Nepsis (“watchfulness” or “sobriety”) is the Orthodox practice of keeping watch over the thoughts that enter into our minds and hearts – “guarding the soul.”

The Philokalia describes the human being as a fortress, always under attack by robbers and thieves waiting to plunder. They enter into the fortress by the doors and windows of our soul – the five senses.

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

1 Begin with Prayer

Begin each day in Christ. As soon as you wake and before doing anything else, pray

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me a Sinner.”

In this way, your mind and your heart will be oriented towards Christ from the very beginning, before the assaults of mundane concerns, which invade your stillness and disturb your dispassion – your “apatheia.”

From this moment on, you will begin your watch.

2 Watch Your Thoughts

The Fathers say sin enters in stages:

temptation→ assent→ surrender→ captivity → passion.

“Cut off the roots of our sins and not merely their fruits”

– St. John Cassian

Sin is easiest to deal with at the very beginning, when we first feel tempted.

“Assent” is the stage in which sin fools the mind into dialoging with the temptation. This, in turn, leads to “surrender” to the sin. Once we have surrendered once, we become a captive to this habitual sin, until it finally becomes a passion we are addicted to.

3 Lean Not on Thy Own Understanding

It’s important to simply recognize the temptation and discard.

By no means try to argue with the temptation. This is how the evil one tries to deceive you — through a clever argument. Instead, simply dismiss these thoughts before they enter the stage of assent, and eventually to surrender.

Remember humility. Never rely on your own discernment, or think that you are too clever to fall prey to the evil one’s arguments.

Don’t go it alone. Consult your spiritual father, make frequent confession, seek the counsel of the saints, and above all seek Our Lord in prayer.

4 Silence and Stillness

Modern life is full of noise and distraction – flooding the mind with endless, trivial information. This is the opposite of Nepsis.

Try adding a “social media fast” to your prayer and fasting routine. Put your phone down unless it is absolutely necessary, and check notifications once a day.

Work in silence, rather than having a podcast or YouTube on in the background.

Set aside ten minutes each day to sit in silence.

5 Pray without Ceasing

Whether you are driving, working, or even doing the dishes, continually pray. This will draw your mind back to Christ.

Make prayer the “background noise” of your life, rather than distractions. In this way, it is more difficult to hide your daily activities from God, or to allow bad thoughts into your heart.

“…take heed to yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap; for it will come upon all who dwell upon the face of the earth… Watch, therefore, and pray at all times.”

– Luke 21:34-36

6 End with Prayer

End each day with prayer and reflection. Ask yourself:

When did my watchfulness waver?

When did I allow the passions to make their way inside the fortress of my soul?

How did pride, resentment, lust, or distraction sneak in through tiny doors?

“Attention must go forward and observe the enemies like a scout, and it must first engage in combat with sin, and resist the bad thoughts that come to the soul. Prayer must follow attention, banishing and destroying at once all the evil thoughts which attention previously fought, because by itself attention cannot destroy them.”

– St. Symeon the New Theologian

(Published with permission from our spiritual father)

Closer to Heaven

I’m travelling alone. Oil is leaking from the head gasket of my 96 Honda Civic with 200,000 miles on it. I travel 10 hours through mostly deserted wilderness.

I frantically pray the Jesus prayer over and over. Every mile marker, I ask the Mother of God to pray for me.

Somehow, through their prayers, it makes it up the steep dirt road to the monastery without a flat tire or white smoke coming out of the AC.

Somehow, through their prayer, I make it up the steep dirt road into the mists of the mountain.

Everything is wet. There’s a gentle white noise of falling rain. But no raindrops make it through the trees and make contact with my skin.

Beautiful blue onion domes topped with golden three-beamed crosses tower above the cloud-enveloped mountain.

Beneath them, cobbled together wooden cabins made of old abandoned mining equipment from the gold rush hide amongst the trees. The outsides are bare. The insides are covered in beautiful gold icons. Families of deer frolick around them, carelessly.

Shrines in a mixture of Russian and Chinese architectural styles – onion domes above sliding ornate screens and mossy upright stones – above the golden California sun.

“The kitchen is the only room with electricity,” says the monk. I meet him in the mist and he gives me and another pilgrim a tour of this place the best he can, through barely discernible English. “In case, you need to charge your phone.”

I introduced myself, but I regretted it. I wanted to use my baptismal name. But my email used my birth name, and I didn’t want to confuse him.

His black robe is stained. The hairs of his red beard are twisted around like a worn-out toothbrush. The next cabin is the old printshop. In the middle of it is a heavy, black, iron press. On the shelves are metal negatives of the portraits of various saints.

“The metal had to be cut in New York and shipped over in the mail,” says the monk.

I imagine myself receiving one of them in the mail. The sweet salivation of anticipation. (An anticipation which has since gone extinct). Then one day, an anonymous box appears out of the clouds and onto my front porch. I pick it up, and it feels heavy. I unwrap it carefully, ready to receive this long-awaited key that frees the fruits of my efforts.

My parents own a print shop. It consists of confusingly complex, plastic printers that make unnatural noises. They connect to a computer via wifi. Even the buttons on them have no weight or substance – they exist on a touch screen.

The monk continues the tour.

He shows me to my cabin, a ways down the mountain.

We walk for a while down the steep path, passing some deer.

I open the door and reflexively reach for the light switch. But it isn’t there. The room has a primitive cot – luxurious compared to the bare wooden boards that the monks sleep on – walls covered in beautiful icons, shelves full of spiritual books – thick books and thin books, Russian and English books – and a box full of firewood. The latter is for a black, iron furnace that dominates the center of the room. That and the shovel next door must be for the winter.

“Oh you’re lucky, you have lots of water,” says the monk, gesturing towards a box of water bottles in the corner. The only other water down here is a large jug of thick blue plastic turned on its side, like a beer keg. This is for washing your hands after using the outhouse, I infer, not for drinking.

“What was your name again?”

I repeat it, but he can’t pronounce it.

“What about your baptismal name?” he asks.

I give it to him, with a small sense of relief, and he writes it down.

He leaves.

I close the door of the cabin.

I say a very long prayer thanking my guardian angel, the Theotokos, and Our Lord.

Hermitage

My cabin is at the bottom of the mountain.

Two other pilgrims – a subdeacon and a layman both named Seraphim – are staying at the top. Closer to the chapel.

I try to engage in some friendly conversation, but for the most part no one speaks.

At meals, everyone eats in silence. I am seated across from another pilgrim, but there is no small talk between us, only gesturing to pass each other this or that. A monk begins reading from a book of the lives of the Saints, describing them getting beheaded, skinned alive, and burned – either by Roman emperors or Bolsheviks. Occasionally, it describes those Saints who survived the purges and made it out of the prisons to profess their faith freely. Usually, they expressed how disappointed they were that they did not get the honor of suffering a baptism of blood for Christ.

In the dining hall, the monks sit at the other end of a very large table, far away from us. Many of them are absent, travelling, or sick. Those that remain pay us no attention.

