In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Foreword: Patricide
The above is the revelation to all mankind, written in the Prologue of St John’s Gospel. However, we also know that after the beginning and after the creation of heaven, of the invisible world, there came a fall in that invisible world. Jealous of God, Lucifer with half the angelic host fell away in a revolt against the Father. This was attempted patricide, which is why his name is also the slanderer, ‘o diavolos’, he who slanders the Father. Some 150 years ago the Orthodox thinker, Alexis Khomiakov, called the filioque that lay behind the Western Schism of 1054 ‘fratricide’. We wonder if the word ‘patricide’ might not have been more suitable here too.
The Ideology of Patricide
The death of the Old Orthodox West and the birth of the new, anti-Orthodox West began with the sin of the Frankish iconoclast Charlemagne. This consisted of adopting a provincial expression of faith from Spain, used there to bolster Orthodoxy against Arianism by emphasising the Divinity of Christ, and making that into the Ideology of the New West. This was the Ideology of Illusory Superiority. In itself innocent, though also profoundly ignorant, unScriptural, unApostolic and unPatristic, this expression, called the filioque, became the flag and motto of a new and aggressive anti-Orthodox ideology. This asserted that the Father was irrelevant, because the Father is absent, never having become incarnate, and that therefore the Father (Christian New Rome) had been replaced by the Son (pagan Old Rome).
This attempt to usurp legitimate authority was dismissed by the Orthodox Popes of Rome. As Pope John VIII condescended in the ninth century, the expression could be allowed the barbaric Germans for a time on account of their ignorance. Sadly, that time and their ignorance has lasted for 1200 years and during that time has spread worldwide. From the representative of the Son in Old Rome – called from the eleventh century onwards ‘the Vicar of Christ’ – flowed all spiritual authority. From him proceeded the Holy Spirit. Inevitably, this claim of universal authority ultimately meant declaring as a dogma that the Pope of Rome is infallible. He had taken over from the pagan Roman Emperor and became a new Pontifex Maximus. Thus, the popes took over from the emperors, claiming that they, and not the emperors, incarnate Christ on earth. In this way the popes of Rome became secular and not spiritual rulers.
The Patricide in Constantinople
By its return to pagan Rome, the whole Church in the West fell out of Christendom. In order to justify itself, the Western elite had to discredit and then kill the Father. This came with accusations that the Church was disloyal to the Creed by ‘leaving out the filioque’. This ignorance was compounded in 1098 when Anselm of Canterbury, the Father of Scholasticism, spoke aggressively ‘against the Greeks’, justifying the Western heresy by syllogism. At that time Western warriors had already set off for areas outside Western Europe on their ‘Crusades’. (Even before this they had conducted centralising military operations against outlying parts of Western Europe, in southern Italy, Sicily, Spain and in 1066 England and from there the rest of the Isles). All this was to discredit the Father. But in 1204 the Son set about killing the Father by bloodily sacking and looting New Rome, the Capital of Christendom, of Romanitas.
With their conversations in Lyon in the thirteenth century and in Florence in the fifteenth century, the patricidal Western elite did its utmost to destroy the Father. Indeed, once it had bribed the elite in Constantinople to betrayal and apostasy, in 1453 Constantinople fell. It is significant that the Schismatics themselves see this date as ‘the end of the Middle Ages’. In other words, the fall of the City was their own spiritual loss. So they set out on the road to Protestantism, in which every individual is a pope and Christ is no more than a private opinion, at best personal pietism, ‘Jesusism’. Although schismatic historians state that Rome had already fallen some thousand years before 1453, Rome did not fall, not even in 1453. Escaping the decadence of the neo-pagan Renaissance and the unspeakable popes of that age, the Capital of Christendom, of Romanitas, was transferred for a second and final time, this time to Moscow, where Romanitas is called Rus.
The Patricide in Moscow
There began a constant self-justifying struggle by the Western elite to discredit and kill the Father here also, to prevent Moscow from ever freeing Constantinople by wiping Russia off the map. Already in the thirteenth century that elite had sent out Teutonic Crusaders to destroy Russia. St Alexander Nevsky had saved it by paying tribute to the East, which at least left Russia free to practise the Christian Faith. However, now came full-scale invasions. First came the Polish-led invasion of 1612, with Lithuanians, Germans and Swedes, occupying Moscow. Then, 200 years later in 1812, came Napoleon and the twelve tribes of neo-pagan Europe. The new Frankish knights now occupied Moscow. Just as in Constantinople in 1204, now too they destroyed churches, raped nuns, slaughtered priests and made bonfires of icons, proving once more that like the iconoclast Charlemagne before them they too had no concept of the Incarnation.
Seeing Christian Russia mighty after it had freed Paris in 1814, throughout the nineteenth century the British Establishment mounted attacks on it, organising the Decembrist revolt in 1825, allowing anti-Christian terrorists to set up shop in London, Lenin to study at the British Museum, even glorifying those terrorists in the early twentieth century children’s book ‘The Railway Children’. In 1854 came another ‘Crusade’, that of the French and the British, allied with the anti-Christian Ottomans, to prevent the freeing of Constantinople. Then, sixty years later, came the German and Austrian invasion of 1914 and in 1915 the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, again to prevent the freeing of Constantinople. This was followed by the British-organised, French-greeted and American-financed coup d’etat of 1917. Ironically, the ‘useful idiots’ were the US-financed, murderous atheist Trotsky-Bronstein and the other foreign Bolsheviks, who replaced the Third Rome with their Third International.
The Father Answers the Son
Ironically, the Bolsheviks’ Western atheism was defeated by yet another Western anti-Christian Crusade, the invasion of the multinational Axis forces in 1941. Then even the atheist Soviet tyrant realised that he could not defeat this evil without Holy Russia. Sovereign Russia had overcome Trotskyist internationalism. When fifty years after this in 1991, the old atheist ideology of the West finally fell in the Soviet Union made bankrupt by it, the traitors then in power adopted the new atheist ideology of the West, the consumerist worship of the golden calf. But this lasted only a few years as Russia began to return to her roots. In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church at last glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors, the glorious sacrificial victims of the patricidal West. This was a turning point.
Since then national healing and recovery, however hesitant and fragile at times, has gone forward. And with it comes the possibility of international, inter-Orthodox, healing and recovery, the recovery of the old vision, role and calling of Russia as the centre of Christian (Orthodox) civilisation. 2012, the fourth centenary of the occupation of Moscow by the Poles, Lithuanians and Germans and the second centenary of the occupation of Moscow by the twelve tribes of Western Europe, was a key year. In that year, there was a repeat of the anti-Russian Western propaganda onslaught of 1916. This new attempted patricide failed. The Western elite and the fifth column Russian traitors who orchestrated it betrayed themselves and were seen to be ridiculous. Their little plot to discredit and destroy failed lamentably. Now, 2013 is the fourth centenary of the House of Romanov, Roma Nova, New Rome, and hopes for the long-awaited restoration rise in our hearts.
Afterword: Prophetic Times
The West, not content to be an outlying province of Christendom, invented its own self-justifying ideology. The Son wanted to take the place of the Father and, following the Luciferan principle, attempted patricide. Despite this, that which we have been praying for all these long years, ‘the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people’ may yet be coming for a brief time before the end. Prophecies, old and new, speak of the Liturgy being finished in the Church of Christ the Wisdom of God (Aghia Sofia) in Constantinople. Perhaps – but we must know that all prophecies are conditional, dependent on our repentance. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!