The battle is raging….perhaps just when we thought it had dimmed over the decades to a mere flicker of memory of how the ferocity of conflict and strife tore assunder the fragile but persistent piecemeal efforts to sustain a glimmer of social cohesion in the Europe of the interwar years.

And we know that with the Middle East for example, the main cause of conflict there is the historical feud between the brothers Israel & Ishmael who had not completely resolved their disagreements before the resentments continued to eat up hope of ever simply agreeing to disagree and make peace in order to see each other in terms of the brotherly relations which God had enabled through the circumstances of procreative decisions taking their course.

In Europe right now, as had been the case in the preceding decades, eras, and centuries, similar sets of feuds have not been completely resolved nor have the conflicts brewing beneath the surface on account of these feuds entirely cessated.

It must be acknowledged that just as much of the discord in the Middle East, and in particular when we see how strained are often the relations between Jews and Arabs, who are in generational terms cousins from the two brothers Israel & Ishmael, it must be said too that much of the strife which has swathed Northern, Central, & Eastern Europe over the centuries and decades has its roots, believe it or not, in feuding between relations, blood brothers & cousins back in the pre-Christian era. It is so that even when you had these mass conversions as it were of Visigothic/Varangian tribes in the 9th and 10th centuries, such conversions, although were aimed to some degree at harmonizing the previous discord that was a constant factor permiating the social landscape of semi-continuous war between different Viking groups, they never really severed the spiritual ties or (soul ties as they are sometimes referred to) of the various groups to the underlying or root causes of these tensions which were often steeped in the various barbarisms of former conflicts rooted in pantheistic superstition.

And often public declarations en masse, (as good as they are to a certain degree in solidifying or galvanizing a sense of common solidarity or unity among different but sociohistorically related groups), will not have a permanent desired effect of maintaining the cohesion they were originally instigated to create if the individual minds and hearts of the people involved are not entirely converted to the core of their being. By converted, I am talking about something far deeper than that which is produced through engaging in or donning a one-time sacramental grace. See, for the one-time sacramental grace to work properly, there needs to be a continuous nurturance and a conscientious desire on the part of each person in the deepening of this grace, otherwise its effects will lie dormant and untapped, essentially without an abundance of good fruit in one’s spiritual life having been formed. And when spiritual tepidity sets in as the norm on a wider-society level, people can on the whole (not in every single instance but generally speaking) tend to collectively descend into a spiritual deception of believing that this superficial way of going about the spiritual life, in a constant state of mere ritualizing without sowing into actually cultivating a deeply satisfying and lasting relationship with God, with one’s faith, and with others in and through the preceeding two, is the new normal and that this is what it means to be ‘converted’ when in actual fact, they have missed the point on what authentic conversion actually is.

I know on the surface, it might sound like I am writing off vast swathes of people on the European continent insofar as the pathetic shallowness of their spiritual life goes but I can assure you that my intention is far from writing them off. In fact, it is against the principled dignity of my Catholic faith to write anyone off since God has created everyone with a unique and cosmically profound purpose and He wants this fact to be written on the hearts of each and every person on the face of the earth. Rather, I am speaking from a position of personal conviction and concern for the spiritual wellbeing of these people and indeed the whole of humanity and the creation entire. In part, this very personal conviction exists because of my own heritage and relationship to those people in a generational sense as my mother’s maternal side of the family was from North Central Europe and I know for a fact that my family on that side of the generational divide basically emigrated to the Southern hemisphere to get away from “all the wars” as my grandma used to say, that were being waged non-stop in that part of the globe during the latter part of the 19th century.

And here we are in the 21st century, just when the preceeding decades looked to be yielding some fundamental good fruit on a wider-societal level from the conflicts of infernal proportions from eras past, another version of these same rivalries we all presumed had been finally buried under the slow but steady progress of many different types of global peace-building initiatives rears its ugly head and we are now witnessing the return of hyper-nationalistic sentiments which are once again expressing themselves publically and at a level of military aggression not seen on the European continent since the waning days of the Cold War period. We can think Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1965, not to mention the latter disputes in Belarus. But whilst those conflicts were ruthless and largely unprovoked, the current situation concerning the position of Ukraine is even more confronting because Putin signed a declaration of respect towards the independance of Ukraine as a sovereign state in 2014 when he met Pope Francis in Havanna, Cuba. To see that Putin has gone back on his word in this regard is a disturbing turn of events. It is from one angle, of a similar ilk to the shock of Pope Francis himself in early January of this year, going back on his word regarding honouring the tenets of Laudato Si, when he unjustifiably criticised people who hold pets dear to them as ‘selfish’. When we see how that was uncharacteristic of Pope Francis, how then are we to view what Vladimir Putin has now done relative to his full-scale military aggression towards Ukraine?

