Category Archives: The Saints

The Apostasy of Western ‘Civilisation’ and Our Salvation

Introduction: The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire

It has become customary to speak of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a ‘Papal Empire’, later of ‘the Spanish Colonial Empire’, ‘the Portuguese Empire’, ‘the French Empire’, ‘the British Empire’ and most recently of ‘the American Empire’. In fact, all these empires have only been facets of one single empire, ‘the Western Empire’. Although this has been an Empire that has covered much of the world geographically, it is also an Empire of the Mind. One day, and probably quite soon, someone will write a book called ‘The History of Western Exceptionalism’ and will show how this imperialist mentality developed. Certainly, this will mention the model of the Pagan Roman Empire that obsessed the barbarians who invaded Western Europe and how a Frankish barbarian princeling called ‘Karl’, later known as ‘Charlemagne’, wanted to ‘renew’ that Pagan Empire and failed, but how he was still ‘the first neocon’.

More interestingly than this failed forerunner, it will then go on to speak of the crucial eleventh century, of the appearance of the Western superiority complex, ‘we are right, everyone else is wrong’, or as they say now ‘West is Best’. They will speak of elitist Papism and castle feudalism, of 1054 and 1066, of the ‘formation of a persecuting society’ to persecute all others, of hatred, intolerance, genocide and ‘crusades’, on which ‘Europe’ was created and united, of the bloodshed on which the Western Empire was founded. Since then, there followed 900 years of slow but steady rise to world domination and then the dramatic and suicidal events that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and led to those in Kiev in 2014, which have led to the progressive fall of that Empire to the mess that it is in today, when we have once more reached a millennial turning-point. Below we give an outline of what is happening now.

Belief and Unbelief

A few years ago, I took part in a BBC Radio 4 ‘religious’ programme – although as with all BBC ‘religious’ programmes its direction was purely secularist and in fact anti-religious. There I was told by a former MI6 agent/BBC journalist who took part that since only 2% of Russians go to church, the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Civilisation in Russia is irrelevant. I was astonished by his total lack of understanding and limited secularist/post-Protestant view of the importance of religion. But then what else can you expect of a typical British Establishment atheist? It is values and actions that matter, not how often you go to church to gain spiritual strength. He had missed the point. They all have.

Although only 2% of the population may be in church on an average Sunday in Russian Orthodox countries (though not necessarily the same 2%), the rest do believe. This is different from the West, where only 2% go to church, and it is the same 2%, but the rest do not believe. In other words, the West has lost the roots of its Civilisation, it no longer has any Civilisation. If it had a Civilisation, it would not support Ukrainian and Israeli genocide and would not promote LGBT. Here is the difference. The West no longer believes in its roots. What remains is its profound self-delusion. Whether it is slanted to the left or to the right is irrelevant – the disease is one and the same.

The European Union Repeats the Soviet Union’s Fate

As a result of this lack of belief in civilised values and actions, the main political and economic institution in the historic European centre of the Western world, the yellow-starred European Union (EU), is corrupting, fragmenting and collapsing in exactly the same way as the old red-starred Soviet Union (SU). It is a Soviet Union II. Just as most had stopped believing in the Soviet Union by the 1970s (as I know from living there then), knowing that its unelected commissars were lieing, that it was bankrupt in every sense and had failed in its aims, so most have stopped believing in the EU, because it too has failed, is bankrupt in every sense and has failed in its aims. Indeed, the EU’s once strongest ‘locomotive’ economy, the German, is being deindustrialised, is in recession and was overtaken last year by the booming Russian economy, which is now the fifth largest in the world and is due to overtake the Japanese economy in two to three years. In front of it then will be only the expanding Chinese and Indian economies and the disastrously flagging US economy.

The EU has not only failed to make Europeans prosperous, but it has also failed in its aim to unite Europe. For instance, it has failed to unite the Western European peninsula edge with most of Europe, which is mainly in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. It has failed to unite with the Western Balkans and failed to keep the UK in itself, let alone getting prosperous Switzerland, Norway and Iceland to join itself. On top of that, it is now financing on a huge scale the Nazi regime in Kiev and the proxy war in the Ukraine in order to try and force that country to join it. Just as few in the SU had the courage to say that the SU was dead, so too today, for the same reasons of censorship and punishment, few in the EU have the courage to say that the EU is dead. The difference is that in the SU, all people bought the Izvestiya and Pravda newspapers, because there was no toilet paper, but in the West some people still buy newspapers and, incredibly, read them and actually believe in them, despite the availability of toilet paper. Such is the level of the delusion of some of the EU population.

Delusionists: The Western World

After the defeat of its multinational Western invasion of Russia under Napoleon in 1812 and stalemating in its invasion of Russia in 1854-6 under the Franco-Ottoman-Sardinian-British, the West tried to fight its wars using proxies, ‘colonial’ troops, as cannon fodder. For example, in the nineteenth century in its colonies and also in the First and Second World Wars, which were essentially tribal European Wars, it used millions of Indian and African troops. The Ghurkas and the Foreign Legion are the remnants. The Far West, the USA, used this proxy method too and in both those wars joined in after they had begun, hoping for easy pickings after the suicidal Europeans. In the Second World War, the Anglo-Americans hoped that the Nazis and the Russians and their allies would kill each other and then they would be able to pick up the pieces. That did not entirely happen. Nevertheless, in the 1990s the West used the same proxy technique in yet another anti-Russian war, using Chechens. However, the Chechens realised that they were being used by the West, turned on their Western masters and sided with the Russians.

