How Was the World Made? Facts and Theories

How was the world made? There are many things that we do not know and cannot know in order to answer this question, because quite simply and obviously we were not there at the time. The world was made before we existed. So what can we know about it?

Everyone agrees that we, human-beings, standing at the height of visible creation, are far higher and far more complex than mere liquids, gases and solids, than microbes, plants, insects, fish, birds and all animals. This is why we were made only after everything else. When we make something, we start with the simplest things, the building blocks of life, as they say, and then we go on to other things that are more complex.

All this is why there are so many theories about how we were made, like, for example, the theory of evolution. If you were not present, then all you can have is theories. They cannot be proved, but sadly, such theories are often presented as facts.

In order to help us answer our question about how the world was made, even in part, we can refer to the oldest text that we have about it, that found in the first chapter (one page) of the first and oldest book of the Holy Scriptures, the Book of Genesis. (Genesis means Birth). This was written down thousands of years ago, on the basis of stories handed down by word of mouth for thousands of years before that. What exactly does it say?

Firstly, the first words in this Book say that God made everything. The existence of everything is therefore not an accident or a chance. All exists for a reason. All was made on purpose. If we can understand something about God, then we can understand why all was made. Now we are told by St John in his Gospel that God is Love. It is clear therefore that we were made to love one another. That is why we were made, that is the purpose of our life. Nothing is by chance, all is for Love.

Secondly, it is clear that everything was made in a special order. Just as we do not make a car by starting with the last details like the seat covers and then build the bodywork and the engine, so God too made everything in logical order. In fact, we are told that He made everything in six different phases. Firstly, He made space and time, with light and water (because, as we know, nothing can live without light and water). Secondly, He made the sky and the earth. This was so that, thirdly, He could make all sorts of plants and trees, which can only grow if there is earth. Fourthly, God made days and seasons, creating the sun, the moon and the stars. Fifthly, He made everything that lives in the water (fish etc) and everything that lives in the air (birds etc), each species or ‘kind’, as the Book of Genesis says, separately. In the sixth and final phase, God made all sorts of creatures that live on the land (animals and reptiles), again each species separately, and then He made the first man and the first woman. When He made each of these things, we read again and again that everything that He made was good. After all, why would God make anything that was bad? That would be very strange. Nobody sets out to make something that is bad, but something that is good, that works as it should.

One thing we should notice here is that God made animals and then, separately, the first human-beings. In other words, it is not true that human-beings are animals. Of course, it is clear that higher animals and human-beings are similar. For example, most animals have a head and a face, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, and four limbs with muscles, as well as organs like the heart, the brain, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the stomach etc and there are an equal number of males and females (in itself a miracle), just like us. But this does not mean that human-beings are animals. The resemblances between our bodies only mean that we have the same Maker – God.

Some people especially notice the physical similarities between people and monkeys and say that we are descended from them. But if monkeys had changed into people, then monkeys would no longer exist! The fact that millions of species of plants and animals exist at the same time proves that there is no such thing as evolution. If there had been evolution, then nothing would exist except for people, according to the theorists of evolution the last stage of ‘evolution’. Of course, this does not mean that plants and animals cannot adapt. It is well-known that some butterflies change colour if they live near factories, their wings go darker. Also there develop different species of the same animal, some become bigger and some smaller. This is because, for example, they may live on big islands where there is lot to eat or small islands, where there is little to eat.

Such adaptation also exists among us. For example, in hot countries people have darker skin, hair and eyes in order to protect themselves. On the other hand, in cold countries people have pale skin and often have blond hair and blue eyes. This is all about survival in different climates, we adapt in order to survive. But this adaptation is not the same as some magical and quite unproven theory of evolution, where somehow microbes become whales, bees become eagles, kangaroos become elephants or chimpanzees become human-beings.

We also note that the human race began with one man and one woman, whom we call Adam and Eve: although we are all different, through adaptation to different climates, we all have one common father and mother, we all belong to the same family. This fact is confirmed by modern DNA testing. Why are people white, brown, yellow, black and have different colour hair and eyes, different sizes and heights, slightly different shape eyes, noses, lips and so on? Simply as the result of adaptation to cold and hot climates, to mountains and lowlands, and to diet.

Of course, we also know more about the past from what we have found in the earth.

For example, we now know that the universe is enormous; in fact, we did not know just how enormous Creation is until quite recently. This discovery has been made now, so that we can adore God’s work in wonder, rather than dismiss such a vast and complex universe as some random accident.

We also know that there were many creatures that no longer exist. Some animals have died out quite recently, hunted to extinction, others, like so-called ‘dinosaurs’, whose fossils we can find, lived a very long time ago and died out because of huge changes in climate. Nobody knows exactly when, and scientists disagree with each other about this, constantly changing their theories as they make new discoveries. Some people ask why the Bible does not mention such creatures that long ago died out. This is quite simply because they lived before people did, as the Bible says, animals were made first, so the only way that we can know about them is by discovering their fossils, which we have only done in recent times. The Bible records only the most important things about God and human-beings. We leave the records of disappeared animals like dinosaurs to those who dig up their fossils.

And, thirdly, we also know that although God made everything good, now there are many bad things: death, animals that kill each other, mosquitoes that kill people, rats that spread diseases. The reason for this is also related in the Book of Genesis. Here we learn that God made everything good, but when people disobeyed Him, they became bad. And because they became bad, they died. And this bad and death spread to all Creation, poisoning it.

