Category Archives: Pastoral Matters

At Last a Real Cathedral for all Orthodox in London?

One of the greatest pastoral problems in London is the chronic lack of Orthodox churches. For example, St Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow Road is very small, hardly a Cathedral at all, and the medium-sized Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Knightsbridge is smaller than St John’s Russian Orthodox church in provincial Colchester. Of course, there is one church building that would suit Orthodox in London, providing it was frescoed and fitted with iconostases and other Church furnishings. One person who works there would be glad to help us use it.

St Paul’s Cathedral is located on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London. Its dedication to the holy apostle Paul dates back to the original church on the site, founded in 604, though unproven stories assert that this was because St Paul actually preached here. The present Cathedral, dating from the late 17th century, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren. At 365 feet (111 m) high, it was until 1967 the tallest building in London.

The first recorded Orthodox Bishop of London was called either Restitutus or Adelphius and attended the Council of Arles in 314. However, the location of his Cathedral is unknown. St Bede recorded that in 604 St Augustine consecrated Mellitus as the first Bishop of the East Saxons, whose territory covered London, and their King, Sabert. Sabert’s uncle and overlord, Ethelbert, King of Kent, built a church dedicated to St Paul in London, as the seat of the new bishop. It is assumed that this first Cathedral stood on the same site as the present one.

On the death of Sabert in about 616, his pagan sons expelled Bishop Mellitus from London and the East Saxons reverted to paganism. Christianity was restored later in the seventh century and it is presumed that either the Cathedral was restored or else a new one was built as the seat of seventh-century bishops like St Cedd and St Erconwald, ‘The Light of London’, who was buried in the Cathedral in 693. This building, or a successor, was destroyed by fire in 962 but rebuilt in the same year.

In 1016 King Ethelred the Unready was buried in the Cathedral. This was burned down with much of the city in a fire in 1087. The Norman occupiers then built a new Cathedral, known to history as ‘Old St Paul’s’. This Gothic building was in turn gutted by the Great Fire of London of 1666. While it might have been possible to rebuild it, a decision was taken to build a new Cathedral. The task of designing it was assigned to Sir Christopher Wren in 1669.

The design process took several years, but the result was the present St Paul’s Cathedral, modelled partly on St Peter’s in the Vatican. St Paul’s is still the second largest church in Britain. The building was financed by a tax on coal and was completed within the architect’s lifetime. It was declared officially complete by Parliament on 25 December 1711, though in fact construction continued for several years after that. In 1716 the total costs amounted to £1,095,556 (£148 million in 2015 money).

Today, though with a small but active Protestant congregation, St Paul’s is largely a tourist monument. With an area of some 6,000 square metres and several altars, it is ideally suited for London’s huge numbers of Orthodox Christians. Consecrated to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, it could become the Cathedral for all Orthodox in London. Fantasy? But our God works miracles.

Archbishop Mark is Relieved as Ruling Bishop of the Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland of the Church Outside Russia

On 8 December 2016 the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia  relieved Archbishop Mark as ruling bishop of the Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland. In his letter, which he asked to be circulated, Archbishop Mark asked forgiveness of all for what he had said and done over the years that had hurt and aggravated his flock. He particularly regretted that his lack of pastoral oversight made two monastic communities in England turn their backs on him.

The First Hierarch of the Church, the Most Reverend Metropolitan Hilarion, is for the moment the new ruling bishop.

The Paris School and the Future

The phrase ‘Paris School’ (of Russian religious philosophy) is a vague phrase because many of its representatives ended up not living in Paris or even France and because it was such a very varied phenomenon. Thus, it included intellectuals mainly of Russian origin (but not all of them), who ended up living as far apart as the USA, England, Finland, Bulgaria (the anti-monarchist plotter, Fr George Shavelsky) and Constantinople (the philosopher Metr John Zisioulas). Some of these were close to Orthodoxy, others were in open heretical revolt against the Church and constructed anti-Church ideologies, others were simply harmless eccentrics who lived in the clouds.