In the latest Western War against Russia, being fought by proxies in the Ukraine, similar things are occurring, as Ukrainians slowly realise that they too have been deceived and betrayed by the West. Here again, the Western Ukrainian proxies, encouraged to die ‘until the last Ukrainian’, are being routed by joint Russian and Eastern Ukrainian forces. Afraid of facing reality, the delusional West is refusing to negotiate and negotiations have been banned by law by the Ukrainian puppet dictatorship, which tortures those who speak freely, has banned other political parties and democratic elections and plans to ban the Church. It has disguised this refusal to negotiate with the absurd claim that Russia wants to take over Western Europe. This laughable propaganda claim, invented by US and British PR hireling firms in Kiev, has been made in the Ukraine and duly been repeated in the Baltics, Germany, Sweden, the UK and Norway so far. It is the familiar old excuse ever since Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941, who claimed to be saving ‘Western Civilisation’ from the ‘Asiatic barbarian hordes’ of Russia, ‘better dead than red’.

Realists: Hope in South-Eastern Europe

In its current war against ‘the Asiatic hordes’ of Russia, which war the West began in 2014 with its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of the Ukraine, the West has committed suicide several times. Having given eight years to Russia to prepare a Plan B in case it had to fight a full-scale war against the ever-aggressive West, the West imposed thousands of sanctions which have helped destroy its own economies. The present revolts in Western Europe are about the impoverishment resulting from the facts that so much money has been given to the Ukraine, that there are so many Ukrainian ‘refugees’ being paid for nothing and because the USA ended by violence the supplies of cheap gas from Russia. These revolts are not only of farmers in Poland, Romania, Germany and France, but include mass strikes of millions of workers in the Dickensian UK, Germany and France. In all these countries the destitute have been forced to use food banks to survive. In Northern America too, the rulers are extremely unpopular and revolts are ongoing in Canada and in Texas.

Deluded Western leaders have actually believed their own delusions, which they call ‘PR’. Most people no longer believe in those lies, repeated ad infinitum by the State-controlled Western media and nearly all Ukrainian flags have been taken down in Western Europe – only the now panicking very rich still fly them. Many are beginning to understand the great manipulation. Nowhere is this more obvious in Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are the only Western leaders not to be US puppets. As the Russian victory becomes obvious, other countries will also free themselves from US/EU tyranny. Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and even perhaps neutral Austria may enter this Union of Free Europe. In other words, the whole geographical entity of South-Eastern Europe may come to link itself with Russia and the other BRICS economies, of which Russia is the closest to them. This is the future path to peace, justice and prosperity, away from the disaster and decadence of the warmongering US-created EU vassal.

Conclusion: The Mystical Presence: North-Western Europe

Some ask: How then do you in North-Western Europe, in England, survive, as you still labour under the tyranny of the Norman-imposed British Establishment and its moral perversions and lies, and now completely under the heel of the corrupted Washington elite? Around us blow hurricanes, however we remain calm. Why? We have a secret. It is because our saints, in our case, those of Eastern England, are with us. Never have we felt the intercession and mystical presence of our saints so strongly as over the last three years, when so-called ‘Orthodox clergy’ began persecuting us. Only this week we were in Ely again and felt the prayers of and experienced a miracle of St Audrey, as we bowed before her right hand, whose fingers are still clasped in the sign of the cross after exactly 1350 years. She responds to real veneration, not to that of the pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who suffer from that selfsame American exceptionalist complex that they are right and all others are wrong, They persecute real Orthodox Christians and their families and try and steal our saints and our churches. Those outside the Church cannot feel the mystical presence of our saints, for their pretended veneration is political and sectarian and in fact is a perverted persecution of the faithful.

But we have felt the presences of St Edmund in Hoxne and Bury St Edmunds, of St Fursey in Burgh Castle, of St Botolph in Iken, of St Felix by the old fortress in Felixstowe, of St Osyth in the woods in Chich, of St Cedd in his still standing church in Bradwell on Sea, of St Eanswythe in her relics in Folkestone, of St Walstan in Bawburgh, of St Withburgh in Dereham, of St John in his holy relics in Beverley, of St Guthlac and St Theodore in Crowland, of St Huna by his hermitage-farm in Chatteris, of St Ivo in St Ives and of St Neot in St Neots. They are all present and have all resisted the great millennial apostasy of the new Western world, whose depth has become so astonishing in its present death-throes. The patience of these saints is unending, calling those who live here back to repentance, waiting for them to return, like the father the prodigal son. Victory is theirs and, because we venerate them and ask them for their protection, victory is ours too. We feel the warmth from their relics. It will not be long now. And the same presences are all over Western Europe as the First Millennium says to the finishing Second Millennium: We told you so, but we are still waiting for you to return. Herein is their witness and herein is our salvation from the devil’s yoke.

America, the Ukraine, Russia, the Church: Temptation, Tragedy, Challenge and Opportunity

Foreword

The world is now becoming a post-globalist world. The Globalists (Americans) have been defeated by the Sovereignists. Despite the attempts by the US elite, the power behind the throne, to keep the embarrassingly senile Biden in power until after the next elections, the Ukraine is collapsing (and Gaza genocided by American bombs) and so Biden too will Biden. First in Russia, then in Hungary, then in Slovakia, now in the Netherlands, the Sovereignists are in power. They are increasingly strong in Germany, Italy and France. Union is off the cards. Confederation is the order of the day, as the real New World Order. Sovereignty is beyond the artificial and absurd divisions of left and right, inventions of the Western oligarchies (the mythical ‘democracies’) in order to divide and rule. Sovereignty is what both Russia and China have, though the Globalists falsely call them ‘autocracies’. The Western world has yet to recover its sovereignty. It still can, if it takes the opportunity to return to the Holy Trinity, the model of unity in diversity, what politicians today call multipolarity.