We should be careful about saying much more than this, because then we would get involved in theories and ideas and so in arguments, which can never be proved one way or the other. It seems to us better to stick to facts.

The above was first published in the second issue of ‘Searchlight’, the ROCOR diocesan magazine for young people. It is available from Mary Kisliakov: mary0170@yahoo.com

Fake News and Fake History, Frangistan and Freedom

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Fake News and Fake History

We are told that in 2017 43% of British people still trust the UK media to tell the truth, down from 50% in 2016 (1). Why is the figure still so amazingly high? After all, by the end of the old Soviet Union, the figure for trust in the Soviet media must have been 0%. And the fake news issued by all the Western Establishment media, from the BBC to the New York Times, from Le Monde to German Television, is no more truthful than the propaganda lies issued by the three generations of the Soviet Establishment. The reason for this high figure can only be because many Western people have been so deeply brainwashed by Establishment lies, not over three generations, but over a millennium, forty generations. In other words, what lies behind fake news is fake history.

This fake history actually began over a millennium ago, with the Frankish ‘Charlemagne’ (real name: Karl the Tall) in the First Reich centred in Aachen. He began the first post-Truth society with the news that he had the right to massacre any non-Frankish peoples (Saxons, Slavs or anyone else) who resisted him. This was because he had the self-created divine right to bring ‘barbarians’ to his ‘truth’ and if they refused to accept his truth, then they could be murdered en masse, which he did. As the ‘Father of Europe’ (2), the truth of the Holy Spirit flowed from him as vicar of God on earth – a conscious part of his filioque ideology. Fortunately, his propaganda myth was rejected in and immediately after his time, because Orthodox Christianity was still then strong enough, even in his Western tip of Eurasia, for it to be rejected.

Unfortunately, this spiritual strength did not last and by the mid-eleventh century his propaganda to mask plunder, that the task of Frankish ‘Europe’ was to spread ‘civilization’ among ‘primitive peoples’, had been revived under the popes. As a result, in 1066 the papally-sponsored, feudal Normans invaded, occupied and massacred their way through England (3) and then all Britain. A generation later Frankish Europe began the ‘crusades’, invading, occupying and massacring their way to the Holy Land. In 1204 their greed led them to plunder the Christian Capital of ‘Byzantium’ (real name: New Rome). Their cousins then attempted to plunder Russia under the name of the ‘Teutonic Knights’. In and after 1492 their ‘Frankish’ (4) Spanish and Portuguese spiritual cousins took part in the rape of South and Central America, as well as Mexico.

Later, other spiritual descendants of the Franks got rich quick by plundering Roman Catholicism, under the pretext of ‘The Reformation’. In England, the Tudor ‘reformers’ proved to be ruthless Machiavellians and their descendants massacred all who resisted them in civil wars in England and then in genocide in Ireland. In 1689 they usurped power from the legitimate Stuart Kings and invited Dutch and then German puppet monarchs to permit their merchant class to build an Empire based on slavery. They sang ‘Britons never, never, never will be slaves’, but did not add that everyone else would precisely be slaves, including their own voteless labouring masses. In the 19th century the elite of Western Europe plundered Asia and Africa, as described by the Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novel ‘The Heart of Darkness’.

Nineteenth-century ‘Frankish’ hypocrisy, wiping out the ‘Red Indians’, the Tasmanians, slaughtering spear-armed Africans with Maxim guns (5) and anyone else who stood in their way, led directly to two ‘World Wars’ (real name: inter-tribal European Wars), which Western Europe spread worldwide, not least through the descendants of European colonists in North America. The Western European ideologies of Capitalism, Communism and Fascism did untold damage, creating and using weapons of mass destruction, which killed tens of millions and can destroy the whole planet many times over. In the 21st century the continued neo-colonial attempts to impose Western values on the Middle East, notably on Iraq, called a ‘crusade’ by the Italian leader Berlusconi, in a bid to plunder and control, are still generating massive genocide.

Frangistan and Freedom

The above, presented by fake history as the ‘generous’ civilizing influence of the West among the Rest, ‘the barbarians’, is in fact the unjustifiable justification for the plunder and control of the Non-Western world by the Western world. Because of its origins in Continental Western Europe under the Frank Charlemagne, this Western world became known as ‘Frangistan’ in traditional Persian. However, long before, the Norman invasions of Scotland and Ireland in the 12th century were called ‘the coming of the Franks’, Arabs called Westerners ‘Faranga’ and when the Portuguese and Spaniards arrived off the coasts of China in the 16th century, locals called them ‘Fo-lang-ki’ – Franks. And in modern Hindi all Europeans in general are still referred to as ‘Firang’ (4). In other words, ‘Frangistan’ is the Western world.

With its modern acronyms of USA, EU, NATO and G7, Frangistan, represents much less than one seventh of the world, much less because many ordinary ‘Franks’ can themselves see through the fake history spun by the Frankish elite. In the real world, where live the other six and a half billion of the world’s population, this Western world seems to be isolated. Originally meaning only the Western tip of Northern Eurasia, the name Frangistan comes, as we have said, from the one Germanic tribe, the Franks. Ironically, this meant ‘the free’, but it has come to define the world’s greatest enslavers – whether literally, as before in the Americas and Africa, or else economically, as today. The endlessly greedy and aggressive ‘Franks’ not only destroyed the Christian Civilization of New Rome, but all other civilizations, whoseever assets could be stripped.

