Spirituality and state

Again, with incredible power (and to the not last degree due to the girls from Pussy Riot, languishing in anticipation of the trial), a dispute about the ways of spirituality in our state was hardened. On the nineteenth of April, they were extended, allegedly “investigating” some kind of “case”, in a sober gaze, not worthwhile and a vacationy egg, but indicating the fusion of the church, the state and the “independent court” along the line of the self-returning interests of the power elite. It is significant that in prison they did not perform a single investigative action with them.

And these interests, apparently, do not shine with originality: to attach a new ideological machine to the monetary state with approximately the same functions as in the output years of the leading and guiding role of the CPSU. Then, as you know, the leaders of the proletariat themselves appointed themselves by the gods, and one was even buried in a glass coffin. The district committees became churches. And the red corner, where the believer usually had icons, without hesitation, renamed the “red corner”, undermining the position of a competitor.

In the opinion of the commissars that in the tsarist time, in the Soviet, ideology is already good in that it gave extra -legal motivation everywhere where common sense and formal law came into conflict with political necessity. The question is: “Are you against the Soviet regime?”, He completely shot any initiative from below. And the mind “as Comrade Vladimir Ilyich told us,” on the contrary, he justified any nonsense.

Today the reverse process has begun, which some publicists tend to interpret positively - as a return to spiritual sources. The church again becomes a church, and icons icons. However, in it, as before, an unequivocally guesses the desire of the political class to restore the indisputable ideological instance, lost with the defeat of the communist regime.

Some United Russia dreams about the symphony of the authorities and the authorities of heaven. In particular, Vladimir Medinsky even offers the church over the state. And the fact that the union of white (Orthodox patriots) and the Reds (Orthodox Stalinists) against hated democratic liberals broadcasts the popular television rostrum Prokhanov.

Prokhanov is not shy about the next formula: “Russia does not need political reforms. The meaningless crackling of parliamentary assemblies does not need. Russia needs altars and defense plants. ” Which does not prevent a man -to -blade of a liberal bored public.

On the part of the church, the deal is fixed by the rejection of the “Orange Revolution” (that is, a peaceful change in power, when the authorities interfere with legal rotation) and the recognition by Patriarch Kirill of the results of the elections. No matter what, it doesn’t matter where and it doesn’t matter with what a degree of honesty or dishonesty.

And from the part of a grateful state, tax benefits and other preferences for church enterprises . Direct state participation in church affairs. It is curious to find out that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, where the church congresses are held, is on the balance of the Moscow City Hall. Administrative pressure in litigation (case Pussy Riot), which affects the real or imaginary interests of the Church.

The church complains of a campaign supposedly leading against Russian Orthodoxy ... There is a line in prayer singing (April 22): “About the every other eye to grate your holy to the Church and create nobes and irresisture from the rebels on the nude and trampling the shrines of it ...”. Which, apparently, is not so far from the truth.

As a violently economic and politician, the Church really stepped too much on the tail, counting its square meters. Why any, including the purely economic response of an economic “enemy”, is certainly projected into the issues of religious dogma. But to say that this campaign is conducted from a certain center, hostile to Russia, would probably be a great exaggeration.

But another statement (Prokhanov) is true-about the divorce of the Russian Church and a significant part of the Russian liberal intelligentsia, which in the seventies and eighties of the last century saw her natural ally in the church. And there are objective reasons.

After all, the totalitarian state used to be equally irreconcilable both to liberalism and Christianity. And the conductors of the latter suffered equally from the KGB. And Christianity itself in those years was understood as antitotalitarian, anti -Tiranian philosophy. Which, for example, was brilliantly noticed by the dissident poet Alexander Galich, who brought both the gospel story in the same poem and recognizable features of Soviet reality:

“But then two submarines burst into the vertep/ and shouted that the inconsistent came out,/ that the holiday is canceled, alas,/ that the Romans did not understand jokes./ And thundered for fifteen days/ I yielded to the woolers on time” ( A. Galich, “Christmas”, 1966-1969 )

But the main thing is that there was a time of a very careful and very interested attitude of the educated class to the gospel text, which, oddly enough, was never noticed in the church itself, more preoccupied with the ritual.

