The Stage of the World: How Secular History Was Bent Against Christ
Part 7 in The War Unseen: The Long Battle Against Christ and His Church
This article is Part 7 in a series. Be sure to start with Part 1!
This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 1, be sure to read Part 2!
This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 2, be sure to read Part 3!
This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 3, be sure to read Part 4!
This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 4, be sure to read Part 5!
This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 5, be sure to read Part 6!
Author's Note: What follows is a personal hypothesis. While I am a devoted member of the Orthodox Church, this work does not reflect the official position of the Orthodox Church nor does it speak on behalf of it. Instead, this is the work of a sinner.
What follows is my own hypothesis—an Orthodox Christian reading of secular history as a theater of spiritual war. I’m not speaking for the Orthodox Church. I am proposing that many “non-religious” turns in Western history are best explained as coordinated pressures that reshape souls and societies so they will no longer recognize Christ or His Church.
I owe much of this article to the writings of Fr. Seraphim Rose in his Orthodox Survival Guide and the podcast Ek Nekron for exposing me to these ideas at the time I was writing this series.
Beyond the Paywall
What comes after the Great Schism is not just religious division—it is the slow reprogramming of the entire Western world. In the full article, I trace the causal chain:
From Scholasticism to Rationalism — how a shift from revelation to logic set the stage for faith in human reason over divine wisdom.
Papal Politics and the Revolutions — why papal claims of world power invited secular revolts and new “civil religions” that mimicked the Church.
The Enlightenment and French Revolution — the deliberate enthronement of “Reason” as goddess, with altars, calendars, and rituals replacing Christ.
Nihilism and the Occult — how Nietzsche’s “God is dead” gave way to spiritualism, Theosophy, and Crowley’s black mass, demonic parodies of Christian worship.
Totalitarian Experiments — how both the Soviet gulag and modern consumerism seek the same thing: to erase Christian consciousness and re-engineer human beings.
Digital Tyranny — the rise of surveillance capitalism and engineered passions, a soft persecution that leaves Christians docile and distracted.
Fragmented Churches as Easy Targets — how Reformation-era splintering weakened Christendom, leaving Protestants and post-Christians vulnerable to the spirit of the age.
Subscribe to read the full article and follow the thread from 1054 all the way to our digital dystopia today. You’ll see why the world we inhabit is not neutral ground, but the carefully cultivated stage of an ongoing spiritual war.
Setting the Scene
If the devil cannot kill the Church, he can try to make the air she breathes unlivable. The answer is not retreat but sobriety: to recover the mind of the Fathers, keep the fasts, guard the senses, and build households where the King is obeyed. The war is ambient; the weapons are ancient; the Saints have already charted the victory.
If the devil cannot unmake the Church, he can try to unmake the world that nourishes Christians. He can change what people love, what they fear, what they consider “normal,” and what they imagine to be possible until Good is called Evil and Evil is called Good. He does this by rearranging culture itself—its authorities, myths, institutions, and technologies—so that faith appears implausible, the passions feel irresistible, and the Church looks like an outdated antique.
The Break (1054): From Communion to Self-Reference
When Old Rome and New Rome fell out of communion, the West lost the corrective mechanism of conciliarity and the ascetical mind of the Fathers. The split widened over papal claims and doctrinal additions (e.g., the Filioque), and the two civilizations diverged. In the Orthodox reading, this wasn’t just an institutional quarrel; it changed how the West would think and pray. Detached from the patristic phronema (mindset), the West increasingly answered theological questions with systems and synthesis built primarily by discursive reasoning. This is the seed of later rationalisms.
From Revelation to Rational System: Scholasticism
Medieval scholasticism brought enormous intellectual energy to Christian questions, but it also habituated minds to trust dialectic over illumination. As theology became a school discipline, it increasingly lost its connection to the path of deification. You can see the pivot in classic accounts of the scholastic method and its heirs.
Result: when a rational system displaces ascetical wisdom, the spiritual dimension is thinned. That made the later embrace of reason against revelation psychologically easier.
