AN APPEAL TO THE BELIEVERS OF EUROPE:
RETURN TO UNITY AND AN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN EUROPE.
Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross,
and follow me.
St Mark 8, 34
Of all previous attempts to unite Europe, the Europe of Charlemagne was the first example of a perverted Europe...it was the first failure of all the attempts to build a Europe dominated by one people or one empire. The Europe of Charles V, that of Napoleon and that of Hitler, were in fact anti-Europes.
Jacques Le Goff, French medieval historian
In the ninth and tenth centuries, and even in the first half of the eleventh century, the Church does not yet wish to rule over the world and will neither judge nor condemn it...In spite of many temporary deviations, the decisions about the relations of the two powers which were made by the great popes about the year 500 remained in essentials unaltered until the second half of the eleventh century.
Gerd Tellenbach, German medieval historian
Europe was born in the second millennium of the Common Era, not the first.
R.I. Moore, British medieval historian
From AD 200 to 1000, the leadership of worId civilization passed to the East... throughout this period the Byzantine (sic) Empire remained by far the greatest European power and the chief surviving representative of higher culture in the West... It was not until the eleventh century that the religious bond which united East and West was finally destroyed and Western Christendom emerged as an independent entity, separated alike in culture and religion from the rest of the old Roman world.
Christopher Dawson, Roman Catholic philosopher
Everything in the West changed between the end of the eleventh century and the end of the twelfth.
Yves Congar, Roman Catholic theologian
FOREWORD: AN APPEAL
This
historical study shows how historians, philosophers and theologians, English,
French and German, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Protestants, agree with
the Orthodox Christian analysis of Western history. The works of these
respected scholars, cited in our Bibliography, are recent, and can be
consulted at will: much of this study consists of quotations from them,
quotations which could have been a hundred times longer and made the same
point. As can be seen above, we say nothing from ourselves, but simply
cite the facts of history.
Given this, we ask those who still value the word 'Christian' to consider
whether it is now time to throw off the secular aspects of Non-Orthodox
religion, 'to deny themselves and follow' the Saviour. This would mean
returning to the Christian Church and Faith of the first millennium, the
Orthodox Church and Faith. This then is an appeal to the 'small flock'
(Luke 12,32), to the remaining ordinary believers of Western Europe, and
indeed their heirs throughout the Western world, to recognize the historical
truths of Orthodoxy, the Faith that has been persecuted and slandered
in Western Europe for a thousand years by their elites.
At the present time of crisis, as Western Europe lurches towards a thorough-going pagan Constitution, the repentant move towards unity with the Orthodox Church is, we believe, the only way out for the Western world. To throw off the burden of the world, borne for nearly a thousand years, is the only radical way out from the dead end of the world. 'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?' (Mark 8, 36).
THE CHURCH AND THE NON-ORTHODOX WORLD
The (Orthodox) Church stands apart from the Non-Orthodox world, essentially because Orthodox Christianity resists the worldliness inherent in Roman Catholicism/Protestantism. The desire to 'rule over the world', as one of the above-quoted historians has put it, is so inherent there that ordinary Non-Orthodox do not even realize its presence in their inherited religion (1).
The Orthodox Church cannot unite with the inherent secularism of Non-Orthodoxy. The fact is that, in assuming the role of a State as long ago as the eleventh century, the Church in the West absorbed the world, and so Roman Catholicism was born, with its papal armies, Crusades and Inquisitions. Later, the offshoot of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, inherited the selfsame mentality, with its witch-hunts and aggressive cultural missionaries, sponsored by commerce. Conversely, apart from the usual well-known, spiritually irrelevant and corrupt 'representatives' among national elites enticed by power and lucre, living Orthodox Christianity has resisted the State, remaining faithful to the Tradition.
The fact is that in dealing with the State and the world, Orthodox Christianity long ago decided that it would suffer the State and the world. It would Christianize them wherever possible, accepting in full the implications of the Incarnation, calling them to repentance and renewal, but it would not itself become a State, part of the world. As Christ, the Head of the Church, the Body of Christ, says in the Gospel, 'Ye are of this world; I am not of this world' (Jn 8, 23), and as the same disciple whom Christ loved wrote: 'The whole world lieth in wickedness' (1 Jn. 5,19). The German historian, Tellenbach, wrote of the attitude towards the world in pre-mid-eleventh century period in Western Europe thus: 'Man must not oppose God, whether He bless, try or punish, but must accept what He gives with fortitude, and hope for deliverance through grace...Decisive conflicts between the sacramental and the monarchical conceptions of the hierarchy had not yet arisen' (2). In other words, until about 1050, Western Europe was still fundamentally Orthodox Christian.