The American Temptation

The American temptation was Empire building, not just in one region, but universally or ‘globally’, as it proclaimed. Let us leave the north to the ice and build ‘from sea to shining sea’, they said. So they stole half a Continent from the natives, whom they slaughtered, bought from a desperate Napoleon, grasped the south from Mexico, began a Civil War with 600,000 dead and invaded small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. This culminated in a four-year war and dropping its atom bombs on the big island of Japan in 1945 in order to dominate the Pacific. At the same time, they conquered and occupied the peninsula of Western Europe in 1944-5, which victory followed its expeditionary experiment of 1917-18. The 1945 double victory meant its victory over half the world. The USA was a Superpower. It still had to conquer the heartland of Eurasia, which it thought it had done in 1991, becoming the only Superpower. This was a delusion and it duly proclaimed it as ‘the end of history’. This proud triumphalism, a Non-Jewish Zionism, was failure, for the fall always follows pride – delusions are always countered by reality.

The American Empire depended on using expendable proxies, puppets whom it flattered and told that they were superior to their neighbours. These puppets were hired do the dirty work for the US. Through them it could divide and rule, sowing chaos and destruction, whether in Latin America, East Asia, West Asia or in ex-Soviet Eastern Europe. However, its agents, from Marcos to Somoza, from Hussein to Bin Laden, from Bolsinaro to Zelensky, would go off script, falling into delusion. The USA has always suffered from a ‘spoilt child syndrome’. The spoilt child always shouts: ‘If I cannot have it, then no-one will have it’. And so they destroy their once much-coveted puppets and toys. This I know from experience with an American. Internationally, it can be seen in Latin America, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Western and Eastern Europe – now isolated from Russia. However, this spoilt-child syndrome only works in a unipolar world of exclusivism, not in a multipolar world. In the latter there is choice and people can escape US despotism, whose policy of containment fails.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

Now desperate the Kiev government wants to mobilise all Ukrainians between the ages of 17 and 70, Berlin-style, and, barbarically, women. The latter are already being killed on the front, where poorly trained and poorly equipped troops without air support, average age 43, are being forced to commit suicide against vastly superior Russian forces. Kiev dead already number between 500,000 and 600,000 and more and more are deserting. The needless death of these troops is a war crime. President Zelensky, like Hitler suicidally forbidding retreat despite military advice, is also isolated and unhinged in his bunker, having banned elections, delusional with his Messiah complex. His PR advisors have told the Western media that Russians have tried to assassinate him five times. Of course, this is nonsense. Zelensky, the brilliant and well-paid actor but utterly incompetent politician, is the greatest asset of the Russians. He may well be assassinated, only by US-backed Ukrainians, which assassination can then be blamed on Russia. The Ukraine has now lost 20%, of its territory, taken back by Russian forces after being ruled by the Ukraine for up to 100 years. But since Kiev refuses to negotiate, it will lose even more.

If the Ukrainians manage to continue losing, they could lose up to 50% of their territory or even more. Russian forces are waiting to fill the vacuum once the Kiev forces collapse and move forward to the River Dnieper and, if necessary, cross it. Whatever happens, Kiev will be forced to surrender unconditionally. There will be no negotiated settlement, as Kiev refused this constantly for eight years. The new, post-Zelensky government in the Ukraine will have to agree to and sign the Russian conditions. It is indeed time to end ‘the magical thinking about Russia’s defeat,’ by which headlines the Wall Street Journal means ending its own delusions and fantasies and those of the whole Collective West and their carefully censored media since 2014. As we have been predicting in over 116 published articles between March 2022 and October 2023, the West is being routed in the Ukraine. Kiev is the second Kabul and even worse in humiliation. As a result, the failed elites in the US and in Europe will fall. NATO and the EU are therefore finished; they were only ever post-1945 relics. Their time is up. Europe’s future is Eurasian and Confederal.

Indeed, the reign of the official Western media like the BBC, used by Western Establishments as propaganda mouthpieces, weapons of mass deception, are over. People are seeing through their lies. The US and the EU made a fatal mistake in forcing Russia into a close alliance with China through their aggression. It was delusional Western hubris that called Russia ‘a gas station with nukes’. Its booming economy has now overtaken the depressed German economy, cut off from cheap energy by US sabotage. As a result of the rout of the Collective West in the Ukraine, worldwide all recognise that there are three Superpowers: China, Russia and USA – and in that order. It is two against one. Queueing up not far behind them are India, the Muslim World, Africa and Latin America, with largely unpopulated Australia left as the natural resource reserve for the great East Asian Superpower – China. Europe discounted itself by allying itself with the US as vassals and client states. Now US failure and humiliation are shared by its lapdogs, Germany, France and especially the UK. France and the UK are to lose their places on the UN Security Council.

The Russian Challenge

Militarily, economically and diplomatically, this is a triumph for the Russian Federation, a Superpower and not ‘a regional power’, as the US President Obama contemptuously called it only a decade ago. Russia is in fact the leader of what used to be called ‘The Global South’, the 90% of the new multipolar world which is Non-Western. Through Russian-founded BRICS +, Russia is the toast of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They too want independence from the neo-colonial West, now that Russia has shown the way through its superiority. It is Russia, backed by China, which with BRICS troops will make peace in West Asia between Palestine and Israel and at last, inevitably, give the Palestinians justice and a homeland. The US is isolated at the UN and has failed because it was one-sided and supported the injustice of Israeli genocide. The US has failed both to divide Europe from Russia and failed to divide and colonise Russia, which was its aim in using Ukrainian soldiers as pawns to attack Russia and die for Washington. However, winning the war in the Ukraine and defeating American Europe is one thing. Russia must also win the peace.

