Introduction: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Model of Church Administration
What exactly happens when the Church becomes part of the State? This has happened many times in Western history and shaped that history. There is not only the case of the Church-State, known as Roman Catholicism, whose head started wars, commanded armies and ordered mass campaigns of inquisition, repression and torture. There have also been the cases in Protestant North-Western Europe and wherever that model has been imitated. This is the State-Church, where Churches hand themselves over to State control.
Thus, the Protestants founded National (and nationalist, ‘flag-driven’) Churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Finland etc. In the first and well-known case, the new Church was founded by a Welsh genocidal tyrant and wife-murderer, who stole huge numbers of monastic houses and their lands and handed out their immense riches to his cronies. As for the national riches he seized for himself, he wasted them on pointless wars against France, which he lost.
The Adoption of the Model by the Russian State
This Protestant model was imitated by Tsar Peter I in Russia. Between 1682 and 1725 he forced the Russian Church into the same Lutheran mould, abolishing the Patriarchate in 1700, appointing Lutheran-educated Ukrainian bishops, and an ‘Oberprokuror’ to rule over the episcopate, effectively creating a Ministry of Religion. Some of the ‘Oberprokurors’ were not Orthodox Christians, indeed, at least one was an atheist and worked to destroy the Church. This control, resisted by Tsar Nicholas who wanted to abolish it, was copied by the atheist Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks controlled the Church in a similar reformist (in fact ‘deformist’), way, appointing a Secret Police Commissar to control the bishops, working to destroy the Church, murdering hundreds of thousands of clergy and people and literally dynamiting churches or confiscating them for secular uses. It was in this way that over some 300 years since Peter I, a special ‘religiosity’ appeared among nominal Russian Orthodox, which has lasted to this day. What are the three characteristics of this particular form of religiosity?
- Nationalisation
A State takeover of a Church means confusing Caesar’s and God’s, despite Christ’s words in the Gospel which command us to separate them and not to confuse them. Since the Church does not by nature belong to the State, therefore when such a takeover occurs, it means that the Church unnaturally begins to resemble the State. This means the adoption of State attributes – a persecuting, nationalistic, militaristic and bureaucratic mentality. In this way, the Church begins to resemble the State, rather like Roman Catholicism.
Nationalism means an emphasis on a narrow, exclusive, racial identity and language. In the Russian context, this means Russification and the loss of loyalty of other nationalities to the once multinational Russian Church. Militarism means an emphasis on a literal uniformity, obedience and rigidity, which cancels freedom of thought, and also integration with the armed forces. Bureaucratisation means an emphasis on protocols, paperwork and administration against the sacramental and spiritual view of the world.
- Clericalisation
A State takeover of a Church means that the clergy become agents of the State, that is, State employees, who develop the careerist mentality of civil servants and their ranks of promotion, awards and pensions. This in turn means that the people are alienated from the clergy, who become a separate caste ‘behind the iconostasis’ and the people begin to consider that the clergy are ‘the Church’. This creates a passive, disengaged and irresponsible mentality among the people – ‘it is not for us to do this, let ‘the Church’, i.e. the clergy, do it for us’.
This passive attitude of non-participation means that professional choirs sing in churches and services increasingly become abstract concerts and spectacles. Even prayer is delegated to the clergy, as people stop praying for themselves and ask the clergy to pray for them, an attitude that can be called ‘pious consumerism’. This view of the clergy as State bureaucrats, civil servants, means that the people begin to look at the clergy as unable to resolve their real problems and so they turn to elders, ‘startsy’, who in turn are often charlatans.
- Ritualisation
This mentality leads inevitably to ritualisation, the understanding of worship as ‘ustav’ or rubrics, a series of outward rites, in which participation is passive, but which just have to be tolerated. Thus, communion becomes the privilege of the clergy who may control access to laypeople’s communion by weaponising confession. As a result, communion may take place perfunctorily only once a year (the obligation for all civil servants until 1917) and sacraments are replaced by semi-private services, which have nothing to do with the liturgical cycles.
These made-up services, contractions of historic ones, include molebens, panikhidas and akathists. The latter of these are popular because they are comprehensible, since they have been composed recently in a language closer to Russian than the less accessible Church Slavonic, which is seen as the private language of the clergy (‘the Church’). The primacy of private rites means weak parish life, little sense of community, churches are patterned by outward formalities. In turn, non-churchgoers then revert to superstition as their belief.
A Nominal Church and Real Church Life
Reading the above, some may be in despair. However, we have made it clear that all these trends are the norm for nominal Russian Orthodox. Practising Russian Orthodox resist these outward trends and are critical of them. We follow the lives of the saints, who emphasise prayer and the ascetic, inward struggle. The above three trends are not those of St Seraphim of Sarov and St John of Kronstadt, even less are they those of the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Imperial Martyrs, St Tikhon and St Matrona. They are ours.
Firstly, Orthodox oppose Nationalism through cultivating the sense of the catholicity of the Church, meaning cultivating good relations with the other Local Churches, which work in other countries, where the Russian State has no control. Secondly, Orthodox oppose Clericalism through developing the solidarity between clergy and people, which is what Orthodoxy is, and this means the clergy no longer living as State functionaries. And finally Orthodox oppose Ritualism through inner life, the life of the spirit, as in real monasteries.
Conclusion: The Last Tsar and the Coming Restoration
The last Tsar opposed all three deformations of Church life, Nationalism, Clericalism and Ritualism. Thus, his intention, not fully implemented, was to open a Russian Orthodox church in every capital of Western Europe. This opposed Nationalism. As for Clericalism, he was always shocked by the spiritual emptiness of ‘educated’ bishops and priests and their careerist rivalries, for example that of Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. To them he opposed St Seraphim of Sarov, whom he had had canonised, and the Martyr Gregory.
Tsar Nicholas II also ardently opposed Ritualism and wanted to restore the architecture, iconography and Church music from before Peter I, as can be seen in his design of the Tsarskoe Selo Cathedral. Already in 1905 he had proposed the restoration of the Patriarchate. Careerist bishops, all wanting to be Patriarch, opposed him and the Tsar understood that they were not ready for restoration. Indeed, after his overthrow in 1917, this became very clear. Soon another Tsar will come and carry out the unfinished restoration.