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.
Run
to your true homeland, Southron.
Holy
Saints of the Isles, pray for us sinners at the South!
Icon
at http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/91953.htm,
opened 14 Oct. 2016
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the
South!
Anathema
to the Union!
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