To save a person

Conversation with Andrei Kuraev about good and evil in the era of a clash with Ukraine and the world

Enrace or, conversely, the despair and confusion that we all encountered after the start of the “special operation” in Ukraine put us before the problem of good and evil. These concepts seem to be banal, known to everyone from the kindergarten, but whenever the good becomes indistinguishable from evil, it is not clear, and with what, in fact, we are dealing. Do we do good and evil or good and evil do us? Are these absolute truths or subjective assessments, like superstitions? Do the concepts of good and evil change over time, do they participate in the moral and spiritual progress of mankind? I would like to discuss all this right now, when everyone in our kindergarten of history will have to decide on the terminology, to understand whose side it is. We talked about this with the theologian, writer, specialist in the field of Christian philosophy, preacher, deacon Andrei Kuraev.

- Father Andrei, you are watching what is happening today with Russia and the world. Can you convey your sensation from the news?

- I am bitter because my age is such that I am not sure that I will survive the current consensus. That I will see Russia, which otherwise understands itself and its place in the world. So far I see the implementation of the worst script. Because in the nineties, the world was really multipolar, no matter what our president speak there. Yes, there was an obvious pole - the USA. But there were two other poles that gained strength - China and the Islamic world. For Russia, this was an important choice - to whom to join.

It is completely clear that culturally and historically the world of the West is closest to us. The world of Europe. It seemed that we, albeit zigzags, but we go there, in some ways late, well, say, for thirty years. But it was not so scary. There was another prospect, given the considerable role of the traditional Islamic peoples in Russia, and then the influx of migrants - maybe we will become the Moscow caliphate, part of the Islamic world, which, incidentally, is diverse, is the world of Afghan Taliban ( the movement is recognized as terrorist and prohibited in the Russian Federation ) to the Shaykhs of the Persian Bay studying in Oxford. Well, the third option is to become a colony of China, turn into the Moscow regional committee of the CCP.

I think that it really was Putin who chose this particular option. Because, having cut off all contacts with the Western world today - both moral, and economic and financial - it leaves for himself the only possibility of cooperation and trade with China. The Chinese are very tough negotiators, especially when they understand that they need alternatives. So, the benefit for Russia integration into the Chinese economy and politics will definitely not turn into. We will be attached here, China in this union will be a leader.

Everyone remembers this recent remarkable photograph of Putin in Beijing at the opening of the Olympics: such a lonely man, freezing on the tribune. This is the picture of the future Putin Russia as part of the Chinese globe.

And this is only a part of the difficulties that are waiting for us. Further - the new thirties. Let me remind you their logic. Let's get up, as they say, in Marxist on the other side of good and evil. Let's try to understand the logic of Stalin, and not just honor him with a cannibal. Its starting point was the "great military alarm of 1927." By this year, the Trotskyist Comintern brought the British to the Red Military, and everyone else with his constant revolutionary antics and the financing of all kinds of protest actions, strikes and terrorist attacks for the sake of approaching the world revolution. There was a real risk of creating a European coalition against Soviet Russia. In the Kremlin, realizing such a prospect, we thought: are we ready for this? What if the war is really tomorrow?

Having carried out an inventory, they realized that the Red Army was strong only by taccans. There are no tanks, there are no aircraft, there are no rear, no factories, there are no industry at all. Then it was decided to make everything ourselves. NEP is curling up. In Germany and the United States, engineers, machines, factories, samples of military equipment are purchased, including what will later become the basis of the T-34-Bosch engine, suspension from John Christie. Our schools do not say today that the Dnieper, for example, was designed by an American engineer Cooper, who became the first foreign citizen awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.

But in order to afford all this, you needed money, currency. The currency was then grain. And in order to remove this grain from the peasants, collectivization began. Not everyone was satisfied with it, so they moved to repressions. Today I see the same thing.

In Putin’s head, we are on the verge of a global war. We again have a big military anxiety. We need to upgrade production, the army, not to mention trifles such as the content of the ruined Donbass, the support of Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Transnistria. Plus an immense “Chechen exit”. Where to get him money?

