Confiteri: The Saints and the Spiritual Health of a Nation

Everyday in the West we witness what ghostly (spiritual) sickness looks like. But what does ghostly health look like in a nation? One of the signs is the presence of saints, past and present, and the veneration of those saints who have forthfared, men and women who have acquired actual holiness by union with God, not the hologram of holiness in Protestantism or the second-hand holiness of created grace of Roman Catholicism. That the South and other Western countries do not give birth to saints and have forgotten about those of former times is a sign of how far from the Orthodox Faith they have fallen. Father Andrew Phillips again has some good words for us:

Q: Fr Andrew, when did you become interested in the Local Saints?

A: Almost exactly fifty years ago when I was nine years old, at school I read about the saintly Alfred the Great and did a child’s project on him. From here I began enquiring about nearby places that commemorated such saints. Near where I lived there was a little place named after St Albright (Ethelbert + 794) and the town of St Osyth (+ c.700), the town of Bury St Edmunds (St Edmund + 869), the town of Ely (St Audrey + 679) and Felixstowe (St Felix + 647) and a railway station named after St Botolph (+ 680). However, as a child, all I could do was ask questions of adults and wonder who these men and women had been and why they were called saints, who must have been great because 1300 years later people still remembered them in place names.

The year after that, when I was ten years old, there was the 900th anniversary of the so-called Battle of Hastings. I understood that something catastrophic had happened then, which had destroyed and buried a whole, mysterious English Christian Civilization together with all these saints and holiness. And that was kept secret.

It was only in my teens that I began reading and wondering why exactly these saints had been forgotten and hidden and how a whole new layer of unsaintliness and even anti-saintliness had covered them over, obscuring them. The other question that I asked myself was why there were no longer any saints, no new saints, only these ancient ones. The source of holiness had clearly dried up. No-one was interested in holiness any more. We now lived in a different Civilization, with different values, alien to me. Why? That was a question that no-one around me could answer, so I read and understood that it was because the Church, the source of all holiness, had been lost. Without the Church there is no holiness, no saints, because only the Church is Holy.

Q: How did the Church lose the memory of these saints?

A: The memory of major or international Orthodox Saints of the West has never been lost by the Church: for example, many of the Roman martyrs like St Tatiana or St Anastasia and others like St Alexis, St Justin Martyr, St Irinaeus of Lyon, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose of Milan, St John Cassian, St Martin of Tours, St Leo the Great, St Gregory the Dialogist and St Martin of Rome have always been well-known and always been in the Church calendar. But the local Western saints, commemorated only in certain limited regions or even individual villages in Western Europe, were lost, quite simply for geographical reasons. When Orthodox no longer lived locally, then there was simply no-one left to venerate them and their memory was increasingly lost.

Q: Did Catholics not venerate them then?

A: Only to a very small extent; they had largely replaced the saints with new individuals, philosophers and the spiritually deluded, Anselms, Bernards, Dominics, Teresas and what have you. In other words, they replaced the first millennium with the second, that is, they replaced Orthodoxy with Catholicism. For Orthodox these new figures are not saints, since they have a quite alien mentality to that of the Church. Here is the reason why today we know so little about most of the saints – they were forgotten or their real Lives were replaced by false lives, legends and folklore. Even today you can go to Irish villages and instead of the local sixth-century Irish hermit being commemorated, you will find that the local church is dedicated to Bernadette and has a grotto with a statue. A completely alien mentality.

As for the Protestants, they of course completely denied the saints in their general rejection of even the concept of holiness and ascetic life. Nowadays, the ever more protestantized Catholics have stopped venerating the relics of the saints; for instance, in Bari in Italy, it is only Russian Orthodox who venerate St Nicholas, the Catholics have forgotten him. Relics in Catholic churches are kept tucked away in glass boxes in accessible places. And if you go to the Vatican and ask to venerate the relics of St Peter, they will tell you that you have to send a letter asking for permission three weeks in advance! They have lost it.

. . .

Source: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/91953.htm, opened 31 March 2016

Without the Orthodox Church and her holy saints, Western Europe and her daughter countries around the world have taken on a different character:

Who are the great historical figures of Western Europe who define its identity? The answers of the secular world to this question are quite different from those of the Church. The Western secular world exalts secular figures like Charlemagne, Charles V, or Napoleon as “great Europeans”. But all three of these left Europe full of graves. Indeed, Charlemagne and Charles V were renowned for their massacres and, as for Napoleon, he declared that he would have had Christ hanged as a fanatic.

