1.
What is meant
by the expression the Church has come a full circle?
The question refers to the historic
Church that Christ and His Apostles established on earth, the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church,
which comes down in a straight succession without change from the age of the
Apostles. The Orthodox Church has retained the continuity and purity of ancient
Christian teaching, and as a Russian monk explains, it is the carrier of the
fullest, most accurate, authentic, ancient and historic Christian tradition,
one that dates to the earliest Christian times. Even the most polemic
Westerners acknowledge that Orthodoxy's tradition is
the oldest in Christendom. Orthodox Christianity has the “fullness of faith
delivered once and for all to the saints” (Jude 1:3), and it is the repository
of “all that the Lord gave, the Apostles preached, and the Fathers preserved,”
as St. Athanasius the Great (+373) expressed it. From the beginning of the
world, there was one faith only, and one Savior and Redeemer. The Orthodox
Christian faith is but the original and Old Testament faith made complete and
clear.
Many Western Christians have come to
realize that the Orthodox Church is the very continuation of the ancient Church
in modern times. Two Americans who converted to Orthodoxy, for example, observe
that:
The Orthodox Church, especially now with the freedom of Eastern Europe, is gaining ever
greater attention in the Christian West. The Western world is suddenly
discovering that the second largest Christian Church, numbering 350 million or
more souls, lays claim to antiquity — indeed to a history that reaches back to
the time of the Apostles — and to a rich spiritual tradition that reaches far
beyond the limits of Western theological thought. As they rediscover the Church
of the Tsars and of the nineteenth-century Eastern monarchies, the Christians
of the Occident are also discovering a Christianity much older than the Church
of Rome, a Church which discussed and resolved many of the issues of the
Reformation long before Western Christianity was separated from its Eastern
roots. They are finding that the old political and theological prejudices that
served to relegate that separation to the short memory of history are falling
away. With the light of new knowledge from the East, we in the West are coming
to understand that it was Rome that broke away from the ancient Patriarchates of the East in 1054, not
the Eastern Orthodox Church which cut itself off from the Latin Church. We are
coming to see the truncated vision of Christianity which has marked our
intellectual history for more than five centuries. And as this happens, more
and more Western Christians are embracing the Orthodox Church as the criterion
of Christianity, as the source and mother of their own beliefs [Fr. David
Cownie and Presbytera Juliana Cownine, A
Guide to Orthodox Life: Some Beliefs, Customs and Traditions of the Church,
p. 1].
Concerning
the 23,000 Western Churches (which are not the direct concern of this work, but
which will still be examined), these are part of a larger body of groups that
broke away from Orthodoxy since the time of the primitive Church, in accordance
with the Apostle Paul's words that “there must also be heresies among you, that
they which are approved may be made manifest” (1 Cor 11:19). As St. Justin (Popovich) of
Chelije (+1979) writes in this regard, from time to time, many individuals
... have cut themselves off and have fallen
away from the one and indivisible Church of Christ,
whereby they ceased to be members of the Church and parts of her Theanthropic
body. The first to fall away thus were the Gnostics, then the Arians, then the
Macedonians, then the Monophysites, then the Iconoclasts, then the Roman
Catholics, then the Protestants, then the Uniates, and so on....
As Protopresbyter
Michael Pomazansky goes on to add:
Side by side with the straight, or right, path of faith, there have
always been those who thought differently (heterodoxountes,
or heterodox, in the expression of
St. Ignatius the God-Bearer), a world of greater or lesser errors among
Christians, and sometimes even whole incorrect systems which attempted to burst
into the midst of Orthodox Christians. As a result of the quest for truth there
occurred divisions among Christians.
Becoming acquainted with the history of the Church, and likewise
observing the contemporary world, we see that the errors which war against
Orthodox Truth have appeared and do appear a) under the influence of other
religions, b) under the influence of philosophy, and c) through the weaknesses
and inclinations of fallen human nature, which seeks the rights and
justifications of these weaknesses and inclinations.
Errors
take root and become obstinate most frequently because of the pride of those
who defend them, because of intellectual pride [Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, pp. 23-24].