Power Religions: Papal Monarchy, Then Human Monarchy
In 1302, Boniface VIII’s papal bull Unam sanctam asserted that submission to the Roman Pontiff (the pope) is “absolutely necessary for salvation”—and described both “spiritual” and “temporal” swords under the papal plenitude of power. This did not single-handedly “cause” secular revolts, but it helped shift Christianity (in the West) into a visible political frame. When the clergy claim Caesar’s sword, the counter-move is inevitable: Caesars will claim the altars.
Result: a visibly politicized church invites a politicized answer: first Erastian kings, later revolutionary states, finally party-states.
The Renaissance Turn: From Sanctity to the Sovereign Self
Renaissance humanism used the foundation laid by scholasticism but diminished the role of Christian theology and re-centered the attention on man—often productively in the arts and letters. In religion, it favored an ad fontes (“back to the fount”) approach that sometimes cut scripture loose from the living Church and made the individual interpreter his own Pope. Arising in 14th-century Italy and sweeping Europe by the 15th century, it is no mere coincidence that the rise of Renaissance humanism coincides with the Protestant Reformation. Humanism created the intellectual climate that made the Reformation possible. When theology can be reduced to a mere intellectual pursuit, it becomes much easier to displace.
When it came to religion, Renaissance humanism’s emphasis on returning to original sources, known by the Latin phrase ad fontes, was a critical link to the Reformation. Humanist scholars, like Desiderius Erasmus, applied this principle to religious texts, studying the Bible in its original Greek and Hebrew languages instead of relying solely on the Latin Vulgate translation that had been used for centuries in the West.
We see this thinking coming through as Martin Luther prepares the Protestant Bible, jettisoning the Latin Vulgate1, marginalizing the Septuagint (the scriptures the apostles used), and instead basing it on the Masoretic text (Hebrew scriptures compiled by what were essentially Pharisaic scribes. These texts sport anti-Christian variations to remove or obfuscate passages used by Christians to support their beliefs in Jesus as the messiah.) Luther then proceeds to use translations of the Greek New Testament that Erasmus himself had published.
In the production of the Latin Vulgate, St. Jerome also operated on an early version of ad fontes, preferring the textual variants of the proto-Masoretic texts, which contained anti-Christian variants, over those in the Septuagint. This led to a famous conflict between Jerome and St. Augustine (who were contemporaries.) Jerome believed that he was returning to the purest, most accurate source of the Old Testament. Augustine feared that a new translation from the Hebrew would cause confusion and division within the Church. He believed that the Septuagint was divinely inspired and, having been used for centuries by the apostles and the Church, had an authority that transcended the original Hebrew. Augustine famously recounted a story where a bishop who used Jerome’s new translation caused a riot in his congregation because of a minor translation difference.
As an Augustinian friar, student of Augustine, and professor of the bible and theology, Luther was absolutely aware of Augustine’s objections to St. Jerome’s work on the Vulgate and Augustine's opinions on the Septuagint. However, Luther’s own convictions and his embrace of the humanist principle of ad fontes led him to side with Jerome. While he considered Augustine a foundational theological authority, particularly on doctrines of grace and faith, Luther ultimately chose the scholastic path.
Humanism had two major consequences:
Questioning Authority: The critical examination of religious texts led humanists to discover discrepancies in the Vulgate and in the Church’s doctrines. This provided reformers like Martin Luther with the intellectual tools and justification to challenge the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church.
Focus on the Individual: Humanism’s focus on human potential and the individual’s ability to reason and interpret texts, contrasted with the medieval emphasis on strict adherence to institutional authority. This helped lay the groundwork for the Protestant idea that an individual could have a direct relationship with God without the need for a priest or a church as an intermediary.
In essence, humanism provided the methodology and the intellectual foundation that the Reformers used to build their theological arguments and justify their break from the Catholic Church. It also reinforced decisions that led to the continued propagation of corrupted Old Testament scriptures containing anti-Christian changes into protestantism itself.
