Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning: Orthodox Christianity and Post-Soviet Experience 9783631639733, 3631639732

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Alexander Agadjanian, Prof. Dr., graduated from Moscow State University and worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and at the Department of Religious Studies of Arizona State University. He currently teaches at the Center for the Study of Religions of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. He has published extensively on religions in the modern world, including Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity.

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Alexander Agadjanian · Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning

The book examines deep shifts in the religious life of Russia and the post-Soviet world as a whole. The author uses combined methods of history, sociology and anthropology to grasp transformations in various aspects of the religious field, such as changes in ritual practices, the emergence of a hierarchical pluralism of religions, and a new prominence of religion in national identity discourse. He deals with the Russian Church’s new internal diversity in reinventing its ancient tradition and Eastern Orthodoxy’s dense and tense negotiation with the State, secular society and Western liberal globalism. The volume contains academic papers, some of them co-authored with other scholars, published by the author elsewhere within the last fifteen years.

ERFURTER STUDIEN ZUR KULTURGESCHICHTE DES ORTHODOXEN CHRISTENTUMS

Alexander Agadjanian

Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning Orthodox Christianity and Post-Soviet Experience

ISBN 978-3-631-63973-3

15.04.14 14:40

Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning

ERFURTER STUDIEN ZUR KULTURGESCHICHTE DES ORTHODOXEN CHRISTENTUMS Herausgegeben von Vasilios N. Makrides

BAND 8

Zu Qualitätssicherung und Peer Review der vorliegenden Publikation Die Qualität der in dieser Reihe erscheinenden Arbeiten wird vor der Publikation durch den Herausgeber der Reihe in Zusammenarbeit mit externen Gutachtern geprüft.

Notes on the quality assurance and peer review of this publication Prior to publication, the quality of the works published in this series is reviewed by the editor in collaboration with external referees.

Alexander Agadjanian

Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning Orthodox Christianity and Post-Soviet Experience

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Agadjanian, Alexander, 1958Turns of faith, search for meaning : Orthodox Christianity and post-Soviet experience / Alexander Agadjanian. – 1 [edition]. pages cm. – (Erfurter Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des orthodoxen Christentums, ISSN 1612-152X ; Band 8) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-631-63973-3 1. Orthodox Eastern Church–Russia (Federation)–History. 2. Orthodox Eastern Church–Doctrines. 3. Church and social problems–Orthodox Eastern Church–Russia (Federation) I. Title. BX493.A433 2014 281.9'4709049–dc23 2014015387 Cover photo: An old church surrounded by new office buildings (St. Nicholas the Wonder-Worker Church at Tverskaia Zastava, downtown Moscow) ISSN 1612-152X ISBN 978-3-631-63973-3 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-03708-1 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-03708-1 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2014 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents Preface .............................................................................................................................................. 7 PART I. RESHAPING RELIGION AFTER THE SOVIET UNION ......................................... 11 1.

Revising Pandora’s Gifts: Religious and National Identity in the Post-Soviet Societal Fabric .................................................................................. 13

2.

Religion between Universal and Particular: Eastern Europe after 1989 ....................... 31

PART II. RELIGION IN RUSSIA: MAIN DISCOURSES AND MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS ............................................................................... 51 3.

Religious Pluralism and National Identity in Russia ..................................................... 53

4.

Public Religion and the Quest for National Ideology: Russia’s Media Discourse of the 1990s ......................................................................... 81

5.

The Search for Privacy and the Return of a Great Narrative: Religion in a Post-Communist Society ...................................................................... 103

PART III. RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY AND THE CHALLENGES OF LATE MODERNITY............................................................................................ 119 6.

The Social Vision of Russian Orthodoxy: Balancing between Identity and Relevance .................................................................................. 121

7.

Breakthrough to Modernity, Apologia for Traditionalism: The Russian Orthodox View on Society and Culture in Comparative Perspective ......................... 143

8.

Liberal Individual and Christian Culture: Russian Orthodox Teaching on Human Rights in Social Theory Perspective .......................................................... 167

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Individual and Collective Identities in Russian Orthodoxy......................................... 187

10.

Reform and Revival in Moscow Orthodox Communities: Two Types of Religious Modernity............................................................................. 203

PART IV. EASTERN CHRISTIANITY AND RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE .................................................................................... 223 11.

Eastern Christianities Today: Exploring Major Trends ............................................... 225

12.

Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age ............................................................................ 245

13.

Globalization and Identity Discourse in Russian Orthodoxy ...................................... 261

14.

Russian Orthodox Church in Europe: Soft Other with Quadruple Identity ................ 285

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 303

Preface As I decide, thanks to a kind invitation by the Erfurt Series in Eastern Orthodoxy, to publish in one volume my previous studies in a slightly actualized and modified form, 1 I feel that it is necessary to preface this volume with a text setting up a few general “braces” that would hold the entire construction together. These “braces” are, in fact, a few core ideas and objectives that have been animating for more than a decade all the papers included here. Throughout this period, my field has been the dynamic of religious phenomena in the former Soviet lands, with a special emphasis on Russia, with the post-communist “exit” generating its own logic and unique historical experience. However, I was always trying to relate these unique developments to the global shifts that have been unfolding through the turn of the century in both the field of the religious being and the field of religious studies. 1

First publication: Chapter 1: Europe-Asia Studies 53, no. 3 (May 2001) 473–88; Chapter 2: in: Santosh C. Saha (ed.), Religious Fundamentalism in the Contemporary World: Critical Social and Political Issues, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004, 71–90; Chapter 3: International Journal on Multicultural Societies 2, no. 2 (2000) 97–124. URL: http://www. unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol2/issue2/art2; Chapter 4: Journal for the Scientific Studies of Religion 40, no. 3 (September 2001): 351–65; Chapter 5: Social Compass 53, no. 2 (June 2006) 169– 84; Chapter 6: J. Sutton and W. van den Bercken (eds.), Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Europe, Leuven: Peeters, 2003, 163–82; Chapter 7: Religion, State and Society 31, no. 4 (December 2003) 327–46; Chapter 8: Religion, State and Society 38, no. 2 (June 2010) 97– 113; Chapter 9: (co-authored with Kathy Rousselet) in: C. Hann and H. Goltz (eds.), Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, 311–28; Chapter 10: Archives de sciences sociales des religions 162 (April-June 2013) 75– 94; Chapter 11: in: Peter B. Clark/Peter Beyer (eds.), The World’s Religions: Continuities and Transformations (Routledge Encyclopedia Series), London/New York: Routledge 2008, 189– 206; Chapter 12: (co-authored with Victor Roudometof) First published as “Introduction: Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age: Preliminary Considerations”, in: V. Roudometof, A. Agadjanian and J. Pankhurst (eds.), Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age: Tradition Faces the Twenty-First Century, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005, 1–26. In this volume, a shorter version is reproduced and the second part of the text, which makes a presentation of volume articles, is omitted; Chapter 13: (co-authored with Kathy Rousselet) First published in: V. Roudometof, A. Agadjanian and J. Pankhurst (eds.), Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age: Tradition Faces the Twenty-First Century, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005, 29– 57; Chapter 14: The work on this paper was a part of a three-year international project, supported by the VolkswagenStiftung, “Alte Grenzen und neue Fronten – Die orthodoxen Kirchen und die europäische Integration”. The first version of the paper was presented in March 2010 at a conference in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which was a part of this project. The proceedings of the conference will be published soon.

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The post-Soviet turn in Russia and in other lands of Eurasia was, indeed, tectonic, unprecedented in many ways: besides political, economic and cultural breakdown, it was a reshaping of the universe of meanings, a reconstruction of basic symbolic codes. The decades that followed were the years of challenges and choices urged by massive institutional restructuring. These choices, taken by individuals and social groups, were informed, in this situation of symbolic flux, by unfixed, fluid and sometimes unconscious patchworks of motives and reactions. Occasionally, these patchworks were getting a more or less cohesive shape legitimized through references to one of the “worldviews” or a combination thereof. Religion was one of such worldviews, which, among others, strongly affected the cultural landscape in the post-communist societies. Religion enjoyed a favorable environment of a formerly forbidden and freshly attractive fruit. Religion offered a different type of meaningful cosmos, which repudiated the distrusted super-rationalism of the officially standardized Soviet doctrine and, at the same time, rejected a new overwhelming craze: a super-pragmatic, cynical pursuit of wealth and success – not available for many and not fully acceptable. “Religion” was used as an umbrella term referring to a higher source of meaning, which seemed to provide a relative sense of stability in a vertiginous rush toward the unknown future. As an umbrella term “religion” included a fascinating range of forms. For some, it was a full-fledged sacred canopy, referred to a millennial tradition (such as Islam or Russian Orthodoxy); however, in fact, such reference yielded to a variety of interpretations of what the true, authentic “tradition” really meant. For others, religion was a universal, ecumenical repository of common wisdom, de-linked from particular traditions and therefore elastic for individual adjustments. For yet others, religion was a bricolage of mystical, esoteric beliefs and practices addressed to semi-visible, arcane forces underlying the life-process (these forces might be connected or not to a popular-scientific worldview). Finally, for some others, religion was an epiphenomenon of ethno-national identity, an attribute of an essentialist bio-cultural synthesis, serving to collectively-experienced empowerment. Religious meanings, in whatever of the above contexts, became frequent references in the post-Soviet cultural and political landscape, used in many spheres from commercial billboards to intellectual debates, political programs and artistic production; they entered the language of mass media and school curricula; in one word, they moved to the public sphere, in sharp contrast to their almost exclusively private existence back in the Soviet times. In this sense, the post-Soviet trends easily fit into the global trend of public religious resurgence. This shift coincided, however, with another important, and seemingly opposite, shift in society as a whole: the valoriza-

Preface

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tion of privacy, private freedoms and acts, private individual choices, including private religious choices and experiences. Therefore, we should look for religious meanings thriving at both levels: inner/individual and public. And yet, what might “thriving” mean in this case? The post-Soviet return of religion appeared as a “religious revival” and was perceived as such by most religious people and some scholars; but this was a rather misleading definition. Sure, new religious freedoms were in sharp contrast to the enforced, ideological secularism in the Soviet Union, and so these societies became “post-secular” in the direct sense of the word – another link to a theoretical frame lively discussed in academic research over the last decade. What did “post-secular” mean in this case, though? It would seem very naïve to affirm – even with pointing at impressive figures of newly built churches and mosques – that religions are back in forms and with attributes and functions they used to have in the pre-Soviet Empire. Nothing of this kind really happened, of course. Nor are the numbers of deeply committed, practicing believers comparable with the early twentieth century, which is used as a preferred reference point for revivalists. What then happened? In effect, the secular frame in politics and in the sociocultural fabric of new societies seemed to continuously dominate; but in the “postsecular” landscape the secular/religious divide certainly blurred, lost its “classical” relevance, and yielded to a new reconfiguration of meanings. The process was twofold. On one hand, “religions” consolidated into particular social enclaves linked to particular worldviews, more or less cohesive subcultures within an increasingly mixed (global), pluralistic landscape: a type of free associations providing specific “products” on sale at the “spiritual marketplace”. These enclave subcultures could be very small, like a tiny local sect or a New Age hangout; or a nationwide corporation playing power games, such as the Russian Orthodox Church. On the other hand, religions (or, rather, an abstract “religion” in singular) became diffused, crumbled into hundreds of splinter-meanings that have often lost their connection to an original “tradition” or “worldview” or “community” and can be found in various fields: arts, politics, moral debates and even economy (work and business ethics). These diffused bits-and-pieces of religious references are hard to catch and describe, and their significance hard to grasp, but this is what is very characteristic for the post-secular cultural landscape. All the chapters that follow are attempts, based mostly on Russian evidence, to comprehend the trends mentioned above: setting powerful symbolic meta-narratives (Russian Orthodoxy’s self-perception in Russia, within Europe and in the world where it claims to position as one of the religiously-determined “civilizations”); the challenges these narratives are faced with in a fluid, global environment (the context

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of legal pluralism and lived diversity); and the inner reshaping of the religious tradition (Russian Orthodoxy’s new visions of society; partial reforms; and identity quests – both individual and communitarian – generated by the post-Soviet socio-political and cultural dynamic). As I proceed, drawing upon the analysis of both texts and practices, to interpreting religious trends in Russia and other lands of the region, methodologically I position my research at the intersection of religious studies, sociology and anthropology. There is no need to warn the reader about the rapid change that continues to reshape the entire religious landscape after all these chapters were completed and about the sheer impossibility to catch up with these ongoing developments. I consider this book as a series of snapshots, fixing some of the major trends that are based on fluid empirical evidence, but also have some enduring general significance. During the entire period of writing these texts, I was part of a scholarly network looking at the same phenomena, and many colleagues’ studies are referred to on the pages of this book. Two of these scholars, Kathy Rousselet and Victor Roudometof, must be singled out for serving as creative co-authors (chapters 9, 12 and 13). I am also indebted to stimulating academic cooperation within international research projects, such as “Religious Practices in Russia” (2004–6)2; “Twenty Years of Transformations: Religious and Social Life of Orthodox congregations” (2008–10)3; “Alte Grenzen und neue Fronten – Die orthodoxen Kirchen und die europäische Integration” (2009–11)4, and some other smaller endeavors. My special thanks go to the editor of the Erfurt Series, Vasilios N. Makrides, who offered the very idea of the book and invested time in making its publication possible. ALEXANDER AGADJANIAN Moscow

2 3 4

Supported by the Centre franco-russe de recherches en sciences humaines et sociales in Moscow. Supported jointly by the Russian State Fund in Human Sciences and the Centre nationale de recherches scientifiques of France. Supported by the VolkswagenStiftung and animated by the University of Münster.

PART I

RESHAPING RELIGION AFTER THE SOVIET UNION

1.

REVISING PANDORA’S GIFTS: RELIGIOUS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE POST-SOVIET SOCIETAL FABRIC

According to a dominant epistemological paradigm, religion is associated with pastrooted forms of Weltanschauung and sociality that stand at odds with general historical trends. Although this episteme has been recently questioned with a number of new researches witnessing the crisis of secularization theories and the formation of the “post-secular”, in the 1990s the signs of religious revival, in whatever form or context, were considered to have no feasible basis and thus no eventual vitality. They were viewed as especially manipulative and subject to mobilization by ethnic, social and political entrepreneurs. In this article I will explore the validity of these assumptions as applied to the multifaceted cauldron of religious identities in post-communist societies, particularly in the former Soviet Union. The common vision is that the break-up of the communist system uncovered a “Pandora’s box” of old evil spirits competing with the good spirits of democratization. Religious identities are part of this dubious legacy from the frustrating past, providing a temporary and inefficient substitute for real needs and, at the same time, a convenient means of manipulation by resource-hunting elite groups. In this context the excessive exaltation of religion as identity resource can be seen as the reverse side of its demonization. My purpose here is to try to replace these value judgments with a more balanced vision of the religious processes in this area. Disintegration and Reintegration in Post-Soviet Eurasia The post-Soviet religious resurgence of the 1990s is certainly part of a larger societal process of change that started as early as the 1960s. It was a period of ongoing social and cultural diversification and, at the same time, of a reactive hardening of the Soviet regime; it made the institutional framework increasingly at odds with the changing society. This “pressure cooker” effect (Milanovic 1994) finally took the form of an exponential collapse of institutional structures. The institutional catastrophe in turn produced an identity crisis – not just a gradually evolving one but a rapid and painful turning point. The overall identity crisis that developed during the course of this disintegration was essentially dominated by the energy of particularism; it was in fact a crisis of old collective values and symbols, a multiplication and split of identity frames, from cosmic communist and imperial supranational frames down to frames of ethnicity, social strata, locality, family, other immediate groups and the individual. Although

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the crash of the Empire may be explained in terms of a “triumph of nations” (Carrère d’Encausse 1993) – as it seemed to be at least on the institutional level – the energy of particularism was a more general, multilevel phenomenon of structural reaction to totalitarianism. The rapid disintegration of society and the particularization of identities led first to a growing entropy in the societal system of meanings and symbols and then to an increasing anomie in the social and political realm. What appeared immediately was the need for a new kind of social cohesiveness that could create new cognitive frameworks and new social networks to cope with the dangerous processes of entropy and anomie. A natural outcome of this was the growing importance of such symbolically strong identities as those of ethnic, linguistic and religious grouping. Since Shils (1957) and Geertz (1963) these identities have been included in what is labeled “primordial bonds” related to collectivities rooted in the past and oriented backward, as opposed to “civic ties” related to a modem personality and a cognitive framework within modern civil society. What Shils and Geertz stressed in their works with regard to the new post-war nations, and what can easily be applied to the new post-communist nations as well, was the inherent schizophrenia between the two sets of anticipation: The peoples of the new states are simultaneously animated by two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and often actually opposed motives – the desire to be recognized as responsible agents whose wishes, acts, hopes and opinions “matter”, and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic modem state. The one aim is to be noticed: it is a search of identity, and a demand that identity be publicly acknowledged as having import, a social assertion of the self as “being somebody in the world”. The other aim is practical: it is a demand for progress, for a rising standard of living, more effective political order, greater social justice, and beyond that … of “exercising influence among the nations”. (Geertz 1963: 108)

The post-Soviet nations were obviously exposed to this dramatic choice. The powerful matrix of a liberal democratic nation-state that had dominated the public mind, the mass media and official programs ever since Sakharov’s and Gorbachev’s interpretations of universal values (obshchechelovecheskie tsennosti) apparently contradicted the parallel process of rising ethno-nationalism found throughout the Empire, and several conflicts (some of them violent) appeared to prove the general propensity toward primordial forms of cognitive and social frameworks. However, this picture needs to be more specific in several ways. 1. The overt conflicts, which have erupted in all post-Soviet societies, should not hide the fact that in most cases (except Chechnya, Abkhazia, North and South

Revising Pandora’s Gifts

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Ossetia, Fergana, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transdnestria) mass violence, as a qualitatively different form of conflict (Tambiah 1996: 292; Brubaker and Laitin 1998: 426), was avoided. 1 (The bloody Yugoslavian example looks like a different case that requires special explanations.) 2. The “civic” perspective – identified with parliamentary democracy, rule of law and cultural pluralism – was by no means eradicated from the national agenda, though it can be differently interpreted in the Baltic States, Russia, Armenia, Uzbekistan and other new states. 3. “Primordial bonds” were a major, and sometimes the most important, “material” for new nation building. The last statement should be further elaborated: what are usually called “primordial” and “old” bonds that for some reason struck back after the deep freeze of communist power or resurrected themselves from the past, are in fact contemporary phenomena differently structured and substantially reinvented. Latvian, Ukrainian or Tatar nationalism of the 1990s is very far from pre-war or pre-Revolutionary nationalism. The mere fact that ethno-nationalism always operates with the collective memories of the past (myths of origin, cultural heroes, martyrdom, etc.) does not mean that it is trying to revive the past. The founders of the interactionist approach to ethnicity and nationality (see Barth 1969; Eriksen 1993) have shown how ethnic identifies (this approach can be extended to the study of religious identities as well) are affected by their movable, flexible boundaries, which provide them with a communicational and functional volatility. Karl Deutsch (1966) argued that the “nation” was a fluid process rather than a constant organic entity or a set of cultural “givens”. It is quite remarkable that the “organic approach” has become common to the nationalist way of thinking. 2 According to Deutsch, however, the core of this “process of a nation” is the ongoing development of communications, the expanding of the public sphere as the framework of an “imagined community” (as tagged in Anderson 1983). To a great extent, and paradoxically, it was Soviet imperial management that, while attempting to create a supra-ethnic space of multiculturalism, produced at the same time the general political, legal, institutional and cultural framework for contemporary ethno-national mapping and identities (Beissinger 1997). The development in this area proves again that the tough opposition of “given” primordial bonds and civic ties, being a very convenient ideal-typical opposition, 1 2

Compare with Katz’s prediction that “the ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union is likely to be bitter, violent and protracted” (Katz 1994: 331); Katz simply draws this forecast from the analogy with the post-colonial history of Asian and African states. See Tishkov (1997) for an account of the “organic”, and sometimes biological, theories of nation as developed in Russia.