In the second half of the eleventh century the new, reformed Western elite took the opposite stance. Then, instead of trying to Christianize the State and accept possible suffering, the papacy in Rome became a State, it became the world. So papocaesarism was born, together with its logical outgrowth and ultimate development, Protestantism. As Tellenbach noted over sixty years ago, the so-called Gregorian Reformation of the Church in the West in the second half of the eleventh century led inevitably to revolt and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, giving birth to the modern world (3). Orthodox Christianity calls for a return to the beginning, to Apostolic Christianity, the religion of the Gospel, not of the world, as it is conserved and lived among the remaining ordinary faithful of the (Orthodox) Church to this day. Inevitably, this means that this essential living Orthodox Christianity calls for a return to the beliefs of the West before its secularization in the eleventh century.
True, the seeds of the post-mid-eleventh century world were present in the first millennium, but nothing was inevitable about what happened in the second millennium. The Western elite could have pulled back from the brink right up until the mid-eleventh century - hence the more than symbolic importance of the date of 1054. As the historian R.I. Moore wrote of the Carolingian Empire: 'The seeds of the future were there, of course, as they always are, and had begun to germinate; but they did not grow and mature until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and then not by unaided nature, but because they were arduously and skilfully cultivated' (4).
There is no doubt in the minds of both secular and Church historians that Western Europe as a whole drifted definitively away from the Orthodox Church in the eleventh century. The date of 1054, the date of a single event in the mid-eleventh century, is therefore profoundly symbolic of the whole process of the Western Schism which took place throughout that century, punctuated by significant dates, from 1014, the first singing of the filioque Creed in Rome, to 1095, the start of the First Crusade.
THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: THE EXAMPLE OF ENGLAND
The eleventh century was then characterized by a number of changes which took Western Europe out of the fold of the Church. When exactly they happened, it is impossible to say. As the German historian Tellenbach put it: 'The changes took place at different times in the lands and regions of Western Europe with differing preconditions (5). Historians have noted external changes such as: feudalism with 'encastellation' (the building of castles), and, with this, the development of heavy cavalry (one thinks of the Normans at Hastings), and the development of Frankish armour and arms, such as crossbows, and siegecraft.
This is particularly clear in the English context, where the very few castles before 1066 had been built starting in c 1050 by Normans. These had been invited to England by the half-Norman King, Edward the Confessor, (who, for many Orthodox, is a traitor to the Orthodox English cause). After the Norman invasion and the simultaneous coming of feudalism, the Normans everywhere built castles, which by the year 1100 numbered some 400. The alien, castle-building, armoured cavalry elite oppressed the people, as is recorded in all the chronicles of the time. 'And they filled the whole land with castles. They sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour on the castles; and when the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men' (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1137). Another writer has written of the effect of that occupation on the relations of the English Church with the papacy: 'It was the Norman Conquest, followed by an influx of prelates and monks from the Continent, that exposed the English Church to the reforming spirit of the Gregorian age and the mounting assertion of papal authority in the affairs of local Churches' (6).
Having first oppressed the English (as previously they had persecuted Orthodox in Sicily and southern Italy), the Normans took the same process into Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The incursion of a feudal, castle-building cavalry elite into Ireland in the twelfth century, the immigration of settlers, the foundation of towns and the spread of a new coinage and literature marked the same processes as elsewhere in Western Europe. The old Orthodox Christianity was submerged and discredited by the invaders, who occupied not only lands, but also minds. Here at least the 'Age of the Saints' had come to an end.
Ordinary Western Europeans, though belonging to Latin Christianity, 'were the victims, not bearers, of Latin expansion' (7). The phrase used to justify this imperialism was 'to expand the boundaries of the Church' (7). In fact, it was to destroy the authentic Church. As a contemporary source, speaking of Ireland, said: 'The Anglo-Normans invaded from the desire for 'land or pence, horses, armour or chargers, gold and silver...soil or sod' (7). The invaders justified all their usurpations simply by dubbing their victims as 'pagans'. Such is the basis of the post-Orthodox West and the whole of modern Western society is founded on this.
