that their philosophy was characterized by pride, they all thought that they knew better than the Church. They were above the Church. And this pride was characterized by intellectual fantasies, the result of a lack of rootedness in reality and spiritual reality, the Tradition. And the characteristic of this was their inability to provide spiritual food. They fed the brain – to the point of their books and talks giving you headaches – but they were incapable of feeding your soul, leaving you dry.

Q: Why were there, and why are there still, so many modernists in the Orthodox Diaspora?

A: There were and are so many – relatively speaking – they are in fact very few, they just make a lot of noise – in the Diaspora because these people encountered the West directly and never having had any roots in the Tradition, they wanted to mix their superficial Orthodoxy with Western culture. Uprooted from an Orthodox context and denying monastic life, they did not want the spiritual purity of Holy Orthodoxy, but compromise, they wanted to swim with the Western tide. That is why all modernists are essentially ecumenists and secularists. They try to conform the Church to the world, instead of conforming themselves (the world) to the Church.

Q: And why was Paris the centre of modernism?

A: Paris was where the French-speaking aristocrats and intellectuals from Saint Petersburg who had carried out the Revolution under Western influence and with Western backing had chosen exile. A great many of them were freemasons, some, like Yusupov, had been very interested in the occult and hypnotism. Paris was the place of their exile, where they were called to repentance. In other words, this is where the most spiritually decadent Russians, nominal Orthodox, highly protestantized, in the sense of secularized, went to live.

There were two groups. First, there were left-wingers, like Bulgakov, Berdyayev and Mother Maria, but most were right-wing constitutionalists or republicans who wanted either the British model or else the French model of political organization. None of them of course wanted Orthodoxy. All broke away from the Russian Church and her liturgical and canonical disciplines, in other words, they broke entirely away from the Tradition. This they did on the pretext of seeking ‘freedom and creativity’! The saddest thing was that they did not understand repentance.

Q: Why did they not simply become Protestants or Uniats – that would have been honest?

A: Because they were pretentious, which is a disease of intellectuals. They wanted to be different and lord it over others through their ‘exotic’ differences. If they had simply been Protestants or Uniats, no Western-Establishment figures or ecumenists would even have looked at them, they would have lost their exotic tag and been forgotten as immigrants. But by setting up a Westernized branch of Orthodoxy, they attracted attention and admiration. In other words, they, or rather their descendants, were courted by those who wanted to destroy the very Soviet Russia which they had themselves created in 1917, in order to replace it with the sort of degutted Russia they did briefly create in the 1990s until the revival in 2000. For secularist Western Establishments they were all ‘useful idiots’.

Of course, these modernists were peddling a fake Orthodoxy, but Anglicans and others knew no better and gave these semi-Orthodox a false authority by buying their books and listening to their talks. If you say modernist things with a Russian accent, you are suddenly exotic and interesting. Some of these émigrés even faked Russian accents to sound more Russian! There was a lot of acting going on in order to hoodwink simple people, even hypnotism. If you look, you will see that almost all their books were bought and read either by Non-Orthodox or else by converts who knew no better.

Q: Why do so many intellectuals fall into modernism?

A: Because they live uprooted lives in their heads, and not their hearts. So they are prey to fantasies. If you are an intellectual type, you must have a strong spiritual or ascetic life to balance it out. For example St Justin (Popovich) was an intellectual, but it did not, forgive the pun, go to his head. So anyone can become a saint, even an intellectual, but such saintliness exists despite intellectualism, not because of it.

Q: What is the antidote to modernism?

A: First of all, let me say that the antidote is not the censorious condemnation and ritualism of the pharisees. That also comes from hardness and dryness of heart, lack of compassion. It fails to take account of the need for pastoral dispensation, true ‘ikonomia’. The first victims of modernism are the modernists themselves.

The antidote to modernism can never be in another ism, but in the Church. And that antidote is in seeking spiritual food, not intellectual food, and spiritual food comes from holiness, which comes from asceticism, which is exactly what the modernists reject. That is why they dislike people going to the sources in Eastern Europe and Russia, especially Mt Athos. In true Protestant style, modernists hate anything that is beyond the rational, mysterious. What can be more ‘irrational’ and mysterious than holiness? They lack the sense of the sacred.

Holiness is one of the four characteristics of the Church, which they reject, since they reject the Church. For them the Church is not One – there are many ‘Churches’; the Church is not Holy (which is why they desacralize everything), but to be reformed; the Church is not Catholic (in the Orthodox sense of being the same everywhere and at all times), because the modernists reject everything outside their 20th century mental ghetto; and the Church is not Apostolic, because they reject the Faith of the Apostles, the inherited Tradition. The antidote to modernism is in holiness, that is, in the saints.

Q: But some of these modernists were much interested in saints?

A: You have hit the nail on the head – ‘interested’ in saints. Interested in saints – how very fashionable! They were interested in the outward events in the lives of saints, but not in becoming saints. They intellectualized or externalized everything, making it abstract, into a philosophy – they did not live the Faith. Theirs is an outward or Uniat attitude to the Faith, which is of course why many of them had sympathies with Uniatism, like Solovyov did. They loved to talk about ‘techniques’, techniques of icon-painting, techniques of Church singing, techniques of celebration etc. These techniques they analyzed constantly. They spoke about hagiography – but did not want holiness. They spoke, they wrote, but they did not do, they did not fast and pray and there is no holiness without fasting and prayer.

Q: Do you think that modernism has a future?

