We have come from afar, from Athelney and Ekaterinburg, from the tenth century and from White Russia.
‘The argument here is not that the eleventh century invented these distinctions (between the secular and the ecclesiastical), but it made them fundamental to European society and culture, for the first time and permanently. Since this was the foundation on which European civilization has been constructed, it is not easy for Europe’s children to remember that it might have been otherwise’.
The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215, R.I Moore, p. 12
The Year 1000 and the Old Feudalism
The result of revolutionary changes, the Western Schism marks a radical departure from the first 1000 years of Western history A.D. and from every other world civilization. But can it be dated? When did the West, made ‘eccentric’ by its invention of secularism, break away from the rest of Eurasia and above all from the Church? In one sense, the Western Schism cannot be dated because it is a process and is still ongoing. The West is still falling away from the Church and so from Christianity, as the vestiges of the Church and Orthodoxy that it has held on to for a thousand years are ever more decomposing and disintegrating. This we can see, for example, in its recent global releasing of all the demons of hell called ‘shock and awe’, that is, the planetary spreading of Pan-Demon-Ium in violent unrest and wars, its recent approval as ‘a Western value’ of single-sex ‘marriage’ and the latest anti-Christian crusade of the new Teutonic Knights against the Ukraine. True, the Schism has proceeded at varying speeds and with a varying geography, with the ever-present possibility of repenting and returning, though made ever more difficult by the now inherent paganism of Western culture. However, there remain two questions, Can we speak of the beginning of this process of Schism? And why do we refer to the date of 1054?
1054 marks the date of a single event which was a turning-point in the breaking away, but still only the end-point of the actual process of breaking away. In other words, it marked the beginning of the acceleration of a new period characterized by clear anti-Christian aggression towards the peripheries of Western Continental Europe, to Southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Southern France, and then to the Near East. 150 years later this led directly to the sack of the European Christian Capital in New Rome by the barbarian ‘crusaders’ in 1204 and then to the Teutonic crusades against Russia. However, if 1054 is followed by several significant dates, it is also preceded by a host of other dates which illustrate how and when the West fell away from the old order, making the Schism of 1054 inevitable. Academic study after academic study (1) confirms that the event of 1054 is simply the central point of a chain of events between about 900 and about 1200, with the Schism being actively prepared from about the Year 1000 in ‘the crisis of the 11th century’ (2). And by far the most important physical manifestation of the spirit of the Schism, that is, of the theology of the filioque, is the invention of a thoroughly anti-Christian social order called Feudalism – the ultimate pyramid scheme and protection racket.
Thus, the beginning of the Schism can be determined by the physical manifestations of Feudalism – the appearance of an order and institutions which simply do not exist in Christian (= Non-Feudal, Pre-Feudal, Orthodox) civilization, whose development accelerated enormously in the West after about 1050. The clear chain of events involved is: the clearly anti-Christian and much hated wave of castle-building started in about 950 by ‘lords’, that is racketeers and extortioners; the ‘knightmare’ appearance in about 1000 in these ‘castles’ of mounted, mail-clad thugs and marauders called ‘knights’ (= servants) who exercised a legalized reign of terror to enslave, extort and plunder, but who themselves were vassals of their lords; the ensuing militarization of the countryside in order to enforce serfdom (enslavement or ‘feudalism’), whereby peasant freedom was crushed and they were made dependent on the warrior households in the castles and herded into concentration camp villages; the leading role in all this of the now feudalized (theologically speaking, filioquized) Western Church, which had become a Westernized Church, that is, a Super-State, Institution and so Religion, and the rejection of this from about 1020 on by people who were called heretics.
The Feudal Schism
Thus, according to all the studies (1), the vocabulary of Feudalism appears between 950 and 1100, especially around 1000, castle-building and feudal attitudes increased enormously from the year 1000; the first stage in the process of enslavement or enserfment opened between 997 and 1038; the unity of the Church in East and West began to break up after 1000; from the 1020s and 1030s Christ was more and more portrayed on the Cross as a dead man, that is, in His human nature separated from His Divine nature; the lives of saints were falsified and in fact paganized after 1028; campaigns of military aggression began in 1030; ‘a new time’ began after 1033; there occurred in c. 1045 the first known case of stigmata with Peter Damian; cardinals were first introduced in 1050; the Pope first blessed bloodshed in battle in 1051. All of this is summed up in the words: ‘It is at the end of the tenth century that a very ancient social fabric begins to fall apart, and there was an end in Western Europe, or the beginning of an end, of the dominance of a very ancient mode of production’ (3).