THE 'FRANKS'
For the Irish, this invasion was called 'the coming of the Franks into Ireland' (8). Indeed, everywhere, these invaders, whatever their nationality, were called Franks. This was especially visible during the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century (9). Both Muslims and Orthodox Christians in the East labelled all those with the mentality of the new West as 'Franks', for they had taken on the poison of the Carolingian Franks. In the same way, in the West, Welsh chronicles of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries speak of the invasions of the Franci, and in Hungary in the twelfth century the same term was used for settlers from the West (10). The same processes were going on everywhere in Europe, from Poland, Prussia and Hungary to Spain.
Thus, in Scotland, a thirteenth century chronicler wrote: 'The more recent Kings of the Scots regard themselves as Franks in stock, manners, language and style, they have pushed the Scots down into slavery and admit only Franks into their household and service' (11). In Portugal, King Alfonso I referred to foreign immigrants as 'Franks', and the same word was used from Poland and Moravia to Constantinople. The term 'Franks' meant aggressive settlers and conquerors from the West. Even as late as the eighteenth century in China, the same word also came to be used for the aggressive, marauding barbarian traders from the West (11).
This all came about through the 'Frankish' takeover of the papacy in the eleventh century. 'While the papacy had enjoyed a position of prestige and centrality in Western Europe since the very birth of official Christianity under Constantine, the means and mechanics supporting the position underwent a transformation during and after the eleventh century. Starting with the reform movement of the middle and later years of that century, papal power became greater' (12). This movement began with the takeover of the papacy under the Frankish aristocrat Bruno of Toul, cousin of Emperor Henry III, who became a bishop in 1026 at the age of 24 and then Pope Leo IX in 1049. He was the pope responsible for the Western Schism of 1054. Presumably this is why his own ruling elite canonized him (13).
As another author has written: 'What led Europe was an inadvertent, rarely conscious, but very real alliance between Europe's aristocracies and the see of Peter' (14). By 'Europe's' aristocracies, the author clearly means 'Frankish' aristocracies - as we have said, not necessarily Frankish in race, but Frankish in spirit. King-making and secular politics were the characteristics of the popes of the second half of the eleventh century: whether it was Pope Leo IX's leading of a papal army in the south of Italy, Pope Alexander II's blessing for the Norman genocide in England, or the election of Rudolf of Swabia as King, instead of Henry IV, by Pope Hildebrand (1073-1085), called Gregory VII (another canonized pope of the Vatican). One of the latter's favourite quotations was: 'Cursed be he who keepeth back his sword from blood' (Jeremiah 48,10) (15). The fact is that the popes of this age were mere Frankish aristocrats themselves, cousins of emperors, kings, dukes and counts, especially from Lorraine, Alsace, the French ('Frankish') lands to the West, the Germanic ('Frankish') lands to the East or the Lombard ('Frankish'), northern Italian lands to the south - the Frankish heartlands.
CENTRALIZATION
The popes of this age were fanatical about the details of cultic and liturgical uniformity, none more so than Pope Hildebrand, Gregory VII. Thus the old Orthodox Mozarabic rite in Spain was ruthlessly suppressed by him and ended by 1081; the ancient Orthodox Ambrosian rite (and clerical marriage) was suppressed in Milan at around the same time; the Slavonic Orthodox liturgy was forbidden in Bohemia. Another of Gregory VII's letters to clergy in Sardinia even urged them to 'follow the custom of the holy Roman Church' and shave off their beards! Any Sardinian churchman who refused to conform was to have his property confiscated (16).
Gregory's ignorance astounds us, for it was he who was failing to follow the Tradition and the bearded Sardinian clergy who were keeping the Tradition. So it was from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries that for the first time papal legates were sent out all over Western Europe, to Ireland, to Spain, to Wales, to Scotland, to Bohemia and to Livonia, where they led armies of mercenaries in warfare. They were the shock-troop agents, enforcing the new, centralized papacy of the second half of the eleventh century.