Here it is important to note that
Orthodoxy does not belittle those who have separated from it. A Greek hierarch
explains that St. Maximus the Confessor (+662), while expressing absolute
disdain for false teachings and those things which defile the faith,
nevertheless dismissed as abhorrent any harm directed against those who hold
false beliefs themselves. He clearly separated false beliefs from the people
who held them. In the same way, Orthodoxy abhors intolerance, condemnation, and
the dismissal of the worth of any human being. While Orthodoxy condemns false
beliefs that threaten it, it does not condemn those who are misled by
falsehood. The devil is the source of evil doctrine, and Orthodoxy condemns him
and his minions and the poison they spread. However, the bishop concludes,
those who are poisoned by the devil by holding false beliefs are not his, but
are creatures of God, suffering from the deadly, soul-destroying jealousy of
the devil.
The full circle concept in the question refers to the complete cycle
that the Orthodox Church has gone through over the course of two thousand
years. True to Christ's words that His followers would be hated by the world
(cf. Jn 15:18-20, Mk 13:13, Mt 5:11, Lk 6:22-23, Mt 24:9-13), virtually all major persecutions for the
Christian faith have fallen upon ancient Orthodox Christianity.
Many in Israel chose not to follow
Christ, and as a result, the torch of faithfulness to Christ largely passed to
the Gentiles, former pagans, as the Prophet Isaiah had foretold some seven
hundred years earlier (Is 2:2,60:3,5). Christianity then began to spread with
miraculous speed from Jerusalem, through the Levant and the Roman Empire and beyond, and it continued to make inroads among the pagans.
As the prince of this world, Satan,
reigned in paganism, which was a kingdom of sin, he inevitably sensed a
destructive force for him in Christianity. Having at his disposal the full political
force of the pagan world, his immediate reaction was to promote a bloody and
total annihilation of the Church. For three centuries, Christian blood was
spilt throughout the lands of the entire Roman
Empire, although the remarkable steadfastness and
self-sacrifice of the Christian martyrs proved to be the best witness of their
faith. The pagans were awestruck by this witness, and they themselves converted
and began to fill the ranks of the martyrs of the persecuted faith. Thus, the
blood of the Christian martyrs became the seeds or Christianity, and
persecution could not halt its spread.
Although the author of the textbook
for this course states that the Roman Emperor Constantine's con to Christianity
brought an end to the age of martyrs, this assertion is not in fact so, and one
can only conclude that he is simply not completely well grounded in Church history
to make so elementary an error of fact. Constantine’s conversion did end the
initial age of the catacombs and produced the Christian Roman Empire (or Byzantine Empire, as Western historians
named it), during which time the Orthodox Church produced the Liturgy, the
Creed, the Bible, monasticism, and the whole Christian lifestyle with its
elevated ideals and holiness that are totally alien to the corrupt world.
Even so, the age of martyrs continued. As Archpriest Alexey Young notes in
this regard, Orthodox Christianity has lived for two thousand years on the edge
of eternity. It has been faced time and again with virtual extermination by
different conquerors, persecutors and heretical movements, nourished even in
our times by the blood of countless martyrs. Orthodoxy has always passed
through the ages persecuted, wounded and bloody, like its Divine Founder. The
same writer continues, noting that true to Christ's promise, however, the gates
of hell never prevailed against His Church (Mt 16:18). Despite all possible
persecution by the mighty of this world, Orthodoxy has not been vanquished, but
it has always survived victorious. To this day it still survives intact and
gloriously pure, its gaze steadily focused on the end of the ages and the
Second Coming of Christ.
Beginning in the seventh century,
the rise of Islam came about with astonishing speed, taking Syria, Palestine, Egypt and
northern Africa,
and Spain. Later, starting in the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Turkish
Sultanate began to conquer the Balkans, anterior Asia and northern Africa, beginning a domination
that would continue until the early part of the twentieth century.
A Greek hierarch explains that in
essence, Islam is a Christian heresy, having its historical roots in the very
areas inhabited and sanctified by the ancient Desert Fathers. He mentions that
it took from Christianity not only the dress of its clergy, but the model for
the minaret (the towers on top of which the stylites lived and practiced their
ascesis), the practice of making full prostrations during prayer, and other
things as well. (Even the practice of removing their shoes in
prayer when entering a mosque is of Christian origin. In early times,
this practice was observed in Christianity, just as priests removed their shoes
when entering the altar). It is also a well-known fact that Mohammed was
educated by a Jewish relative Varakh, who taught him the Old Testament and
instilled in him a hatred of Christianity — a hatred that was transmitted
straight into the Koran.
