Orthodox Russia and the Unrepentant, Dying West

‘PYLADES:  . . . Make all men living your enemies, but not the gods’ – Aeschylus, The Libation-Bearers, p. 136.

‘ . . . the Christianity of the West has committed suicide, because it stopped being Christianity when it stopped being the [Orthodox] Church; . . . it received death itself into its bosom . . .’ -- Aleksei Khomiakov, ‘Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Letter Published by the Archbishop of Paris’, On Spiritual Unity, p. 102.

Pat Buchanan’s writings on Russia hit once again very near the mark:

. . . Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God’s side. The West is Gomorrah.

Western leaders who compare Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a “KGB thug,” who call him “the alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins did, believe Putin’s claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous.

But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on “The Third Rome.”

The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today’s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was — Moscow.

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

Putin is plugging into some of the modern world’s most powerful currents.

Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America’s arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.

He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.

In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a “culture of death.”

What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes?

The West’s capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide — the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes that she was stunned when in Tbilisi to hear a Georgian lawyer declare of the former pro-Western regime of Mikhail Saakashvili, “They were LGBT.”

“It was an eye-opening moment,” wrote Applebaum. Fear and loathing of the same-sex-marriage pandemic has gone global. In Paris, a million-man Moral Majority marched in angry protest.

Author Masha Gessen, who has written a book on Putin, says of his last two years, “Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world.”

But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia’s role, in Putin’s words, is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”

Would that be the “chaotic darkness” and “primitive state” of mankind, before the Light came into the world?

 . . .

Source:  http://vdare.com/articles/putin-vs-cultural-marxism-whose-side-is-god-on-now, posted and accessed 5 April 2014

Father Andrew Phillips expands on Mr Buchanan’s ideas:

To speak of a new Cold War between the Western secularist world and the Russian Christian world is absurd; the Western aggression of the Cold War never finishes and has been going on for centuries, at least since the age of Daniel of Galicia (1205–1255) and St Alexander of the Neva (1221-1263). True, sometimes that Cold War heats up, as in the thirteenth century, as in 1612, 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. Or, as in recent years, with the attempted US-funded and EU-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008 and now the US-funded and EU-backed seizure of power by mainly Catholic Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine in 2014.

The roots of this aggression, ‘the ‘Cold War’, were sown over a thousand years ago, when what had been the western part of the Church assumed the ideology of papism. This ideology, known as the filioque and stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Pope of Rome, meant that what had been the western part of the Church became a papocaesarist State, its self-proclaimed task to conquer the whole world. This globalist imperialism was in the sixteenth century inherited by a new vital force in the West, Protestantism, which asserted that all male believers are popes, not just one, so ‘democratising’ the filioque.

Today and since its long-awaited appearance in the 1960s, there is the new vital force of atheist secularism, which asserts that all, believers or not, are popes, so further democratising the filioque and making faith completely irrelevant, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from all human nature, not just from white males, but also from atheists, pagans, homosexuals, transgenders etc. So the process of apostasy that started in Rome long ago spread outside it. Rome was only the carrier of the virus that will lead to final apostasy and the end of the world.

In today’s Ukraine we see how all these forces, Catholicism (in its Uniat form), Protestantism (in the new self-appointed President), secularist atheism (in the ideology that rules all these puppets), and also schismatic and apostatic ‘Orthodoxy’ under the married ‘monk’ Denisenko who concelebrates with Catholics) the apostate front is complete. All the filioquists are together, all united, all ready to accept the rule of Antichrist, as long as the West rewards them with their toy of Ukrainian nationalism.

. . .

Euroatlantic aggression against the unity of Holy Rus means a clear choice between Western Secularism and Orthodox Christianity. Whose side are you on?

Source:  http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/euroatlantic-aggression-against-the-unity-of-holy-rus/, posted 27 March 2014, accessed 29 March 2014

And here is the South, the unfortunate inheritor of the West’s Great Schism from Orthodoxy, yet in many ways striving to escape from that curse, groping about in the darkness for the True Faith and for the life that grows out of it.  Thus her social bond individualism, her agrarianism, her hospitality and kindness, her camp meetings (a sort of pilgrimage), and so forth that reflect Orthodox doctrine. 

But she must make a clean break.  There can be no compromise with falsehood, error, heresy.  She must walk away from the unfortunate Catholic and Protestant distortions of the Faith once given by Christ to his Apostles, and lovingly, gratefully, and humbly embrace Orthodox Christianity.  She must walk away from the corrupt Western nations (the [u]nited States and E.U.) who are ruled by greedy, power-mad corporate owners/banksters and their chosen politicians and technocrats, and toward some place, some ally.  As Dr Joseph Farrell put it,

Secession movements typically require the support of some major power in order to succeed(witness the case of the Crimea and Russia) . . .

Source:  http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/04/spanish-protests-shut-55-banks-venice-votes-secede/, posted 4 April 2014, accessed 7 April 2014

Thus we again implore all those who wish to see an independent, Christian South (or such Southern States as wish to leave the godless rule of Washington City) to form ties of friendship with Russia, who alone doth offer the nations a respite from the wickedness engulfing the world.

Works Cited

Aeschylus.  The Libation-Bearers, in The Oresteian Trilogy.  Vellacott, Philip, trans.  New York, Ny.: Penguin Books, 1983.

Khomiakov, Aleksei.  ‘Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Letter Published by the Archbishop of Paris’. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Bird, Robert, and Boris Jakim, trans. Hudson, Ny.: Lindisfarne Books, 1998.