Translated material
Shy Hierocracy
Notes on the margins of "Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church"
The adoption by the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000 of the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” is called one of the most significant successes of the Russian Orthodox Church in recent years. Few people took the trouble to familiarize themselves with the voluminous document written in rather dry language, but the very fact of such a serious and thorough statement by the Church on most social topics, especially a conceptually thought-out and balanced statement, cannot but be considered an event of exceptional importance.
Certain provisions of this “Concept”, however, caused heated debate and confusion. First of all, this concerned the wording about the possibility of civil disobedience in the event of anti-Christian actions by civil authorities. This formulation, adopted clearly to please the fundamentalist-minded part of the believers and clergy, created significant tension in relations between the state administration and the highest hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. The misunderstanding was smoothed out, although “a sediment remained.” But on the whole, society remained satisfied with the emergence of serious leadership for social action in the Church. Praise came even from the traditionally ultra-conservative hierarchs of the Church Abroad, who saw in the text of the “Concept” a rejection of the “Sergianism” they condemned. Critics of the Russian Orthodox Church from among the “foreigners” and “catacombs” focused mainly on the discrepancy between words and deeds, and not on the formulation of the doctrine itself.
Meanwhile, if anything confuses an attentive analyst who would undertake to study the document without setting himself the goal of apologetics of its content, it is the discrepancy between many of the provisions of this document and the traditional teaching of the Orthodox Church, as it has been known to the world for two thousand years from the Holy Scriptures and Holy Tradition - that is, the decrees of councils, church laws (canons) and the works of the holy fathers (outstanding church theologians awarded recognition as saints). Despite the fact that the preamble of the “Concept” suggests that this document be considered a statement of the basic provisions of the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church on state and society, this observation cannot but confuse [1] .
From the “theology of revolution” to... ?
Over the centuries of the existence of Orthodoxy, it has accumulated a certain amount of provisions and statements on the topics of the relationship between the Church and society; many of these provisions can be considered “divinely inspired,” that is, formulated by saints directly according to the will of God. Systematization of these statements is not an easy task and was previously considered not particularly necessary, since the Church was faced with the task of a living sermon addressed to a specific listener in a specific social and cultural situation, and depending on the circumstances of this sermon, certain aspects of church teaching were highlighted more clearly and sharpened. The preacher did not make any claims to the “total” nature of his statements, leaving such totality to the conciliar decisions made in the most critical cases.
Social work and social teaching were parts of primarily pastoral practice - that is, care for the salvation of people's souls - and were developed in a corresponding manner. Serious attention to “social” issues awoke among Christian theologians only in the 19th century, when all sorts of “social doctrines” arose (usually associated with socialism), positivist sociology appeared, which in its early version treated society as a single being, a single body of humanity (which represented constitutes a direct secular projection of the teaching about the Church as the Body of Christ). Western theologians, and after them the Orthodox, began to try to give answers to the “demands of life”, in accordance with the spirit of the time, not only discussing social ideals, but also constructing diagrams of all kinds of Christian social concepts, for which, of course, they chose what had already been created by secular thinkers pattern. The framework for discussion was set by the concepts of society, culture, progress, nation , and theologians attempted to squeeze something about sin, salvation, redemption, mercy.
The Roman Catholic Church, which has always been the most socially oriented of all Christian denominations, has been most successful in building social concepts. The publication by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 of an encyclical (a district message of doctrinal content), which began with the words “Rerum novarum” and went down in history under this name, with analysis and criticism of socialism and capitalism, gave rise to a whole string of Roman Catholic social documents that were considered as general , as well as private aspects of social relations - from salaries and vacations to the ethics of sexual intercourse. Along with the “papal” social doctrine, other social doctrines began to appear, created by Catholics and Protestants, among which, for example, the “theology of revolution” was extremely popular, according to which Christ was the greatest social revolutionary, and the Church should always stand at the forefront of the struggle of the oppressed for your rights. As a practical embodiment of this concept, Jesuit priests in Latin America commanded guerrilla units and participated in terrorist attacks, and quoted Mao and Trotsky in their sermons.