Of this process the German historian Tellenbach wrote: 'Until the middle of the eleventh century the history of the Roman Church had had a largely provincial character, with occasionally periods of wider significance' (17). And again: 'After the decisive events of Henry III's reign (1039-56) the Roman Church began to extend its influence over the churches in the localities. Only from the time of Leo IX onwards (1049-1054) did this gradually change, when the pope moved from being the spiritual head of the church to being truly its ruler and director. Only exceptionally did popes play a significant role beyond their own region before the middle of the eleventh century. Both the claim and the wish to issue instructions to all churches, not only those in their immediate sphere of influence, was a novelty. The churches, up to then united only in a spiritual fashion, came gradually to be united by the fact that there now existed an instance on earth which commanded and judged. Christ had always been their monarch, the pope now became a representative of the heavenly Lord who was present not just in the sacred mysteries but in real historical time, commanding and demanding obedience' (18).
Further the historian writes: 'Apart from a few episodes, there can be no question, before the middle of the eleventh century, of there having been a planned papal government of the Church which might have intervened even in distant countries' (19). Tellenbach wrote of the possibility of such 'reforms' in the mentality of the first half of the eleventh century thus: 'In the first millennium, by contrast, the notion of altering the universal Church through the planned actions of men was hardly thinkable; such changes were reserved for the guiding hand of Jesus Christ' (20). In other words, the concept of 'reform' was and is alien to the Church of Christ. External reform is only possible in a purely human institution, not in the Divino-Human Body of Christ. There, only inner, spiritual renewal is possible, coming from repentance which is met and fostered by the grace of God, the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.
THE BIRTH OF NON-ORTHODOX EUROPE
One of the first historians in this field writing some eighty years ago, the American Charles Haskins, wrote of the 'renaissance' (= rebirth) of Western Europe in the twelfth century. However, as is clear from what we have written so far, more recent historians have preferred to write of the 'birth' of Western Europe at this time. Moreover, they date it back to the second half of the eleventh century, ultimately tracing the roots of this ideology to Charlemagne.
For instance, the French historian Le Goff describes the characteristics of this birth. He speaks of 'dolorisation', the invention of a religion of suffering and pietism, 'the Jesus cult'. This we can see in the humanistic cult of the crucifixion of a man, human nature, 'Jesus', portrayed as a mere suffering human-being. Beloved of the Western Middle Ages, this cult has recently made its appearance in the film of Mel Gibson. This dwells the whole time on the violence and suffering of the Crucifixion, spending only two minutes on the Resurrection. An Orthodox film would have divided its time into two, half on the Crucifixion, half on the Resurrection, half on the human, half on the divine. The same 'Jesus cult' is beloved of modern-day Evangelicals. The French scholar Le Goff goes on to point out the further developments from this pietism of humanism and from there the exaggerated cult of the Virgin, called Mariolatry (21).
The British historian Moore also speaks of another characteristic - the simultaneous birth of 'a persecuting society' at this time: 'the eleventh and the twelfth centuries saw what has turned out to be a permanent change in Western society' (22). Rebellion and then persecution were the inevitable result of tyrannical Gregorian centralization. Perescution had hardly existed in the decentralized Western Church and its Metropolias of the first millennium. Moore. Who knows of what he speaks, for he is from Northern Ireland, speaks in detail of the persecution of Jews and heretics, beginning in the eleventh century, and of the Inquisition, beginning in the twelfth century.
Indeed, at the end of the eleventh century came the turning-point of the First Crusade, with the massacre of Rhineland Jews in 1096. Moore, the European expert on these events, writes: 'The balance of the evidence is quite firmly that between the seventh and the tenth centuries Christian authority in Western Europe treated Jews notably less harshly than it had done before or would do again; that the Jews were assimilated into Christian society to a considerable degree; that the assimilation was continuing - in some respects right up to the twelfth century; and that it was reversed by the growth of persecution (23). In the same context Le Goff describes the use of torture by the Inquisition, rediscovered in the twelfth century - before this period torture had only rarely been used and only on slaves (24). The latter author concludes, without irony, that the only benefit of the Western barbarian massacres of the Crusades was the discovery by the West of the apricot (25).