One of them is a Schemamonk, his back completely bent over. Perpetually bowing. He has to sit in a recliner during liturgical services. The schema is usually given to those monks with one foot in the coffin.

I want the Schemamonk’s blessing. He is close to heaven. He is carrying on his back a lifetime of prayers. Later, I am lucky enough to get it. He turns his face towards us. It is very pale. He blesses me and the pilgrims beside me, drawing the sign of the cross over our heads.

In the chapel, I am blessed again – by the sight of the relics of my patron. I begin to stand beside them during the liturgy. Begging for guidance.

I return to the cabin.

Alone, down at the bottom of the hill, far from the chapel, my infirmities are exposed by the silence. I am carrying on my back a lifetime of sin.

Aside from a few dishes, the monks don’t ask me to do any labor around the monastery. Only pray.

Between 9 am, when our morning meal ends, and 1 pm, there is nothing to do but read, contemplate, and pray.

The monks are mostly away in their cells. I am told that pilgrims are not allowed there. On the tour, they took me to Father Seraphim’s cell, and they rang a little bell first to alert the other monks of our presence.

I sit in the library. I find a rare book.

It’s a book on the life of Father Seraphim. I spend the rest of the day studying it, and praying with him at his grave. He can no longer get sick or be absent. My hermitage is over.

Study

Father Seraphim says that we think of Judas as being something special, but he is not. He says that we are all potential Judases. That we all have some passion, some weak point that Satan can exploit. He uses this weakness as a starting point, and picks at it using logic. A chain of logic that eventually leads us away from Christ.

“We have to look at ourselves and say ‘which passion of mine will the devil try to hook me on in order to cause me to betray Christ?’ If we think we are something superior to Judas, that he was some kind of ‘kook’ and we are not–we are quite mistaken…”

He says that for the West, this passion was the subordination of God to philosophy and the rational. First, the Scholastics tried to make God fit into philosophy. Then, they dispensed with God entirely in favor of “pure reason.” Finally, Hume and Kant critiqued this “pure reason,” knocking it off its throne and leaving nothing.

Father Seraphim says that we must treat all things, good and bad, as being sent by God, and we must think of how to use them to serve Him.

“We should accept all things as God’s Providence, knowing that they are intended to wake us up from our passions, to lead us to God, to show us some God-pleasing thing we can do…Almost every day of our lives, there is something that indicates to us God’s will. We must be open to this…Let us be sober, seeing not the fulfillment of our passions around us, but rather the indication of God’s will.”

I read book after book, Saint after Saint. All of them are of one mind.

Archmandrite Zacharias says:

“When we go along with the Providence of God, we have courage to struggle, because the choice was not ours. God put us there; He will provide.”

St. Basil speaks thus of the horror of becoming Judas:

“What, therefore, shall we render to the Lord for all the blessings which He has bestowed upon us? He is good, indeed, that He does not expect a recompense, but is merely to be loved in return for His gifts.

Whenever I call these things to mind…I am struck by a kind of shuddering fear and a cold terror, lest, through distraction of mind or preoccupation with vanities, I fall away from God’s love and become a reproach to Christ.

For, he who now deceives us and endeavors by every artifice to induce us to forget our Benefactor through the attraction of worldly allurements…will then, in the presence of the Lord, reproach us with our insolence and will gloat over our disobedience and apostasy.

He who neither created us nor died for us will count us, nonetheless, among his followers in disobedience and neglect of the commandments of God. This reproach to me and the triumph of our enemy appear to me more dreadful than all the punishments of hell, because we provide the enemy of Christ with matter for boasting and with cause for exulting over Him who died for us and rose again.”

Lessons from Father Seraphim Pt. 1

“If God wills it, it will be so. And if He does not, then He will create obstacles that make it impossible to continue.”

– St. John of San Francisco (paraphrased by the writer).

St. John Maximovitch was one of Father Seraphim’s spiritual fathers. He was also such for the “co-founder” of Father Seraphim’s magazine The Orthodox Word, Gleb. In fact, it received its name from St. John himself (it was originally conceived of as being called The Pilgrim).

St. John had been Archbishop of Shanghai until he was forced to flee the country by the Communists. He eventually made his way to San Francisco, and became Archbishop there. While in California, he wanted Gleb to start a monastery there in honor of St. Herman of Alaska, the first Orthodox missionary to America. Unfortunately, the Orthodox community in California was sparse. Then, Gleb met Eugene.

At the time, Father Seraphim Rose was Eugene Rose. He had been working towards getting a PhD in Eastern religion and ancient Chinese. During the late 1950s and 1960s, there was a great interest among Americans in Eastern religions. This was brought to the fore by many public intellectuals such as Carl Jung, Timothy Leary, and Alan Watts. However, according to Father Seraphim, these public intellectuals tended not to learn from the Eastern masters themselves on their own terms. Instead, they only learned about these ideologies indirectly, through books, and with a skeptical mind, tried to fit them into Western thought in an attempt to create religious syncreticism. This distorted these Eastern ideologies in the process.

The exception to this was René Guenon. Guenon was a writer from a generation earlier, and unlike Jung or Watts, was more of a conservative, or more accurately, a “traditionalist.” Since Guenon had more respect for traditional ideologies, he emphasized the need to be taught face-to-face by an authentic teacher who had inherited these traditions. This is what Eugene had been doing, studying under Gi-ming Shien, a Chinese Taoist master who had been teaching in China before he had to flee from the Communists.

Then Eugene discovered Orthodoxy, and these Far-Eastern religions paled in comparison. He dropped out of his program. He took a menial job as a janitor in order to support himself while he started writing a book, which was to be the culmination of all of his study. The book would explain how, for 1000 years, the West had fallen away from Christ.

Unfortunately, Eugene knew that due to the unpopularly negative view of his book towards modernity and its idea of “progress,” it would be difficult to find a publisher.

In the meantime, he met Gleb.

One day Gleb had an epiphany. He and Eugene would start an Orthodox bookstore. They would use this “Holy money” that they made selling books to buy a printing press and start a monastery in honor of St. Herman. Then, they could print and sell Eugene’s book and fulfill St. John’s wishes.

This is the origin of Gleb and Eugene’s magazine The Orthodox Word, St. Herman of Alaska’s monastery in Platina, and Father Seraphim’s book, Nihilism.

Father Seraphim did not practice the intense asceticism of some other Orthodox monastics and clergy (such as St. John, who rarely slept, ate only meal a day at midnight, and walked everywhere barefoot). Nonetheless, he was someone who rejected the world. There was a rarely a moment of his life that was not spent working, teaching, or praying.

He did not shower. He would eat anything set before him, seeing eating as simply the equivalent of “filling the gas tank of a car.” He did not add condiments or flavor to his food. When it was his turn to cook at the monastery, he would make dishes such as pasta with only the noodles and tomato paste and no other ingredients. He may not have been martyred, but he died to this life in his own way, living solely to work, and to store up treasure in the Kingdom of Heaven.

