Category Archives: Extremism

The Universal Message of the Russian Orthodox Church

Introduction: The Fringes

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of religious freedom, tens and tens of millions of former Soviet citizens were baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church during the 1990s and after. The baptisms were rushed because we did not at that time know how long we would have. We believed that atheism might come back and the final persecution of the Church would begin. People were baptized, but instruction generally started only afterwards. With just a few thousand priests and open churches, we had to cope with a flood of tens of millions who clamoured for baptism. As a result of lack of instruction, some small groups of newly-baptized on the fringes fell into different extremes, both in fact as secular as each other. The first forgot that, though we are in the world, we are not of the world; the second forgot that, though we are not of the world, we are in the world.

Nationalism

Firstly, there were a few who, horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union, became what the Russia media call ‘Orthodox Stalinists’. In other words, for reasons of psychological insecurity and through spiritual impurity, they tried to bring the world into the Church with themselves. In their case, the world meant Soviet nationalism. For example, together with the real saints, they began to make out that such individuals as Ivan IV and Stalin were also saints.

True, Ivan IV, in the West incorrectly called ‘the Terrible’ (the translation ‘the Formidable’ would be correct), was not at all as bad as he is made out by Russian Westernizers like Kurbsky, Karamzin or the oligarchs of today, let alone by Western Westernizers. Certainly, Ivan was more innocuous than his Western contemporaries, for example, in England Henry VIII, who murdered 72.000 people and destroyed the monasteries. But Ivan IV a saint? No, he was not, whereas his contemporary, the martyred Metropolitan Philip of Moscow, is a saint. As for Stalin, it is true that the post-Nazi invasion Stalin was more patriotic than the pre-1941 mass murderer Stalin, but I know no-one who could possibly think much good of a dictator whose unspeakable crimes involved slaughtering millions, not least martyring millions of Orthodox.

The fact is that such ‘Orthodox Stalinists’ are not Orthodox. They are simply nationalists and every nationalist is an idolator, a worshipper of this world. The last thing we want in the Russian Orthodox Church is narrow, balkanized nationalism, the flag-waving that, sadly, we can daily see in other, far smaller, Local Orthodox Churches and Patriarchates, where sometimes the cult of a single nationality seems to have replaced the worship of Christ. After all, it was Greek Orthodox nationalism, that is, the loss of a multinational, Imperial vision, that led to the fall of Constantinople.

Disincarnationism

Among the newly-baptized masses of the 1990s, there also appeared a small group, mainly of Western-minded intellectuals, who fell under the influence of Protestantism – which seemed to be the remedy for ‘Orthodox Stalinism’. In the ‘free market’ of Western religion, private pietism, ‘heavenly citizenship’ reigned. This was why His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II called the extreme elements here ‘neo-renovationists’. For they were merely imitating the old Protestant renovationism from before the Revolution. This had died out inside Russia by the 1930s, but continues to poison Church life abroad even today, though the influence of the so-called ‘Paris School’, which also infected North America.

In the 1990s American Protestant ‘missionaries’, encouraged by the CIA for ideological reasons, tried to buy the souls of Russians with their dollar bills. They failed; the sincere missionaries converted to Orthodoxy; the majority returned to the USA, poorer but no wiser. However, they did manage to influence a few in the generation of newly-baptized Orthodox. Thus, you can meet Russian Orthodox who have uncritically adopted Protestant Creationism and its obsessions with the Six Days of Creation, the age of the Universe, the Flood, Noah’s Ark etc. Such individuals often seem to know nothing of the New Testament and the Church that was founded therein and Her life over the last nearly 2,000 years, but, like every Protestant, know every detail of the Old Testament. They will even, with only a literalist, almost pharisaical understanding, quote Church canons at you, just as real Protestants quote chapter and verse at you.

