Second Thoughts about Charlemagne

Harmonica has been writing some good essays on Christianity, heathenism, and Europe that have become necessary as apostasy spreads over the West. The mentioning of Charlemagne got things a bit offtrack, however. The key passage is this one, from Part 3 of the series:

“The real origins of the West do not reside in Plato’s Athens, but rather in Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire. It was at this point where all three of the West’s major influences, the Classical world, Christianity, and Germanic culture, all cohesively came together.”

In a sense, he is correct: the founding of the Carolingian Empire was the beginning of something new, but not in the positive sense – rather, in the sense of a deviation from what is true and right. For Charlemagne swerved away from universal Christian teaching in two major ways, both of which have led the West to the decrepit state she is in now. First, he rejected the decision of the Seventh Ecumenical (Universal) Council of 787 A.D., which upheld the veneration of icons of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the saints and angels. Second, he unlawfully modified the Nicene Creed, so that the Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father and the Son, rather than simply from the Father as the original version approved by the Second Ecumenical Council (+381) reads.

By rejecting the Seventh Council at the Frankfurt Synod (+794), Charlemagne rejected an essential teaching about Jesus Christ, rejected His full humanity. In rejecting the veneration of Christ in icons, he belittled the human nature of Christ. But the Lord Jesus, being fully God and fully man, is 1) able to be depicted in icons, mosaics, etc., and 2) receives honor when men and women venerate His holy image. This distortion of belief and practice by Charlemagne disincarnates Christ, separates us from Him by making Him a shadowy ghost somewhere up in the heavens rather than the God-man Whom we may see, taste, touch, kiss, etc. These falsehoods that have uglified Christ turn people away from Christianity and cause them to seek out pagan alternatives.

But this is not his most serious error. His addition of the Filioque (‘and the Son’) to the Nicene Creed, which deformed the true Apostolic teaching of the Holy Trinity, is what has truly devastated the West. Dr. Joseph Farrell in the foreword to his magnum opus God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences goes into some of the details.  What follows are a just a few of the highlights:

“These essays are about the Two Europes and the Three Trinities on which they are based. The first Trinity is the Holy Trinity of classical Christian doctrine, uncorrupted by its Augustinian formulation, the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. As the first term of the second Trinity is St. Augustine of Hippo’s Dialectical Formulation of the Holy Trinity; as the second term of the second trinity is the History which that dialectical formula-tion moulded and shaped, and as the third term of the second trinity are the divisions which resulted from the application of Augustine’s trinitarian dialectics in History, the resulting schisms of “Europe” into First Europe, Second Europe, and Russia. The causes for the Second Europe’s tripartite division of History into its Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Ages is thus to be credited to St. Augustine’s dialectical formulation of the Trinity. This transub-stantiation of the Trinity from a revealed Mystery to a dialectical deduction, and finally, to a dialectical process at work within History is simply unintelligible without Augustine. In the thirteenth century, Joa-chim of Floris’ Age of the Father, Age of the Son, and (coming) Age of the Spirit, or Petrarch’s or Gibbon’s Golden Age, Dark Age, and Renaissance, or Hegel’s well-known Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, or Comte’s “superstitious, metaphysical, and scientific” periods, and finally, our own superficially academic and objective divisions of Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern “History” are but tired exhausted reworkings of the original heresy which split the Latin Church from Eastern Orthodoxy and created the Two Europes. The Second Europe’s historiography, even in its most avowedly secular form, Marxism, is thus one of many logical implications and inevitabilities of the Augustinizing of doctrine which took place from the fifth to the ninths centuries in the Christian West.

… In the ironies of historical development, one encounters the Two Hellenizations being formally adopted and accepted by the Two Europes at approximately the same time, in the ninth century. In that space and in that time, they clash openly for the first time, and the ikon of that clash, with all its attendant historiographical implications, is the coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III in 800 A.D. As we shall see, tragically the Second Europe is incapable even of interpreting Pope Leo’s actions or activities with anything like consistency, and that fact will highlight the first occurrence of a persisting problem in Second European historiography, for the clash more than anything else will demonstrate that it was the East’s which was the original Christian orthodoxy and civilization, and that the West of Charlemagne constituted the departure and digres-sion. We will fail entirely to understand the alarm of a St. Photius later in that century, or the careful diplomacy of a Leo III at the beginning of it, or the monumental hubris of a Pope Nicholas I, if we do not penetrate to their ultimate theological origins. Indeed, we shall see that the fact that the Second, Augustinized Europe of the West should come to view itself as the canon of “Judeo-Christian civilization” is the result of that departure and clash, and of the growth in its own eyes of its status as the canonical measure of what is genuinely “Christian” or “European” civilization stems ultimately from the Carolingian equation of Augustinism with its own imperial orthodoxy and ambitions. Even the massive historical systems of a Hegel or Toynbee are the products of this assumption…”

The overemphasis of Charlemagne, the Franks, and others on Saint Augustine’s teachings brings us to our present pagan revival. Dr. Farrell continues:

“For Augustine the bishop and Augustinism the system are two different things. Augustine the bishop insisted, no less vigorously than his great counterparts in Cappadocia—Sts. Basil of Caesaria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—on the direct continuity of the Church with the ancient Hebrews and with the cultural autonomy conferred on them by God. But Augustine the Hellenizer erected a system founded upon a continuity of theology with Greek philosophy, a continuity of incalculable enormity: the identification of The One (to en) of Greek philosophy with the One God and Father of Christian doctrine. That marriage of Theology and Philosophy occurred not at some secondary level of doctrine, but at the core, at the height, of all Christian belief, the doctrine of God Himself. So long as this cohabitation went undetected and unchallenged, so long did its hidden implications take root, grow, and eventually overwhelm and choke the Christian component. Our current moral and spiritual crisis is the result of that marriage, and will not be resolved until the churches which persist in it, beginning with Rome, repent and recant the error. For Augustine saw discontinuity with that Graeco-pagan world, but the theologians, philosophers, and humanists who came after him and who were the heirs of his system, came increasingly to see continuity.

Thus, at its core the Second Europe is pagan, for it worships a pagan definition of God, pagan, for it is crumbling from within, overladen [sic., i.e., “overlaid”.– A.F.] only with an increasingly thin and superficial veneer of a Christian idiom.”

Prior to Charlemagne, there was one Christian oikoumene (‘inhabited world’), but he broke it apart with his weaponized theology for the sake of building an empire of his own. This is not the happy beginning of a glorious West, but the sorrowful start of her slow death. Instead of spending their time extolling him, the Western European peoples should go about finding ways to rebuild the bridges he burned between the West and the Orthodox Church. We understand that some of this may sound unkind, but we assure everyone it is offered only out of concern for the well-being of the West. In that same spirit of friendship, we invite whoever is interested to read further if they have questions about these crucial subjects:

-Fr John Romanides’s overview of the Franks and Charlemagne and their break with the Christian Roman Empire: http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.03.en.franks_romans_feudalism_and_doctrine.01.htm

-Dr Farrell’s introduction to St Photios’s Mystagogy, which delves more deeply into the pagan theological distortions that have entered the West via the Augustinianism of the Franks: http://www.anthonyflood.com/farrellphotios.htm

-Fr John Strickland’s web site and books about the split between East and West: https://johnstrickland.org/, https://www.ancientfaith.com/contributors/john_strickland

-St Seraphim Rose (+1982) gives a superb overview of the Western spiritual malady in his Orthodox Survival Course (links to the text and audio versions are at the end of the article):https://www.rooshv.com/the-orthodox-survival-course-by-father-seraphim-rose

-By Walt Garlington