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cannot also be seen as consistent historically. What did happen, in my opinion, was a “normal” (unrelated to “normative”) way of imagining and the employment of “new-old” solidarities whose development was longstanding and had only radically accelerated in the last years of the Soviet Empire, being necessary in order to cope with the painful cognitive entropy and institutional anomie. Religious Identity: Its Rise, Levels and Functions The rise of religious sentiments and activities since the late 1980s is well documented: the main and crucial novelty was religious pluralism, brought about by the overwhelming wave of liberalization yet having no precedent in the history of Eurasia. In Russia, the legal pluralistic framework for religions established by the law on religious freedom of 1990 created what can be called a “spiritual marketplace”. This term, although shaped in a different context (Roof 1999), was relevant to the dense urban Soviet culture developing in the semi-underground of the 1970s-1980s and further legitimized in the 1990s. The “marketplace”, operating on the level of intellectual debate, publishing, organizational activities, mass gatherings and events, etc., provided a wide array of products fitting the various demands of consumers – those who in one way or another needed a form of religious identity. The gamut of possibilities ranged from traditional Orthodoxy, Islam or Judaism to the revived and fully legalized smaller minorities of established religions such as Protestant and Pentecostal Churches. It also included New Religious Movements of Western, Oriental or indigenous breed, and even para-religious magic and psychotherapeutic or healing practices. The engagement of individuals identifying with religions varied from a casual lip-service commitment or occasional participation in religious or para-religious events, to collective time-sharing and eclectic individual “seeking”, to profound conversions and a change of lifestyle. Following up with the Russian example, it must be added, however, that the level of faithfulness, measured by attendance at sacred ceremonies and by other religious practices, has hardly changed. Even through the most vibrant period, attendance was fluctuating at around 6 percent of the population for monthly attendance, and 2 percent for weekly attendance. Perhaps a category of “true believers” was needed to designate this minority with a dominant religious identity (see Kääriäinen and Furman 2000a). Filatov (1999: 140) argues that Orthodoxy is virtually a “new religion” for most Russians. Religious revivals in many other parts of Eurasia, such as Georgia or Ukraine, were definitely more spectacular. Yet, for Russia and other new states, the low level of “true religiosity” and the blooming of occult beliefs are sometimes

Revising Pandora’s Gifts

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seen as proof of the insignificance of the religious factor. Such a conclusion, however, seems not quite correct. It does prove that this religious surge was not something exceptional in specifically religious terms; neither was it a kind of spiritual awakening or mass popular movement (Agadjanian 2000a). Rather, it has to be seen as matching the broader process of growing cultural, social and political pluralism and participation occurring throughout society. What really matters here is not just the number of deep conversions but the whole spectrum of religious presence, in whatever form it might take. Thus the vogue for adult baptism and church weddings that grew exponentially at the beginning of the 1990s can perhaps convey even more truth, whatever kind of “real” commitment such practice might imply, about the popular state of mind and its responsiveness to religious symbols operating in society. Considering the religious boom as a thriving variety of possibilities, independent of what “true religiosity” actually means (terms such as “profound” or “true” religiosity are by no means clear in the Western context either), one can outline a manifold picture of needs that religious identity was expected to serve. One basic need was protection: one could not expect religion to provide complete and full protection, given the “religious non-musicality” of the post-atheist culture, but it certainly provided some safety in a time of growing cognitive entropy. Using Berger’s words, this drive showed a need for a “sacred canopy” that could provide some reference points commonly viewed as ultimate. Religious identity also functioned, in accordance with the general compensatory theoretical argument (Stark and Bainbridge 1987), as a means of compensation for the losses accompanying the painful restructuring of society. Another function of religious identity was that of socialization. Never playing such an important role in this respect as does religious identity in societies with generations “growing up religious” (Wuthnow 1999), the nascent religious affiliations in the post-Soviet context were able to provide a foothold for new social networks through parishes, religious organizations or family ties (Rousselet 1994). Creating such a new web of communications, patterns of solidarities, or even more permanent communities (like Orthodox brotherhoods and new “young” parishes, as well as some “home groups” or territorial groups of Pentecostal and other Protestant communities3), also had a protective intent – building a shelter against growing social anomie; this development fits the Durkheimian and social-networking interpretations of religious expansion. 3

These groups, which I studied in Moscow in 1995–7, created regular networking that relates to evangelizing, catechization, charity work and leisure; they also maintain ties with the provinces (see some results in Agadjanian 2000b). My other sample of Eastern cults showed another example of socialization through new religious identities (Agadjanian 1993).

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Reshaping Religion after the Soviet Union

Yet another need to which religion responded right from the beginning of the post-Soviet era was for cultural arguments in the public discourse. The major development of the late 1980s was the emergence (or restoration) of an integral Öffentlichkeit, a public sphere, in the sense of Jürgen Habermas (1989), out of the fragmented and rigidly divided public space of the Soviet period. The old distinction between private religiosity and public religion continued to be clearly felt, while religion became now an open repository of the symbols and ideas for the new public debate. Religious identity conveyed at least an illusion of consistency and a great deal of emotional power for those who introduced into the debate new (or reified old) ideas instead of the rapidly disappearing Marxist discourse. Consequently, as soon as religion became a part of the public discourse, religious identity became a source of political legitimation and mobilization. Although very few political movements have been religiously focused (and those that were, were not especially successful), the elements of religious charisma were widely used across the political spectrum in all former Soviet states, both by the ruling elites and the various opposition groups. Finally, and most importantly, religious identity became, both on the private and public levels, an auxiliary source of ethnic and national consolidation. To be sure, ethnic identity was by far the dominant consolidating force in the late Soviet Empire among non-Russians (including minority ethnicities inside the Russian Federation), while the Russians themselves were said to have a looser ethnic make-up. Ethnic identity was combined with state sovereignty (independent or autonomous polities) to produce a new national identity (see Figure 1). Ethnic identity

+

Sovereign polity

New national identity

Religious identity

Figure 1. Ethnic, religious and national identity Religion was one of the latent or active components that first supported revived ethnicity and then moved up to the level of nation building as one of the major cultural boundary markers: for instance, the Roman Catholic identity of Lithuania, the Christian identity of Armenia (as opposed to its Muslim surroundings), the Muslim identity of Tatars (in Christian-dominated Russia) or, to take a more complex case, the

Revising Pandora’s Gifts

19

specifically mixed Christianity of Ukraine (as opposed to the Russian Orthodoxy of the former imperial center).4 It is obvious that the process of building ethnic and national identifies is both particularistic and consolidational at one and the same time. It is true that the energy of disintegration dictated the course of events in the late years of the Empire, and in most cases negative self-definitions largely dominated (in most cases ethnic groups singled themselves out from the Sovietness identified with Russianness). The particularization created a complex map of ethnic minorities (like the Russians in the Baltic States or Central Asia) or “double minorities” (like the Russian minority within the Tatar minority republic of Russia). This process was accompanied and orchestrated by the “linguistic wars”, by academic and public battles over the past – reinterpretations of histories (Shnirelman 1996; Aimermakher and Bordyugov 1999) – and by the invigoration of religious feelings. Ukrainian Greek Catholicism or North Caucasian Islam were important underpinnings of the centrifugal impulse. At the same time, the ethnic and national upsurge in Eurasia became a major force of consolidation in the fragmented, atomized society once anchored by the superstructure of the imperial state but then brought precipitously to a dangerous degree of disintegration. In a social space with a civil society as weak and underdeveloped as was the case of the Soviet Union, ethnic and then national consolidation was the last and the most powerful reserve of cultural and social solidarity against advancing entropy and anomie. More than that, this consolidation was one of the major channels for conveying the civic values of democratic politics and popular participation (Tishkov 1997: 228). According to one hypothesis, “successful democratic transitions are improbable when national revolutions are incomplete” (Roeder, 1999: 856). Thus, any case of ethnic or national particularism can be seen, from a different perspective, as an example of both protective and prospective social consolidation. In particular, religious identity provided cohesive symbolic networks both on the level of an “imagined” public religion (the moral debates or state-supported church restoration/building campaigns in Russia) and on the level of private everyday religiosity (charities, brotherhoods, parish life, the mass embrace of rites of passage and self-reference as “believers”). In many cases religion was seen as a potentially “civilizing” and future-oriented, albeit past-rooted, force providing moral legitimacy for the democratic transition: for instance, religion was included as a part of the already mentioned “universal values” of democracy in the discourse of the late 1980s; it was included in Russia’s Christian-democratic programs (although unsuccessful politi4

Filatov and Shchipkov (1995) showed how the intellectuals of non-Russian Volga Orthodox nations (Mordovia, Chuvashia and Mari El) reified pre-Christian paganism as a part of an ethno-nationalist project; this extravagant development enhanced a distinct ethnic identity visà-vis Russian dominance partly associated with Orthodoxy.

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Reshaping Religion after the Soviet Union

cally), and it stimulated some of the networks of the democratically oriented intelligentsia (Sakwa 1992 and 1994; Hughes 1995; van der Zweerde 1999). 5 Particularism and consolidation – as trends of nation building – came together in the form of an antinomy, but every antinomy contains the seed of a real contradiction. Most of all, it came from the fact that national consolidation, with a typical emphasis on ethnic sources (either “primordial” or invented as such), produced the majorities and minorities in polities that had only a nascent supra-ethnic legal framework and a relatively weak civic inclusivity. In cases such as the Fergana Uzbek-Tajik clashes (1992), the Georgian-Ossetian strife (1990–2) and the Georgian-Abkhazian (1992– 3) conflicts, the exclusivist emphases of the warring sides and the lack of any such supra-ethnic framework were among the major causes of friction. In the case of the Baltic States, as soon as such a framework became stronger, the relations between ethnic Russians and Baltic ethnics became less acute. The emergence of steady “civic nationalism” in post-Soviet Eurasia was hardly possible, but a degree of “civic inclusivity” within a national and legal order can be a decisive variable for keeping inter-ethnic strife under control. Secular and Religious Elements in National Identity The distinction between secular and religious nationalism or, more broadly, between secular-based and religious-based national identity, is related to, but does not completely coalesce with, the opposition between “civic” and “ethnic” principles within a nation. Civic nationalism is usually described as inherently secular, while ethnonationalism may or may not include religious identity in any particular form (see Figure 2). In post-Soviet Eurasia, secular ethno-nationalism dominates in most cases. However, there are a number of groups with a particularly strong religious component as part of their ethno-nationalism, such as the North-Caucasian and Volga Muslims, the Western Ukrainian Greek Catholics, the Crimean Tatars and some others.6 And almost everywhere, in spite of incontestably secular legislation (the only exception being the attempt to introduce the Shari’ah in Chechnya), the religious component is somehow incorporated in each ethno-national identity. 5

6

The role that Christianity played in the democratic revolutions of such East European countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary is described by Herbert (1999: 281f.), who points out that religion provided “an institutional space”, “symbolic resource”, “international connection” and “intellectual force” for the democratic opposition. The cases of specifically religious definitions of national identity, such as in Pakistani, Israeli or Bosnian Muslims, are very rare worldwide, but there are a few exceptions in Eurasia such as the Adjarians (Georgian Muslims).

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National identity

Ethno-nationalism

Ethno-secular

Civic nationalism

Ethno-religious

Civil religion?

Figure 2. Forms of national identity The distinction between secularism and religious identity is inherent, to one extent or another, in any post-communist nation. This distinction appears independently of whether a “civic” element is present or not: the ethno-nationalist Central Asian ruling regimes of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are secular, though the civic elements are very weak. However, ethno-nationalism, especially with a lack of civic “counterbalance”, inevitably implies some religious connection. In the Central Asian cases, the strongest opposition to the regimes comes from Islamic movements, and in fact the ruling elites have to compete with the opposition for religious legitimation, making alliances with the more moderate and “cultural” rather than political forms of Islam. In this particular case, using part of the religions identity helps to keep the masses of people away from a more militant Islam in order to keep Muslim identity under control. The conflict of secular state and religious nationalism has been described as typical for the twentieth century, as shown for instance by Juergensmeyer (1993) and Asad (1999), and this is confirmed by post-Soviet developments. It is also important to see how far the conflict between the two goes, and to what extent these “civic” and “cultural” elements can find a balance between them. In religiously pluralistic societies like Estonia, Ukraine or Russia, political secularism is the only possible way to avoid conflicts, so secular and pluralist norms are pragmatically introduced in religious legislation. However, the religious component of the dominant ethnonational identity cannot be ignored, and to some extent happens to be included in the political process. Of course, it contradicts the secular principle, but at the same time it helps to avoid too strong an opposition between religious and secular nationalisms. In countries like Estonia, because of a more transparent communal mapping and a higher development of the civic elements within national identity (though ethnic nationalism still dominated in the 1990s), secularism is easily accepted and religious

22

Reshaping Religion after the Soviet Union

appeals are weak. The Russian circumstances are distinct: the combination of secular and religious identities is complex both on the federation level and on the level of ethnic (and religiously marked) minorities, as well as on the level of regional local management. To start at the all-Russian level, secularism (and the principle of separation of Church and State) is a constitutional norm (Article 14 of the 1993 Constitution) applied in the special religions legislation of 1990 and 1997. This legal framework reflected most of all the strong wave of purely civic expectations of the late 1980s, shared by a part of the elite, the mass media and those active within the urban population. It was also inspired by a highly favorable image of Western democratic patterns, in particular, religious pluralism. In fact, the 1990 law on freedom of conscience was said to be inspired by the American model of religious freedom. The civic component of the central Russian anti-communist movement was the strongest, while in former republics both inside and outside Russia the de-Sovietization was mostly ethnic, anti-imperial (and thus anti-Russian). However, the idea of ethnic and religious diversity, as a part of a civic liberal project, was contested from the very beginning by those alternative visions that imputed more significance to the ethno-national constituents of “Russian identity”. Such objections became stronger during the 1990s7 partly as a growing post factum perception of the disappeared Union as a Russian imperial polity, and of the postSoviet federation as an imperial construct. It is true, as Szporliuk (1989) wrote, that Russian intellectuals were either Empire-savers or nation-builders as early as the 1980s. Thus the ethno-national component of Russianness seemed to be relatively weak. The relative weakness of Russian ethnocentrism is sometimes romantically explained by the deeply rooted model of the Russian polity as a universal (and thus ethnically open) Christian Empire, a Holy Russia, the heir of Constantine’s Rome, analogous to the Western supra-ethnic notion of Christendom (Averintsev 1989; Narochnitskaia 1996). A more pragmatic explanation emphasizes the dual status of the Russian ethnos in the Soviet Union as de facto dominant but de jure incompletely formalized (Hosking 1999; Sandle 1999: 68). The two explanations meet, however, in recognizing the same subconscious meta-ethnical identification of Russianness within the broader area of former imperial influence; and this notion is not completely unrelated to the tendency by the Moscow Patriarchate to consider Eurasia as its “canonical territory”. 7

In her interesting analysis of different meanings of Russian national identity, Tolz (1998: 1018) came to believe that the official abandoning of the concept of “de-ethnicised nation and state building” happened in late 1992. However, I would not restrict this process to the elite’s rational choice explanation or to a concrete date.

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Simultaneously, however, there emerged an alternative ethnically bound notion of Russianness (as opposed to the traditional imperial one, with strong Eurasian connotations) – the process that started in late Soviet times with a certain official patronage (Brudny 1998) and was crystallized in the 1990s (Tishkov 1997: 234–40; Byzov 1996: 47). The new focus on a more ethno-cultural meaning of Russianness was a response to the anti-Russian ethno-nationalism that was appearing throughout the whole post-Soviet space, the growing ethnic migrations and the resulting ethnic homogeneity throughout Eurasia (Russia itself became more homogeneous, with the share of ethnic Russians within the Russian Federation reaching 82 percent, compared with 51 percent in the whole Soviet Empire 8). The precarious status of Russian minorities emerged everywhere, leading to real clashes such as those in Transdnestria, Estonia, Latvia and the North Caucasus; so, in a way, Russian ethnic consolidation was reactive and protective. Another rationale, also reactive and protective in nature, was the anti-Western tradition of Russian self-identity (both ethnic and imperial) that became more compelling with the downfall of the liberal reforms proclaimed by the post-communist Westernizers. Speaking more generally, this evolution in Russia was completely predictable: ethno-national identity is a necessary historical component of the process that we call “nation”, especially when it corresponds to a particular territorial frame. Thus, this process specifies the too simple distinction between Empire-savers and nation-builders, for “nation building” in all cases is by no means a pure “civic” enterprise but contains a certain admixture of ethnic and cultural identities. With respect to religion, the growing ethnic awareness and the need for auxiliary identity sources revived the slogan of an “Orthodox country”. As one very crucial development, the “Russian Orthodox” identity moved from its old imperial and meta-ethnic meaning to a more exclusive and ethnically bound one. In any case, it became more pronounced, more publicly visible, and more politically instrumental. Religious legislation has accordingly changed from the liberal laissez-faire model of 1990 to the state-regulated and much more restrictive model of 1997.9 This legal change reflected the earlier spontaneous evolution of the local legislatures and local management practice (Shterin and Richardson 1998; Mitrokhin 1998: 50f.), but 8

9

Both figures are taken from the last Soviet census of 1989. The population of Russia continued to drop throughout the 1990s and 2000s and there was a substantial immigration from former Soviet lands, but this dynamic only partly affected the share of ethnic Russians which was about 79 percent in 2002. The new “Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations” singled out several religions as traditionally dominant; introduced some economic, publishing and missionary restrictions pending a community’s terms of registration; and introduced clear distinctions between the legal status of foreign-based and domestic-based communities

24

Reshaping Religion after the Soviet Union

in the end it mirrored the comprehensive trend of growing ethnic consolidation. The crux of the process was a shift from absolute pluralism to a form of Orthodox-dominated selective pluralism of denominations labeled “traditional” (included in the group are also Islam, Buddhism and – sometimes – Judaism). The anti-sect and antiWestern pressure of the Orthodox Church might be one reason for this evolution (Polonsky 1998), but no less important was the growing mass receptiveness of Orthodox symbolic identity as a part of “nation-ness”. A survey showed a peculiar combination of religious identities in a Russian sample 10: 75 percent identified themselves as Orthodox (in a question containing a direct selection of religious identifications); 59 percent of the same sample “believed in God” (in a different question on this particular subject); 40 percent of the same sample called themselves “believers” (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000a). The essential point here is that there were more “Orthodox people” than those who called themselves “believers” or just “believers in God” (putting aside the distinction between the two latter categories). Keeping in mind a plurality of faiths within “believers” and the more detailed calculation (from the same survey) saying that about half of self-called “non-believers” and “atheists” claimed to be “Orthodox”, it becomes remarkably clear what exactly “Orthodox” can mean in such a mosaic of identity: it is in most cases a marker of ethnic consciousness. To take the example of the Tatars, the picture was more or less the same during the 1990s: strong visible Islamization of the cultural landscape, with a rather moderate growth in “purely religious” Islamic knowledge and practice, such as observing the Muslim holidays as “national days”. In the particular case of the Tatars, Islam was the last resort as an identity for people who were largely losing other ethnic features such as their material and literary culture and even their language. Therefore, “a national consciousness was being manifested through religious identity” (Musina 1998). This is a worthy point: in both the Russian and Tatar cases, and perhaps in several others, religious identity is overlapping with, or becoming a manifestation of, ethnic identity, and therefore of national identity (inasmuch as the latter is based on ethnocultural premises). It may be more obvious and imperative for a minority such as the Tatars, with a much higher degree of consolidation and need “to be different”, than for the dominant Russians, but the tendency seems to be similar in both cases. The instinctive propensity of the popular consciousness to perceive Orthodoxy as a Russian ethnic marker, or to perceive local Islam as an ethnic Tatar marker (to the point that pravoslavnyi or musul’manin – Orthodox or Muslim – become substitutes for 10 The sample represented Russian-dominated oblasti and did not include territories of the socalled “Muslim Republics”.

Revising Pandora’s Gifts

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relational ethnic self-appellation) have little connection either to religious awareness or to the meta-nation messages of “universal religions”. 11 This spontaneous ethnification of religious identity correlates both with the interpretive efforts of the clergy and the broader public discourse. Orthodox writers, prominent priests and hierarchs, although critical of “national intolerance”, are divided between the conservative traditionalism of white clergy and the nativist (pochvennyi) fundamentalism thriving in some influential monasteries, both kinds being Russocentric (Polonsky 1998: 24f.). Though this “Church nationalism” is an old tradition within the Russian Church and, more generally, within Eastern Orthodox Christianity with its ecclesiastical model of autocephaly (Kitromilides 1989), the new evidence is clear: church latent (and sometimes open) support of the two Chechen wars of 1994–6 and 1999–2000 is one manifestation of this “ethnification”. The more rigid position of the church in the Ecumenical Movement through the 1990s is another example. Public discourse in the Russian mass media, a huge new mirror and powerful instrument of national consciousness, created an image of Orthodoxy that was sometimes sarcastically qualified as a “phantom” (Filatov 1999: 141f.). This image was contrastingly assessed by “liberals” and “traditionalists”, who displayed little wish to compromise, but both sides did proceed from the link between religion and the national idea – benign for the former and malignant for the latter. Orthodoxy suits the creation of this national idea that is said to be a traditional necessity of the Russian polity (Wozniuk 1997). This public, or deprivatized, religion (to use the term in the sense forged in Casanova 1994) is congenial to the popular ethnic instinct discussed above, or perhaps even had induced it, for since the 1988 millennium of Russian Christianity (celebrated with much more solemnity than the second millennium of world Christendom), it was the mass media, rather than the church or the Bible (the mosque or the Koran), that was the main source of religious awareness. These religious and media debates, coupled with the attempts by the state to employ religious elements for legitimation purposes, have contributed to the creation of another kind of religion that is going on along with the process of national consolidation – religion as a form, or at least a part, of a national ideology – in a process once described by Kedourie (1960: 70–80). This religion-as-ideology is far from the unique experience of the Western “civic religion”, because it does not care to avoid the damage that the application of particular religious elements or speculations can 11 The Russian religious minorities are more explicitly universalistic; one can feel the hidden polemic with the Orthodox hierarchy in the message of the chief Russian Baptist: “There are no grounds for claiming that a certain nation has a mission for other nations. The Church has this mission; but the Church does not consist of one nation or of those who belong to one Christian confession.” (Konoval’chik 1995: 196).

