Category Archives: Orthodoxy

Towards a Planet of Twelve Patriarchates

Today’s Reality

The first millennium saw the development of seven Local Orthodox Churches, arranged in five Patriarchates and two Autocephalous Churches: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and the Churches of Georgia and Cyprus. In theory, these covered the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. Their number decreased to six after the defection of Rome to its new creed of Papalism and the Western tip of Europe fell away from the Church.

However, in the second millennium the number increased. This happened when the Patriarchate of Constantinople was infected by Greek nationalism (Hellenism) and monolingualism. This nationalism had already played a role in the nationalistic foundations of Monophysite and Nestorian denominations in Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia and groups in Syria, but it fragmented further in Balkanization. Thus, the autocephalous Serbian Church was founded, followed by the Russian, Romanian and Bulgarian, creating another four Local Churches.

In the 19^th century Imperialist Britain also forced the Greek Church to separate from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, making eleven Local Churches. Then in the 20th century, the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches were carved out of the Russian and Serbian Churches for political reasons and the Albanian Church came into being, because the border between Greece and Albania was unjustly delineated, adding another three Local Churches. Thus, at the present time there are fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, so many of which exist only because of the vagaries of politics and nationalism.

What If?

What if the twelve apostles were to meet today in a new Council of Jerusalem, as they did before in 33 AD, with the above information, a map of the world as it is in front of them and information about history, geography, culture and present-day populations (Asia, 4.45 billion; Africa, 1.2 billion; the Americas 1 billion; Europe 740 million; Oceania 40 million), how might they divide the world amongst themselves? Perhaps into Twelve Local Orthodox Churches, something like this?

The Patriarchate of Jerusalem and All the Holy Lands. (A Church based in the City of the Resurrection and covering today’s Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and the Balkans (Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and ex-Yugoslavia), thus uniting two of the present ancient Patriarchates and seven of the present autocephalous Churches.
The Patriarchate of Baghdad and All the Middle East. (A Church to cover all the Christian and Muslim Middle East, from the Lebanon, Syria and the Jordan to the Arabian Peninsula, to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan).
The Patriarchate of Nairobi and All Africa. (A Church based in Nairobi to cover the 1.2 billion people of the African Continent. Main languages: English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and native African languages).
The Patriarchate of Moscow and All the Russias. (A Church covering most of Northern Eurasia, one sixth of the planet, including Mongolia and the Korean Peninsula).
The Patriarchate of Vienna and All Western Europe. (A Church based in the cultural heart of Central Europe, and not in off-centre Rome, to cover all of what was Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe, from Iceland to Hungary and Portugal to Finland, including the territories of the Local Churches in Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia).
The Patriarchate of New Delhi and All India. (A Church to cover the ancient territory of Hindu Civilization with nearly 1.4 billion people, together with Nepal and Bhutan).
The Patriarchate of Beijing and All China. (A Church to cover the nearly 1.5 billion Chinese population, Taiwan and Tibet).
The Patriarchate of Tokyo and All Japan. (A Church to cover the ancient and unique Japanese Civilization).
The Patriarchate of Bangkok and All South-East Asia. (A Church to cover the largely Muslim and Buddhist populations of Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia).
The Patriarchate of Manila and All Oceania. (A Church to cover the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and all the Pacific Islands).
The Patriarchate of Washington and All Northern America. (A Church to cover the USA, Canada and the Carribean. Main languages: English and French).
The Patriarchate of Rio de Janeiro and All Latin America. (A Church to cover South and Central America and Mexico. Main languages: Spanish and Portuguese).

The Gap Between Reality and What If?