The inclusion of the Russian Orthodox Church in social issues in the form in which it was discussed in the West dates back to the 1950s and 60s, when Moscow hierarchs began to actively speak out in the international arena, carrying out foreign policy orders of the Soviet government. The Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, especially since it was headed by the energetic and pro-Catholic-minded Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) (d. 1979 in the Vatican at a reception with the Pope), became the center of work on the Soviet-Orthodox version of the “social theology." This theology was dominated by the ideas of “world peace”, “the aspirations of the oppressed”, the active social mission of the Church for the sake of transforming the existing world, the identity of the goals of Christianity and communism, and so on, which the then head of the Church Abroad, Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky), critically designated as “chiliasm” - the revival of the ancient heresy, which taught about the advent of the Kingdom of God on Earth, in earthly life, in the form of peace and prosperity for people, about the renewal of humanity, which will live on a renewed earth.
Samples of the DECR theological creativity of that time looked like this: “In recent decades, when profound changes, a kind of revolution, took place in philosophical, scientific and theological thinking, as a result of an anthropocentric view of the cosmos , the evolutionary concept of the universe and a new rethinking of the entire history of mankind, - only after this the opportunity arose to develop a theology of development and revolution [emphasis added. - E. Kh. ],” wrote one of the most authoritative employees of the DECR, Protopresbyter Vitaly Borovoy (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate (J.M.P.), 1966, No. 9, p. 78). And Metropolitan Nikodim himself reasoned: “From early times, apologists for the inviolability of unjust social relations began to incline the thoughts of Christians towards complete alienation from the world in order to distract them from burning social problems, from the struggle for the reconstruction of society on the basis of justice. Under the long-term influence of such pseudo-Christian preaching, entire generations of narrow fanatics with disfigured ideas about Christianity were brought up and grew up” (J.M.P., 1963, No. 1, p. 40).
Such speeches by Metropolitan Nikodim and his successors found a favorable reception among the socialist and liberal leaders of the world ecumenical movement, in which the Russian Orthodox Church soon became one of the leaders, inspiring its social-radical wing. But the real (and not too hidden) sympathies of the DECR leaders themselves lay more on the side of the papacy with its strong organization, formalized by a doctrine that combines novelty and conservatism. Therefore, when the political necessity of the Soviet era disappeared, the now inappropriate revolutionary rhetoric was quickly forgotten, but the social one was preserved and developed precisely in the spirit of the Vatican documents. It is no coincidence that it was the DECR who created and lobbied for the text of the current social concept. Continuity in relation to the doctrines of previous years and to Catholic teaching is visible both in the very idea of such a concept (the history of Orthodoxy does not know even approximately similar documents), and in its implementation, where the text of the concept and the texts of the Vatican “schemes”, “encyclicals” and catechisms coincide sometimes to the point of literalism, and the hidden theological basis of the text of “Fundamentals of the Social Concept” is the teaching of the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who tried to combine Christianity and evolutionism. The theological preamble of the social doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church is, in essence, an attempt to retell Teilhardian formulas in the language of Orthodox theology.
Traditional Orthodox teaching is that the present world is fallen as a result of the fall of God's creation, entangled in the nets of evil. Christ, being perfect God and perfect man, unites humanity with the Divine, gives every person the opportunity to become “by grace” what God is by His nature. The Church, which is the Body of Christ (almost in the literal sense, confirmed by the communion of the Body and Blood in the Eucharist), is the union of perfect Divinity and perfect humanity, a reality opposite to the “world.” The purpose of the Church’s existence in the world is a war with it to win from it as many souls as possible to be saved, that is, people united with God. According to Christian eschatology (the doctrine of the end of times), the Church after the Second Coming will appear as the Kingdom of Heaven, as the resurrection of the holy righteous, while the “world” as the totality of sinful ties and creations “spoiled” by sin will be destroyed - “the earth and all the works on it will burn " (2 Peter 3:10). Accordingly, any social action can be considered by the Church either as sinful, or as neutral, or as contributing to the salvation of an individual person, creating a condition for this. The Church does not set itself the utopian goal of transforming the world; its goal, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "save at least some" .