A representative close to the Tradition, for example, was the academic theologian (and not philosopher!) Fr George Florovsky, who was ousted from St Vladimir’s Seminary by another much more Protestant-minded thinker of a Paris-born generation, Fr Alexander Schmemann. However, there were others like the notorious Fr Sergey Bulgakov, who founded a new heresy under the influence of the alcoholic Catholic occultist Vladimir Soloviov. The latter was the real founder of the School, who infected it with all its basic currents of Gnosticism, Origenism, liberalism and ecumenism and had a great influence on the enormous intellect of the polymath, Fr Paul Florensky.

Then in Paris there was also the esoteric philosopher Berdyayev, who was imbued with semi-Catholic mysticism and like Bulgakov never quite shook off his Marxism, but there was also the more Orthodox Fr Basil Zenkovsky who wrote a magisterial ‘History of Russian Philosophy’. Then there were Vladimir Lossky, trained in Scholasticism, but whose views were very close to the Tradition in many respects, but on the other hand, the fantasist Bishop John Kovalevsky or the recently deceased French ecumenists, the ex-pastor Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and Olivier Clement. Their views were respectively as close to Protestantism and Catholicism as is possible without lapsing.

In England there were other representatives of the Paris School. These included the late Metr Antony (Bloom), whose curious, personal views combined a theoretical conservatism with an extraordinary liberalism and influenced several convert followers, like the Jewish Fr Sergei Hackel. Then there was the late ex-Uniat Fr Lev Gillet, who appears to have died either as a Quaker or else a Buddhist (no-one is quite sure), or the Parisian artist and intellectual the late Fr Sophrony Sakharov, whose whole esoteric philosophy of Orthodoxy came to be shaped by the peasant St Silvanus whom he had met on the Holy Mountain, where he had been a librarian.

With such a variety of individuals, some much closer to Orthodox Tradition than others, some more renovationist than others, some more fantasist than others, what do they all have in common? Negatively speaking, it is how far most of them seemed to have stood from the saints of the Church in the emigration like St John of Shanghai (also who also lived for many years in Paris and often came to London) or St Seraphim of Sofia, or from the genuine Orthodox philosopher of the emigration Ivan Ilyin. These followed the wholeness of the ascetic Tradition of the Church, and not selected fragments of it, which is why the Paris School was opposed to authentic monasticism.

However, this was not the essence of the Paris School. Its essence was its intellectual pretentiousness, which contains the pride which is at the heart of all deviations from the Church, without exception. Not understanding that enlightenment comes from the grace of God that alone cleanses the repentant heart, they all mistakenly believed that enlightenment comes from the purification of the intellect and the imagination. This tragic mis-take meant that their views were intellectual, philosophical, more or less renovationist, more or less fantasist, disincarnate from reality and from ordinary Orthodox and Orthodoxy, and so ultimately they became sectarian and cultish.

The proof of this thesis is in the fact that when the time came for the gradual liberation of the Russian Church inside Russia from Sergianism and Renovationism after 1991, they refused to re-enter Her fold and glorify the New Martyrs and Confessors together with Her. They had not been longing to return all along, as had the faithful, but had instead been cultivating their own intellectualist philosophies outside the Orthodox Tradition. Thus, cultivating private, personality-driven sidelines, they failed to see the mainstream of Church catholicity and ended up isolating themselves in the worst sort of isolation – isolation from the real saints, the New Martyrs and Confessors.

This meant that they allied themselves only with the vestigial renovationist and sectarian elements on the fringes of the Russian Church inside Russia. It also meant that they sullied themselves with politics (under the pretence of being apolitical!, which is always political). Thus, they allied themselves with Russophobic elements in the Western world, for example, with the self-justifying neocon hawks and past-worshipping warmongers of NATO, who never wanted the Cold War to end and in their ethnocentricity arrogantly never understand that the vibrant values of Orthodox Christian Civilization are quite different from their dying anti-Christian Western culture.

