[This chapter was written by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich
while he was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp
during World War II, and excerpted by Nicholas Candela
from Fr. Justin Popovich's "HUMANISTIC ECUMENISM", found
in "ORTHODOX FAITH AND LIFE IN CHRIST" by Fr. Justin (+1979),
translated and edited by Asterios Gerostergios, et al.,
Institute For Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont,
MA, 1994, pp. 177-196]
BISHOP NIKOLAI VELIMIROVICH (+1956) ON THE WEST
The glorious prophet Isaiah prophesied the
following: "When the Lord shall arise to strike the
Earth terribly..., the haughtiness of men shall be
brought low, and the Lord alone shall be exalted on
that day" (ISAIAH 2:10,11). Haughty...men...imposed
themselves on others as gods. Therefore the Lord has
risen up many times to strike the Earth because people
worshipped men instead of Him, the only God.
The heretical people of our time gave Christ our
Lord the last place at the table of this world, as
though He were the least of beggars, while they placed
their own great men in the first seats: politicians,
authors, mythmakers, scientists, capitalists, even
tourists and soccer players. The eyes of this people
were fixed upon these great men, these modern gods,
while only a few eyes were turned to Christ, the
conqueror of death...Our "baptized" brothers, who were
carried away by the Papal and Lutheran heresies,
thought themselves to be wiser than Christ. They
looked upon us Orthodox as ignorant and uncivilized
people.
But truly the words of Saint Paul were proven
in them: "Professing themselves to be wise, they
became fools" (ROMANS 1:22). And this was so because
they rejected the spiritual wisdom of Christ, Who
walks with the garment of humility and love, and they
put on, according to the example of the pagan
philosophers, carnal and worldly wisdom, which is
filled with haughtiness and wickedness. "And they
changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an
image made like coruptible man...and they worshipped
and served the creature more than the Creator" (ROMANS
1:23,25). In other words, they took all the glory of
Christ the Lord and put it over the shoulders of mortal
men, whom they then elevated as the new Messiahs. Such
was their perception of glory, which they got from their
godless wisdom. And the meaning of culture and of
civilization was for them respect for the creature,
that is, visible nature, and worship of it rather than
worship of the Creator: mortal gods and deified nature!
This is the latest stop of Western humanity in its
unrestrained and eternal descent from the heights of
Christ to the depths of satan...Thousands of books are
written annually glorifying famous people and praising
their civilizations, and thousands of newspapers serve
this ephemeral and false glory daily...For this reason
God delivered them to shameful pleasures and passions,
so that they could find satisfaction only in whatever
is earthly and not Heavenly, and only that which gives
the devil gladness and laughter, while the angels of
Christ lament. Their enjoyment is based upon the
pleasures of the flesh, in stealing from others,
trampling upon the small and weak, increasing the
cunning conquests of foreign lands, in good times
and in dance, in the rejection of...religion, calling
it superstition, in the denial of God, in the totally
physical life, in the shameless recognition of the ape
as the ancestor of man, in the submergence of
anthropology into zoology.
The supreme happiness of man, however, is the
appearance of God in the flesh; the highest calamity
of man is his apostasy from that same God and his
return into the service of satan. This misfortune has
its origin in the non-Orthodox Western peoples...(who)
gradually rejected Christ, until they finally excluded
Him from all the sectors of the life and institutions
of the people and the state and confined Him only to
the churches. From Him Who said after His glorious
resurrection from the grave, "All power is given unto
Me in Heaven and on Earth" (MATTHEW 28:18), from Him
these blind people took away all authority. But they
did not do only this: they took away His influence in
schools, in the communty, in politics, in the arts,
in international relations, in science, in literature,
and all the rest. God, however, cannot be mocked by
all this. Whenever people, as guests, become too
impudent at the table of God, a warning has to come
from the master of the house. Two terrible warnings
have been given to (this) generation: two world wars
in a period of two decades. Let the (Western) people
kneel before Christ Whom they have insulted and return
to Him that authority, that honor and respect which
belongs only to Him. And you too, my Orthodox
brothers, must do this, if you want to save yourselves
from the third world war, which will be far more
horrible than the previous two.