In the Ukraine, this means no occupation of the real Ukraine, where real Ukrainians live, in the north-west and centre-west. It also means that all the Non-Ukrainian parts of the pre-2014 Ukraine, created by brutal Soviet dictators and whose brutality the Collective West has so fervently supported, where Russians, Poles, Romanians and Hungarians live, will at last be able to return to their homelands. They will leave the real Ukraine, about half the Soviet Ukraine. As post-Soviet Russia learned its lesson not to oppress Non-Russian peoples and has never had the slightest intention of occupying the real Ukraine, let alone other Eastern European countries (Zelensky’s Ukraine was in no way defending the West ‘against the Asiatic Muscovite hordes’; that was pure racist propaganda), the peoples of Europe are going to see the real Russia, instead of seeing it through the eyes of their US-selected elite of nonentities, who constantly lied to them. With people’s governments in Europe, a new agreement could be reached, with the abandonment of NATO and mutually beneficial security guarantees.

This means the repeal of the illegal anti-Russian sanctions and respect for the human rights of Russian minorities in all European countries, especially in the Ukraine, where the Orthodox Church has been banned. Tragedy remains. Apart from the unnecessary sacrifice of a whole generation of well over a million Ukrainian men, killed or crippled, Ukraine will need rebuilding – and repopulating. Eight million and more fled Zelensky’s tyranny and his hated SBU secret police and many were needlessly made to fear Russia because of Western propaganda. They emigrated, first to Russia, then to Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. The death toll for Russia could well reach 40,000 dead. There were also the 14,000 Russian-speaking civilians massacred by the US-installed Kiev regime in the Donbass since 2014. Apart from this, there is the whole question of the once multinational Russian Church. In February 2022 its leadership took a Russian nationalist stance. This meant that Non-Russians and those Russians who did not agree with the Russian Military Operation in the Ukraine left that politicised Church, some with bitterness.

The Orthodox Christian Opportunity

Clergy and people outside Russia, in the Ukraine, in the Baltics, in Moldova, in Western Europe and one day in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, will not return to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Church will have to decentralise and form a family of new and autocephalous (independent) Local Churches for these peoples. This is the challenge and the only way forward. The Russian temptation was to try and dominate the rest of the Orthodox Church because their Church is by far the biggest and so the most powerful, three-quarters of the whole. God has humbled them and they will be reduced to half of the Orthodox world. Russians will have to return to their saints, to Sts Antony and Theodosius of Kiev, St Sergius of Radonezh, St Nil of Sora, St Paisy (Velichkovsky), St Seraphim of Sarov, the Saints of Optina, St John of Kronstadt, the New Martyrs and Confessors, St John of Shanghai. These are the actual spiritual and moral leaders of the Russian Church. Today the Russian Church is at last heading towards becoming a post-post-Soviet Church, that is, to a Church free of centralisation, nationalism, politics, sect and schism.

However, there was also the Greek nationalist temptation, no less historic in its catastrophic proportions. This temptation, which began as long ago as 1917, was to go the way of the world, that is of the USA. Now God has humbled the Greeks too, making them powerless in worldly terms, for they placed their hope ‘in princes and the sons of men’. Their only greatness is in the saints whom they themselves persecuted, St Nectarios, St Paisios and St Porphyrios, to name but a few. The situation reminds us of the following. Some forty years ago St Paisios the Athonite told a then young man, whom I know well, the following. The young man had been scandalised by the conduct of certain bishops. Fr Paisios told him: ‘When you walk along a path on Athos and come across animal excrement, what do you do? You kick it aside into the bushes so that other passers-by will not tread in it and then you wipe your shoes’. This is what we do today. We shall defeat both sectarianism and modernism, for they all end up in the same way, in the bushes, in sect and schism.

On the 1350th Anniversary of St Audrey

Praying before the icon of St Audrey on the iconostasis of St Edmund’s Romanian Orthodox church in the High Street of Little Abington just outside Cambridge, we sang a service of intercession to her, taking hymns from our untampered service composed to her. Then we went to her birthplace in the the village of Exning and her holy well and then on to Ely to pray and sing in front of the holy relic of her right hand. Today is not only her feast-day, but precisely the 1350th anniversary of her repose. St Audrey is the Mother of East Anglia and it is only because of the saints of East Anglia that this part of England survives.

May she who has protected us from the persecution of sectarians and schismatics continue her intercessions for us, always now and ever and unto the ages of ages.

Holy Mother Audrey, pray to God for us!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe

6 July 2023

 

The Truth from Childhood

Death is the enemy of Life, but he has many friends among men, in all those authorities in whom a debased sense of Life is linked with temporary power.

 

I knew about the Age of Saints from earliest childhood. The evidence was all around me locally, even if come out of eternity. I was born by a former monastery. My family lived near Bury St Edmunds, in honour of St Edmund, whose mystical presence has followed and guided me all the days of my life, both here and overseas. Near me were old churches dedicated to St Albright, St Botolph, St Osyth and St Cedd (built by himself), St Felix and St Audrey.

I knew all of these places in childhood and then I also read of St Alfred, then later I discovered St Guthlac and read of St Cuthbert and discovered the unique mystical atmosphere in Hoxne in Suffolk, the place of St Edmund’s martyrdom. When I was twenty, I discovered Walsingham in Norfolk, where in a humble village in 1061 the Mother of God appeared in a last consolation of grace, outpoured at the end of the beginning, before the beginning of the end.

These saints taught me that the other world, which in childhood I knew of intuitively, is real. This world is not the real one. This is only a pale reflection, seen in a glass darkly, of the real one. The real one is just beyond the veil, on the other side, a glimmering country of Beauty and Wisdom, where a King and Queen reign, together with all these saints and many more. I understood then that the meaning of life is the seeking and living of that Kingdom just beyond.

Like many others, I was called on to glimpse the world beyond sense and strive to bring down fragments of its Beauty and Wisdom from its stars and to convey them to others, acting as a poor and unwitting messenger of the Sacred and the Eternal. But how did we get from that Age of Saints, who perceived that bright kingdom, from the seventh century on, to this Age of Sin, which does has never even heard of that country, in the twenty-first century?