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bring to the civic idea of religious pluralism. The first 10 years of post-imperial pluralism was a short time to see the development of a new tradition, but it is a sufficient period to see how the need for identity becomes manifested in the “nationalization of religion” on both private and public levels. Religion, Ethnicity and the Broader Social Context: The Issue of “Manipulation” It is still not clear from the previous discussion to what extent religious identity, like ethnic and other particularistic identities, is manipulated or even invented by elites (local, regional, central) for purely instrumental purposes. The extent seems to be very substantial indeed: as Tishkov (1997: 256) learned from his personal administrative experience, it was astonishing “how local leaders have learned so quickly to use mobilization tools, legal procedures, material incentives, and personal contacts to influence and direct the power control”. A multivariable analysis by Treisman (1997: 247f.) showed that the “power bargain” between local and central elites was the main factor of separatist activism in Russian ethnic regions, compared with such variables as ethnic, religious and other forms of revival. He concluded that the “social and cultural capital” of primordial bonds was conspicuously used by the local leaders for political mobilization in these power games. Ivekovič (1997) showed how the link between ethnicity and religion was abused for chauvinistic claims in Armenia (during the Nagorno-Karabakh war), in Georgia (under the first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia) and in Yugoslavia. In their apt repertory of scholarly approaches to ethnic violence, Brubaker and Laitin (1998: 434 and 437) distinguish an influential “rational action” type of approach, which explains the cultural (ethnic, religious) conflicts within the frame of “game” and “strategy” theories, eventually emphasizing the manipulative political use of cultural resources. Tolz (1998: 1017f.) finds only political interests in the process of nation definition in Russia. Shnirelman (1996) sees mostly political goals in the attempts by Tatars and Chuvash elites to exalt their history. From another angle, in their analysis of the correlation of different kinds of identities in three post-Soviet countries, one group of scholars showed a trend in the steady increase in importance of social identities (class, status or profession) at the expense of a diminishing emphasis on ethnic and religious affiliations; they use these results to support their critique of the culturalist thesis of ethno-religious explosion (Miller et al. 1998). The amount of research “unmasking” the ethno-religious phenomena as overlapping with, or even dependent on, other social identities and eventually being manipulated by politicians is so big that it would be simply unreasonable to deny these

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27

links. It is totally correct to see the post-Soviet “entropy and anomie” as a “window of opportunity” open for political and social mobility, a struggle for restructuring economic resources and upgrading individual and group status. And it is quite likely that, in many cases, ethnicity or religion can he used (and in most post-Soviet cases were used) as sources of mobilization for achieving these goals. Two considerations, however, need to be outlined at this point. On the one hand, it seems senseless to use the results of such studies as an argument against the “primordialist” vision simply because this vision, in its strictly academic form, ceased to be taken seriously long ago. The intention to fight “primordialism” in academia seems like tilting at windmills. (It is true, however, that in politics this simplistic vision can be found and often serves as a demagogic veil or mobilization tool.) Yet, on the other hand, the manipulation thesis seems to run to another extreme, failing to see, in Weber’s words, “the other side of the causal chain”. It is not clear why ethnic and religious “entrepreneurs”, driven by clearly “materialist” stimuli, choose ethnic and religious identities (or proto-identities, if they are still to be created or invented) for their aims, and why they finally succeed in “creating” and mobilizing these identities. Why do these ethnic and religious identities (or proto-identities) provide “cultural and social capital” that can be experimented upon, reified, multiplied and, finally, manipulated? In my opinion, Weber’s Wahlverwandtschaft, or “elective affinity” explanatory strategy, would be the most appropriate. For example, in post-Soviet “ethnic revival” one can find an elective affinity of such completely different factors as the legacy of imperial “ethnic engineering” and its peculiar combination of real status divergences with ideological “equality” discourse; the legacy of semi-hidden historical memories, prejudices and disputes; social differentiation that brought about new economic incentives; the maturing of national political elites and their political claims; the growth of intellectual elites with strong ethnocentric motivations; and finally, the enormous need for communal solidarity. All these factors easily coalesced in different combinations in these unique historical circumstances of a rapidly declining Empire. Similarly, religious identity also appeared at the intersection of all these different developments and circumstances. Although attaining various levels of specifically religious commitment and publicity, religious identity provided a major symbolic legitimation for ethnic, national and other group solidarities in a disoriented society. Religious symbolic orders latently retained, in spite of long state pressure, some collective memories that became relevant as reference points in the time of disintegration. Certainly they took on, in most cases, new (non-traditional) forms and became highly manipulated by the mass media and by politicians, but they might have been reconstructed and instrumentalized only because they meant something for large numbers of people.

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Conclusions My purpose in this essay was a certain revision of the “gifts” that flitted out from the Pandora’s Box of post-communist Eurasia. It is simply incorrect to consider the reemerging ethno-religious identities only as evil spirits of past hatred, maliciously manipulated in power games and leading to animosities and conflicts. 12 First, these spirits are not necessarily evil, for in many cases they provided a primary solidarity and self-confidence during the rapid institutional crash. Second, they are not necessarily past-oriented, a sort of reactionary backlash. On the contrary, they are being produced by a new configuration of inter-ethnic and inter-religious encounters and are mostly focused on current needs, while being highly updated cognitively and practically. 13 Third, their manipulation, in most cases, is certainly very far from a crude or totalitarian Machiavellianism, which was hardly possible in the general democratizing environment with its lax control over information flow. And fourth, religious identities did not necessarily lead to conflicts, but in some cases perhaps prevented the transition of these conflicts to the level of violence. It goes without saying that religious, as well as (and especially) ethnic, identities can be “evil, reactionary, manipulative and conflict generating”. However, one should abstain from making generalized value judgments describing such a complicated and manifold phenomenon as the post-communist identity fabric. The particular cases can be as dissimilar as the highly exclusive and monolithic national syndromes present during the wars in Georgia, Azerbaijan or Yugoslavia; the dual form of an ethno-civic balance mingled with a precarious denominational pluralism as in Ukraine (Miller 1997); or the secular ethnic nationalism challenged by more integrationist Muslim religiosity in Central Asia. In every single case, any particular configuration depends on many things, such as a certain dynamic of inter-ethnic encounter (sharper in Chechnya and Dagestan, softer in Tatarstan); religious and ethnic exclusiveness (stronger in Muslim and weaker in Buddhist regions); the level of “civic engagement” between communities (Brubaker and Laitin 1998: 435) in heterogeneous societies (compare Estonia and Moldova); particular positions of religious elites (like the good cooperation of what Filatov calls “Euroislam” and “Eurorthodoxy” in 12 Himmelfarb (1993) writes of the “dark and bloody crossroads where nationalism and religion meet” (cited in Ivekovič 1997). In his very interesting but, in my view, one-sided article on nationalism during the time of the Russian Revolution, Buldakov (2000) describes the breakup of the Russian Empire as a “chaos of ethno-phobias”, corrupting the masses and downgrading the people to the level of psychopathic tribalism. His description contains a clear allusion to post-Soviet ethnic revival. 13 For an interesting account of the indisputable Modernity and Post-Modernity of religious fundamentalism, see Grew 1997.

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Tatarstan (Filatov 1998: 276); the character of the ruling political elites (the old party atheists and internationalists who ruled in most of Eurasia in the 1990s being eventually replaced by a new generation of leaders inclined to a more resolute incorporation of religious and ethnic components into the national identity without losing “control” over them). In general, the entire paradigm of ethnoreligious-versus-civic duality seems not to be relevant when going too far beyond its careful use as just an excellent idealtype analytical device. Van der Veer showed that Protestantism was as important a source of the modem British nation as was a reified Hinduism for the modern Indian nation; he pointed out that the “Enlightenment did not kill religion in Europe” (van der Veer 1999); he referred to Mauss (1969), who transcends the “primordial-civic” duality, and criticizes Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Habermas 1989) that calls secularity a feature par excellence of Modernity. 14 The point is not that this last statement is incorrect, as van der Veer believes, but that it is not counterbalanced by recognizing the crucial role that the religious discourse and religious networks, interrelated with ethnic identities, played in the framing – and legitimizing – of modern nations. As a contentious example, Iran in the early twenty-first century is emerging from the “Islamic Republic”, perhaps as a much more coherent nation in the modem sense. In the quite different setting of the United States, besides the everlasting debate over the religious roots of American democracy and “civil religion”, at the end of the twentieth century the religious identities were said to sustain ethnic immigrant communities in a number of ways and for a number of feasible reasons (Warner and Wittner 1998) and to retain many other functions widely documented in the growing sociology of religion (Sherkat and Ellison 1999). The “ethnification cascade” and the “religious renewal” of post-Soviet Eurasia show many examples of the multifunctional identity fabric relevant to contemporary developments and challenges.

14 Herbert’s account of the theoretical debate over Habermas and Touraine’s sociology of Modernity follows the same line and refers to recent East European experience to show how religion is interwoven in the discourse and practice of democratization (Herbert 1999: 285–8). The further development of Habermas’ thought in the 2000s showed an obvious revision of former emphases and a growing openness to include religious voices in the European Öffentlichkeit.

2.

RELIGION BETWEEN UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR: EASTERN EUROPE AFTER 1989

Religion vs. Global Culture: To Resist or to Accept? This chapter will attempt to summarize some recent religious developments in Eastern Europe 1 with one specific perspective in mind: to investigate the ways how religions of this area in the post-Cold War era have responded to the advance of “global culture”. Responding to global culture – or to whatever we can call a trend thereto or an expression thereof – means to revisit a religion’s eternal claim to represent the universal while being constantly bound to a particular entity: community, ethnos, polity, or tradition. In the past, universal and particular have been always dialectically linked in the history of religions. They might simply ignore this distinction as a problem, as in isolated tribal communities whose particular gods were the only conceivable source of universal order; they might have tried to cultivate a certain universal divine space that would overcome particular regional preferences while at the same time tolerating them, as in classical Greco-Roman oecumene; they might have posited a hierarchy of access to the ultimate universal truth, with a particular community being clearly marked as having an exclusive mission to be the God’s people, as in the Judaic theology of covenants; they might have established an imperial expanse combined with exclusive dualistic regime of messianic warfare with infidels, as in classical Islam or medieval Christianity; or to postulate a more inclusive universalism recognizing particularities as only accidental, outer forms of an essential inner unity, as in modern colonial Christianity. The contemporary situation seems to create, however, a new intricate complexity. In a Problemstellung article Roland Robertson and JoAnn Chirico were the first to explore the religious resurgence against a backdrop of a new condition of globality. They indicated the tendency toward a “relativization of personal identity” and “a near-global conception of selfhood”, as an expression of the broad globalization process. An outcome of, or a response to, this tendency, “[t]he resurgence of ‘fundamentalistic’ promotion of particularistic ideologies and doctrines (local, ethnic, national, civilizational and regional)”, may be seen as a backlash, a reestablishment of clear contours of identity. This outcome, as Robertson and Chirico emphasized, 1

My focus will be primarily on post-communist Eastern Orthodox nations, with addition of the cases that do not fall into this category but share some commonality, as well as providing partly contrasting properties, such as Greece (Orthodox Christian, but never communist) and Poland (post-communist, but Roman Catholic). My main focus, however, will be Russian Orthodoxy.

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“does not by any means constitute counter-evidence [against globalization], for…the recent world-wide assertion of particularistic ideas is heavily contextualized by the phenomenon of increasing globality” (Robertson and Chirico 1985: 233, 235 and 237). In what way, then, may religion be thought of in this new global context? In another article William R. Garrett and Roland Robertson posit four possible answers: 1. The global order is predicated on normative rubrics without a vital connection to any religious tradition; it would mean to assert that there is no place for religions in this radically secular global order. 2. On the contrary, religions may be thought of as “contribut[ing] significantly to the development of patterns of universal order”. 3. As an intermediary position, the essentially secular universal order would, nonetheless, “afford niches wherein religious groups or sentiments may find some degree of security”. 4. As the fourth possibility (which means, in fact, to conceive of religion in an “entirely different mode”), religion may become a “genre of expression, communication, and legitimation [of collective identities and individual needs] rather than simply an institutional enclave alongside political, economic, and familial entities, as was [religion’s common image] during the modern era.2 While providing these four patterns of possible development, Garrett and Robertson judiciously abstain from viewing them as excluding each other; in fact, as the totality of further studies show, each of these four patterns is partly, if not exclusively, valid. Further in the same article, Garrett and Robertson treat the issue of universalism and particularism. Deriving from the general notion of the dialectical relationship between the two concepts, they articulate an important idea: the assertion of particular cultural enclaves, of particular identities (national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, or, indeed, those that intermix all the previous), is a necessary means of their self-preservation “in face of their global participation” (Garrett and Robertson 1991: xix). In other words, a human community (as, indeed, an individual, too) must protect its particular self, in order to participate in the global culture as a self. In my opinion, this law is valid for all four tentative prospects described above: to inscribe oneself into the universal is only conceivable through self-determination. Peter Beyer makes the same point: all religious responses to the global universum are driven by an objective need not to reject it, but to become a part of it. In the Iranian Revolution, he assumes, “the central thrust was [only] to make Islam and 2

See Garrett and Robertson 1991. This fourth option is the view that Robertson (1991: 282) seems finally to embrace.

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Muslims more determinative in the world system, not to reverse globalization”; in this way all religions, therefore, were instrumental in the elaboration and development of the global culture (Beyer 1994: 3). As Beyer proceeds, he refers to modern movements (such as Boxer rebellion, Arya Samaj, and others, – a list that might include, indeed, some more recent ones), which constituted themselves as “religions” or “traditions” and thus inscribed themselves into the new cultural order (ibid., 54). For Robertson, “globalization itself produces variety – more accurately, it encourages heterogeneity-within-homogeneity…” (Robertson 1991: 283). At the same time, we can expand the global culture, or, more specifically, a new universal taxonomy is being spelled by the self-asserting narratives of particular identities, by their very efforts to inscribe themselves into the global whole. Beyer further speaks of two major religious responses to global culture: the fundamentalist negative rejection and the inclusive positive acceptance. A striking paradox that he points out is that the first, negative reaction may be considered as more instrumental in the creation of this new universal taxonomy than the second, positive one. Why? Because in the second case a religious tradition “is reoriented toward the global whole and away from the particular culture with which this tradition identified itself in the past”; instead of its past content, this religion “takes up the values of the emerging global culture” (Beyer 1994: 10). After such a transformation, religion is dissolved in the global culture and loses the ability to convey “specifically religious information…that people could not get from non-religious sources” (ibid., 87). Not only is such religion deprived from its particular cultural identity, it even loses its specifically religious content. This unidentified self contributes nothing to the universal. On the contrary, a religion which is resistant, well-articulated, and clearly conscious of its particularity, assumes a certain locus in the new universal taxonomy. The more expressively particular is the self of a religion (religious movement, community, or group), the stronger is its specifically religious symbolic and social capital. Therefore, the particularistic expression and the resistance against the universal may be inferred as a typical religious strategy and, paradoxically, a more assured way to be inscribed into the new universal taxonomy! Let us pause upon this preliminary hypothesis and move on to its further elaboration, while directly tying it to the East European data.

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Reshaping Religion after the Soviet Union

Religions in Eastern Europe: Choosing Particularistic Strategies in Negotiating a New Field Religion has been omnipresent in former communist countries since the late 1980s in a number of ways, in full conformity with a general trend of public religion’s resurgence (Casanova 1994; Ramet 1988, 1989 and 1998). After the collapse of communist ideologies and liberalization, religions quickly moved to the center of public discourse. Religious leaders and organizations suddenly became prominent players in political games. Religions provided a set of references both for dismantling of communist regimes and for a swift ethno-national mobilization, leading to ethnic clashes but sometimes creating islands of social stability in the critical and chaotic times of transition (Agadjanian 2001a). Post-imperial wars in former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were at least partly orchestrated and sometimes motivated religiously. The introduction of religious pluralism was followed by direct inter-denominational tensions and clashes both over property and souls along traditional and new lines (Witte and Bourdeaux 1999). These evidences of religious presence seem to be a rather motley bunch of illassorted phenomena. Let us try to introduce some qualifications that would help us to comprehend it in a more methodical way. The first statement to be made is that in spite of a significant growth of religious presence or religious prominence, in no case were religions able to claim any determinate, let alone exclusive, role in defining the nation-building or cultural climate. Although religious references, in most cases, have directly entered into the discourse of national identity and political practice, the religious legislation reflected this discourse only in a muffled way and handled religion in a clearly secular manner. 3 Overall, after fifteen years of change, religions 3

The level of constitutional disestablishment varies. “Eastern Orthodox Christianity shall be considered traditional religion in the Republic of Bulgaria” (Article 13.3). In Georgia “[t]he state recognizes the special importance of the Georgian Orthodox Church in Georgian history but simultaneously declares complete freedom of religious belief…” (Article 9). In Macedonia the Orthodox Church is singled out in an educational clause with “other religions” (Constitution of 1991: Article 19.3). The Romanian Orthodox Church is not mentioned in the Romanian Constitution, but the state supports religions in organizing charities and education in public schools (Constitution of 1991: Articles 29 and 32.7). The most clear establishment statement is found in the Greek 1975 Constitution, which is adopted “[i]n the name of the Holy and Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity”, proclaims Orthodoxy “prevailing religion” and prohibits proselytism (Part I, Section II, Article 3.1–3; Part II, Article 13.2). Poland is another case with a special constitutional mention of one, Roman Catholic, denomination (Constitution of 1997: Article 25). In all these cases freedom of (other) religions is, however, constitutionally guaranteed. Other Constitutions abstain from making any special references, while some, such as the Ukrainian, does refer to “our responsibility before God” (Preamble of the

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seem to be included as an institutional and discursive field in the diverse, complex, and predominantly secular texture of new societies. Therefore, religions faced the need to reshape themselves in such a way as to be able to operate within this newly defined field. For a religion, this “being-in-the-field” means to engage in two types of negotiation. First, it is the negotiation with other societal fields in the new open space – in fact, transnational, global space. The issue at stake here is the relevance of religion to the secular and global world, and it requires each religious tradition to elaborate a new set of ideas and mechanisms that would define the measure and the model of its relations with political power, legislation, civil society, economy, new mass cultural idioms, and the condition of globality. For Eastern Orthodox Churches it was a task of dramatic opening, of profound (and painful) restructuring, of acquiring and interpreting of a new language of Modernity, of which they were cut off for decades of isolation and repressions. The second type of negotiation, which partly originated from the same fact of a new global openness, is the negotiation within the religious field, or the competition for this field, with other religious forms of an unprecedented variety. The main issue here is that of domination. “Religious pluralism” that the Eastern Orthodox Churches faced in the 1990s was an absolutely new context, even in comparison to the religious diversity that they might have experienced in old imperial settings of the early twentieth century. The negotiation and conflicts that have arisen within the religious field of this area belong to four major cleavages: Orthodox versus Roman Catholics and Uniates, or Greek Catholics (all along the line of the old Latin-Greek divide); Orthodox versus Western and local Protestants; Orthodox versus Muslims; Orthodox versus New Religious Movements. 4 The process of self-reshaping along these two lines exacerbated the fundamental internal tension within each Eastern Orthodox tradition: the problem of identity. On the one hand, the new situation of openness prompted an overture and change. On the other hand, any change is always accompanied by a clear redefinition of the self of a tradition. While opening itself, a tradition simultaneously has to clearly define the limits of this opening, and thus the limits of the self. While inscribing itself in a new order of things, the borders of self should be clearly circumscribed. A religious

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1996 Constitution), while some, such as the Russian, clearly declares secularism (Constitution of 1993: Article 13). Special religious legislation, however, may introduce substantial corrections (like in the Russian case where a special 1997 law clearly created a hierarchy within religious pluralism). It is out of question that most of these cleavages (except the last one) are by no means new, but they have been exacerbated in the last decades and especially after the disintegration of the communist system that managed to muffle them up.

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tradition, being exposed to the challenge of openness, reacts by folding up, or compressing. We can call this process the dialectic of overture and compression, in which a tradition tests a precarious balance of reform and identity-protection. Correspondingly, overture implies a universalist discourse, while the compression, a particularistic discourse. In practical terms, this innate tension, revealed through negotiating of both relevance and domination (as described above), often leads to ideological and/or institutional divisions within each religious tradition. Some Churches were on the brink of complete schism but it did not occur in most cases.5 It is certain, however, that everywhere the strain along these lines was and remains very tight. The famous Serbian bishop, Nikolaj Velimirović (1880–1956, canonized posthumously), reflected this strain in his theology: his initially opening project of going beyond Christian EastWest rupture was finally replaced by a staunchly protective and particularistic emphasis on St. Sava’s legacy implying two key patterns: Orthodox monasticism and Serbian ethnic identity. Justin Popović (1894–1979), Velimirović’s younger contemporary (and also a saint of the Serbian Church), carried this trend of compression to a radical intolerance toward “heretical” Western Churches and the West in general (see Bremer 2003; Groen 1998: 120–2). In Greece, trends of renewal and ecumenism anchored in such periodicals as Synaxe and Kath’ Hodon and such institutions as the Society for Ecumenical Studies in Thessalonica, are counterweighed by the lingering monastic fundamentalism (centered at Mt. Athos), diffused Old Calendarist movement, and widespread anti-Latinism and anti-Westernism (Groen 1998; Makrides 2005a). In the Catholic Poland similar tensions occurred after the same pattern, with two clearly discernible religious currents formed in the middle of the twentieth century, liberal and populist; within the clergy, this division put forward people like the late Józef Tischner or Archbishop Józef Życiński of Lublin, as compared to a much more conservative mainstream clergy and the Lublin Catholic University in general (see, e.g., Pace 1994). The internal tension has been also reflected in an alteration of various phases of post-communist religious developments. In the last years of communist regimes, the religious language was largely interwoven into the anti-communist liberal discourse; in this mixture, religious symbolic capital enhanced the liberal political agenda,

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In Bulgaria we can speak of a split between the Synod headed by Patriarch Maxim and a rival Synod headed by Bishop Innokentii (Petrov); in Ukraine the Church schism in early 1990s (in fact, institutionally, it was a schism within the Russian Church) was caused by other reasons (see below in this section); in Russia the split between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church Abroad goes back to the early 1920s. (The formal reunification was achieved in 2007).