This is what Metropolitan Kallistos Ware referred to as the “green martyrdom” of the monastic life. This green martyrdom mocks the idols of this world through its indifference to temporary worldly pleasures and comforts. The green martyr becomes immune to these poisons, by weaning themselves from them. If a person becomes dependent on pleasure and comfort, they become a slave to them. They also becomes a slave to those who have the power to take them away from them, through money, social stigma, or other means.

This slavery to pleasure and comfort is true death – the death of the soul.

If one never eats, they cannot go hungry. If one does not sleep, they can never become tired. If one is accustomed to the cold, they cannot go naked. If one lies out in the street, then they cannot be deprived of a home. If one is numb to pain, they cannot be tortured. If one has already died, they cannot be killed.

When one is free from the world and its addictions, they become empty of desire. The things of the world no longer fill their soul. And when the soul has been emptied of the things of the world, then there is room in the soul for God.

The world is full of distractions. These distractions have become so incessant that they distract us from our sins. St. Basil says in his “long rule” that when we live in the world, we have less time to reflect on the sins that we have committed each day, and that we can even come to think of ourselves as more righteous than we actually are.

“In the quiet life of solitude, we overcome our former manner of life in which we neglected the commandments of Christ, and so have power to eradicate the stains of sin by ceaseless prayer and constant attention to the will of God; for we cannot hope to apply ourselves to such contemplation and prayer amid the many things which distract the mind by leading it to worldly cares.”

These distractions draw our attention not only away from our little life of sin, but also away from knowing God. They may seem important, but really they are fictions and falsehoods. God, beneath them, is the true Reality. These distractions pull us away from Reality and into fantasy. Asceticism is the way to dispel them, and thus see the Truth.

However, one does not have to become a monk to become “dead to the world.” Anyone can practice asceticism on their own. When you fast, fast also from social media, and from idle entertainment and amusement. Fast even from too many spiritual books, when done not in moderation. Fast from anything that creates noise. Fast from anything generates too much information for the mind to digest or remember. Fast from warm clothes. Fast from showers. Fast from a comfortable bed. Fast from all forms of pleasure and comfort. Either slowly build up an immunity and break the addiction piece by piece, or simply give it up cold turkey. Just as you would break any other addiction.

Lessons from Father Seraphim Pt. 2

“What does the youth want? … youth is full of ideals and wishes to do something to serve these ideals. The answer for someone who wishes to work with youth…is to give them something to do, something useful and at the same time idealistic. Our printing press is perfect in both regards…this is something small, but it is a good beginning. God will teach us what more we can do!”

— Father Seraphim Rose

Eugene and Gleb had to overcome many obstacles to create The Orthodox Word. At the time, Eugene was still working as a janitor, so he did not exactly have money to burn. The ancient press that they ended up being able to afford was so old, that an antique dealer once came to their shop more interested in the press than in the publication itself. They had to lay out the type manually, so that only ¼ of a page could be printed at a time. They would work all day in order to complete a single page, then fall asleep in the print shop.

There was also nobody to read their product. There was not a large Orthodox community in San Francisco, and even fewer American Orthodox converts who would have an interest in an English-language publication. After seeking help from their local parish, they were only able to find 12 people interested in subscribing. Thus, there was no plan for how they would make The Orthodox Word profitable.

“The publication of this magazine is so difficult that it is only with God’s help that we are able to put it out at all”

– Father Seraphim Rose

Orthodox priests visited their shop and laughed at them, with their primitive equipment and amateurish production. These priests had their own, parish-funded, professional operations. Because they were in Greek and Russian, they had a built-in readership. This is why, despite English being the world’s most spoken language, no one else printed in English. They preferred to stay in their ethnic ghettos, rather than preach the word.

Nevertheless, there were many, like St. John, who came to help them. They took advantage of every opportunity. For example, when they opened their bookstore, they had to figure out a way to afford their inventory. Father Seraphim looked for a way to afford discount books, and was able to work out a deal where the books could be paid for as they were sold.

When Father Seraphim and Gleb were creating The Orthodox World, they lived in a country in which there was much more opportunity. Goods and services were far cheaper relative to today. When they created the bookstore, they were able to find one down the street from the parish in a prime location. With real estate prices the way that they are these days, it is difficult to imagine something like that would be affordable to two young people, one of them working as a janitor. The land that St. Herman’s was eventually built on must have been far cheaper as well. If it was conceived of today, perhaps it would be too expensive and would not exist. Not to mention that their scheme of buying the land using money from selling books rests on the fact that books could be profitable. Or that you could support yourself as a janitor while you were writing a book in the first place.

Money is a lubricant. It makes the impossible possible, and the possible far easier.

So many people’s problems today, especially young people’s problems, are caused by a lack of the opportunity afforded by money. People cannot support a family, start a business, search for truth, write a book, pursue a dream, start and run a monastery, or even have enough time to pray.

All anyone can afford to do is worry about money.

This also makes it far more difficult to escape from worldy comforts and pleasures, which for some becomes the only solace they have in life. Their only way to numb their inescapable spiritual thirst. While it is too expensive to raise a family or start a business, there is an endless and cheap supply of pornography, drugs, and entertainment.

Of course, one does not have to have money to be a good Christian, quite the opposite. But if anyone wants to do anything important or out of the ordinary, to the benefit of themselves and others and to the glory of God, this has become far more difficult.

This is why, in this day and age, charity is so valuable. Money is a terrible thing to pursue for one’s own sake, but it is necessary to solve many social problems. If we can free people from the slavery to money, this will free them to start families, live a more dignified existence, and give them time to look for God again, quenching their spiritual thirst instead of numbing it.

But, this may require some to martyr themselves for the sake of others. To sacrifice their own dreams, and to make themselves even poorer. As poor as a monk.

There are many Christian charities. But often they are limited to handing out material comforts to the most financially impoverished. This is laudable, of course. But it is incomplete. Where are the charities that help those who may not be on the streets, but are nonetheless living lives of despair? Those who are diligent and conscientious, and yet despite this are unable to afford homes, start families, start small businesses, and pursue the American Dream?

On the contrary, these days, people are almost ridiculed for having dreams. Even those who simply want an average middle-class life are derided as “entitled.” Where is the charity for those ordinary people, who were not born into wealth, but who nonetheless have dreams? The pioneers, the explorers, the inventors? Where are the charities for the forgotten men of America?

Everyone deserves to be treated with at least enough dignity to keep them from going hungry, and for this Christian charity is luckily in no short supply. But surely charity towards those who are already industrious will bear more fruit – both for themselves, and our society – than charity towards the indigent.

One day, I hope that America can once again have a society that provides enough opportunity for beautiful dreams to blossom.

The good news is that God is not constrained by financial concerns.

Wounded by Love

On the way back down the mountain there is a fallen tree on the road, blocking my path. One of the monks comes out with a chainsaw to dispose of it.

