| — Many would like to see in the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church a model for a Local Church. To what extent are such views justified? — Of course there was much that was good, remarkable and holy at that time, but the whole Petrine structure of the Church was uncanonical, decadent, Protestant. This was the tragedy of the pre-Revolutionary Church. In my view, the Revolution became inevitable precisely because the Church had become a department of the State. It is not surprising that the Soviet authorities adored Peter I. It was only thanks to the untiring efforts of a great universal hierarch, Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky), that the Patriarchate was restored. I have a dream that the time will come when both parts of the Russian Church will together canonize Metropolitan Antony of Kiev. All the mistakes of both parts of the Russian Church in recent years have happened because we have not lived according to the admonitions of Metropolitan Antony. — What forces, both inside and outside the Church are impeding unity? — Apart from the well-known problems of mutual lack of knowledge, mutual misunderstandings and prejudices, there are also forces of this world which are preventing eucharistic communion. These forces exist in ROCOR and in the Moscow Patriarchate. Sometimes these are political forces – the spectres of the Cold War which refuse to recognize reality, either through a lack of trust or else through inertia. Sometimes these forces are those of Renovationism, the forces of Western liberalism, modernism and ecumenism, which have always set themselves against both parts of the Russian Church, both in Russia and, with a particular fury, outside Russia. To this day, Renovationism infects parts, or rather former parts, of the Russian Church in the emigration. — How could the two parts of the Russian Church mutually enrich one another? — I would like to answer by giving one concrete example, which cries out to heaven – the catastrophic pastoral situation in London. There are only two Russian churches for a population of between 150,00 and 250,000 Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians. My soul simply aches for them. But, it seems, there are just not the resources to deal with this. Together, both parts of the Russian Church could do something. Just recently a good priest from Russia, Fr Andrei Teterin, was serving there, but he was forced to return to Russia. That was a tragedy. They need to open another five Russian churches in London in order to feed and console these people. The churches could be stavropegic, directly under the Patriarch. |
| These rights and freedoms are inseparably related to the position and status of our sacred sites – monasteries, churches, cemeteries, and cultural monuments. Serbia has done everything – and will do so in the future – to protect, renovate, restore and preserve these sacred sites and, sacral and cultural heritage monuments. And, in this endeavor, Serbia has the undivided support of relevant international institutions, primarily UNESCO. The highest representatives of our Church are constantly and tirelessly advocating for them, as this is not an everyday political issue, but an essential historical reality and an identifying value of the Serbian people. We cannot be passive and keep silent, given the fact that a significant part of this church/spiritual and cultural heritage has already been destroyed before the eyes of the entire world, and that the remaining heritage is now threatened with the same destiny. Relative to this, we wonder and ask how they, who initiated their rebellion by burning the nuns’ sleeping quarters of the Pech Patriarchate (1981), will protect it and other Serbian sacred sites and cultural monuments in the future? We remind all that international legal order, established in the world following the Second World War, fully justifies the position of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the state of Serbia and the Serbian people regarding this painful issue. This also applies to public opinion in most countries in the world, and among them many of the largest countries, including some European countries, as well as EU member states, which do not recognize this illegal secession and unilaterally declared “independence”. Even the most relevant international institutions (the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) do not recognize it. Without the consent of Serbia and the UN Security Council, and without the consensus of all European countries (including as many as five EU members that do not recognize Kosovo’s independence), this situation cannot be changed aggressively despite all political pressures faced by both Serbia and some other countries that do not recognize an “independent” Kosovo. |
| This polarity was, in fact, nothing else than the opposition between the «old» and the «new» Adam in man. In terms of social ethics, it excluded clear-cut formulae and legal absolutes, and prevented the Church from being fully identified with an institution defined in terms of politics, or sociology; but, at times, it was also interpreted as a Platonic or Manichaean dualism, and it then meant total withdrawal from social responsibility. Occasionally this attitude led to a takeover by the state of the Church " " s mission, leaving the monks alone in their witness to the inevitable conflict and polarity between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar. 2. The Mission of the Church The Byzantine concept according to which the empire and the Church were allied in the leadership of a single universal Christian oikoumene implied their cooperation in the field of mission. The designation of «equal-to-the-Apostles» (isapostolos) was applied to Constantine the Great precisely because of his contribution to the conversion of the oikoumene to Christ. The emperors of Constantinople, his successors, were normally buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles. Their missionary responsibility was stressed in court ceremonial. The emperor was expected to propagate the Christian faith and to maintain Christian ethics and behavior, and to achieve these goals through both legislation and support given to the Church« " s missionary and charitable activities. Outside the imperial borders, the Church-state alliance frequently led to a de facto identification, in the eyes of the non-Christians, of the political interests of the empire with the fate of Orthodox Christianity. Non-Christian rulers of Persia and Arab caliphs often persecuted Christians, not only out of religious fanaticism, but also because they suspected them of being the emperor» " s allies. The suspicion was actually frequently justified, especially during the lengthy holy war between Islam and Christianity, which made spiritual contacts, mutual understanding, and meaningful dialogue virtually impossible. For this reason, except in a very few cases, Byzantine Christianity was never able to make any missionary inroads among the Islamic invaders coming from the East. 445 |
| The economic crisis couldn’t feed the frenzy public who were overwhelmed by the expensive brands and labels. Groups of English teenagers managed in what Adolf Hitler failed to accomplish; the mighty city of London was set into fire for the first time since World War II by hundreds of youth who attacked shopping centres to steal DVD players and expensive pairs of trainers. Although those rioters were threatened by imprisonment for years, the riots broke out all over the Britain and deaths were reported. Meanwhile, thousands of Americans were queuing in open airs, under snow, for days waiting the first shopping stores in New York to start selling iPad devices. The absence of Jesus in his own birth celebration is coined in the new expression of Xmas in which the name “Christ” was substituted by the depersonalizing symbol of any unknown “x.” The necessity for restoring the Christmas spirit is not stemming from a mere religious concern, but also from the urgent calls to rescue the world from being swallowed up into a severe economic crisis due to the lavish expenditure of individuals today. A Different set of priorities Few days ago, more than 35 Nigerian Christians were killed and nearly 52 injured after the radical Islamist group Boko Haram attacked a Roman Catholic church in Lagos. Christians in Nigeria fear more attacks while they are approaching New Year Eve. Meanwhile, Egyptian Christians who suffered in 2011 more than any other Christian community are approaching Christmas with an account of tens of victims, hundreds of injuries and bombed churches. The fear from the Islamists is justifiably increasing after the latter groups achieved a striking victory of the parliamentary elections and the blatant support they receive from the current regime in Egypt. Several Churches in Egypt decided to give up the forms of celebration this Christmas and declared the mourning state. The priorities of Middle East Christians are how to be able to protect their lives and to manage under the severe economic and social problems. In such a context, the centricity of Jesus in the heart of Christmas is glorified since it is Him who experienced the same conditions. Jesus was born among a marginalized Jewish community that suffered the social and financial burdens set by the Roman prefect. The church precisely celebrates the launch of the kingdom of God which Jesus inaugurated by his birth in the neglected Bethlehem, among the marginalized and the poor. One of the interesting notices that the famous scholar Tom Wright embarks upon is the people’s often omission of the second part of Mary’s famous prayer in Luke 1:48 in Luke which says: He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. (Luke 1:51-53) |
| Let me now conclude by summarizing the main points which I have tried to make and by placing what I have said in the light of the actual situation of Orthodoxy in our time. I have been discussing Christology, Pneumatology and ecclesial institutions in Orthodox theology – not in Orthodox practice. What I have said however, is not just theory; it derives from historical experience, even if this historical experience tends to be a somewhat remote memory from the past. My points have been the following: 1. Orthodox theology has not yet worked out the proper synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology. Without this synthesis it is impossible to understand the Orthodox tradition itself or to be of any real help in the ecumenical discussion of our time. 2. The important thing about this synthesis is that Pneumatology must be made constitutive of Christology and ecclesiology, i.e. condition the very being of Christ and the Church, and that this can happen only if two particular ingredients of Pneumatology are introduced into the ontology of Christ and the Church. These ingredients are: eschatology and communion. 3. If the Church is constituted through these two aspects of Pneumatology, all pyramidal notions disappear in ecclesiology: the “one” and the “many” co-exist as two aspects of the same being. On the universal level this means that the local Churches constitute one Church through a ministry or an institution which composes simultaneously a primus and a synod of which he is a primus. On the local level, this means that the head of the local Church, the bishop, is conditioned by the existence of his community and the rest of the ministries, particularly the presbyterium. There is no ministry which does not need the other ministries; no ministry possesses the fullness, the plentitude of grace and power without a relationship with the other ministries. Equally, a pneumatological conditioning of the being of the Church is important for the opening-up of ecclesial institutions to their eschatological perspective. Too much historicity is often attached to the ecclesial institutions. Orthodoxy often suffers from meta-historicism; the West usually suffers from a historization of its ecclesial institutions. The liturgical ethos of Orthodoxy will probably never make it possible for her to be fully involved in history, although it has not prevented such eruptions of liberation movements as those of the Greek war of independence in the last century. But the justification of any permanent ecclesial institution certainly needs an eschatological perspective; history is not enough. |