These unprecedented personality switches are certainly out of character not only with what we knew of these two men previously but with the nature of the progressive learning curve humanity has been undergoing over the last 3 centuries relative to supposedly becoming more aware of how to become more sensitive to the human needs of our brothers and sisters as a human family sharing the earth as our common home, and alongside how we have also made fruitful progress in turning our swords into ploughshares and also coming to appreciate the importance of valuing in the sense of inalienable worth, the dignity of animal life and the diversity and essential coexistential beauty of the plant life that inhabits the earth alongside us. And considering the enemy of our souls (both on an individual and a collective level) – the devil – wants to stop where he can the continuity of such progress, he has obviously devised a plan in the spiritual realm to throw a spanner in the works so to speak, to try and halt the progress humanity has been steadily making towards becoming more saturated little-by-little with values that emphasize the importance of turning swords into ploughshares. It is, on a spiritual level a kind of retaliation manifested in the temporal and it is a tragic reminder too that there is still alot of solid ground-work to be done before the backfiring of such retaliation from the demonic forces operative on the spiritual plane is brought to a complete and utter definitive end once and for all.

Funny this, as I was around the time of the Djokovic saga in early January reading about the history of the region – the Balkans and Eastern Europe generally, and it is very interesting. See, prior to the 10th century, most of the population in that whole region were pagans, they were Norse people, of Viking origin and they worshipped Thor, the god of war. Now around 988 AD, the Byzantine Church converted these pagan Vikings (or Varangians as they were otherwise known), to Christianity and they have like their Greek catechists been particularly since the Great Schism of 1054 between the “Western” (Roman) and “Eastern” (Greek) patriarchate, seperate as Orthodox from the Roman Catholicity of the other European nations.

Now I read in an article* the other day that the Russian Orthodox Church was pressuring the government to try and get the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to re-allign with the Moscow patriarchate, (heads of bishops based in Moscow) instead of remaining seperate….Since it became clear to me upon studying the history of the region that the origin of this pressure dates back to pre-Christian era with the complex and often turmultous relations between these Viking states and how they were eventually united into one larger totality called the Varangian or Kievan Rus. The contemporary Russian state believes that a continued autonomy of Ukraine from Russia will mean the splitting not only of their perceived historical unity in Orthodox tradition but also their common ancestral ties as Varangian Rus…..

It’s really a very frivolous and stupid nationalistic thing which dates back to the both the Viking age and the corresponding perceived national unification between various Viking groups in the region during the 10th and 11th centuries and how intrinsically factual it is that many of these people have contemporarily-speaking not “gotten over” the residue of age-old tensions brewing beneath the surface of what looks to be a flimsy unity further galvanized in Orthodox sectarianism as a result of the East-West Schism of 1054.

And those tensions which were most likely left over from the pre-Christian era are not only present in Russia in the now-time but were present all throughout North-Central & Eastern Europe for many centuries which is why the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries saw so many heightened antagonisms and the downright senselessness of unbridled full-scale conflicts and military incursions engulf the four corners of our world as a result of these menacing forces of age-old feudal tensions on the European continent underpinning frivolous nationalistic fads.

Such fads were the result of buried regional tensions that had not been resolved by a dialogue of human solidarity as the notion that they ought to be and could be resolved this way was very rarely engaged simply because the modus operandii of conflict resolution was very much steeped in the feudal mentality of jousting it out to see who survives the duel!

On top of that, because the Orthodox church is often very insular generally speaking, they are extremely “closed-door” oriented, not only in Central & Eastern Europe but you will find this trend in Greece as well. They unfortunately desire to remain spiritually closed off from other Christian denominations and do not believe so much in the spirit of dialogue unlike, say, the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglicans or Lutherans or any other mainline protestant denominations, be they Methodist etc….When I went to Greece in 2016, I learnt that non-Orthodox people are not allowed to go on retreats at Orthodox monasteries and convents unless, they are accompanied by a member of the Orthodox church. It is VERY strict in that Eastern Orthodox congregations sometimes have an almost paralyzing fear of outsiders and, in a similar way to Ultra Orthodox Jews, do not like to marry outside the faith or associate friendship-wise with non-Orthodox people very often. This closed-off way of maintaining strict insular communal boundaries can be unhealthy and historically, such insularity caused alot of problems in that because such groups are so inward looking, they do not do “dialogue” very well. A great example of that holding sway was during the period of the Iron Curtain. The closed-off existence of Russia during the time of the Soviet era was called the “Iron Curtain” precisely because the ultra-insularity of a society that was so rigidly sectarian despite claiming an “Internationalist” solidarity was the norm and if you did not belong to that quirky marriage between the radical political theology of 18th century Protestant-type Reformism and a strictly Moscow-serving Orthodox patriarchate then you were considered a ‘traitor’ and sent to the gulags. So in reality, during the Soviet era, you actually had what I think Orthodox theologian Rev. Cyril Hovorun** would technically call “fascism” masked cosmetically as its opposite due to the ultra-nationalist bent of the Soviet style government.