Orthodoxy with them is often reduced to narrow-minded bigotry and moralizing puritanism – just as in Protestantism. Rationalist understanding of everything, as in its extreme form of Kochetkovism, is the only thing that counts. Worse still, just as Protestants consider religion as a mere piece of disincarnate ‘God-slot’, personal pietism or ‘spirituality’, without any political, economic and social implications and ramifications, such fringe Orthodox have no concept of the Incarnation. In other words, such intellectuals do not understand that Orthodoxy is about Christianizing ‘ourselves, one another and all our lives’, not just a private, theoretical part of ourselves.

Conclusion: The Mainstream

Such fringe groups do not represent the Church. Opposed to both nationalism and disincarnationism, the mainstream of the Russian Orthodox Church is neither national nor anti-national, it is above both these narrow views, above both national bigotry and personal pettiness. The Church is Imperial, both Global and Local. It is the task of us Russian Orthodox to spread the spiritual enlightenment of Christ worldwide, incarnating it through example into lives, not just in the vast multinational Russian Federation, but from the Philippines to Cambodia, from Argentina to Scotland, from New Zealand to China, from Canada to Italy, overcoming narrow nationalism and petty pietism alike. Having come through the Golgotha of atheism and risen from the dead, we Russian Orthodox give this universal message to the world’s increasingly atheistic States, politics, economics and societies: Follow the Church of the Risen Christ.

The Rejection of the Highway of the Cross and the Resurrection Leads to the Byways

Introduction

In His earthly life Christ suffered not only from the cowardly Paganism of the Romans (and Hellenes), but also from the errors of two Jewish sects. These were the deceitful Pharisees, who rejected the possibility of repentance, that is, they rejected the Cross, and the treacherous Saducees, who rejected the Resurrection. Under different names these three errors, Paganism, Saduceeism and Phariseeism, which like all errors separate us from Christ, are still with us today. Human nature has not changed and it is still besieged by pride of mind, which is the origin of all errors.

Time and again we can notice how we make mistakes by pride of mind, lack of humility in our minds. The only guarantee that we are near to the God of Love, to Christ and therefore His Body, the Church, is when we are humble-minded. Pride of mind always results in spiritual catastrophe, separation from Christ and so the inevitable self-imposed obligation to think according to the ways of the world and so follow them. And prince of this world is the cunning devil, who is called Satan, the slanderer. Let us take three examples, one general and two specific to contemporary Russian Orthodox life.

Modern Paganism

Many assert that they cannot believe in a God of Love, Who wants suffering, wars, earthquakes, cancer etc. As a Russian Orthodox priest, I agree with them. For I believe in the God of Love, Who does not want suffering, which is why He became man and was crucified by those who do want suffering. However, unlike these modern pagans, or secularists, whose beliefs are entirely patterned by this world, I believe in the God of Love, Who because He is Love allows freedom of choice. It is not from choice, but from wrong choices that all human suffering stems. It is Satan’s greatest slander that God is responsible for suffering. In reality, it is pride of mind to blame God for suffering and Satan is the source of all pride. It is the refusal to recognize the Fall and so human sin and the sin of our own minds that is to blame for suffering.

Those who reject the God of Love because suffering exists are those who do not believe in the reality of sin, the human capacity for evil. They blame God for everything. They claim personal sinlessness and then make excuses to disguise their actual laziness by asserting that they cannot believe in a God Who allows suffering. For belief in God would entail responsibility, action for self-improvement and love of our fellow human-beings. And they are too lazy for that. So they reject God. This is why their atheism has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions in the 19th and 20th centuries alone, slaughtered by Nazism, Communism and in the abortion holocaust. The rejection of the God of Love because of the Satanic illusion that God creates suffering creates yet more suffering. This Paganism, today known as Secularism, is the rejection of Jerusalem, of both the Cross and the Resurrection.

Modern Phariseeism

I know a very elderly Russian. He is honest, sincere and a model of integrity. But he belongs to a tiny sect. Why? Because he cannot accept the Russian Orthodox Church as She is, given that the pre-Revolutionary Russian State has not been restored. Only when everything associated with Soviet Communism is removed from Russia will he accept the Russian Church, for he confuses Church and State. He wants perfect restoration of the State now. He does not have the patience to wait for the gradual restoration of an Orthodox Christian State and Empire, for which we are all ardently working, and, worse still, he does not understand that we do not want a restoration of what existed before. We want a restoration to something better than there was before, not to those decadent aristocrats (including most Romanovs who were, to the despair of Tsar Nicholas, vain wastrels) and bishop-apostates who welcomed the Revolution and then later went on to become renovationists.