| The high moral bar set by Christ demanded a renunciation of the usual way of life, of the favourite pleasures and entertainments. But of paramount importance was the fact that Christianity, which had expressly forbidden robbery and killing and had unconditionally condemned all forms of armed violence, posed a threat to the activities of the Russian ‘military aristocracy,’ that is, to their military campaigns. Byzantium, the closest and wealthiest neighbour of Rus, was transformed from being an attractive place to loot to becoming a powerful ally sharing the same faith, and there could be no moral justification for war with her. Regarding the obvious advantages of the new religion as the foundation of statehood, then Latin Christianity was in no way any worse, and perhaps even better, in asserting for the state an ideology of centralization and social order, while Islam and Judaism established even more secure horizontal social connections predicated on the idea of fraternal mutual aid and the unity of faith communities. No, it was not political or practical goals that motivated Prince Vladimir when he chose the Eastern Christian model of civilization. What attracted him in Orthodox Christianity were the loftier and perhaps not totally comprehensible to the modern mind categories of spiritual heroism, elevated beauty, truth and love. It was not ‘fasting in as far as is possible’ that attracted the Russian prince but austere asceticism. Not formal rituals but an unearthly beauty and the harmony of the Divine Liturgy. Not economic interests but sacrificial love of neighbour. Not political pragmatism but the seeking out of the kingdom of heaven for life everlasting in God. Was the choice made 1032 years ago the right choice? History has provided us with the answer to this question. The loose conglomeration of tribes gathered together by the first Riurikids by the time of Vladimir’s sons had already been transformed into a powerful state that impressed its European neighbours with its wealth. |
| It was certainly Origen who had put into his mind the juxtaposition of the ideas of the Pax Romana being the providentially favorable environment for the rapid internationalization of the Gospel. Origen himself, however, was pacifist in his attitudes to war and world powers, and was sternly against the notion of the Church advocating its transmission and spread by force of arms. 373 In his wider exegesis, Eusebius shows himself consistently to be a follower of his teacher’s lead and the Old Testament paradigms of the “downfall of the wicked” are what are generally at play in both Origen and Eusebius when they highlight biblical examples of vindication, or military collapse. Several scholars misinterpret Eusebius radically, therefore, when they read his laudation of Constantine as some kind of proleptic justification of the Church as an asserter of rightful violence. His Panegyric on Constantine should not be given such theoretical weight, just as a collection of wedding congratulatory speeches today would hardly be perused for a cutting edge analysis of the times. In applying biblical tropes and looking for fulfillments, Eusebius (certainly in the wider panoply if all his work is taken together not simply his court laudations) is looking to the past, not to the future; and is intent only on celebrating what for most in his generation must have truly seemed miraculous – that their oppressors had fallen, and that they themselves were now free from the fear of torture and death. Origen and Eusebius may have set a tone of later interpretation that could readily grow into a vision of the Church as the inheritor of the biblical promises about the Davidic kingdom (that the boundaries of Byzantine Christian power were concomitant with the Kingdom of God on earth, and thus that all those who lay outside those boundaries were the enemies of God), but there were still innumerable dissidents even in the long-lasting Byzantine Christian politeia (especially the monks) who consistently refused to relax the apocalyptic dimension of their theology, and who resisted the notion that the Church and the Byzantine borders were one and the same thing. 374 |
| Better Dead Than Red However, it was not at home but abroad that the heaviest artillery of the population control onslaught was directed. During the Cold War, anything from the Apollo program to public-education funding could be sold to the federal government if it could be justified as part of the global struggle against communism. Accordingly, ideologues at some of the highest levels of power and influence formulated a party line that the population of the world’s poor nations needed to be drastically cut in order to reduce the potential recruitment pool available to the communist cause. President Lyndon Johnson was provided a fraudulent study by a RAND Corporation economist that used cooked calculations to “prove” that Third World children actually had negative economic value. Thus, by allowing excessive numbers of children to be born, Asian, African, and Latin American governments were deepening the poverty of their populations, while multiplying the masses of angry proletarians ready to be led against America by the organizers of the coming World Revolution. President Johnson bought the claptrap, including the phony math. Two months later, he declared to the United Nations that “five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” With the Johnson administration now backing population control, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1966, including a provision earmarking funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for population control programs to be implemented abroad. The legislation further directed that all U.S. economic aid to foreign nations be made contingent upon their governments’ willingness to cooperate with State Department desires for the establishment of such initiatives within their own borders. In other words, for those Third World rulers willing to help sterilize their poorer subjects, there would be carrots. For the uncooperative types, there would be the stick. Given the nature of most Third World governments, such elegant simplicity of approach practically guaranteed success. The population control establishment was delighted. |
| PTSD is an awful evil. The quotes above come from the Road to Emmaus: A Journal of Orthodox Faith and Culture . It speaks to a major difference between the East and the West. The West believes that certain wars are justifiable. The East does not believe that, but simply believes that no war is good. All wars are evil, but sometimes wars are the lesser of the possible evils present in a particular historical situation. “… war inevitably damages the soul,” is the Orthodox belief. Again, this does not mean that war may not be the least of many evils, but it does mean that all wars incur damaged people. Not all damaged people end up expressing what is now called PTSD. But almost all who participate in war experience some type of moral trauma. It is crucial to understand that the more that the American psychological establishment probes into PTSD, the more that we are realizing the vastly negative effects of war. War breeds trauma. Trauma breeds PTSD in some people. But war also breeds some type of moral injury on many more people than those who express an outward form of PTSD. Does this mean that we should fight no wars? Well, uhm, yes, that is exactly what it means. However, question two, does this mean that no war can be fought? At this point, the answer is not so simple. Remember what I commented about the lesser of various evils. As odd as it seems to say it, war sometimes produces fewer evils than not-war. At the same time, those who wage war need to recognize that those who participate in war will emerge damaged, to one degree or another. Any country that simply treats its returning veterans as those who simply, and only, need to be cheered is a country that will be surprised at the high percentage of damaged expressing veterans found within its population. So, we have to tread a fine line. On the one hand, we do not wish to approve war. On a second hand, we wish to say that the waging of some wars is a lesser evil than no war. On the third hand, we need to recognize that any war leads to several degrees of trauma within the fighting population. On the fourth hand, we need to understand that any country involved in a war will need to have some type of follow-up program available to those who return from the war that was fought, so that the country’s responsibility to care for its own go unfulfilled. |
| Father John McGuckin observes that St. Basil refers to St. Athanasius as the father who wrote, in his “Letter to Amun,” that killing the enemy was legitimate in wartime. McGuckin argues, however, that St. Athanasius was advising Amun on the question of the sinfulness of nocturnal emissions. “In fact the original letter had nothing whatsoever to do with war… The military image is entirely incidental, and Athanasius in context merely uses it to illustrate his chief point in the letter,” which is to show that the moral significance of actions may not be discerned without reference to the contexts in which they occurred. Against any simplistic readings of the letter as a blanket justification of killing in war, St. Basil places the issue in a specific context. As McGuckin writes on St. Basil in “War and Repentance,” “what he speaks about is the canonical regulation of war in which a Christian can engage and find canonical forgiveness for a canonically prohibited act…” Killing in war had been forbidden completely in earlier canons, such as Canon 14 of Hippolytus in the fourth century, which states: A Christian is not to become a soldier. A Christian must not become a soldier, unless he is compelled by a chief bearing the sword. He is not to burden himself with the sin of blood. But if he has shed blood, he is not to partake of the mysteries, unless he is purified by a punishment, tears, and wailing. He is not to come forward deceitfully but in the fear of God. St. Basil distinguishes between outright murder and killing “for the defense of Christian borders from the ravages of pagan marauders.” By limiting fighting to such circumstances, he sought to “restrict the bloodshed to a necessary minimum.” In contrast to the lifelong exclusion from the sacraments imposed on murderers, St. Basil recommends three years of exclusion from the chalice, thus providing a public sign that the Gospel standard is violated by war. The Christian soldier who has killed in war is to “undergo the cathartic experience of temporary return to the lifestyle of penance… Basil’s restriction of the time of penance to three years, seemingly harsh to us moderns, was actually a commonly recognized sign of merciful leniency in the ancient rule book of the early Church.” (It is not uncommon to meet veterans who are tormented for the rest of their lives by the horrors of war. I recall the father of a childhood friend who suffered from nightmares thirty years after the conclusion of his military service during World War II. Those who are trained to kill sometimes have difficulty returning to the mores of civilian life, not to mention the life of theosis .) |
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