The theological doctrine of the Fundamentals is fundamentally different. In it, the eschatological goal of the world is assumed to be “transformation”, “renewal”, “purification”, “restoration” - that is, the transition to some better and higher state from the current lower and worse. The Church has the goal of “ not only the salvation of people in this world, but also the salvation and restoration of the world itself ” (I, 2) [2] . The Church itself is conceived not as the “perfect humanity” of Christ, to which the believer joins in the Eucharist and which becomes the guarantee of salvation for the Christian, but as an imperfect, but gradually “improving” humanity that is increasingly united with God. The Church is presented in fact as the place of the “divine-human evolution” of the world and man towards the “reification of the world” and “divine-humanity.” With this view of things, personal salvation becomes not the ultimate goal of a person, but only part of the overall transformative social work to “reinstate ” the world.
This approach does not cause reproaches from the church community for freethinking or even heresy, primarily because no one usually reads or takes documents like the “Fundamentals” seriously. For a secular reader, the socio-utopian approach evokes more understanding - at least out of nostalgia for Soviet times - than the harsh and unconsoling view of traditional Orthodoxy for most worldly people. Psychologically, it is easier to consider yourself living with one foot in a bright future than to imagine how the world collapses and burns. However, social utopias have one sad quality - from time to time someone undertakes to implement them “here and now”, and in utopian logic “five-year plans for acquiring grace” and “accelerating rates of achieving deification” are no less real than Soviet and other totalitarian-utopian experiments.
Through the eclectic formulations of the “Fundamentals”, whimsically combining the most extreme, reaching the point of obscurantism, conservatism (by no means required by church teaching) with radical renovationism and liberalism, one attitude breaks through, obviously stemming from Orthodox “social utopianism” - the attitude towards belittling the role of the state in society and to emphasizing the social role of the Church, going so far as to hint at the desirability for society of the power of the clergy as the most morally justified form of government...
Birth of orthodox fundamentalism
Very often, critics of the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” reproach it for its excessively compromising approach to the state, “Sergian” conformism and sycophancy. The reproach could not be less fair. In comparison with traditional church doctrine, the state in the “Concept” is simply neglected; it is given a significantly smaller place in the life of society than the one assigned to it by traditional church institutions and preaching.
The “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” questions the original divine establishment of the state. For the traditional social teachings of Orthodoxy, it seems undeniable that for the world after the Fall, the state is a natural form of organization of society, given by God for the correct organization of human life on the basis of the natural law of justice, “planted” by God in the hearts of people. According to the teachings of the Apostle Paul, “there is no authority except from God,” which does not mean that every ruler is pleasing to God, but presupposes that God has established the very principle of ruling.
Instead of this view, the theory of the origin of the state as a result of the decline of theocracy - that is, the direct political control of God through the mediation of prophets and "judges" - is proposed as a social doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church. “In ancient Israel, before the period of the Kings, there existed the only true theocracy in history , that is, the rule of God. However, as society moved away from obedience to God as the organizer of worldly affairs, people began to think about the need to have an earthly ruler [emphasis added. - E. Kh. ],” says the document (III, 1). At the same time, the authors of the concept do not notice that they are extrapolating the “unique in history” experience of theocracy to the state and society in general. Any state turns out to be a “lower form” compared to theocracy; any state, except the theocratic one, is not established by God, but only “tolerated.”
In accordance with the lower status of the state, in the new social concept of the Russian Orthodox Church it is allowed to be democratic. “The emergence of the earthly state should be understood not as an initially established reality by God, but as God providing people with the opportunity to organize their social life based on their free will [emphasis added. - E. Kh. ]" (III, 1).
In former times, the state was considered by the Church as a force independent of the will of the people, whose unconditional task was to preserve justice (either “natural” or “divinely revealed”). Therefore, the Church preferred a monarchical form of government, in which the main thing depends on the moral sense of a particular person (one of the Russian philosophers defines monarchy as a “dictatorship of conscience”) . Now the Russian Orthodox Church is “democratizing” its state concept, the state turns out to be the fruit of democracy. But there is no profit for any authorities, even democratic ones, from such adjustments in church doctrine. The state turns out to be something accidental and secondary, necessary, but not possessing any unconditional value. From now on it is only a “lesser evil” compared to anarchy. There can be no talk of any divine calling of this or that state to this or that role in the history of mankind, which immediately eliminates the Byzantine view, characteristic of both the Church and the state and presupposing a special calling for the Roman Empire, parallel, but independent from the Church service of power to Divine purposes.