If what existed before were restored, then there would simply be another Revolution. This elderly man does not want to be with the Russian Church today. Why? Because not all Her members are as demanding as he is. And yet the very Church that he rejects is not only the Church of a great many nominal Orthodox, She is also the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors. Here there is pride of mind. He wants a Church that is not made up of sinners who want to become saints, of penitents who are following the Cross, as the Church always has been made up of, but a Church of the pure, of ready-made saints. Here we see the pride of perfectionist idealism. He refuses to recognize that the direction we are going in is right, even though we have to allow for the weaknesses of the people we meet on the way, whose repentance is in progress. Sadly, this is the pride of Phariseeism, which joins up with the pride of Saduceeism, for extremes always meet through their mutual rejection of Christ.

Modern Saduceeism

If we come now to an example of pride of mind, specific in both time and place, we can see the same error in the Paris School of Philosophy (or ‘Theology’ as they self-flatteringly call it). Here a group of Russian revolutionary aristocrats and intellectuals, who rejected their oath of allegiance to the Lord’s Anointed in Russia, and overthrew the legitimate government in order to create a Protestant-type secular State in which they would have all the power. Failures, they were then exiled to Paris by the Bolsheviks and there they applied their liberal, modernist, pro-Protestant politics to Church life. The result was a liberal, modernist, pro-Protestant ‘theology’, that is, the basically secularist philosophy of the Paris School, of which the chief representative was the fantasist and heretic Fr Sergius Bulgakov, a Marxist who never cleansed himself from his Marxism, who continued to think that the only resurrection was a this-worldly resurrection, political, economic and social.

Unlike their renovationist cousins in Russia who, despite the support of the Bolshevik atheists, died out because the people would not follow their fantasies, the Paris renovationists did not die out. By cutting themselves off from the people and abandoning the episcopal and liturgical disciplines of the Russian Church, the Paris renovationists were able to survive and develop their peculiar sectarian philosophy. They and their descendants even infected individuals in the then Soviet-run Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe (which is how it became so impoverished at that time), across the ocean and elsewhere and still practise their errors today. Beneath a mask of outward piety, they show themselves to be pro-Revolutionary and anti-Orthodox, anti-the People and anti-Russian. Little wonder that Western secularists admire them, for, like them, they too reject the possibility of the Resurrection and the importance of the preparation for it here and now. Sadly, their pride of mind is stronger than their nostalgia for inherited childhood memories of piety, which they have since deformed and distorted. This is the pride of Saduceeism.

Conclusion

Modern Secularism, like Paganism of old, rejects the Cross and the Resurrection. However, there are those who, though outwardly confessing Christ, in some way reject the Cross or the Resurrection through their pride of mind. The lack of humble-mindedness always detaches us from the Church and so from Christ and so from Love. Every heresy and every sect, every ‘ism’, from Gnosticism to Roman Catholicism, from Protestantism to Bulgakovism, is always based on human pride. It is visible in Syria today, where the Pharisaic Islamists reject the Cross and the Saducean Zionist West rejects the Resurrection. And, as usual, these two extremes meet and support one another in their hatred for Christ.

Human pride means the rejection of Christ, whatever the outward piety it may be disguised in. Modern Secularism, like Roman Paganism which it imitates, rejects the Jerusalem of the Cross and the Resurrection on account of its pride. Modern Sectarianism, like the Phariseeism of old, rejects the Cross and so crucifies Christ in His Body, the Church, on account of its pride. Modern Renovationism, like the Saduceeism of old, rejects the Resurrection, conforming itself to this world, so denying the power of the Church to prepare us for the life to come on account of its pride. Humility of mind, obedience to the Church of the Cross and the Resurrection, is the only highway, all other ways are byways, where we are no longer in communion with Christ and the Jerusalem on high.