We will not fall to blame the Patriarch for an expensive watch. The church officially did not agree with the non -meter Nile Sorsky (1503) and ... allowed to get down. And if she allowed, she allowed. We will not be the Hanjams. All over the world, administrative power is fraught with symbols of power, and Breguet fits into this definition. The patriarch cannot walk in a Chinese fake!

However, there is no more important question from another, more important question: what is it - “spirituality” today, which clergy and Orthodox patriots are hollowing the head of liberals?

Whether this is the shaking of the eyes, the scarf around the neck of Nikita Mikhalkov and the pronunciation with the aspiration of the word "spirituality". Or is there any specific cultural achievements and intelligible moral achievements, and political, too, will we not be afraid of this word - principles?

What to argue, Russian Orthodoxy (as well as Protestantism, like Catholic Christianity) gave a lot of bright names and demonstrated considerable achievements. Although it cannot be said that very large within the framework of world Christianity. Many intellectuals are known in Orthodoxy. The names of Nikolai Berdyaev and Alexander me come on memory.

However, in general, if he speaks of the Russian Church as an institute, then its history is a story of great political absurdity. As far as the ancestors of Christianity initially clearly expressed their positions, it was always unclear as the Russian Church refers to the oppression and injustice.

Ultimately, imported from the West, “Christianity in Russian” did not become truly popular, since the people were illiterate, did not read books. On the contrary, during the years of the Tatar-Mongol invasion of the Orthodox Church, he had to become a great opportunist, for which the Mongol invaders liberated all the clergy under their authority from the duties that the enslaved population was taxed. And later, the monasteries growing as a result became the first landowners who asked the monarchy of letters attaching the peasants to the land. What, one must think, undermined the sympathy of the people. All these invectives were used by the Bolsheviks with success.

“When the patience of the workers burst in February 1912, ” the Soviet historian and bibleist Nikolai Nikolai Nikolai Nikolsky wrote about the Lensky execution in the book “History of Russian Orthodoxy”, “and the strike began to spread from one mine to another, the iconic priests immediately opened the gift of eloquence and, together with the police and the administration, used all the efforts to disrupt the strike, in other words, for preservation, for preservation, to preserve it. superprofits of St. Petersburg and London shareholders of the company. "

Now you can argue with the details and give other historical interpretations, but it is undoubted that the Bolsheviks who committed the revolution were quite easy to force the nation to abandon religious culture, leaving it surviving old women and in very narrow niches - architects, museums, cemeteries and few existing temples.

When I walked in my childhood near the Church of the Ascension of the Lord, in which Pushkin was married, I remember very well that there was a warehouse, and this was especially not indignant at that. Nearby there was not a single person who would say: “I’ll go and die for faith!” And if he said, what is good, conscious citizens would have handed over him to the station as a pest.

On the contrary, the liberal revolution of 1991, under the leadership of the damned liberals, disinfected the communist ideology (surrogate of religion) and again brought the Russian church to operational scope. It would seem that live and rejoice, paint the eggs, go about spirituality.

But then two curious contradictions arose.

First. In world history, cases are not known that the developed secular states are again transformed into clerical ones, if this would not be associated with social degradation and a decline in education and sciences. Therefore, we must see what Orthodox rallies signal us about, and think very good before moving along this path.

And the second. Our church has too much experience of fraught with power to despise our own archetype. And in the service of the authorities, the authorities of the Church have to abandon their main spiritual resource-the socio-humanistic democratic in the essence of the pathos of Christianity, the absence of which cannot be hidden in the splendor of the rite and murmur of not very understandable prayers in the Old Slavonic.