True Eastern Orthodoxy
Big State & Status Quo ?
The Times (UK)
January 16, 1998, Friday
HEADLINE: Russia and the ghost of Rasputin
BYLINE: John Lloyd
John Lloyd asks if Orthodoxy can cure the moral malaise
Russia is reborn, but lacks a moral nervous system. The country wallows towards the millennium, a rough - and vast - beast, in search of a national idea with which both its people and the rest of the world can feel at ease.
The Russian Orthodox Church must be part of this. The question is how? And, more ominously, does it have the strength, and the standing? Earlier this week, I met, among others, Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk. He is the Church's chief ideologist, its main political fixer and is widely seen as the most powerful figure in the hierarchy, the eminence behind the
Patriarch Aleksi II whom, at present, he seems best placed to succeed. Kyrill would be the first post-Communist Patriarch.
The subject of our conversation was a law, just passed, on freedom of conscience. Keenly promoted by the Church, it has attracted protests from the West
since it is seen as repressive of rival, mainly Christian, groups. The matter is serious; the Vatican claims that it may mean restrictions on Roman Catholic churches, the Archbishop of Canterbury has complained, and the US Congress - led by members whose religious beliefs are proclaimed as more important than their political positions - has voted to cut off aid if the law is not amended. My companions, who included three of the most devout of these congressmen, put these points to Kyrill, who was unabashed. Vigorous and genial, with a mellifluous voice shaping crystal-clear Russian, he told his visitors, graciously and at length, to mind their own business.
Like the Christ whom he believes is risen, he liked to speak in little parables. One concerned a sick man confined to bed, who is told to get up by a fit, strong visitor whom he has invited to his sick bed. The sick man, agreeing, asks for help; the fit man refuses and instead challenges the invalid to a boxing match. This, said Kyrill, was Orthodoxy's situation. It was the sick man, asking for assistance from brother churches. Instead, it was told it had to compete for souls on its own ground. But now it was fit again. It neither needed, nor wanted, help.
Two differing mindsets stared at each other across Kyrill's vast conference room. The visitors saw an obscurantist priest protecting his territory. The Metropolitan saw men who, at best, did not understand the traditions and spiritual integrity of Russia.
The more he talked, the more one was aware of any simplicity of response slipping away. The law is by no means uniformly illiberal; indeed, it gives an honoured place to confessions - Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim - which had long existed in the old Russian Empire. Its most alarming provision is
the stipulation that all religious groups seeking a legal status must prove that they had existed for 15
years; this could cut out the evangelical groups that have flooded in since the collapse of communism, many of them from America.
Much will depend on how these provisions are administered; they could, like much Russian law, be either draconian or meaningless. But the issue matters for three reasons.
First, if the law is applied rigorously, it may confirm Orthodoxy's obvious tendency to become a de facto (though not de jure ) state church. The leaders of the Church, KGB-approved under communism and clinging to their residences, cars and servants, have a common interest with the Yeltsin administration in propping each other up without asking difficult questions.
The priests bless every new office block, shopping arcade and even the latest MiG fighter; the politicians give the Church concessions that allow it to fund itself by importing commodities tax-free - mainly alcohol and cigarettes - and to live richly off the proceeds of their sales. It is a useful, seemingly inevitable and corrupting embrace.
Second, this relationship coexists with an emphasis on a Slavic spirituality - a tradi tion that emphasises submission to God
and the State. It is a turning away from the slender tradition of "democratic priesthood", which is kept alive - after the unsolved murder of its charismatic leader Father Aleksandr Men in 1990 - by such priests as Father Aleksandr Borisov. Once again, there is no black and white; the Metropolitan has no history of bigotry (unlike the late Metropolitan Ioann of St Petersburg, a virulent anti-Semite), but democratic priests believe they stand on narrowing ground.
Finally, if Orthodoxy is to give Russia a moral example, it appears to be choosing the wrong one of its traditions.
To again bow its head in uncritical collaboration with the ruling power is to traduce its own
awful, brave martyrdom at the hands of Lenin and Stalin and their successors. If we in Britain lack a spiritual content for the
"Millennium Dome" - [the " Millennium Dome"
is a state-sponsored construction project to innaugurate the new millennium]
-, imagine the turmoil in the minds of Russians who see a grasping and indifferent State shored up by a complaisant Church.
To what system of values does Russia now turn? Here was a nation whose most glorious modern cultural expression - its 19th-century literature - was essentially concerned with the issue of how fallen man might live. Communism could not destroy these texts in the same way as it tore down churches, or turned monasteries into borstals for orphaned, feral children. But it may have so weakened the Church and the laity that their faith in each other cannot be rekindled, and the country must lurch on without a counterweight to the cynicism that is its main public expression.
John Lloyd is associate editor of the New Statesman.
Please
Note: We do try to be accurate. If you see anything which you believe
Is not
correct on our website, please do bring it to our attention.
Thank you