To explain now, the gist of this post’s title. Well, you see, J.R.R. Tolkien used a great deal of Norse mythological imagery for the backdrop and even in some instances, the content of his Lord of the Rings literary epic as he was apparently influenced markedly by Beowulf. But he creatively pitched these mythological imageries within the context of trying to illustrate a few key tenets of the Christian moral discourse. The other side of his fascination with the use of Norse mythological concepts harks back to his own family background as they emmigrated to England from, Kreuzburg, in Prussia (modern day Slavskoye, Russia).

In Tolkien’s mythical geography, there were places that in some ways shared a similarity to Dante’s well known allegorical classic The Divine Comedy. Readers of the Dante masterpiece would be familiar with the three key locations of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso that set the backdrop and narrative for the thematic story-lines in this great poetic epic. The place Tolkien named Mordor is synonymous with the theological concept of Hell just as Inferno was for Dante, for it is the abode of the forces of evil, corruption, and death. It must be emphasized that Jesus Christ on the other hand, is The Prince of Peace who defeated the forces of Hell and death, (the forces of Mordor in the J.R.R. Tolkein spiritual landscape) that is, the pernicious designs of the Devil on the spiritual plane when Chirst as Supreme Victor, went down into the depths of Hell on Good Friday and Easter Saturday to take back what was rightfully His from the usurping hands of Satan.

While the Great Work of Salvation was accomplished once and for all by Jesus in this cosmic battle He underwent on Calvary for our souls, the nature of our existence on the temporal plane is still frought with many different types of spiritual problems that can present themselves as vexacious battles that rage behind the scenes in our lives, which for the most part go unnoticed for what they really are, and henceforth we are often because of our spiritual blindness in those areas, caught unawares in various types of traps and snares which materialize or manifest themselves as “circumstantial problems” with patterns that at the outset and on the surface seem rather innocuous but after a while the banality of their clamourously repetitive nature becomes as an alarm signal clanging in our ears beckoning our attention.

You may be wondering Why did God leave us with all these problems if in fact Jesus conquered evil, sin, and death on the Cross? The answer lies in the necessity of our own free-willed cooperation with God in the act of restoration. Because God intended for us before the Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden to be co-sharers in His creative design and purpose, and this included sharing in the very act of creation to some degree as well, following the disobedience of our first ancestors, we were made co-sharers in the act of needing to clean up the mess they had made. Hence our role in that regard still persists in the now-time and will persist until the end of the Age, when all creation will be completely restored to its rightful place as without blemish, taint or wrinkle.

And so it is we are indeed once again seeing these forces of Mordor that still occupy certain territories in the world at large try and maintain their pernicious stranglehold on the course of world events, the ebb and flow of life. Now, it is also the case that these negative forces in the spiritual reality behind the scenes of the temporal war occurring in Eastern Europe had not altogether been completely quashed after the Kievan Rus were baptized into the Christian faith. These forces of Mordor which occupied the regions of North, Central and Eastern Europe during the pre-Christian era of antiquity (Viking period & all eras prior) were very strong and they kept these different but related tribes semi-antagonistic towards each other. Hence the various tribes and clans would fight, then make peace, then fight again, then make peace, then fight again and then make peace again and so on it went. The pantheistic deities which augered this continuity of feuding between different regions and the various clans that ruled or vassalled them spurned each other on in a vicious circle of life that centered around placating these deities through the waging of feuds and battles.

You could argue that the same kind of life-way ruled the Roman and Greek empires too. It must be said however, one of the main reasons why the Romans and Greeks successfully overcame most of the spiritual fall-out from the pagan era is that Greece became the first seat of the Church after St Paul’s missionary journeys bore a super abundance of very good fruit and then Rome followed suit soon after with the emperor Constantine galvanizing both freedom and acceptance en masse of Christianity, with an unprecedented enculturation of Roman society with Christian values following soon after. In both the cases of Greece and Rome, you had these interlocking superhighways of faith enculturation exploding onto the scene at a rate and to an extent never before encountered relative to cultural epiphenomena. This never happened in the lands beyond the borders to the North and North East of Italy & Greece.