In the same period, courts (including papal Rome) became comfortable with astrology and occult curiosities: a symptom of religious energy drifting from ascetical discernment to “techniques” and spectacles. The point is not to indict the entire Renaissance; it is to note that, culturally, man moved himself to the center of attention. That reorientation set the stage for the next step.
The Enlightenment: Deism, then Dethronement
The 17th–18th centuries weaponized the earlier tilt toward systems. Deism said God is a distant Architect whose world runs on its own; that conveniently removes any need for sacraments, saints, repentance, or the Church’s authority. It also naturalizes the idea that man can “finish” creation without God.
French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire’s program was explicit: “Écrasez l’infâme”—“crush the infamous thing” (superstition/clericalism). This animus animated a public project, not just a private opinion. Voltaire rejected divine revelation, miracles, and the authority of the Church. He believed religion should be reduced to natural morality and reason. His philosophies helped shape the secular rationalist worldview of the modern West.
Result: If God is distant and priests are harmful, then “progress” requires a new priesthood, philosophies, committees, and eventually party cadres.
The French Revolution: A New Liturgy Against the Old
And so it came. In 1789–94, France enacted a cultural-religious replacement:
Churches were desecrated or re-purposed; Notre-Dame was converted into a “Temple of Reason”; a civic “Cult of the Supreme Being” was installed; the calendar itself remade to erase the Lord’s Day. This is not incidental iconoclastic icon smashing—it was liturgical replacement on a massive scale.
A move by Napoleon is illustrative: if the Christian order is obsolete, the state can curate religion as it pleases—including summoning a Grand Sanhedrin (1806) to manage Jewish affairs, a sign that the political center now openly presides over the sacred.
The Revolution illustrates that an anti-Christian order needs ritual, symbols, saints, calendars—a secular parody of a Church. When religion is removed, something else needs to fill the vacuum.
After Faith: Nihilism and the Will to Power
In the late 19th century, Nietzsche announced the outcome of the great Western experiment: “God is dead,” not as a metaphysical claim but as a diagnosis of a culture that has lost belief—and must now create its own values by will. His relativism/perspectivism (“there are no facts, only interpretations,” from notebooks later assembled in The Will to Power) became the mood music for post-modernism, post-truth politics, and a post-Christian morality.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, in Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, traced a four-stage descent—liberalism to radicalism to “vitalism” to nihilism—showing how the denial of transcendent truth logically ends in the denial of any binding truth. This isn’t just an observation; it is a map of spiritual corrosion.
Result: If you erase the God-man, you get the man-god, or finally no god at all and only power.
The Vacuum Fills: Spiritualism, Occultism, and Counter-Mysteries
When reverence for the Holy Spirit is exiled, lower spirits naturally rush in. In 1848, the Fox sisters’ “rappings” launched mass spiritualism; even after later confessions of fraud, the appetite remained. In 1875, Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society—an explicit attempt to assemble a syncretic esoteric “wisdom” without the Church.
In the 20th century, Aleister Crowley re-packaged ceremonial magic as a religion of the self—Thelema—and Anton LaVey secularized the pose as the Church of Satan (1966 was declared “Anno Satanas” Year One of the era of Satan” in an attempt to reset the calendar around the declaration of Satanism and away from the birth of Christ.) Whether or not you think either man touched “real power,” both normalized a ritualized Liturgy of an Anti-Christ in the public imagination. Crowds and media followed, and what had once been fringe became mainstream.
Result: If you push Christian mystagogy out; counterfeit mystagogies sell themselves as empowerment. The passions get their sacraments, as man makes his Ego an Idol.
Totalitarian Trials: The Church in the Meat Grinder
While the West experimented with secular humanism, the East was chained. Four centuries of Ottoman rule kept Christ’s original body on a political leash (with seasons of toleration and seasons of humiliation). Christians existed as the Rūm millet—formally subordinate, taxed, sometimes preyed upon (e.g., the devşirme “child levy”). This is why the Orthodox world could not meaningfully resist Western philosophical tides: they were preoccupied with survival.