What is Europe? It is the desire...for power and
pleasure and knowledge---all of which is human:
firstly human desire...and secondly human knowledge.
And these two are personified by the Pope and Luther.
What then is Europe? Europe is the Pope and Luther,
human desire to the extreme and human knowledge to the
extreme. The European Pope is the human desire for
authority. The European Luther is the obstinate
decision of man that everything must be explained by
the mind: the Pope as the ruler of the world and the
scientist as the sovereign of the world This is
Europe in a nutshell, ontologically and historically.
The one means the surrender of mankind into the fire
and the other means the surrender of mankind into the
water. And both mean the separation of man from God,
because the one means the rejection of faith and the
other the rejection of the Church of Christ. For the
spirit of evil has been working in this way on the
body of Europe for a few centuries now. And who can
expel this evil spirit from Europe? No one, except
the One Whose Name has been marked in red in the
history of the human race as the only One Who expels
demons fom people. You already know Who I mean: I mean
the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, and Savior of the
world, Who was born of the Virgin, killed by the Jews,
resurrected by God, witnessed by the centuries, justified
by Heaven, glorified by the angels, confessed by the saints,
and accepted by our forefathers. As long as Europe followed
Christ as the sun of righteousness and His Apostles, martyrs,
saints, and the countless righteous people who pleased Him,
Europe was like a square that was illuminated by hundreds
and thousands of candles, large and small, burning brightly.
When human desire, however, and human wisdom struck as two
srong winds, the candles were blown out and a darkness
descended like the darkness of the subterranean passages
in which moles live. According to human desire, every
nation and every person seeks power, pleasure, and glory,
imitating the Pope of Rome. According to human wisdom,
every nation and every person finds that he or she is
wiser than everyone else and that he or she deserves
all earthly things. How then can there not be wars between
people and nations? How then can there not be foolishness
and wildness in people? How then can there not be sicknesses
and terrible diseases, drought and floods, insurrections and wars?
For just as pus has to seep out of a pus-filled
wound, and a stench has to come out of a place filled
with filth, so this has to happen.
Papism used politics because this is the only way
it can get power; Lutheranism uses philosophy and
science because it believes that this is the only way
to obtain wisdom. And so desire declared war against
knowledge and knowledge against desire. This is the
new Tower of Babel, this is Europe. But in our time,
however, there came a new generation of European, a
generation that married desire to knowledge through
atheism and rejected both the Pope and Luther. Now
neither desire is hidden nor wisdom praised. Human
desire and human wisdom are joined in our times, and
thus a marriage has taken place which is neither Roman
Catholic nor Lutheran, but obviously and publicly
satanic. Today's Europe is neither Papist nor
Lutheran. It is above and outside of them both. It
is totally earthly, without even the desire to ascend
to Heaven, either with the passport of the
infallibility of the Pope or by the ladder of
Protestant wisdom. It totally denies the journey from
this world. It wants to stay here. It wants the grave
as its cradle. It does not know about the other
world. It doesn't smell the Heavenly fragrance. It
does not see the angels and the saints in its dreams.
It does not want to hear about the Theotokos.
Debauchery makes it hate virginity. The whole square
which is Europe is sunk now in darkness. All the
candles are out. Oh the awful darkness! Brother
plunges sword into his brother's breast, thinking that
he is the enemy. Fathers reject their sons, sons
their fathers. And the wolf is a far more loyal friend
to man than man is. Oh my brothers! Do you not see
all this? Have you not felt the darkness and the
wrongdoing of unChristian Europe on your bodies? Do
you prefer Europe to Christ, death to life? Moses
offered these two choices to his people. And we also
put these choices before you. You have to know that
Europe is death, Christ is life. Choose life and live forever...