There is already the formula "people - second oil." The pumping out of people has already begun. Through inflationary promotion, increase in fines, excise taxes and taxes. Ahead is the confiscation of bank deposits. The people will murmur, but we are in the war, we are in the besieged camp. Those who are against are traitors and enemies. For them, the homeland has only one tool - “re -education”, that is, repression. Everything is logical. But only for someone who wants “in their own way, albeit stupid, to live a mind”, there is no place in this logically built system.

“Let's get back from that side of good and evil to this one.” Do you have your own experience of understanding these categories? How early did you think about the place of good and evil in this world?

- It is clear that the ideas about good and evil are invested in babies. I remember when my father and I went to the cinema, my first question was: "Dad, where are ours?" Naturally, my sympathies were always on the side of the red “elusive avengers”, because we were prepared in kindergarten for the 100th anniversary of Lenin's 100th anniversary. But then, at eleven years old, I remember my own surprise when my parents left with me to Prague and I was in shock because I felt that not longing for our birch trees, that I was not pulling me back to my homeland (I had just watched “seventeen moments of spring” with a song with a song that normalizes the distant homeland). And this lack of nostalgia for the block-panel homeland was very confused by the internal pioneer brought up in me, who wore a red tie on top of his coat.

Everything was Soviet in me. But, apparently, everything Soviet included everything anti -Soviet. In our house, the notes of Vysotsky and Galich constantly spun, which were brought by a familiar captain of the KGB. The radio was configured to alien voices. When we found ourselves in Prague (in 1973, when the Czechs were undisguised painfully painfully experiencing a recent invasion), my father did not work at the embassy, ​​not in the trade, but in the journal “Problems of Peace and Socialism”, the journal of the Communist Party of the whole world, in fact, in the nest of the future Soviet perestroika. We lived not in the embassy town, but in an ordinary house. On the contrary, the family of a refugee lived us - a member of the executive committee of the Arafatian organization of the liberation of Palestine. Nearby are the Communists from Latin America, who could not return to their homeland, captured by black colonels. A communist from Sweden lived above us. And these were very different "communisms". I still have a collection of coins of exotic countries, which I then exhausted. Internationalism was even that for the first time I kissed a girl from Hungary in the Romanian camp "Artek".

I am talking about this to the fact that the norms of good and evil are cast by the Amalgam school, in which it has the ability to delay over time. With new experiments and meetings, a lot of school-appropriate is perceived differently.

I gained experience of understanding this phenomenon later, studying at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. There were very good teachers of the history of philosophy. The special course on Heidegger was read to us by Alexander Lvovich Dobrokhotov. I remember how he told us thoughtfully and without drawing: "You know, in his youth Heidegger was a Marxist, but then thought better of it in time."

I also loved Marx, loved and still love as a publicist, as a witness to my time. I don’t even understand why modern cultural scientists have forgotten Marx, in vain they are. He is quite interestingly analyzing the era of Louis Bonaparte, the events of modern English life and even the Crimean war. This is good journalism. But I understood this only when I was baptized when Marx was reduced to me from his pedestal “Classic” when he ceased to be those who dictate and force.

Marx is beautiful as an economist and sociologist of the mass. But his anthropology (psychology) is extremely scarce. With his terminology, one cannot study the "inner world of a person." Here you need another language. And another system of values ​​that would allow to appreciate individual freedom: "The independence of a person, the key to his greatness." In Russian literary classics, in Russian religious philosophy and, in the end, in the Gospel I found this for myself.

- Your appeal to Vera was caused by the ambiguity of the picture of good and evil, a way to understand why it is changing?

-An appeal to the faith of some value change in me did not make. The humanistic system of values, which has long sprouted from the Gospel through centuries and centuries, through the thicknesses of folk cultures, was close to me before my appeal in 1982. I just enjoyed and accepted the roots of this system. Then, forty years ago, it seemed to me: yes, there are clear criteria for good and evil. But today I understand that any text, any manifesto, any symbol of faith is defenseless in front of its users-weapons. Take at least a declaration of human rights, at least a naked sermon, at least ten commandments. If someone takes them to interpret, then he will always find a way to turn the eternal to his momentary and selfish benefits.

Even “love your neighbor” instantly turns into a warhead. It is enough to ask: "And who is my neighbor?" Or: "And what does it mean to" love "?" Or: "And what is really worthy of love in the neighbor?"