While the social role of the Church is placed extremely highly in the theological part of the Concept, much higher than is typical for traditional church teaching, the social role of the state in the Concept is clearly underestimated. From these premises the conclusion suggests itself that the Church, busy with the “renewal of the world,” can and should inevitably have a much greater significance in the social and political system than what is currently assigned to it. This conclusion is actually made in the section where forms of power are divided according to their “spirituality” into three stages:
“Under judging - the social system described in the Book of Judges - power acted not through coercion, but by the power of authority, and this authority was communicated by Divine sanction... Under a monarchy , power remains God-given, but for its implementation it no longer uses so much spiritual authority as compulsion. The transition from judiciary to monarchy testified to a weakening of faith, which is why the need arose to replace the Invisible King with a visible king. Modern democracies , including those that are monarchical in form, do not seek divine sanction of power. They represent a form of power in a secular society, presupposing the right of every capable citizen to express their will through elections [emphasis added. - E. Kh.]" (III, 7).
The unique social system of ancient Israel, which was simultaneously a state , a people , and an Old Testament Church , is considered one of the stages in the general classification of state forms, which can be extended to any countries and peoples. Moreover, a system for which it is known that it was unique and will never be repeated anywhere again is declared theoretically subject to restoration, if, of course, the spiritual level of the people is high enough. “However, one cannot completely exclude the possibility of such a spiritual revival of society when a religiously higher form of government will become natural” (III, 7). If the “Concept” contrasted the historical form of the Byzantine-Russian Christian monarchy and the modern secular republic, then what we were talking about would be clear, and the meaning of the phrase would not go beyond the monarchical aspirations of many Orthodox Christians. In this context, questions inevitably arise regarding this formulation - who and how can determine whether society has not reached that spiritual level when the natural power in it is the spiritual authority of judges (which, moreover, was not completely non-violent)? Isn't there a thinly disguised claim here about the possibility of establishing in Russia at some point hierocratic (i.e., presupposing the power of clergy on behalf of God) form of government?
There is nothing incredible in such a development of the provisions expressed in the Concept. In this document, the church is attributed an exceptionally high social significance, in fact, a utopian task of renewal and transformation of society. The secular state is left with purely power functions, and it itself is made dependent on the will and desire of the people (on whose moral level, according to the same concept, the choice of the form of government depends). This allows us to imagine a situation when the people, realizing their “highest spiritual level,” will change the form of government to hierocratic with the goal of “renewing and transforming the world” in accordance with Christian principles. There will be a “people's Orthodox revolution.”
The least expected thing from the modern Russian Orthodox Church was to put forward the doctrine of “Orthodox fundamentalism” with a claim to political power. However, in practice, “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” became the first fundamentalist manifesto so clear and elevated to the level of church teaching. All kinds of “liberal” statements contained in the document are connected primarily with the fact that the moral state of modern society is recognized, firstly, as low, and secondly, as not subject to correction. On behalf of the Church it seems to sound: “Let them. Well, what can we take from them? (the position is, of course, practically very comfortable). State statements are heard in the “Concept” to the extent that the Russian Orthodox Church is interested - at this stage - in support from the state. But the fundamentalist provisions follow directly from the theological preamble and are evenly scattered throughout the text, being the most innovative and original, having no serious precedents in previous documents of the Russian Orthodox Church. So there is reason to believe that Orthodox fundamentalism is a trend that is still timidly making its way, but has a great future within the Russian Orthodox Church, and will gradually only intensify.
At the same time, it is important to understand that we are talking specifically about fundamentalism , and not about conservatism and traditionalism. Traditionalism is based on traditional church teaching, as it has been formulated over centuries of Christian history; conservatism tries to adhere to values proven by practice for at least several centuries. Therefore, both Orthodox conservatism and traditionalism are “statist” oriented; they perceive the Byzantine-Russian model of close cooperation between Church and state either as proper and divinely established, or as the most natural and proven by thousands of years of experience.
