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Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that
you may be able to prove what the will of God is, that which is good, and acceptable,
and perfect.
Romans 12-2.
This is resistance and reformation on the fight, laugh, feast, and work.
In 1551, Tsar Ivan IV called for a Russian church council to address the flaws in the Russian
translations of the Greek liturgical literature of the church.
Now irrevocably cut off from the patriarch of Fallen Constantinople.
His purpose was to establish, once and for all, the ascendancy of Moscow's status as the
third Rome.
The Moscow Council was able to set the parameters of the massive undertaking, but the work preceded
only haltingly until the accession of patriarch Filareth.
Patriarch Filareth was born into one of the elite ruling Norse clans in the Muscovite
Duchy.
His given name was Feodor Nikitivich Romanov.
As a young man, he lived the life of a soldier, and then as a diplomat, but in 1609 he was tapped
by his cousin, Tsar Dmitry II, to be the patriarch of all Russia.
Shortly afterward, the land was gripped by the chaos of war.
The Polish king and conqueror Sigisman Vasa III invaded Russia and captured Moscow.
Filareth was imprisoned for nine years.
Having refused to acknowledge the poll as the Tsar of Mustavi.
Finally, on the conclusion of the truce of Delino in 1619, he was released, and canonically
enthroned Patriarch of Moscow.
Thereafter he established himself, and then his son Michael, as the royal Russian
diarchs, the third Rome, would have two actual sovereigns, Tsar Michael and his father,
the most holy Patriarch Filareth.
Theoretically, they would be co-regents, but in practice Filareth administered the affairs
of both church and state without consulting his son Tsar Michael.
It was Filareth, who permanently stratified Russian populace binding the peasantry to
the soil in perpetual serfdom.
This was aimed at stunching the ever-increasing migration of the impoverished serfs to the
Caspian steppes, where they could escape the autocratic rule of the Tsar, as well as
escaping the chafing yoke of the Tsar's taxation.
Filareth was zealous to complete the work undertaken by the earlier Moscow Council.
He set up a printing press, which produced a host of essential liturgical and theological
works.
These works eventually formed the nucleus of Moscow's famous patriarchal library.
Filareth, the Moscow Patriarchate, developed into a state within a state, and extractively
connected to the ruling Romanov family.
For the next three centuries, the Romanov's would rule the nation through both Tsardom
and Patriarchate.
The peculiarities of Russian history, its seemingly mystical detachment and monomaniacal
imperial ambitions, can only be understood through the lens of this peculiar, theocratic
third-rome ideology and its peculiar autocratic Romanov genealogy.
Following their long reign, the Romanov's produced a host of autocratic rulers.
Filareth's great grandson, Peter I, known as Peter the Great, helped to transform the
isolated kingdom into a legitimate continental empire, established a new imperial capital
at St. Petersburg and launched a cultural revolution based on the European enlightenment.
Catherine II, known as Catherine the Great, was impressed of Russia from 1762 to 1796.
She continued Peter's modernization reforms and expanded its cultural and commercial influence
and its political and military incursions into Eastern Europe.
And then of course, Nicholas II.
He was the last emperor of Russia.
He ruled from 1894 until his forced abdication in 1917.
He was able to survive the first bloody Russian revolution in 1905, following the imperial
defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.
He also survived the second Russian revolution during World War I and the desperate winter
of 1916 and 17.
But he could not withstand the convulsive Bolshevik civil war that erupted the next autumn.
In some ways, the fall of Zarniculus in the tragic assassination of the entire family
represented not just the end of royal lines in Russia, but the end of the era of royalty.
His mother's siblings included King's Frederick VIII of Denmark, George I of Greece and
Queen Alexandra of England.
He was the first cousin of the German Emperor Wilhelm II.
King George V of the United Kingdom, King Heicon VII, Queen mod of Norway, King Constantine
X of Denmark and King Constantine I of Greece.
For good or for ill, the West would never look the same again.
Karl Marx's nightmarish communist ambitions were foiled again and again and again in the European
revolutions of 1848 in the Italian re-Orgamento of 1861 and 1870 in the Paris commune of 1871
and in the Lombard insurgencies of 1915 and 1917, but the fall of the Romanovs in 1917
triggered a dramatic cultural earthquake that has over the course of the last century altered
the whole of the Christian West and the dark specter of radical progressivism, of revolutionary
socialism, of an anti-Christian, anti-traditional, anti-historical, anti-rational, ideological
fundamentalism reminds us of the vital necessity of both resistance and reformation.
I'm George Grant from the Fight, Laugh, Feast Network.
For more information and for resources, go to GeorgeGrant.net.