This was the monk who had spent most of the week caring for me and the other pilgrims. He showed us around the monastery grounds, fed us, attended to our needs, asked if there was anything that he could do for us. He even assisted pilgrims who had just been casually passing through, and had audaciously requested a place to plug in their computers or take advantage of other modern conveniences while in the middle of an ascetic community.

He tells me to grab some food from the kitchen while he deals with the log. I run to the kitchen and stuff a few pieces of fruit down my gullet as fast as I can. I want to leave with a full stomach, so that I won’t be starving if my car breaks down on the way back and I am trapped in the middle of the desert. But I also think there will probably be lumber to move after he is done with the chainsaw, or perhaps something else that he would need assistance with. So I want to get back to him in time to help.

I go back down to the road, and I meet him coming back up.

“Are you finished already?”

He says yes. Then he hugs me goodbye.

He says, “If I have done anything to offend or upset you during your stay here, please forgive me. And pray for me.”

At that moment, I understand what is meant by “wounded by love.”

After a week of feeding me, taking care of me, rescuing me from every obstacle, after attending to my body and my soul, and all the while asking nothing in return, now he asks me to forgive and pray for him?

Me – who did nothing to earn such kindness, gave nothing in return, and was surely a greater sinner than any monk, or even a layman of a more normal, mild-mannered temperament than myself.

It is an audacious, almost subversive act of love. It is powerful, and capable of piercing the hardest of hearts. It is an act of love that pierces through pride, ugliness, and falsehood.

This is the truth of God.

The truth of Christ.

The truth of the God that loves.

A truth buried in noise – distractions, money, and delusional ideologies promising a false, man-made paradise.

Beyond rationality or ideology.

Beyond thought or feeling.

Pure light, pure life.

But now I have to throw this all away and return to my daily life? A life spent worrying about money and business and plans and amusements and so much other noise?

I want to escape from the noise and be free to live in truth.

But how?

No sooner do I feel it, then I can already feel it slipping away. Falling back into the old routine. Back into the noise.

How can I keep the candle lit?

I am an Acolyte – a partisan of the Mother of God, indifferent to my life and death in this world for the sake of Christ.

I am the ghost of the old world, coming back to haunt these pitiable times — being born in this age, I have rejected its shameless insurrection against God, and not only have I rejected it but I have made of my life a sign of contradiction against it. I am the Counter-Revolution.

The Acolytes have come to harrow this faithless age as Christ harrowed Hell after His Passion. Death expected to receive only a man – it encountered God, and was cast down.

This era of history thought it was receiving a hopeless and dissolute generation – it will encounter the Acolytes, and because of this will soon come to its conclusion.

Where there is one Acolyte, there is the complete death of today’s faithless world. One Acolyte life is one casualty for the dying culture, whose demagogues believe that they will direct the course of history because they have brought such a great amount of people into the dark. But as ‘love covers a multitude of sins’, so the sacrificial life of one Acolyte covers the profligacy of many. A person who would be discouraged from the fight even if he were the only one alive in the world who still remembered God, is not to be found in our ranks.

Lord, you have told us:

Therefore, I declare war against my own self interest, against that barrier between me and my God, between me and my brothers and sisters. In this warfare let me be a merciless and unsympathetic conqueror; but in my love for others and patience with their faults let me be most compassionate and lenient.

We’ve arrived at the point of ruin that past generations thought to be far away. Acolytes are those who will restore what has been lost – even though it’s too late. We haven’t arrived until now because if we came when there was still any hope, the rationalists could have predicted our victory. We have come late, long after it has became hopeless – so that the rationalists may be put to shame, and to show forth the ignorance of this world.

A new type of human being came to exist 2000 years ago – the Christian – who bears the name of Christ. The Christian lives not according to this world – he lives according to its coming end. Christ lives in the one bearing His name; the one who has Christ living in him has no need of any other life; much less the “life” offered to us by this age of indulgence, this life apart from God. Acolytes want to be living icons of the beauty of the Christian life, to give our lives in oblation.

The words of Padraig Pearse:

This is the essence of our movement. We are not like those who live in fair times when a home, a family, children, and a fulfilling life are not far out of reach. No, we live in times of disgrace. Even on a purely secular level, we are facing a privation of even the most fundamental parts of a happy life in a functioning civilization.

The state of our profligate, consumerist western world has gotten so depressing that there just isn’t any use anymore in intellectualizing about how bad it is. People have been doing that for a while. What is needed now is a group of people whose lives are so sharply set against this age, who are so annihilated to the love of self, so peacefully and sweetly reposed in their militant defiance of this dishonorable, calculating modern world that just the passive presence of two or three of such people is enough to put the whole thing in distress.

Perhaps we almost enjoy living in such shallow, depressing times; maybe we get some satisfaction in being surrounded by consumerism and getting to pretend like we are something or someone meaningful in the midst of it. Maybe there’s something romantic in this; but that isn’t the romanticism of the Acolytes. Our romanticism lies in our resolution; we want to tear down the images of our imprisonment – the products, the entertainments, the noise, the sin – with greater fervor than the fervor of those who can’t stand the holy images of our Faith, who look with apathy at the forgiving and saddened countenance of our Savior.

Our romanticism is of reparation; our lives and the vitality of our youth given up in a sacrifice of consolation to Christ.

“You’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making rock music worse.”

– Hank Hill

Christians have created the greatest works of art in Western society. In fact, they define Western society. Religious art, such as Michelangelo’s David or his paintings in the Sistine Chapel, are known as “the works of the Great Masters.” Mozart’s Requiem is called “Classical Music” (a classic being something that is timeless or the best of its kind). Because the essence of Western society was Christian, so naturally its artists created Christian art, because they could not create any other.

These artists portrayed a timeless and transcendent beauty, a beauty which was bestowed upon Nature by its Creator. Thus, their art was a form of communion with God, the timeless, transcendent, and all-beautiful One. Because it portrays the universal beauty of a universal God, it can be appreciated by all men from all places and at all times. Today, we still hold the Great Masters as the pinnacle of artistic achievement. Those from outside the West, whether they be Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, or even atheist, travel from across the surface of the world to bask in the beauty of our cathedrals.

Yet something has happened to our art. It is something that seems far off and fossilized. Relics from another time. It appears to the contemporary person old-fashioned and from another civilization than our own. Contemporary art is from a new civilization — a secular civilization. At its best, contemporary art no longer portrays the timeless and transcendent beauty of the Creator but rather the self-indulgent expression of the artist. Other times, it portrays mere novelty. At its worst, it even portrays outright ugliness — a rebellious, “anti-art” that makes an open mockery of the very concept of aesthetics.

The Church has little to nothing to do with any contemporary art. Art that is popular, relevant, or significant –– whether in the form of literature, architecture, visual art, or music — art that can be said to be representative of our contemporary civilization, is strictly secular. The few remaining contemporary attempts at religious art are ineffective, and come off as boring, a hollow rebranding of secular art with Christian motifs, or simply a stale attempt to copy a once glorious past that has been lost to time.