(We see forerunners of antichirst at the
beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the 19th
century): Napoleon Bonaparte, Pope Pius IX, and
Friedrich Nietzsche. The sickest people, Caesar, the
Pope, and the philosopher---and not in idolatrous
Rome, but in the heart of "baptized" Europe!...When
Bonaparte laughed in front of the holy churches of the
Kremlin, when Pius was declared infallible, and when
Nietzsche publicly announced his worship of the
antichrist, then the sun darkened in the sky. And if
there were a thousand suns, they would all have been
darkened for shame and sorrow because of this amazing
thing that the world had never seen before: an atheist
king, an atheist pontifex, and an atheist philosopher.
In Nero's time, at least the philosopher was not an atheist...
Who is the victor, then, since it is the Caesar, the pontifex,
and the philosopher of the Europe that rejected Christianity?
The winner is the Balkan peasant and the Russian muzhik,
according to the words of Christ: "for the least among you
is the greatest" (LUKE 9:48). Who was the most unknown,
meaningless, and least person of the 19th century, the
century of the great Napoleon, of the infallible Pius,
of the unapproachable Nietzsche? Who if it was not the
Russian muzhik pilgrim to the holy places and the Balkan
peasant fighter against the crescent (Islam), the
liberator of the Balkans?...
If Europe had remained Christian it would boast
about Christ and not about its civilization. And the
great but unbaptized nations of Asia and Africa, who
have a penchant and inclination toward spirituality,
would be delighted to understand Christianity and
honor it...(These nations) do not boast about the
works of their hands, about their civilizations, but
about something more important which they consider
greater than these things: their beliefs, their
deities, their religious books. The people of Europe,
however, do not boast about Christ and His Bible, but
about their dangerous machines and the cheap products
of their hands---in other words about their culture
and civilization. And the result of this boasting
about its famous "culture" is the hatred all
non-Christian nations feel for Christ and
Christianity...Hating European people and their
products, they hate the European god. But shame on
Europe, for this does not bother or worry her. She,
after all, was the first to hate and reject her
God...Without Christ, Europe is the poorest of beggars
and the most shameless exploiter of this world...
The West became moronic. This is the reason for
its disgrace and madness. In Christian times, when
the West was Orthodox, it was concerned with the
spiritual and with its mind. But as much as it
removed itself from Christian truth and virtue, its
spiritual vision became worse and worse, so that it
darkened altogether in the 20th century...It has armed
its external eyes with many excellent machines, so
that it can see the perceptible world better and more
precisely, the beauty and color of things and creatures,
their numbers and measure and size. With the microscope
it looks at tiny worms and microbes that nobody had seen
before. It looks through the telescope and sees the stars
as though they were just above the chimneys, as no one has
looked at them before. But this is where its vision stops
and goes no further. If it concerns the...spiritual
knowledge of the hidden nucleus of things, the meaning
and significance of all Creation in this great universe
around us, about this, O my brothers, Western civilization
is blinder today than Moslem Arabia, Brahmin India, Buddhist
Tibet, and spiritualistic China. In fact, Christ has not
been shamed more in the last two millennia than from Europe,
where "baptized" people are blinder than the unbaptized!
Because of this, Saint Paul would say the same thing
to the moronic West today that he said to the baptized
Galatians of his day: "O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched
you, that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes
Jesus Christ has evidently been set forth, crucified among
you...Are you so foolish that having begun in the Spirit,
you are now made perfect by the flesh?" (GALATIANS 3:1-3).
Europe also started in the Spirit at one time, but now is
ending up in the flesh, that is to say, with carnal vision,
carnal reasonings, carnal desires, and carnal conquests, as
though someone bewitched it! Its entire life moves in two
dimensions in these days of ours: in its length and in its
width. It does not know anything about depth and height.
And because of this it is struggling for earth, for territory,
for expansion, for space and only space. See how it goes from
one war to the other, from one terror to the other, because God
did not create man to be just an animal in space, but to
penetrate the depths of the mysteries with his mind, and to
climb with his heart to Divine heights. War for the earth
is against truth; war against truth is war against Divine
and human nature. O bitterness more bitter than gall!