As we can see from the above, only Churches No 1, 2, 3 and 4 already exist, although: Church No 1 is at present tiny and seems to be run largely as a Greek clerical colony; Church No 2, though claiming to be the Church ‘of All the East’ is at present small, based in Damascus/Beirut, though claiming to be in Antioch in Turkey, and is largely run by four merchant families; Church No 3 is also small, and though claiming to be ‘of All Africa’ is governed almost entirely by Non-African bishops, is based very far from its flock, in Alexandria, and has converted only 1% of those in its canonical territory. Although Church No 4 would remain much as now, Churches Nos 5-12, to cover some 5.5 billion human-beings, do not even exist.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Why I Love My Parishioners

My three parishes in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk cover an area of over 5,000 square miles (13,000 square kilometres). That is why we have long needed and, at last have, two assistant priests. How big is my main parish in my native town of Colchester, in the biggest Russian Orthodox church building in the British Isles and Ireland? Well, there are about 100 people I can depend on to be there almost always. Then there are about another 400 parishioners, whom I know I will see within the space of a month. So there are 500 parishioners, of 25 different nationalities, born on four continents.

However, in addition to these 500 there are about another 4,500 people, scattered all over this region and up to 60 miles (100 kilometres) outside it, occasionally attending one or other of the three parishes. I may see them only once or twice a year, and some even less often than that. Many of them only come to church for baptisms and weddings, but when they do come, they come to us. Many of them I hardly know. So, not parishioners as such, but they are still in my mind and heart. There are all sorts of reasons why I see them only rarely, and it is not just a matter of distance. But I will not go into that here.

I want to tell you about two of them. With a title like ‘Why I love my parishioners’, you may think that I want to tell you about two of the 500 regulars. Since I do not want to embarrass anyone, I do not. I want to tell you about two of the other 4,500. They are of two different nationalities.

The first one is a real Orthodox man. In his forties, he is married with two lovely children. He has a business with employees. I first met him when he was in prison. Yes, in prison. Unfortunately, he had criminal competitors who tried to attack him and were jealous of him and his family. They threatened to throw acid in his wife’s face, if he did not take the blame for a crime of fraud which they had committed. He had no doubt that their threat was real. They were capable of it and had already done it to another. So, in order to protect his beloved wife, he went straight to the police and told them a lot of lies about himself. He went on trial and was sentenced. His only ‘crime’ was to lie in court in order to protect his wife. He had to go to prison for one year, but his wife was protected. There was such happiness and rejoicing in his house when he came home.

What a man. No, he has never studied theology, he has never heard of any modern ‘theologians’ (though he does know something of the Lives of the Saints), he cannot tell you about the history and structure of the services, has never met a bishop, does not know the Bible backwards, will not give you lots of pious talk about prayer and fasting, has never heard of ‘the Council of Crete’ and knows nothing about Catholicism and Protestantism. As a real Orthodox, he does not believe in God, he knows Him. So he has humility and there is no self-loving question of proud people about ‘Why has God allowed this to happen to me?’ Just acceptance of God’s will. He has protected and defended what is most precious to him. An example. He sacrificed himself, but has one of the best families in the world. They love each other. That is God’s reward to him. A real Orthodox man.

The second one is a real Orthodox woman, a lady with dignity and self-respect, which has become so rare these days. I first met her when I was making a pastoral visit far away. She married in her early 20s and had two children. But then her husband began drinking. And beating her. She was patient. They only divorced when he began harming the children. (He has since died). So she, then aged 34, brought up two children alone, struggling to pay her bills. She has made a good job of it too. The first went to University and now has a good career. A lovely person. The second, a girl, is finishing school. She has a very noble and idealistic disposition and is not afraid to stand up for the truth. She stands out from the others of her generation. (She has had her mother’s example). A year ago this Orthodox woman, who had shed so many tears for her broken dreams and broken heart these last 25 years, quite downhearted, came to church and there she met a man. The man. Within a week they had fallen in love. It was her dream, the one which she had wanted as a romantic teenager. She had been waiting all those years and then it all came true. Out of the blue.