In the rest of this article, we will take a look at what Christian art works, what does not work, and see if we can diagnose and perhaps cure this ailment.

What Works

Christian art works best when it has the following characteristics:

1. Authenticity – if the art is too “try hard” or not a true expression of the artist, it loses its authenticity and thus its expression of “truth.” There is a certain organic quality that must be present.

2. Transcendence – This authenticity, as an expression of truth, is in itself a form of transcendent. There are other expressions, such as, most obviously, aesthetic beauty. Also, technical skill – an expression of fortitude, intellect, etc. – is another transcendent quality that can transmit in the audience a sense of awe. Effective art is a communion between the artist, the audience, and these transcendent qualities.

3. Romance & Emotion – Art is a meeting between the human nature of the artist and the divine transcendent. Part of the artist’s human nature is the artist’s heart. Post-modern art tends towards being “conceptual,” or else an expression of trivial passion that is often highly subjective and local to the artist or their particular secular identity. Deep human emotion can communicate a complex and universal human condition, which is another particular case of the transcendent, the nature of the created order which flows from the creative will of God.

4. Tradition & Context – Effective traditional art draws on a continuous tradition. It is a living organism. This is another form of transcendence. While post-modern art is solely an expression of the individual, traditional art is an expression of the civilization that created it, and ultimately all of mankind. This is especially true of Christian art which an expression of the Body of Christ. Thus, effective Christian art should be Christian. It should draw on the rich tradition of the Church handed down from the beginning until our own time.

“When a society is perishing, the wholesome advice to give to those who would restore it is to call it to the principles from which it sprang.” – Rerum Novarum.

5. Ingenuity & Contemporaneity – At the same time, art should not simply be a mere mimicry of what has come before it. To do so is to implicitly acknowledge that the tradition is a fossil of another time, not a living tradition that continues unto this day. It also detracts from the authenticity of the art. Every age is slightly different, and re-contextualizes tradition, in the same way that a living person will behave differently in different environments, yet at the same time this action is consistent with the nature of that same person. “Copy-catting” or “LARPing” is a frequent obstacle to effective Christian art. Christians should embrace new media, such as memes, AI, digital art, electronic music, and what have you, but they should use them to express Christian ideas – “where can God work through this new development?”

6. Not a Copy of Secular Art – There is another frequent obstacle to effective Christian art that is even more ubiquitous than “copy-catting” traditional art, and that is copying secular art. This obstacle reduces authenticity. Secular art, by its very nature, contains a separate set of implicit ideas. This is why Christian Rock is the ultimate example of bad Christian art. It is impossible for Christian art to out-rock-n-roll rock-n-roll. Simply copying a secular piece of art and making it Christian is like slapping a sticker of a cross on something, rather than baptizing it. Christianity has to create on its own terms, leading rather than following. A better alternative is experimentation from scratch. Forget you ever heard techno music and apply the principles of Gregorian chant to a synthesizer.

Art Review

Here are some contemporary Christian artists, chosen at random.

Some are high art, others are a mix of more pedestrian art/popular art comparable to secular popular art.

Owen Cyclops

Owen Cyclops is a New York–based illustrator and comic artist whose work explores themes of religion, mysticism, symbolism, and esoterica, often through a Christian lens. His art blends sacred imagery with contemporary commentary, aiming to counteract the pervasive influence of modern visual culture.

I first found him on right-wing Twitter, where his tweets often went viral.

https://owencomics.com/

1. Authenticity — 9/10

Owen draws heavily from his own life. His comics feature personal anecdotes, spiritual and theological questions, American Christian esoterica, conspiracy theories, stories from his pre-Christian life as a hippie artist who experimented with psychedelics, observations about the absurdity of modern life, etc.

2. Transcendence — 5/10

The art is highly focused on his own personal life. It has a fairly down-to-earth style. So, transcendence is not the first thing that comes to mind. But it is not anti-beauty either.

3. Romance & Emotion — 7/10

Owen’s work may not necessarily be “romantic” per se but it is deeply personal. The audience can certainly relate to his comics and his emotions pertaining to contemporary life as a Christian.

4. Tradition & Context — 9/10

Owen draws on Christian themes and symbolism heavily. One of his most well-known comics points out that the “goth” aesthetic often used by anti-Christians is really an expression of the Christian motif of “momento mori.” On his website, he offers a fully illustrated liturgical calendar.

5. Ingenuity & Contemporaneity — 9/10

Owen Cyclops excels at using new media, especially meme aesthetics and digital formats. He has a large following on Twitter. Although trained in classical art, his style is highly contemporary and unique. His work shows how Christian thought can be injected into modern forms without simply copying secular trends. His art is clever, timely, and inventive.

6. Not a Copy of Secular Art — 9/10

His art style is contemporary and in a modern format. Aside from this, he really is not trying to create a “webcomics but Christian” product.

Death to the World

Death to the World is an Eastern Orthodox Christian zine founded in 1994 by monks from St. Herman of Alaska Monastery in Northern California, notably Justin Marler, a former member of the doom metal band Sleep. Aimed at reaching disillusioned youth in the punk and metal subcultures, the zine promotes the ancient principles of Orthodox Christianity as the “last true rebellion” against modern nihilism and despair, encouraging readers to be “dead to this world and alive to the other world”.

https://deathtotheworld.com/

Authenticity – 9/10
This is a good example of “baptizing” rather than “copy-catting.” Although it does participate in a secular music movement and format (zines), this is a movement that the creators were authentically a part of prior to their conversion. They emphasize and extract the Christian elements – and thus transcendent truths – already inherent in this movement for their aesthetics.

Transcendence – 9/10
The message of the zine expresses a perennial Orthodox motif.

“Keep thy mind in Hell and despair not.” – St. Silouan the Athonite.

“If you give all your life to the Earth, the Earth will give you a tomb; but if you give your life to heaven, heaven will give you a throne.” – St. Ephraim the Syrian.

This motif is common to both the metal/goth music scene and Christianity. The difference is that the Christian life offers an answer to momento mori, not simply nihilism and hedonism. This creates a more complete message.

Romance & Emotion – 10/10
The zine channels the intense emotions of its readers, addressing feelings of alienation and despair by presenting the profound emotional depth found in Orthodox spirituality. The gothic aesthetics are literally romantic (goth comes from the original Romantic Art movement) and it doesn’t get much more emotionally dynamic than contemplating your own death. This romanticism is one of the prominent themes of metal and alternative music, and Orthodoxy speaks to the same inner heart of a person from whence this comes.

Tradition & Context – 9/10
It is firmly rooted in Orthodox tradition and aesthetics, and the zine draws upon the writings of Church Fathers and monastic teachings, presented in a contemporary format. The zine format hearkens back to the epistles circulated by the early, underground, DIY Church of the apostles.