This is why, when at the end of 2016 the time of generational change had come for renewal in Russia and then, inspired by the Russian example, for the first glimmers of freedom and the hope of repentance in the West, the Paris School and its values stuck to the dead past. These last representatives were now aged, vestigial relics, whose rebellious and often absurd ideologies had been half-baked in the spiritual desert of the 1960s, which had been passed on to a few convert intellectuals in Russia who still had not caught up with the real world. As for the Church, we look as ever towards prophetic holiness and the dynamic restoration of the Tradition in the Holy Spirit that is happening now.

On False Spiritual Fatherhood

Although fortunately rare, false spiritual fatherhood exists. In order to understand this, we must first understand what true spiritual fatherhood is.

True spiritual fatherhood is the guiding of the person towards salvation, away from the sins to which it in particular is prone. It is not the suppression of the person and its replacement by a self-serving personality cult of the false spiritual father. In such cases of personality cult, it will be seen that the victim (‘spiritual child’) will start physically resembling the so-called spiritual father. In other words, clones will be produced. This cloning involves not only external resemblance by wearing the same clothes, having the same hairstyle, cultivating the same walk, gestures or mannerisms, repeating the same words, wearing the same glasses, but also psychic resemblance. In such a case, it will be found that the clone will by mimetism (imitation) start to physically resemble the guru, the physical features changing to those of the cult leader.

Such a cult can very swiftly be identified by the exclusivist attitudes of the cult members or adepts to outsiders. These outsiders will not be recognized by them, for they cannot exist. They cannot exist, because no-one has a right to exist outside the cocoon of the exclusive cult. They have no right to exist because they owe no obedience to the idolatrous cult. In this way the cult takes on a sectarian, esoteric mentality, cutting itself off from the wider Church. Its spiritual pride becomes narcissistic, reflecting the narcissism of its idolized founder, who may have suffered from NPD (narcissistic personality disorder – google for details). Eventually, however, the cult begins to wither and die because of its spiritual pride, becoming irrelevant to the wider world. This is summed up by the Gospel words, ‘By their fruit ye shall know them’.

We write the above in order to warn the naïve, often young and intellectual. As we have said above, false spiritual fatherhood is rare – but it does exist.

The Tradition is One

An integral part of the destructive ideology peddled by modernists is to deny the existence of the Tradition. Making out that there is no such thing as the Tradition, they claim that there are therefore only human customs, thus, very typically for them, reducing the Inheritance of the Holy Spirit to relativistic humanism. They are wrong – the Tradition exists and this is precisely the deposit of the Holy Spirit that the Apostle calls us to guard (1 Tim 6, 20).

There is only one Tradition, just as there is only one Church. True, there are local customs, but some of these are bad and come from spiritual decadence. These have come into the Church in recent times through Western influence and can be encountered especially in Greece, Cyprus and in parts of Romania and the Patriarchate of Antioch, which have been exposed for some generations to Western decadence. In their parishes in the USA and elsewhere, some of these groups actually use organs and people sit in pews during Church services! Of course, this is no part of the Tradition and is only justified as a custom because it is what heretics do. Here there are clear cases where the Tradition is being lost. However, modernists justify all this saying that ‘you can have organs or not have organs, you can have pews or not have pews – these are merely differences of custom’. This is a lie.

Such people are simply victims of modernist decadence and have lost the Tradition. Much more seriously, and this is now widespread among those who come from heterodox backgrounds, there is the custom of communion without confession and even persecution of those who do not take communion. This is like saying that communion is medicine which can be administered without a diagnosis. The fact is that if you take the wrong medicine because you do not have a diagnosis, you can die. Though the modernists hate the Scriptures because they are not politically correct, the Apostle Paul wrote about communion for damnation in the first century: ‘For this cause many are weak and sickly among you’ (I Cor 11, 30). Similarly, there is the modernist practice of forcing women to take communion during menstruation, which also goes against the Holy Spirit.

