Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
(Matt. 6, 33)
You are of this world; I am not of this world.
(Jn 8, 23)
I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.
(Jn. 12, 47)
If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love his own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you…And you also shall bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.
(Jn. 15, 18-19 and 27)
For many shall come in My name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many…Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and you shall be hated by all nations for My name’s sake.
(Matt. 24, 5 and 9)
Faith is a gift from God; Religion is a gift from the Devil.
(Anon)
Olga was burdened with the consciousness that those same people who so warmly befriended her belonged to a nation which had refused justice to her country.
The Last Grand Duchess (Olga Alexandrovna) by Ian Vorres, P. 240
There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.
Conan-Doyle, His Last Bow
Russia is the only centre of an unenslaved civilization capable of showing itself to be Christian. Therefore our patriotism…is above all the understanding of the importance of the unique Christian mission for which our people lives and of which it is convinced…Do today’s Western European elites belong to the real Europe? Alas! Theirs is not Europe. Theirs is Babylon…The goal of the real Europe is us, people who remember the presence of eternal and unchanging values, people who know what we live and die for. Such knowledge has virtually been lost in the west of the European continent.
Interview with Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin on Politrussia on 25 February 2015
Introduction: The Sovietization of the West
In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Empire used to arrest Russian Orthodox for ‘anti-Soviet activities’, such as printing the Gospels and other Orthodox literature. Referring to a passage like I Peter 2, 17, its KGB agents would try to intimidate them with sly questions like: ‘Why do you not obey your own Apostle Peter and ‘honour the ruler?’ A few younger ones among those arrested were confused by their cunning. Others, older and with a clearer understanding of the New Testament and so Church teaching, would answer approximately thus:
‘We certainly honour our rulers and all men by praying for them, we never harm or hate others or use violence, we pay our taxes, we are law-abiding, but we put the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven above the laws of the kingdoms of this world. If the State and its appointees persecute us, try to silence us, order us to renounce our Faith and not go to church, then we refuse, accepting imprisonment or death for the sake of the Truth. This is the story of the Crucifixion and of the martyrs and of all Church history and nothing has changed today’.
Theirs is the answer that faithful Orthodox give in today’s world too. Wherever apostasy from Orthodoxy has occurred since 1917, throughout the Western Empire, in Estonia, in the Ukraine, in Czechia and elsewhere, we answer the same. We pray for our enemies, we utterly condemn violence and terrorism, we honour all, but we put the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven above the laws of the kingdoms of this world. ‘Blessed are you when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake’.
Given the speed of the present Western apostasy from the vestiges of Orthodox Christianity conserved in heterodoxy, especially over the last fifteen years, it seems as though Western States are now setting out on the path of the old Soviet State. They are trying to silence us through intimidation. Orthodox Christians here must be prepared for persecution in the future, sooner than we thought. Why does this possibility of persecution concern heterodox less than us Orthodox? The answer lies in two different teachings on Church and State.
Heterodox Teachings on Church and State
Inherent to the filioque Trinitarian theology of heterodoxy are the twin heresies of papocaesarism and caesaropapism, which are the two sides of the same false coin. The first heresy is that of Catholicism, which puts the Bishop of Rome, called the Pope, above the rulers of the world and makes him the infallible source of the Holy Spirit. This simply makes his ‘Church’ into a State in its own right. In other words, what was once the Church is deformed into a mere religion, a worldly institution and so is deprived of the Holy Spirit.
The second heresy is that of Protestantism, which subjects the Church to the rulers of this world. This makes their ‘Churches’ into simple departments of State, Ministries of Morality which soon turn into phariseeism. This was what was introduced into Russia from Holland by Peter I, who greatly admired Protestantism, often preferring it to authentic Christianity. It also explains why most Anglicans, belonging to an erastian, State-founded institution, do not understand the Incarnational spirit of the Orthodox Faith and accuse us of being political!
these heresies represent the ideology of ‘in the world and of the world’. In other words, both are inherently secular. The reaction to them is in abstract, spiritualist, disincarnate philosophies, which are very attractive to intellectuals who lapse from the Catholic/Protestant coin and fall into spiritual illusion. They can be characterized as ‘not in the world and not of the world’. These pseudo-mystical, spiritually irrelevant currents were originally represented by the Gnostics and Origen and in the Western Middle Ages by such as Boehme and Eckhart.
In more recent times such futile speculations have been represented by masonry and Swedenborgianism, in modern times by the orientalisms of Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Kabbalah and various disincarnate movements like anthroposophy, occultism and hippy movements with their ‘mind-expanding’ drug-taking. These movements were very popular among the uprooted, disincarnate Russian elite in early twentieth century Russia, being pioneered by the pseudo-Catholic philosopher, the alcoholic Vladimir Soloviov.
The Christian Teaching on Church and State
Papocaesarism and caesaropapism, ‘in the world and of the world’, as well as disincarnate, anti-Holy Spirit illusions, ‘not in the world and not of the world’, oppose the balanced Gospel and so Church teaching on the Incarnation, ‘in the world but not of the world’. The Gospel, Orthodox view was represented in ancient times by those like St Basil the Great, St Ambrose of Milan and St John Chrysostom, more recently by Patriarch Nikon in Russia in the 17th century or the martyred St Gregory, Patriarch of Constantinople in the 19th century.