What a woman. No, she has never studied theology, she has never heard of any modern ‘theologians’ (though she does know something of the Lives of the Saints), she cannot tell you about the history and structure of the services, has never met a bishop, does not know the Bible backwards, will not give you lots of pious talk about prayer and fasting, has never heard of ‘the Council of Crete’ and knows nothing about Catholicism and Protestantism. As a real Orthodox, she does not believe in God, she knows Him. So she has humility and there is no self-loving question of proud people about ‘Why has God allowed this to happen to me?’ Just acceptance of God’s will. She has protected and defended what is most precious to her. An example. She sacrificed himself, but has one of the best families in the world. They love each other. Her new husband adores her – as she deserves. That is God’s reward to her. A real Orthodox woman.

Now you know why I love my parishioners.

Those Who Lapse and Those Who Last: The End of ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ and the Beginning of Orthodoxy in Europe

For some 40 years between the 1960s and the end of the twentieth century, some two thousand Anglicans joined certain parishes of the Orthodox Churches in England – mainly those under the then Parisian ‘Sourozh Diocese’. Together with a small number of ordinary (Non-Anglican) English people, they joined the Church for many reasons. Some of us, perhaps especially the Non-Anglicans, joined because we were sincerely seeking, not being influenced by any personality, but called by Christ to help rebuild His Church in the Western desert. For us, the Orthodox Church was and is the only Church, our spiritual home, to which we had come after realizing that this is God’s Will for us and our souls will die without spiritual food, that is, outside the Church. We have lasted and not lapsed because for us, belonging to the Church has always been a matter of spiritual survival, although and because we have been voices crying in the anti-Orthodox and so secularist wilderness.

However, some did not last but lapsed, for it seems that they were not attached to the Orthodox Church and Faith. Dissatisfied with the ever-changing and ever-new fads of Anglicanism, they attached themselves only to some personality or intellectual philosophy, and not to the Church Herself. Some were perhaps received by marginal figures who, without support from Churched Orthodox, needed to build personality cults for themselves among the naïve, ill-prepared, uninstructed or deluded. In other words, attraction operated for negative reasons, by being against something else, and some never accepted the Church as She is. Deluded by anti-Incarnational fantasies, sometimes of Hindu or Buddhist origin, Russian fakirs and charlatans and secondary and superficial attractions, some remained ‘converts’, not actually becoming Orthodox because of their baggage. They joined the Church, but did not become and live as Orthodox Christians.

The fundamental error of such ‘converts’, as they often liked to call themselves, consisted in not first separating themselves from the 900 + years of the anti-Orthodox and therefore also anti-English, Norman-founded British Establishment. This included its Anglican extension under the syphilitic Tudor tyrant Henry VIII and his followers, not least his murderous ‘theologian’ daughter Elizabeth, the genocidal Cromwell and then various other mercantile Dutch, German and ‘British’ Protestant Imperialists with their ‘Rule Britannia’ jingoism that invaded and enslaved the world. In no way therefore were they able to adopt the Orthodox Faith, for they had not first cleansed their minds and souls from the Anti-Orthodoxy, which they had been conditioned and deluded into thinking of as ‘Western Christianity’. Not having first made room in their minds and souls for the Orthodox Church, the only authentic Western or any other Christianity, they could not last and so lapsed.

Unwilling and so unable to live according to the Orthodox way of life and the Orthodox view of the world and so to think naturally in an Orthodox way, many lapsed completely, some returned to Anglicanism, and others lapsed into a fringe ‘Anglican Orthodoxy’. This inability and unwillingness to integrate meant that these latter tended to form exclusive cliques and convert clubs, which made their church into a ‘Halfodox’ hobby, Anglicanism with icons. Thus, some allowed the baggage which they had brought with them into the Church to define their lives and block possible spiritual growth and understanding. This was because their Western-founded Norman Establishment has always called us, the people, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ or ‘plebs’, although we have always called ourselves simply ‘English’. Their alien Norman Establishment has always patronisingly despised us natives and all who ‘go native’, that is, all who are Orthodox Christians in mind and heart, who are foreign to them.