Maybe only the eternal soul of the neighbor is worthy of love, which should be quickly freed from the bad influence of this sinful-mystery body?

- The text is probably defenseless. But in themselves, good and evil can be in the power of man?

-You know, the philosopher and theologian would surely answer you: yes, in the world of ideas, somewhere in God, the standard of good and evil is probably stored. Jews and Muslims believe that in the sky there is an ideal-norming scroll of the law or the Qur'an. There is even a version that God created the world, looking at the Torah. The question is, through which customs, that is, in fact, ordeal, this eternal light passes into the sublunar world, into the world of people. How it is projected into our local sociocultural fabric. And it comes - through people's mediation. So will it not fit some of his ax on this way under this set-off compass from heaven?

Among the Orthodox, Catholics and Armenians, it is believed that the quality of interpretation of the gospel is guaranteed by the presence of the organization and hierarchy of interpreters - the Church with its clergy, the “Student Church”. This can be agreed when it comes to the actual theological issues, detached from earthly interests. But attempts to make a clean standard from the chamber of measures and weights immediately lead to its pollution.

Personally, I had no illusions about the “teaching of the Church” even during my neophy. I studied at the university at the Department of Scientific Atheism, which had its own library in a separate room number 1003. The iron lattice blocked access to the confiscated library of the Optina desert. But the students of the department could come and use it. And there was a magazine of the Moscow Patriarchate, which the department received through the Council for Religious Affairs. And it was clear to me that the official part of the “Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate” is the newspaper Pravda, recruited by church and Slavic font. So neither before my baptism, nor after I had the reason to believe that at the head of the church were lights of reason, conscience, courage, real confessors.

But the grain is thrown into the mud, into the ground. The lamp is placed on the windowsill. Therefore, to the church then I had a request much more modest than now. I reasoned: the text of the prayer “Our Father” is not changed - and thanks for that. You can calmly come to the temple and pray, as under the king-priest, and wait for the Soviet government to wait out in the yard. And in confession you are not asked - whether you listen to the "voice of America." You never know who is a “October theology”, these are their problems and their sin, and no one obliges me to agree with this.

Therefore, it seemed to me that the church has no threat of freedom of conscience. It is not there today, if not professional Orthodox, but to remain a parish in a resident. Just take a measure appropriate for you.

This is generally my advice on how to relate to the church today. Do not force yourself to take a patriarch as a political adviser. Do not subordinate your conscience to the church nomenclature.

Today I have become more sensitive to such issues. That church of my youth lived in a non -free society. And today? From the slave, the demand is different from the volunteer.

-That is, we say that somewhere there, among the highest meanings, there are ideal good and evil, but here, among us, they are a dynamic picture that depends on interpretations. And a person appears here, as it were, the co -creeper of good and evil. I understand correctly?

- I probably cannot unequivocally answer whether moral progress has really occurred in the history of mankind. I will say as a Christian. At what minute of the history of the Jewish people is Christ born in him? Christian historiosophists have two options. The first: “Not healthy have the need for a doctor, but patients”, which means that the Savior is at the time of maximum decline and spiritual degradation. The second is the opposite: Virgin Mary is a flower that has been prepared by millennia of cultivation by a divine gardener, who cultivated the Jewish garden, so that the fruit finally matured in it, capable of making the flesh of God. That is, the appearance of Jesus is a minute of the highest take -off of the Israeli culture. Two answers, both have both arguments and the right to exist, but are opposite to each other in essence.

Well, we will count from this point for two thousand years. Are we better or not? The Gospel has a story about how the Pharisees once led a sinner to Christ and he said: which of you without sin, let the first throw a stone into it. And the bad Pharisees parted, heeded the voice of conscience and reason.

But if today Putin brought Chubais to Red Square and said: here you are, do what you want, I think the paving stones would go into business.

But you can notice another. At the beginning of the fifth century, John Zlatoust, Patriarch of Constantinople, lived to all of us. He was judged. One of the accusations was like this: he brutally treated a certain deacon, whom he removed from the service and left without a food. At the trial, Chrysostom explains: this deacon brutally treated his Boybell boy. Of course, I am entirely on the side of the Chrysostom, but I am posed by the question: imagine if today the Moscow Komsomolets wrote that a certain deacon Andrei Kuraev brutally treats his boy-to-era ... Today it is from the world of unthinkable not only for saints.