They all believed that the Church should remain separate from the State, but also should incarnate the Church’s values into State life, while keeping Her integrity, thus creating a people’s monarchy and harmony or symphony. The Church is not an idea, a philosophy, a distraction for intellectuals, a plaything for idle minds. The Church is the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven made Incarnate. This is why the Church has always been persecuted, both from outside and from inside, by heresy and schism, by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’.
In particular, there are those who lapse from Orthodox Christianity and fall into the heterodox error of caesaropapism, kow-towing to the Establishment. However, the 20th century gave millions of examples of confession of the Orthodox teaching, the New Martyrs and Confessors in the former Russian Empire, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria. Our consciences dictate to us to resist the persecuting and anti-Christian States or Establishments which detest us, bully us and threaten us for contradicting their this-worldly ideologies.
Let us take the case of Fr Vsevolod Shpiller. In 1970s Moscow this well-known priest and pastor, who put the Kingdom of God first, was arrested by the KGB and interrogated. His charge? He had paraphrased what Christ had said to Pilate (Jn. 19, 11), that if it was God’s will, the Roman (in 1970s Moscow, the Soviet) Empire could cease to exist in an instant. The KGB had taken fright, for they took it as a threat to the Soviet State and this turbulent priest had to be arrested for his ‘threat’ of proclaiming that God is greater than any Establishment.
The Struggle to Free England from the Oppression of the British Establishment
Forty years on the situation is becoming much the same in the West. Some followers of the British Establishment are, amazingly, frightened of us. The corrupt British Establishment, an invention of the Normans, has always detested the people (whom they call by the public school term ‘plebs’), especially when we enter Establishment organs like Oxbridge, once the preserve of the Norman elite. They still patronizingly resent meritocracy and the ascent of common mortals, whom they try to ‘freeze out’ through cliquishness and clubbishness.
As they believe their own propaganda, what they really dislike is anyone who contradicts their Establishment line and tells the Truth. So ‘liberal’ are they that they attempt censorship and its agents carry out death threats, as David Kelly found out. When adventurers accuse you of being ‘political’, then you know that you are close to the truth. As patriotic subjects loyal to what is beyond the Establishment, the England on high, we pray for the Royal House, the government and the armed forces, that they may be guided by the Heavenly King.
Next year, 2016, will mark the 950th anniversary of the Invasion and Occupation of England, when the country was finally dragged into the Great Western delusion and the establishment of the Establishment. Unlike the idolators of the British Establishment, we put the Kingdom of God first, above this-worldly values, for, like the disciples, though we are in the world, we are not of the world. We feel no hatred or condemnation for the followers of this world and its Establishments, only sorrow and compassion for the deluded, wherever they may live.
After all these centuries we are still fighting for freedom for England and all these Isles and all the Western Lands, that we may win our lands and peoples back for the King of Heaven and His saints. Like the Great Alfred, English Orthodoxy is still calling from Athelney. Incredibly, the British Establishment is frightened by us little people. Why? Because the pen is mightier than the sword, our Faith is mightier than all their threats. Unlike them, we are not afraid to die. God is with us. They are right to tremble. As Chaucer said: the truth will out.
Conclusion: Three Revelations
In 1969 I read Seton-Watson’s book about the Russian Revolution. Despite his clear bias, it was revealed to me, even then, that all the insidious ideas for that historical error had come from the West and hoodwinked faithless Russians. In 1971 I bought in Colchester the book of interviews by Ian Vorres with the sister of the martyred Tsar, Olga Alexandrovna, who had died in Canada eleven years before. On P. 240 she revealed her fondness for England, but her disgust at the ‘utterly vile’ anti-Russian politics ‘of successive British Parliaments’.
Finally, in 1984 I was, with others, followed by the KGB in Paris and labelled by the follower as ‘a dangerous counter-revolutionary and monarchist’. Revelation! How times change in just thirty years! Today the demons which infested the Soviet Empire, cast out by the prayers of the New Martyrs, infest the Western Empire, with its New World Order. Motivated by the desire for global control and so the destruction of the sovereignty of the peoples and of faithfulness to Christ, Who is outside their control, the Western leaders are blinded.
The demons cast out by the New Martyrs and Confessors, by our recognition of them and so our prayers to them, went to the West, where they were welcomed. Now, as at Gennesareth of old, the demons have entered into those who welcomed them and they, like a herd of swine, are rushing to their suicide all over the Western world, shouting ‘Je suis Charlie’. Now is the time to redouble our prayers to the Saints of the Western world who belong to the Church. Together with all the heavenly hosts, they can send these demons back to their place in hell.
The Final Battle is coming. Every day the Second Coming draws closer, but the miracle of repentance is no less possible today than yesterday. The end may be only a few years away, but it may also be a thousand years away. The demons can still be cast out of the West ‘by prayer and fasting’. We do not fear, because whatever happens, we know that the real end of history, and not the end imagined by an American academic a history-filled generation ago, will be the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The last words in world history are Christ’s.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy 2015