Thus, they destroyed the great civilization along the Amazon, reducing the cities by the banks of that river to jungle, they destroyed the other civilizations of South America, among them the Inca, those of Central America, among them the Aztec and the sophisticated Maya, and despised and laid waste to all others in North America, India, China, Japan and the rest of Asia, as well as in Africa. Only when the ‘free’ ‘Franks’, or at least the 43% of them who apparently still believe in the fake history told them, have delivered themselves from their self-justifying fake history, that they are ‘civilized’, demonizing the Non-Frankish peoples with their often far more advanced and humble civilizations, as ‘half-devil, half-child’ (Kipling), ‘wild animals’, ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ and wishing them dead, will they really be free.

The self-justifying foundation of the ‘civilizing’ propaganda for plunder, ‘the white man’s burden’, is that the Franks persuaded themselves that they alone are ‘Christians’, that ‘God speaks only to them’ (George Bush (6)). But their god is not the Risen Christ, the Living God, Who is ‘an all-consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12, 29), but the sentimental, weak as water, bleeding Western man ‘Jesus’. Thus, there is nothing new in fake news. Western history is a thousand years of fake news. The news is: ‘We are bringing you ‘Christian’ civilization (meaning our plunder of your civilization), and if you reject it, ‘as true Christians’ we will be so kind as to bomb you back into the Stone Age’. Gun and Bible. Freedom will come for the ‘Franks’ only when they give up their thousand years of fake news and retrieve real Western history in the saints of the pre-Frankish past.

The word ‘Europe’ is said to mean ‘the West’ and the word ‘Asia’ ‘the East’. Hence ‘Eurasia’, where all civilization began, means ‘West-east’. By far the greatest part of ‘West-East’ Eurasia is united in the Eurasian Russian Federation. This developed and expanded by assimilation, not by massacre, quite rapidly from Muscovy to the Arctic north, then to the east, gradually heroically overcoming immense Tartar/Muslim opposition, as far as the shores of the Pacific and even across it, then to the south (although ‘Frangistan’ has challenged that expansion by aggressive wars and imposing German puppet kings in the Balkans, especially to the south-west, invading the Crimea twice in a century. With illegal sanctions it is still challenging today the overwhelming democratic will of Crimeans to return to and belong to the Federation (7)).

Indeed, even apart from the Crimea in the south-west, the Christian Federation of Russia (unlike the atheist USSR) has never been able to expand to the west, with Western Europe powers repeatedly invading Federation territory, four times between 1812 and 1941 alone. This tragedy has meant the self-isolation of Western Europe, cut off from Christian Northern Eurasia. Today’s great hope among many in the Federation is that it will at long last be able to establish a Metropolia in Western Europe, thus bringing the extreme Western territory at least into Church order out of its chaos. This will represent a spiritual victory, the victory over 1,000 years of fake news, the millennial fake history of ‘Frangistan’, delivering it and bringing it to rediscover the real Europe, the Free Christian Europe of the Saints of the first millennium, of the Church of God.

Notes:

1. uk.businessinsider.com/fake-news-drives-down-programmatic-budgets-2017-6

2. The monstrous Karl, founder of the First Reich in 800, the mass murderer and forerunner of Bismarck of the Second Reich and of Hitler of the Third Reich, is still quite seriously honoured as ‘The Father of Europe’, notably by the Fourth Reich EU elite.

3. The Norman occupiers wrote their own propaganda history, proclaiming that there had been no English kings or people before them, merely ‘primitive’ and ‘decadent’ ‘Anglo-Saxons’. To this day kings of England are numbered from the foreign kings from 1066 on; not one of them has been English.

4. For a full survey of the word ‘Frank’ to mean a Western European see ‘The Making of Europe’ (950-1350), by Robert Bartlett, 1993, especially pages 101-105.

5. See Hilaire Belloc, in the words of the figure “Blood” in his poem “The Modern Traveller”:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

6. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

7. The bilionaire leader of the genocidal, US-installed Kiev puppet junta, Poroshenko (real name: Waltzman) has only this week stated that all Ukrainians who do not accept his tyranny should go and live in Siberia. With these words he has repeated the ‘Drang nach Osten’, ‘Lebesnraum’ policy of Hitler, to exile all East Slavs to the east of the Urals in order to make room for ‘European’ expansion and exploitation in the east.

How Democracy Can Be Evil

Some, seeing the above title, will be surprised. They should look more carefully. It does not say that Democracy is evil, only that it can be evil. And it can be evil when it is taken out of its ethnocentric context. By this I mean that Democracy is a culturally-limited product, a product of Protestant history and Protestant societies only, first of all of England, then Great Britain, the Netherlands, northern and eastern Germany, Scandinavia and above all, of course, of the USA and the rest of the Anglosphere, from Canada to Australia and New Zealand. I would not suggest that Democracy is evil in that context, although there are debates even about that, given the monolithic bipartisan corruption inherent in the Establishment elites of all Protestant societies.

What I am suggesting, however, is that Democracy becomes evil outside the context of Protestant culture. Democracy (Demonocracy, as it is called in today’s Russia) only works in Protestant and Protestantized societies. We only have to consider the fact that by 1939 every single Roman Catholic country in Europe had become Fascist, admiring the democratically-elected Roman Catholic Adolf Hitler – a dictator like the Roman Catholic Napoleon before him. This is why, after 1945, the USA decided that it would Protestantize Roman Catholicism, which it successfully did a generation later in the Second Vatican Council, which desacralized and secularized the Vatican machine, though it left deep corruption in all ex-Roman Catholic countries such as Italy and France.

