Andrey Kuraev

Deacon

The reaction of the leadership of the Belarusian Orthodox Church to the brutal suppression of protests was much softer than the reaction of the Catholic Church. The Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church even hastily replaced the Patriarchal Exarch in Belarus, Metropolitan Paul, who apologized for the premature congratulation of Alexander Lukashenko with a victory. The Catholic archbishop of Tadeusz Kondrusevich, a citizen of Belarus, the current government did not let into the country - for too loud statements and an open condemnation of violence. Deacon Andrei Kuraev explains why the Orthodox and Catholic leaders responded so differently and what it could turn out for the religious life of Belarus.

10 years ago I wrote a school textbook “Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture”. He was for not very adults - 4 classes. But I explained to teachers that culture and art are not the same thing. That the meaning of the word "culture" is determined through the selection of its antonym. Such is the word "nature". Garden strawberries are culture. Forest strawberries are nature. Culture is what a person does (with the world and with himself). This is all in the actions of people that cannot be explained based on our anatomy and physiology.

Accordingly, culture is not always beautiful and far from always good. There are cultures of human sacrifices, criminal chanson and psychedelics. If an ozone hole over Antarctica is a consequence of our economy, then it is also part of culture, not nature. And the foundations of culture are cultural scenarios of everyday life. How the baby swaddling, how the father communicates (or does not communicate) with his daughter, how the boys are fighting, how they care for a girl, how they work and how they are sick ...

And among hundreds of such scenarios, there is one that conveys, as is customary to “conduct business” with the authorities. Orthodox Byzantinism half cut off the commandment “do not false evidence”: the message of evil information about a person continues to be considered a sin, but the message of obviously unreliable excitingly good information is not considered sin. Fraternity is the form of lies that is not considered to be a sin. This lesson can be indulged in publicly, right in the squares and before the television cameras, and even in the presence of the authorities. As a result, in the Orthodox tradition, the price of compliments is devalued to zero. This is money, the fake of which is known to everyone, so there is no deception. Sweet flows of molasses pour on every anniversary and visiting honorary guest, and even more so as a boss. One must be a completely fool to take them seriously. But these fakes are still in use.
And the culture of posture and gesture is also important. And here "the West is the West, the East is the East." What are we reading with Sergey Averintsev:

“In police times, the Greeks are used to talking about subjects of the Persian power as broken slaves; The wisdom of the East is the wisdom of broken. In the spaces of old Middle Eastern despotism, such an experience of moral behavior in the conditions of the rooted political lack of freedom was accumulated, which did not dream of the Greco-Roman world. The Athenian sage firmly knows that he can be killed, but cannot be humiliated by gross physical violence, that his measured speech in court will last as much time as he is guaranteed by the rights of the accused, and no one will force him to shut up, hitting his face or eloquent lips. Even the close Persian sovereign in the case of disgrace could be put on a stake. The people of the East knew well that their bodies were not guaranteed from such abuse that simply leave no room for Socratic equanimity. The Old Testament is a book in which no one is ashamed of suffering and screaming about their pain. No cry in the Greek tragedy knows such bodily, such "celiac" images and metaphor suffering. This is a bodily, smelling of blood, then tears, the bodily of resentment of the humiliated flesh. The beautiful and calm “Olympic” nudity, never perceived as an ambiguity and defenselessness, is magnificent insofar as the nudity of a free and full -fledged person, fenced from humiliating pain, from torture. Byzantine exegets indicated quite practical reasons for the silence before Pilate’s court: when the court is “unrighteous” and a person clearly sees his insecurity, when the word is still not humanly heard, only silence can be protected by the last remaining values. ”

So from the east to the west such a culture of plastic appearance came in which a prayer on the knees is more important than a decent posture:

So fall down down, down!
This right is given to you.
Before the king, fall NIC!
In slush or mud - anyway.

(Vladimir Vysotsky. Alice in Wonder Wonders)

Our, the Byzantine-Orthodox “cultural scenario”, suggests bribes, flattering the language without bones and the “vertical of power” into people.
Oh, if it were possible to explain all the strange “gestures” of our lord with cowardice, greed or vanity of specific faces! This could be limited in the 18th century. But humanitarian science has changed a lot over three hundred years. Servlism is firmly sewn into the matrix of the Orthodox elite. We serve the khan who sat on our neck, regardless of the degree of legality and moral sanity of his reign. Moreover, this is quite sincere, since the church elite since the time of the Emperor Constantine has been invested in a secular elite. According to their connections, identity, interests and obligations of bishops, this is part of the elite class. Specific names mean nothing here. These are functions programmed centuries ago.
In psychology, there is the concept of “stigmatization”. These are some developed and already clicked ways of reaction. And these stigmata process a generation for themselves behind the generation of career-oriented church youths. The word bishop literally means the overseer. Therefore, it is quite appropriate to recall the words of Julia Daniel - the front -line soldier and the first dissident convicted after Stalin's death:

