ROME AND THE ORTHODOX WORLD VIEW:
WITH CHRIST OR WITH THE BARBARIANS?
Europe will one day have to lose the Christian faith in order to
appreciate what it has lost.
Kierkegaard
Introduction:
The Fall of Rome
In the year 476 the ‘last’ Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the barbarians under Odoacer. Although the ‘Fall of Rome’ is traditionally dated from that year, the date is largely meaningless. Why? Firstly, because Rome had virtually been under barbarian control ever since the barbarians had crossed the Rhine in 406, making the Western Empire into a battlefield of warring tribes. Secondly, because the supposed ‘last Roman Emperor’, in fact a mere puppet, was himself of barbarian ancestry. And thirdly, and above all, because the real Rome, ‘the Eternal City’, fell neither in the fifth century, nor in the fifteenth century, nor even in the twentieth century. Indeed, it even now exists.
New Rome and its Fall, Engineered by the Usurpers of Old Rome
Yes, it is true that the historic Rome in Italy fell into the hands of the barbarians in 476. However, some one hundred and fifty years before this, in 330, the Capital of the Roman Empire, which was then about to become a Christian Empire, had been moved. It went from Old Rome, with all its pagan associations, to the east and a small port called Byzantium. This New Rome very soon became known as Constantinople, after the bilingual Emperor Constantine who had ordered its removal. Thus, the ‘Fall of Rome’ was in reality no more than the temporary loss of some outlying Western provinces of the Empire.
The name Constantinople, City of Constantine, an amalgam of Latin and Greek (Constantinus and polis), was a fitting name for the New Christian Rome and its Christian civilization. Equally fitting was its position, on the very edge of Europe, looking across the Bosphorus towards Asia, from where the faith of Christ had come. It was therefore also fitting that its symbol should have been the double-headed eagle, looking east and west, towards the then only existing world civilizations, in Europe and Asia (1). Thus, the pagan name ‘Byzantium’ swiftly fell into disuse, until it was revived by French secular humanists of the eighteenth century ‘Enlightenment’ (= Endarkenment), who used the name to discredit the Church of God.
As for the barbarians who had invaded the Western provinces, they became at least nominally Christian. Thus, the Western provinces continued to look to New Rome as their Capital until the middle of the eighth century. Then, isolated by Mohammedan control of the Mediterranean, the nominal Western Christian elite yielded to its underlying temptation to ‘renew’ pagan Old Rome and so steal its ‘glory’. This first became apparent under Charlemagne. However, it was laid aside after him and even until the end of the tenth century the West was still reigned over by an Empress from New Rome, Theophano of Constantinople. It was only in the eleventh century that the elite definitively fell back into its underlying barbarianism. It began attacking the New Rome and its Emperor out of envy and pride, developing a new self-justifying ideology. This made its ideological leader ‘the Vicar of Christ’ and claimed, moreover, that all spiritual truth, authority and power proceeded from him (2).
The visible fruit of this transformation was expressed in the semi-barbarian Western iconography, or rather iconoclasm, of the art and architecture of that age. Abandoning the Orthodox ‘Pre-Romanesque’ style, the new religion of ‘Roman’ Catholicism first adopted the power-hungry ‘Romanesque’ style, yet another attempt to incarnate and ‘renew’ the power of pagan Rome, and then the ugly ‘Gothic’, which revealed the barbarian nature of their lust for power and control. Even the eagles which various European nations took as their standards faced west, turning their backs on the east and the source of the Resurrection Faith in Jerusalem.
This Eurocentric, and not Christocentric, ideology, was promoted by the semi-barbarian elite and centred in pagan (‘classical’) Old Rome. It abolished God-inspired, ascetic, Christian theology and adopted man-devised, rationalist, pagan philosophy, Christ usurped by Aristotle. It was this ethnocentric ideology which from the very beginning was used by the barbarians as a justification to covet, despise and finally fatally plunder the Christian Capital in New Rome in 1204. Thus, significantly, the ultimate cause of the fall of both Old and New Rome was the same. Old Rome fell because it was invaded by barbarians in the fifth century. New Rome, the Capital of the Christian Roman Empire, fell because it was invaded by the descendants of the selfsame barbarians in 1204.
True, Christian Roman civilization did last for nearly another 250 years after 1204, in fact for a thousand years after the fall of Old Rome, until 1453. However, its final fall in 1453 was the direct result of its treacherous ‘Christian’ sacking of 1204. That was what made the Mohammedan occupation of 1453 possible. Thus, the Western barbarians who occupied part of Europe opened the path for the Eastern barbarians to occupy another part of Europe. This the latter did three generations later, for after breaching the gates of Constantinople in 1453, they set about reaching the gates of Vienna in 1529.