We can take as an example the Western attempt to export Democracy to the theocratic Russian Empire in 1917. Deriding Russian autocracy, which it never understood as something positive and balanced because of its cultural blinkers and kneejerk prejudices, the West arrogantly and patronizingly decided on regime-change for Russia. To do this, it exploited the fifth column of wealthy internal traitors who greedily wanted power for themselves (just like Navalny today). Western-imposed Democracy very quickly resulted in tens of millions of deaths through the Western ideology of Marxism. When the Soviet Union collapsed bankrupt, after the ‘victory’ of Democracy, millions then died prematurely of despair through suicide, alcoholism and lack of medical care. ‘Democracy’ again was to blame.

However, the CIA sent thousands of Protestant missionaries to the ex-Soviet Union in order to ‘prepare’ the new countries for Democracy. Although local people were happy to take their pathetic bribes of dollar notes for stadium evangelism, the missionaries failed miserably, for Protestantism is a Western cultural phenomenon; the few authentically Christian missionaries among these Western agents actually ended up joining the Orthodox Church, most others, all blind emotion or cultural imperialism, disappeared. The same has happened in China and Iran, where culturally illiterate, disrespectful, US Protestant and sectarian missionaries were also sent as dupes of Western influence, have failed. In some cases they have been arrested, as the CIA agents they are.

We can take as another example the 2003 Anglosphere attempt to impose Democracy on Iraq (and also to strip it off its natural resources) by murdering the earlier CIA-imposed dictator, Hussein. The result has been hundreds of thousands of dead in the ensuing civil war, millions of refugees, many of them Christians, and the development of horrific terrorism under ISIS. It is the same tragedy as in Latin America, Vietnam, ex-Yugoslavia (still a powderkeg waiting to explode), before that and since then throughout the Muslim world, including in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. The result of the imposition of Democracy on Non-Protestant cultures is always the same: US puppets, client strongmen, with their corrupt dictatorships which divide and slaughter their own peoples.

Ultimately, arrogant and incredibly ignorant, ethnocentric, culturally blinkered Western ‘Democrats’, who understand nothing of any culture and race and history other than their own, must take responsibility. Blood is on the hands of all these neocons, of the Clintons, of Albright, Powell, Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Obama, Kerry, Kagan and all their EU vassals in NATO-controlled Brussels and Berlin. These neocons thought themselves ‘morally superior’, but in fact they showed their moral inferiority in their utterly stupid meddling, so making themselves puppets in the hands of the devil to whom death and violence are so sweet. In addition to everything else, they now have the blood of tens of thousands of Ukrainians on their hands. A lot of blood.

Patriotism and Treason: On Resisting the Mystery of Iniquity

In the face of today’s treasonous Babylonian globalist threat, not only is Russia having to return to its patriotic roots, but so too are all other Western countries. In the case of Russia, her roots are clearly in the Tsar’s Russia, in Orthodoxy, which was finally, after many threats, betrayed only 100 years ago. In the case of Western European countries, these patriotic roots are much less clear because those countries have been through so many different permutations, secularist, Protestant or Roman Catholic, in many phases.

Thus, in England, there are those who wish to return to the recent nationalist Protestant-imperialist past. However, this was an invention of the treasonous merchant-class slavers, who brought in foreign monarchs after their usurpation through the Dutch invasion in 1689, the bribery of the Scottish elite into the Union in 1707 and after, with their mean ‘Rule Britannia’. But these are not real and patriotic English roots, and neither are English roots in more distant discredited Roman Catholicism, nor in ancient Germanic paganism.

English roots are in the English period of English history, that is, before it was tainted by the Norman occupiers with their imperialist, pagan Roman revivalist ‘British’ Establishment. The greatest political representative in English history is thus St Alfred the Great (+ 899), its Church representatives ranging from St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne to St Edward the Martyr. In other words, patriotic English roots are in the 450 years of the Old English saints, just as the roots of other Western European cultures are also in their Old European saints.

Patriotic movements all over Europe, from the Urals to Iceland, from Finland to Cyprus, as well as in the USA, are marching against the treason of secularist globalism. However, they will not win their battles of national resistance if they are not underpinned by Christian roots, that is, if they are merely nationalist and not patriotic. In order to understand their real roots, they must consider the Russian battle for roots because that battle is more advanced, as the secularist-globalist Babylon did not begin in Russia, but in Western Europe.

Indeed, there are already many in the secularist-globalist West who are so blinded by their ethnocentric arrogance that they have been deluded into willingly taking part in the process of their own self-destruction. They deny patriots even the freedom of speech, all under the mask of political correctness, calling real patriots Fascists. And yet they hypocritically support real Fascists, in the form of their petty nationalist puppet-strongmen, like those in the Ukraine and the Baltic States, as also in the Third World.

The secularist support for recently-invented, artificial countries comes because their petty nationalism can undermine the national identity and culture of real countries, making them ready for secularist-globalism. The treasonous secularist-globalists are thus forerunners of the Antichrist. Thus, we have the Holy Spirit, Who unites mankind in God, without cancelling out human diversity, unlike the spirit of Satan, which creates the new Tower of Babylon, destroying all national identities, personalities and local cultures.