This was also the age when the Monastery was replaced by the University, when grace was replaced by law. This was symbolized by the philosophy of the northern Italian, Anselm of Canterbury, 'the Father of Scholasticism', at the very end of the eleventh century and the discovery of the pagan philosophy of Aristotle, quickly incorporated into Western 'theology' in the twelfth century. As the scholastic Abelard wrote in the Prologue to his Sic et Non around 1120: 'The Fathers were guided by the Holy Spirit, but we are not'. And the modern thinker Ivan Iliich wrote: 'In the book of civilization, the monastic page closes and the scholastic page opens in about 1140'.(26)
At this time in the twelfth century, as men lost direct contact with God, theology became an abstract science, a rationalistic philosophy, scholasticism, as is chronicled by the French historian Chenu and the German Tellenbach (27). From about 1140 this scholasticism came to be represented in stone by the new Gothic style of art and architecture starting in the Paris area, 'Frankish art' as it was called (28). This was a universal art, unlike even the previous Romanesque art with all its regional diversity (29). As another author sums up this whole process: 'From around 1050 Rome thus created a new institutional and cultural uniformity in the Western Church (30).
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF EUROPE
It is this process of uniformity which can be called 'the Europeanization of Europe' (31). 'The Europeanization of Europe, in so far as it was the spread of one particular culture through conquest and influence, had its core areas in one part of the Continent, namely in France, Germany west of the Elbe and north Italy, regions which had a common history as part of Charlemagne's Frankish empire. In part the cultural homogenization of Europe was thus a function of the Frankish military hegemony...The Hungarian historian Rigedi writes: 'We maintain that Hungary was Europeanized (europäsiert) in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries''(31).
He continues: 'Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile, a ruler active on another flank of post-Carolingian Europe, the Iberian peninsula, has been characterized as 'anxious to Europeanize his realms', pursuing a programme part of which was the 'Europeanizing of the liturgy'. (Ed. Note: This means the suppression of the Orthodox liturgy). The term crops up too in discussion of the 'modernizing' kings of twelfth-century Ireland. The usage is of course incorrect, if not meaningless, in a strictly geographical sense, since Ireland. Spain and Hungary all form part of the Continent of Europe as defined geographically. Its significance rests rather on the assumption that there was a culture...that had its centres in the old Frankish lands, that was Latin and Christian, but was not synonymous with Latin Christendom'. (32). We have picked out the above phrase in bold, because it demonstrates our point, that Latin Christendom only later came to mean Roman Catholic, originally it meant Latin Orthodox.
Thus the early Middle Ages had a diversity of rich, local cultures. The story of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries relates how that diversity was overtaken by uniformity. It is how one culture and society attained hegemony over others. In so doing, it naturally met with opposition. Knights were the military wing of the operation to destroy this opposition. The late Oxford historian, Sir Richard Southern, wrote that the 'slow emergence of a knightly aristocracy' was a social revolution (33). As 'Frankish' knights and Latin clergy took their imperialism into different parts of the world, resistance was not lacking, and not only in the Eastern Orthodox world. As we have already related above, there was resistance in the West too. Everywhere these conquests were a loss and a tragedy. Thus, the Welsh cleric Rhigyfarch, a witness to the Norman invasion of south Wales in the late eleventh century, echoing the earlier laments of the English from 1066 on, wrote:
'The people and the priest are despised
By the word, heart and deeds of the Frenchmen.
They burden us with tribute and consume our possessions.
One of them, however lowly, shakes a hundred natives
With his command and terrifies them with his look.
Alas, our fall, alas the deep grief' (34).
Thus, all the native peoples of Europe, subject to the violence of the military and ecclesiastical aristocracy of the new Western world, lamented. Ordinary Western people were the first victims of the new system forced on them by their own corrupt and semi-barbarian military and ecclesiastical elite.
THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN WORLD
In this way, a uniform culture was spread by force all over Western Europe. Imposed homogeneity naturally met with resistance and cultural division, a theme familiar to those who know modern history: modern Western racism and colonial exploitation were born in the medieval world. The conquerors of Mexico knew the problem of the Muslims of Spain, for all the societies of Europe had had wide experience of colonial enterprises long before 1492. As for later colonists - the planters of Virginia had already been planters of Ireland and the Protestant imperialism of the nineteenth century like that of Livingstone in Africa, merely continued the medieval heritage.
