Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Offsite Post: ‘Second Thoughts about Charlemagne’

 

‘Harmonica’ has been writing some good essays on Christianity, heathenism, and Europe that have become necessary as apostasy spreads over the West.  The mentioning of Charlemagne got things a bit offtrack, however.  The key passage is this one, from Part 3 of the series:

‘The real origins of the West do not reside in Plato’s Athens, but rather in Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire. It was at this point where all three of the West’s major influences, the Classical world, Christianity, and Germanic culture, all cohesively came together.’

In a sense, he is correct:  The founding of the Carolingian Empire was the beginning of something new, but not in the positive sense – rather, in the sense of a deviation from what is true and right.  For Charlemagne swerved away from universal Christian teaching in two major ways, both of which have led the West to the decrepit state she is in now.  First, he rejected the decision of the Seventh Ecumenical (Universal) Council of 787 A.D., which upheld the veneration of icons of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the saints and angels.  Second, he unlawfully modified the Nicene Creed, so that the Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father and the Son, rather than simply from the Father as the original version approved by the Second Ecumenical Council (+381) reads.

By rejecting the Seventh Council at the Frankfurt Synod (+794), Charlemagne rejected an essential teaching about Jesus Christ, rejected His full humanity.  In rejecting the veneration of Christ in icons, he belittled the human nature of Christ.  But the Lord Jesus, being fully God and fully man, is 1) able to be depicted in icons, mosaics, etc., and 2) receives honor when men and women venerate His holy image.  This distortion of belief and practice by Charlemagne disincarnates Christ, separates us from Him by making Him a shadowy ghost somewhere up in the heavens rather than the God-man Whom we may see, taste, touch, kiss, etc.  These falsehoods that have uglified Christ turn people away from Christianity and cause them to seek out pagan alternatives.

But this is not his most serious error.  His addition of the Filioque (‘and the Son’) to the Nicene Creed, which deformed the true Apostolic teaching of the Holy Trinity, is what has truly devastated the West.  Dr Joseph Farrell in the foreword to his magnum opus God, History, and Dialectic:  The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences goes into some of the details.  What follows are a just a few of the highlights:


These essays are about the Two Europes and the Three Trinities on which they are based.  The first Trinity is the Holy Trinity of classical Christian doctrine, uncorrupted by its Augustinian formulation, the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.  As the first term of the second Trinity is St. Augustine of Hippo’s Dialectical Formulation of the Holy Trinity; as the second term of the second trinity is the History which that dialectical formula-tion moulded and shaped, and as the third term of the second trinity are the divisions which resulted from the application of Augustine’s trinitarian dialectics in History, the resulting schisms of “Europe” into First Europe, Second Europe, and Russia.  The causes for the Second Europe’s tripartite division of History into its Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Ages is thus to be credited to St. Augustine’s dialectical formulation of the Trinity.  This transub-stantiation of the Trinity from a revealed Mystery to a dialectical deduction, and finally, to a dialectical process at work within History is simply unintelligible without Augustine.   In the thirteenth century, Joa-chim of Floris’ Age of the Father, Age of the Son, and (coming) Age of the Spirit, or Petrarch’s or Gibbon’s Golden Age, Dark Age, and Renaissance, or Hegel’s well-known Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, or Comte’s “superstitious, metaphysical, and scientific” periods, and finally, our own superficially academic and objective divisions of Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern “History” are but tired exhausted reworkings  of the original heresy which split the Latin Church from Eastern Orthodoxy and created the Two Europes.   The Second Europe’s historiography, even in its most avowedly secular form, Marxism, is thus one of many logical implications and inevitabilities of the Augustinizing of doctrine which took place from the fifth to the ninths centuries in the Christian West.

 . . .

The rest is here:

https://identitydixie.com/2023/05/01/second-thoughts-about-charlemagne/

A somewhat different version is here:

https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/globalists-obsession-charlemagne

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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