A: Yes and no. Most of the well-known names of modernists belong to those who have died in the last 75 years, many in the last 25 years. And modernism is strangely old-fashioned in the present post-modernist world, which is characterized by cynicism. The only answer to cynicism is faith, not half-faith and half-faith is what modernism is: Halfodoxy instead of Orthodoxy. In that sense modernism is over because it has no answer to post-modernism, which it created. And yet it is not over.

For example, I remember the words of Metr Antony Bloom, when real Orthodox started coming to his church in London around the year 2000. They were naturally, like the rest of us had been decades before, very shocked by what they saw. He said that it would take fifty years to convert these people to Orthodoxy (that is, to his Bloomism). In other words, the truth is that it will take fifty years to convert the modernists to Orthodoxy. There is still the hangover from the past and it will take time for the vestiges of modernism to die out. In that sense, modernism is not over.

Q: Some would be shocked by your listing of Mother Maria Skobtsova as a modernist. She was canonized by the Rue Daru group with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

A: As you know, that top-down canonization was controversial and you would be hard put to find a single icon of her even in any Greek Church in the world, let alone in others. In other words, her canonization was purely local and actually very political. Veneration for her simply does not exist in most of the Orthodox world, given her very strange life and anti-Orthodox writings. Having said that, however, we must say that in her concentration camp death, she, like millions of others, must have cleansed herself.

Q: So is she a saint?

A: I would say that her destiny has not been revealed to us. Let us remain silent. We do not know. We simply do not know the measure of her repentance in Ravensbruck. It may well have been deep and complete, as surely it was for millions of others. In the hour of death, people become realistic, which is why the memory of death is ascetically so important. Here we have a vital point. There is no place for personal dislike, still less hatred, for these individuals. Like the rest of us, they made their mistakes, it may be that many of them repented before the end, though of course the damage was done by then. We should pray for all of them. Some of them had good hearts – they were poisoned by their heads.

For instance, I remember Fr Alexander Schmemann, He was a charming and interesting man – though of course we agreed on nothing. But I still pray for him. Or there was Elisabeth Behr-Sigel the feminist Protestant pastor. She said appalling things about ROCOR, which just showed how ignorant she was of Orthodoxy. But I prayed for her when she died. Even though modernists persecuted us and slandered us, it is important to pray for them, not only does it help them, but it helps us too, it stops our hearts from growing hard. We must always pray for our enemies. We are Christians.

What is disturbing is that those who canonized Mother Maria canonized her not for her sacrificial death, but for her anti-Church musings – and that is not to venerate her, but to malign her. When people die, we should try to remember only the good things about them. Personally, I think her writings should be made secret because they are shameful, the fruit of someone who had not yet been converted from being a Social Revolutionary.

Q: What form does modernism take today?

A: Modernism now tends to have a more philosophical, ‘spiritual’ form, in any possible way so as to blur the clear and dogmatic. This is very cunning, as we have seen with the new documents for the Crete meeting next June (if it takes place). For example, in Greece, you have the case of the philosopher Yannaras, in Russia you have the case of the Kochetkovite sect, in Finland you have a very active group, including clergy, though they are so extreme that they are very isolated, even having abandoned Orthodox Easter. They go back to the notorious Archbishop Herman (Aav), and that continued through Archbishop Paul, Archbishop Leo and now Metr Ambrose. But this is purely modern Lutheranism.

Q: What are the themes of these modernists?

A: On the one hand, there are still the crude renovationist practices taken from 1920s Russia, where such modernism more or less died out under Stalin. Such practices include letting laypeople do the proskomidia in the middle of the church and generally desacralizing the services, which is an abandonment of the priesthood. Remember that modernism, as I said, is essentially secularization, the opposite of sacralization. So first it had to destroy the sacral Emperor (the Tsar), then their next task was to destroy the priesthood – equally sacral. Linked with this destruction of the priesthood are the many divorced and remarried priests among the modernists, the uncanonically ordained and all the anti-liturgical practices, which include shortening the services and introducing the so-called ‘new’ or Roman Catholic calendar, which has always been the first stage in falling away from Orthodoxy.

On the other hand, today, as a result of the tide of secularization or desacralization that the modernists have never been able to resist and even welcome, the latest fad among them is pushing to introduce female priests and homosexual marriage into the Church. The latter movement is strong in some of the parishes in Finland, which are basically Lutheran with icons. Of course, whenever there are homosexual clergy, that push is even stronger because there is self-interest, self-justification.

Q: Where is modernism in general strongest today?

A: Although there are the debased remnants in Europe in the ever smaller Paris Jurisdiction (all the big intellectuals are dead), and there are still those in the USA as well as in Finland, now there is a group of people connected with Fr George Kochetkov in Russia. The disgraced Protodeacon Andrei Kurayev is among them, and the murdered Uniat Fr Alexander Men still has a few disciples. Then there is the provocateur Fr George Mitrofanov, as well as Fr Alexei Uminsky. However, I think they were all stronger in the 1990s than today. They too are figures from the past and I think they will die out, like the others. Now we are in the 21st century, it is time to grow up.

Q: Given this continued modernism, aren’t you pessimistic about the future?

A: As regards modernism, our Christian life is a combat, a struggle, it always has been and always will be. We will fight these anti-dogmatic currents, just as we combated the old modernism. Thus, we, like all Orthodox, combat and reject the absurd documents prepared for the meeting in Crete in June. However, Christians are always optimists because however grim the situation is now, Christ will triumph at the end of history.