The other thing we need to understand here is that the geographic region known as the Kievan Rus historically originated with a figure known as Rurik who, according to local tradition hailed from Roslagen in Sweden and was a folk leader who helped unite various Viking communities together in Eastern Europe and he was also instrumental in providing much of the man-power for the Varangian Guard which basically was the Byzantine Emperor’s equivalent of the Roman Pontiff’s Swiss Guard. Because the Byzantines so lauded the military prowess of the Vikings, they recruited them to be the official imperial bodyguards and to comprise the vast majority of the imperial armed forces. This explains why these Vikings were so loyal to the Orthodox Church following the 1054 Schism as for example, they would pit all their might against the attacking armies of the Crusaders during the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 – Fourth Crusade. It is clear that the Crusades themselves were not only aimed at helping Pilgrims travel safely to and from the Holy Land for that was the positively edifying side of the Crusader mission but conversely, they were also protagonized & deployed during the East-West Schism to try and militarily force a closure to the schism. And now, we are once again seeing a tyrannical tour de force on the part of the forces aligned with the mythical supremacy of the Moscovite Russian Orthodoxy over the other branches of Orthodoxy and even those of Catholicism and other denominations in Ukraine. The situation is also very Anschlussy as the Moscow patriarchate thinks Ukraine needs to become unified with ‘Greater Russia’ as one, as in the olden days of Rurik. This is also how Nazi Germany tried to annex Austria and other neighbouring areas.

So given the historical circumstances, it is not hard to see why there is an undercurrent of unhealthy military zeal still hijacking the region which, unlike that of Rome and Greece, still has not as yet been thoroughly vanquished, subdued or quenched on the spiritual plane. This also explains why there were similar manifold tensions and undercurrents plaguing most of Central, North and North Eastern Europe well throughout the 18th, 19th & much of the 20th century. It might well be argued that France, although historically not being a part of the Viking territories, also fell victim to so many unnecessary and doleful military conflicts within her borders such as the infamous Wars of Religion which errupted during the time of the Reformation. And indeed the British Isles and surrounding countries also saw countless numbers of battles rage over the centuries including being subject to Viking conquests. But as ferocious as these were at the time they ran their course, the condition of relative internal stability, with the exception of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was pretty much without deflection.

There is no doubt the Reformation brought to bear upon a great proportion of Europe’s sizable misery and its’ own very (un)fair share of complications but on the whole aside from the spectre of sectarian rivalry between Catholics and Protestants that raged and convulsed regionally like Vesuvius for a number of centuries, it was nothing like the massive extent of sheer banality underpinning the crumbling social fabric and order which ravaged every land in Kaisarist Central, North, and North Eastern Europe just like the example cited in a brilliant but harrowing article by Eli Rubin*** In topping it off, to think that the virulence of such henious culturescapes dreanched and drowning in the mire of unjustifiable racial vilification, particularly towards Jews and Gypsies actually led to two unfathomably disastrous World Wars, and beyond this to even think that perhaps today in some of the exact same locations that were so blighted by the absolute ferocity of such horrors, very little has changed is almost beyond belief! For instance, even as regards the persistence of provincial or regional snobbery, take the narcissistic rancour contained within the statement: “You don’t say Dos Verdanya here!” I mean, for goodness’ sake, to hear these words coming from a presumably quite devout Catholic woman in Poland who was helping to organize the 2016 WYD (World Youth Day) pilgrimage to Krakow all because I got the Polish way of saying Goodbye mixed up with the Russian version is just unthinkable given the fact that, for one thing, Catholic Social Teaching promotes a universal brotherhood of man that is anchored in the love of Christ and is not partial to divisive nationalistic or sectarian sentiments.

Therefore, it is apt to conclude that it is this undercurrent of war-mongering continuity in the region despite the many lessons supposedly learned but all too quickly forgotten that tells us there is something deeper going on than just what appears on the surface to be “the culprit of causality”.

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References:

* https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/how-putin-is-exploiting-orthodox-rivalries-in-ukraine/15685

AND

https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/kirill-the-extremely-political-russian-orthodox-patriarch/15716

** https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/orthodox-theology-must-be-de-putinized-says-leading-church-scholar/15772

*** https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2335459/jewish/The-Tsars-Scapegoats-Beilis-the-Chassidim-and-the-Jews.htm

Key Words: Varangians, Kievan Rus, Rurik, Byzantine, East-West Schism of 1054, Orthadox Church, J.R.R. Tolkien, Norse Mythology, Mordor, Prince of Peace