The Globalists’ Obsession with Charlemagne

Western European globalists are quite smitten with Charlemagne. Former IMF Director Christine Lagarde enthused in 2012,

‘Charlemagne is often referred to as the Pater Europae, the leader who forged a cohesive unity out of a divided western Europe, and unleashed an intellectual and cultural revival.

‘He is also famous for his economic reforms—he harmonized and unified a complex array of currencies, introducing a new currency standard, the livre, based on silver.’

There is also the Charlemagne building of the EU; the EU’s European Charlemagne Youth Prize; and the Council of Europe’s Via Charlemagne.

At the same time, traditionalists in the West also proclaim their devotion to him. The Charlemagne Institute, situated in Minnesota, declares,

‘Charlemagne Institute is a non-profit, periodicals publisher dedicated to the restoration of the principles and traditions with which Western Civilization was founded and upon which the American Republic has been built. Our purpose is to cultivate discussion and debate on seminal topics within the studies of politics, culture, history, family, education, and the arts. In terms of viewpoint, Charlemagne Institute conveys the values of a heartland conservatism.’

There is a contradiction here.

Folks like the Charlemagne Institute make him out to be a defender of traditional Christian Western culture.

And yet the Western globalists, who also praise him, have tried to eradicate Europe’s Christian history, excluding any mention of it in the EU constitution, which earned a rebuke from Pope Benedict XVI on more than one occasion. One example:

‘In a toughly-worded speech to European bishops, Benedict said Europe was committing a form of “apostasy of itself” and was thus doubting its own identity.

‘The Pope, who like his predecessor John Paul often calls for a mention of God and Christianity in the European Constitution, said leaders could not exclude values that helped forge the “very soul” of the continent.

‘“If on the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome the governments of the union want to get closer to their citizens, how can they exclude an element as essential to the identity of Europe as Christianity, in which the vast majority of its people continue to identify,” he said.

‘“Does not this unique form of apostasy of itself, even before God, lead it (Europe) to doubt its very identity?”’

Someone is misinterpreting the life and legacy of Charlemagne. But who is right and who is wrong? Two defining actions of his dispel the fog of confusion.

The first is his calling of the Council of Frankfurt, held in 794 A.D., which rejected the decision of the 7th Ecumenical (Universal) Council of the Church (+787) upholding the veneration of icons of the Lord Jesus Christ, His Most Pure Mother, and all the holy saints and angels. This was the first step toward the desacralization of art in the West, which has brought forth the brutalism seen in her recent architecture (e.g., the EU’s own buildings) and in other fields, a result ironically decried recently by one the Charlemagne Institute’s writers.

The second is his decision to unlawfully modify the Nicene Creed (added to the Frankish liturgy sometime between the end of the 8th and the beginning of the 9th century, per Dom Gregory Dix), 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. This deformation of the true relations amongst the Persons of the All-Holy Trinity, Who is the Supreme and Highest Good, led predictably to catastrophic effects across the West. Dr Joseph Farrell, writing in his illuminating book God, History, and Dialectic: The Theological Foundations of the Two Europes and Their Cultural Consequences, describes the disaster:

‘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.  . . .

‘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.’

What this amounts to is Charlemagne using theology to create an empire in the West over which he could rule unhindered by anyone, as Fr John Romanides and others have pointed out. He created in fact, without exaggeration, an anti-Christian Empire (‘anti-’ in the sense of ‘in place of’). For the West, from the days of St Constantine to Charlemagne, already belonged to the Orthodox Roman Empire, the icon of the heavenly kingdom on earth. Michael Warren Davis, in a splendid essay on monarchy, includes these passages which are relevant to this subject:

‘Christ is the King of all; He shares His kingship with the rulers of this earth because—again—He wants to. He gives men the honor of ruling His people in His stead.

‘So, in a sense, the Incarnation continues to unfold as the kingship of Christ is embodied in the person of the king—just as the bishop acts in the person of Christ when offering the sacramental mysteries. All such power comes from God, and belongs to God, but it comes to us through our fellow men.

‘And, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware once observed, this incarnation of authority transformed Christendom into a vast, living icon:

‘“If Byzantium was an icon of the heavenly Jerusalem, then the earthly monarchy of the Emperor was an image or icon of the monarchy of God in Heaven. . . .

‘“[The Byzantines] believed that that Christ, who lived on earth as a man, had redeemed every aspect of human existence, and they held that it was therefore possible to baptize not human individuals only but the whole spirit and organization of society. . . . Byzantium in fact was nothing less than an attempt to accept and apply the full implications of the Incarnation.”’

Having broken the West’s communion with the Orthodox Church and thrown off the authority of the lawful emperor, Charlemagne is the inspiration for the modern Western globalists’ own anti-Christian Empire (and for their hatred of Russia, which is slowly regenerating her love for the Orthodox Church and for monarchy). This is why they love him as much as they do.

Our traditionalist friends, unfortunately then, are wrong. The preponderance of evidence is that Charlemagne is not the friend and restorer of what is true and beautiful, but their enemy and destroyer. We will probably not get very far in improving things here in the West until they are able to acknowledge that.