The catalogues of the Church exclude all such tyrants, for the true identity of Western Europe is defined not by them, but by the thousands upon thousands of Western Saints. Here we have no space to mention the many amongst them who achieved only local fame, but we can at least mention some of the greatest, who obtained international honor.

. . .

Source: Fr Andrew Phillips, http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/64458.htm, opened 20 March 2016

He goes on to list many of them. Here are just a few:

Thirdly, after these martyrs who sowed the seeds of the Church, there came others to sow and then harvest. There came Church Fathers such as St. Hilary of Poitiers († c.368), St. Ambrose of Milan († 397), the Church writers Blessed Jerome of Stridon († 420) and Blessed Augustine of Hippo († 430), Fathers such as St. John Cassian (†435), St. Vincent of Perins (†450), St. Leo the Great (†461), and later St. Gregory the Great († 604) and St. Martin I († 655). And we should not fail to remember one who, though not a Church Father, is a great confessor who shone forth in Rome, St. Alexis († 5th century), the Man of God.

Similarly there are the great monastic founders and organizers of the Church, especially in heathen northwest Europe. For instance, in Gaul there were St. Martin of Tours († 397), who inspired St. Ninian († 432) in Pictish Scotland and St. Patrick in Ireland († c.461). In Italy, there was the great St. Benedict of Nursia († c.550). In Frankish Gaul there were St. Remigius (Remi) (†553), who baptized Clovis, St. Germanus of Paris (†561), St. Eloi († 660) and St. Peger († 679). In Iberia, there were St. Leander of Seville († c.601), St. Isidore of Seville († 636), St. lldefonsus (Alphonso) of Toledo († 666) and St. Julian of Toledo († 690). On the Germanic Marches there are also two great Apostles of the Lowlands, St. Lambert († c.705) and St. Hubert of Maastricht (+ 727).

For the last one thousand years, the West, and America in particular, sundered from the Orthodox Faith, has been doing its best to fulfill the expectations of all the old wise men of the world:

. . .

It is only natural that “America” and “Mo-Uru” have a direct relationship to the myth of Atlantis, the paleo-continent about which Solon, Plato, and many before and after them spoke. Atlantis was the Western, sacred continent upon which a spiritual civilization flourished only to be destroyed as a result of a great cataclysm and flood. The death of the continent is most often described as comprising several stages. After the sinking of the mainland located to the West of Eurasia and Africa, for some time after separate islands in the North Atlantic were preserved on which the last tribes of the Atlantians were concentrated, the carriers of the ancient tradition. In Wirth’s opinion, Mo-Uru was such a remnant of Atlantis which in turn came to be flooded only much later, perhaps a few millennia following the main cataclysm.

Judging by everything, the American continent was not the westernmost continent in sacred geography as Atlantis was, but rather its further-Western “continuation.” In other words, America was “beyond Atlantis”, the lands located “on the other side of the West.” It is possible that the sacred, symbolic location of America explains the disturbing secrets associated with it in the sacred geography of Eurasia’s traditional civilizations.

According to this sacred geography, located in the West is a “Green Country,” the “Land of the Dead,” or some kind of quasi-material world resembling Hades or Sheol. This is the country of dusk and dawn in which there is no escape for mortals and whom only the initiated can reach. It is believed that the name Greenland (literally “Green Land”) refers to this same symbolic complex. But this “Green Country” is not Atlantis (and not even Mo-Uru!). This has to be one laying even further West as the “world of death,” the “kingdom of shadows.” And it is thus the supernatural dimension of the American continent which is quite miraculously revealed in such a, at first glance, banal thing as the dollar sign. Rene Guenon once noted that this symbol on American money is the graphic simplification of the sacred seal found on ancient coins of the Mediterranean zone. Originally, the two vertical bars were depictions of the two “pillars of Hercules” which, according to legend, stand in the far West beyond the Gibraltar Strait. The loop on this mark was once a slogan with the symbolic inscription “nec plus ultra”, which literally means “onward to nowhere.” Both of these symbols were meant to mark the border, or the Western limit of human sacred geography beyond which were found “inhuman worlds.” This “border” symbol, which indicates that it is impossible to go beyond the Gibraltar, paradoxically became the financial emblem of America, the country lying “beyond the borders” precisely “where it is impossible to go,” where the inscription on the original dollar sign categorically prohibited travel. It is here that the “otherworldly” symbolism of America appears, revealing the shady, forbidden sacred-geographical aspects of human civilization.[36]