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whereas the religious vocabulary developed strong universalist connotations: religion was believed to be the utmost expression of “universal values”, repressed, repudiated, and distorted by particularistic, class-bound, and partisan communist ideology. Catholic or Orthodox traditions were referred to as repositories of universalism. This was a common motif of the glasnost’ discourse in the late Soviet Union. Polish Catholicism was, however, a more effective religious force contributing to anti-communist mobilization, partly because, in contrast to the Orthodox Churches in the region, it had an international scope and largely intact symbolic resources; 6 another telling example from Poland would be the evolution of a popular Catholic “Oases” movement from being a germ of the civil society under the communist regime to becoming a grouping with a conservative “integralist” agenda in the 1990s.7 This religious universalism was, however, a part of a predominantly lay, not clerical, discourse. Nevertheless, the degree of Churches’ direct social and political involvement soared. Immediately, this involvement became highly controversial both within and outside the Churches. Rather quickly, the process of overture has been replaced, or overweighed, by the opposite trend of compression, and the particularistic discourse has become clearly dominant among the clergy. The mainline religious institutions were becoming more and more conservative in most cases, with modernist and anti-modernist extremes occupying marginal niches, the latter being much more visible and articulate than the former. The same Catholic Church in Poland, after playing a crucial role on the initial stage of “transition”, moved significantly to the pole of particularism, assuming the highest degree of nationalism that the global structure of the Roman Catholic Church can allow to a national ecclesiastical body; this nationalism is expressed by some organizations with strong Catholic identity, such as the Fellowship of Christian Nationalists (who were once a part of Solidarność), the Liga Polskich Rodzin (Polish Family League) party, Radio Maryja, and a peasant Samoobrona party. On most issues the Church lost the dynamism of overture and entrenched itself on definitely conservative stands (Szawiel 2000). 8 6 7

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Another factor was certainly a rigid authoritarian structure, but its effectiveness was largely due to the fact that the focus of authority was located abroad, namely in Vatican. See Johnston 1992. Yet another huge factor that cannot be omitted was the Polish Pope. Cf. Michel’s (1990) important thesis about the Catholic Church being a location of civil society in communist Poland. On the evolution of “The Movement of Living Light”, or “Oases”, in Poland, see Mucha 1993. This last case suggests an interesting precision in the pattern I am illustrating: the pulsating rhythm of opening and closing, overture and compression, is patterned by larger trends of social change. Although not as endemic and far-reaching as in Eastern Orthodoxy, ethnic and national particularism within Roman Catholicism has a long history, going back at least to the creation of Gallicanism in fifteenth-century France; contemporary Mexican or Philippine Catholicism are unmistakably parochial; more examples can be added.

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The central issue where the compression phase became the most visible is that of religious pluralism, the issue where the dominant religions felt most vulnerable; the theme of identity and the theme of domination over the newly outlined “religious field” are tightly intermixed in this issue. To insure their continuous control over the field, the dominant Churches developed a discourse of the spatial and temporal privileges. In terms of space, they claimed their responsibility over certain territories by right of canonical law or custom (such as “canonical territory”, ascribed to each Eastern Orthodox Church according to norms of ecclesiastical autocephaly). In terms of time, the Churches put forward the notion of “traditional religion” as opposed to all the rest, a new cultural dichotomy construct legitimizing a special historical link to a nation or ethnicity. 9 Ethnic and/or national particularism that religions tend to express is definitely the major phenomenon. Now, in almost all Eastern Orthodox countries the denominational line concurs with ethnic boundaries, and the level of religious “compression” positively correlates with the level of ethno-nationalism: groups such as some brotherhoods in Russia, are both most fundamentalist (and anti-ecumenical) and nationalistic. 10 Russian Orthodoxy’s ostensibly transnational discourse of a “canonical territory” roughly corresponding to the former imperial space is clearly particularistic – first, because of its obvious denominational sensibility, and second, because this discourse is by no means transethnic, for their main addressees are ethnic Russians (or at least Russian-speakers) everywhere. Even in those cases when, such as in Ukraine or Belarus, the Moscow Patriarchate speaks of a transnational “spiritual unity”, the ethno-centric (Slav, or Eastern Slav) implication is inherent.11 Ukraine represents an interesting and convoluted example. The main religious developments there are very much defined by the vicissitudes of the quest for ethnonational identity: as ukrainstvo (Ukraineness), an ethno-cultural entity, should get free from Russian imperial legacy, so must a new ecclesiastical entity be created to match the new national project. An immediate result was the split of the Church: one 9

The Russian legislation singles out “traditional religions” enjoying a preferential treatment; in Rumania the same discourse goes back to the 1930s, see Gurau 2000; in Bulgaria Orthodoxy is set apart in the Constitution as “traditional”; in the same vein, the Greek Constitution distinguishes the so-called known (gnostes) religions, also a rather old term of legal classification (Alivizatos 1999: 28). 10 The most powerful brotherhood of this kind is “Radonezh Society”, created on the base of Sretensky Monastery in Moscow (see URL: http://www.pravoslavie.ru); on Russian Orthodox radical groups, see Verkhovsky 2001. 11 Once again, this general tenor might be manifested in a relatively moderate, although quite tenacious, nationalist stance of the Moscow Patriarchate hierarchy, or in the openly xenophobic, Russo- or Slavo-centric, and unequivocally imperial appeals of relatively marginal ultranationalist groups.

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part being dependent upon the Moscow Patriarchate and another one independent (and further divided, however). 12 The idea of an independent “national Church”, which is a clear opposition to Moscow’s “transnational” claim (and which is rather eager to go under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, – the last symbol of Eastern Orthodox universality), 13 was an ongoing national debate from the very declaration of Ukraine’s independence.14 The symbolic allure of the (yet virtual) national Church is so strong that the third major player of the Ukrainian religious field, Greek Catholics (the Uniates), who claim to represent the primordial true Ukraineness, consider to overpass the age-old denominational rivalries and to join the independent (not pro-Moscow) Orthodox for this national religious project.15 The situation in Ukraine is quite unique exactly because the ethnic identity is split between two forms of religious expression, Greek Catholic and Orthodox, and the creation of the national religion (if at all imaginable) is an ongoing process of interdenominational interaction. In most other countries of the area the identity link with Eastern Orthodoxy is absolutely clear. Srpstvo (Serbdom), a term analogous to ukrainstvo, is an unequivocal alloy of ethnicity and religion. This phenomenon is quite common for the area. This link of religion and ethnicity/nationality has strong roots in the history of Eastern Orthodoxy: one factor is ecclesiastical autocephaly (full independence) that was always a formative principle, making the Churches directly dependent of local secular forces; another reason (applied to the peoples subject to long Turkish domination) was the Millet system in the Ottoman Empire, which managed ethnic minorities as religions communities; consequently, the rise of ethnic consciousness in the

12 As for the beginning of 2002, major Orthodox denominations in Ukraine were: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in union with the Moscow Patriarchate (about 9,500 congregations); the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kiev Patriarchate (about 3,000); and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (about 1,000). The Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church had about 3,300 congregations, densely concentrated in Western Ukraine. See Yelensky 2002a (Statistical data are from the Ukraine State Committee of Religious Affairs.) However, other surveys suggest a substantial correction of this official institutional picture, as the majority of people seem to declare their affinity with the Kiev independent Church rather than with the Moscowled Church (see Yelensky 2001). 13 Οn the role of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, see Groen 1998: 122f. 14 The independent Ukrainian religious identity actively involved the North American Ukrainian Diaspora, thus creating a symbolic and institutional alternative to Russian “transnationalism”; however, as in the Russian Orthodox case, this “transnationalism” is unmistakably ethno-centric. 15 See Rousselet and Boiko (2004), who believe that the “national values draw together the [independent Orthodox Churches] and Greek Catholics above the denominational cleavages”.

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nineteenth century; when the Rum Millet, administered by the Patriarch of Constantinople, disintegrated, ethnic identities was largely expressed in particularistic religious terms. To be sure, the so-called phyletism, or the ethno-national principle in church organization, was officially condemned in 1872 by a Synod under the Patriarch, but this rejected principle continuously dominated modern religion history of the whole region, along with what Victor Roudometof (2001: 106, 124, 135) calls “redeployment of Orthodoxy” on a national basis and in national terms. The spatial and temporal borders mentioned above – the “discourse of the territory” and “the discourse of tradition” – besides expressing ethnic particularism, also mirrored increased denominational sensibilities: the barriers were erected against the established Western denominations, first of all (in “Orthodox” countries) Roman Catholicism, sharpening the old hostility towards the Uniates (especially in Romania);16 and then against a sweeping growth of New Religious Movements and the influx of Protestant missionaries. For example, the revived missionary work is mostly aimed at the “protection of our Church and our Orthodox people from a variety of foreign proselytizing activities”. 17 The Christian mission, which is apparently a universalistic endeavor, is clearly reinterpreted here in a defensive, protective way. Proselytism is seen as the main form of the “war for souls”, waged by foreign denominations (Witte and Bourdeaux 1999). The term “proselytism” is defined here broadly, meaning not just reconverting a person from one religion to another, but also converting those who belong to no religion, precisely because, according to a dominant interpretation, all people living on this particular “canonical territory” and belonging to this particular ethnos (for example, Russians) are endemically Christian Orthodox, independently of their religious beliefs and practice or the absence thereof (which is largely the case in most post-communist societies). Therefore, proselytism is seen as creating a threat not only to the dominant Church but also to the whole ethno-national community. In the same vein, “[t]he Protestant evangelization of Ukraine” is said “to destroy the sense of togetherness, of ethnic unity, and to lead to individualism”; the Protestant missionaries want to “alter the spiritual ethno-type of Ukraine”. 18 In Romania, the conceptualization of 16 The Uniates of Transylvania created an important (and complex) stimulus for the formation of Romanian national consciousness; Orthodox clergy regard this “hybrid faith” as “the most grievous injury done to their world by the West since the Fourth Crusade of 1204”, as “a kind of artificial insemination” (as phrased by a priest) that corrupted the purity of the nation (Clark 2000: 217). 17 From the documents of the First Congress of Orthodox missionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church, held in Belgorod, Russia, in 1996. – Cited in Yelensky 2002b. 18 See an article by Dmitry Kanashkin, “Politichnyi sens okkultnoi pandemii v Ukraine”, Visti z Ukrainy, no. 45 (1994), published by the Kiev Patriarchate, cited in Yelensky 2002a.

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“heresy”, alien and detrimental for national identity, is an ongoing discourse within Eastern Orthodoxy, which is by definition equated to national tradition. The Orthodox Church rejects the notion of post-communist “religious vacuum” or “spiritual desert”, assuming (as is the case of Russia) that Romanians are endemically Orthodox (even those who do not practice), and thus the “sects” – a term applied mainly to Protestant groups – carry out proselytism that must be outlawed (Gurau 2000). In Greece anti-proselytism legislation has been in force since the regime of General Metaxas (in the late 1930s) and served the same goals (Alivizatos 1999). These examples from Eastern and Southeastern Europe reflect an ubiquitous anti-globalization pattern found in different parts of non-Western world.19 The “war for souls” was waged to ensure the domination-in-the-field and against something that was supposed and labeled to be foreign, alien, detrimental to this territory and to this people. With a shift to particularistic conservatism, it was only logical to associate the source of this foreignness, in the final analysis, with that which represents the claim for the universal, the West. The unacceptable foreignness of this universalism is twofold: not only does it stem from another socio-cultural setting, but it also is largely secular. Therefore, the whole Western ethos is thought of as bringing an ontological threat; in particular, new religious forms of Western origins are suspected to bear not just a competition within the religious field but the very trend to reduce this field.20 In 2000, the government’s plan to remove religion from identity cards in Greece ignited mass demonstrations led by the Church hierarchy with a clear anti-Western agenda. This agenda pinpointed two dangers: first, de-Hel-

19 One region with a particularly strong similarity is Latin America that witnessed a major rise of Protestantism and especially Pentecostalism in the latest part of the twentieth century, see Platero 2001. In Latino countries Roman Catholicism, as universal as theoretically it can be, clearly associates itself with particular Latino identities that are endangered by Protestant invasion. Again, like in “Orthodox” countries of Europe, traditional religion refashions itself as ostensibly particularistic and protective against the global (Western) alien intrusion. 20 “Just remember”, Victoria Clark’s Serb interlocutor told her, “the Orthodox Church looses by every inch of western progress – telephones, roads, the Internet, whatever” (Clark 2000: 59). The anti-Westernism in this area has had a long history that goes back to the nineteenth-century anti-Europeanism, expressed by the Russian Slavophile movement (that also affected the Balkan Slavic religious thought) and by indigenous Orthodox identity founders; it was a more complex process that just a blunt rejection, but rather a “cultural schizophrenia between xenophilia and xenophobia”, an anti-Orientalist discourse that unwillingly reproduced crucial elements of European Orientalism (Makrides and Uffelmann 2003).

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lenization of Greece, and second, “marginalization of religion” in “global consumerism”; quite significantly, both were closely linked. 21 Russian Orthodox anti-globalists of the late 1990s, an uncoordinated collection of variously radical groups, were speaking of the Western threat both to the Russian Church and to the Russian people (Verkhovsky 2001). And again, the Church in Poland, in spite of assumed Catholic internationalism, was split on the issue of Polish integration into Europe, accepting it (in accordance with the Vatican’s recommendations) only under condition of promoting a “Christian spirit” of the Union and on a principle of “homeland of homelands” (Hałas 1999). 22 Overall, in the course of last decades, the dominant religions have practically yielded the sphere of the universal, de facto recognizing that the Western liberal secular ethos acquired exclusive rights to claim the universal and to represent it. Most theological, political, and institutional efforts have been spent to create the whole concept of a particular religious tradition and its various parochial linkages with territory, ethnicity, language, culture, history, power system, and worldview. The Russian Orthodox Conundrum of Overture and Compression: Preserving Uniqueness (A Case Study) Let us observe this twisted internal strain between impulses of overture and compression in the Russian Orthodox case. Although the size of the Russian Church makes the degree of this strain unique, its experience is typical to the area, as indeed it may reveal some promptings for understanding the religious dynamic the world over. I would like to track a discursive thread of Russian Orthodox rhetoric through an exegesis of one text, called the “Bases of the Social Concept”, a programmatic official document conceived in mid-1990s and adopted in 2000 by the Moscow Jubilee Bishops’ Council. This semi-theological document was an absolutely new type of text for the Christian Orthodox tradition: its main goal was a direct treatment of both

21 “Resist, my dear Christians”, Archbishop Christodoulos, the Church Primate, told the protesting crowd. “The forces of globalization and religious marginalization are out to get us.” (New York Times, June 25, 2000). He contended that the measure (removal of religious line) was a part of a sinister plot to de-Hellenize Greece. “Our faith is the foundation of our identity. If you abolish one, you abolish the other” (New Statesman, August 21, 2000). 22. On the issue of “Christian values”, as the central identity-defining discourse of the Polish Church, and its application to abortion controversy, see Miller 1997: 77–9.

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fundamental and topical issues of society: from the nation to the death penalty to war to bioethics to globalization. 23 The text clearly reflects various competing voices within the Church officialdom, as, indeed, within the Church at large; it is multivocal in many senses: in vocabulary, in concepts that are used, in references to traditional authorities, and in ideas. An analysis of the whole document goes beyond this chapter. I only wish to pinpoint one striking contradiction of this text, which I believe to be strategic. On the one hand, it shows an obvious intention to become modern and relevant, to cut off the inherited and allegedly endemic other-worldliness and cultural isolation, to build a bridge between natural and supernatural, to affirm the value of this world. It calls the Church “not to shun the world”, to consider human activity as a co-work, a synergy with Creator. It fights the staunch Manicheanism and promotes a social openness and inclusive activism, a kind of Eastern Orthodox version of aggiornamento. The document ipso facto is a thrust to Modernity. On the other hand, with a closer approach to the text, one would find something quite different, if not the opposite. For example, one can see in the document an extremely strong border sensitivity, a constant concern, sometimes an obsession with traditional self-identity, a permanent reification of the “we-they” dichotomies operating on several levels. The presumption that the Church is opposed to the rest of society is quite explicit; in most cases, in this opposition the Church is conceived as an institution with certain corporate interests, rather than an open and inclusive community. The Church as a Christian institution is juxtaposed to the “non-Christian state, associations, and individuals”. The following quote is typical in both its tone and theological argument: “…The internal law of the Church is free from the spiritually fallen world and even opposed to it” (IV.4). It is one of the major themes of the document to clearly define the institutional borders of the Church: it comprises “clerics, monks, and laity”, whose activities are controlled by the hierarchy (i.e., Church authorities; see V.2., V.4, XV.2). In many cases the text emphasizes the Eastern Orthodox identity in general, or even more specifically, the Russian (national) form of Eastern Orthodoxy. The structure of authoritative references found in the text clearly reveals this denominational bias: 140 out of 147 non-Biblical references are to Eastern Orthodox theologians,

23 “Osnovy sotsial’noi kontseptsii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi” (Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church) – see Osnovy 2001. The word “concept” which is used in the official rendering of the title in English is in fact closer to what is called “Social Doctrine” in Roman Catholicism. The references to “Osnovy” hereafter will include the number of chapter (Roman figures) and the number of paragraph (Arabic figure).

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rulers, and ecclesiastic documents. 24 The adjectives “Christian” and “Orthodox” (pravoslavnyi) are used almost interchangeably in the text, though sometimes “Orthodoxy” seems to be used in contrast to a broader category of “Christianity”. 25 At some places, through the use of archaisms or old religious vocabulary, a specifically Russian linguistic flavor comes to the foreground in text, or specifically Russian historical images and events are evoked, to attach to Orthodoxy a more national appearance. Thus creating several implicit particularistic definitions, the document establishes a sequence of barriers that stand against the initial overture and decisively limit the degree thereof. The purpose of all these barriers is a self-definition, protection of a certain identity, a certain theological, denominational, and institutional purity that is threatened by this risky process of self-inscribing in a virtual universal taxonomy. Therefore, we can call them purity-protective taxonomic barriers. What stands behind this particularistic impulse is another strong paradigm of the text, a second leitmotif directly contradicting the initial world-affirming effort. The world is described as still extremely dangerous and inimical, especially the contemporary world (this actualization of the discourse is obvious, too). The criticism of the contemporary world is overwhelming and relentless, sometimes assuming prophetic and apocalyptic pathos. In a number of instances the document calls the world “fallen” and “degrading”, refers to demographic crisis, family breakdown, ecological catastrophe, blooming “industry of vices”, “spiritual void, the lack of meaning of life, the erosion of moral guidelines” (XI.6 and passim). This kind of world can never be accepted, embraced, or justified. What is perceived as the origin of this poor condition, with such a clear emphasis on latest days? Basically, at the bottomline, it is the apostasy, or secularism, an anthropocentric self-aggrandizement of the godless human being: “Seduction by the achievements of civilization moves people away from the Creator and leads to a deceptive triumph of reason, which attempts to arrange the world without God” (VI.3). To describe this challenge, the document uses the term “theomachism” (bogoborchestvo) that has a long history in the Russian thought (XII.4). (A parallel to other Eastern Orthodox cases is obvious: the Serb Velimirović, whom I mentioned earlier, used exactly the same logic.) As a matter of fact, what is rejected is, to use Jürgen Habermas’ term, the Modernity-project seen as a Tower of Babel sort of challenge 24 For a detailed analysis of references, which reveal interesting clues in understanding the selfconsciousness of the tradition, see Chapter 6 of this volume. 25 For example, speaking of the “Christian states” (IV.5), the authors mean both Western and Eastern Christendom; but the expressions “Orthodox politician” (V.3) or “Orthodox physician” (XI.2) are evoked to convey a denominationally charged meaning. “Western Christian tradition” is explicitly defined as being different from the Eastern one (e.g., VIII.3).

