“Union” of the Churches Is the Best Way to Eliminate Christianity

If injustice, hatred, and falsehood had ceased to exist, then peace would have been the consummation of human happiness. Unity would have been a natural and not an artificial result. But something totally different is noticeable. Today, when everyone is speaking of peace and unity, self-love and hatred, injustice and falsehood, ambition and greed, are at their zenith. All—everyone in his own way—speak of love for man, of love for humanity. But there has never existed a greater hypocrisy than that so-called love. Because love towards something theoretical, for something imaginary, such as the concept «humanity», is equally theoretical and imaginary. It has no relation to love for the particular man we have before us. This love for a particular person, when it exists, is the only real love. It is the love for our neighbor that Christ asked.

This particular man with his imperfections and weaknesses, instead of being loved, has been hated in our time more than in any other age. Not only has he been hated, but he has been scorned and humiliated; he has been regarded as a «thing» without any particular value, a means for the attainment of «high goals», a particle of the mass. Those who speak the most of love towards man and humanity, of peace and union, are precisely those who hate the most their neighbor, their acquaintance. They love man the creation of their own imagination; they do not love man the reality. This worship of the idol «man» is in reality narcissism; it is the worship of the ego.

It would be naiveté, therefore, if one were to believe that the pacifist disposition that characterizes humanity today proceeds from love. These words about love are hypocrisy and self-deception. This desire for peace proceeds from loss of ideals, from fear, and from love of comfort. It is the desire to be left in peace to enjoy the good things of this earth. It is the conventional co-operation for acquisition of goods which each person separately would not be able to acquire. It is a universal understanding upon something which has become the passion of the whole earth: sensualism and materialism. It is a product of necessity.

The peace of which the world speaks is an unconditional capitulation of everything good and sacred and great, and the dominance of pettiness, mediocrity, and lukewarmness. It is the blotting out of the personality of individuals and of peoples. It is a marmalade of compromises and calculations, a sea of hypocrisy, indifference for truth, betrayal of everything holy and sacred.

War is a terrible thing, a result of the fall of man, and no one is about to praise it. But the peace for which the world is haggling is something infinitely more fearful. A fever is a very unpleasant thing, but it shows at least that the organism is reacting against something bad which has entered it. The peace which they wish to bring is not, unfortunately, that which comes from the victory over evil, but that which comes from defeat. It is the feverlessness of a corpse. …

So-called Christians play a significant role in the world’s effort for peace. With the slogan «Christians unite», they set out for the bazaar where truth will be sold out.

Once, Christians had faith and were ready to die for their Faith. Today their zeal for truth has cooled. They have begun to consider it as something secondary. They find the differences between churches, for which in former times Martyrs eagerly sacrificed themselves, the Fathers were exiled, and the faithful mutilated, as unimportant and unworthy of mention.

Most of them are sickly and incorrigible sentimentalists who think that the religion of Christ is an ethical system concerning human relations. Others pursue political purposes and dark interests. All of them together are building the city of Antichrist. They seek union, being indifferent to truth; they seek an external rapprochement, ignoring internal dissensions; they seek the letter, being indifferent to the spirit.

How is it possible for them to hope that what failed in the first centuries of the schism shall be accomplished now that the differences in dogma and mentality have, with the passage of centuries, widened from breaches to gulfs? …

How will the Westerners be taught that the Orthodox Church is the One and True Church when they see her consorting with the false «churches» as an equal among equals? Will they not think, therefore, that Orthodoxy is also like the others - relative and partial? …

They are only flattering the Orthodox in order to draw them over to their side. If they had a genuine nostalgia to know Orthodoxy, they would have no need for councils and conferences. They would have gone to drink from her sources, from her Fathers and Saints. …

Why are our Christians so easily moved by sermons about the union of the churches? And instead of being filled with zeal for the transmission of the truth to this world which lacks it so much, they suck on the caramel of peace, weighing to see which are more, the things which separate or those which unite Christians.

It is because they themselves lack knowledge of the truth. Most of them being members of social-Christian organizations and brotherhoods, were catechized from their earliest years in an ethico-philosophical system with a Christian veneer which led them to believe that the purpose of Christianity is to achieve the peaceful coexistence of men in the spirit of love. Eternity and the vision of God are things very distant for these Christians, and often of no interest. Most of them, being extroverts, are men of action who came to Christianity to find an organized and directed modus vivendi, a way of living as good and honorable citizens upon this earth. For such people, God is the Great Servant of their personal interests, and eternal life is a good but, fortunately, distant hope of restoration. …

But Christ did not become man in order to save this world which abides in wickedness. Rather, He came to save His own from the world, to pull them away from the ranks of evil, to unite them to Himself and to deify them by Grace, and with them to save the entire groaning creation. The world is walking the way of death. It is following the ruler of this world, the enemy of God. I do not pray for the world, but for those whom Thou hast given Me (Jn 17:9).

But such people take the part of the world and sacrifice the jewels of Christian faith and life for that diabolical party which will never be saved. It is not Christ Who asks for the so-called union of the churches, but the world. Christ does not ask for the union of falsehood with truth, but it is the world that seeks to adulterate the truth, to make it relative and partial. This is why, when a discussion arises about the union of the churches, one sees that it is supported enthusiastically by people who were never previously interested in matters of religion. Union is the best way of neutralizing Christianity that the devil’s party has discovered. It is the beginning of the [final] dissolution of Christianity and its submission to the whims of politics; it is the conversion of Christianity into a servant of the interests of the world.

With union, Christianity may acquire greater world power, but it will lose all its spiritual strength, exactly what troubles the world. Has it not already happened to the Roman Catholic “Church?” The Papists’ thirst for world power has made them descend to the well-worn path of political machinations, from which they have emerged as tools of the great political trends.