Fundamentalism focuses on its own doctrine, on its internal logic, which is totalitarian in nature. Religion must transform today's world in accordance with its principles, carried out consistently and uncompromisingly. At the same time, social instruments - the state, the army, social services, education - are declared to be the means of achieving the religious goal. This is Islamic fundamentalism, this is any other religious fundamentalism, of which a lot can arise in the 21st century. Fundamentalism is by no means conservative; on the contrary, it is usually revolutionary and amazes with the scale of its social projects. Fundamentalism is rarely traditional - on the contrary, fundamentalist leaders are prone to modernism, to reworking traditional orthodox teaching in a spirit close to themselves. Therefore, the appearance of revolutionary and “modernist” elements in fundamentalist concepts is quite natural.
Suffice it to remember that Ayatollah Khomeini’s teaching on hierocracy, on velayat-e faqih - the direct power of the clergy - and on the Islamic state from the point of view of traditional Islam should be considered a radical and dubious innovation. Iranian Shiites before Khomeini always supported the power of the Shah as a secular power protecting religion. The revolutionary and socially transformative rhetoric introduced by Khomeini was also something not very familiar and customary for Islam, therefore the conservative clergy resisted Khomeinism almost more than secular circles. It is interesting, by the way, that the Russian Orthodox Church conducts a constructive dialogue with the highest Islamic religious and political bodies, there is a joint commission of theologians (given the fundamental difference in dogma - what else should they do besides social issues?), there is a regular exchange of visits, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church admit that “with are interested in the Iranian experience.”
The above, of course, does not mean that one should suspect the highest hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church of some kind of conscious fundamentalist conspiracy. Modern hierarchs quite often make it clear that they are ready to cooperate very actively with the state. However, at the same time, they are characterized by their constant concern for creating an independent and self-sufficient institution from the Church, which has a huge influence on society - both with the help of the state and in addition to it, in the absence of social control from society.
The provisions of the “Concept”, while promising loyalty to the existing state, at the same time require it to recognize the complete independence and autonomy of the Church. It is obvious that within the Russian Orthodox Church itself there is a fairly influential group of those who would consider it desirable to transform the church structure into a huge self-closed world, which, under favorable conditions, could extend its total influence to the entire society. And the noted fundamentalist tendencies of the “Social Concept” are the fruit of the mental work of this particular group. This motif is only one of those present in the Concept. The large and diverse composition of the working group led to the fact that this document is very eclectic in its content. Quite deeply worked sections are side by side with very superficially formulated, dogmatically and canonically impeccable statements - with more than debatable ones. However, it would be impossible to analyze every controversial and debatable point of the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”; it would be necessary to write a voluminous commentary, many times larger than the document itself.
The purpose of this article was to highlight the main and, in a sense, the most “innovative” node of the social doctrine promulgated by the Russian Orthodox Church, fraught with the most serious consequences in the future. This node is a new teaching about the Church as a force renewing social existence, which, as such a force, has a higher status and purpose than the state. In the social concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, the secular liberal statehood is opposed not by Christian statehood, but by hierocracy, which claims to directly represent God, and is considered the highest form of social order known to man. The political claim to establish such a hierocracy is not clearly expressed; moreover, in the section devoted to “The Church and Politics”, the apolitical nature of the Church was quite clearly indicated, but it was also indicated there that this apoliticality is situational, determined by current circumstances. No ahistorical principle of the Church’s apoliticality was declared, and therefore, no obstacles to the development of a fundamentalist (namely fundamentalist, not traditional) line in the Russian Orthodox Church have been and will not be placed.
[1] However, the status of this document itself is not entirely clear: on the one hand, official representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church declare that, adopted by the council, this document is now part of the Holy Tradition, on the other hand, the preamble says that it sets out the fundamentals of the teaching ROC (not the Ecumenical Orthodox Church for some reason, but only the Russian Orthodox Church), the official position of the Moscow Patriarchate and the guidelines applied by the episcopate. What is the relationship between these three elements in the concept? Do they complement each other, or are they different components of the same thing? Is the document a statement of principles actually applied, or is it prescriptive? Each line of a very short preamble raises a lot of such questions.
[2] The text of the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” consists of sections (indicated by Roman numerals) divided into paragraphs (indicated by Arabic numerals).