Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 3 – Many Russians
believe that the controversy around “Mathilda” explains why Orthodox radicalism
is on the rise, Sergey Chapnin says; but in fact the reasons for that are far
deeper and when the clashes over the film quiet down, the faithful will have to
confront serious questions about “which empire and which Orthodoxy we are heirs
to.”
In an address to the Predaniye
Foundation last week that has been written up by Svetlana Solodovnik of Yezhednevny zhurnal now, the commentator
argues that there are many reasons why individual Orthodox radicals have
emerged, and they all reflect basic failures of the Moscow Patriarchate (ej.ru/?a=note&id=31631).
These failures in
turn are a product of the fears of the church leadership that if it takes a
clear decision on any one of a number of issues, it will be confronted by large
protests from the many who will disagree with it. And it has thus tried to be all
things to all people, a stance that in the end has infuriated almost everyone.
First of
all, Chapnin says, “it has turned out that the Russian Orthodox Church cannot
say anything articulate on the occasion of the centenary of the two
revolutions,” even though the one allowed the Patriarchate to reemerge and the
other brought the church untold suffering.
Second, “it
hasn’t been able to find a format for recognition of the genuineness of the
tsarist remains. In the church, there were and are opponents of recognition,
this group is quite large, and the church hierarchs do not want to take the
risk.
And third,
the Moscow Patriarchate “hasn’t been able to find a mechanism for the transfer
of St. Isaac’s Cathedral,” in large measure because whatever it does, it is
going to continue to face large crowds of protesters in the streets.
The
church has taken the same stance during the Mathilda controversy, Chapnin says.
It has said that “force isn’t Christian, but somehow no one condemns the
specific use of force which is taking place here and now,” lest it offend one
group of Russians or another.
As a
result, he argues, “the state and the official church are losing their monopoly
on symbolic capital,” and individual radicals “who aren’t meeting the necessary
resistance” are coming to the fore. And this of course is “the result of church
construction … which has cultivated a kind of Christianity without Christ.”
“Over the
last 10 to 15 years, the Russian church just like the state has been mainly
occupied with searchers for a post-Soviet identity. The state quite quickly …
chose as its goals the restoration of the empire.” And not surprisingly, given the church’s
links with the state, it followed allow.
“The
empire is now considered by many Orthodox as something sacred.” But the problem
is which empire, tsarist, Soviet or post-Soviet? In large measure because of the way the state
has proceeded, Chapnin says, the church has been forced to go a long way toward
“Soviet imperial consciousness.”
That of
course is what the fight over Mathilda is all about, but even once that film
recedes from public view, the church and its followers are going to have to
come to a decision on whether they support an Orthodox empire or a Soviet one
and whether they support only an Orthodox emperor or any emperor altogether.
Some have
drifted in the latter direction but “happily” not everyone. Another speaker at the meeting Chapnin
addressed suggested that “the less free from the state the church is, the more
this logic will be considered and the more will appear individual radicals.”
That isn’t a necessary result but rather one made likely and more disturbing by
the decisions of the hierarchy.
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