With this mentality of Establishment condescension and pride towards us English, they also rejected the Orthodox people, with our unintellectual and unphilosophical simplicity and uncomplicated and unmoralizing piety. Thus, some refused in their imagined racial ‘superiority’ and intellectual theorizing to ‘go native’. Between about 2000 and 2010, with Anglicanism altogether disappearing into the New Age blur, few Anglicans asked to be received into the Church, while the by then ageing converts from the last century began to isolate themselves and die out. In recent years, however, a new period has begun. Some ordinary (Non-Anglican) English people from the vast majority have begun to join the Orthodox Church. Like the few Non-Anglicans among those who had preceded them, they have had little difficulty in renouncing the Norman-founded British Establishment and its corrupted culture, because they have in any case never even belonged to it.

Thus, unlike some who had preceded them, they have never been tempted to put British Establishment culture above Christ, so betraying Christ, His Church and also His Orthodox England. For this reason they can begin to develop a real English Orthodox culture. Far more importantly, what has happened in England is only an example of the wider situation all over Western Europe. The betrayal of Western Europe by its Christophobic elite, making it into a wayward, schismatic and isolated province through heresy in 1054 and then apostasy, the betrayal of the real England, Orthodox England, finally destroyed in 1066, the repeated Western betrayals of the Christian Emperors and invasions of the multinational Christian Empire between 1204 and 1917, these are what real Orthodox in Europe reject. What we accept is the end of the old compromised ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ of the philosophers and the beginning of the real Orthodoxy of the saints of Europe, the Restoration of Europe.

The choice for Christophobic and so Russophobic Europe today is fast becoming Apocalypse or Repentance. Europe, on its suicidal death-bed, caught between self-invented Secularism and self-imposed Islamism, has a last chance. If the peoples of Europe can yet throw off the degeneration of their millennial brainwashing, they can still learn that the truth will set them free from stepping lemming-like off the precipice into the abyss. If they can accept that their elites have deluded them into thinking that they are ‘free’, by being enslaved to the elites’ millennial secularist ideology, regardless of whether it is called Roman Catholic, Scholastic, Protestant, Anglican, Conservative, Socialist, Communist, Democratic, Liberal, Agnostic, Atheist, Post-Modernist, then suicide can be averted. If they can accept that their roots are only in the Tradition, Orthodox Christianity, the Church of God, and not in any latecomer manmade religion, then Repentance even at this late hour is still possible.

On the Resurrection of Europe: The Message of the Christian Empire to Europe

There was once a Christian Empire. At the far Western tip of the Eurasian Continent, Europe was an integral part of that Empire, giving birth to the light of ten thousand saints to combat and defeat native European darkness. This was Holy Europe. But Europe fell away from those saints, that ideal of holiness and its Empire, replacing holiness with the darkness of idolatry, out of envy not tolerating that it was not at the centre of the Empire. In revolt and falling back into its old darkness, Europe successively laid waste to both centres of the Christian Empire, New Rome in 1204 and the Third Rome in 1917, slaughtering even the Russian Ruling Family, who were Europeans. To allow them to be killed, on orders from New York, was suicide for Europe, but as for the Christian Empire, it miraculously survived.

Now, one hundred years on, in 2017, Europe is at a turning-point. Will the yearnings of Old Europe be heard or will the New Europe, atheized and so homogenized, altogether wipe out the Old Europe of the saints and their heritage of holiness? The message of what survives of the Christian Empire, of Russian Orthodoxy, to Europe is that its Resurrection, the salvation of the best of Old Europe, that which is compatible with the Church, is still possible. Once Europe was Holy Europe, just as the Russian Lands were Holy Rus. The Saints of the Russian Lands speak to Europe and the Saints of Europe speak back to the Russian Lands. The Russian Orthodox message to Europe is to give it back the Orthodox Trinitarian commandments in order to save it. These Trinitarian commandments are:

Faith: To keep faith with the integrity of Orthodox Christianity, avoiding manmade substitutes, mere religions, recent constructs of the fallen mind.

