In society

The game with the sacred

April 25, 2013 Boris Kolymagin

The church fills the ideological vacuum. This statement, beaten in different ways, has long become a common place of politicians. So Ilya Yashin recently began his video message from him, at the same time opposing the strict anticlerric rhetoric. Like, not everything is so hopeless inside the church fence. But few people focus on the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church also fills the cultural vacuum. Yes, yes, despite fierce battles with actual art and barbaric sometimes attitude to antiquity monuments, conflicts with museum workers and scene workers.

Recently, Vladimir Putin announced the year of culture in 2014 and signed a corresponding decree . Cultures are really getting less and less every day. Modern games and simulacra are not very contributing to, as used to say, the des of the “wild stone” of the human heart, building an axiological vertical. And the year of culture, of course, will not change anything, unless it will please the hearts of officials of the relevant departments.

But what really exists and does not disappear is the Christian cultural code.

Protodiacon Andrei Kuraev, although he is lying with a scandalist, sometimes gets to the point. Of course, his remark that the Boston terrorist attack of the Tsarnaev brothers is connected with Islamic identity , sounds unspoken. He could probably have expressed himself somehow more accurately, without inciting unnecessary passions. But in fact, the cleric is right. Religions set certain behavioral strategies. And the negative generates their own. For example, a drunken monk at a sports car donated by a dignitar lover is ours, Russian-Orthodox . You can certainly do without this negativity. But if it appears in people with certain religious identities, then in known forms.

Orthodoxy with its real cultural requests, on the one hand, narrows a person. On the other hand, it structures it in a certain way. The very presence at the liturgy, with its antiphone singing, ornate rhetoric, solemn entrances and exits returns us to Byzantium, to the cult theater, and introduces into a certain cultural space.

People are strangers, by the way, the connection between the theater and the temple perfectly caught. Soviet officials, authorized councils for religions, for example, who looked at the church not only through the prism of ideology, but also culture. They compared nothing nothing in their reports a church mug with income from spectacular events. And they were very jealous of the fact that the singers of the Philharmonic and artists participated in church construction. There should be no competition - and the point!

Theatrical gestures today have become an integral part of the image of some clergymen. Especially those who have become a media person who constantly communicates with the press and VIP public. It is enough to look at the current show with the participation of a person in a cassock. He is subordinate to the law of the genre, he is a player. And if he behaves somehow differently, he will be a loser.

The media environment sometimes dictates its rules even to hierarchs. I remember how, after one of the tricks, the late Patriarch Alexy II walked and talked with a high -ranking official. At some point, he noticed that many lenses were fixed on him. The Holy Pausa took it, lingered, even interrupted the conversation for a second. And after the outbreaks he continued him again.

Modern church life presents a lot of theater scenes. Take, for example, the bishop's chirotony of Archimandrite Panteleimon (Shatova) on Solovki. Initially, chirotony about. Panteleimon was supposed to be performed in early August 2010 in the Moscow Novodevichy Monastery. However, in those days, the capital was covered by the smoke of forest fires, and it was decided to cancel the worship in order to avoid a large combination of the people and not to endanger the health of people. Patriarch Cyril called Father Panteleimon and said that Hirotony was transferred. "He humbly says to me in response:" Or maybe to cancel it in general? " - He told the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church after the construction of Shatov on Solovki to the rank of bishop. How to regard these words of the head of one of the synodal departments? Sign of humility or humility playing? After all, everything has already been decided, and to pronounce them in order to really expand the situation, followed much earlier. Probably, after all, a game. And the game is convincing: the patriarch liked Shatov’s words - “they warm my soul.”

A lot is built around the Divine Liturgy. Therefore, the Orthodox react so painfully to every game with the sacred. In the recent performance of the Odessa Metropolitan Agafangel against the theatrical production of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Odessa, there is nothing unexpected in a passionate week, this is a completely expected reaction.

But if cultural figures do not burrow too much, then you can still find a common language with representatives of the “Orthodox community”. So in St. Petersburg, the Cossacks at the ICONS exhibition (in the photo) of Marat Gelman did not find anything criminal. It sounds, of course, anecdotal: the Cossacks came to the exhibition with their inspection, but this is reality.

If we already started talking about artistic expositions, it is impossible to pass by April 24 in the Tretyakov Gallery on the Crimean Val of the exhibition of Mikhail Nesterov (in the photo above) . This is Christianity already in its flight: go and look.

Nesterov is a peak, and it does not appear from scratch. Today, in the relationship of the Church and culture, there are many sad moments that do not give hope for the emergence of a new Nesterov. That Nesterov, who would not be discouraged from current churching.

The church unobtrusively rakes museum margins, drags the icon away from the cultural community. The story with the Toropetsk icon of the Mother of God shows with all the clarity of the technology of such departments.

Squeezes museums from sacred places. The recent collision on the leadership of the Rublevsky Museum is probably connected with this.

Yes, there are many barbaric, anti -cultural actions inside the church fence. And at the same time, thanks to church structures, thousands of temples and monasteries were revived from the ruins. Thanks to the church, it is born - every day is born - poetry, painting, rhetoric associated with human vertical intuitions. Despite the deplorable state of the church community, the church is engaged in cultural construction. You can’t take it either.

Photo by ITAR-TASS/ Valery Sharifulin and EPA/ ITAR-TASS/ Anatoly Maltsev