It is the duty of Islam and of each
individual Moslem to convert every person to the Islamic religion, and by
whatever means necessary, including swordpoint***. This policy is fundamental
for Islam's teaching (and it was likewise adopted by Roman Catholicism after
its apostasy and schism in 1054, in complete contradiction to the teaching of
the Gospel). Moreover, in the event attempts at conversion fail, the ultimate
aim of Islam is the extermination of every “infidel” from the face of the
earth.
Under the Moslems, Christians were
once again forced to enter the catacombs, as it were, to live in constant
expectation of violence, horrendous torture and death (things the West is only
beginning to understand in light of the recent growth of Islamic fundamentalism
and the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States).
For 400 years in Greece and 500 years in Serbia and other parts of the Balkans,
entire villages of Christians — men, women and children — were impaled on
thousands of stakes planted along the sides of roads. This situation of living
in a sea of violence continues unabated even to this day among those Christians
witnessing a recrudescence of warlike fanaticism on the part of the Moslems.
Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church,
ever since its departure from the ancient Apostolic Church in
1054, has acted with all possible malice in its attempts to destroy Christ's
Church. Writing of the Latin Church's numerous inquisitions and mass murders of
the Orthodox (something that continues to these times), St. John of Kronstadt
(+1908), a contemporary of the last Russian Tsar, stated:
The Roman Church is not only the mother of countless offenses
perpetrated against God and His Holy Scriptures, and against Tradition, but of
gruesome and bloody atrocities against Orthodox Christians on the part of
Rome's pope, its bishops and its clergy.
Prior
to the year 1054, the Roman Church was united to the Eastern Orthodox Church;
both were a part of the ancient Apostolic Church of Christ. Orthodox
Christianity is indigenous to all the West, as well as
the East, having come to Italy, Gaul, Scandinavia, Ireland and
the entire West long before the East-West schism of 1054. There was only one Christendom (something which has
survived down to our own days in the form of the Orthodox Church, which is the
only true continuation of the early undivided Church). For one thousand years,
the Christian Church — both East and West — lived
together in harmony and essential oneness, and its bishops governed the Church
as equals. In addition, the bishop of Rome held a position as
patriarch of the West, whose authority consisted of jurisdiction over all the
bishops in his metropolitan see, just as the patriarchs of Jerusalem, Constantinople, and elsewhere,
oversaw the bishops of their respective sees. (A see is the territory of a
bishop's jurisdiction). All bishops in Christendom were regarded as equal, and
none was seen as an episcopus episcoporum,
a “bishop of bishops.” This same understanding has been maintained to this day
in Orthodoxy. Certain of its bishops — patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops —
enjoy special status among other
bishops, but they are not above them.
Beginning in the ninth century, East
and West began to drift apart when the bishop of Rome, or pope, began to introduce new and
foreign ideas into the faith. (The words pope
and patriarch were commonly used in
the early Church to refer to the bishops of important historical sees. Pope was not a designation reserved only
for Rome's bishop, contrary to what many today erroneously think). One of the
false ideas was that of the supremacy of the bishop of Rome over the bishops of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria and
Antioch, and over all other bishops, of whom there were hundreds by that time.
Protopriest Victor Potapov notes that under the influence of national
traditions that were bound up with the might of ancient Rome, the Romans came
to think that mighty Rome should have the same significance in Church affairs
as it had in affairs of state. Especially powerful in the Roman mindset was the
idea of the monarchical absolutism of the Roman emperors, which went so far as
proclaiming them gods. The idea of unlimited supremacy in one person over the
whole world became an ecclesiastical idea in the West, and it came to be
transferred from the emperor to the Roman pope. Even the title Pontifex Maximus that the Roman emperors
bore was taken over by the popes. Thus, Fr. Victor notes, a striving for
self-exaltation and domination over the Church overtook the Roman popes, and in
this striving, Rome entered the path of error. As Fr. Theodore Pulcini, a convert from
Roman Catholicism to Orthodoxy, goes on to point out, “The division between the Eastern and Western Churches was not the result of
Orthodoxy's stubborn refusal to recognize papal authority, but of Roman
Catholicism's unjustifiable claims.” [Orthodoxy and Catholicism:
What are the Differences? pp. 8-9].
Concerning
the role that the Apostle Peter played in Rome, Scripture is silent. However, Fr.
Raymond Brown, a Roman Catholic priest and Church historian, makes the
following noteworthy observations:
We have no knowledge at all when [the Apostle Peter] came to Rome and just what he did
there before he was martyred. Certainly he was not the original missionary who
brought Christianity to Rome, and therefore was not the founder of the Church of Rome in that sense.
