Posted on 11/22/2002 10:22:39 PM PST by Destro
THE FALL OF ORTHODOX ENGLAND
Vladimir Moss
It is true what I say: should the Christian faith weaken, the kingship will immediately totter.
Archbishop Wulfstan of York, The Institutes of Polity, 4 (1023).
INTRODUCTION: ENGLAND, ROME, CONSTANTINOPLE, NORMANDY
On October 14, 1066, at Hastings in southern England, the last Orthodox king of England, Harold II, died in battle against Duke William of Normandy. William had been blessed to invade England by the Roman Pope Alexander in order to bring the English Church into full communion with the “reformed Papacy”; for since 1052 the English archbishop had been banned and denounced as schismatic by Rome. The result of the Norman Conquest was that the English Church and people were integrated into the heretical “Church” of Western, Papist Christendom, which had just, in 1054, fallen away from communion with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, represented by the Eastern Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Thus ended the nearly five-hundred-year history of the Anglo-Saxon Orthodox Church, which was followed by the demise of the still older Celtic Orthodox Churches in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
This small book is an account of how this came to pass.
The Beginning of the End
Now the English had been perhaps the most fervent “Romanists” of all the peoples of Western Europe. This devotion sprang from the fact that it was to Rome, and specifically to Pope St. Gregory the Great and his disciples, that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes owed their conversion to the Faith in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. From that time English men and women of all classes and conditions poured across the Channel in a well-beaten path to the tombs of the Apostles in Rome, and a whole quarter of the city was called “Il Borgo Saxono” because of the large number of English pilgrims it accomodated. English missionaries such as St. Boniface of Germany carried out their work as the legates of the Roman Popes. And the voluntary tax known as “Peter’s Pence” which the English offered to the Roman see was paid even in the difficult times of the Viking invasions, when it was the English themselves who were in need of alms.
However, the “Romanity” to which the English were so devoted was not the Franco-Latin, Roman Catholicism of the later Middle Ages. Rather, it was the Greco-Roman Romanitas or Romiosini of Orthodox Catholicism. And the spiritual and political capital of Romanitas until the middle of the fifteenth century was not Old Rome in Italy, but the New Rome of Constantinople. Thus when King Ethelbert of Kent was baptized by St. Augustine in 597, “he had entered,” as Fr. Andrew Phillips writes, “‘Romanitas’, Romanity, the universe of Roman Christendom, becoming one of those numerous kings who owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the Emperor in New Rome…” Indeed, as late as the tenth century the cultural links between England and Constantinople remained strong, as we see, for example, in King Athelstan’s calling himself basileus and curagulus, titles ascribed to the Byzantine emperor.
We may tentatively point to the murder of King Edward the Martyr in 979 as the beginning of the end of Orthodox England. Only six years before, his father, King Edgar the Peaceable, had been anointed and crowned as head of the Anglo-Saxon “empire” in Bath Abbey, next to the still considerable remains of Imperial Rome. And in the same year he had been rowed on the River Dee at Chester by six or eight sub-kings, including five Welsh and Scottish rulers and one ruler of the Western Isles. But then the anti-monastic reaction of King Edward’s reign was followed by the murder of the Lord’s anointed. “No worse deed for the English was ever done that this,” said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; and while it was said that there was “great rejoicing” at the coronation of St. Edward’s half-brother, Ethelred “the Unready”, St. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, sorrowfully prophesied great woes for the nation in the coming reign.
He was right; for not only were the English successively defeated by Danish pagan invaders and forced to pay ever larger sums in “Danegeld”, but the king himself, betrayed by his leading men and weighed down by his own personal failures, was forced to flee abroad in 1013. The next year he was recalled by the English leaders, both spiritual and lay, who declared that “no lord was dearer to them than their rightful lord, if only he would govern his kingdom more justly than he had done in the past.” But the revival was illusory; further defeats followed, and in 1017, after the deaths both of King Ethelred and of his son Edmund Ironside, the Danish Canute was made king of all the English. Canute converted to the faith of his new Christian subjects; and the period of the Danish kings (1017-1042) created less of a disruption in the nation’s spiritual life than might have been expected. Nevertheless, it must have seemed that God’s mercy had at last returned to His people when, in 1043, the Old English dynasty of Alfred the Great was restored in the person of King Ethelred’s son Edward, known to later generations as “the Confessor”.
It is with the life of King Edward that our narrative begins.
(Excerpt) Read more at romanitas.ru ...
Well, that may be an important distinction.
As is obviously evidenced by the title of his work, the Rev. Dr. J.A. Wylie is not primarily concerned with "The Fall of Orthodox England", but rather with "The History of the Scottish Nation".
Wylie actually spends very little time at all on the development of Orthodox Christianity amongst the Anglo-Saxons; his concern is almost-entirely focused upon the Celts of Scotia Major and Scotia Minor (Ireland and Scotland) and the Rock of Iona which formed a central monastic nexus between the two Scotias.
Wylie quotes numerous and extensive Patristic Quotations proving the existence of an ancient Strong-Predestinarian Tradition amongst the Orthodox Celts (albeit Greek-origin in Liturgy and Ecclesiology). He devotes nowhere near such consideration to the development of Christianity amongst the Anglo-Saxons.
Why? Because to Wylie, the Anglo-Saxons were a Pagan Invader who cut off the Orthodox Celts from Roman Christendom for over 200 years. He's not particularly concerned with the LATER evangelization of the Anglo-Saxons; he's primarily concerned with the isolated development of the Celtic Scots -- "THE HISTORY OF THE SCOTTISH NATION"; or as the Venerable Bede has explained: "beyond the reach of the decrees of synods, . . . they could learn only those thing contained in the writings of the Prophets, the Evangelists, and the Apostles."
"This is historical revisionism of the worst sort."
Absolutely!!! This kind of crap is nearly as bad as the revisionism that sees England as the final destination of the lost tribes of Israel. It is pure fantasy created by people with an axe to grind.
Britain has always been Rome's canonical territory as evidenced by the ancient basilicas that have been unearthed here long before the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes got here - not to mention the arrival of St. Augustine. I wonder how a revisionist thread about Ukraine and Russia being originally Catholic would go down?
England is Our Lady's dowry and will one day be restored to the orthodox Catholic Faith again. I don't expect most of the contributors to this thread to understand this though because:
a) They are not English
and
b) They don't understand the English phronema!
Hands off our history Johnny foreigners!!!!
Amen
Wilton Diptych
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.