Then came militant atheism. In the Soviet 1920s–30s, most churches were shut, hierarchs arrested or shot, and public religious life intentionally destroyed. This was not random cruelty; it was a deliberate “de-churching” to manufacture a new human being. The greatest of Heresies. Instead of Christ’s mission to remake fallen man back into what humanity was originally intended to be in the image and likeness of God, the communist agenda to make a new human being sought to countermand that with a program to reforge humanity and cement it within its own fallen nature, based on the image and likeness of anti-christ (i.e. demonic) philosophies.
Result: smash the Church’s visible life, and you can try to refit human nature to the demonic.
The New Infrastructure of Temptation: Technics and the Self
A culture that dethrones God must enthrone someone or something else. In modern consumer democracies, it is the self—measured, catered to, and, increasingly, shaped by data-driven systems.
Surveillance capitalism. As Shoshana Zuboff argues, today’s platforms do not just “serve” us; they extract behavioral data to predict and modify us. That is not philosophically neutral; it habituates people to live by impulse and feed habits and passions against nepsis (watchfulness).
Digital authoritarianism. The same tools permit states (and, increasingly, coalitions of state-corporate actors) to profile, nudge, and mute dissent; a soft coercion that feels benevolent. (e.g. digital ID’s)
Result: A civilization discipled by devices is catechized in distraction and docility. When passions are reliably and consistently gratified, resistance to vice (and to lies) withers.
The Reformation’s Fragmentation as an Attack Surface
In prior articles, we traced how fragmentation—born of sincere protests but detached from conciliar healing—multiplied rival altars while filling those altars with resurrected heresies. That produced hundreds, then thousands, of mini-magisteria. Once modern philosophers reframed truth as relativistic, “my truth” vs “your truth,” many flocks became unmoored from God’s truth, lacking the sacramental ballast and patristic guardrails of the original Church.
In the 19th–20th centuries, fragmented communities of Christians (Catholic and Protestant) were easily catechized by the surrounding culture—first in “reasonable, rational religion” (deistic, then liberal), later in therapeutic moralism, and today in politicized identity as a quasi-soteriology. St. Justin Popovich warned that Western “ecumenism” often conceals a humanism that regards the Church as just one institution among many—a stance that cannot withstand the cultural acid he described.
Result: Where the Church is reimagined as an invisible voluntary club2, secular catechisms flow in. When the Eucharist is merely a “symbol,” it can easily be replaced by almost any other that fits the prevailing culture. Thus, today we see crosses with pride flags wrapped around them shamefully being allowed to be carried into St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Reading the Arc with Fr. Seraphim Rose (and Friends)
Ek Nekron’s “Brief History of Anti-Christianity” (following Fr. Seraphim’s Orthodox Survival Course) argues that the modern world is not a neutral space but a counter-tradition—a long pedagogy training us to accept a world without Christ or his church. You need not chase conspiracies to see the pattern:
Intellectual: scholastic confidence in reason → Enlightenment deism → positivism → nihilism. (Nihilism is the key here.)
Political-liturgical: papal monarchy → de-Christianized republics with new cults → states with civilly created and run religions (just like the Pagan religions of old.)
Mystical: ban true mystagogy → sell occult counterfeits → normalize sacramentalized vice.
Technological: industrial efficiency → behavioral engineering → surveillance capitalism/digital control.
This is precisely the logic of the “mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess 2): not one silver-bullet event, but a pedagogy of apostasy.
What This Means for Us
The spiritual war is real, and it’s ambient (i.e., it’s pervasive, has permeated the social and cultural fabrics, and often goes unnoticed. In other words, it surrounds us, and we are living in it.) It comes through schoolbooks, the internet, social media, popular culture, influences, mainstream news media, and app stores more than swords.
The answer is the same as in Acts I: repent, be illumined, keep the fasts, cling to the Eucharist, live under obedience, cultivate watchfulness (nepsis), and keep your family as a small monastery.