Why did they undergo a millennium of decline? How did they replace God with man? Why did they make the seeing and singing of what is done in Paradise into a weapon to beat others? Why did the powerful try to make Christ into a political ideology with which to beat and humiliate the righteous? Why did they make Beauty into ugliness and Wisdom into folly? Why did they use Heaven to make a hell on earth, the opposite of the Lord’s Prayer?

I realised that there are the animists and atheists who had stopped before they reached God and then the Non-Christians who had stopped after they had reached the One God, before they had reached Christ. Then there were others who, though advancing further, had stopped after they had reached Christ. Then there were those in the West who, going further, had stopped before they had reached the Holy Spirit. For Him they had substituted others.

These were the quenchers of the Spirit, the Spirit-deniers, the mere formalists and the spoilers, the enemies of all spiritual progress, for there is no-one who can stop after the discovery of the Holy Spirit. But Christ is coming back to overturn the table of these Spirit-resisting frauds and moneychangers in His Father’s House and to return us to our roots. His righteous anger will be terrible to behold and then He will show us His bright Kingdom on a New Earth.

 

 

The Battle for the Holy Spirit

All who are hostile to the Orthodox Christian Faith, whatever label they may carry, including a superficial label of ‘Orthodox’, are hostile to the Holy Trinity, though in different ways.

Thus, Pagans reject God the Father, preferring instead to make idols of mere creation, so worshipping itself. Like the Hindus, in a multitude of gods and goddesses, a sun-god, a moon-god, an earth-god, a king-god, a wind-god, a sea-god, a river-god etc. As animists, they worship spirits, including their own bodies and minds, like the Buddhists, not understanding that any such spirits are fallen human spirits or else, worse still, the fallen spirits of the demons. The only Spirit we can know and worship is the Holy Spirit.

Thus, Heretics reject God the Son, rejecting either His Divinity, like the Jews, the Arians, the Nestorians and the Muslims, or else His humanity, like the Monophysites.

Thus, Western Secularists reject God the Holy Spirit, preferring the values of this world. Therefore they replace the Holy Spirit, Who is the Authority and the Power and the Spirit of the Church, with a Pope in Rome, then with any white man, including Stalin or Hitler, and finally with any human-being who thinks himself equal to the Holy Spirit according to his ‘human rights’. So the world turns full circle and reverts to Paganism, under the humanist delusion of being clever, it narcissistically worships itself.

Thus, lapsed Orthodox replace Him with worldliness, disguised either as a flag-waving nationalism, or as a post-Soviet, get-rich-quick culture which in all practical terms is atheist, or as a spiritually feeble imitation of Western culture, or as a mere right-wing conservative ideology of dictatorial power. All these reject the Revelation of the Holy Spirit.

In order to battle for the Holy Spirit, for nearly 50 years we have called on Christ, the Mother of God and on the Saints of all ages and lands. For though not of this world, the voices of the Saints are the bearers of the Holy Spirit in this world, and in all ages and in all lands, thus witnessing against Pagans, Heretics, Western Secularists and lapsed Orthodox.

On the Slaying of the Seven Fake Orthodoxies

Introduction

In nearly fifty years of association with Orthodoxy, I have seen how the devil can fake everything. This is because he is himself a fake: a fake god – though many still worship him. As ‘a liar and the father of lies’ (Jn 8, 44), he can most certainly fake every human activity, including faith. He can use faith to create fake faith. I have seen this in the seven types of fake Orthodoxy, the deviations which he creates and which I have observed. The first three are primitive deviations, the next two are psychological deviations and the last two belong to the more complex realm of delusional deviations. All of them have one thing in common: they provide no spiritual food at all and so the souls that follow these fakes die of the spiritual famine which they leave in their wake.

Three Primitive Deviations

These deviations are those which are chosen by those who live fleshly lives, the life of the body with its material interests.

The first type of fake Orthodoxy is nationalistic. This involves demeaning Christ to the level of flag-waving and attachments to this world. Beware of churches which proudly display national flags of any sort. They worship not Christ, but the Caesar of their State. This Orthodoxy is deathly, for it kills the Spirit, which is why it is ritualistic and superficial.

The next and second type of fake Orthodoxy is bureaucratic. This is linked to the first fake, inasmuch as it is political. This involves demeaning Christ to the level of paperwork and ‘protocols’, behind which the State bureaucrat with his Church title hides. This Orthodoxy is deathly, for it kills the Spirit, which is why it is cowardly and gutless.

The next and third type of fake Orthodoxy is diplomatic. This is linked to the first and second fakes, inasmuch as it is also meanly political and insincere. This involves demeaning Christ to the level of lies and compromise and the seeking of some worldly advantage behind the camouflage of Christ. This Orthodoxy is deathly, for it kills the Spirit, which is why it repeats the well-worn lie that all faiths are the same – which they are obviously not, for only one Faith comes from the Holy Spirit, Who comes forth from the Father.

Two Psychological Deviations

These deviations are those which are chosen by those who live emotional lives, the life of the feelings and the interests of the ego.

The next and fourth type of fake Orthodoxy is psychological, at worst psychopathological. In any case, it has nothing to do with theology. It involves demeaning Christ to the level of conforming Him to the ways of the (Western) world, with its calendar and all its other compromised values. It is the easy way out, the way of self-justification, for it means living a more or less effortless, secular life behind the mask of Christ. This Orthodoxy is deathly, for it kills the Spirit by creating a worldly, adaptationist, conformist Orthodoxy, a pseudo-Orthodoxy that swims with the secularist tide.

The next and fifth type of fake Orthodoxy is psychological, at worst psychopathological. In any case, it has nothing to do with theology. It involves demeaning Christ to the level of a personal psychological rebellion against the values with which those who confess it were brought up and then hating them. In this way it is also a form of self-hatred. Thus, it disobeys the commandment which tells us to love our neighbour AS OURSELF. This Orthodoxy is deathly, for it kills the Spirit by creating an extremist, aggressive Orthodoxy of hatred that is a negative anti-everything and is therefore not a positive love of Orthodoxy.