And perhaps it's time to intercede
For the "hero" of yesterday:
No, not a robot, not a gloomy dumbass
Protects people from me.
Not an executioner, not a fool being angry,
Not a killer in love with lead,
And puny, bespectacled, green
In boots and caps, a young man.
Hey, on the tower! Boy on the tower!
How did the trouble happen to you?
You looked into good books
Before driving here.
This is a matter of good taste:
Reject outright evil.
Listen, man, from what course are you?
How did you bring you to the tower?
... a quiet hut with a May Day poster.
The sky is low in gray shreds.
Illuminated by the Mordovian sunset,
The boy with glasses guard us.

These lines, of course, are about modern riot police ... These are not personal shortcomings and sins. This is a system, a “subculture”, which selects the right people for itself, nurturing in them the qualities of character and etching objectionable. There were exceptions - but these are nothing more than exceptions. The matrix is ​​just that. And it is impossible to demand from any one modern metropolitan so that he is such an exception. At the top of the church food chain, he turned out to be precisely because he showed the embodiment of traditional cultural scenarios.

August Belarusian history showed nothing new. Only in one case, the episcopal “matrix” admits the failure: if the metropolitans are unclear who is power today. As the bishops of the Solovetsky camp honestly said in 1927: speaking against the Bolsheviks in the first years of Soviet power, we simply did not know that you were power, not bandits. And now we understand: you are here for a long time, and therefore now the church with the Soviet regime.

Minsk Metropolitan Pavel, recently recalled by the Patriarch from Belarus, also lost the right class orientation for a second. At first, he congratulated Lukashenko on the victory. Then, when the protesting parishioners surrounded him at the exit from the temple, he assured them that he called back his congratulations. And then his press service published a message that information about the cancellation of congratulations is not true. “The undertaking failed. For the attempt - thanks. "

These throwings showed how difficult it is for Orthodox prelates to get out of the usual track. The maximum that the courage of our rites is enough for is a lamentation on the topic "We are all sinful, and the victim with the executioner is equally to blame for each other." To give a simple moral assessment and say that the beating of unarmed people and the torture of the already arrested has a crime, neither the Metropolitan nor the Patriarch did.

Give a simple moral assessment - the beating of unarmed and torture has a crime - the metropolitan and the patriarch did not succeed

And this despite the fact that the Catholic archbishop of Tadeusz Kondrusevich said this loudly - enough for him, a citizen of Belarus, they are banned from entering her. But neither the old nor the new Minsk metropolitans here saw the reason for protest.

Catholics also have above the heads of such servilism in their history and modernity. And yet, not all of their benefits and benefits they received from the khans. They also had their own experience of extraterritoriality, as well as the experience of the Batron with secular feudal lords. Their prelates did not come out of the "humble novices", but from the proud counteaulus. They also had the theology of the revolution (real, not verbal, as in the "Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate" of the Soviet era). There were also rebellious cardinals in Soviet eastern Europe.
In general, Catholics and Orthodox have different survival strategies. How in the world of animals: pretend to be dead or set needles? Growing into the mink, run away or spread the wings, imitating the attack of the point snake?

If we are talking about the confrontation of the absolute predator like Stalin or Hitler, then at a short distance the strategy of the Orthodox “Sergianism” wins the short distance (the patriarchy waited for legalization, and the union was eliminated). But if we are talking about dictators of more opera and less Autarchic, then the Catholic hedgehog strategy has more prospects. And also the difference in the question of what exactly to be considered an attack. The threat of their income and real estate, or a threat to their parishioners? Is it possible to protest not for insulting icons, but for insulting people? In other cases, we say so sweetly that in the temple the priest is equal to both icons and parishioners, for both in both sees the shrine in both. As the Orthodox sank together, if someone cooked from the candlestick or trampled the icon. But if people are stomping before their eyes, here "we are out of politics, we pray." Not forgetting to lead the governor Dracula "Many Summer".

For religious life, different reactions of the Orthodox and Catholic leaders mean that in the cities of Belarus, sympathy for the Church of Roman, not Moscow, will grow. “Muscovites” muffle the conscience of the Sivukha Homegrown Geopolitics: they say, we are hated for our exclusive spirituality, and therefore everywhere they send agents of the corrupted West.

The preference of moonshine Italian guilt is a matter of taste. But the ban on himself to simple conscientious reactions for the sake of the “geopolitical interests of the power” is exactly what is condemned by the gospel. At least that line that commands not to care about tomorrow, seeing the misfortune of the neighbor today.

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