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to God – an old anti-Enlightenment and romantic discourse going back to de Maistre, Dostoevsky, the Neo-Thomistic revival of the nineteenth century, and even the Heideggerian concern to return to “the power of being” as opposed to the rootless universalism; and it is similar indeed to what we can find in a cross-cultural, crossdenominational, anti-modernist and anti-secular discourse everywhere. Opening itself to the new global order, inscribing itself therein, the tradition simultaneously resists it, because this global order is defined, according to the tradition’s constituent assumptions, as “a universal de-spiritualized culture” (XVI.3). Impulses of “overture and compression” are dialectically inseparable. This inherent ambiguity of responses becomes even more intriguing when we go further in the deconstruction of the text. One major emphasis is on the dignity of human person, a concept widely used in contemporary Western theology and in global secular discourse, but quite unusual in the Russian Orthodox theological context, at least in traditional scholastic vocabulary. 26 Yet another surprising emphasis is the one on diversity, something not quite common for the conservative traditional discourse; diversity is extolled both in biological and cultural realms. Both concepts of dignity and diversity appear to belong to the modern discourse and thus attest again to an ongoing aggiornamento, an overture. And it is certainly the case, because both concepts were unmistakably new for Russian Orthodoxy, although they were theologically contextualized as deriving from the tradition of Christian personalism and tolerance. However, in the very process of this contextualization the whole semantic field associated with these concepts changes dramatically. In no way does “the dignity of human person” leads to fully accepting the universality of human rights or liberties; in no way diversity means pluralism with the slightest degree of liberal connotations. What is at stake in both cases is preserving individual uniqueness in all forms and contexts, preserving uniqueness as such, uniqueness as a primary principle of being. Uniqueness is endangered by the “contemporary world”, and this is the point where the theologians directly address globalization. While they do admit some achievements of globalism, their overall pathos is to resist “the spiritual and cultural expansion fraught with total unification”, the “universal culture devoid of any spirituality and based on the freedom of fallen man unrestricted by everything…” (XVI.3), or “the world order in which the human personality, corrupted by sin, is placed at the center of everything” (XVI.4). As the inspirer of the whole project, then metropolitan Kirill Gundiaev, then the second person in Church hierarchy (Patriarch since 2009), wrote in another publication, the Russian Church rejects “an aggressive globalizing 26 The expression “dignity of the person” is mentioned twelve times throughout the document in various contexts: in connection to the private property, gender equality, and bioethics. “Uniqueness of personality” is another adjacent form used mostly in the chapter on bioethics.

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monoculture that dominates and assimilates other cultural and national identities” (Gundiaev 1999a: 66). Here is the focal point. What harbors a real danger is unification. What is endangered is unique identity. It may be individual identity (“uniqueness of the human person”); but it will be, more likely, the “identity of nations and other human communities” (XVI.3). The Church itself is implied here as a community, and the nation is another one. The document explicitly speaks (in Chapter 2) about the national tradition as congruent, and actually interwoven, with a religious tradition. It refers to the Old and New Testament to prove, basically, that the particularity of a national Christian community (such as the Russian) does not contradict the universality of Heavenly Jerusalem. It refers to the people of Israel as the epitome of the universal idea, and yet a chosen people who clearly opposed themselves to others (‘am to goyim in Hebrew, laos to ethne in Greek), a community tied together by ethnic and linguistic bonds and rooted in “a particular land, the Fatherland”. It refers to Jesus Christ, who, in spite of the ultimate universalism of his message, was clearly conscious of belonging to the Jewish nation (II.1, 2). While the document tries to negotiate a balance of universal and particularistic messages, its overall emphasis is certainly to endorse the “Orthodox people” (pravoslavnyi narod), an ethnically and religiously defined “nation”, a particular traditional identity mobilized against the pressure of global secular universalism. The overture to the discourse of human dignity and diversity turns out to be submerged in the strong particularistic compression. 27 Elaboration: Strategies of Religious Response to New Universalism The Russian and other East European examples show how intrinsically convoluted is the religious response to globality, how intermixed and dialectically interrelated are the impulses of acceptance and resistance, fundamentalism and reform, universalism and particularism. It also proves our initial presumption that the ultimate goal of such a response is to find a place in the new global taxonomy, or “global culture”. As a matter of fact, the resistance, reluctance, even repugnance toward Modernity (or Late Modernity) that a religious mind can experience and express do not necessarily mean that Modernity is not accepted as a general framework; and vice versa, adjustment, reform, aggiornamento do not necessarily mean embracing something more than just this general framework.

27 On Russian media discourse about religion and nation, see Agadjanian 2001b.

Religion between Universal and Particular

47

Moreover, a typology of responses to globality needs more elaboration beyond a rough dichotomy of rejecting or embracing. We can think of at least three major strategies of response and seven ideal-typical religious dispositions: I. The strategy of rejection includes two possible religious dispositions: (a) reactive, when a religious group maintains a strong fundamentalist coherence and delivers a conscious aggressive response (a guerilla model); (b) protective, when a religious group links its own tradition with a particular subject of identity (a social community, an ethnos, a nation, etc.) and chooses to protect itself from expansion (a fortress-under-siege model). II. The strategy of coexistence includes three religious dispositions: (a) isolationist, when a religious group overtly accepts the framework of globality and claims an isolated locus reserved for itself, without fighting against globality or even trying to negotiate with it (an ivory tower model); (b) consumerist, when a religious group retains a particular identity instrumentalized as exotic ethnic attraction that sells in a global cultural “market” (a curiosity shop model); (c) negotiating, when a religious group maintains a constant dialogue within the global culture, negotiating functions, rights, and privileges of a certain space it occupies (a bargain model). III. The strategy of embracing includes two religious dispositions: (a) reformist, when a religious group accepts globality not only as a framework, but also deliberately chooses to adjust its own core of traditional beliefs by including some foundational values of what is believed to be the global culture (a reform model); (b) globalist, when a religious group embraces all core values of the global culture, thus eventually losing its own particular identity and actually ceasing to represent a specifically religious message (a disbandment model). These are ideal-typical models that may be simultaneously manifested in one and the same religious community, even in one and the same party within it, even, indeed, in one and the same document: we have seen that the Russian Orthodox “Social Concept” contained elements of all three strategies, combining protective, negotiating, and reform dispositions, with the latter one, reform, being much less outspoken than the former two. This posture may be also considered as a median, mutatis mutandis, to most of Eastern Orthodox Churches, although the sub-groups with all dispositions can be found in each Church. Common to all of them is a strong sense of religious

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identity, a clear reference to ethno-national cultures, and the perception of the “global secular culture” as a threat. Overall, these Churches have a clear particularistic penchant, and they develop practically no substantial universalistic discourse except for interfaith and ecumenical contacts. Their main ideological and theological position is to insure the endurance of unique national cultures whose spiritual ethos they believe themselves to embody. It goes without saying that this particularistic disposition is not unique to Eastern European religious cultures. In no way can this phenomenon be seen as specifically recent or isolated. In fact, this trend to preserve uniqueness has to do with a profound and perennial tension in the history of human culture: between the “threat” of unification and the “shelter” of difference; it is true, however, that this tension became especially obvious with the advance of the meta-narratives of Modernity, while the “post-modern” context added more legitimacy to these protective claims. On the other hand, historically, the world religions that after Karl Jaspers are sometimes called post-Axial, always expressed a strong and elaborated quest for universality. This concept of a “notional, ideational oneness of the world” is certainly a part of world religions’ narratives (Simpson 1991: 14). To repeat once more what I have said earlier: it seems that religions are now loosing this ability to define a universal discourse; the quest for universality is not associated with religions any more, at least in the way it seemed to be, for example, at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 or during the rise of ecumenism after World War II. The discursive space of the Universal seemed to be firmly ceased by the new global culture based on the core values of Western secular liberalism. One significant shift in this universal discourse of Late Modernity (perhaps, the last quarter of the twentieth century) consisted in the emphasis on cultural relativism and acceptance of difference, partly as a reaction to a sweeping standardizing effects of consumerism. This Late Modernity discourse apparently rejects the teleological idea of uniform progress and offers instead the idea of universal humanity which celebrates the plurality of particular identities. Now, to become a part of the global project, communities are not explicitly urged to match one universal standard, but they are prompted to retain their particular traits. In this new framework, religions are reconceptualized as a form of symbolic expression of these particular identities, of particularistic cultural resistance to the new, apparently meta-cultural, universalism. Religion became a symbolic language for protecting, enhancing, and sometimes creating particular identities, in accordance with the earlier cited opinion of Roland Robertson (1991: xv), when he speaks of religion as a new “genre of [particularistic] expression, communication and legitimation”. As Roger Friedland (1999: 314 and 317) strongly puts it, in times when cultures and capitals become sans frontières, “religious nationalism represents the

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return to text, to the fixity of signs, the renarrativization of the nation in the cosmic context”; religion helps the non-Western states “to fabricate a discursive space in which they can breathe easily”. 28 These roles, as well as a certain institutional space (field), are allotted to religions within the new universal taxonomy by the new ethos of world culture. Thus it is only seemingly paradoxical that a straightforward, ostensible particularism, shown by Eastern European religions, turns out to be in fact to be the only tactic for them to retain a substantial symbolic power in the era of global culture. On the contrary, those eclectic and over-inclusive religious movements that claim to express a universal message lose the touch of the primordial power of soil and a specifically religious quality by simply dissolving in the “global culture” or at least losing their religious quality (many New Age movements, Scientology, Bahá’í). The same can be said about recent examples of Roman Catholic and Protestant embracing strategies: the more they assume the mainstream values of secular liberal universalism, the more they lose the power of carrying a specific message. 29 Not every instance of particularism and open anti-global religious resistance is, therefore, an indication of the rejection of the global discourse as such; not every impulse of fundamentalism is, accordingly, an indicator of aggressive militancy, as in the guerilla model of my classification. The guerilla model is just an extreme expression of a broad tendency – an obvious invigoration of traditional religious particularism and, consequently, of both inter-religious and secular-religious divides. In 28 I cannot share the whole Friedland’s paradigm. He believes religion to provide the only possible language on which non-Western nations can express cohesive cultural response to Western secular globalization; he idealizes to an extreme degree the religion’s role as a redemptive alternative to the oppressive and ephemeral global culture, as a way “to secure morality against an increasingly post-humanist world” (Friedland 1999: 317). This inexorable dichotomy, reviving global “dependency” and Orientalist constructs, distorts, in my opinion, the true picture of variety of responses and of the dialectic with which religions negotiate their space within the global taxonomy. Friedland’s very strong point, nevertheless, is his tangible and lucid articulation of this special power that religion extracts from associating itself with particularistic identities, thus creating a meaningful response to globality. 29 The case of Western religions has its particular profundity because of the genealogical kindred of modern Western theologies and the liberal universalistic ethos. Western religious universalism grounds itself on the claim that contemporary “secular liberal civilization” originated from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. The embracing strategy toward global culture seems therefore more natural in the case of Western religions. Roman Catholicism has an especially strong universalistic appeal because of its meta-national structure and its post-Vatican inclusiveness. However, the Vatican constantly emphasizes the distance of its teaching of catholicity with the secular ethos; even more important is the fact that most national Catholic Churches retain, as the Polish example shows, strong particularistic tendencies diverging from meta-national catholicity.

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most cases this broad tendency has two constituents. One is the concern to secure a certain space in the religious field allotted by a new global taxonomy whose domination is reluctantly but realistically accepted and whose apparently pluralist agenda does create this opportunity. The second motive is more fundamental and tenacious: a profound distrust to the secular liberal universal ethos as such in its content, an ethos that is felt to be as it really is: only apparently pluralistic but intrinsically as absolutistic as all other previous forms of universalism. However, this last presumption is not to be developed here: it requires a further special study.

PART II

RELIGION IN RUSSIA: MAIN DISCOURSES AND MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS

3.

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN RUSSIA

Introduction: Contemporary Nations and Religious Identity The idea of Russia as an “Orthodox nation” has a long history; it ties in with both official definitions and popular perceptions; it is also at the core of the historical and philosophical debates that have aimed to delimit the geopolitical place of Russia and to understand the essence of “Russianness”. Russia is by no means unique in this respect. The religious dimension has always played an important role in the selfdetermination of peoples and nations. The conflicts of ancient and medieval states were conflicts of gods. Religious traditions frequently determined, in one way or another, how cultures and states were divided and united. In Europe, contemporary nation-states developed on the basis of communities that defined themselves partly in terms of their religious affiliation: Catholic, Protestant or Eastern Orthodox. Later, in the twentieth century, Islam, Buddhism and Catholicism have played a key role in the formation and legitimation of the new nations of Asia and Latin America. 1 However, paradoxically, contemporary nations have developed not only by tying into a particular cultural continuity and a given religious tradition, but also by distancing themselves from there. Indeed, the civic values that have come to the fore, based on individual freedoms, presuppose that the new “imagined community” transcends “primordial bonds”, including ethnic and religious ones. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation, composed of “free citizens” and founded on natural law, embodies religious pluralism as a fundamental principle. Thus, while eighteenthcentury France could be described as a “Catholic country”, the same designation in the twentieth century points to nothing more than the existence of a tradition or the fact of a quantitative predominance of Catholicism over other religions. The United 1

See, inter alia, the article and the collection published by van der Veer (1999), who contests the thesis put forward by J. Habermas of an initial secular foundation of European Modernity. In particular, he compares the roles of Protestantism and of Hinduism in the formation of the British and Indian nations. It is a quite widely held view that the paradigm of a strong link between Modernity and secularization is a purely European phenomenon. Warner (1993) has shown that it does not apply to the history of the United States, where modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proceeded alongside turbulent religious activity; the role of the “Biblical” tradition in American national consciousness is beyond dispute. Furthermore, even in Europe, national identity of countries such as Ireland, Poland or Greece can hardly be accurately represented without taking into account their religious traditions, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As far as other continents are concerned, there is abundant literature on this subject which it would take too long to go into here.

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States in the nineteenth century could by the same token regard itself as a “Protestant nation”, whereas by the end of the twentieth century such an association of terms had become practically meaningless. And even in countries where, in one way or another, a State religion still exists (as in Great Britain or Denmark), the nation has, in its contemporary form, progressively lost its religious dimension. In Europe, this is linked not only to the need of managing diversity but also to the decline in the influence of traditional religions as such and to the absolute supremacy of secular principles in the life of nations. Even in India, where religion continues to exert a very great influence, the contemporary nation is thought of as a community transcending any particular faith (or ethnic affiliation). 2 Therefore, there is an antinomy of opposite assumption about the link between contemporary nation and religion. This dialectical relationship can be defined according to the following parameters: (1) On the one hand, nations have been formed against the background of a dominant religious tradition that has left its mark on values, institutions and national consciousness; the level of such influence has depended on: (a) the degree of preeminence of a given tradition over the others; (b) the relationship between the dominant religion and the state (whether or not it enjoys the status of State religion), the degree of dependence of religious institutions on the state; (c) the importance of the link between a given religion and the dominant ethnic group; (d) the level of religious sentiment in the society as a whole, and hence of the nation’s need for religious legitimation. (2) On the other hand, nations have developed within the framework of a new secular and civic tradition; they have progressively freed themselves from religious determination: (a) by recognizing religious plurality through the assertion of the principle of individual freedoms and equality on the basis of a new conception of “citizenship”, and by acknowledging the pragmatic need to manage the diversity 2

For the definition of “imagined community”, see Anderson 1983; for a new approach to national identity in Eastern Europe, see Brubaker 1996. Regarding the difference between “primordial bonds” and “civic bonds” as two principles in the organization of a national community, see Shils 1957 and especially Geertz 1963. Nowadays these principles are seen as idealtypical models rather than simply two social realities that succeeded one another. In particular, religion cannot be any longer regarded as a “primordial” factor only. Eisenstadt and Giesen (1995: 74–7) have put forward thee ideal-typical models of national identity rather than two: primordial, civic and cultural, and religion can be linked to the last one. Also relevant to my research is Eisenstadt and Giesen’s insight into collective identities: the socially constructed nature of their “frontiers” and of their “symbolic codes of distinction”; the close connection of these constructed identities with the control of economic resources and social differentiation.

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of faiths; (b) through the secularization of political power (even when a religion retained its status of “official” religion); (c) through the general decline of traditional religion. Starting from these observations, we can go on to ask ourselves how far the image of the “Orthodox nation” is relevant to the analysis of contemporary Russia. We can try to understand to what extent and in precisely what way Eastern Christian Orthodoxy has helped to shape national identity in general, and what are the factors that have worked against this influence. We can attempt to see how far this image and this understanding of the “Orthodox nation” are compatible with the current reality of religious diversity. The last decade of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of a new situation, opening up multiple choices of social and cultural identity, with the religious dimension becoming only one possibility among many. The 1990s were a period marked by the “free creation of identities”, at the level of individuals and communities alike, and by the “invention of traditions”. They were also a period in which old and new elites waged a fierce struggle for symbolic hegemony. In these circumstances, as in all systemic crises, religion provided an effective symbolic capital for the construction of new formulas of identity, including that of a “collective national identity”, which various elites claimed to express in ideological constructions. Religion, mainly in the form of Eastern Orthodoxy as the dominant, traditional form of Russian religion, proved a potential resource, previously underestimated, for the restoration of the historical continuity which was perceived as been interrupted by communism. In reality, the images of this continuity, as we shall see, became increasingly varied reflecting on overall positions adopted by the participants in the debate. We shall examine these issues in an historical perspective before considering the current situation.3

3

For the concept of the “invention of tradition”, see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 14. According to Hobsbawm, modern nations “generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity”, “so natural as to require no definition other than self-assertion”, but they are largely made up of what this author calls “constructed and invented components”. The Russian nation of the 1990s and still now has been in the process of being totally reinvented.

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Religious Pluralism in the History of pre-1917 Russia and of the Soviet Union Following the Christening of Russia in 988, and in keeping with the Byzantine conception of the “symphony”, the political space of the Russian princes, the tsars and the emperors was coterminous with the area “enlightened by the faith”. This is how the ideal identity triad of “religion-state-people”, based on the Eastern Christian tradition, originally came into being. The idea of Holy Russia was gradually forged from cultural oppositions: opposition to the “Muhammedan” Tatars, to the “Latins” of the West, to pagan tribes (during the expansion of the Empire), to Jews (especially following the annexation of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century), etc. However, the idea of Holy Russia maintained an ambiguous relationship with Russian ethnicity. On the one hand, it was based on Christian meta-ethnic universalism, on a belief in the “catholic” (universal) mission of the Russian imperium – a mission that had devolved upon Russia after the fall of Constantinople (such a universalistic mission, and such supra-ethnicity, were also the attributes of the Holy Roman Empire) (Averintsev 1989). On the other hand, we witness a gradual merging of two dimensions of “Russianness” – religious and ethnic: the fact that the description “others” applied indifferently to persons of foreign origin (inorodtsy) and people of other religions (inovertsy) is the negative reflection of the “Orthodoxy”/“Russian” duo; broadly speaking, Christianization corresponded at that time to Russification. 4 The Orthodox Church was very soon transformed into an autocephalous “national” institution (at least from the introduction of the Patriarchate in1589), while still retaining its universalistic claims. In short, there came into being in Russia a whole system of cultural and legal norms, whereby adherence to Orthodoxy was accorded full civic value. The provisions of the Code of Laws of 1832, modified in the Code of Laws of 1906, affirm the pre-eminence of the “Eastern Orthodox Church” (see Article 40 of the Code of 1832 or Article 63 of the Code of 1906). The autocrat in power was duty bound to belong to this Church alone (Articles 41 and 63); in accordance with Byzantine tradition, “he is, as Christian sovereign, the supreme protector and guardian of the right faith piety in the Holy Church” (Articles 42 and 64) (cited by Smolich 1996: 120f. and 128). The Holy Synod, the supreme organ of the Church since 1721, 4

In the first article of the first chapter of the Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 (chapter called “Blasphemers and troublemakers in the Church”), “persons of other religions” are distinguished from the “Russian man” (Muscovite Law Code 1988). As Smolich (1997: 201) has pointed out, Catholics or Protestants, once they became Orthodox, were regarded as Russians, whereas the words “Polish” and “Catholic” meant the same thing for Russians. With time, the word inorodtsy (persons of foreign origin) ceased to be used to refer to persons belonging to the Christianized peoples (ibid., 204).

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was then part of the state apparatus, whereas, at least from the 1830s on, other religions became the specific responsibility of the special bodies within the Ministry of the Interior. The policy as regards persons of other religions (inovertsy) consisted in converting them to the fold of Orthodoxy, whereas calling upon Orthodox believers to convert to another religion was regarded as proselytism and was strictly forbidden (this rule was introduced in the decree on religious tolerance of Peter I in 1702). The institution of marriage remained under the control of the Orthodox Church, and legal restrictions were placed on marriages contracted with believers of other creeds. At the same time, a series of historical events and processes cast doubt on the idea of “Orthodox Russia”. The first serious blow to this idea was the seventeenthcentury Schism (Raskol), and a second came with the rise of religious sects and spiritual movements among both the elites and working classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.5 The religious (as well as ethnic) diversity of the Empire became increasingly obvious. The domination of Western Christian theology and religious training in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emerged as a major challenge to the Eastern Christian tradition (Florovsky 1981). The political orientations of the tsars and governments began to change, too: while all the Romanovs stressed to varying degrees their Orthodox identity, more tolerant attitudes were adopted to “other believers” from the reign of Peter the Great onwards, a development that could be taken as de facto recognition of religious diversity within the territory of the expanding Empire. This pragmatic recognition of religious diversity was linked to the liberal and secular ideas then entering the country, ideas that would ultimately be embodied in ideological changes and in legislation, as attested by the “Manifesto on the Strengthening of the Principles of Religious Tolerance” of 1905. At that time, Russia was becoming an Empire as diverse as the Habsburg or Ottoman Empires, characterized by processes of secularization, with the result that the identification of national consciousness with Orthodoxy no longer appeared so obvious. 6 A strong secular current developed, from Alexander Herzen to Pavel Miliukov, openly contesting any kind of religious determination of the Russian national consciousness. This current initially coincided with trends towards Westernization, and subsequently encompassed large sections of the intelligentsia, which wavered between a moderate, liberal-style agnosticism and radical anti-religious nihilism (of which Marxism was the culmination).