Two Delusional Deviations

These deviations are those which are chosen by those who live fantasy lives, the life of the brain and the interests of the fantasy.

The next and sixth type of fake Orthodoxy is an intellectual conceit. It involves demeaning Christ to the level of cold, bookish knowledge which is merely the arrogant delusion of the puffed-up mind, of ‘fleshly reasoning’, the pompous pretentiousness of those who can talk about everything, but know nothing and live by nothing. This Orthodoxy is deathly, for it kills the Spirit by creating fantasist philosophies and is therefore not Orthodoxy.

The next and final and seventh type of fake Orthodoxy is a pietistic conceit. This is linked to the sixth inasmuch as it comes from the brain and the imagination. It involves demeaning Christ to the level of delusion through spiritual pride, of the pseudo-ascetic, of the depressed, of esoteric exotica, pretending to be ’spiritual’, pretending to be what they are not, with spiritual pride and imagined superiority, condemning others as ‘not spiritual’, being full of pretentiousness, foreign words, dressing up in black like monks or nuns, play-acting, pseudo-holiness, obsessively and self-flatteringly claiming charlatans and frauds who deceive and mislead the simple as their ‘spiritual fathers’. This delusional Orthodoxy is deathly, for it kills the Spirit by pretending to be what it is not. It is therefore anti-spiritual, for the spiritual is always founded on the real, not on the imaginary.

Conclusion

If you are at any of the above stages or at any combination of them, you must renounce and kill this spiritual enslavement at once and move on to Freedom, to Real Orthodoxy, which is simple. It means loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves, living in and according to the Church, following the Lives of the Saints, of the real holiness of those who really lived, who were incarnate in life, in the real world. Real Orthodoxy is not Death, but is Life itself, it is living in the Creator of Life, living in Christ, but that Life is reached only by first slaying in yourself the dragon of all these seven fakes.

 

The Russian Orthodox Émigré Contribution to the Future World Orthodox Church

A few years ago the now Metropolitan Tikhon of Pskov asked us the question: What distinctive contribution can the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) make to the Church inside Russia? Here is my answer to him in the light of the most recent events:

Our Orthodox Christian Faith is Trinitarian: God the Father, Who is the instinctive knowledge of the existence of God, God the Son, Who represents the Incarnation of the Faith in all human affairs on earth (as denied for a thousand years by the Western world), and God the Holy Spirit, Who sanctifies all the nations who accept Him. This Trinitarian knowledge has always been expressed in the Russian Orthodox words: ‘For the Faith, For the Tsar, For Rus’. This motto was in turn expressed in recent history by the three ROCOR Saints, the Three Saints of the Emigration:

‘For the Faith’ was expressed by St Jonah of Hankou (+ 1925), the first ROCOR saint. Fleeing as a refugee with the White Russians and absolutely faithful to the fullness of Russian Orthodoxy, within a very short time of becoming a bishop at a very young age in Manchuria, he established an orphanage, a school, and a dining hall for the poor. Thus he combined the love of the Liturgy with practical love for our neighbour, as the Gospel calls us to do. This is indeed the essence of the Orthodox Christian Faith.

‘For the Faith and for the Tsar’ was expressed a generation later by St Seraphim of Boguchar (+ 1950). He expressed the values of Russian Orthodoxy in his writings and was also the great defender of Orthodoxy against both the heresies of the renovationist Paris School in the 1930s and ecumenism, notably at the Inter-Orthodox Council of Moscow in July 1948. He asked: What is the role of the Tsar? He answered that he is the incarnation of the Faith in the life of the State, in social, political and economic affairs. This is why we await the coming of the next Tsar, the White Tsar, whether he is a man of piety, or Christ Himself in His Second Coming.

‘For the Faith, for the Tsar and for Rus’ was then expressed by St John of Shanghai (+ 1966). The first ‘universal saint’, as he has been called, he lived all over the planet and celebrated the Liturgy and preached in many languages, extending the understanding and practice of ‘Rus’ worldwide far beyond East Slavdom, which stretches from Slovakia to the shores of the Pacific. Now we talk about American Rus, Australian Rus, English Rus, French Rus, German Rus, Irish Rus, Peruvian Rus, Swiss Rus. Wherever, worldwide, there is the uncorrupted Christian Faith of the Russian Orthodox world, there is Rus.

Some in Russia would say that this is what they have always believed. True, but the emigration expressed it with a refined purity and much extended significance, all of which became possible only after the catastrophe of the 1917 Revolution.  All three saints together, the Three New Pillars of Orthodoxy, completed their lives on three different continents: St Jonah in China in Asia; St Seraphim in Bulgaria in Europe and St John in San Francisco in North America.

It is this, the global reality of Rus, which the Church inside Russia is now learning from us. Once captive inside the mental borders of the Soviet Union, the multinational Russian Orthodox Church has recently established a Western European Exarchate and a South-East Asian Exarchate, becoming ever more deeply the Church of Eurasia. Now, with the long-expected apostasy of Greek Churches, far too weak to stand up to corrupting American pressure, there has appeared the possibility of setting up a Turkish Exarchate in Asia and solving the old calendarist schism in Greece in Europe.

Moreover, extending to a new Continent, it could set up an African Orthodox Church with local, not colonial, bishops. Beyond this there is the possibility of founding a real North American Orthodox Church, with the future merger of the healthy elements of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) with ROCOR. And ROCOR in turn can, with canonical and practical support from inside Russia, help set up a Church of Oceania and a Church of South America. It is our hope that we shall yet see founded a church dedicated to the Three New Pillars of Orthodoxy, the Pillars of the Russian emigration of three different continents. The future begins now.

