Western Schism

“ The two ways of thinking in the history of civilizations are reflected in humankind’s approach towards ‘communism’ and now towards ‘harmoniousness’. The East is pursuing the story in an inclusive form; the West segregates the beliefs of different regions separately. The West does not identify itself with the “inclusive approach” and right now is ejecting the ‘harmonizers’, like the ‘communists’ before them, out of the Western ideological hemisphere. ”

“ Today the West is helpless and in disbelieve, starring at the (until now peaceful) rise of not one, recovering Russia, but more than eleven new players: China, India, and the nine Tiger States, plus the world’s number two standing superpower, Japan.
In order to understand the mechanics of ‘history’s darkest events’ caused by a inner-world, monstrous, deadly psychology, the communion of Eastern and Western souls, this concept, we have to talk again about Right and Tact. ”

“ Isn’t it more reasonable to think that branches or sub-branches of history may die off, wither, break, become lost or forgotten rather than ‘to clash’? Surely, if the militant West wishes a clash (of civilization) , a clash it will be, albeit an uninspiring, unimaginative, and utterly useless one. This so, because the Western hemisphere still does not wholly appreciate the grand alternative and worthy goal of engaging the East based on mutual respect and towards an “inclusive approach”. ”

“ Any reader knowledgeable in the history of thought will have noticed that pre-war Germany, in an incredible shift of paradigm later supervised by the Nazis, had cultivated upon their soil of a pure Apollonian Western culture the mindset of a collective, emotional, sexual, mystic, fertile, revolutionary Dionysian Eastern soul – with disastrous consequences for the well-being of Europe. ”

“ It was desirable in the interest of the Austrians, the Hungarians, and the Russians, that these weaknesses should be exposed; and if the Christian states of the West ever become so organized that their weaknesses are concealed until their consequences become irremediable, Western civilization itself will be on the road to decline. ”

“ Let it never, then, be forgotten, that any argument which would prove the Church of England to be in schism would condemn likewise the Eastern and Russian Church. It is not the Catholic Church against a revolted province, as our adversaries would have us believe; it is the one Patriarch of the West, with his Bishops, against the four Patriarchs of the East, with theirs, and that great and, as yet, unbroken phalanx of the North, which Constantinople won to the faith of old, and which now promises to beat back the tide of heresy and infidelity from the beleaguered Sees of the East. ”

“ Fashionable Imperialism not only has no ideas of its own to extend; but such ideas as it has are actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to extend them. The Crusading kings and knights might be represented as seeking to spread Western ideas in the East. But all that our Imperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the East. ”

“ When a schism is once spread in a nation, there grows at length a dispute, which are the schismaticks. Without entering on the arguments used by both sides among us, to fix the guilt on each other, it is certain, that in the sense of the law, the schism lies on that side, which opposes itself to the religion of the state. I leave it among the divines to dilate upon the danger of schism, as a spiritual evil ”

“ To tell the Western world of the terrors of Communism", I thought, but as I was to later to find, to my cost, one cannot write or talk of the truth in the West. All horrors must be smoothed over, all must have a patina of "decency". ”

“ Everywhere they contributed a valuable element to the economic and social life of the community which they joined. The great schism in the Russian Church became an agent of emigration and colonization. It helped to spread the Russian nationality over remote frontier regions of the empire which previously had been almost exclusively Asiatic; and distributed groups of dissenters in the neighboring provinces of Turkey, Roumania, Austria, Poland and Prussia.171
Natural regions of retreat. ”

“ Then, too, his idea of a schism made him blush. He again beheld himself at Rome, dreaming of writing a book by which he would violently sever himself from Catholicism to preach the new religion of the democracies, the purified, human and living Gospel. But what ridiculous folly! A schism? He had known in Paris an abbé of great heart and mind who had attempted to bring about that famous, predicted, awaited schism. Ah! the poor man, the sad, the ludicrous labour in the midst of universal incredulity, the icy indifference of some, the mockery and the reviling of others! ”

“ The simplification of life, the decrease of "vital" demands, strips the arts and culture of the West of all efficacy and worth. To these men, whose longing was for the inner, spiritual freedom of man, Western progress, with all it connoted, was an abomination. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the Westernizers, the rationalists, strongly arrayed against them. ”

“ He reminded Barton that as a body the Dissenters could not complain at their being expelled from the situations in which they were placed by an unlawful and usurped authority. He trusted that wise and moderate men would, by conformity, avoid this evil, and prefer the true praise of sacrificing their scruples at the shrine of peace and unity, to the false glory of courting reputation, by first exciting and then enduring persecution. He spoke of schism as an evil the most afflictive ”

“ It is because our fathers, obsessed by their narrow realism and by selfish fears, let the rights of the people of Eastern Europe be violated, that to-day the West is shattered, and the sword hangs over the small nations—over you, my friends, as over the country which is befriending me, Switzerland. Whoever harms one of us harms all the others. ”

“ The overthrow of the twentieth century’s totalitarian systems has not meant the end of ideology. On the contrary. There has not been a society in the history of the world, no matter how pragmatic, experimentalist and multi-form it may have been, that did not derive its thrust from some foundational interpretation of reality. Such a system of thought reigns today virtually unchallenged across the planet, under the nominal designation “Western civilization”. ”

“ Hence, to renounce in any degree the authority and jurisdiction of Rome, was deemed the most inexpiable of all sins. The name of Schism was fastened upon it; a name, which was sounded higher than that of Heresy itself, as implying in it the accumulated guilt of Apostacy, and Infidelity. ”

