Þe
Technocrats are fairly far along in turning Modern Man into, as Andrew Lytle
calls him, Momentary Man - one who lives only for present pleasures with no
thought for what came before or what will come hereafter. This is precisely the model of man we must
turn from in order to live a life that is more than a gratification of the
flesh, which is death. The best thing in
this life, the most beautiful, is man filled with the Holy Ghost, man who is so
pure that he reveals the wonderful Light of the Spirit that fills him and is
joined with him. Matter and ghost
together, not sundered as latter day false teachers tell us it must be, whether
with Church and state, work and faith, God and His creation, etc.
We
must recover the truths of the past like these if we would live rightly and
well, if we would experience a foretaste of the Kingdom of God
here on earth while we work out our salvation.
We must recover the truths of the past if the South is to become truly
herself, to attain to the goal the Lord has set before us: the likeness of the
forepattern of the heavenly Souð that the Lord God made when he called us into
being as a people.
Father
Andrew Phillips speaks of this work and what it entails below. In a future post, we will look in more detail
at how this work could manifest itself in the South.
The
eleventh century made the distinction between the secular and the
ecclesiastical fundamental to European society and culture for the first time
and permanently. Since this distinction 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. Our history has been
written by the victors in the struggle to bring this social order into being,
in the certainty that their victory was right, and because it was right,
inevitable. By the middle of the twelfth century the victors dominated the
record almost entirely and their spiritual descendants occupied the commanding
heights of European historiography until the Enlightenment, and of much of
European education, including higher education, until well into the twentieth
century.
The
First European Revolution c. 975-1215, R.I. Moore, Pp. 12-13
Introduction:
A Spiritual Pilgrimage
I
am one of ‘Europe’s children’, one of those who in the second half of the
twentieth century ‘remembered’, first by instinct and then by knowledge, ‘that
it might have been otherwise’ in Europe. In
other words, I made a spiritual pilgrimage to the roots of Europe
and found Another Europe. This was made possible firstly by the fact that I had
been born into a family linked with farming in the English countryside, so into
the most traditional of backgrounds. This took me back beyond the little that
those in the big towns were allowed to know, especially those uprooted in
unEnglish London,
back to the great realm of lost knowledge. Secondly, with shock my father, a
soldier of the Second World War, also told me in childhood what he had seen of
the unjust way that the imperialist Norman British Establishment behaved in
Egypt and in other colonies, a way completely at odds with the far older,
neighbour-loving, Christian traditions of popular England. All this gave me a
sense of the beyond, a sense of piercing the veil beyond the present and
superficial, getting through to the essence and roots of things, and also to a
sense of my own destiny.
The
Consequence of the Sense of Beyond
The
sense of the beyond came to me in my discovery of the Old Saints of England,
who had lived locally. Their names in some form or other had been passed down
in local place names, which is how I first came to hear of them, and yet their
lives and feats had been made into foolish legends or else wholly forgotten:
Felix, Cedd, Botolph, Audrey, Osyth, Albright, Edmund, Alfred and many others
who witnessed to holiness, that which was quite unknown to the England of the
present, meaning that all manner of charlatan could claim to be holy without
being so. I noticed that these Old Saints had all lived long before the Middle
Ages, itself a period long before the rapidly disappearing Protestant present
of fifty years ago. And then I discovered at the age of twelve that that past
was still alive in spirit in Orthodox Christian Russia and indeed in all the
other much smaller and captive Local Orthodox Churches. At that time, however,
the Russian Orthodox Church was Herself captive to an atheist regime, the
ultimate, fully anti-Christian result of the spiritual degeneration of the
Western world which had first begun to lose its way precisely by forgetting its
saints, its Felixes, Cedds, Botolphs, Audreys, Osyths, Albrights, Edmunds,
Alfreds and many others.
The
Double Restoration
Therefore
it has somehow been my calling, obviously in a very, very modest way, to help
contribute to a double restoration. Firstly, there has been the restoration,
contributed to by so many, of the veneration of those Old Saints, not only of
Old England but of all Old Europe. And secondly, especially in the last
twenty-five years since the slow but long hoped-for resurrection of Russia
began, and again in a very, very modest way, to help contribute from outside
Russia to the restoration, contributed to by so many others who have played
far, far more important roles, of the Centre of the Orthodox Church in Russia.
This has meant struggling for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy against all
deviations to left and right, both inside the Russian Church
and in the other Local Churches. And this has also meant defending the
Incarnation of Orthodoxy into life, both inside Russia and also in other lands,
through the preparation and hope for the restoration of the Christian Emperor,
the Tsar. For, since our Faith is not some private, individualistic,
Protestant-style fantasy, this incarnational public restoration is the only
thing that stands between us and the apocalyptic End of the World.
Conclusion:
Hope Against Hope
I
have lived and fought for the Church
of God, quite naturally
centred outside the secularist Anti-Europe which in its anti-Christian
delusions so fears, hates and tries to destroy the Centre of the Church. I have
done this so that ‘it might be otherwise’. I have challenged the victors and
their spiritual descendants, the historiographers, who have supported that
false and secularist millennial social order. In the certainty that their
victory was not only wrong, but also not at all inevitable, I therefore
venerate the Saints of Old Europe and honour all the others for whom it was
otherwise. I have struggled to reverse the temporary, though millennial,
victory of their Anti-Europe and unfolded the vision that it once was and again
shall be ‘otherwise’. For in the third millennium the revolutionary New Europe,
that is, the second millennium Anti-Europe presaged by Charlemagne in Aachen, may yet be
overthrown. Thus, first millennium Old Europe can be spiritually restored
through the Church of God in Europe, made
possible as a Metropolitan extension of the Christian Empire of a restored Holy
Rus.
Source: ‘The Restoration of Europe and of Russia’, Orthodox
England
events ‘blog, http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/the-restoration-of-europe-and-of-russia/,
posted 6 May 2015, accessed 29 May 2015
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