That spirit reduces all to the lowest common denominator, levelling humanity down to the level of the beasts. The Holy Spirit makes people angelic, but the spirit of Satan makes them bestial, demonic. The spirit of Satan rejoices in ‘freedom’ from the commandments of God. This is what is today disguised under the name of ‘liberalism’, whose aim is to bestialize humanity, making it the slave of the demons. ‘Liberalism’ thus means enslavement, for the laws of Satan are always perverse, contradicting all human common sense.

How can we resist the secularist-globalist spirit? It is by cultivating the local, but only in the anti-secularist Spirit of the Church, in the Holy Spirit. This is why the local saints are especially dear to us. And this is why we should love all the local saints everywhere, for they are all invested with the same Spirit of God. This is diversity in unity and unity in diversity. And this is why Old Europe is also the Tsar’s Orthodox Europe, both of which are reaching out and calling to us from across the darkness of the new pagan age of the secularist globalists.

Putin: It’s “my duty” to attack the New World Order for degrading “family values”

Putin: “As head of state today, I believe it’s my duty to uphold traditional values and family values. But why? Because same-sex marriages will not produce any children. God has decided, and we have to care about birth rates in our country. We have to reinforce families. That doesn’t mean that there should be any persecutions against anyone.”

For source, see: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/06/09/putin-its-my-duty-to-attack-the-new-world-order-for-degrading-family-values/

Please do not read the above too far.

Just Another Miracle from the Orthodox World

In Sochi, a shoal of dolphins has returned the icon of the Virgin of “The Sign” to the people …

On May 17, a colonel, along with his wife, were sitting on the seashore in Sochi, enjoying the clean sea air and the vastness of the water. Suddenly their attention was attracted by a shoal of dolphins that swam to the shore: the couple even managed to count them – exactly a dozen. Soon it became clear why these intelligent marine animals had gathered here – they were pushing something out of the water, and when they had done their job, they immediately swam away.

The strange thing that the dolphins brought ashore was all mud and looked very unpresentable at first sight, which made few people pay attention to him, although not only the colonel and his wife were resting near the sea at the time. Eventually, the wife asked her husband to see what the dolphins had pushed out of the sea.

The witness of the event decided to consider the unexpected gift of the marine inhabitants. The colonel raised a mysterious object, cleared it of mud and … experienced a real shock, as a moment later, his wife too. It was an icon of the Mother of God (later it was revealed – of the “Sign”).

The eyes of the Mother of God looked at the man from the ancient icon. As the shrine must have been on the seabed – no one knows, and scientists could not understand why the dolphins realized that it must be urgently delivered to the shore and given back to people. It turns out that dolphins perfectly understood the value of this icon for people and that it does not have a place at the bottom of the sea …

Found in such a miraculous manner, the icon was taken to Moscow by the same person who stands next to Barnabas’s father (in a sweatshirt) – a retired colonel, a veteran of the Alpha group. Her want to show His Holiness the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kyril, while telling him this truly fantastic story about the miracle …
Nikolai Kaklyugin, Ph.D., a psychiatrist-narcologist

For pictures, see: http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/06/10/chudo_chudnoe/

St Alban and the Salvation of Europe

The following talk was read at the symposium of SOPHIE (The Society of Orthodox Philosophers in Europe) in Frankfurt in Germany just before today’s All Saints’ Day Feast

Foreword

25 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and 25 years after the appearance of the European Union, we are facing great generational changes. The lands of the ex-Soviet Union continue to suffer from chauvinist strife, instability and extreme unemployment and poverty, not least the Ukraine and the rapidly emptying EU Baltic States. As one Russian put it to me some years ago: ‘Under Communism we had no political freedom, but we did have security. Today, under Capitalism, we have political freedom, but we have no security’. And also: ‘We knew that the Communists were lieing to us about Communism, but we did not know that they were telling us the truth about Capitalism’.

Further events are unfolding in Russia today, on the centenary of the catastrophic, so-called ‘Russian Revolution’, which gave rise to the alien, Marxist Soviet Union, with its Red terror, artificial famines, Gulag, alcoholism, abortion, corruption, divorce and environmental degradation. Equally, some wonder if the European Union will ever recover from Brexit, as other countries also eye freedom from the straitjacket of EU centralization. However, all this comes against the background of the new US President, who is half-Scottish, whose wife is a Slav from ex-Communist Slovenia, and who is apparently anti-EU and pro-Brexit. The world for some people has been turned upside down. Or perhaps rather the world was upside down and is now gradually being turned the right side up?

Against such a contemporary political background, my talk today is based on the only recorded words of a saint who lived nearly 1800 years ago, at some point between 209 and 305, historians, as usual, cannot agree exactly when. Perhaps we can simply say that he lived in the third century. His words, only eighteen of them in their modern English translation, seem to me to prophesy a possible future for this Europe that now seems to be lost and drifting. For although the European Union is largely discredited and rejected, few wish even to think about the Modern, Alternative Europe to replace the outdated, post-Hitlerian, failed, centralized EU Europe. However, there are the words of this saint, from what might be called ‘Brexitland’, who may provide an answer.