Ingenuity & Contemporaneity – 10/10
By utilizing the zine format popular in punk culture, it ingeniously bridges the gap between ancient faith and modern subcultures, demonstrating that Orthodox Christianity can be both timeless and timely.

Not a Copy of Secular Art – 7/10
Death to the World does copy the themes of the metal and alternative scenes, but the alternative scene copied them from Christianity first. So Christianity ultimately owns them. The zine format is something that originated from outside the Church in a secular subculture hostile at times hostile to Christianity, so in this sense they did copy the secular culture, thus they lose a few points.

Honorable mention: Kat Von D.

She followed in a similar vein to Death to the World, emphasizing the aesthetic appeal of Orthodoxy in order to appeal to the alternative scene. Some might say this is shallow, but even if this were the case, if it gets people to their first Divine Liturgy, God can take them the rest of the way from there. And I would argue that it is not shallow, but draws upon the same transcendent aesthetics.

Honorable mention: “Orthobro” TikTok edits

Another similar version of this are Orthodox Instagram and TikTok accounts, which copy the Death to the World gothic aesthetics, this time applying them to a new technology and format. The “zine” format is a little dated and Gen-X/Millennial coded, and this is a bit of an updated version of the same idea. The “Orthobro edits” show how this same strategy of “baptizing” rather than copying can be applied to various media.

Arvo Part

Arvo Part is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. He is also an Orthodox Christian. Part’s music is inspired by traditional religious music such as Gregorian chant, but has an extremely modern and avant-garde style. He was the most performed living composer from 2011-2018, and 2022.

While a bit older than the others – his works go back to the 70s – Arvo Part does an excellent job of creating truly high art by blending the traditional with the modern, and is an excellent model to follow for those aiming higher than “art zines.”

According to Wikipedia:

In April 2020, although Pärt rarely gives interviews, he spoke to the Spanish newspaper ABC about the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that it was a “mega fast” and reminded him to follow the example of John Updike, who “once said that he tried to work with the same calm as the masters of the Middle Ages, who carved the church pews in places where it was impossible to see them.”

Authenticity – 10/10
Part’s music is totally sincere and original. He is a highly trained classical master who built on the techniques of old masters who came before him, and then invented his own. This is the ideal Christian artist.

Transcendence – 10/10
His works evoke a sense of the sacred, often described as transcendent and meditative.

Some contemporary and experimental composers of the 60s and 70s emphasized dissonance, and had an “anti-art” style, or a style that simply embraced novelty and subversion for the sake of novelty and subversion, Arvo Part instead, embraced experimentation while adhering to transcendent notions of beauty.

Romance & Emotion – 9/10
While Part’s music is characterized by restraint and minimalism, it conveys deep emotional resonance.

Tradition & Context – 10/10
Part draws heavily from early Christian music traditions, particularly Gregorian chant and Orthodox liturgy. His compositions are deeply rooted in these traditions, yet he presents them in a contemporary context, bridging the ancient and the modern.

He writes choral music, featuring familiar liturgical pieces such as “Kyrie,” “Gloria,” and “Angus Dei” – just as the traditional masters such as Mozart once did. However, his compositions also represent the peak of avant-garde contemporary composers such as Phillip Glass.

Ingenuity & Contemporaneity – 10/10
By creating the tintinnabuli style, Part introduced a novel musical language that resonates with contemporary audiences while maintaining a timeless quality.

Not a Copy of Secular Art – 10/10
Part’s music isn’t a copy of anything. It is totally original and represents mastery over the forms and techniques of composition.

Healing Aesthetic Sickness

Aside from the fact that religion was simply an inseparable part of the average person’s identity (such that an artist’s self-expression necessarily entailed a religious expression), there was another practical cause of the Church’s dominance of our civilization’s artistic output. The Church simply found the most talented artists and patronized them to make its art. It is really that simple.

The Church simply needs to find people who are 1. Good at art 2. Christian, and give them money to create art. However, it must take care to do both simultaneously. One without the other is inefficient.

If the Church patronizes artists who are not skilled simply because they are Christian, this will do damage to its reputation as an institution that creates good art, and the art itself will be of poor quality, doing a disservice both in terms of glorifying God and edifying the audience. Thus, the Church must take great care to be discriminating in its patronage and to hold high standards. It may not seem “nice” to turn down a mediocre artist who is nonetheless zealous in their faith and innocent in their intentions, but it is necessary and just. The Church also holds a responsibility to offer the best fruits of its harvest as an unblemished offering to God, who is only worthy of the greatest. It should be a privilege to be accepted for the Church’s patronage — this alone will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, making such patronage scarce and therefore of inherent value.

If, on the other hand, the Church patronizes artists that are skilled but unbelievers, then it will fail at institutionally supporting and promoting Christian artists, and as more money flows to secular artists, it will be these who have this means who will continue creating. If there are simply not enough excellent Christian artists to meet its high standards, then the next step is to produce some through education. Find those artists that do not yet meet the high standards of the Church, but show potential either through undeveloped talent or an industrious spirit. Then, these candidates should be trained to develop high technical skills according to objective standards. For example, for music, artists should receive a classical education in the fundamentals such as chords, scales, point, counterpoint, reading music, studying classical and contemporary music, etc. Or in the case of visual artists, they should be trained to paint in a classical, realistic fashion as did the old masters. However, so that they are not simply copying older traditional forms that are no longer relevant, they should also be given opportunities for experimentation and dialogue with more contemporary styles.

The ultimate aim should be a fusion of traditional and the contemporary — an expression of universal and transcendent excellence from within a modern context. An avant-garde traditional art.

In this sense, the Church is lucky to live in such times as ours. In the past few decades, secular art has been of a very high quality. But increasingly, secular art has started to decline. This is felt in the increasing proliferation of “safe” art that is created by large corporations to be cheap and have mass appeal. In consumer goods such as cars and clothing, vivid colors have been replaced by blacks, whites, and greys. Movies churn out sequels and remakes. Culture has become “stuck” (https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/culture-stuck). Due to the “culture war” between “wokeness” and “anti-wokeness,” entertainment must be careful not to say anything that can offend one side or the other, and thus often ends up saying nothing at all. Or, it participates in the culture war by telling stories with a preachy, ham-fisted agenda. There is an appetite for something new and different. A void for aesthetic beauty has opened up that beckons to be filled.

Creating a Beautiful Society: An Act of Charity and Source of Conversion

Why is it so important to cultivate a Christian artistic movement? Why is such an investment of time and money necessary?

In fact, this is a common criticism leveled by low-church Christians, who tend towards iconoclasm, towards traditional apostolic Christians.

“Shouldn’t the church spend all that money on the poor?” asks the Evangelical Christian to the Catholic.

They echo the criticism of those who were with Jesus in the house of Simon the leper when the woman anointed Our Lord’s feet with expensive ointment. We, like Our Lord, understand that it honors God when we anoint His mystical body with beautiful things. It is only those who degrade art to the level of a mere consumer product that would question the practical utility served by investing in art.