Sovereignty: To be loyal to the Incarnation of the Faith in the Christian Empire, rejecting manmade substitutes, false and idolatrous empires based on envy.

The People: To respect the gifts and restore the destinies of each individual European people, inasmuch as they are inspired by the Holy Spirit.

From north to south, passing from Oslo to Madrid, from west to east, passing from Dublin to Vienna, passing over the centre of the Cross in Paris, we make the sign of the Cross over Europe and entrust it to the Church of God. It is our belief that we are approaching the end of the world and that that end will come, if another Christian Emperor is not soon restored. And for the Tsar to be restored, we require the Cross of Repentance in the west, Return in the east, Redemption in the north, Rebirth in the south, and so Resurrection in the centre. And if the Tsar is not restored, then the Tsar of Tsars will come.

METROPOLITAN ISAIAH: WE WILL NOT FOLLOW THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN INSTRUCTIONS FROM EUROPE

Limassol, 1 June 2017

The website Agionoros.ru. reports that in Cyprus on 28 May, in front of a large audience, an evening meeting was organized by the local Metropolia to coincide with the anniversary of the fall of Constantinople, ‘the Acropolis of Orthodoxy’, on 28 May 1453.

The local Metropolitan Isaiah said that the new Franks (modern Western Europeans) were trying with new laws and the spread of heretical teachings to uproot ‘all that is holy from the souls of contemporary Greeks and to deprive Greece of Christ’. He added: ‘However much the occupiers try, we will not surrender and accept the plans and memoranda of the international creditors and the anti-Christian, immoral and neo-liberal instructions from Europe’.

The Orthodox: The Ultimate Recusants

In British history recusants were Roman Catholics who in Elizabethan England and afterwards remained loyal to ‘the Old Faith’, refusing to attend the ‘modernist’ Anglican Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recusancy). For them the head of the Church could never be the King or Queen of England, but only the Pope of Rome, whatever illusory external trappings of Catholicism the Church of England may have retained.

From an Orthodox viewpoint we may have some sympathy for recusants in their battle against anti-sacral, boring, reductionist Protestantism, but the fact is that they remained loyal not to Orthodoxy, but to an already corrupted form of Orthodoxy, to medieval Catholicism. Although faithfulness is a virtue, we always have to ask ‘faithfulness to what? This is also true of ‘contemporary Catholic recusants’.

By these I mean those traditionalist Catholics who reject the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and its protestantizing tenets. We may have some sympathy for them, but to what do they remain faithful? To the anti-Orthodox tenets of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism? And all too often, let it be said, to a very right-wing form of politics that can have sinister echoes in 20th century Western European history.

The fact is that Orthodox in the West are the ultimate recusants. We are faithful to the genuine ‘Old Faith’, that which predates eleventh-century invented Roman Catholicism, we are faithful to the Church of God. We are faithful to God and not to man and his essentially filioquist and so secularist desire to replace the Divine, paradisiac and sinless Holy Spirit with the human, fallen and sinful unholy spirit.

The Battle for the Soul of the Anglosphere

The term Anglosphere has come to be used to mean the English world, what old people used to call the White Commonwealth and the USA. Roughly it means the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Arguably, it could also include parts of South Africa and countries such as Ireland. The Anglospere in terms of power and finance is by far the most important part of the world, the part that others either copy or else fear, either admire or detest. Clearly, by far the most important part of this Anglosphere is the USA. Great Britain ceased being ‘Great’ a long time ago, but in fact the USA is today’s ‘Great’ Britain, as it continues the same policies as Great Britain did in its time of worldly glory, 100-200 years ago, only with all the power of modern technology.

