I would long ago have gone mad in the face of human injustice, if I had not known that Christ will have the last word in history.

St Paisios the Athonite

Decadence has always existed. It is a result of the Fall. However, it is one thing for decadence to exist, quite another for decadence to be institutionalised. Some people like to imagine that the decadence of the West was institutionalised only recently, in, say, 1997, or the 1960s. Others, more radically, suggest that it was at the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Renaissance or even in 1274 and with the invention of Nominalism. In fact, the rot set in well before that. The rot began before with Charlemagne, but ‘set in’, or rather, was institutionalised in the eleventh century and the date of 1054, in the middle of the century, symbolises the institutionalisation of the rot.

The West is civilised? The Papally-sponsored massacres of hundreds of thousands in Spain, Italy and, then in 1066, in England? The massacres of the Jews in the Rhineland on the way to the genocidal Crusades in the Holy Land, the sacking of the Christian capital in 1204, the genocide of the Cathars in France, and then that by the Teutonic Knights? The Inquisition? The Black Death? The Conquistadors? The witch-hunts? The ‘Wars of Religion’? The genocide in the New World, South and North America?

The colonialisation of India? The ‘opium wars’ with China? The genocide of the Tasmanians and the Maori? The European scramble for Africa? That of Leopold in the Congo? Two suicidal European Wars, become World Wars? The Germans in Namibia? The British in Kenya? The French in Algeria? The Western invasions of and genocides in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine? And all these tens or hundreds of millions of dead Non-Europeans are enshrined in 1,000 years of ‘heroic’ pro-Western ‘narratives’? Western Civilisation?

We have had a thousand years of Western Anti-Civilisation. But who can recivilise the Western world and return it to the first millennium? Or is it finally going to destroy itself? Clearly, extremists will not help save it, neither those who accept and want to ape the West in everything, nor those who reject and want to denigrate everything in the West. It is all more subtle than that. Thus, religions like Islam and Hinduism will not work in the West, for they are too closely connected with the alien Arab and Indian worlds. As for the Buddhist or Confucian philosophies, they are only for intellectuals.

What remains and can attract and answer the West’s spiritual needs, bringing it back to the Age of the Saints, the time before decadence became institutionalised? We can answer the question negatively:

What remains and can attract and answer those needs CANNOT be something corrupted, sexually depraved, financially depraved or depraved by jealousy for us.

What remains and can attract and answer those needs CANNOT be something sectarian that condemns other Christians as Non-Christians.

What remains and can attract and answer those needs CANNOT be something that belongs exclusively to another race and condemns all other races.

I have been telling the world for fifty years what can attract and answer the spiritual needs of Western people who have such needs. However, I have all this time been persecuted by the extremists, by the corrupt and depraved in the Russian Church inside Russia, by the sectarian in the Russian Church outside Russia, and by the racist everywhere, not least in Constantinople.

He who has ears, let him hear.