5 6

Interesting, that the laws were more inimical to schismatics and members of sects than to those of believers in “foreign faiths”: Old Believers and sectarians were considered as apostates fallen away from Orthodoxy. See the interesting debate on this question in Dixon 1999.

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Nevertheless, there remained within the framework of the “synodal” system – in which the Church formed part of the state apparatus – an “official” Orthodoxy (in the person of the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, between 1880 and 1905), close to the “cognitive” orthodoxy of the ecclesial hierarchy, 7 which reacted to the pluralization of society with pragmatic concessions while maintaining an invariably hard line for the preservation of the “Orthodox nation”. At the same time, major historical and philosophical debates became in the nineteenth and early twentieth century nothing short of intellectual laboratories of Russian identity, intent on constructing a “Russian idea” with the aim of restoring (and in reality inventing) the integral image of Russia, in order to alleviate the crisis and fragmentation to which it was subject and to nurture to some degree the new current of nationalism – along the lines of the nationalism taking shape at that time in Europe. The ideologues of the “Russian idea” restored the myth of Holy Russia (which resurfaced also in its official version) and proclaimed Orthodoxy as the cornerstone of Russian identity. 8 In so doing, they fashioned a new kind of speculative Orthodoxy, which became a philosophical and mythological abstraction, lending itself to all manner of interpretations: romantic-Slavophile (I. Kireevsky, A. Khomiakov), theocratic ecumenical (V. S. Solov’ev), nationalistic (F. Dostoevsky, K. Leont’ev), liberal-conservative (B. Chicherin, N. Berdiaev, S. Frank and others). Later, in the 1920s, the Eurasionist movement, an important philosophical and ideological tendency, integrated Russian Orthodoxy into a composite Slavic-Turkish formula of identity, linked to the idea of Empire (P. Savitsky, N. Trubetskoy and others). Thus, even though the evolution in this domain remains ambivalent, one observes, from Peter the Great to the Revolution, a certain secularization and a gradual decline in the influence of Orthodoxy on society and the state – a trend largely determined by two factors: a growing diversity of faiths (linked in part to ethnic diversity) and the development of a secular current of thought, particularly within the liberal movement. This trend did not however prevent a whole series of legal privileges

7 8

See Freeze 1990 with regard to the term “cognitive Orthodoxy”. Fedor Tiutchev wrote in 1849 in the Revue des deux mondes: “Russia is above all a Christian Empire; the people are Christian not only on account of the Orthodoxy of their beliefs, but still more because of something even more intimate than belief” (Quoted by Poliakov 1989: 59). “The general disposition of the Russian soul is such that the Christian idea constitutes, it might be said, its very nature”, wrote the philosopher V. Ivanov in 1909; echoing the words of the heroes of Dostoevsky, he described the Russian people as “God-bearing” or “Christophoros” (“Christ-bearing”) (“O russkoi idee” [On the Russian idea]) (Maslin 1992: 238f.). These same images (as nowhere else in the world) deeply permeated the public discourse of the preRevolutionaries and of émigré Russians.

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from remaining in force 9 and a variety of religiously-informed ideological constructs from constantly emerging. It was with the Revolution, in particular the Decree of Sovnarkom “on freedom of conscience, religious and ecclesial societies” from 20 January 1918, that the Orthodox Church became separated from the state (Art. 1) and that “all forfeitures of right linked to a religious affiliation of any kind or to the absence of religious affiliation” (Art. 3) were abolished. So it was that all the debates on “Russian Orthodox identity” seemed to come to an end.10 Although the Bolshevik regime endeavored, in a paradoxical and extreme manner, to embody certain elements of “Holy Russia” (the existence of a “symbol of faith”, a doctrine of the chosen “Soviet people”, a messianism commensurate with the new Empire, a series of pseudo-religious rituals, etc.), the break with tradition was nonetheless radical in two respects: Orthodoxy and “Rus” were both rejected. An important shift nevertheless took place during the Second World War: the idea of Orthodox identity was included in official propaganda for purposes of mobilization, and the regime even went so far as to restore the Patriarchate in 1943. This is implicit proof of a certain persistence in the Russian mind, despite the years of antireligious indoctrination, of the archetype of the “Orthodox nation”. And it is interesting to note that, at more or less the same time that it officially recognized Orthodoxy, the regime began to exalt Russian national culture and traditions, thus rehabilitating the old “Russian-Orthodox” duo. To be sure, this shift in doctrine was at odds with “internationalism” and with the concept of the “Soviet people”. In the course of time, the ideological rhetoric began to exhibit a tendency to consider ethnic Russians (representing scarcely more than half the population of the Union) as the main standard-bearers of the “international idea” and, more generally, of the communist project. 11. Veiled Russian or Slav nationalism and the half-concealed cult of the Ortho-

9

In particular, the draft laws on the freedom to leave the clergy, on the possibility of converting to other faiths, on civil marriage and burial and on many other more specific points, proposed by the Duma or by the government from 1906 onwards, provoked strong opposition and were not adopted (cf. Firsov 1996: 271ff.). 10 Cf. Dekrety 1957: 373. In this instance, I am leaving aside the second aspect of this famous decree, which in fact deprived the religious organizations of all legal and material rights, thereby giving rise to a situation that no longer bore any relation to “religious pluralism”. 11 Although the Russian Federation was, within the Soviet Union, an “incomplete” body (which, according to Hosking 1999, resulted in the “incompletion” of the Russian nation in both the civic and ethnic sense), there was a clear “Russification” of the political apparatus and of the elites in power during the post-war period (or, more specifically, a Slav domination, with in particular a very strong influence of ethnic Ukrainians).

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dox heritage persisted alongside the official discourse on internationalism, and up to the end of the 1980s was part of the symbolism of the regime in power. 12 “Semi-official”, ethnically determined Orthodoxy had an essentially decorative significance, and was not linked to any significant rebirth of religious sentiment; post-war religious practice remained, as previously, seen as alien to the Soviet habitus and incompatible with the history of the “ordinary Soviet man”. The general context of the post-war era was indeed non-religious, and religious affiliation was becoming a marginal phenomenon. The religious revival of the 1970s in urban areas (mainly Moscow and Leningrad) was very limited, and occurred, it must be stressed, quite unrelated to any ethnic identity, in mostly cosmopolitan groups. The decline in religious practice concerned not only Orthodoxy but also all the other faiths whose activities were strictly controlled by the government. But it is important to note that Orthodoxy alone, among all the faiths scattered throughout the Empire, enjoyed the ambiguous protection described above. The Christian Churches of the Republics that did not come under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate (Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic countries), while retaining a symbolic capital, never enjoyed such protection, either at the central or the local level. The same was true of Islam (in the Caucasus, in Central Asia and in the Volga region) and of Buddhism (in Buriatia, Tuva and Kalmykia). The Old Believers and so-called sects (including those of the Protestant persuasion) found themselves, as in the Russia of the tsars, on the fringes or beyond of legal existence. The effect was to reproduce in part a pre-Revolutionary type of “religious pluralism”, with a dominant faith that stood quite apart from the others and was recognized as having a symbolic link with the dominant ethnic consciousness in the Empire. And the clearest evidence of this may be seen to be the national celebrations that took place in 1988 to mark the millennium of the Christianization of Russia. The Problem of the Nation and of Religious Pluralism in Post-Soviet Russia The rapid dislocation of the Union and of the communist regime was accompanied by a major crisis of identity and the search for new points of reference. The young nations then wavered between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism, between “traditional” self-determination and “modern” self-determination. To be sure, ethnonationalism emerged as the force that caused the break-up of the Union, and provided 12 This trend was particularly visible in the literary process (cf. Brudny 1998), but also linked to the “Society for the Safeguarding of Monuments” and the association “Pamiat”, which originated within this context, but was quite rapidly marginalized towards the end of the communist regime. On the Russian nationalism within the Moscow communist elites, see Mitrokhin 2003.

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the social cement for the new countries. But the anti-communist “democratic project” also imposed recognition of “universal values”, of pluralism and of individual and communal freedoms. The old question then arose of how far ethnic rationales were compatible with Modernity, how a dominant ethnic group could fit into a “modern society”, particularly a plural society, how its capacities for social consolidation could be used and how, at the same time, its potential of particularism and antiliberal feeling could be neutralized. The religious issue arose in the same terms. The cultural capital of religion was initially turned to active account in the democratic (anti-communist) movement. But it subsequently found itself caught between the rationales of a growing ethno-nationalism, requiring added religious legitimation, and the need to construct a modern pluralistic society. Because of the low incidence of religious belief and practice, the lesser development of specifically religious culture, and because religion had long survived in an “ethnographic ghetto”, the revival of religious identity in all its postSoviet scope was very much a manifestation, or a feature, of a rebirth of ethnic identity. However, in relatively homogeneous societies such as Lithuania or Armenia, the “national” religion could be seen as a significant force for symbolic consolidation. At the same time, relatively heterogeneous countries had to introduce a system of “diversity management” that corresponded not only to purely pragmatic objectives, but also to the liberal image of religion as a “spiritual force” for anti-totalitarian emancipation. Ukraine proves to be a complex example, involving an attempt by the nation and the political regime to find a balance between two kinds of religious legitimation: on the one hand, displaying evidence of a specific ethno-religious consciousness (by placing the emphasis on the Greco-Catholic Church or autocephalous Orthodoxy, as opposed to the Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate), and on the other, through a policy of religious plurality, ensuring the democratic orientation of the country while reducing the likelihood of conflicts. 13 Of all the post-Soviet countries, Russia stands out clearly as an even more complex instance of the relationship between secularism and the assertion of religious identity. From the start of perestroika, and in particular following the official celebrations of the Christian millennium in 1988, religion (up to then quite irrespective of creed or affiliation) figured in liberal, anti-communist rhetoric as a symbolic al-

13 The question arises in a completely different manner in countries such as Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, where Islam, playing a role in the process of emancipation and ethnic consolidation, is partly used pragmatically by the non-liberal secular regimes in power for purposes of legitimization, but is also kept in check by them when its potential for mobilization is used by their political rivals. In this context, we cannot talk of either a “national religion” or of religious pluralism.

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ternative opening the way to a rediscovery of universal values. In this context, religion thus conferred legitimacy on a certain democratic myth, which itself presupposed a secular social model and absolute religious pluralism. This model corresponded also, in a pragmatic way, to the existence of a diversity of faiths. Totally new in Russian history, the model was enshrined in the new legislation of 1990. However, this model was from the outset contested, being regarded as utopian and not in keeping with Russian traditions and specificities by those who attached major importance to the ethnic and religious dimension of national identity. Opposition to the civic model grew stronger during the 1990s and was reflected in trends in local and federal legislation. In public debates, which indeed were sometimes somewhat reminiscent of pre-Revolutionary discussions or those held by emigrants on the “destiny of Russia”, the old idea of the “Orthodox nation” and even that of “Holy Russia” reappeared, among other variants of national identity. Three important factors converge in this process: (1) the state is in search of legitimation, (2) the Orthodox Church seeks to reassert its pre-eminence, and (3) society is in search of forms of social and cultural identity. 1. Although the liberal elite exerted for a certain period a decisive influence on politics in post-Soviet Russia, the state apparatus as a whole – particularly the army and the other ministries concerned with law and order, and above all in the provinces – maintained its conservative stance and showed itself disinclined to accept the pluralist civic model. The semi-official nationalism of the Soviet era maintained its hold; moreover, irrespective of any adherence or opposition to liberalism, this trend was largely dictated by pragmatic considerations, new forms of legitimation being sought, while those associated with anti-communism, “market reforms” and “democracy” gradually lost their mobilizing power. The governing elite could no longer ignore the fact that ethnic Russians made up over 80 percent of the total population of the new Russia, 14 and that an almost equally overwhelming majority affirmed its adherence to Orthodoxy – at least in the cultural sense of the term. The pre-Revolutionary model of a “national faith” and of limited pluralism (even if, as distinct from the Russia of the tsars, it coexisted with a secular principle of nation-state building) seemed to the state both natural and appropriate.15 14 According to a process described by Brubaker (1996) as the “unmixing of peoples in the aftermath of empire”, ethnic Russians make up 82 percent of the population of the Russian Federation, as compared with 51 percent in the Soviet Union (these two figures are taken from the census of the USSR in 1989. 15 The preamble to the “Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations” of 1997 refers to the “special role of Orthodoxy in the history of Russia in the evolution and development of its spirituality and its culture”; however, the term “dominant religion” (which is found

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2. The Russian Orthodox Church, fully aware of its clear pre-eminence, equally regarded itself as the sole interpreter of the national historical tradition and as the essential vehicle of the new, post-Soviet Russian identity. The Moscow Patriarchate, which would seem to be a conservative organization not only by tradition and nature but also because of its forced social isolation during the Soviet era, has tried simultaneously to discover a new modus vivendi within the context of a secularized society and to restore, at least in some respects, the pre-Revolutionary variant of a limited pluralism, bestowing on Orthodoxy the status of “dominant religion”. The idea of a “canonical territory” of Russian Orthodoxy, corresponding more or less to the area covered by the former Empire, has provided the basis for the attacks directed by the Patriarchate against foreign missions and the other Orthodox denominations and sects, in a manner wholly reminiscent of the bans on evangelism and the anti-sect legislation of pre-Revolutionary days. 16 And it is the rapprochement between Church and State, in line with the classical model, which has appeared to be the guarantee of this pre-eminence. At the same time, the model of an “established” State Church has been rejected in favor of the old conception of the “symphony” (of Church and State), which can be interpreted as a flexible form of cooperation situated midway between (almost) total dependence, similar to the old “synodal” model, and total independence along the lines of the secular model. 17 3. Let us now turn to the third factor – central to our argument – namely, the problem of the search for a new national identity. Russian society was plainly suffering in the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire of 1906) is only used by public law experts and has not been used in actual legislation. 16 Cf. Rousselet 2001, on the use of the term “canonical territory” and its effects on the policy of the Patriarchate of Moscow (the resistance to Protestant missions, the conflicts with the other Christian denominations of the East and with the Vatican). In its turn, the Council of Bishops of 1994 adopted a broad program of missions directed towards defensive actions and intended to combat the sects and foreign missionaries, but clearly different from the programs of evangelization of the missionaries prior to the Revolution, which had “offensive” objectives. 17 Patriarch Aleksii II preferred to speak cautiously of an “active partnership”, referring to the fact that “the relationship between the Church and the State is not yet as well-defined as in other countries” (see his interview in the newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda, February 1, 1999). However, it was in stronger terms that the concept of “symphony” was presented as an ideal model that “would give back to Russia its status as an Orthodox State, recognizing and respecting the traditional faiths” (Volodin 1996: 21). The Social Concept of the Church adopted in 2000 delineates a broad area of “co-operation” with the state, and reminds the state that it should “take into consideration the number of followers [of a denomination], its historical role in defining the cultural and spiritual make-up of the people, and its civic stand” (Osnovy 2001: III.6).

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from a lack of the symbolic resources required to forge its identity: communist or liberal values, despite their clear opposition, were confined to close-knit, relatively limited sections of society. It was the growth of ethnic awareness that characterized the majority of the population during the 1990s. This trend represented the continuation of what had been observed at the end of the Soviet period, albeit in a more diffuse, veiled manner (cf. Tishkov 1997; Byzov 1996: 47). The new stress placed on the ethno-cultural dimension of Russianness was stimulated by a reaction against the anti-Russian character of most of the post-Soviet forms of ethno-nationalism, and against the precarious situation of the Russian ethnic minorities (both within the Russian Federation and in the independent New States). The emergence of Russian ethnocentrism – both before and after the end of the Soviet Union – was a special process: the Russians had to overcome their consciousness of being an imperial metropolis, and reevaluate the disappeared Union (as well as the Russia of the Romanovs) as an ethno-Russian polity par excellence. The self-appellation rossiianin, which seemed a felicitous innovation and corresponded to a “European” type of national identity, fairly quickly gave way to the ethnic self-appellation russkii.18 It is against the background of a shift in Russian identity, from the imperial metaethnic to the ethnic pure and simple, that the pattern of religious self-determination is becoming transformed. Orthodoxy is increasingly seen as a complementary source of ethnic affirmation, as the Russian ethnic religion. Consequently, and insofar as the new nation-state is widely perceived as the “nation of the Russian ethnos”, identification with Orthodoxy constitutes another mode of national macro-identity. Thus we find that, in response to a question on “religious affiliation” in an enquiry conducted in areas where ethnic Russians are in the majority, 75 percent of those questioned replied that they were Orthodox (whereas the choice of answers included the option “I do not belong to any religion”). It goes without saying that this figure in no way reflects the level of religious practice, inasmuch as only 40 percent of people in the same sample (admittedly in response to another question) considered themselves “believers”, and only some 6 percent went to church not less than once a month (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000a: 38f.). Clearly, this figure of 75 percent indicates that Orthodoxy serves rather, in this case, as a symbol of ethnic consciousness (and to a 18 According to the figures cited in a study, in 1993 41 percent regarded themselves as “rossiiane”, but by 1997 the corresponding figure was only 24 percent, while the percentage of “russkie” in 1997 had reached 57 percent (there is no figure for 1993) (Abramova 1998: 23); however, the author makes no connection between this changing pattern and the growth of ethnocentrism. Byzov (1996: 45), however, believes that “there has taken place within the Russian national consciousness one of the most radical changes ever: from a meta-ethnic sense of identity to a strictly ethnic identity”.

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much lesser degree as a normative value). 19 This is why it is considered that Orthodoxy, as the national religion of Russians, forms part of the national identity. 20 We shall now consider how this idea was reflected in the public debates of the 1990s. Models of Nationhood and Formulas of Identity in the Public Debates of the 1990s Summing up the results of a competition published in the official newspaper Rossiiskaia gazeta for the forging of a new conception of the nation, the commentator came to the conclusion that Orthodoxy was at the basis of all the projects submitted.21 However, it would be incorrect to say that there was no exception to this rule. Moreover, the level and mode of participation of Orthodoxy in the “formula of identity” can vary considerably depending on the “model of nationhood” adopted as a reference point. There exist, although overlapping and fluid, three major models of the nation that are at stake in Russian debates: the civic, the ethnic and the imperial (see Figure 1). The model of the civic, or European, nation prevailed in the anti-communist ideology of the end of the 1980s, and Orthodoxy was at that time virtually ignored in the new “formula of identity”. This trend formed part of the legacy of the Constitutional Democratic Party dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, to which was added the influence of the 1960s intelligentsia, shaped by Soviet atheism and generated by the thaw of the Khrushchev era. If mention was made of religion at that time, it was simply in order to affirm (irrespective of any denominational or historical expression) the “universal values of democracy”, Orthodoxy in its concrete and historical form being rather in contradiction with this kind of religion. The model of religious pluralism of the early 1990s enjoyed indirect social support as a result of the largely secularized character of the population and the anti-totalitarian and, above all, anti-dogmatic spirit then dominating Russian society. In this context, Orthodoxy 19 Islam plays a wholly similar role in Tatarstan, where it has had a strong and visible impact on the cultural landscape, although religious knowledge and practices have been comparatively unaffected, which means that “national consciousness is expressed through religious identity” (Musina 1998). In the areas of contact, the terms “Orthodox” and “Muslim” may even replace the terms of ethnic identification. 20 This logic is quite widespread: in the same way as the Mexicans have adopted Catholicism, the Indonesians Islam, etc. An example worth mentioning was the massive opposition of the Greeks to an initiative on the part of the state in June 2000 to delete the mention of religion on identity cards. 21 However, the winner of this competition has not been announced, although it could be the case that there was no intention to do so, cf. Rossiiskaia gazeta, August 1, 1998.

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was still perceived as an “ideology” and as a “totalitarian dogma” whose relevance to the “new Russia” was strenuously denied. Figure 1: Formulas of identity within the discursive space of Russian public debates

Religious References

Christian Conservative

Russian Ethnic Isolationist

Christian Democratic

Secular Liberal Western

Civic Nation

Russian Ethnic Orthodox

Imperial Orthodox

Russian NeoPagan

Slavic

Eurasian

Secular Statist Western

Secular Statist Russian

Ethnic Nation

Imperial Nation

Explanation: This figure maps out the discursive space of formulas of identity (ovals) by distinguishing their underlying models of nationhood and their degree of religious references. In addition, it highlights the emphasis on the state inherent to the respective formulas of identity (shadowed ovals).