The Saints and the Bad Old Days

My interest in the saints deepened greatly in the 1970s and 1980s, once I had come into contact with the quite extraordinary spiritual and moral decadence of the Orthodox emigration of various nationalities. These immigrants included self-appointed ‘elders’, fraudulent gurus, so-called ‘Orthodox’ bishops who were not even Christians, bishops and priests who were simoniacs, criminals, perverts, bureaucrats, political appointees and who included the usual assortment of clerical narcissists. At least saints could provide positive models to counter the reality.

In those decadent days, and even much after, there were by and large four criteria for ordination to the priesthood if you were English (and indeed Western in general):

Be an adept of a sect or cult grouped around a bishop or priest (a self-appointed ‘starets’) with their various perversions, or else be an adept of some extremist sect based on a political ideology of left or right. Neither of these options had a future. Bishops and priests do not join political parties or tell people who to vote for (either publicly or privately), we only try to influence the course of events positively, in favour of the Church as the Body of Christ.

Be a freemason.

Be an Anglican vicar.

Be fluent in a foreign language e.g. Greek or Russian.

The first two criteria were spiritually and morally repugnant to me, the third not even conceivable, as I have never been an Anglican and have never had any desire to become one; Anglicanism is quite foreign to me as an Englishman, as it is to most Englishmen: there remained only the fourth criterion.

Hopefully, in the future, the criteria for ordination will become spiritual, that there is a group of Orthodox people in a certain place who put forward a man without canonical impediments who is not unwilling, and whose wife is not unwilling for him, to become a candidate for eventual ordination to the priesthood, once he has passed through all the necessary steps. The bad old days, when married men were excluded from consideration simply because they were married, or men were excluded from consideration because they had spiritual interests, as was the case in my youth, will be over. I thank all those who persecuted me; they made me more interested in the Lives of the Saints.

 

Towards a Map of Western European Holiness

By origin the word Europe means ‘the land of the sunset’, that is, the west, for it lies at the western tip of the 54.5 million square kilometres of the Eurasian Continent. Measuring 10.5 million square kilometres, only one fifth of the whole of Eurasia, Europe from a Church viewpoint can be divided into three parts. Over 50%, or 5.5 million square kilometres, 4.5 million square kilometres in Russia and just over 1 million in the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, is canonical Russian Orthodox territory. The second part covers 1.4 million square kilometres and is the territory of various Local Orthodox Churches, the Romanian, Serbian (whose territory includes all of ex-Yugoslavia), Greek, Bulgarian, Polish, Czecho-slovak, and Albanian. This is two-thirds of Europe. There remains the final third of 3.6 million square kilometres.

This may be called Western Europe, even though it includes Central Europe, Hungary and Finland. The name can be justified because this part of Europe has for nearly one thousand years been isolated from the Church. This was as a result of the spiritual delusions, and so intellectual and political disaffection, jealousy and hostility towards the Church, of the governing elite of Western Europe. In other words, this is ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant Europe. Going from west to east and north to south, this means the 25 countries of: Iceland, Ireland, the British Isles (the three countries of Wales, England and Scotland), Norway, Denmark (and the Faeroes), Sweden, Finland; the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany; France, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Hungary; Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Italy, San Marino and Malta.

There exist many maps of this Western Europe. Some show the borders of the various states and the main cities; others show seas and lakes, hills and mountains; others show population density; others show the main roads and railways; others show the longevity of the population. And yet, although a millennium ago this Western Europe had a history of holiness, that is, of Orthodoxy, because this history has been forgotten, there is as yet no map showing the places hallowed by its saints who received the holiness brought to it from the east. If we drew up such a map of its saints, we would find huge variations. For example, in the very sparsely-populated Nordic countries, over one third of the area, we find little holiness, with no known native saints in Iceland and Finland and only a handful in Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

However, in the rest of this Western Europe we find a very different situation. The centre of its holiness is what is now Italy (and San Marino), close to the source of the Faith in the East with the capital of Rome. From here holiness spread north to Gaul, now France, the second centre of holiness, to southern England and from there to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and from there to Austria and Hungary. From Gaul holiness also spread east to Switzerland, south and west to Andorra, Spain and Portugal, and north to what is now Belgium and above all to the thebaid of saints in Ireland, converted by the monastic life brought to them from Egypt via Gaul. Their influence spread back to east and south, to all the Celtic lands, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, and also to northern England, Belgium, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

The first saints of this First Western Europe are of course the leading apostles, Peter and Paul, together with St James the Apostle in Galicia, as well as a huge number of internationally-venerated martyrs, especially in Rome, like St Pancras of Taormina (1st cent.),  St Clement (100), St Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107), Sts Sophia, Hope, Faith and Love (2nd cent.), St Tatiana (225), St Cecilia (230), St Hippolytus of Rome (c. 235), St Agatha (251), St Lawrence (258), St Eugenia (262), Sts Chrysanthus and Daria (283), Sts Sebastian and Comps (287), St Maurice of Agaunum and the Theban Legion (287), St Anastasia of Rome (304), St Lucy of Syracuse (304), Sts Agapia, Chionia and Irene (304), St Vincent of Spain (304), St Eulalia of Barcelona (304), St Januarius of Pozzuoli (c. 305), St Alban of Verulamium (c. 305), St Pancras (early 4th cent), St Agnes (c. 350).

It includes Church Fathers like St Justin Martyr (165),  St Irinei of Lyon (200), St Hilary of Poitiers (368), St Ambrose of Milan (387), St John Cassian (433), St Vincent of Lerins (445), Blessed Jerome of Stridon (c. 420), St Leo the Great (461), St Gregory the Great, called the Dialogist (604), St Maximus the Confessor (662). It includes pious bishops with Gallo-Romans like St Martial of Limoges (c. 250), St Saturninus of Toulouse (257), St Julian of Le Mans (Cenomansis) (3rd cent), St Paulinus of Nola (431), St Germanus of Auxerre (448), then later St Remigius (533), St Germanus of Paris (576), St Gregory of Tours (594), St Leander (601), St Valery (621), St Fulgentius (633), St Isidore of Seville (636), St Eligius (660), St Omer (670), St Amand (675), St Julian of Toledo (690), St Lambert (705), St Hubert (727), St Gregory of Utrecht (776).

