Europe Betrayed: The Original Sin of the West

The original sin of the West began in Aachen under the Father of ‘Europe’, Charlemagne. His sin was that he wanted to restore the overthrown empire of pagan Rome on the pretext of Christianity. In reality, Charlemagne, who had invented his own form of Christianity and declared all historic Christendom to be heretical, was not the Father of ‘Europe’, but the Father of ‘the West’. He knew that once the elite of Europe had been captured by his sin, then the people of Europe would fall and so become ‘Western’. For Europe is a geographical and ethnic concept, whereas the West is an ideological concept.

Indeed, historically, the West is only a small corner of Europe, which has always tried through repeated, bloody invasions, both military and political, to take over the rest of Europe. Whether by Norman shock-troops, Crusader bandits, Teutonic knights, Napoleon Bonaparte, Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler, or the EU, the West has striven to spread itself all over Europe and the whole world, to ‘Westernise’ others.

It was the West, and not Europe, which undertook a series of apostasies, the Deformation of the eleventh century, which led directly to the Reformation of the sixteenth century, which led to the atheist Revolution in France of 1789. And, exactly five generations later, that in turn led to the twentieth century, which spiritually began in 1914.

The Twentieth Century: 1914, 1939, 1964, 1989.

Western civilisation and culture have been at death’s door for ninety-five years. For Europe seems to have become amnesiac. It has lost virtually all memory of its much earlier history in the unifying Christian Faith in the tribal slaughter of its Civil Wars of the twentieth century. This amnesia which began then marked the real beginning of the twentieth century and was inevitably followed a generation later in 1939 by a new crisis.

Two generations after 1939, the neo-pagan Eastern Empire fell with the Berlin Wall in 1989. As for the Western neo-pagan Western Empire, which had begun its hedonism a generation before in 1964, it is yet to fall, but its end is now only a few years away. For, after nearly a thousand years of apostasies, in 1964 the West definitively put man in the place of God at the centre of the world. Since then it has striven to dilute nearly 2000 years of history into 50 years of infantile decadence. Claiming to inculturate Christianity, it has in fact deculturated Christianity and so repaganised itself.

The Cock Crowed Three Times before the Twentieth Century

Finding its being in Christ alone, the Orthodox Christianity of the first millennium of Western Europe and of all eternity proclaims: I believe, therefore I am.

In the Gospels Peter renounced Christ three times and each time the cock crowed (Matt. 26, 75). Therefore, Christ asked Peter to repent three times, asking him: Lovest thou me? (Jn. 21, 15-17).

So also in Western history, the cock crowed three times, when the West was tested three times to know whether, accepting Christ, it loved God, its neighbour and itself, in accordance with the commandments (Lk. 10, 27).

Renouncing Christ and so finally abandoning the Church in the eleventh century, the West committed deicide, proclaiming: I have replaced God by one man, therefore I am.

Then, in the sixteenth century, the West committed fratricide, proclaiming: I have replaced God by myself, therefore I am.

Then, in the eighteenth century, the age of great spiritual darkness, called ‘the Enlightenment’, in 1789, the West committed suicide in revolutionary atheism, proclaiming: There is no God, therefore I am.

The Cock Crowed Three Times in the Twentieth Century

1789 led directly to the twentieth century, which began spiritually in 1914, exactly five generations later. Then, suicidal atheism developed in three different forms and three more renunciations of Christ took place:

First came the deicide of Communism, exported to Russia, proclaiming: I hate God, therefore I am.

Then came the fratricide of Fascism, remaining in the West, proclaiming: I hate other men, therefore I am.

Then came the greatest illusion of them all, the self-flattering suicide of consumerist narcissism, proclaiming: I love myself, therefore I am.

Under the regime of narcissism the leaders of the Western world flatter themselves with their images, created by public relations propaganda. The neo-pagan Western Emperor, the new false messiah, now called Obama, like his client kings, is financed by borrowing tribute money from his colonies. But the tribute money is running out. Now, at last, having revealed our vices, there is with the fall of mammon the opportunity for repentance from illusion, the opportunity for adversity to reveal our virtues.

Already on the eighth centenary of the West’s sin, in 1854, a real American, Chief Seattle, is said to have prophesied something in the nature of these words: ‘When the last tree has been cut down, when the last river has been poisoned, when the last fish has been caught, then you will know that you cannot eat money’. Whether it was he actually uttered these words, or it was another, they remain true.

Who will Free Europe from the West?

This question is asked: Is Russia in Europe? The question is absurd. We can see the fact that Russia is in Europe by the fact that the geographical centre of Europe is in Carpatho-Russia, the mystical significance of which is still so little understood. Moreover, we can affirm that Russia is Europe. Without Russia, Europe is not. This we saw after 1917. Without Russia, Europe lost its balance and fell into civil war and suicidal chaos, deservedly becoming an American political, economic and cultural colony. The salvation of Europe can only come from inside Europe and only from that part of Europe, which has not yet succumbed to the sickness of ‘the West’. For to free and save Europe from the West, to restore Europe to its rightful mind, is Russia’s task. Whether Russia will prove itself capable of this at present seems most unlikely. And yet if the transformations that have occurred since the fall of the neo-pagan Eastern Empire in 1989 continue for another twenty years, then it will become possible.

Will Russia and then Europe be heroic enough to make the right spiritual and moral choice? We do not know, but if Russia does not prove able to fulfil its destiny and free and save Europe from the West, then Europe’s Western sickness, like Russia’s Western sickness, will prove to be a sickness unto death.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

13/26 August 2009
Leavetaking of the Transfiguration