Another widespread modernist practice is to change the services, justifying arbitrary changes contrary to the Tradition. All of this goes hand in hand with the use of the papal calendar instead of the Orthodox calendar. Here too modernists assert that there are two calendars, therefore we can use either. In reality, there is only one Church calendar. The fact that we accept as Orthodox those who use the papal calendar for the fixed services is economy, a dispensation made for the sake of their salvation. Another abuse is celebrating without an iconostasis. This can happen initially in missionary circumstances, but after a few weeks any real Orthodox parish will have an iconostasis. Not to take a blessing on seeing a priest is another abuse – not part of the Tradition. Connected with this is the refusal of women not to cover their heads (I Cor 11, 13) and generally wear improper and immodest dress in church.

It is no good like Anglicans, who do not understand what the Church is, saying that in the Church there are only various human customs and so that we can ignore them or compromise them in amoral ‘pick and mix’ consumerism. In reality, there is right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, and there can be no compromise between right and wrong, just as there can be no concord between Christ and Belial (2 Cor 6, 15). The Tradition is One.

On the Fringes of the Empire

Outside the Lands that were Orthodox Christian, that is, holy, in the second millennium and indeed, sometimes for much of the first millennium also, we in the Isles of the North Atlantic live on the fringes of the Empire. We have our examples of holiness, but they are far in the past. So what happens in the third millennium when the double-headed eagle of the Orthodox Christian Empire once more flies above us, despite a near millennium of apostasy in England?

At first sight it seems that only compromise happens. However, although there may be a need for superficial compromise, for empty platitudes, there are also those who confess the Orthodox Faith despite diplomacy, despite the failure to witness of those who are quoted as witnesses, but who in fact compromised themselves with the Norman Establishment. They may be Jerusalem, but we are Galilee and, without us, they are but stones without living voices.

Who understands us? It is not the personalities who demanded guru-worship, not the philosophers who lived in their intellectual fantasies, not the administrators with piles of gold who have little understanding of pastoral reality. It is the little people in the poor and ignored places who live the Faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, our saints St Elizabeth the New Martyr and St John of Shanghai the New Confessor, who give us food for our souls.

Two Extremes: Calvinism and Modernism

By Calvinism, which has its roots in Augustinianism (which is rather different from the teaching of Blessed Augustine of Hippo), we mean the human tendency to despair. This is the tendency to see all as black, that salvation is impossible, whatever efforts we make – despite the Gospel saying that with God all things are possible – that depression is our life. It is the source of dour Scots, serious Swiss and earnest Dutch. This is the error that says that God has no mercy, only truth.

By Modernism, which has its roots in Pelagianism and Origenism, we mean the human tendency to self-exaltation. This is the tendency to see humanity as already saved, that no confession and repentance are necessary for forgiveness, that the effect of holy communion is magic, automatic, requiring no effort on our part. This is the source of modern humanism and secularism and, in the Church context, renovationism. This is the error that says that God has no truth, only mercy.

As ever, Orthodoxy, the faith in the God-man, transcendent and immanent, neither Monophysite or Nestorian, neither Origenist or Calvinist, has balance, truth and mercy, repentance and forgiveness, the Tradition of the Holy Spirit.

The Errors of the Sectarians

Those who in 2006 were opposed to the unity of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Russian Lands and inside them, always put forward the same argument: the Church inside the Russian Lands (which they called the Moscow Patriarchate) is corrupt. Thus, on Red Square the mummy of the forerunner of Antichrist, Lenin, is still displayed, and those in control of State and Church, from President Putin to the Patriarch, were all brought up during the Soviet, atheist period and are therefore corrupt. (They who themselves opposed unity are of course not corrupt, but morally superior: the spiritual law is that pride is at the source of all schisms, throughout history).