Churchill accurately predicted that Britain would always prefer the USA (‘the ocean’) to mainland Europe. I remember a conversation in a famous French School of Management 25 years ago, when a Frenchman asked me why the UK was so ‘anti-European’ (= by which he meant anti-European Union – what he mistakenly believed to be a French project), as the UK is geographically not in Africa or Asia, but clearly in Europe. I answered simply that geography had nothing to do with it; blood is thicker than water, British people sent their Christmas cards to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, not to mainland Europe. At that point a German businessman in the class spoke the truth to the discomfort of the Frenchman (and also of many Englishmen), saying that for Germans of his generation Britain is simply ‘the front end of the USA’.

All this is politics, history and geography. But I mention it because it was not always so. Once the English, although politically weak and small in number, had saints and their main export was holiness. All this was over 1,000 years ago. Here then is the battle for the soul of the Anglosphere. To begin to return to that holiness or to continue as now, not just in England, but also to lead the Anglosphere gradually towards that, that is the question. A return is impossible? Probably that is so. After all, why have so few English-speaking (and also in general Western) people joined the Orthodox Church and then actually become Orthodox? Because they reject the depth of repentance vital after 1,000 years of layer after layer of heresy. Self-justification is much easier. But it is not enough to take a Greek name: being a Hellenophile is not Orthodoxy. What is necessary is the cleansing of souls that have been polluted and corrupted by an anti-Orthodox mentality and world-view and then to return to the saints.

The chances of our victory in the battle for the soul of the Anglosphere are minute. But that does not mean that some individual reparation is not possible and if many individuals were to choose this path, then surely there is still hope. Once, the Reformation, separation from Rome, led to excommunication. This led to the Tudor trading conquest of the world through pillage and tyranny. Brexit, separation from the Treaty of Rome, is leading to economic excommunication. This could lead to some new spiritual insight, some return to the holiness of the ancient past. Our God is the God of wonders.

The Paris School and the Future

The phrase ‘Paris School’ (of Russian religious philosophy) is a vague phrase because many of its representatives ended up not living in Paris or even France and because it was such a very varied phenomenon. Thus, it included intellectuals mainly of Russian origin (but not all of them), who ended up living as far apart as the USA, England, Finland, Bulgaria (the anti-monarchist plotter, Fr George Shavelsky) and Constantinople (the philosopher Metr John Zisioulas). Some of these were close to Orthodoxy, others were in open heretical revolt against the Church and constructed anti-Church ideologies, others were simply harmless eccentrics who lived in the clouds.

A representative close to the Tradition, for example, was the academic theologian (and not philosopher!) Fr George Florovsky, who was ousted from St Vladimir’s Seminary by another much more Protestant-minded thinker of a Paris-born generation, Fr Alexander Schmemann. However, there were others like the notorious Fr Sergey Bulgakov, who founded a new heresy under the influence of the alcoholic Catholic occultist Vladimir Soloviov. The latter was the real founder of the School, who infected it with all its basic currents of Gnosticism, Origenism, liberalism and ecumenism and had a great influence on the enormous intellect of the polymath, Fr Paul Florensky.

Then in Paris there was also the esoteric philosopher Berdyayev, who was imbued with semi-Catholic mysticism and like Bulgakov never quite shook off his Marxism, but there was also the more Orthodox Fr Basil Zenkovsky who wrote a magisterial ‘History of Russian Philosophy’. Then there were Vladimir Lossky, trained in Scholasticism, but whose views were very close to the Tradition in many respects, but on the other hand, the fantasist Bishop John Kovalevsky or the recently deceased French ecumenists, the ex-pastor Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and Olivier Clement. Their views were respectively as close to Protestantism and Catholicism as is possible without lapsing.

In England there were other representatives of the Paris School. These included the late Metr Antony (Bloom), whose curious, personal views combined a theoretical conservatism with an extraordinary liberalism and influenced several convert followers, like the Jewish Fr Sergei Hackel. Then there was the late ex-Uniat Fr Lev Gillet, who appears to have died either as a Quaker or else a Buddhist (no-one is quite sure), or the Parisian artist and intellectual the late Fr Sophrony Sakharov, whose whole esoteric philosophy of Orthodoxy came to be shaped by the peasant St Silvanus whom he had met on the Holy Mountain, where he had been a librarian.