This saint in question is the Protomartyr of the British Isles, a Romano-British citizen called Alban, who lived in the Roman city of Verulamium, just north of London. Having given shelter to a Christian priest fleeing persecution, Alban was so moved by the priest’s faith and courage that he asked to be taught more about Christianity, then a forbidden religion, and was baptized by the priest. Before long the authorities came to arrest the fugitive. But Alban, inspired by his new-found faith, exchanged clothes with the priest, allowing him to escape.

Thus, instead of the priest, it was Alban who was arrested and brought before the magistrate. Alban refused to sacrifice to the emperor and the Roman gods and was flogged. When asked to identify himself, he declared these eighteen words: ‘I am called Alban and I worship and adore the true and living God, Who created all things’. The magistrate ordered that Alban receive the punishment due to the priest. He was taken out of the town and up the hillside to the site of his martyrdom and beheaded. His town is today called St Albans and is a mere 20 miles, 30 kilometres, to the north of London. St Alban’s Day is celebrated on 22 June.

I Am Called Alban

I am interested in these eighteen words, the first four of which are: ‘I am called Alban’. The Romano-British name ‘Alban’ means ‘White’. The Latin word ‘alba’ is at the root of many words and names, not least Albion, a name for Britain that stems from the white chalk cliffs of south-eastern Britain, the first view of the country for Roman and other invaders. However, the word ‘White’ has in the Russian Orthodox context another meaning, referring to the White Movement after 1917. True, the White Movement was betrayed by those who claimed to be White, but were not White at all, and were mainly killed or went into exile. However, the best White representatives, although only a minority, sought the restoration of the Orthodox Christian Empire in Russia. These true Whites sought the restoration of ‘the White Tsar’.

The word ‘White’ in this context thus stands for faithfulness to our roots and Christian inheritance, to the Faith that is to be made incarnate in the countries in which we live. ‘White’ means faithfulness to the incarnate integrity of the Faith. This means not just vaguely Christian, but Orthodox Christian, and not just Orthodox Christian, but Orthodox Christian to the point of working to incarnate the Faith, socially, economically and politically. Thus, ‘I am White’ can be taken to mean the confession of the post-Constantinian Civilizational values of the Church, as expressed in the spiritual ideal of Romaiosini in the New Rome that St Constantine founded to unite Europe and Asia and which were continued in Holy Rus, the spiritual ideal of the Eurasian Christian Empire.

And I Worship and Adore the True and Living God

These ten words of St Alban express his Faith, a Faith that he was prepared to die for and did die for, in the worship and adoration of the Christian God, the True God, the Holy Trinity. Today all sorts of things are worshipped: money is worshipped, technology is worshipped, convenience is worshipped, sex is worshipped, food is worshipped, social networking is worshipped, television is worshipped, sport is worshipped, celebrities are worshipped, the self is worshipped, as in the selfie. ‘Because I am worth it’ is indeed the slogan of today’s narcissistic society.

However, St Alban’s worship is of the True and Living God. St Alban worshipped the Living God. He did not worship pagan gods or goddesses, who intervene in human affairs whenever some passion of pride, greed, lust or other, which as demons they embody, seizes them to meddle for the perdition of mankind. They never sacrifice themselves for mankind, but only take advantage of mankind, as parasites. These demons are dead gods, gods of death, not the God of Life. The Living God is He Who defeated death by death, sacrificing Himself and so proving that He is not only the God of Life, the Life-Giver, but also that He loves mankind, the Love-Giver.

Who Created All Things

Following on from the darkness of the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’, which proposed a distant, theistic God, Who in no way plays a part in human affairs and so offers humanity autonomy to practise all its sins with impunity, virtually the whole of nineteenth-century Western thought was devoted to denying and rejecting the above words. Almighty man creates, not a weak, Nietzschean-imagined God, so weak that He allowed Himself to die famelessly on the Cross. This human assumption of God’s creative power resulted in the twentieth century in destructive manmade World Wars, concentration camps, nuclear bombs and the abortion holocaust. Essentially, modern times have replaced God with man, construction with deconstruction. Man, reverting to idolatry, has replaced the sinless Creator with sinful creation.

This idolatry, the denial of the Living God Who created all things, the last four words of St Alban, has resulted in the heresy of what might be called ‘self-creation’. Far from the innocent, God-inspired inventions of such things as the wheel, the boat, the plough or the windmill, self-creation has led not just to the deafening and blinding inventions of the Industrial Revolution that poisoned human life, the earth and the sea and the sky, as in China today, not just to the Satan-inspired invention of killing and maiming machines like the Maxim gun, poison gas, napalm and the cluster bomb. It has led to the prophesied possibility that humans will so interfere in the chemical elements and genetic codes of life that they will create beings that are monsters and food that is poisoned, apocalyptically killing the Planet and all life.

Afterword

We have entitled our talk, ‘St Alban and the Salvation of Europe’. Of course, we are not proposing that a saint alone can save Europe. But it is our belief that Europe can be saved by Christ acting through the assembly of Europe’s saints because they all proclaim the same truths as St Alban. Next Sunday is precisely the feast of All Saints, who are the fruit of the Holy Spirit, Who came down at Pentecost. The British Isles has St Alban, but Germany has St Ursula, Ireland St Patrick, France St Denis, Belgium St Gertrude, the Netherlands and Luxembourg St Willibrord, Denmark St Anschar, Sweden and Norway the two St Olafs, the Czech Lands have Sts Ludmila and Viacheslav, Switzerland St Maurice and the Legionnaires from Thebes, Austria St Severinus, Hungary St Martin, Italy the Apostles Peter and Paul, Spain St Eulalia, and Portugal St Martin of Braga. All of these proclaim the same thing: Not, as one American President nearly fifty-five years ago, in June 1963, proclaimed, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, but, ‘Ich bin Alban’, in other words, ‘I belong to Christ’.