Nevertheless, there is an answer also to their practical concerns.

The first is that the creation of public art is an act of charity to the poor, just as much as food or clothing. For “man cannot live on bread alone.” In a secular, hyper-capitalist society, only the rich have access to beauty. They can afford beautiful homes, beautiful neighborhoods, and beautiful possessions. The poor, meanwhile, increasingly live in cheap, un-aesthetic housing in graffiti-covered, cramped apartment complexes of cement and asphalt. The public art that they do have access to, mostly a creation of a secular government, is often ugly, post-modern slop, if they are lucky enough for it to exist at all. Whether it be the inside of a beautiful cathedral, streets lined with buildings with beautiful facades, or beautiful public statutory and murals, all of these provide both poor and rich alike with the dignity of surrounding themselves with the beauty of God’s creation as reflected in the creative works of His creations.

The second is that beauty is a tool of evangelization. Not all men are brought to the Church through well-crafted philosophical arguments or inspiring homilies. Some are brought to the Church through a conversion of the heart. This can be a dramatic period of their life that turns them towards God. Or, it can be a longing for some good that they can sense is sorely missing from society — justice, morality, or even simple beauty.

Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev sent his emissaries to tour the world in search of the true faith. Upon arriving in Constantinople and entering the Hagia Sophia, they reported to him the following:

Then we went to Greece [Constantinople], and the Greeks (including the Emperor himself) led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.

This encounter with beauty resulted in the “baptism of Russia.” To this day, the nation of Russia is home to tens of millions of Orthodox Christians. If it had not been for the beauty of the Hagia Sophia, all of them could easily be Muslim or Pagan instead.

The same phenomenon is just as likely today. Every Christmas, even some of the most secular Americans cannot resist the allure of the beauty of traditional Christmas hymns celebrating the nativity of Christ. How many, each holiday season, wander into a Candlelight Mass simply to enjoy a romantic holiday night, only to encounter the God that dwells there?

Recently, New York City has seen a recent wave of conversions from atheistic liberal hipsters into traditional Catholics due in part to the beauty of the Traditional Latin Mass. In one case, a well-known transgender model known as “Pariah Doll” converted to Catholicism, abandoned his lucrative but unseemly career, and detransitioned.

Thus is the power of Our Lord, and the gift of beauty He has bestowed upon us. It is therefore the responsibility of the Church to revere, cultivate, and protect this most Holy Gift, this most precious Energy of Our Father, and set it on high for the adoration of mankind, which is due to it.

The Acolytes of the Theotokos was founded in the year of Our Lord, 2024, to bring about a restoration – not to return to some point in the past, as some would like to do, nor to embrace the course of destruction that secular modernity has taken the western world down, as most have, but to take up again our inheritance which has been betrayed, and to take up the traditions handed down to us by our dead generations and defend them from the onslaught of this age, that we may hand them down to our children.

We are young people, from a generation under siege, who have resolved that the hopelessness of modernity must end with us; so help us God. The Society throws itself forward as a wall of defense standing between the innocent and all weapons raised against innocence.

Firstly, we are a cultural organization, committed to teaching the youth the way of life of the Old World, that is, the world as it was before the hegemony of western secularism. We are committed also to giving our members a strong community, a movement to belong to that is active in the real world and united not just by shared ideals but by visible brotherhood and action. The fundamental point of our Society is to give people a way to gain spiritual and economic independence from the state of vanity and corruption of the world around us, what we consider the ‘culture of death’ that is so harmful to the human spirit; and using the existing infrastructure, to build a true, living, beautiful culture out of the one that is dying.

We wish to see extinguished from this land all those things that destroy the human spirit and bring to a halt the natural pattern of life – unchecked capitalism, consumerism, immorality, nihilism…

We will stand in defense even if our immediate chances of victory are none. We don’t weigh and calculate, we trust only in God. We don’t make political guarantees, but this we can ensure; that at the very least our generation’s final act may be an incursion against all those forces that have for so long poisoned and used us and those before us. We don’t know if the victory we envision will be ours or our children’s, but we will fight to the end of our souls’ capability to make sure that the sun will soon set on the culture of death that has been inflicted on us.

We aren’t a political group. Because truly, what is taking place in our nation has no political solution. The culture of death must be fought, disrupted, and replaced by a culture separate from it, a culture of light. The days we live in ask us to tolerate evil and to affirm its privileges; that is something that can’t be asked of those who truly believe in goodness; for good has no communion with evil, and light has no communion with darkness. A right is something that is owed; we owe nothing to evil, to the “father of lies”. But we owe it to the Thrice-Holy God to renounce the devil and all his works.

Our resistance to consumerism isn’t radical in itself; there is practically nobody that speaks positively about it. But we are not only criticizing consumerism – we are giving people a tangible way of bringing it to an end. We don’t deem it enough to simply withdraw ourselves on an individual scale from consumerist society. We don’t want to just free ourselves, but to free all people who crave freedom, and to give the consumerist culture its anticipated execution. This force that has done so much damage to so many souls, that has wrought so much misery on us, does not need to just be fled from; it needs to be made into a ruin, a page in history.

How will we do it?

With extreme ingenuity.

The mercantile pop culture, as we call it, depends on people remaining participants in it. It is not a ‘culture’ in the same sense of the word as a culture that arises naturally from heritage and customs; instead, it is a social and economic phenomenon that tends towards the destruction of authentic, local cultures in favor of an international market culture. It depends not on the spiritual life of a people, as authentic cultures do, but on markets. On money.

The Acolytes of the Theotokos offers people a way out of this. This isn’t as hard as people imagine; and it doesn’t require moving to the woods or a farm and learning to live without electricity. That’s an option, of course, but we believe that in these times what is really needed is a way to build a culture which is spiritually independent from the mainstream one without having to retreat from it.

To do this takes an organized effort; more organized than one person deciding to leave everything behind, move to the forest and build a cabin, as the oft-repeated aspiration of our times goes. Someone who could actually follow through with this – after getting around the barrier of buying useful land – may come to find that physically separating from society didn’t bring them the peace they were hoping for. After spending years engulfed in the noise of the world, going into the forest didn’t make it go away. The work of restoring the peace of the spirit is a work that must be done in community, by intention, and most of all by a return to the Faith.

The long-term goal of the Acolytes is to establish a community, or communities, within existing towns or cities in which people practice a more self-sufficient and communal way of life, similar to that of the early Christians as described in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:42-47). Even if this were done on a small scale, it would allow people of our generation to escape an almost certain fate of endless debt, loneliness, and unfulfilling labor, and most importantly to show that it is possible to do so. The model we propose would offer our generation a higher quality of life and a higher degree of freedom than what we are currently offered by the normal means, where even those who secure a stable career are still dependent on an economy that because of its reliance on finance capitalism is acting like a rigged slot machine that breaks down every ten years; and if you’re lucky you can spend a little less than half your lifetime paying off your mortgage.