There is no proof that he was the bishop (or local ecclesiastical officer) of
the Roman Church — a claim not made [by Rome] until the third
century. Most likely he did not spend any major time in Rome before 58 AD... and
came to the capital city shortly before his martyrdom [Quoted in The Myth of Papal Infallibility, pp.
33-34].
As
D.W. O’Conner also writes concerning this matter:
Nothing can be finally
determined, however, about when Peter
came to Rome, how long he stayed, or what function of leadership, if any, he
exercised in the Roman Church [Ibid., p. 35].
Harvard-educated
and twice Fulbright scholar Dr. Constantine Cavarnos sums up this uncertainty
of Catholic scholars in his notation that the
Roman Catholic Church defined its founder to be the Apostle Peter. This
claim was made not because Peter had
in fact founded the Church of Rome, but because the Latin Church wanted to exploit certain passages in the Gospels
where the Apostle Peter is mentioned, and wanted to base the dogma of papal
primacy on those passages.
According
to the Acts of the Apostles, it was the Apostle Paul who first taught Christianity
in Rome. However, neither St. Paul, the actual founder of the Church
of Rome, nor St. Peter (perhaps the
co-founder) ever held any actual primacy in the Church, nor did any city. (In
the matter of Peter's being the co-founder of the Church of Rome, the
authorities differ, although had Peter truly been the first bishop of Rome, it
is inconceivable that Paul would have ignored his presence (cf. Rom 15:20). The
notion of papal primacy is ludicrous to Eastern Christians, for Christian
primacy rests squarely on the Divinity of Christ. As Protopresbyter Michael
Pomazansky explains:
The Orthodox Church of Christ refuses to recognize yet another head of
the Church in the form of a Vicar of
Christ on Earth, a title given in the Roman Catholic Church to the bishop
of Rome. Such a title does not correspond either to the word of God or to the
universal Church consciousness and tradition; it tears away the Church on earth
from immediate unity with the heavenly Church. A vicar is assigned during the
absence of the one replaced; but Christ is invisibly present in His Church
always.
The rejection by the ancient Church of the view of the bishop of Rome as the Head of the
Church and Vicar of Christ upon earth is expressed in the writings of those who
were active in the Ecumenical Councils [Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Op. cit., p. 228].
As
another writer also noted, the “Vicars of Christ on Earth,” with their
pretensions not only to spiritual, but also to temporal authority, were
representatives of spiritual pride. No greater spiritual pride can be imagined
than the conviction of one's own infallibility.
St. Cyprian of Carthage (+258),
himself a bishop and one of the most
authoritative of the early Church Fathers — and also regarded as a saint by
the Roman Catholic Church — spoke about the authority of bishops in the
following way:
Let each one give his opinion without judging anyone and without
separating from the communion of those who are not of his opinion; for none of
us sets himself up as a bishop of bishop, nor compels his brethren to obey him
by means of tyrannical terror, every bishop having full liberty and complete
power; as he cannot be judged by another, neither can he judge another. Let us
all wait the judgment of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who alone has the power to
appoint us to the government of His Church and to judge our conduct [Quoted in
Abbé Guetée, The Papacy:
Its Historic Origins and Primitive Relations with the Eastern Churches,
1866].
Knowing
that Rome's novel teaching of a supreme ruler with primacy of jurisdiction would
divide and corrupt the Church, the Eastern patriarchs pleaded with the Roman
patriarch not to introduce this false teaching. Another innovation that Rome began to introduce
was its changing the Nicene Creed that had been established by the early Church.
Based on Holy Scriptures and the truths that the Church has always held since
the time of the Apostles, this Creed is a summary of the beliefs of the
Christian Church. The Eastern Church warned the Church in the West of the
dangers of changing any part of the Christian faith, and especially the very
Creed itself. However, Rome insisted on its innovations, even though the believers resisted.
During these difficult times, many
attempts were made to work out the differences between the Eastern and Western Churches,
and all of Christendom tried to call Rome back to the orthodox
understanding of Christianity. In the end, though, the Orthodox Church could
not compromise and allow the faith to be changed and corrupted, and for its
part, Rome had already made its decision to part ways and would not come back. In 1054, the Roman Church officially
severed itself from the ancient sees of the Christian Church, including the
Mother Church, the first Church of Christendom — Jerusalem, and from the Church
where Christians were first known by that name — Antioch (Acts 11:26), and from
the rest of the Christian Church. As Thomas Hulbert, a Dutch convert to
Orthodoxy notes, the Great Schism of 1054 proved to be a heavy curtain dividing
Christianity: it cut the West off from the right doctrines and the right faith
preserved in Eastern Orthodoxy.
