Category Archives: Communism

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:

frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.

Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk

From the Back Cover

Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Foreword to the Third Edition

For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)

All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.

That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.

Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition

This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.

Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.

This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.

Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.

For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.

Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.

Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England

The Atheist War Against the Multinational Orthodox Church Continues

The seizure of power in Kiev by a tiny minority of extremist Galician Catholics (Uniat Ukrainians from the far west, formerly eastern Poland) had been carefully planned. Through the violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government with generous US financial backing ($5 billion) and EU support last February, it opened a Pandora’s Box. Now the three parts of the Ukraine, the small Polonised and Neo-Fascist Galicia, central Malorossiya (Little Russia) and purely Russian southern and eastern Novorossiya (New Russia) are divided. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine do not recognise the unrepresentative Kievan junta.

The nature of the modern Ukraine as an artificial construct, a nationalist divide and rule Western project, has been revealed. This is despite the empty and pathetic sabre-rattling by the head of NATO, which is still licking its wounds from its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Ukraine is a puppet made in Austria just over a century ago and founded on xenophobic pride and hatred. Its puppet leaders, whose ancestors fought with Hitler and have been handpicked by the US politician Victoria Nuland, are incompetent and cannot control their peoples. Russia now waits while what remains of the ‘Ukraine’ goes bankrupt, its gold reserves yesterday transferred to Switzerland and the USA in the final act of twenty-three years of asset-stripping by corrupt oligarchs.

The events in the Ukraine must be seen as part of the whole, Western-orchestrated, geopolitical war against the Church of Christ. That began in North Africa, spread to the Middle East, especially Syria, the only place on earth where the language of Christ, Aramaic, is still spoken, and has now been spread to Little Russia, the south-western corner of the Russian Lands, Rus. This attempt to divide historic Rus by the Western atheists uses Ukrainian nationalism, so recently founded on a provincial identity and a regional language from the Polish borderlands (‘Ukraine’ in Russian). All this is in order to cut off this potentially rich area, where natural gas has just been discovered, from its kindred Russian Lands and their peoples.

Western atheism is outraged that the Russian Lands are united, their unity founded not on ethnicity, but on over a thousand years of Christianity, the common and multinational Russian Orthodox Faith, thus making those lands into Holy Rus. It has not forgiven its peoples for throwing off Western atheism in its Soviet form. This is why Western atheism has now set out to use its puppet Patriarchate of Constantinople to undermine the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, the majority of whose members are Carpatho-Russians – another part of Holy Rus. However, in failing to recognise the Czechoslovak episcopate and even absurdly daring to call itself its ‘Mother-Church’ (!), that sorry Patriarchate has indicated that no Inter-Orthodox Council will be held in 2016. Such a Council could only take place if all the Local Churches are represented there, and not just the ones that the CIA allows.

Holy Rus is by definition multinational and not nationalist, the heritage of the Roman Christian Empire, and not some provincial localism. It unites 62 different nationalities. Unlike Ukrainianism (or for that matter Hellenism, Montenegrinism and Macedonianism etc – other artificial Western constructs from the 19th century on), Holy Rus does not put a regional national identity and language above the Universal Church of Christ. In the Second World War Hitler instructed his occupying administrators to set up a separate church in each village of the Ukraine. This is still the Western project, so coloured by Protestant separatism, today. It will not succeed.

Some are concerned that the Russian Orthodox Church and those with it, the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church, the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and supporters in Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, will be isolated by Western meddling. They should not be concerned by this. We recall how the ‘democratic’ majority shouted out ‘Crucify him, Crucify him’; we are happy to be ‘isolated’ from that majority. Today the Russian Lands are rising from the ashes of the past. A generation has passed since the dissolution of Soviet atheism. Now that the Church is being reborn, its values are beginning to be embodied in social, political and economic life and so the Russian State is also being reborn, returning to Orthodox roots and traditional values.

Why do both Capitalism and Communism Hate Christ?

Both Capitalism and Communism claim that they hold the keys to the Kingdom, that only they can build on earth, Capitalism through consumer abundance, Communism through social justice. But the Kingdom that both create ends in bankruptcy, depletion of resources and ecological catastrophe.

Both Capitalism and Communism claim that they have Power on earth, Capitalism through the myth of democratic elections of a dictatorship, Communism through undemocratic elections of a dictatorship. But the Power that both have ends in wars, concentration camps persecution and exploitation.

Both Capitalism and Communism claim that they have Glory on earth, Capitalism through the efficient production of goods and services, Communism through the spread of social order and social services. But the Glory that both have ends in human degeneration, decadence, self-indulgence, abortion and the inglory of suicide.

Why do both Capitalism and Communism hate Christ? Because they secretly know that ‘Thine’, and not theirs, ‘is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory’.