With such a variety of individuals, some much closer to Orthodox Tradition than others, some more renovationist than others, some more fantasist than others, what do they all have in common? Negatively speaking, it is how far most of them seemed to have stood from the saints of the Church in the emigration like St John of Shanghai (also who also lived for many years in Paris and often came to London) or St Seraphim of Sofia, or from the genuine Orthodox philosopher of the emigration Ivan Ilyin. These followed the wholeness of the ascetic Tradition of the Church, and not selected fragments of it, which is why the Paris School was opposed to authentic monasticism.

However, this was not the essence of the Paris School. Its essence was its intellectual pretentiousness, which contains the pride which is at the heart of all deviations from the Church, without exception. Not understanding that enlightenment comes from the grace of God that alone cleanses the repentant heart, they all mistakenly believed that enlightenment comes from the purification of the intellect and the imagination. This tragic mis-take meant that their views were intellectual, philosophical, more or less renovationist, more or less fantasist, disincarnate from reality and from ordinary Orthodox and Orthodoxy, and so ultimately they became sectarian and cultish.

The proof of this thesis is in the fact that when the time came for the gradual liberation of the Russian Church inside Russia from Sergianism and Renovationism after 1991, they refused to re-enter Her fold and glorify the New Martyrs and Confessors together with Her. They had not been longing to return all along, as had the faithful, but had instead been cultivating their own intellectualist philosophies outside the Orthodox Tradition. Thus, cultivating private, personality-driven sidelines, they failed to see the mainstream of Church catholicity and ended up isolating themselves in the worst sort of isolation – isolation from the real saints, the New Martyrs and Confessors.

This meant that they allied themselves only with the vestigial renovationist and sectarian elements on the fringes of the Russian Church inside Russia. It also meant that they sullied themselves with politics (under the pretence of being apolitical!, which is always political). Thus, they allied themselves with Russophobic elements in the Western world, for example, with the self-justifying neocon hawks and past-worshipping warmongers of NATO, who never wanted the Cold War to end and in their ethnocentricity arrogantly never understand that the vibrant values of Orthodox Christian Civilization are quite different from their dying anti-Christian Western culture.

This is why, when at the end of 2016 the time of generational change had come for renewal in Russia and then, inspired by the Russian example, for the first glimmers of freedom and the hope of repentance in the West, the Paris School and its values stuck to the dead past. These last representatives were now aged, vestigial relics, whose rebellious and often absurd ideologies had been half-baked in the spiritual desert of the 1960s, which had been passed on to a few convert intellectuals in Russia who still had not caught up with the real world. As for the Church, we look as ever towards prophetic holiness and the dynamic restoration of the Tradition in the Holy Spirit that is happening now.

Two Extremes: Calvinism and Modernism

By Calvinism, which has its roots in Augustinianism (which is rather different from the teaching of Blessed Augustine of Hippo), we mean the human tendency to despair. This is the tendency to see all as black, that salvation is impossible, whatever efforts we make – despite the Gospel saying that with God all things are possible – that depression is our life. It is the source of dour Scots, serious Swiss and earnest Dutch. This is the error that says that God has no mercy, only truth.

By Modernism, which has its roots in Pelagianism and Origenism, we mean the human tendency to self-exaltation. This is the tendency to see humanity as already saved, that no confession and repentance are necessary for forgiveness, that the effect of holy communion is magic, automatic, requiring no effort on our part. This is the source of modern humanism and secularism and, in the Church context, renovationism. This is the error that says that God has no truth, only mercy.

As ever, Orthodoxy, the faith in the God-man, transcendent and immanent, neither Monophysite or Nestorian, neither Origenist or Calvinist, has balance, truth and mercy, repentance and forgiveness, the Tradition of the Holy Spirit.

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”.