One Thousand Words on One Thousand Years of the Western Heresy
Introduction: Blinded Captives
Most of the West is captive, blinded by its culture. Just as a blind man cannot see the Sun, so most cannot see that 1,000 years ago Western culture had utterly different values from those today, and that outside Western culture there are other cultures with utterly different values from it. In the captivity of blindness it cannot see that all these values have many advantages over modern Western ones. All these values the West proudly dismisses as ‘primitive’, arrogantly presuming that all other cultures will one day resemble its own, which it has spread throughout the world, causing spiritual enslavement to it and blind imitation of it.
Such is its captive blindness that it is only just beginning to realise that not all cultures can become like it. Even if the rest of the world wanted its cultures to be Westernised, they could not be, because then the world’s natural resources would be consumed in greed in just a few decades. It would take several planets like our own even for the present world population to live in the Western way for just a few centuries. So we are faced with three questions: How is Western culture different from all other cultures? What is Western culture as it has evolved over the last thousand years? And where did Western culture come from?
How?
All other cultures in world history have proclaimed that this life and this world are only pale reflections of the life and the world to come. All that we have now is but a preparation for what is to come after death. For after death there is immortal life with the Creator, a Divine Being, Who is the source of our being and Who is at the centre of the Universe. However, for a thousand years formerly Christian Western culture has been different from all others. It has been shaped by ever-evolving, anti-Christian beliefs that, whatever there may or may not be after death, this world and the human-being are at the centre of all things, and that this is all that we can know for sure.
What?
These beliefs are called ‘humanism’ (in Greek ‘anthropismos’, in English ‘man-worship’), and ‘secularism’ – the belief in the centrality of this age, that is, of this world. Humanism proclaims that the human-being is the measure of all things and that all things, this age included, revolve around him, his world and his mortal existence. These fanatically-held beliefs have been spread through centuries of ruthless aggression all over the world, massacring and bombing their victims into submission to ‘freedom and democracy’. Between the Crusades and the Internet there has sprung every ism in the world, from Scholasticism to Lutheranism, from Imperialism to Capitalism, from Fascism to Communism. Each ‘ism’ denotes a different aspect of Godless human life. Thus, in Western culture even the word ‘theology’ has come to denote human theories and understandings about a possible Deity, rather than the Absolute Revelation of God to man, the Word of God, which is what the word ‘theology’ actually means.
Where From?
Just like Islam, these fanatically-held beliefs originate from a Christian heresy. Indeed, as two extremes, two sides of the same coin, this is why these two heresies, the Western and the Muslim, sharing blind and spiritually deadening fanaticism, are so frequently allied, like cousins. Just as Islam proclaimed that Orthodox Christianity was too hard to live by and so fell back into the Old Testament, with its primitivism and eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, so 1,000 years ago the West also rejected Orthodox Christianity. Proclaiming that it was too hard to live by, it decreed on the basis of a speculation from Muslim Spain that the world be ruled by one man, that that man be proclaimed as the representative of God on earth, and that it be believed that all power and all authority, God the Holy Spirit Himself, proceeds from that man. And so it was not long before others proclaimed that this humanistic belief in the power and authority of one man should be extended to all human-beings. Humanism evolved from this.
Conclusion: What is to be Done?
And so we come to a fourth question: Given the above, what is to be done? First of all, it is clear that, like any disease, heresies are degenerative, that is, their effects grow more intense with the passing of time. Thus, a disease first attacks the heart, affecting the circulation of the blood. Then, through blood clots, it affects the reason. Next it spreads throughout the body, destroying its inherited immunity. Thus, it has been with Western culture. The heresy attacked its heart (in Rome), clouded its mind, century by century its thought degenerating from theology to philosophy, and finally it spread throughout the body, among the people, destroying the immunity inherited from the first millennium of Christian Faith. Today, the spread of degenerative Western culture in the movement called Globalism, by definition worldwide, will inevitably bring the end of the world.
However, when a poison enters the body, this does not mean that the body must die of it at once. Although the end of the body is inevitable, there are antidotes, meaning that the spread of the disease can be slowed or stopped, and even reversed, in the body, in the mind and in the heart. This is what we Orthodox Christians work for. Through the Orthodox Church and our Orthodox Tradition and culture, through the Body of Christ, by Whom all things were made, we proclaim that God is present in the world, Healing, Redeeming, Regenerating and Resurrecting. The Orthodox Church proclaims another culture in this world. Accepting neither false choice (heresy), neither Muslim nor Western culture, neither East nor West, we proclaim the Incarnated, Crucified and Risen Christ, in Whom is East and West, North and South, evident to all – except, alas!, to the spiritually blind.