As R.I. Moore has written: 'It was Europe and the 'neo-Europes' it strewed around the world that upset the equilibrium between the traditional civilizations and set about reducing the world to a single social and economic regime...The beginning of 'European supremacy' has been dated variously...In reality it begins here in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the birth of Europe itself' (35). Thus, Europe's colonization of the Middle East with their Latin States and the fake Latin 'Patriarchs' in the twelfth century Crusades was nothing new. The Crusaders' forebears had already practised their oppression in Sicily and the British Isles, in Spain and Hungary in the eleventh century. Even before this Crusader Europe, an initiator of conquest, colonization and cultural transformation, had been the product of one.
Conquest, colonization and catholicization/protestantization brought the techniques of settling a land and maintaining an alien cultural identity, they brought the institutions and outlook to confront and repress native cultures - law and 'religion', guns and ships. The Europeans who sailed to the Americas, Asia and Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came from a society that had long been a colonizing society. In the sixteenth century Spanish and Portuguese bandits carried out genocide in what is now Latin America and in the seventeenth century Western 'missionaries' set up fake 'Uniat' imitations of Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe and later in the Middle East to hoodwink the simple.
In the following centuries the 'Franks' of Western Europe enslaved Africans, with the keen co-operation of Muslim Arabs and pagan Africans themselves, in the nineteenth century a mixed bag of Western Europeans ('Franks' again) massacred the native inhabitants of North America. It did not matter, it was all in the name of 'Western civilization'. Spanish oppression in the Philippines, British imperial oppression of China in the 'Opium Wars', and oppression from the Indian subcontinent to the Carribean, from Tasmania to the Sudan, was of the same sort. And a little over 100 years ago, Spanish imperialism invented the modern concentration camp in Cuba, which British imperialism quickly imitated in the their genocide in the Boer War in South Africa. However, they were all merely imitating the 'Indian' concentration camps, called 'reserves', in North America, which in term imitated the Hanoverian 'clearances' in eighteenth-century Scotland, which in term imitated the massacres of Charlemagne among the Saxons a thousand years before.
More recently, in the 1950s, the British Empire massacred 100,000 Kikuyu people in the Mau-Mau bid for freedom in Kenya; in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the French Empire massacred over 2,000,000 Malgache, Vietnamese and Algerians in their bloody 'decolonization'. The Portuguese Empire in Africa, the Italian in Ethiopia, the Belgian in Central Africa, the Dutch in the East Indies all did the same. Austria-Hungary did not take part - it was too busy massacring mainly Slavs in the Carpathians and the Balkans, neatly creating the First World (= European) War. Neither did Germany, now under Prussian leadership, take part. It was busy spreading bloodshed throughout Europe itself, continuing the historic work of Charlemagne in Saxony and the 'Teutonic' Knights of Prussia in north-eastern Europe, In any case Germany saw its own non-European colonies confiscated by greedy British and French colonialism.
Even more recently, fifty years after the record bloodletting of Hitler's new European War against 'subhumans', 'Untermenschen', Slavs, Jews Gypsies, all the Non-Roman-Catholics and Non-Protestants, the processes have continued: the Anglo-American elites have bombed, terrorized, invaded and occupied Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, massacring the Non-Roman Catholics and the Non-Protestants - all those beyond the pale of Western 'civilization'. As we have shown above, there is nothing new in any of this, or the many other examples that could be quoted to illustrate the barbarity of Western Imperialism. However, the first victims of Western or 'European' barbarity were ordinary Western Europeans themselves, victims of their power-mad elites - starting in the eleventh century with the ideology from Rome. So, nearly a thousand years ago, began the tragic modern history of Western Europe.
AFTERWORD: AN APPEAL
We appeal to you:
It is time for you, the believers of the West, to 'unfrank' yourselves, to free yourselves from the Frankish mentality of conquest and colonization, to return to the Christian Faith and Tradition of the first millennium. The Roman Catholic academic Christopher Dawson wrote correctly: 'We have lost unity by departing from God. The more we make our religion a human thing, the more deeply it is involved in the temporal, this-worldly sphere, the more we lose the spirit of unity. Schism is the breach which results from the collision between the spirit of the age and the spirit of God' (36).
We appeal to you:
It is time for you in the West to concentrate on your own salvation, instead of spreading exploitation around the globe, the meaning of the word 'globalization'. Only a radical solution, a return to the roots of Europe, can now save Europe from itself. We conclude this appeal to you with a summary of the words of the same Roman Catholic philosopher of history, written some three generations ago, but still true today:
We appeal to you:
'Europe stands at the parting of the ways. Science alone is not enough...the civilization of Western Europe is faced with inescapable alternatives; it must either abandon the Christian tradition and with it faith in progress and humanity, or it must return, consciously and deliberately, to the religious foundation on which those ideas were based...The achievements of material progress - seem already to have carried us nearer to the abyss of disaster than to the mountain of salvation' (37).