“ We have recently become so much accustomed to hear of the antagonism and rivalry of interests between East and West—as if all Eastern countries represented one set of immutable ideals and all Western countries another—that we are apt to lose ourselves in a mist of generalities. The East has problems of its own to solve, some of which reproduce in a more restricted area the racial problems that are beginning at a late hour to agitate the minds of statesmen in Europe and America. ”

“ Western nations seek a global civilization, which they believe is an extension of their own; while the Eastern nations, still cherishing their traditional cultures, will feel the ‘rage of the Western destabilizers’, if they do not comply to this aggression:
“Chinese society bears a function of ‘interior self-stability’, while the European society possesses an ‘interiorly-installed unstable factor’” (Needham, 1964) . ”

“ And as suitable endeavours have been wanting effectually to extirpate heresy and error, so schism, its inseparable companion, and necessary consequent, has exceedingly grown and increased, to the great damage of the church of Christ in these kingdoms, and utter subversion of that most pleasant fabric of uniformity in religion, which the League and Covenant binds us to endeavour. The word of God makes schism a very great sin, as is evident from Rom. ”

“ Remarkably, the East-West dichotomy, as if an invisible hand dealt the right cards, still persists to determine world affairs and history despite long and enduring phases of centrism, trials of expansion, colonialism and empire, alliances and ganging-ups, rivalry or false beliefs in superiority. What makes us think then that the disparity of East and West can be best explained by anything other than a law of nature? ”

“ The opening of that colossal empire to unrestricted intercourse with other countries was not a gradual evolution from within—it was the result of a series of collisions between the conservatism of the extreme Orient and the progressive spirit of the Western world. ”

“ For a century it had little to do save an occasional foray upon the peasants of the Alpine valleys, or an extortion on the Jews of Palermo, or the fomenting of a witchcraft craze. It no longer had the stimulus of active work or the opportunity of impressing the minds of the people with the certainty of its vengeance and the terrors of its holocausts.
At the same time the Great Schism had inflicted a serious blow upon the veneration entertained for the Holy See by both clergy and laity, which found expression in the great councils of Constance and Basle. ”

“ They seem, at the first glance, to lie just as heavily in favour of an aggressive Pan-Germanic power struggling towards a great and commanding position athwart Central Europe and Western Asia, and turning itself at last upon the defeated Slavonic disorder. ”

“ When civilization reaches that goal, it turns toward corruption and starts being senile, as happens in the natural life of living beings. (Ibn Khaldun, 1377)
Treating cultures as living beings has been the scientific trend ever since Khaldun. Reading Western sociology today, we now have plenty of exciting – if not incredible - choices of a culture’s ‘rise and fall’:
“youth, growth, maturation and decline” (Spengler, 1917) ; ivilizations taking turns or going in circles (Ji, 2006) ; a masculine West vs. a feminine East (Garrison, 2000) ”

“ Our Author thinks fit to report what concerns the People, and, after his partial Manner, he conceals the first Mean that is laid down by this faithful Assembly, "for preserving Order, Unity and Peace in the Kirk, and for maintaining that Respect which is due to the Ordinances and Ministers of Jesus Christ, for preventing Schism, noisom Errors, &c." ”

“ The Allied Socialists who have placed themselves in the spotlight have shown themselves to be, generally speaking, utopists, entirely ignorant of Germany, of the German mind, of geography, ethnography, and political economy, pinning their faith, before all else, to formulas, and knowing even less than the official diplomats of the technique of the multifold problems imposed by war and peace. ”

“ Indeed, after all the recent pre-emptive strikes on terrorists and failed states, the irreversible process of ‘westernization’ and ‘globalization’, the tiresome break with each and every civic code of mutual respect and non-interference in any nation’s internal affairs, and the desire to conquer nature and, if necessary, the traditional people and tribes that made a pact with nature – how can we not say that the deductive West is rejecting thoroughly, entirely the inductive Eastern notion of ‘harmoniousness’? ”

“ It is not impossible that in the course of time, and by dint of reciprocal action and reaction, the German views may be sufficiently modified and moralized to render possible the usual process of assimilation with which the history of speculative ideas and social movements has rendered us familiar. Meanwhile, truth compels us to admit that part at least of the western system is being overtaken by decay, and stands in need of speedy and thorough renovation. ”

“ The more completely Western Europe withholds its help from absolutism, the quicker will it be overthrown. To assist to this end, to discredit Czarism as much as possible, is today the most important work of the International Socialist movement. ”

“ Your mistake is always in assuming that Western institutions are a stereotyped model upon which all reforms should be based. It is this delusion that is at the bottom of half the wars and predatory aggressions carried on by Europeans against men of other races. If reforms are wanted in Russia, it is not either Western or Eastern reforms, but measures suited for the people, and not for other peoples. The assumption that reforms so called must be constructed upon Western models is a pure product of Western exclusiveness, and is opposed both to Christianity and to common sense. ”

“ For the vital, expanding nineteenth-century West to have deliberately restrained itself while the backward East blunderingly experimented with Westernism, accepting and rejecting, buying goods and refusing to pay for them, negotiating loans and then squandering and repudiating them, inviting in Europeans and then expelling or massacring them, would have been against all history and human nature. ”

“ Nevertheless, the reactionary attitude, though unintelligent, is intelligible. Westernization hurts too many cherished prejudices and vested interests not to arouse chronic resistance. This resistance would occur even if Western influences were all good and Westerners all angels of light. But of course Westernization has its dark side, while our Western culture-bearers are animated not merely by altruism, but also by far less worthy motives. This strengthens the hand of the Oriental reactionaries and lends them the cover of moral sanctions. ”