Like the non-Chalcedonians before
him, the pope precipitated another schism, and like them, he estranged himself
and his followers from the Church. In the Great Schism of 1054, one of the Churches — and only one — Rome, separated itself from the ancient Churches which had
been preserved in the East since the time of the Apostles. Concerning Rome's schism, the Roman Catholic writer, former Jesuit priest and insider
at the Vatican, Malachi Martin, writes that the Latin Church was
…now ready to abandon one half of Christianity (and the more ancient,
the more flourishing part) for the sake of worldly ambition.... In their greed
and jealousy, the Roman popes asserted an absolutist primacy that Eastern
Christians will never accept. The damage went even further. Once Rome was willing to
sacrifice the oldest and most substantial part of Christianity to its own
concept of power, it is small wonder that it could not be bothered by an
obscure but loudmouthed Augustinian monk called Martin Luther.... The popes,
blindly and without thinking, cast off half of Europe and made straight the way
for the Protestant Reformation [The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Church, 1981].
In
the aftermath of this devastating schism, the West experienced tremendous
turmoil and corruption. The Crusades were undertaken, which evolved into an
attack upon the Eastern Church. Later came the
Inquisition, then the Renaissance, which mixed pagan ideas with Christianity,
and finally the Protestant Reformation, which splintered Western Christianity
into thousands of denominations.
Having succumbed to one of the
temptations put to Christ by Satan in the wilderness, that of worldly
domination, and severed at that juncture from the true doctrine of the East and
the grace of the Holy Spirit, Rome stopped looking to the Church as something
otherworldly which pointed believers to Heaven. Instead, it became this-worldly
and pointed them to the earthly organization, thus beginning “organized
religion.” Now regarding the authority of the Roman Caesars as their own
prerogative, the popes seized power in the temporal sphere and asserted an absolute
authority and universal domination over all mankind.
Carrying one step further the
ambition of supreme worldly power that the power-hungry popes arrogated to themselves, the infamous Jesuit order, the shock troops for Rome, promulgated the
slogan that the end justifies the means. Translated into action, this principle
meant that whenever Rome's bloodthirsty Uniate movement could not persuade
Orthodox Christians to become Uniate Catholics under Rome through words, the
Latin Church was then justified in using force and murder, for “error has no
rights,” Rome believes, and is therefore subject to “control” by decree and
deed. One such decree, the Syllabus of
Errors propagated by Pope Pius IX in 1864, demands that the “Roman Church
be regarded as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other
religions” (#77). This same decree, which is listed in the Catholic Dictionary as being the official teaching of the faith,
has never been retracted or disowned by the Latin Church, although its contents
have been closeted. In another place, the decree proclaims that the Roman
Catholic Church has “the power to employ force, or any temporal power, direct
or indirect,” when dealing with persons dangerous to it (#24), and it claims
that it is pernicious to deny that the Church has “immunity from civil law or
its penalties” (#37). The textbook for this course notes that the tale of the
Uniate movement in Poland makes sorrowful reading: the Jesuits began by using deceit and ended by
resorting to violence.
After its separation from Orthodoxy,
the Latin Church promoted countless murderous inquisitions in Eastern Europe. As a Greek monk
notes, Rome conducted these genocides through the same Unia, the papacy's most
effective siege engine, which operates as the janissaries of the papacy, with
all the fanaticism of the janissaries, against Orthodoxy. Among the many
inquisitions in the twentieth century, one took place in World War II Poland,
where the Latins murdered 800,000 Orthodox. At the same time and at the
direction of the same black hand, in Croatia, Catholic killer clergy (most
notably the Franciscans) and killer police massacred 750,000 Orthodox for their
refusal to renounce Orthodoxy and embrace Roman Catholicism, although not
before submitting them to infinitely gruesome tortures, no doubt the worst
recorded in the annals of history. One of the members of the evil coven of
sadistic clergy assassins openly boasted that he alone had killed 40,000 of the
Orthodox. As Alexei Khomiakov perceptibly noted, the ancestors of Roman
Catholics who long ago committed moral fratricide by unilaterally changing the
Church's Creed invariably would resort to physical fratricide. Such they did,
and well did St. Nikolai Velimirovich (+1956) call the Latin Church a
semi-military organization that has used all means to gain world domination.