In this view, Columbus’ newfound discovery of the American continent bears a rather sinister meaning, as it signifies the emergence of “sunken Atlantis” on the horizon of history. But not even Atlantis itself, but its “shadow,” its negative continuation of the symbolic West to the point of the “world of the dead.” It is quite characteristic in this regard that this “new discovery” temporally coincided with the beginning of the severe decline of European (and pan-Eurasian) civilization, which rapidly began to lose its spiritual, religious, qualitative, and sacred principles from this time on.

On a cultural, philosophical level, it is America that went on to become the perfect projection of purely profane, atheistic, and poly-atheistic utopias. Social models based on purely human rationality, beginning with Thomas Moore, increasingly settled on this continent.

Here once again, we see how it is not only the “unexplored” quality of these lands rendering it favorable for the realization of utopia, but also the archetypes of the “land of the dead where eternal peace and order reigns” and the image of the “green country” of the West that influenced the choice of this geographical space.

The historical cycle of America, its rise from the watery depths as the “New Atlantis,” can be likened not to the true and risen[37] return of the “golden age”, but to the chimerical, fake, and illusory bearing the noxious smell of a continental grave.

. . .

Source: Alexander Dugin, http://4pt.su/en/content/america-green-country, opened 20 Aug. 2016

But this does not have to be, not for the South and not for any Western European country. We may take England for an ensample:

. . . Norman-mindedness means turning everything upside down. With no interest in inward life and inward values, the Norman mentality, as we have seen above, prefers invasion, occupation and desecration, externals, pomp and ceremony, outward ‘niceness’, academic theories and fantasies, that is, spiritual castration. Now, at long last, over the last fifty years since the 900th anniversary of the Norman Occupation in 1966, there has been a revival of the veneration of the English saints; we are at last de-Normanizing, reversing the ills of invasion and occupation.

For example, in the last fifty years holy relics have been returned to the Church, like those of St Edward the Martyr, some of those of St Alban have gone back to St Albans and some of those of St Edmund have gone back to Bury St Edmunds. Pilgrims go to St Eanswythe in Kent, St Botolph in Suffolk, St Walstan in Norfolk, St Frideswide in Oxfordshire and St Bertram in Staffordshire and many others. Why? Because today there are Orthodox pilgrims who want to venerate the saints, to ask for their prayers, who compose services to them and paint icons of them. Many of these pilgrims are English, many others are Russian. Thus, there is a service to St Edward the Martyr and an akathist to St Audrey of Ely in Slavonic. Icons of some fifty of these saints have been painted, services have been composed to them, individually and collectively, their feasts are celebrated.

More than this, there have been miracles. For example, St John of Beverley. St Morwenna of Cornwall and St Birinus of Dorchester have all shown their presence to the devout in the places where their relics lie. St Wite of Dorset, whose relics have remained in place all these centuries, is venerated for her miracles. St Nectan and St Edward the Martyr have worked miracles of healing and St Edmund has shown a light in the sky where he was martyred. As for the feast day of St Audrey of Ely, 23 June, it was marked by the Brexit vote, recalling that Ely was one of the very last bastions of Englishness against the Norman occupiers and desecrators, whom we shall yet defeat. If veneration grows, we can expect more miracles, which will profoundly transfigure national life for the better, gradually freeing us from the age-long curse of the Norman Yoke.

Source: Fr Andrew Phillips, http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/the-saints-have-been-woken/, opened 14 Oct. 2016

If any still think veneration of the saints a little thing, here is one more quote from Fr Andrew to consider:

Q: What is the importance of the venation of these saints?

A: The veneration of these saints means the reintegration and reincorporation of Western people into the holiness of the Church. That is spiritually significant, not only personally, but nationally. There can be no salvation for the separated Western world until this happens. Eschatologically, it is part of the gathering in of the Church before the end, the coming together of the Church in heaven, the saints, and the Church on earth, us.

Source: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/91953.htm

Run to your true homeland, Southron.

Holy Saints of the Isles, pray for us sinners at the South!