This argument, conditioned by politics and not faith, has never taken into account the fact that State and Church in Russia are separate (unlike the Church of England, where all the bishops are appointed by the Prime Minister and the bishops follow whatever secular fashion prevails) and in Russia what the State does generally does not necessarily take into account the Church’s view. Neither does this argument take into account the fact that, as regards those brought up during the Soviet, atheist period, there was always the possibility of rejecting atheism at that time (the case of the Patriarch) and, if not, there is the possibility of rejecting that atheism by repentance later (the case of the President). However, the politically-minded never accept the reality of repentance, preferring to remain in the past, for that alone justifies them.

Worse still, the above argument does not take into account the longer-term view that is informed and shaped by Divine Providence. Limited by its short-termism, this argument quite fails to see what is beyond, that what we are about is not the present Russian President or Patriarch, but the restoration of the Christian Emperor and Empire, whose centre is in Moscow. The present bearers of the posts of President and Patriarch are only figures on the way to this restoration. We should not confuse the path, which leads us through ikonomia, but not compromises on issues of principle, with our destination, with where we are heading. And herein is the problem of those who broke away from both sides in 2006, falling away to left and right: they are so obsessed with their path that they have lost from sight the destination, for they are heading nowhere.

Who Killed Christ?

Many different answers are given to the above question. For example, there are those with personal axes to grind who will tell you that it was the Romans or the Jews. Such answers are childish excuses of the sort ‘it wasn’t me, it was him’. More generally it is true to say that fallen humanity killed Christ, or more exactly it was hatred, cruelty, ingratitude and indifference that killed Christ. In three words this general answer can even be summed up as a ‘lack of love’, for this is the greatest killer of all, for it kills individuals, parish churches, monasteries and indeed, as we are witnesses, whole dioceses. However, this lack of love has in human history taken two specific forms.

The first form of a lack of love is the error of putting creation above the Creator, in other words, idolatry. This is the error of paganism that we can see in animism, superstition and throughout paganism. The further away from Jerusalem, the more pagan people were. This we can see in how the Creation story, faithfully recorded only in the Book of Genesis, became ever more distorted in the creation myths of Australia or the Americas, India or Africa, Scandinavia or China. This misidentification was the error of the Romans who made their emperors into gods, putting Caesar above Christ. Through lack of love of God and man, creation, fallen and sinful, is identified as Divine. A fundamental error and distortion.

The second form of a lack of love is the error of putting oneself (and so love of oneself) above the Creator. This self-idolatry was the error of the Jewish elite, but it can be found among the ‘professionals’ of all institutional religion, which is always opposed to faith. This second form is called phariseeism, which makes salvation most difficult for all except its own members, who are the self-appointed elect. This misidentification is the error of humanism, which deifies fallen human nature. Humanism has its origins in papism, which put one man above God, making God absent and so enabling itself to replace him. And humanism is merely papism extended to all Western and Westernized humanity, putting the self above the Creator. Through lack of love of God and man, creation that is fallen and sinful is identified as above the Divine. A fundamental error and distortion.

Who killed Christ? Human lack of love that put itself on the level of the Divine and, even worse, even above the Divine. Although the Romans were guilty of the first form of lack of love, in their indifference ignoring Christ, and although the Jews were guilty of the second form, in their jealous hatred of the Truth (and pharisees hate nothing more than the Truth, for it shows them up as they are, as liars), all fallen humanity is capable of such acts. The fact is that if Christ returned today, He would be killed again. Indeed, this is why when He returns, He will return ‘with power’ (Lk. 21, 27). Who killed Christ? Lack of love, for God is love, but sin is lack of love.