By far the most virulent and deadly
form of anti-Christianity the world has so far witnessed is the end-times
phenomenon of Communism, an outburst of primordial satanism that was created
and financed in the West, and that was unleashed upon Russia by Western
capitalism as an experiment for the one-world government of the antichrist.
Because of that great cataclysm, far more Christians have lost their lives for
their Orthodox faith in the tragic, pre-apocalyptic twentieth century than in
the three hundred years following Christ's Crucifixion.
Communism is part of the “mystery of iniquity” (2 Thes 2:7, Apoc
17:5), that is, Satan's plan of battle with Christ's Church. Archpriest Boris
Molchanoff explains that this process has been in motion for ages and that it
will reach its culmination at the appearance of the antichrist (2 Thes 2:8).
Writing of a “force that withholdeth” the mystery of
iniquity (2 Thes 2:6), the Apostle Paul states that this force will be “taken out of the way” (2 Thes 2:7).
As the meaning of the withholding power
in this passage is not obvious, Fr. Paul Volmensky provides the following
explanation:
In seeing the everlasting battle of Satan for supremacy over the entire
world, God gave a restraining power
which does not let the devil deploy his various means. Limiting the power of
the devil so that he could not destroy us, God does not deprive us of the freedom
to choose to serve Him. Digression from God denotes an increase of iniquity.
When almost all of mankind of its own will shall be immersed in evil, not
seeking communion with God and eternal life, then the restraining power of God
will withdraw, antichrist will appear, and the end shall come to all....
The appearance of the antichrist shall not take place until divine
providence determines the time at which moment the “withholder” will be taken away. According to the Holy Fathers, what withholdeth is the Holy Spirit and
Roman authority [“In Memory of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II,” Orthodox Life, vol. 43, no. 4, 1993, pp.
2-4; emphasis added].
Concerning
these two parts of the withholding force — the role of the Holy Spirit and that
of Roman authority, comment is needed on both. The same Fr. Paul explains the
Holy Spirit's role by noting:
Some Fathers explain that antichrist shall not come while the Holy
Spirit abides in people, while people possess an intimate, grace-filled union
with the Lord through the fulfillment of God's commandments. When evil shall be
multiplied among people and no longer shall there be men seeking eternal life,
then the Holy Spirit will withdraw from the world. If there is no one on earth
being saved, then there is no further need for its existence. People darkened
by sin, in whom the Holy Spirit is absent, will accelerate the end of the
world. They themselves shall rise up against lawful government authority and deprive
themselves of that restraining power which would have hindered the appearance
and activities of the antichrist [Ibid., p. 4].
Archimandrite
Panteleimon (+1984), a co-founder of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville,
New York, provides a well developed and detailed analysis of the other factor
that withholds — that is, the Roman authority. He writes:
What are the means for restraining the antichrist so that the elect may
be brought to salvation? Our Fathers considered the withholding power of the
antichrist to be the Roman Empire. In their time the Roman Empire still existed and it was
possible to support this interpretation based on the prophecy of the Prophet
Daniel. In our times, the only significance we can give to such an idea is
within the context of understanding the Roman
Empire to mean imperial
(monarchical) power in general. Concerning such power, we should understand
it to be a monarchy which has the ability to control social movement, and at
the same time adhere to Christian principles. It does not allow the people to
stray from these principles; it contains the people. Since the antichrist will
have as his main task the goal of attracting the people away from Christ, he
therefore will not arrive if monarchy is still in control. This power will not
allow him to appear; it impedes his negating spiritual activity. This is the withholding power. When the monarchy fails, and everywhere nations institute
self-government (republics, democracies), then the antichrist will be able to
act freely. It will not be difficult for Satan to prepare voters to
renounce Christ, as experience taught us during the French Revolution. There
will be no one to veto the movement. A humble declaration of faith will not be
heard. Thus, when such a social order is instituted everywhere, making it easy
for anti-Christian movements to appear, then the antichrist will come forth.