For centuries, undoubtedly, the sensitivity of people and society to one or another habitual or deviation changes. Say, about three hundred years ago, racism was not considered evil. Anti -Semitism was not considered a sin. Slavery and slave trade were not a moral problem. Family violence was not condemned, but recommended. And on the contrary: those values ​​that were carefully planted in those centuries have somehow become irrelevant. Let's say confessional self -identification. Many canons of the Byzantine Church forbade him to be friends and dinner with Jews or Armenians. And now our patriarchs calmly do this, participate in joint meals and even prayers, although all the same liturgical books with curses are preserved. A single mother, divorce and a second marriage ceased to seem “sinful abomination”.

- But in the current specific situation of confusion and cruelty, is it possible to understand that it is good and what is evil? How to determine at least for yourself - on which side are you on?

- There is a simple way formulated in the Bible. This is generally the golden rule of ethics. Imagine that your project, advice or dream is used against you. Put yourself in the place of the victim of historical progress. This is the “moral imperative” of Kant. Imagine that the action you planned will be the universal law of the universe. And you and your children will also be subordinate to him ... Do you still want this?

- Surely in the Bible, as in the Gospel, there are other wise thoughts, but why do you think the church is silent about them? In all this ominous silence and among the sounds of the bombing, she could elevate her voice and, sorry for the banality, indicate moral guidelines.

- First of all, because those who imagine themselves in the voice of the Church are connected with a thousand threads with the current sociopolitical elite. They look at the world through the eyes of these elites, i.e. your class. And all that this elite can say, we saw at the Security Council a few days ago. Принимается историческое решение, во многом хоронящее будущее России. Самое время устроить мозговой штурм, но мы видим, что они не только перед телекамерами отказываются от дискуссии, но и ранее всерьез это между собой и с первым лицом не обсуждали. Глава СВР Нарышкин вообще не понял, какой вопрос обсуждают — признание суверенитета восточно-украинских республик или, напротив, принятие их в состав РФ.

— Но вы видите какой-либо шанс, что эта система способна на что-то другое, кроме подобострастия и молчания? Она способна все еще различать добро и зло?

— Система неспособна, но Бог способен. Иногда вдруг появляются странные люди. Скажем, 14 июня 1982 года завершилась Фолклендская война. На торжественной благодарственной службе в лондонском соборе Святого Павла присутствовали королева Елизавета, Маргарет Тэтчер, военные чины, вдовы погибших солдат. Архиепископ Кентерберийский Роберт Ранси — бывший танкист Второй мировой.

И вдруг вместо торжествующего победоносного спича он призвал к примирению, прощению и молитве за погибших аргентинских солдат наравне с погибшими британцами.

«Война — это признак человеческой ошибки, и все, что мы скажем и сделаем на этом богослужении, должно быть помещено именно в этот контекст», — сказал предстоятель Церкви Англии. «Босс в абсолютном бешенстве», — сказал военным муж Маргарет Тэтчер после службы.

Что касается нас, то, может быть, лет через 20 христиански мыслящие публицисты так и будут говорить: Господь через беду и позор привел нас к новому очищению. Может быть, они скажут, что поражение — лучший учитель. Эти мысли очевидны, но все равно поражение лучше не зазывать и не предсказывать. Пророчествовать лучше о прошлом.

А сегодня мы ничего не знаем о том, чем все это кончится. И можем даже не узнать о том, что это уже кончилось и кончилось плохо именно для нас.

Комментаторы могут и после поражения уверять страну, что она всех победила. А поражения объяснять происками врагов и предателей. Так что поражения и мудрость не всегда идут вместе. А победа — тем паче.

Рецептов спасения России и человечества у меня нет и быть не может. Но для каждого отдельного человека возможен свой собственный путь. И если этот человек желает ориентироваться в вечных ценностях, то мои советы ему будут банальны. Мы вообще пришли в то состояние, когда надо говорить банальности. Не завидуй. Не кради. И дальше по Исаичу: Живи не по лжи. Не верь (обещаниям). Не бойся (угроз). Не проси (поблажек).