Some years ago we composed a service to all the Saints of the Western Lands. Here are five stichira from Lord, I have cried from that service, which summarize our thoughts:

For one thousand years the light of the Sun of Righteousness shone forth from the East on the lands of the West, forming a Cross over Europe, before they fell beneath the darkening shades of the Churchless night. Let us now return to the roots of our first confession of the Holy Spirit in the bright Sunrise of Orthodoxy, which is brought again from the East, and so shine forth the light of the Everlasting Christ once more.

O all the saints of the Western Lands, pray to God for our repentance and return, our restoration and resurrection. Tell the people to leave aside the things of men, the fallen fleshly mind and all its vain musings, for they are without the Saviour and the Spirit. And so, through your life in the Holy Trinity, shall we find salvation in the purity of the Orthodox Faith before the end.

Now do we sing to all the saints of the lands of the West and at their head the apostles Peter and Paul, the true glory of Old Rome, and, like stars in the dark night sky, to the constellation of the martyrs and fathers who followed in their apostolic footsteps, leaving behind them the great treasury of holy relics. O First Rome, who art glorious in thy saints alone, do thou return to the eternal faith of Orthodoxy through the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father, as the Saviour tells us.

Thus from the fountainhead of the East through Old Rome flowed streams of the Holy Spirit to all the lands of the West, through Gaul and Spain, to the uttermost isles in the far ocean and to all the lands of the north, where the darkness saw the light of Christ and all the trees of the forest bowed their heads before the Wisdom and Word of God, forsaking the superstitions and proud errors of the pagan past.

O constellation of all the saints of the Western lands, who shine forth in the night sky, together we gather in your name, in praise to ask you to intercede for us with your prayers. Bring back the Western peoples from the inglorious darkness of their unwisdom to the Wisdom of God, that they may cast aside all the illusions of the fallen reason and know again that the only true glory and enlightenment is in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.

A Cornish Orthodox Parish?

The pagan ‘Celts’, a group of cruel and warring tribes, invaded the British Isles and Ireland only a few centuries before the Romans came, some arriving not much before them. However, by the first centuries AD these ‘Celts’, some Christian, some, according to St Gildas, definitely not, had separated into two main groups. These were the Irish (in Ireland, and then by emigration, in what is now Scotland) and the Brittonic (in Wales, Cornwall, and then by emigration, in Armorica, the future Brittany in France, and also in Galicia in Spain). The Church in all these lands was represented then by Irish and Brittonic, both Latin-speaking, but both with a strong monastic ethos. So much for the ‘Celtic Church’ myth, about which so much new-age nonsense is talked.

What can we say of Brittonic Cornwall specifically? The word Cornish (Cornovii) is itself Latin, meaning those who live in the ‘horn’, that is to say, those in the horn-shaped peninsula of south-west Britain. Later, by deformation, ‘Corn-wall’ came to mean the land of the ‘Welsh’ (= Non-English) who live in the horn. Cornwall was first taken into England, though only on paper, in the tenth century by King Athelstan. However, in some ways it would be truer to call Cornwall an island, for, surrounded by the sea on three sides, on its fourth side it is separated from Devon and so from England by the River Tamar. Only 70 years ago, and perhaps still today, those who lived on the Cornish side of the Tamar and crossed it spoke quite naturally of ‘going to England’.

Today, it is true that those who have grandparents born on the Cornish side of the Tamar have very different DNA from those born on the English side in Devon, even though the Cornish language has been lost. This is because, Cornwall lies between Wales and Brittany and so became a land through which saints passed, coming from north and south. Thus, Cornwall is a land of local saints and of their names – 140 in all unique to Cornwall. Unfortunately, most of these names are precisely only names. Usually, virtually nothing is known of the saints behind the names, sometimes if they were even saints at all, not even the correct form of their name, not even the century when they lived (usually the sixth or seventh), and sometimes even their gender is unknown.

As for their Lives, when they exist – and that is rare – they were often written over 600 and up to 1,000 years after the saints lived. In other words, most of their Lives are almost completely untrustworthy and sometimes absurd. All that remains is speculation without edification, ‘games with names’, as in the booklets on them, written by the Anglican researcher G.H. Doble in the last century. Here we see all the sadness when people forget their saints, their tradition of holiness. All we can say is that a large number of mainly Welsh monks, nuns, hermits and ascetics came to live in Cornwall in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, and that that was a golden age of holiness. In all this two Cornish saints stand out, St Piran and St Petroc.

St Piran (Perran) (+ c. 480) came from Ireland or Wales and settled in the north of Cornwall, giving his name to Perranporth, where he had his hermitage. He is commemorated on 5 March and is now considered to be the patron saint of Cornwall. St Petroc (Peter) (+ c. 564) was a sixth-century abbot who for long was considered to be Cornwall’s most famous saint. He came from south Wales and lived near what is now Padstow (Petrocstow), where he founded a monastery. He later founded another monastery and then lived as a hermit on Bodmin Moor. He was famed for his closeness to the natural world and founded other monasteries. At his repose his relics were venerated in Padstow and later at the main Cornish monastery in Bodmin. His feast is on 4 June.

