“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat. But I have prayed that your own faith may not fail. And once you have returned to the faith, you must stand firm and strengthen your brothers.' And Peter replied, 'Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.' And Jesus said, 'Amen I say to you, before the cock crows, you will deny three times that you even know me.'”
Luke 22:31-32
The following essay has been edited for size. A link to the original in Greek is in the title below. A special thanks to my good and faithful friend Jason and his blessed family in Athens, and especially 'le grand seigneur'. Αληθώς Ανέστη!
"Many times, people believe they understand what is happening around them, while in reality they only touch the shadows of things and miss reality itself. We live in such an era today.
Everyone expected that the next phase of a global confrontation would manifest itself with the familiar images of destruction, with explosions above our heads and frontal clashes that would fill the horizons with fire. The assessment turned out to be wrong. The new phase revealed itself to be much more complex, much more pervasive, much more quietly violent than we imagined. It is not announced with marches, it is announced by banks, markets and headquarters. It does not begin with general mobilization, it unfolds with energy sanctions, with disruptions in supply chains, with closed sea passages, with cyberattacks, with censorship, with psychological operations, with cultivated panic, with an everyday life that becomes more expensive, narrower, more suffocating every month.
People continue to believe, even now, that it is not a war, because they do not see missiles over their neighborhood, tanks in front of their door, military vehicles moving anxiously through the streets. But when bread becomes more expensive, fuel becomes gold, electricity takes the form of a luxury, income evaporates and insecurity becomes normal, then peace has already been seriously damaged. Then another war has already begun.
It is a war against societies. A war against the resilience of nations. A war against the soul of man.
The first great mistake of the era was that peace was identified with the absence of spectacular battles. This is a childish and at the same time tragic mistake. Peace means a life that does not bend under fear, economic exhaustion, spiritual confusion and political coercion. When entire societies are led step by step into insecurity, when peoples get used to accepting the unnatural as natural, when poverty is baptized as “transition”, when deprivation is presented as “resilience”, when obedience is described as “responsibility”, then we are faced with a new form of total war that is waged with costumes, screens, algorithms, loans and press releases.
People feel that something huge is approaching, while they have difficulty describing it in the old forms. They feel it as a weight in the atmosphere, as a constant tightening, as a global storm that has not yet fully erupted, yet has already darkened the sky.
The worst part is that most people have learned to see the phenomenon and miss the essence. They see oil prices rising, gasoline becoming hoarse again, energy putting pressure on households and businesses. What escapes them is that the energy shock goes far beyond a simple economic event. It is a political tool, a geopolitical weapon, a mechanism for rearranging societies.
When energy surges, it is not only the consumer who is affected. The entire social pyramid is reorganized. The small bends first, the medium is squeezed, the large endures or buys out its exhausted competitor at a bargain price. The same happens with states. The strong absorb part of the shock, the weak drown. This is how the so-called “natural selection” of markets works, which in reality constitutes a violent redistribution of power on the suffering of the people.
That is why the present crisis cannot be read only in terms of the stock market or diplomacy. It also needs to be read as a spiritual symptom of the times. Modern man, especially the Western man, has been trained to treat History as a matter of systems, strategies, interests and technology. He has distanced himself from any theological reading of the historical drama and has come to consider such an approach dangerous, outdated or unscientific. This is precisely where the drama of recent centuries lies. Societies have learned to describe mechanisms, but they have lost the ability to recognize the spiritual matrix of events.
Behind the geopolitical arrogance of the powerful there always stands a deep spiritual blindness. Behind every imperial hubris lurks the illusion that man can take the place of God. When an era believes it can redesign man, gender, family, nation, memory, language, religion, currency, the body, and ultimately life itself, then the crisis goes far beyond politics. Then we are faced with a spiritual rebellion.
This rebellion has become the very atmosphere of our time. It is the arrogance of postmodern man who rejects all obedience and demands total control. It is the worship of technology without morality, economy without homeland, politics without truth, information without shame, freedom without responsibility, science without humility. It is the man who demands that even his own downfall be recognized as a new humanism.
And in this atmosphere, when crises break out, the modern world wonders why everything seems increasingly out of control. And yet, a society that systematically removes God from the center of its life is itself preparing the disruption of all balance.
The saints of Orthodoxy spoke of wars as the fruit of apostasy, the arrogance of the powerful, the accumulating injustice, the sin that demands correction, the pedagogical permission of God when peoples and rulers persist in a course of hubris.
And yet, most people are still waiting for traditional war to realize that they are already living in a much more insidious war regime. For years, Western societies have been sustained by borrowing, by monetary expansion, by artificial abundance, by asset bubbles, by the illusion that consumption can continue indefinitely without moral and metaphysical cost. Now this illusion is coming head-on to the limits of reality.
The debt is gigantic, interest rates are pressing, energy is becoming more expensive, the productive base of many Western societies has weakened, social cohesion has eroded, people are tired. In such a landscape, a major energy shock or a prolonged geopolitical conflagration does not function as a simple crisis. It functions as a catalyst for stripping. It exposes the shabby edifice.
The bankruptcy of our time rarely appears first in government budgets. It appears in the refrigerator at home, in the gas station, in the electricity bill, in the lockout of a small business, in the anguish of a family that works nonstop and still can't make ends meet. It is the bankruptcy of the middle class, the bankruptcy of normal life, the bankruptcy of the very sense of security.
And then the most insidious stage begins. Those who manage the crisis or exploit it turn the disruption into a means of deeper control. They invoke the emergency to demand more powers, the threat to impose greater surveillance, the instability to install more suffocating technocratic centralism. Thus the war acquires an internal front. It becomes a war to reshape societies themselves.
The powers of our time are not content with simple governance. They seek worship. They want to decide who will live, who will buy, who will speak, who will be considered legitimate, who will be excluded. The modern technocratic world is moving dangerously in this direction. It wants to manage man as an object, to reprogram him, to shape consciousnesses, desires, fears and choices, to construct a man without memory, without roots, without God, without homeland, without resistance, without metaphysical stature, a man who is easy to use, digitally controllable, diminished.
Today's world war, this strange, modernized, multi-layered war that does not resemble the images of our cinematic reflexes, needs to be read as something much more than an international crisis. It is also a spiritual mirror. It shows what happened to man when he removed God from the center of his life and put money, power, technology and desire in His place. It shows what happened to states when they forgot justice and believed only in management. It shows what happened to societies when they got used to living with lies as long as they maintained a semblance of comfort.
The conclusion can be stated clearly. The world is entering a great conflict, and this conflict takes forms that are economic and military, technological and spiritual, energetic and metaphysical, external and internal together. Peoples will be hard pressed by uncertainty, uncertainty, decay and fear. Debt and prices can be transformed into weapons equivalent to missiles. But the deeper question is not limited to how long the world economy will endure. It is judged by how long the human soul will endure without truth, without repentance, without God.
That is precisely where our era is being tested, not only in the headquarters, in the naval passages, in the stock exchanges and in the undergrounds of the secret services, but also in the hearts of people. There it will be seen who worshiped the lie and who kept the spark of freedom alive within him. There it will be seen whether man will accept becoming a number or whether he will remember that he is a person. There it will be seen whether nations will finally bow down or whether through the test they will rediscover their lost center.
Because in the end, no matter how much the powerful rant, no matter how much empires may threaten, no matter how much the beasts of History rage, the final say does not belong to oil, debt, fear, or the merchants of war. The final say belongs to God. And that is what frightens those who have tried to deny Him the most.
Dimitris Sotiriou,
The invisible face of war, Prime News, March 24, 2026