At this critical point in Western history there can be no clearer call to Western repentance and a return, 'consciously and deliberately to the religious foundation', to unite yourselves with Orthodoxy and the Church of Christ.
Fr Andrew
14/27 March 2005
Sunday
of St Gregory Palamas
St Benedict of Nursia, Abbot of Monte Cassino, 'Patron of Europe'
Concise Bibliography:
Bartlett
Robert, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change
950-1350, Penguin 1994
Brown Peter, The Rise of Western Christendom, Blackwell 1996
Chenu M.D., La Théologie au XII siècle, Paris 1957
Delort Robert (Ed), La France de l'An Mil, Paris 1990
Fletcher Richard, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity
371-1386, Harper Collins 1997.
Fontana Josep, The Distorted Past: A Reinterpretation of Europe, London
1995.
Haskins C.H., The Renaissance of the XII Century, Harvard 1927
Lawrence C.H. (Ed), The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages,
Sutton 1999
Le Goff Jacques L'Europe Est-Elle Née au Moyen Âge?, Paris
2003
Maalouf Amin, Les croisades vues par les Arabes, La barbarie franque en
Terre sainte, Paris 1983
Moore R.I., The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance
in Western Europe 950-1250, Blackwell 1987
Moore R.I., The First European Revolution c.970-1215, Blackwell 2000
Mundy John, Europe in the High Middle Ages, London 1991
Munier Charles, Le Pape Léon IX et la Réforme de l'Église
1002-1054, Strasbourg 2002
Romanides Fr John, Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine, Holy Cross
Orthodox Press 1981
Southern Sir Richard, The Making of the Middle Ages (MMA), Hutchinson
1953
Southern Sir Richard, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages,
Penguin 1970
Tellenbach Gerd, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the
Investiture Contest (CSCS), (Trans.), Blackwell 1940
Tellenbach Gerd, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early
Twelfth Century (CWE), (Trans.), Cambridge 1993
Wolff Philippe, L'Éveil Intellectuel de l'Europe, Paris 1971
Notes:
1)
Chronicled by Le Goff, pp.198-203.
2) Tellenbach, CSCS, pp.68-69
3) Tellenbach, CSCS, p.xvi-xvii
4) Moore, The First European Revolution,
p.2
5) Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe
(CWE), P. 135
6) Lawrence, p.ix
7) All three quotations are taken from Bartlett,
pp.21-23
8) Bartlett, p.95
9) Le Goff, p.16
10) Bartlett, pp.103-4
11) Bartlett, p.105
12) Bartlett, p. 243
13) Munier
14) Mundy
15) Bartlett, p.260
16) Bartlett, p.249
17) Tellenbach, CWE, p.185
18) Tellenbach, CWE, p.305
19) Tellenbach, CWE, p.22
20) Tellenbach, CWE, p.160
21) Le Goff, pp.105-6. See also Southern,
MMA, pp.234-238
22) Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society
(FPS), p.5
23) Moore, FPS, pp.88-89 and also p.29
24) Le Goff, p.117
25) Le Goff, p.132. see also the work of
Amin Maalouf, who also recounts the cannibalism of the Crusaders.
26) Quoted in Le Goff, p.169
27) Tellenbach, CWE, p.321
28) Le Goff, p.179
29) Le Goff, p.191
30) Bartlett, p.250
31) Bartlett, p.269. See our own 'The Westernisation
of England', in Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition, 1983.
32) Bartlett, p.270
33) Moore, The First European Revolution
(FER), p.4. See Southern, MMA, pp.110-111
34) Quoted in Bartlett, p.312
35) Moore, FER, pp.197-8
36) Christopher Dawson, Unpublished notes
for the chapter The Disintegration of Western Civilization in The Judgement
of the Nations, to be found in his biography A Historian and His World
by Christina Scott, London 1984
37) Review of Christopher Dawson's book Progress
and Religion by Vera Brittain in Time and Tide, 17 May 1929