Do not be scandalized that the world is the world. The Church has won by love and blood before, and she will again.
BUT… It’s a war against the demonic and, whether you know it or not, you are a combatant. So you had better be aware of it and prepare yourself to face the onslaught or be counted amongst the casualties. This is not Lee’s hyperbole. The church fathers have been preparing us for this for millennia.
“Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
Ephesians 6:11–17
Romans 13:12 — “The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.”
1 Thessalonians 5:8 — “But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation.”
St. John Chrysostom (Homily XXII on Ephesians):
“What is the armor of God? He himself is our armor. For if you put on Christ, you will have put on the armor of God. Stand therefore, says Paul, having your loins girt about with truth. What he means is this: hold yourselves always ready and prepared, for such is the condition of a soldier who is girt. … Righteousness is a breastplate, faith is a shield, hope of salvation a helmet, the word of God a sword.”
St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechetical Lectures 13.3):
“The whole armor of God is your shield against the adversary. When tempted, say: I am clothed with Christ; I carry His cross on my forehead; I am fortified with the armor of salvation; I fear not the devil.”
St. Gregory the Great (Moralia on Job, Book 7, ch. 21):
“The breastplate of righteousness is charity; the helmet of salvation is hope; the shield of faith is defense against every hostile dart. The sword of the Spirit is the word of God, which both defends us from wounds and strikes down our adversaries.”
St. Theophylact of Ohrid (11th c., commentary on Eph. 6):
“By the armor of God he means virtue, for if we are armed with it, we can never be wounded by the demons.”
If you are reading this and don’t know how to prepare yourself for the battle, send me a private message so I can help point you in the right direction, but generally, I’d say, find a local Orthodox church, attend a liturgy, and sign up for the catechumen’s classes.
Conclusion
Across this series, we have traced the long shadow of spiritual warfare — from the moment the demons panicked at the Jordan, to the bloody persecutions of Rome, through heresies, schisms, and secular revolutions that promised freedom but delivered only chains. Every age shows the same pattern: when the light of Christ shines, the devil scrambles to counterfeit, corrupt, fragment, and seduce.
And yet, through it all, one reality remains unshaken: the Church that Christ founded has not fallen. Christ was not a liar; his church didn’t require a restoration because of some great apostasy; it never apostatized. There **is** one true, holy, universal, and apostolic church that the gates of hell have not prevailed against.”
Our Lord Himself promised:
“I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” (Mt 16:18)
Not churches, but My Church. **Singular** Visible. Apostolic. Guarded by the Spirit and nourished by the sacraments.
The apostle Paul exhorts us:
“So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.” (2 Thess 2:15)
This is the measure of the true Church: not innovation, not the charisma of a reformer, not the shifting sands of culture, but the tradition once delivered to the saints both orally and in writing, and safeguarded in the Body of Christ.
Today, among the thousands of heterodox counterfeits — splinters, sects, and schisms — only one Church still carries the full inheritance of Christ and the apostles: the Orthodox Church. It alone has preserved the apostolic succession, the Eucharist as the true Flesh and Blood of Christ, the unbroken confession of the Trinity, the fullness of the sacramental life, and the faith of the Fathers.
Every other body, however sincere, however well-meaning, is at best a partial echo, at worst a distortion born of the devil’s ancient strategy: “if you cannot destroy the Church, counterfeit it.” I’m sorry if this offends you; however, the truth is the truth, and in a war of deception and lies, the truth needs to be spoken clearly and unequivocally.
This is not arrogance; it is simply fidelity to Christ’s own promise. The Church is not a man-made association of like-minded believers; it is Christ’s own Body, His Bride, His Ark of salvation in the midst of a storm-tossed world. To step into that Ark is to step into the Kingdom even now.
So the call of history is simple: flee the counterfeits, cling to the Truth, and enter the one, holy, universal, and apostolic Church — the Orthodox Church.