More than ten years later, that state of mind has not disappeared, but its importance has diminished; the secularized “formula of identity” has progressively proven less and less in tune with society’s expectations (while the legislative model regulating the religious sphere has also undergone change). The secular position has accordingly assumed an increasingly defensive form, consisting of warnings against the “threat of clericalism”, against the danger of restoring the “symphony” (i.e., State religion) in any form whatsoever and against the hidden resemblance between communism and Orthodoxy, seen in both cases as forms of the Russian national ideology. 22

22 See, for example, the article “The second decline of the Third Rome”: “The structure of the Russian State quite simply cannot stand an ideological vacuum. Such a vacuum may be filled in all sorts of ways – whether religious or scientific, but invariably along totalitarian lines”

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With the passage of time, many supporters of the “European nation”, influenced by this general revival of interest in “Russian specificity”, 23 have gradually distanced themselves from thoroughgoing secularism and have tried to integrate religion, in one way or another, into their “formula of identity”. As a result, we find ourselves reading speculations on the subject of “spiritual and social harmony” or on the “crucial role of religious denominations” (but without any specific reference) (Skrypnik 1997: 34f.). Society – according to the participants in a round table on religion and society in contemporary Russia (NG-Religii 1, 1998) – needs a “vertical dimension of the sacred”, a “shared concept of civilization”. Some speak of Christianity (rather than Eastern Orthodoxy): the national idea cannot be other than Christian, declared the leader of the Russian Christian Union (Nezavisimaia gazeta, December 11, 1996). It would thus seem possible to distinguish a specific Christian “formula of identity”. Although this current is by and large a continuation of the liberal-conservative line developed by the Russian religious philosophers of the beginning of the last century, some important divisions are apparent: alongside the Christian democrats, who are truly liberal in the Western sense of the term and are generally open to ecumenism, 24 another more conservative strand declares that, in accord with Western democratic traditions (and not in opposition to them), Russia should choose Orthodoxy as its symbolic foundation insofar as it is the religion of the majority (NGReligii 11, 1997). Thus it is claimed that the project to build a civil society (i.e., a Western-type liberal society) “has failed” in Russia, and that the country should “develop organically” (that is to say, basing itself on Orthodoxy and other national traditions).25 The “Orthodox intelligentsia” is therefore encouraged to create a political movement that is “attuned to Russian civilization”, and “Orthodox journalists” are urged to “prepare society for the adoption of a truly Orthodox Weltanschauung” (Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 23, 1996). Filatov (1999: 141f.) has written in a similar way about communism and Orthodoxy. 23 A tendency which, since 1992–3, after the first shock of liberalization, has dominated social consciousness and transformed the attitudes of many liberal intellectuals of the late 1980s (cf. Janov 1998: 115f.). 24 According to Shchipkov, there appear to be practically no Orthodox believers by birth among the Christian Democrats, who mainly consist of “neophytes, Protestants and sceptics”, who seek to bring together “Christians of all denominations and even atheists” (Shchipkov 1998: 39). Moreover, as the leaders of the Russian Christian Democratic Party have written, they recognize the need to “give Christian ecumenism a Russian national cultural basis”, combining Orthodoxy with Protestantism (sic!) (ibid., 41). 25 NG-Religii, no. 12, 1997. The concept of “organic development” in the tradition of Russian thought is necessarily closely associated with the old discourse of the Slavophiles and the later theorists of “Russian thought”, including religious thinkers such as Sergei Bulgakov or Ivan Il’in (see his article “Russia is a living organism” in Il’in 1956, vol. I: 223–9).

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(NG-Religii 1, 1988; 5, 2000). As one expert has written, this tendency can be defined as a “liberal-conservative synthesis” – an ideology that is “pluralist and secular”, but “Orthodox in its content”. 26 As can be seen from these different quotations, the ideological spectrum is very broad, the positions held varying in accordance with the meaning given to “Orthodoxy”, namely, to what extent Orthodoxy is “ecumenical”, that is to say, more or less receptive to a global Christian paradigm. Generally speaking, one is close to the “speculative” Orthodoxy of the pre- and post-Revolutionary debates, characterized by a relative degree of flexibility in dealing with a changing social and cultural reality. Nevertheless, religious pluralism already appears problematic in this context, given the tendency to develop Orthodoxy “in all its fullness” (which places in jeopardy the secular principle) and having regard to the somewhat ambiguous situation in which the other denominations then find themselves. If, moving through this spectrum, we step back from the model of the “civic nation”, then we approach a model of a quite different kind: the “ethnic nation” model. As we have seen above, it gradually comes to occupy the center stage. This model includes Orthodoxy as one of its key components in its “formula of identity”. But here again we are dealing with a broad spectrum and a number of variants. The ethnic model, in principle, can be conceived, similar to the civic model, without an obvious religious component: some adherents of the strong Russian ethno-centric state are, to use Max Weber’s phrase, “religiously unmusical”. However, the ethnic accent naturally requires a clearer religious overtone. The stress is here placed on the reconstruction of the archetypes of “Russian Orthodoxy” and of “Orthodox Russia”. Ioann Ekonomtsev, for example, puts forward the idea that the (Orthodox) religious element is a “ferment of ethnogenesis”, and that the Orthodox Church is the “leaven of ethnogenesis” (Ekonomtsev 1991: 536f.). In the same area, albeit with quite different overtones, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his writings in the 1990s, criticized contemporary atheism and, taking up Slavophile arguments, called for a local form of democracy based on the revival of the Russian zemstvos (local authorities) and for a very specific national isolationism. 27 Close to the position of Solzhenitsyn, Andrei 26 See A. Morozov in NG-Religii 3, 2000. This is a reappearance of the tradition represented by Frank (1924), who writes on the post-religious “sacred foundations” of contemporary secularized societies. 27 See his thesis on the “voluntary restrictions”, which are seen as more important than “human rights”, or on the “superiority of the moral principle to the legal principle”. At the same time, his constant references to the moderate liberalism of Vassili Maklakov and Petr Stolypin distance Solzhenitsyn from both the Slavophiles and the new Russian ethno-nationalists, who assign a central place to Orthodoxy. Cf. “Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiiu?” [“How can we rebuild Russia?”], Literaturnaia gazeta, September 18, 1990.

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Saveliev developed a more radical and overtly religious program for an “Orthodox civic movement”, calling for the “restoration of the historic heritage of the Russian way of life” and for a “spiritual nationalism” (NG-Religii 1, 1998). Another position, comparable to that of Solzhenitsyn but stripped of all democratic rhetoric, is that of the inheritors of the semi-official strain of “literary nationalism” dating from the Soviet period (to be found, for example, in the literary reviews Nash sovremennik and Molodaia gvardiia), marked by a nostalgia for a traditional, popular and Orthodox way of life, in line with the tradition of Ivan Kireevsky and tending likewise towards Slavophilia. 28 Close to these traditionalist currents, one finds a very large group of Orthodox organizations, such as the Sretensky (Hypapante) Monastery, the Radonezh brotherhood, and news agencies and publishing houses such as “The Russian House” or “The Russian Messenger”, which are much more ideologically and politically active; the focus of their concerns is not so much the shaping of national identity as such as the question of the construction of the Russian Orthodox State. Historically, this position is close to the integralist stance of the official synodal Orthodoxy of the nineteenth century. The influence of this group and the impact of its views on public opinion continued to grow throughout the 1990s. 29 Close to this group, one finds the “Union for the Moral Rebirth of the Motherland”, which calls for an Orthodox State in the form of a classical Russian monarchy – and in that form and no other. Others, such as Viktor Aksiuchits, place even greater stress on the statist dimension of the “formula of identity”, speaking of an “Orthodox cosmism” and of a “spirituality” that can be promoted only by a strongly authoritarian state. 30 In the context of this ethnic model of nationhood, one finds a number of other variants that introduce a religious component into their “formula of identity”. One of 28 “…the very distinctiveness of the Russian way of life stems from the fact that it derives from perfect Christianity…“ (extract from the famous reply by Kireevsky to A. Aksakov 1839; see Maslin 1992: 71f.). 29 Thus, Averianov writes that it is this same group which defined, towards the end of the 1990s, the public face of the Russian “Orthodox idea” (NG-Religii, no. 5, 2000). It clearly appears to be the case that this influential position is shared by a number of the most senior representatives of the hierarchy of the Patriarchate of Moscow. 30 Aksiuchits (Nezavisimaia gazeta, December 15, 1996 and Nezavisimaia gazeta, February 26, 2000) often uses the term “ideocracy”, invented by the Eurasianists to emphasize the particularly Russian link, in his opinion, between the predominant national idea and its authoritarian state embodiment. The growing interest in the state during the 1990s has become more and more obvious, even among the liberals, the supporters of the concept of a “civic” nation. Vladimir Putin’s presidency since the beginning of 2000 is openly based on a program of reinforcement of the state.

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them (which became somewhat fashionable at the end of the 1990s) focuses on the Old Believers as the authentic expression of “Holy Russia”.31Another stresses the idea of Slav Orthodox unity, with direct references to the tradition of Fedor Tiutchev and Fedor Dostoevsky; its impact on public opinion was particularly great after the war in Bosnia and Kosovo.32 Close to this Slavocentric idea is the broadly acknowledged position of Solzhenitsyn on the natural union of the “three fraternal peoples” (Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian). And this ethnic model is also shared by part of the new Russian communists, who replace classical Marxist internationalism and atheism with a Russian nationalism tinged with egalitarianism and authoritarianism. 33 There can be no doubt that all the ideological positions represented on this ethnonationalist spectrum are at variance with the model of religious pluralism: Orthodoxy is seen as the sole expression of Russianness, and it is the state’s role to strengthen these reciprocal links, and even to be their embodiment, the missing element, the third in fact, in the classic trilogy “people-religion-power”. The other denominations appear to be naturally somewhat superfluous in this scheme of things. Some articles make a point of underlining the fact: “The idea of a religious free market, which was unfortunately enshrined as the cornerstone of the ‘Law on Freedom of Conscience’ of 1990, has from the start been in total contradiction with the historical specificity of Russia and with the interests of the spiritual and moral health of its people”. 34 One 31 Solzhenitsyn has himself some sympathy for the Old Believers (cf. Nivat 1997); Yuri Afanas’ev (in NG-Scenarii 1, 1998) believes that the worldview of the dominant Church is “medieval” and links the “positive experience of Orthodoxy” to the Old Belief; however, Alexander Dugin (Zavtra, no. 1, 1998), who holds radically different views, regards the preRaskol Muscovy as a paragon to be followed, thus providing a quite different interpretation of the Old Believers. 32 See I. Shafarevich on the “new wars of religion” (Zavtra, December 10, 1996); see also the reappearance of the watchwords of the middle of the nineteenth century to bring Constantinople back to Orthodoxy (Zavtra, May 21, 1999), and the views on the “radiant Orthodox victory of internal truths over external power”, expressed in the course of the NATO operations in Kosovo (NG-Religii, no. 3, 1999). 33 The Russian nationalism of the communists is more moderate in the statements by the party leaders (for example G. Zyuganov), in stark contrast to the extremism expressed in Rus’ Pravoslavnaia, a supplement to Sovetskaia Rossiia, the main mouthpiece of the communists. 34 Migranian and Tsipko 1997. It is interesting to note that the title of the article refers to the classic triad. The trend towards “Orthodoxization” is subjected to constant criticism: for example, A. Malashenko casts doubt on the idea of “Orthodox identity”, partly because as an expert on Islam, he regards it as impossible to ignore Russian Islam (Nezavisimaia gazeta, June 17, 1997); the Baptist A. Markevich seeks to defend the “traditionalism and Russian dimension” of Russian Protestantism, which is allowed no place in the Orthodox “formula of

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Church hierarch has raised his voice in even stronger condemnation: “The honeyed lie of ‘pluralism’ and ‘freedom’ (understood as moral arbiter and as libertarian worldview) conceals within itself a deadly poison that destroys the spirit of togetherness (sobornost’) of the Russian people as well as the power of the State” (Snychev 1994: 5f.). If we move even further along the ethno-nationalist spectrum, we arrive at more authoritarian statist formulas of identity (they may be termed “ethnarchic”), and we pass imperceptibly into the realm of the third model – one dominated by the concept of empire-state.35 We have seen previously how, in certain writings, the ethnic conception of the nation is not easily contained within the context of an isolated “Russianness”, how the nation constantly conceived itself as transcending strictly Russian ethnic frontiers; in the same way, Orthodoxy, as it becomes, within the classic triad, the religion “of the Russian people constituting itself as a State” (V. Aksiuchits), tends to metamorphose, like in Russia of the Romanovs, into a religion whose scope is coterminous with the area of domination of the Russian ethnos. By the same token, the old messianic argument is strengthened, legitimating Russian ethnic domination. The links with the imperium here appear as essential element. When Russian identity is associated with Old Believer currents that claim to transcend any state, there is no possibility of any imperial claim taking shape; on the other hand, when one speaks, for example, of Eastern Slavic unity (with Ukraine and Belarus), the imperial archetype dictates that Russian Orthodoxy should be seen as constituting, by its nature, “the spiritual center of many ethnic groups and peoples”,36 which corresponds to what the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church calls its “canonical territory”. It is interesting to note that whereas the Russian State has renounced its imperial claims beyond its internationally recognized territorial limits, the Russian Orthodox Church, by virtue of its “meta-ethnicity” and its “extraterritoriality” within the boundaries of the old Empire, is becoming a kind of imprint of the imperial tradition, a witness to its break-up, that is to say, in some of its more extreme expressions, a reminder to the state of its lost imperial power. 37 identity” (Nezavisimaia gazeta, August 30, 1997); the jurist Yuri Rosenbaum sees in the appeals of Migranian and Tsipko a “spiritual muzzle for free Russia” (ibid.). 35 Berelowitch (1992: 39) contrasts specifically two kinds of Russian nationalism and identity: “the assertion of Russian identity either takes the form of a desire to return to imperial Russia or of an archaic and regressive quest for a vanished and exclusive Russia”. 36 In an article devoted to Orthodoxy in Ukraine (NG-Religii 3, 1999). 37 As Rousselet (2001) has observed, “for the first time in its history, Russian Orthodoxy is no longer coterminous with the Russian State”; and the new situation has given rise to the concept of “spiritual citizenship” (belonging to the Russian Church) as opposed to the concept of political citizenship of the new states.

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One thus observes in discussions on Russian identity an interesting turnaround in public opinion, involving a swing from an imperial outlook to ethnocentrism and then back to the former outlook; more specifically, one sees how Russian ethnocentrism itself engenders imperial claims that are legitimized by religion.38 How, in the context of the imperial variant of the model of nationhood, can the issue of denominational and ethnic diversity be resolved? One solution is provided by the concept of Eurasia. This “formula of identity” revives to some point the ideas of the Eurasianist movement of the 1920s, and also make an attempt to incorporate Turkic-Muslim minorities. This is a peculiarly imperial, resolutely anti-Western formula. The opposition to the West becomes increasingly marked as one moves further from the “European” model and culminates in Eurasianism. In the religious sphere, Neo-Eurasianism proposes a rapprochement between Orthodoxy and Islam, taking up the thesis of the early Eurasianists on the spiritual proximity of the two religions and developing the idea of the uniqueness of their union.39 The framework of the Muslim-Orthodox and Slavo-Turkish union can be extended to all the other ethnic groups and faiths of Eurasia. Viktor Aksiuchits thus gives the title of “Russian nation” to the “political and spiritual gathering (sobor) of the Russian peoples, whose core is represented by the strategic union of the Slavic and Turkish peoples, of the Orthodox and Islamic civilizations” (NG-Religii, July 23, 1996). The social philosopher Alexander Panarin, writes of a synthesis of the “great monotheistic traditions” in a future Eurasian State. 40 The occultist philosopher Alexander Dugin contrasts Atlantic civilization (meaning Western civilization) with the Eurasian Empire in which is achieved the “Slav Christian destiny”, and puts forward the idea of a “typological resemblance” 38 Father Ioann Ekonomtsev (1991: 540) draws a very clear distinction between the idea of “Holy Russia” and the idea of the Empire, taking the view that since the sixteenth century (with the theory of “Moscow – the Third Rome”) and particularly since the time of Peter the Great, there has been confusion between the two ideas, and then the replacement of one by the other. See also with regard to the central importance in Russian history of the Holy Empire and not Holy Russia, the article by Kholmogorov (Segodnia, April 23, 1994). 39 V. Polosin, an Orthodox priest who converted to Islam, personifies this Muslim-Orthodox unity; he writes: “Russia has always been a Eurasian and de facto imperial country. [The heart of the Empire has always been] a complementary union of Muslims and Orthodox Christians. Moreover, the ideology of the state as a secular program must be renewed on the basis of the values of monotheism, because that is precisely what Islam and Orthodoxy have in common” (Nezavisimaia gazeta, July 7, 1999). One of the conferences on Islam in Russia came to the general conclusion that Russia is a unique civilization of Orthodox Slavs and Muslim Turks, to which the model of Western democracy cannot be applied (NG-Religii 12, 1997). 40 Panarin 1995a and 1995b; Panarin and Il’in 1994. See also the description and analysis of the views of the Neo-Eurasianists in Ignatow 1992 and Laruelle 1999.

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between Orthodoxy and “fatalistic, anti-individualistic Islam” (Dugin 1997). At the same time, Egor Stroyev, President of the Upper Chamber of the Federal Assembly, the third-ranking member of the Russian constitutional hierarchy, speaks of Russia as “the core of Eurasian civilization, the point of anchorage of the unique synthesis of Eastern Christendom and Islam”. 41 Thus Neo-Eurasianism likewise represents a vast spectrum, one that does not however correspond entirely to the spectrum of the ethno-nationalists, who have imperial pretensions. Another “formula of identity” of the Russian ethnos, less significant but no less noteworthy, is that of the “pagans” (iazychniki) who either reject “cold Byzantine Christianity” in favour of a return to the pre-Christian “Indo-Aryan cultural substratum” or who regard Russian Orthodoxy as a particular manifestation of Russian paganism. 42 The pagan groups and movements may focus on their common European roots or proclaim a “pure” Russian ethno-nationalism, but in most cases they show similarities with the Eurasianist groups inasmuch as Russian ethnic identity absorbs, in their ways of thinking, other cultures to be found on the vast expanse of the continent: Islam and Buddhism may quite simply be regarded as two branches of the Russian (“Vedic”) religion (Kandyba 1996: 212). Like Eurasianism, paganism in its most ideological forms links national culture to the categories of Empire. 43 The ambiguous attitude of the “Neo-Pagans” towards Christianity, their anti-liberalism and their anti-Semitism mean that their views are unlikely to coincide with the principle of religious pluralism. Eurasianism is rejected by another section of Russian ethnonationalists who fear the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Russia, who speak of the “Muslim threat” – for example, with regard to the aspirations of the Wahhabis to integrate themselves into the “very heart of Russian civilization” – or who readily agree with Radovan Karadjić in asserting that the main confrontation in the war in 41 Nezavisimaia gazeta, July 29, 1998. While for the nationalists grouped around the journal Zavtra (including A. Dugin) and for the communists, sympathetic to Orthodoxy and Islam, the “Eurasianist model” is a form of imperial ideology, for a senior figure such as Stroyev, Eurasianism seems to be rather a form of political discourse, dictated by pragmatic considerations of power. What is important here however is the attraction and influence of this model. 42 Cf. Kandyba 1996; Petukhov 2000; Istarkhov 2000; Miroliubov 1996. For Russian “Vedism”, see Moroz 1993. On the other hand, the “semi-paganism” of Russian Orthodoxy may be blamed on the Russian Church and may become an argument against its influence (Lisickin 1999: 29). 43 With regard to Slav Neo-Paganism, see Aseev 1999. It is worth pointing out that the revived paganism of the ethnic minorities of the Volga regions (the Mordovian, Chuvash and MariCheremis peoples) reject Orthodoxy as a religion linked to the Empire; ethnic paganism has become the foundation of a new anti-Russian ethno-nationalism (Filatov and Shchipkov 1995). 43 See the article of the Kurginian group in Zavtra (no. 3, 1998).

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Bosnia “lies in the spiritual field … between Islamic expansionism and the Orthodox faith”44. Finally, Eurasianism is also rejected by those who believe that it encourages expansionist ambitions of the Turkic elites throughout Eurasia.45 “Russian power” (derzhava) is brutally confronted not only in the West, but also in the East, and here the rupture with Eurasianism becomes striking. However, despite this important difference on the question of Islam, it is often difficult to draw a line between Russian ethnocentric imperialism and Eurasianism on a whole series of other issues: they both link the “formula of identity” to a strong, imperial-style state, to “traditionalism” (as opposed to the liberal Western model) and, finally, to some or other form of “ideocracy”, i.e., to the predominance of a particular “national idea” having “official” backing and a religious stamp. The official Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church that has been developed since 1994 and was approved by the Council of the Church in August 2000 deals with questions of identity in Chapter II entitled “The Church and the Nation” (Osnovy 2001). The Social Concept seeks to achieve a balance, maintaining its distance from both virulent Orthodox nationalism (very severely criticized 46) and from secular positions. While reaffirming the foundations of Christian universalism on the basis of well-known quotations from the New Testament, the Social Concept stresses the idea of a national Christian culture, of a national Christian “identity and expression”, and of “Christian patriotism”, all deeply rooted in a particular Fatherland. In conclusion, the Social Concept states: “when a nation, in civic or ethnic terms, is fully or mainly a mono-confessional Orthodox community, it may, in a certain sense, be regarded as a community united by faith – as an Orthodox people”. Here, despite an attempt to put forward a moderate point of view by correlating the terms “ethnic” and “civic”, and through the use of the expression “in a certain sense”, the idea of an

44 Interview with Karadjić (Zavtra, April 11, 1996). 45 The revival of “Neo-Eurasianism within the non-Orthodox opposition, on the face of it an antiAtlantic trend, but also anti-Russian, and the emergence of the concept of a ʻEurasianist unionʼ among the young Turkish elites and the post-Soviet nomenklatura are not fortuitous” (Narochnitskaia 1996: 158). The Eurasianist formula is indeed very popular within the TurkoMuslim elites (cf. on this subject Laruelle 2000). Eurasianism has been subjected to criticism from the more moderate supporters of a “European” identity, who warn of the dangers of the “Muslim-Turkish influence”, with reference to Solzhenitsyn (Nezavisimaia gazeta, November 6, 1998). 46 Aggressive nationalism and xenophobia are described as sins, and it is stated further on: “Even more out of line with Orthodox teaching are those who put the nation in the place of God or reduce faith to an aspect of national consciousness” (Osnovy 2001: II).