There is no clearer example than pre-Norman England, which lay outside and free of the initial process of social, economic, moral and spiritual decomposition and disorder, or ‘Feudalism’, as it is now called. This had begun as such in what is now northern France, between the Loire and the Rhine. Thus, the first castles in England appeared in 1050, erected on the orders of the treacherous, half-Norman King Edward (later called ‘the Confessor’ by the Norman invaders) by foreigners whom Edward had invited into England. However, the foreigners who built the castles were chased out of the country by English patriots. Slave-done castle-building began again only with the papally-blessed genocide by the Norman occupiers of 1066, who introduced Feudalism and enserfment – previously completely unknown in England or anywhere else in the British Isles and Ireland. The Normans set up what is known as ‘the British Establishment’, which is a mafia, whose foundation is Feudalism, the supreme protection racket. Even today, the British Establishment is known for its perversions and pedophilia, having 950 years ago assassinated the King and then massacred, dispossessed or exiled the whole native English ruling class.
As we can see, from about the Year 1000, it is clear that Christianity in Western Europe was displaced by another system of belief, which, however, did retain vestiges of Christianity. Those vestiges were particularly important among the people, but much destroyed among the fundamentally atheist elite; as they say, ‘a fish rots from the head’. Thus, we should distinguish very carefully between ideologies which justified plunder and barbarity and hid behind ‘religion’ in self-justification, and the ‘natives’, the local Christian people, who like the later ‘Red Indians’ were and are the first victims of institutionalized spiritual deprivation. We distinguish very carefully between Catholicism and Catholics, between the barbarian thugs of the Crusades and the Inquisition and their first victims. The latter came to be ‘Catholics’ but only because the real Church had been stolen from them and replaced by the all-powerful feudal elite with an anti-charismatic ersatz institution, a medieval con-trick, to which they were allowed no alternative.
The Year 2000 and the New Feudalism
The essence and foundation of the Western world is then in Feudalism: ‘Whatever the case, it (feudalism) is, whether we like it or not, the lasting foundation in Western Europe of a solid and complete political hierarchy. The state…can now despise or pretend to despise the submission of one man to another, a ritual fiction of an all-powerful paternity’ (4). What better description of Big Brother? So it is no surprise to see that nothing has changed today. Since about the year 2000 we have seen in the West another half-millennial turning point in the development of its Schism. 1,000 years after the rejection of Church Christianity by the Western elite and so its introduction of Feudalism and the secular principle, 500 years after the turning point of the ‘Reformation’, that is, the rejection of a great many of the vestiges which still restrained the development of modern secularism, we are now seeing a Second Reformation. This time it means the rejection of all the remaining underlying restraints inherited from the Church Christianity that was planted in the West in the first millennium. This means total paganization, including that of many instinctive, ‘natural’ values which only a few years ago were absolutely unquestioned.
Of course, the vocabulary has changed; God is called Profit; the Pope is called the US President; Western Christendom is called ‘the international community’; Europe is called the EU; castles are called military bases; cathedrals are called shopping centres (though the aisles are still called aisles); knights are called tanks; swords are called guns; catapults are called missiles; falcons are called drones; feudal lords are called oligarchs; enserfment is called work; plunder is called capitalism; farms are called offices; usurers are called bankers; merchants are called businessmen; slaves are called voters (and also plebs); heretics are called anti-political correct and are ‘pilloried’ and their characters ‘assassinated’; courtiers are called PR advisors; feudalism-justifying troubadours are called singers; jesters are called entertainers; magicians are called scientists.
All else is the same atheism, the same inward and ignoble Godlessness hiding behind noble words, the same arrogant terrorism and aggressive hubris, the same exploitative spirit and hostility to all others, the same dehumanizing, demonizing and supremely ignorant propaganda from William the Bastard to Goebbels and the US State Department, the same anti-people elitism and manipulations, whether in Western Europe or Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or the Ukraine, whatever the camouflage made of outward pietism and sweet-worded sentimentalism. Above all, the plunder of the planet’s resources goes on, no longer masked by ‘spreading true religion’ and the excuse of ‘crusading’, but by the cries of ‘spreading freedom and democracy’ and the excuse of ‘bringing peace’, sowing Pan-Demon-Ium worldwide. This is none other than Neo-Feudalism. Until the Western world can think outside the feudal, filioque box into which it confined itself a thousand years ago, it will never escape its spiritual and so mental self-enslavement. And that can only happen when it returns to the Orthodox way of thinking and life.
Notes:
1. For example, just a few recent works in English:
The Feudal Transformation 900-1200, Poly and Bournazel, 1991
The Making of Europe, Robert Bartlett, 1993
The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215, R.I Moore, 2000
Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century, Kathleen G. Cushing, 2005
Millennium, Tom Holland, 2008
2. The Feudal Transformation, p. 355.
3. The Feudal Transformation, p. 352.
4. The Feudal Transformation, p. 357.