It includes monastic founders like St Martin the Merciful of Tours (397), St Genevieve of Paris (500), St Benedict of Nursia (550), St Martin of Braga (580), St David of Wales (589), St Columba of Iona, Enlightener of Scotland (597), St Columban of Luxeuil (615), St Hilda of Whitby (680), St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (687), St Odile of Alsace (720). It includes confessors who evangelized whole stretches of this Europe, like the Roman-Britons St Ninian, Apostle of the Picts (450), St Patrick, Enlightener of Ireland (461), the English St Willibrord-Clement in the Netherlands (739) and St Boniface of Fulda, martyred in Frisia (754), St Anschar of Hamburg (865). It includes pious kings and queens, St Bathilde (545), St Oswald (642), St Clotilde (680), St Edmund of East Anglia (869), St Edward the Martyr (879), St Olaf of Sweden (950), St Olaf of Norway (1030).

The list of saints is immense. There are some ten thousand names of saints of Western Europe, martyrs and confessors, men and women, internationally-venerated and only locally-venerated, some with highly detailed lives, others little more than names. Forty-five years ago we began work on the Saints of England, despite the lack of any encouragement. Then thirty-five years ago we began work on the Saints of what is now France. However, that work was interrupted by the negativity of the then Exarchate in Paris and other concerns, one of which was work on the Saints of Iberia twenty-five years ago. That work helped lead to their recent adoption into a feast of the Diocese of Iberia under Archbishop Nestor. Now with a real Russian Exarchate for Western Europe in Paris, we will be turning our attention back to the Saints of what is now France.

Most of a Life

Foreword

I may live another twenty or thirty years, but equally my time on earth may come to an end tomorrow, next week, in a month’s time, or next year. No-one knows, but I have no illusions. Now that I am coming to an end, it is fitting to set down the three tasks of my destiny which have filled my unworthily lived days. It is my belief that others will more effectively continue these tasks after me, just as many others worked on them both before me and at the same time. And although, not always in positions of power, they worked far more efficiently and with far greater success than me, it has often felt as though I were totally abandoned in these tasks. I never chose them – they fell to my lot despite my clear manifold human weaknesses and equally clear unsuitability and unwillingness to fulfil them.

With the Saints

My first task has been the modest contribution to spreading the veneration of the Saints of Western Europe in the Church. This meant fixing them in locally-issued calendars, praying and writing their lives and compiling, collecting and celebrating their services and icons. This was a bitter battle and cost me enormously, for resistance from all sides without exception was very harsh. Isolation was my lot. There were – and are – so many who resist the saints. Altogether, above all by the reposed Monk Joseph (Lambertson) whom I much encouraged, services were compiled to nearly one hundred saints or groups of saints of Western Europe who did not yet have one. Victory came slowly and over forty years later several such saints were included in the official Russian Orthodox calendar, with more to follow.

Church Unity

My second task has been to help contribute to the restoration of the unity of the two parts of the Russian Church and to call others outside it, for example those who had fallen away in Paris, to unity with it. My part was very, very minor, of course, but it must have helped, for people told me it had. Having visited the Soviet Union twice in the 70s and seen the lamentable state of much of the Patriarchate in England and France, I could see that nothing could be done until the fall of the Soviet Union. Only that would bring the liberation of the hostage episcopate there. So it was only in 2000 that it repented for its compromises with the atheist government and so its failure to recognize the New Martyrs and Confessors earlier, as well as for its politically-motivated compromises with heterodox.

Equally, however, the Church Outside Russia would have to reject decades of the spiritual impurity of sectarian politicking with the treacherous and tragic Vlasov movement and its CIA backers, as well as its own embarrassing failure to canonize the New Martyrs until as late as 1981. Victory came only in 2007 with the Act of Canonical Communion, signed in the presence of thousands of us in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, the Russian Patriarch and President and longsuffering clergy of both parts of the Church in attendance. That Cathedral had been built to commemorate the 19th century Orthodox victory over the French atheist Napoleon and rebuilt to commemorate the 20th century Orthodox victory over the German atheist Marx. Thus, the Cathedral became the place of a threefold victory.

A Life for the Tsar

My third task has been to help contribute to the restoration, now inevitable, of the Orthodox Empire, based in Russia under the coming Tsar, just as St Seraphim of Sarov prophesied nearly 200 years ago. This has been and is, if anything, the hardest of all. This is because it involves the Incarnation, that is, the political, economic and social ramifications of our understanding of the Incarnate Christ. Resistance here is ferocious and mocking, for our struggle is with the Devil himself. Firstly, we must defend the holiness of Tsar Nicholas, both in life and in death. Secondly, we must defend all those faithful to him, many not yet canonized. Thirdly, we must promote his shining vision, which was a century ahead of its time but tragically interrupted for a blood-soaked century by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’, as he described.

Afterword

Some might say that then all has been completed. This is not so. The task for Rus, to spread veneration for the Western saints of the first millennium Church is to develop much further. The task for Faith, to see the full unity of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe in a single Metropolia, the foundation of the future new Local Church, helping build up a little part of it in my native East of England, is nearing its conclusion, but is not complete. Finally, the task for the Tsar, to explain his holiness and defend his healing vision of justice and balance after a century of global injustice and wars, which resulted directly from his overthrow by internal traitors, so-called allies, Great Britain, the USA and France, and enemies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and to implement that vision, so long delayed, has only just begun.