Consumerism can only survive among a people who are losing, or have lost, a sense of cultural and religious identity, of tradition, of having a place within eternity. When an imperial power colonizes a nation, it always strengthens its rule by repressing the conquered nation’s culture; especially their practice of their faith, their language, their customs, and their education. That is because imperialists understand that these things, above all, are the source of a people’s strength, especially for those who do not have many earthly riches. If the people have no sense of unity and identity, then they have no energy to fight, nor do they understand what it is that is being taken away from them. The mercantile pop culture is acting exactly like this type of imperial oppressor in every nation in which it appears, razing the traditional way of life in exchange for profitable modern individualism, and this is perhaps most clearly the case in our poor America.

Are we communists?

Never. Many have rightfully identified capitalism for the unquestionable role it has played in creating the misery of modernity, but have come to a false conclusion that to end the suffering it has brought it should be replaced with yet another faithless, materialist ideology; communism.

This conclusion has been wholeheartedly embraced by vast portions of the population and many of our own generation, the youth.

The problem is, both capitalism and communism see reality as a mere sum of changing material conditions. Capitalism values efficiency and abundance above all, and therefore thrives on ever increasing amounts of production of unnecessary goods, regardless of the consequences. The exploitation required to meet the demands of this vicious system slowly creates a wider disparity between the classes, meanwhile encouraging wealthy nations to move their industry to foreign countries to exploit the people there too.

Communism is a shallow reaction against capitalism that sees all of human history as the history of class warfare. Therefore, says communism, all hierarchy must be destroyed. Religion, for acknowledging the hierarchy of the divine world above the mortal one, must disappear from people’s hearts so that they have hope in nothing but this passing life. The traditional arrangement of marriage and family, Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto, are just more forms of bourgeois exploitation.

Later Marxist thinkers would put forth the idea of totally destroying the existing social norms of family life – they detested the oppression and supposed patriarchy of marriage, monogamy, the raising of children by their parents as opposed to some communal model, the traditional roles of fatherhood and motherhood, and so on. If it isn’t obvious by now, this way of thinking unfortunately became quite influential in the West, and remains so up to this day. Everything that these Marxist intellectuals could wish to see happen to society’s sense of morals has been fully accomplished; and yet, our communist fairytale world never came, and capitalism is as strong as ever.

But as for us, we do not adhere to any of these earthly ideologies, but to the tradition of Οδός (the Way), the Christian Faith. This Faith is not an ideology, because it is simply authentic existence. It is the way of concord, of peace between the body and the soul, between this world and the world to come, between the temporal and the eternal. It is a holistic view of life that cannot be separated from its lived experience.

The ideologies of modernity are not organic progressions of society, and so cannot be called “progress” at all.

“We are too fond of clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern progress… Modern speculation is often a mere groping where ancient men saw clearly… There have been States in which the rich did not grind the poor, although there are no such States now; there have been free self-governing democracies, although there are few such democracies now; there have been rich and beautiful social organisations, with an art and a culture and a religion in every man’s house, though for such a thing to-day we have to search out some sequestered people living by a desolate sea-shore or in a high forgotten valley among lonely hills…”

-Padraig Pearse, The Murder Machine

Tradition embraces the romantic, intuitive impression of life that combines idealism with action, the mystical with the mundane. Because it is not dependent on trends and fashions, tradition is ever youthful and always new, while progressivism is always growing old.

Starting from the 1920s you see this pattern take shape, with some breaks in between, where the previous generation’s resistance against established morality becomes dull in the eyes of their children, and so the children resist in an even greater excess against an already weakened morality, and so on until you reach the present day, where it’s hard to say what there is even left for us to resist against, what morals there are left to be destroyed. And of course, one thing has stayed true from generation to generation, which is that these trends against morality, disastrous for the psychological and spiritual health of the people, have opened the doors to making immeasurable amounts of money for those who benefit from exploiting the culture this way.

Our Appeal

The Acolytes of the Theotokos, as stated in our member’s Club Manual, “is an organization founded for the purpose of bringing about a resurrection of spiritual identity, with its single orientation being the salvation of souls. We desire for the reign of Christ to be acknowledged in this land. For this to happen, the divine law of the apostolic Christian faith must become, as it was in the more dignified and august moments of history, the principle behind social and public life. All the activities of the nation, whether they are economic, educational, political, and so on, must all be directed to one and the same end; not to mere economic efficiency, nor to the enforcement of modernity and internationalism on the people of this world, but to the spiritual health and wellbeing of the nation’s people.”

We are unlike any other current effort at a movement like this in that we have nothing to do with politics. We are concerned only with a spiritual rejuvenation, with the awakening of conscience, with a total reorientation of society towards true peace and holiness and love. While immorality and militant unbelief reigns, there is no true peace and no true freedom, ever.

We respond to the lasting, primeval cry of humanity, the one that has haunted all of history, the unutterable cry for freedom. The communists and modernists shout for freedom, but with a voice that is hollow, empty of the truest longing of the human heart — and which has in it something of the voice of the Deceiver, the Accuser who in Eden lied to make us renounce heaven.

We, too, call for freedom, but with a voice of conviction, a voice in which there is no tone of robbery or betrayal. It is quiet, for it is the sighs of the penitent, and of hearts broken and humbled, of children crying out “Abba, Father!”

Humanity, in its aching for freedom, has ofttimes gone far from the path and reached for what curses and poisons us. We have strayed from the embrace of the Anointed One, the Christ.

Where else, O Lord, is our freedom?

Where else, our God, but in You, will we find our blissful repose?

How long shall we stay in this valley of tears, despising our inheritance and forsaking our forgiveness? How long will this time of hatred endure, while our world becomes rich in its outrages against You? Modernity has tried to take our Faith away from us; look now upon its failure. Never will we submit to the prince of this world, for “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John viii 32)

The apokatastasis, the Restoration, must come before the final darkness which will shroud the end of this age. Peace will reign when people finally return to God who alone is the Lover of Mankind. What justification do we have to say that this generation, facing such a dark hour of history as this is, couldn’t be the one to do something so unexpected, so shocking, sweeping aside all convention and resolving to go against such staggering odds, doing the last thing we are wanted or expected to do according to the doctrine of “eternal progress”?

On our own, as scattered individuals, our potential is crushed under the weight of those combined forces of the world which seek only to hurt us. But coming together in absolute determination, our potential is endless.

There has seldom been moments as decisive as this, and we have fatefully been chosen to live through it all; either to yield to the way of death, or to take up vigilantly our course on the way of life. It is up to you; and I must tell you that it is the inevitable outcome made known to us by the immortal mythos of mankind that the way of life will prevail. That is the drama of existence; that what is innocent and peaceful must be besieged by darkness, that innocence may gloriously triumph over the vainglory of sin.

“We seem to have lost; but we have not lost. 
To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. 
We have kept faith with the past, 
and handed on its tradition to the future.”
-Pádraig Pearse