My Struggle as Editor of OnePeterFive, Part IV: “Orthobros” & the Subtlety of the Fallen Angels Online

Mr Flanders continues his series of essays on his struggles against what he refers to as the Antichrist Technocracy of the internet.

From One Peter Five

By Timothy Flanders, MA

My Struggle as Editor of OnePeterFive

Or: Mary Against the Antichrist Technocracy

Part I: My Soul was Crushed by the Matrix… and then I took over OnePeterFive

Part II: Disembodied Antichrist Community: Good out of Evil?

Part III: What this Non-Profit Did for Me

Like I said, when I plugged back into Skynet in 2018, I thought the evil of the internet was obvious: evil images (euphemism: p*rnography), and such things as that.

OK, so I’m not addicted to evil images. Check.

I guess I’m good to just go swimming in these dark waters right, Mom?

(Mary, Mother of Light at Fatima, was working overtime for me, as I would later find out.)

No, screens are nothing less than the false light of Lucifer. That doesn’t mean that the Holy Cross cannot crush Satan and bring good out of evil. But the very design of the thing itself is evil (in the broadest sense of the term, as a deprivation of the good[1]). So the caution which is necessary is huge.

I didn’t realise this at the time when I dove back into The Matrix in 2018. But eventually I found out something rather strange: the Eastern Orthodox online community had shifted radically.

Back before 2013, I used to interact with many people in the Orthodox world as I did my academic studies as an Eastern Orthodox writer. At that time, the main hub of Orthodox online community was a fantastic website called Monochos.net. This website was really the best of Eastern Orthodoxy: “Orthodoxy through Patristics, Monastic and Liturgical Study.” This is nothing less than Eastern Catholicism – everything that is true, good and beautiful that is Greek, Russian, Syriac or another oriental tradition.

The best online community for east-west issues was an Orthodox blog called Eirenikon, which promoted the Akathist to the Theotokos, Softener of Evil Hearts. (Both of these great Orthodox websites are defunct now.)

Even the Serbo-ROCOR site OrthodoxInfo.com was potently ascetic, even though it was thoroughly anti-Catholic.

But back in the early 2010s, there was no such thing as “Orthobros.”

The term didn’t exist.

The oldest entry of the term on Urban Dictionary is from 2021.

Who are the “Orthobros?”

They are a mob of anti-ascetics who, in the words of one good Orthodox writer, “study the Tradition” but fail to “understand” it, because their hearts are not filled with love, which is literally the heart of Orthodoxy (pun intended).

They are anti-ascetics because they fast from food, but not from sin. They fast, but their fasts are the Pharisee’s fast, which allows them to be puffed up with pride. This is false asceticism and it’s the worst form of prelest. This poison is embodied in the character of Father Farapont by Dostoyevsky (SPOILER ALERT):

Suddenly an extraordinary uproar in the passage in open defiance of decorum burst on his ears. The door was flung open and Father Ferapont appeared in the doorway. Behind him there could be seen accompanying him a crowd of monks, together with many people from the town. They did not, however, enter the cell, but stood at the bottom of the steps, waiting to see what Father Ferapont would say or do. For they felt with a certain awe, in spite of their audacity, that he had not come for nothing. Standing in the doorway, Father Ferapont raised his arms, and under his right arm the keen inquisitive little eyes of the monk from Obdorsk peeped in. He alone, in his intense curiosity, could not resist running up the steps after Father Ferapont. The others, on the contrary, pressed farther back in sudden alarm when the door was noisily flung open. Holding his hands aloft, Father Ferapont suddenly roared:

“Casting out I cast out!” and, turning in all directions, he began at once making the sign of the cross at each of the four walls and four corners of the cell in succession. All who accompanied Father Ferapont immediately understood his action. For they knew he always did this wherever he went, and that he would not sit down or say a word, till he had driven out the evil spirits.

“Satan, go hence! Satan, go hence!” he repeated at each sign of the cross. “Casting out I cast out,” he roared again. He was wearing his coarse gown girt with a rope. His bare chest, covered with gray hair, could be seen under his hempen shirt. His feet were bare. As soon as he began waving his arms, the cruel irons he wore under his gown could be heard clanking.

Father Païssy paused in his reading, stepped forward and stood before him waiting. “What have you come for, worthy Father? Why do you offend against good order? Why do you disturb the peace of the flock?” he said at last, looking sternly at him.

“What have I come for? You ask why? What is your faith?” shouted Father Ferapont crazily. “I’ve come here to drive out your visitors, the unclean devils. I’ve come to see how many have gathered here while I have been away. I want to sweep them out with a birch broom.”

“You cast out the evil spirit, but perhaps you are serving him yourself,” Father Païssy went on fearlessly.[2] 

Indeed, it is the preternatural subtlety of the fallen angels to harness that zeal without knowledge (Rom. x. 2) so that a pious soul serves the Devil even though he consciously thinks he is serving God.

I say all this because I am a recovering “Orthobro” myself. It takes one to know one, as we say in the States. (This is why my soul is simply not safe as an Orthodox Christian, because I’m too prideful to not be under an authority, as my forthcoming book will attempt to show.)

In the decade of the 2010s, the internet created this online community of Eastern Orthodox men who are worse than the Pharisees in their pampered prelest.

When I dove back into Skynet in 2018, I was diving into my own version of that, but I didn’t know it. (Lamentably, this kind of thing is not only afflicting the Orthodox.[3])

I didn’t realise what the devils were doing to me until it was too late.

You see, I really enjoyed the dopamine burst from correcting other people online. But I had never read the wisdom of St. John Climacus:

He whose will and desire in conversation is to establish his own opinion, even though what he says is true, should recognize that he is sick with the devil’s disease. And if he behaves like this only in conversation with his equals, then perhaps the rebuke of his superiors may heal him. But if he acts in this way even with those who are greater and wiser than he, then his malady is humanly incurable. (my emphasis)[4]

It was only because of Our Lady that I’m even aware of this evil now. When I consecrated myself to the Immaculata in 2012, while I was still Orthodox (with the blessing of my Orthodox spiritual father), my heart belonged to her as her slave (according to the Montfortian spirituality). She took care of me and kept me from falling into greater and greater sin when I had no idea of the danger.

But I will return to the Immaculata in the climax of this series.

Because at that time, in 2018, when I plunged back into The Matrix, I immediately began to drown in the dark waters of the fasting Pharisee.

But because I was in virtual reality, I told myself I wasn’t drowning. The internet created “Orthobros,” but Latin rite traditionalists can also fall victim to this poison. And I did that too, as I will confess in the final part.

To be continued.

PART V: The Darkness Takes Me Alive

---

[1] Obviously artificial light is not intrinsically evil, and nobody is sinning by using light bulbs or screens. But I’m saying that this man-made light, because it strikes at the heart of the “Father of Lights” and the Image of Man, is not just a neutral tool. It’s much more subtle than that. See, along with McLuhan, Silva’s article “Light Pollution as Antichrist.”

[2] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constange Garnett (New York: The Lowell Press, n.d.), bk. VII, ch. 1.

[3] The term “Rad Trad,” without a pejorative sense, comes into Urban Dictionary just this past August. I do believe a similar phenomenon of “pampered prelest” does indeed afflict young Latin rite traditionalists however, based on their online behaviour, like effeminately attacking women from anonymous accounts.

[4] St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (Harper & Brothers, 1959), Step 4.