Any Orthodox who wish to set up a parish in Cornwall would perhaps wish to start in Truro, the capital of Cornwall and which is located relatively centrally. As for a dedication, we would suggest, quite simply, All Saints. However, in any such parish there should be a large icon of Sts Piran and Petroc.

All the Saints of Cornwall, known to the Lord, pray to God for us!

Towards a Social Brexit

The UK election results once again show the blind over-confidence and imperialistic hubris of the Conservative leadership. The Conservative Party may be trusted to negotiate Brexit (though that is not certain, since they have already wasted a whole year doing nothing about it), but they are not trusted to deliver social justice. And yet decent infrastructure, good roads and, above all, a proper health system, educational system, police force, prison service and proper regulation of privatized railways, telecom and water, electricity and gas companies are demanded. Perhaps, as it is seen by many as the party of the rich and NATO warmongers, the Conservatives should go into coalition with the Labour Party, so creating a government of national unity in this time of national crisis.

However, whatever the politicians decide, the real question is that Western electorates everywhere are rejecting the rule of the neocon oligarchy, the global elite of banksters, warmongers and businessmen, of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. People are rejecting Anonymous Globalism, and choosing National Identity instead. However, parties that promote identity politics will only be successful if they also work for social justice and welfare. This was the error of the Conservative Party: it lost sight of the needs of the majority, over 50% of the population, who want those needs to be met, even if it will cost more. Especially, if the costs can be met by taxing the many rich and also businesses, who have so benefited over the last 35 years from rule by pro-business monetarists. What is needed is a Social Brexit.

100 Years On: The End of Anglican Orthodoxy and Reality

Within a few years of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing enslavement of the Russian Church inside Russia centred in Moscow, some 2,000 Russian émigrés had settled in England, mainly in London. They split into two Church groups, both independent of enslaved Moscow, a larger group of various origins, and a much smaller group, mainly of liberal aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly Anglophiles and mainly from Saint Petersburg. The first group formed a parish in London under the initially Moscow-established Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which had four Metropolias, in China, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Americas, catering for all emigres. The second group also formed a parish in London, but under the small Parisian Rue Daru breakaway jurisdiction, outside the Russian Church, under the then largely Anglican-run and financed (now US-run and financed) Patriarchate of Constantinople.

After the Second World War the first group, under ROCOR, formed more parishes for several thousand refugees with Polish nationality, mainly Ukrainians and Belarussians but also some Russians, who all awaited freedom in the Russian Church inside Russia. (This was to come in 2007, only after most of them had died, bringing reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia). On the other hand, after the Second World War the second group returned formally to the still unfree Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, but on a special basis under the unique Parisian personality of the then Fr Antony Bloom, and developed into an independent group of several small communities. After he died in 2003, this group split in 2006, the majority remaining under Moscow and as a result, by 2007, the majority in the second group and the first group had entered into the unity of canonical communion with one another.

However, some 300 people, often of Anglican background and in small scattered communities, returned to the breakaway Paris Rue Daru group in 2006. Why did they avoid the reconciliation of the vast majority? It was because their leading ideology was that of an English-language Orthodoxy, which was in fact a Russophobic Anglican Orthodoxy. This has largely been invented by an Oxford Anglicanophile academic called Nicholas Zernov. Indeed, it could be called ‘Zernovism’, though in truth many individuals were involved in its formulation. This consisted of a sociological dream, that of reconciling a certain ‘embourgeoisé’ Russian Orthodoxy, liberal, intellectual, aristocratic and conformist, with an upper middle-class Anglo-Catholicism. This was a phyletist (racist) ideology that put a bourgeois and effete Russian Orthodoxy and the Anglican ‘public school and cricket’ Establishment, first – above Christ and His Truth. For when all is compromise, there is no place for Truth….

Those who had never been Anglican felt totally out of place in this group, indeed rejected by such a narrow and forced sociological concept of the Church. Today, their dream (a nightmare for others) is over. It has been made irrelevant by reality – for we do not live in the past. It is not at all that English-language Orthodoxy in itself is irrelevant, in fact just the opposite, today it is all the more important. For in today’s England there are not 2,000 or even 5,000 Russian Orthodox, but 300,000 Russian Orthodox. These come mainly from the Baltics, Moldova and the Ukraine, not to mention 220,000 Romanians and 80,000 Bulgarians, totalling 600,000 Orthodox from these three areas of the Orthodox world. This recent immigration, together with their English-born children, dwarfs all previous Orthodox emigrations, including the mainly 1950s-1960s 200,000-strong Greek-Cypriot immigration, which is now largely dying out after almost complete assimilation.

With 600,000 new Orthodox and their children, mainly in England, there is a huge mission-field for English-language Orthodoxy. However, most of these immigrants work on building sites, in car washes, in hotels and catering, or in farming and horticulture and food-processing factories. They certainly have no interest in an effete and intellectual-dream philosophy of Orthodoxy, but rather in a hands-on, down-to-earth Orthodoxy, which alone meets their simple and practical needs. They need an English-language Orthodoxy to meet the needs of their children, who are being brought up on council estates and in rented flats in the East End of London and the crowded suburbs of modest working towns up and down today’s England. We clergy will be judged on how well we meet their needs, keeping faith with Orthodoxy, but at the same time speaking in the language that their children and increasingly the immigrants themselves, communicate and socialize in. History moves on.