How people suffer, are tortured, and how much they sacrifice
for this temporal deceptive earthly Kingdom! If they had
suffered but one per cent of these tortures and sacrifices
for the Christian kingdom, war would have become so ridiculous
as to make them laugh until tears came to their eyes. It is
with difficulty that they give two cents to Christ, but to the
Church of Moloch---satan---they give all their property and
all their children!...
The ambitious and haughty people of Europe do
not recognize their own faults. They have lost an
awareness of sin, of sin and repentance. For them,
someone else is always to blame for every evil in this
world, never themselves. But how is it possible for
them to commit a sin, since they have sat upon the
throne of God and proclaimed themselves infallible!
Their religious leader, the Pope, was the first to
declare himself this. The leaders and the kings of
the West then followeed his example. Everyone
declared himself infallible, those who bore the cross
and those who wrought the sword...
If the history of the last three centuries were
to be given a proper name, then there would be no more
proper appellation then the record of the trial
between Europe and Christ. This is because nothing
has taken place in Europe in the last three hundred
years that did not relate to Christ God.
In this trial...Christ says to Europe that it was
baptized in His Name and it should remain faithful to
Him and His Gospel.
To this, Europe, the defendant, answers: "All
religions are the same. We were told this by the
French encyclopedists. And no one can force us to
believe anything. Europe tolerates all religions as
the superstitions that they are, because of its
imperialistic interests. It does not have any
religion itself. When, however, it realized all of
its political aims, then it will settle its accounts
very quickly with all the superstitions of the
people."
Christ then asks with sorrow: "How can you people
live with only your imperialistic, material interests,
with only animalistic desires for your bodily
appetites? I wanted to make you gods, sons and
daughters of God, but you go away from Me and try to
become a pack of animals?"
To this Europe answers: "You are old fashioned.
In place of your gospel we discovered biology and
zoology. And now we know that we are not descended
from you and your heavenly father, but from orangutans
and gorillas...And we are perfectly able to become
gods (on our own), because we do not recognize any
other god than ourselves."
To this Christ says: "You are more obstinate than
the Judeans were. I raised you up from the darkness
of barbarism to the Heavenly light, but you have gone
back to the darkness like a water buffalo goes into
the mud. I shed My Blood for your sake. I showed My
love to you, when all the angels turned their faces
away from you because they could not stand the smell
of hell that came from you. When you were all
darkness and stench, I was the only One Who stayed to
clean you and illuminate ou. Now stop being
unbelievers, because you will only return to that
unbearable darkness and stench again."
To this Europe mockingly shouts: "Get away from
us! We do not recognize you! We follow European
civilization and culture, and the Greek philosophers.
We want to be free. We have universities. Science is
the star that guides us. Our slogan is: freedom,
brotherhood, equality. And our mind is the god of
all gods. You are an Asiatic. And we reject you. You
are only an old myth our grandmothers and grandfathers
believed in."
With tears in His eyes, Christ says: "Behold, now
I am leaving, but you will see. You have left God's
road and you are following satan's. Blessings and
happiness have been taken away from you. Your life is
in My hands, because I was crucified for you. And yet
in spite of all this, I will not punish you, but your
own sins and your apostasy from Me your Savior shall
punish you. I revealed the love of My Father to
everyone, and with love I wanted to save all of you."
Europe then says: "Love? Our agenda only
includes a hardy and manly hatred for everyone who
disagrees with us. Your love is only a fable. And in
place of this fable, we have raised up the flag of
ethnicity, of internationalism, of the state, of
progress, of evolution, of trans-oceanism, and of
cultism. Our salvation is found in these, so get away
from us."
My brothers, the debate ended in our times.
Christ went far away from Europe, as He did at one
time from the land of the Gadarenes, when the
Gadarenes asked him to leave. As soon as He left, war and
violence broke out, and terror and horror,
catastrophe, and the breakdown of everything.
Pre-Christian barbarism returned to Europe, the
barbarism of the Avars, the Huns, the Lombards, the
Africans, only it was one hundred times worse. Christ
picked up His Cross and took His blessings and left.
And what remained was the darkness and the stench.
And now you must decide with whom you will go,
whom you shall follow: the gloom and stench of
Europe---or CHRIST?"