The Third Rome
However, the parallels do not stop here. For, after the fall of New Rome in 1453, the Capital of the Christian Empire was transferred to a Third Rome, called Moscow. Here, eventually, an Empire was built up, spreading over one sixth of the globe. Its ruling dynasty was known as Roma-nova, New Rome. Although the Third Rome survived the attack by the atheist barbarian forces of Napoleon in 1812, it finally fell in 1917, undermined by similar atheist barbarian forces.
The barbarian forces of 1917 possessed terrifying weapons of World War, spreading slanderous propaganda against the Romanov House and sending to Russia an atheist materialist ideology. This inspired evil revolutionaries, who created the world’s most murderous and immoral regime. But even having achieved this measure of destruction, the barbarians later attempted to wipe Russia altogether from the face of the earth in 1941. This was under the atheist barbarian forces of Hitler, with his pagan myth of the racist supremacy of barbarians.
Conclusion: The Last Chance
By the grace of God and the prayers of the New Martyrs, the atheist regime in Russia collapsed and since 1991 there have been gallant moves to restore the Third Rome there. This is the last chance for the world. How successful this restoration will ultimately be, we do not know. However, even its enemies recognize its spiritual significance, because the forces of Western barbarianism are today striving to undermine even this restoration. They are once more attacking the Russia that is restoring the Faith, encircling it with missiles and launching a campaign to portray it as evil and despotic.
In all this we see clearly that there has never been any need for the peoples of the West to attempt to restore the Roman Empire or later set up their own ‘Gothic’ Empires. For nigh on a thousand years after the fall of the First Rome, they still had their Emperor in the New Rome which had not fallen. And for nearly five hundred years after that they still had their Emperor in the Third Rome which had not fallen. However, in their pride they could not accept their provincial status and wanted to be masters. They refused to recognize their legitimate Emperor and instead wished to usurp him with their own, as the Jews had done with Christ, killing the son of the owner of the vineyard: This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours (Mark 12, 7).
This is why, after a few centuries, they set up their own semi-barbarian Empire, which they dared call ‘Holy and Roman’, whereas in fact it was neither Holy nor Roman. In the eleventh century, Germanic Popes, sponsored by Germanic rulers, appeared in the abandoned Old Rome in order to carry through this operation. They condemned the real Christian Roman Empire as schismatic and heretical, whereas in fact it was they who were schismatic and heretical, having changed the Creed. When they cast aside the authority of the Popes in the sixteenth century, each Western people then began colonizing the rest of the world. Each people gradually formed its own ‘Roman’ Empire, still ignoring the real Roman Empire.
All of this is history and yet today little has changed. True, the outlying Western ‘provinces’ are now made to look even more provincial by the cowboy values of the leading Western nation and its Empire. Although situated in the cultural desert of the Far West, in the Western tradition it too still attempts to control the world. The Western provinces may have the most advanced technological sophistication, ‘shock and awe’, but spiritually they behave as savages. They plunder the resources of the world, changing even the climate, and smash human bodies into a thousand pieces through the stupidity of their ‘smart’ bombs. They have replaced the rule of God, Theocracy, with the rule of craft, Technocracy.
However, ninety years after its destruction and sabotage by the West, the Third Rome is now resurgent. All that the Western provinces have to do is to accept their provincial spiritual status, abandoning their primitive rationalism and accepting spiritual reconquest by the heir of Rome. All they have to do is to accept the spiritual sophistication of the Christian Revelation of the Church of God, which is the only mission and message of the Third Rome: And have ye not read this scripture; The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner (Mark 12, 10). In other words, those Western people, who have not already chosen, still have a choice to make, a choice which gives them one last chance.
Are you with the Christian Apostles or with the Heathen Goths? Are you on the side of Orthodox Christianity or on the side of Barbarianism? Choose.
Fr Andrew
4/17
July 2007
The Holy Martyr Nicholas (Romanov), Last Emperor of Rome,
and all the Holy Royal Martyrs
Notes:
1. We count the then civilization along the coastal strip of northern Africa, which penetrated into Ethiopia and Nubia, as an extension of Greco-Roman civilization. As for the Egyptian civilization of the Pharaohs, it had long been dead. All other civilizations, whether in Persia, China or India were in Asia. All of this was long before the appearance of Islamic civilization, which in any case was largely based on the civilizations of peoples with whom the Arabs had come into contact, as they adopted Indian (so-called ‘Arab’) numerals, Persian thought or Greek philosophy and medicine. As for the Zimbabwe civilization in Africa or the ‘pyramid civilizations’ of South and Central America and Mexico, they all developed later.
2.
The term Vicar of Christ as applied to the Popes of Rome is not earlier
than the mid-twelfth century. (See Western Society and the Church
in the Middle Ages by Sir Richard Southern). As for the novel filioque
doctrine, according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds from Christ and
therefore also from His ‘Vicar’, its first systematic justification
came only at the end of the eleventh century. This was compiled by the
Italian Anselm of Canterbury, known as ‘the father of scholasticism’.