St. John Chrysostom's words lead us to this thought when in his time monarchy
was understood to mean the Roman Empire. “When it is said that the Roman government has ceased to be, then the
antichrist will appear. Until that time the government [monarchy] will be
feared. No one will easily follow the antichrist. After this time, when such
control will be liquidated, anarchy will triumph, and the antichrist will try
to capture all human and divine power.” [A
Ray of Light: Instructions in Piety and the State of the World at the End of
Time, p. 38; emphasis added].
Analyzing
further the term what withholdeth,*** Fr. Paul adds
that:
The Russian Fathers of the Church ascribed particular significance to
the Russian Orthodox sovereign, the
only protector of Orthodoxy in the whole world. For example, this is what the
holy righteous John of Kronstadt taught about royal authority: “By means of
sovereigns the Lord watches over the good of earthly kingdoms, especially the
good of the peace of His Church. Through them He does not allow godless
teaching, heresies and schisms to overwhelm her. And the greatest villain of
the world, the antichrist, cannot appear in our midst, because of autocratic
authority (that is, the benevolent Orthodox sovereignty), deterring the lawless
reeling and absurd teaching of the ungodly. The Apostle says that antichrist
shall not appear on earth as long as autocratic authority shall exist.” [Op.
cit., p. 4].
In
these pre-apocalyptic times, the significance of the removal of the withholding
power cannot be overemphasized. It is therefore important to examine this
matter even further, and Fr. Michael Azkoul does so with careful and elaborate
detail. In his booklet Sacred Monarchy
and the Modern Secular State, Fr. Michael explains that Communism put an
end to the four great empires that
were to rule upon earth, as foretold by the Prophet Daniel. According to this prophecy, these four empires were
the Egyptian, the Persian, the Greek and the Roman,
after which would come the end times.
The same writer goes on to note that
the Roman
Empire was both pagan (inaugurated
by Augustus Caesar) and Christian (inaugurated by Constantine the Great). The Christian Roman Empire had two phases
as well: the Byzantine Greek and the
Russian. As Schema-Archimandrite
Damian of the Ascension Monastery in Resaca, Georgia adds, from Constantine to
the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the mantle of “Protector of the Church”
fell upon the shoulders of the Roman authority, then resident in
Constantinople, the Second Rome. With the fall of Constantinople, this mantle fell to
the lineage of the Russian Tsars to protect and preserve the well-being of the
Church. Thus, Tsar Nicholas II and his predecessors, having received autocratic
authority from Byzantium, were successors to Constantine and those Greek (or Byzantine) emperors
who followed him. Such was God's
providential means of establishing the Orthodox Christian Church in the world.
Continuing, Fr. Michael explains
that the Russian Empire, the last
phase of the Roman Imperium, successor to Byzantium or Christian Rome, was the
last Christian society, and Tsar Nicholas II was the last Christian emperor, as
true kingship depends upon the true faith. Thus, none of the heretical
societies of the post-Orthodox West can be spoken of
as a societas Christiana. Fr. Michael
also states that there has never been a monarch in the post-schism West “by the
grace of God.” (One can observe a striking example of this principle in the
so-called Holy Roman Empire.
Historians note that this empire was not holy but was very secular. As an
Orthodox historian notes in this regard, the Holy Roman Empire was conceived in
heresy, born in schism, and maintained in existence in order to bolster the
power of the heretical popes against the Orthodox Church). Unlike the
monarchies and kingdoms of apostate Western
Europe, the
Russian monarchy maintained the true faith as given by the Holy Apostles and
kept in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The Russian Tsar played a decisive
role in restraining the approach of the satanic powers. Western Europe was well aware of
the might of its Orthodox Christian neighbor in maintaining peace, and the title
the Peacemaker was ascribed to Tsar
Alexander III not by the Russians, but by the West. Likewise, after the
destruction of Russia by Communism, one authoritative Western historian, Professor G. Ferrero
of the Roman National University, wrote that:
Europe urgently needs peace.
Innumerable misfortunes are threatening us from all sides. Why? Because Imperial Russia is no more. And without her, there
is no more peace, which she alone brought to the world. After
the victory over Napoleon, Russia completely gave herself over to the cult of peace. Russia's amazing aspiration to maintain and protect peace at any cost and
simultaneously with absolute selflessness, must be acknowledged
as a deep mystery. Balance in the world shall not ensure and we shall not avoid
crises until Russia will arise in all of her glory [Quoted in Fr. Paul Volmensky, op. cit., pp. 4-5].
As
the devil recognized that the Russian monarchy interfered with his attempts to
possess the whole world, it was necessary to destroy that authority. Archbishop