The war continues, but the victory is already won. Christ has trampled down death by death, and His Church — though battered for millennia and suppressed for hundreds of years by followers of demonic ideologies — still stands. And it will stand until He comes again in glory.
Amen.
Σῶσον, Κύριε, τὸν λαόν σου, καὶ εὐλόγησον τὴν κληρονομίαν σου·νίκας τοῖς βασιλεῦσι κατὰ βαρβάρων δωρούμενος, καὶ τὸ σὸν φυλάττων διὰ τοῦ Σταυροῦ σου πολίτευμα.
“O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance. Grant victories to the Orthodox Christians over their adversaries, and by the power of Thy Cross preserve Thy habitation.”
Troparion (Thematic Celebratory Hymn) of the Church.
Ἐξομολογεῖσθε τῷ Κυρίῳ, ὅτι ἀγαθός, ὅτι εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα τὸ ἔλεος αὐτοῦ.
Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, For His mercy endures forever.
Psalm 135
Selected Sources & Further Reading
Great Schism / Scholasticism / Deism / Enlightenment: Encyclopaedia Britannica overviews.
Papal monarchy: Boniface VIII, Unam sanctam (1302).
French de-Christianization & civic cults; Notre-Dame’s “Temple of Reason”: Britannica and scholarly summaries.
Nietzsche and nihilism: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Fr. Seraphim Rose: “Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age.”
St. Justin Popovich on Ecumenism: “The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism.”
Spiritualism & occult revivals: Smithsonian on the Fox sisters; Britannica on Blavatsky and Crowley.
LaVey and “Anno Satanas” (1966): Church of Satan’s own historical page.
Orthodoxy under the Ottomans; devşirme: Britannica.
Soviet de-churching: overview statistics and policy summaries.
Surveillance capitalism & digital authoritarianism: Zuboff (Harvard Gazette / HBS); Freedom House & CSIS.
The Latin Vulgate is a Latin translation of the entire Bible, completed by St. Jerome in the late 4th century CE. The Pope commissioned it to create a standardized Latin version of the Bible for the Roman Catholic Church, as the existing Latin texts were inconsistent and of poor quality.
The Vulgate was not a simple Latin translation of the Septuagint. While Jerome did use some Greek sources for his New Testament and some parts of the Old Testament, his primary approach for the Old Testament was to go directly to the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts. These were not the Masoretic texts, as those did not yet exist. Jerome went to the “proto-masoretic” texts that formed the basis of the Hebrew tradition in the 5th century. This was a radical departure from the tradition of the time, as the Septuagint had been the dominant Old Testament text used by the apostles and all early Christians. Unfortunately, even the proto-masoretic texts include textual anti-Christian changes. Jerome most often incorporated the anti-Christian textual variants in favor of the Septuagint version. This famously produced conflict between Jerome and St. Augustine, who objected and argued that the Septuagint had the authority of Apostolic usage.
The “invisible church” is a theological concept that distinguishes between the institutional body of Christians on Earth and a hypothetical spiritual body of all believers who are known only to God. This doctrine came about as a direct response to the institutional authority of the Roman Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation. Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin employed this distinction to argue that the true Church was not defined by its hierarchy, traditions, or physical buildings (since they lacked these), but by the genuine faith of its members. i.e., an excuse to break away from the Roman church and establish some pseudo-authority for doing so.
The core idea is that the “visible church”—the organized body you see on Earth, with its leaders and members—contains both true believers and those who are not. The “invisible church,” by contrast, is a mystical body composed solely of the elect, whose faith and membership are known only to God. This concept was essential for the Reformers to justify their separation from the Roman Catholic Church without abandoning the idea of a single, true Church established by Christ. Like other core protestant doctrines, this idea is as real as it’s invisibility. (i.e. it’s a load of bunk.) History shows that the apostles established churches, created and instituted hierarchies and traditions and these operated out of physical buildings. The concept of an “invisible church” is an imaginary fantasy born from theological necessity, and it itself is heresy. Another move by the demonic to erase God’s church by making people believe it doesn’t exist and is just an idea in their heads.