An Appeal: Thirteen Eastern Churches

A Dream of Thirteen Churches in the Eleven Counties of Eastern England

(Only the first two exist so far)

1. Colchester (north Essex and so looking after east Suffolk) – dedicated to our former Archbishop, St John the Wonderworker, who revived Orthodoxy in Western Europe. The secondary patron is St Helen, Equal-to-the-Apostles, who is said to have walked the streets of this town in Roman times. There is also a chapel dedicated to All the Saints who have shone forth in these Isles. The secondary patron here is St Alban the First Martyr, appropriate for this ex-military church.

2. Norwich (east Norfolk) – dedicated to St Alexander Nevsky, the Saint of the North and so of ‘North-wich’, he who resisted both Islamism and Secularism, the present scourges of the world, and so maintained Orthodoxy against all odds. The secondary patron (the icon to the right of the Mother of God) is St Xenia of Saint Petersburg, who intercedes in cases of homelessness, a problem which many of our parishioners here have had to face.

3. Exning (west Suffolk, near Cambridge), a church is now available for £350,000 – dedicated to St Audrey, as Exning was her birthplace and she became a saint in nearby Ely. The secondary patron could be St Edmund, who was venerated in nearby Bury St Edmunds.
This covers the three eastern counties. However, other churches are needed both here and in the six counties of the East of England region:

4. Romford (south Essex), to cover the eastern suburbs of London (two churches already cover those in the western suburbs of London), a perfect church, with hall, a priest’s house and plenty of parking, just over a mile from Romford Station and the future Crossrail, is now available for £1.25 million – dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ. He will help the teeming thousands of Orthodox immigrants who have arrived at the railway station in Stratford nearby and live around it, seeking housing, work and happiness after their homelands have been ravaged and look for hope. The secondary patron could be St John of Kronstadt, who looked after those who lived in poor suburbs like the East End of London.

5. Peterborough (north Cambridgeshire), to cover the fens and south-west Lincolnshire – dedicated to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, as this city was named after the Apostle Peter. The secondary patron could be St Olga, who is already venerated locally.

6. St Albans (Hertfordshire) – dedicated to St Alban the First Martyr, a church which would also cover those in the north of London. The secondary patron could be St Stephen the First Martyr.

7. Bedford (Bedfordshire) – dedicated to the Holy Trinity, in rejection of the heresy of the local Cromwell, who had no understanding of the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit and so became an iconoclast. The secondary patron could be St Fremund of Dunstable, the locally venerated hermit.

8. Kings Lynn (west Norfolk and covering those in south-east Lincolnshire) – dedicated to St Nicholas the Wonderworker, as Kings Lynn was of old an important port trading through the Baltic and with Russia. The secondary patron could be St Guthlac, the English St Antony and Saint of the Fens.

Beyond the above eight churches for the six counties of the East of England region given above, churches are needed in the other five counties of Eastern England:

9. Canterbury (Kent) – dedicated to Christ the Saviour, as in the sixth century. The secondary patron could be St Augustine of Canterbury, who made Canterbury his Church capital.

10. York (Yorkshire) – dedicated to Sts Constantine and Helen, since St Constantine was proclaimed Emperor here over 1,700 years ago. The secondary patron could be St John of Beverley, the wonderworker who is so venerated in Yorkshire and was once Bishop of York.

11. Brighton (Sussex) – dedicated to the Nativity of the Mother of God, in memory of her purity in this city of impurity. The secondary patron could be St Wilfrid, the Apostle of Sussex.

12. Lincoln (Lincolnshire) – dedicated to the twelve Apostles, as this is the twelfth church. The secondary patron could be St Paulinus, the first Bishop of Lincoln.

13. Walton on Thames (Surrey) – dedicated to the Royal Martyrs, since the future Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra stayed here in June 1894. This church would also cater for those in the southern suburbs of London. The secondary patron could be the Grand Duchess St Elizabeth, sister of the Tsarina and who is also venerated in Sussex.

Those who read the above will say ‘fantasy’. But, think, all it would take is one Russian oligarch to donate a quarter of the cost of one player for Chelsea Football Club and this dream would become reality. And a quarter of England would be covered by a network of churches.