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ethnocentric Orthodox identity tending to be extended to the whole of the Russian nation seems to predominate. 47 A Hierarchical Pluralism of Religions The three factors in question (the state in search of legitimacy, the Orthodox Church in search of pre-eminence, and society in search of social and cultural identities) have worked in one and the same direction: the trend towards religious pluralism that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s, stemming from a basic indifference on the part of the new nation towards any form of denominational determinism, was replaced towards the end of the decade by a much more complex and unstable hierarchical organization of religions, instituted by the new law of 1997 and by social practice. This hierarchy represented a compromise between various positions, but was mainly the result of deeper processes at work within Russian society. The religious policy of the state has indeed evolved: whereas at the beginning of the 1990s it might have seemed that the complete equality of religions was the best means “of managing diversity”, a decade or so later the policy has shifted in favor of a hierarchy of religions (see Figure 2).

47 The quotations are taken from the same second chapter (Osnovy 2001: II). In order to justify “Christian patriotism”, the text refers to the “Biblical people of Israel”, recalling, in addition to the Covenant of the people with God, their strong attachment to “linguistic and tribal integrity” and to the “Promised Land”. The way in which the Israelite model is used here makes the ethnocentric interpretation quite clear and is reminiscent of the ancient messianic allusions based on this same comparison between Biblical Israel and Russia. Another feature of this approach refers to Jesus who “insisted on his membership of the Jewish nation” and who was a “loyal subject of the Roman Empire and paid tribute to Caesar”. That is the central point of the chapter, as is shown by the comments on this question by then Metropolitan (and later Patriarch) Kirill Gundiaev in his lengthy presentation of the Social Concept during the Council. He also particularly stressed the idea, set out in the Social Concept, that Christian patriotism is reflected inter alia “in the issues of State governance”; Kirill added that politics should not be avoided by the clergy under the pretext that it would be “a non-Christian domain where we might get our hands dirty” (Gundiaev 2000c).

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Figure 2: The hierarchy of religions: a “scale” of national identity as reconstructed from public discourse. Mainline Russian Orthodoxy Islam Buddhism Judaism

specially mentioned in the 1997 law

Roman Catholicism Mainline Protestantism

non-Orthodox Christians (inoslavnye)

Old Believers Other Protestant Denominations New Religious Movements (Russian) New Religious Movements (Foreign) Occultism and Paganism

“traditional religions”

other religions or sects

Let us rapidly examine this hierarchy. It would seem that there has been a gradual return to the pre-Revolutionary binary hierarchy, which drew a distinction between the inorodtsy and the inovertsy, although nowadays other terms are employed (“national minorities”, “peoples of Russia”, “other faiths”) and the context is different (as a result of the general decline in the influence of religion). In any event, a certain affinity between ethnicity and religious faith is now generally acknowledged. The division into two groups – “traditional faiths” and “other faiths”, a form of limited pluralism – is a new phenomenon in the hierarchization of religions. Each of the two groups is in turn subdivided. This dual and multilayered classification would seem in fact to reflect the varying degrees of proximity of religious identities to what is regarded as the true Russian identity; it mirrors not only changes in public opinion but also the debates described above. The “traditional faiths” are classified in the following order: Eastern Orthodoxy, as the dominant religion, the historic religion of the Russians and the religion closest to the new “formula of national identity”, comes first. It is followed by Islam and Buddhism, which are linked to specific peoples, but partly included in the “formula of identity” through the concept of Eurasianism. 48 Then comes Judaism, which is a 48 A first draft of the preamble to the 1997 law added after Orthodoxy: “and also Islam which has several million believers, Buddhism, Judaism and other religions traditionally present in

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little lower still in the hierarchy, but present in the “formula of identity” as an isolated element. 49 Further on we find other Christian denominations: Roman Catholics and Protestants (but only the mainline Protestant Churches such as Lutheranism and Evangelical Baptism); according to the former system of classification they are the denominations that are regarded as non-Slavic and not really wholly Russian, and which have to justify their place in the new “formula of identity” in the face of the public rhetoric that is overall unfavorable towards them. 50 The next group covers the “other faiths” or “sects” and includes some of the Protestant denominations and the New Religious Movements. These groups have been refused recognition as “traditional” and are, therefore, deprived of some degree of historical legitimacy. Even though the sects have always been part of Russian religious life, they have always symbolized heterodoxy and dissidence and have remained outside the law. Likewise, under the current legislation, they are by definition deprived of certain rights, although they are not prohibited. The sects may be subdivided according to their degree of exclusivity, their structure and their origin – the Russian Federation” (Rossiiskaia gazeta, September 16, 1997); Islam was thus given a special second status. In the final text, this special status disappeared. 49 The introduction of Judaism in the preamble of the 1997 law as “one of the traditional religions” was by no means a foregone conclusion (cf. NG-Religii 1, 2000); in public debate Judaism is far from being considered as part of the “traditional group”. While Islam, and to a lesser extent Buddhism, may be regarded among Eurasianist theorists as belonging to the national tradition, the thesis of the Judaeo-Christian foundations of Russian identity (which is widely used, for example, in American national discourse) has proved impossible to maintain. 50 In the preliminary draft of this same preamble, the other Christian religions were not mentioned and were perhaps implicitly included in the category of “other existing traditional religions”; in the final version, after the Orthodox religion, which is given a special status, there come: “Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and other religions”. The term “Christianity” covers the Christian denominations of the West; they are placed before Islam and the other religions, not because they are higher in the hierarchy, but because to mention Christianity after other religions would be regarded as strange in a largely Christian country. However, in one way or another, the distinction between “Orthodoxy” and “Christianity” remains ambiguous. It is a fact that, in the general sense of the terms, these concepts do not always coincide with one another; O. Mramornov even remarks sarcastically that the word “Christianity” will soon be regarded as an insult (see NG-Religii 5, 1997). This confusion is similar to the way how the word “Christians” is widely used in the Latino world as a pejorative marker for Protestants. In the Russian press (not just the religious press but also the secular press) there are a large number of articles that criticize the activity – the “proselytism” – of the Roman Catholic Church in Russia (sometimes described as “expansionism” or even “spiritual aggression”) and of the Protestant movements, as well as articles on the dangers of ecumenism. The official position taken by the Patriarchate of Moscow on this question has always been extremely prudent.

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whether of Russian origin or Western (and in some cases Eastern) origin. The published texts describe them as “destructive” and “totalitarian” (these terms are used in a wider sense than, for example, in other European countries) (cf. the fairly long list in Novye religioznye organizatsii 1997); and their ordering within this second group is based on the extent to which the religious movement is “dangerous” (the less exclusive and the more Russian the movement is the less it is considered “dangerous” and the higher it is placed on the scale. The more “dangerous” it is, the more it is regarded as remote from the “formula of identity”). 51 Thus everyday language no less than the language of public debate and, indeed, the language used in legislation coincide in putting forward a particular classification of religions, which is clearly different from the purely pluralist model. This hierarchical pluralism is based on a view of Orthodoxy (that of the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate) as the norm of religious life, corresponding to both the aims of the state and the expectations of the nation.52 All the other forms of religion are evaluated in terms of their degree of proximity to this norm or their possibility of interacting with it, constituting a hierarchy of faiths behind which lies the hierarchy of symbolic congruence with national identity. Conclusions: In what Sense may Russia be said to be an Orthodox Nation? The idea of an “Orthodox nation” reappeared in Russia during the 1990s; the preRevolutionary past was then brought into play, even though the contemporary situation in Russia differs fundamentally from the situation in the nineteenth century. The Orthodox “nature” of society and of the state was then a reality; Orthodoxy formed part of the popular consciousness, of daily behavior and of state practice; contemporary “Orthodox identity”, on the other hand, is rather a mythological idiom that appeared in response to a need for a new identity. Pre-Revolutionary society had gradually evolved towards a secularized and pluralist “formula of identity”; contemporary society already seems to be secularized and pluralist (as a legacy of the post51 The fact that this hierarchy of religions within a context of limited pluralism reflects the link (perhaps more symbolic than real, as at the beginning of the century) between national identity and religious allegiance is confirmed by the ambiguous status of the Old Believers: they should be included as a “traditional Church” in the upper group, but are, on account of a number of features, closer to the lower group; the Old Believers (like other groups affiliated to Russian Orthodoxy) present, as in the past, a serious problem for the question of Russian identity. 52 I am obviously leaving aside here the question of the heterogeneity of Orthodoxy, even within the Russian Orthodox Church itself; such heterogeneity reflects the whole spectrum of attitudes within society, in particular as regards problems of identity; there has been considerable controversy on what is really the “Orthodox norm”.

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communist period) and is seeking ways of gradually including the elements of Orthodoxy within its “formula of identity”. “Orthodoxy” in pre-Revolutionary Russia was a religious reality permeating the whole of society, while “Orthodoxy” in present-day Russia is only a reality within the religious “field” and is essentially a kind of a cultural symbol, used as an important ideological construct. It nevertheless seems undeniable that we are seeing to some extent a repetition of the past – particularly as regards the relationship between the question of “national identity” and the practice of inter-religious relationships. Russia at the beginning of the twenty-first century, like the Russia of the beginning of the twentieth century, is very heterogeneous and, now as in the past, manifests a comparable model of “hierarchical pluralism”. In both cases, this model is based on the idea of a (predominant) national religion and a (dominant) national Church, on the inclusion – consciously or unconsciously (secretly or declaredly, on ideological or pragmatic grounds) – of Russian Eastern Christianity among the cultural and political symbols, and on a tendency on the part of the Russian nation to identify itself with the “Orthodox people”, (as is clearly apparent in the Social Concept of the Russian Church). This enlisting of Orthodoxy in the shaping of the “new nation” seems natural in Russia (if we take as our starting point the criteria set out in the introduction), given its dominant position and its clear links with a dominant ethnos. Consequently, the model of pluralism described – despite its instability, the absence of strict legal norms, and a certain arbitrariness in the relations between the state and the various faiths – persists in Russia and could even receive a constitutional “blessing” at some future date. There is no doubt that this has hampered the development of a civic and political nation of the European kind or, in any event, has changed the nature of that process,53 but it has not called into question the principle of a certain tolerance, nor the secular nature of the state nor, above all, the secularized nature of society. In spite of Orthodoxy’s ubiquitous presence in public and political debates, the real impact of religion on political culture, state institutions, or social life in general remains relatively weak. This situation, inter alia, makes a large-scale extreme religious nationalism or overt religious intolerance hardly possible. We may call Russia “Orthodox”, so to speak, phenomenologically, but not substantially. The discrepancy between these two planes makes the Russian case unique and certainly different 53 Cf. Simon 1999, where the rhetoric of Empire (in part related to the Orthodox rhetoric) is seen, just like economic and juridical-political “regionalization”, as a threat to the Russian political nation (Russländische Nation). Tolz 1998, examining the various definitions of the Russian nation, considers that the “civic definition” is still alien to “social engineers” and to the people, and has to give way to such definitions as a Eurasian Empire, a community of Eastern Slavs, a community of Russian speakers or a community of race. That reflects general skepticism towards the civic model in the region, as defined by Brubaker (1996: 105).

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from, for example, Indonesian or Mexican cases, yet not similar to any Western pattern. The case of Greece, perhaps, shows the most obvious similarity in terms of strong national connotations of religiosity, yet Greece’s ethnic and religious homogeneity makes it definitely less complex than that of Russia. Bibliographic note on newspapers used: Nezavisimaia gazeta is a Moscow newspaper that first appeared at the time of perestroika and was known for its liberal tendencies. One of its supplements, NG-Religii, published bimonthly, was the only periodical dealing with religious affairs and having no denominational affiliation in the 1990s. Segodnia was another liberal newspaper. Rossiiskaia gazeta was the official government daily. Zavtra (Den’ prior to 1993) is a weekly publication that reflects the views of both the nationalist right and partly the new Russian communists.

4.

PUBLIC RELIGION AND THE QUEST FOR NATIONAL IDEOLOGY: RUSSIA’S MEDIA DISCOURSE OF THE 1990s 1

Introduction In the Soviet Union the quasi-religion of communism expelled traditional religion from the public space, which it filled with its own symbols, rites and doctrines. Traditional religion became a secret form of “inner emigration” (the term that Soviet dissident intellectuals used to describe their stance of escaping the ideological grip of communism by withdrawing into their own spiritual worlds). In the last years of the Soviet Union religion emerged from underground and ceased to be a private refuge. It rapidly entered the “empty” public space. However, this was a very much more complicated development than might appear. Being now open to global processes, Russia became subject to “post-modern” relativism, consumerism and, once again, privatization. Of course, being private in the modern (or post-modern) sense is something completely different from Soviet clandestine privacy. Rather, post-modern religiosity relegates religion to the private sphere, as the secularization thesis predicts in the post-modern world: religion becomes “invisible”, although omnipresent in a metaphorical sense (see Luckmann 1967). As a matter of fact, Russian culture appeared at the end of the1980s, and perhaps for the first time in its history, to be rapidly moving towards a fully secularized society in the Western sense. At the same time, public interest in religious issues, and the public prestige of religion increased dramatically (galvanized by the simple fact that state control was at once removed). What was in fact beginning to happen in the Russian case was exactly what José Casanova called “deprivatization”, meaning the fact that “religious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the marginal and privatized role which theories of Modernity and theories of secularization have reserved to them” (Casanova 1994: 5). Casanova’s critique proceeds from the differentiated approach to the secularization thesis: he accepts as relevant such a modern trend as growing differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms; but he denies “secularization” in the sense of the public irrelevance of religion and its restriction to private observance (Casanova 1994: 211–13). To prove the thesis, Casanova uses, along with the examples of Brazil, Iran and the United States, a case of Poland that suggests some parallels with other post-communist societies including Russia. 1

I thank Professor Judith Robinson-Valéry, former Director of Research at the C.N.R.S., Paris, and Dr. Eugene Clay, Professor at Arizona State University, for their close reading of this chapter.

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Russia was exposed simultaneously to two developments which appear to be theoretical opposites: secularization and religious revival. Both trends had particular causes. A liberal idea to build a civil society and a European democracy required absolute religious neutrality, new multicultural approaches, and a sort of technocratic naïveté refusing any kind of ideological programming, after the Soviet experience of a sort of “ideological fatigue”. At the very same time, religion was perceived as a fresh spiritual and emotional compensation for the shocking break-up of the social system, as well as a repository of cultural arguments, collective memories, and symbolic strength needed to build new national, group and individual identities. Religious arguments, among others, were instrumentalized to create a new Russian nationalism. This chapter will focus on the public discourse on religion as manifested in the major Russian periodicals in the 1990s. It was this discourse that became the main territory for the reception, reinterpretation and reapplication of religion in contemporary Russian society. 2 It is important to emphasize that the mass media, and particularly the new press, performed a crucial role in the fall of the Soviet Union, and were essential in shaping the new Russian public space, continuing both to mirror and to shape mass attitudes and preferences of ruling elites.3 The discourse found in the newspapers took various forms, ranging from short, hasty appraisals (following reports on particular occasions), to pamphlets, analyses or discussions. Although the articles were very different in depth, tonality, and intentional “objectivity”, they produced a common space of the discourse open to the broad public. It dealt with a variety of topics, among which I have selected only four: contemporary mass religiosity; religious pluralism and legislation; religion-state relationships; and finally religion’s relevance to the quest for a “national idea”.4 The main question I bring up in this chapter is connected to a “strange” disproportion that strikes the observer: religion attracts much attention and is often referred to, while the practical, regular religiosity (measured in figures of church attendance and group affiliation) has surprisingly remained more or less on the same low level as before the liberalization. This makes the Russian case very different from the 2 3 4

As Filatov (1999: 142) aptly points out, Orthodoxy, reinvented for public consumption in the 1990s, is a “phantom” created by the mass media. This special role of the press has never really been questioned by the TV with its very different functions. In the 2000s, however, there was a major shift: the main forum of free public debate moved from the newspapers to the Internet. In my work with the press I partly used the Universal Database of Russian Newspapers, a full text online database by East View Information Services (URL: http://www.eastview.com); I retained the 3-literal abbreviations of newspaper titles used in this database. See the abbreviations at the end of the article.

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Polish one, and in fact unique.5 If religiosity itself is relatively weak, why is religion a major matter of public discussion? How is it perceived as relevant to Russia’s development? What are the functions of this public religion for those who participate in this discourse? 6 General Religious Dynamics and Mass Religiosity: The Entropy Thesis The religious revival has been one of the central notions in the discourse on religion since the late 1980s; ten years later this controversial phenomenon is generally recognized as a mere phantom produced by groundless expectations. By the end of the 1990s most journalists looked skeptically at any effort to estimate mass religiosity. As one newspaper put it: Russia didn’t see the religious revival that the priests foretold in 1988 when everything was just starting. Nor did Russia fall into the hands of the Hare Krishna into which it seemed to be moving in 1991. Nothing of this kind happened. It’s a shame to speak of atheism, but it’s boring to speak of religion. To put it scientifically, religiosity didn’t become a social factor… (NGA, January 6, 1996)

Most journalists expressed disappointment and disillusion when writing about this revival manqué. This disillusion with religion was manifested in a lamentation of a religious sympathizer about “the abandon of the sacred” as the most serious injury inflicted by contemporary culture; in a warning by an Orthodox writer about the “danger of secularism”; and in a claim by an atheist that “it is time now to temper religious zeal” and to recognize human inner forces and the progress of science (an opinion that could hardly be publicized at the time of religious enthusiasm ten years ago) (NG-REL 11, 1997; SPV, March 6, 1999; NG-REL, 12, 1997). 5

6

The figures vary from 2 to 7 percent of regular church-goers in the entire population. Kääriäinen and Furman (1997) fix the monthly church attendance at 6–7 percent level, the weekly attendance being not more than 2 percent; Dubin (1999: 364) cites a monitoring for 5 to 6 percent monthly attendance. In contrast those who “believe in God” reach almost 60 percent; and those who see positively the role of the Orthodoxy in society attain 94 percent, the Church being considered the number one institution of people’s confidence. The term “public religion” is sometimes used as a synonym for the notion of “civil religion” shaped by Robert Bellah (1967), although the meanings are slightly different in one point: “civil religion” may include non-religious (secular) elements sublimated to religious status and incorporated into a national symbolic system, while “public religion” refers to traditional religious phenomena (meanings, symbols, movements) publicized by entering – or been involved in – the space that is assumed to be secular (as used in Cochran 1990; Casanova 1994).

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Journalists most often used the terms eclecticism, post-modernism, secularism and entropy to express their skepticism about religious revival. A youth survey showed that secular values dominated among students in the 1990s (NG-REL 1, 1998). Another author says that the Russian consciousness is “neither religious nor atheist”: “what we have is the domination of an undetermined, undogmatic worldview” which is in fact “spiritual entropy” (IAI, December 12, 1999). Yet in another article, after reviewing the results of a survey, the author commented: The study shows that we have entered the period of the eclectic world-view. It is by no means peculiar to Russia. Post-modern eclecticism is growing all over the world, in the USA, England, Ireland, etc. … In all countries we witness the decline in “hard”, “totalitarian” religiosity, along with all kinds of rigid partisan and ideological systems … The cognitive uncertainty and the break with all kinds of traditionalism is under way. (NGREL, September 1997)

This parallel with the universal (especially Western) patterns and trends was one way to explain the weakening of the revival thesis. Yet there was another stream in the discourse which still holds that the religious and broader social entropy is not a global norm but rather a Russian anomie: the following passage is the best expression of such a view: It is hardly surprising that so many different religions and sects entangle the whole of Russia. In the country where the ruling power has no pivotal idea that can consolidate society, where there is no national anthem or emblem and in fact no national flag, people are attracted to those who promise to give sense to their lives and help them to cope with permanent stress…” (IZV, April 6, 1998)

Thus “entropy” was not a norm, but an anomie, while the norm is a sort of public unanimity and integrity (“a pivotal idea that can consolidate”). In fact this critique was targeted at the non-traditional sects who unveil what the author thinks to be a painful deviation from the Russian norm (probably normative Orthodox religiosity). The same causality – the multiplication of faith as consequence of the national crisis – was found in another article comparing the rise of the sects with the similar wave at the beginning of the twentieth century (IZV, April 7, 1998). “Entropy” remained probably the most emblematic word to depict the state of the public mind. It means that, as was widely admitted, any strict definition in the religious field would be irrelevant. “Entropy” also meant the transitional character of religiosity. The forecasts for this transition varied significantly. The liberal (and Westernized) approach foresaw the future as a normal evolution of the post-modern

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mind in a secularized society. For those more inclined to Russian cultural integrity, entropy was the temporary result of the system crisis and of the atheist contagion, and the transition will finally lead to a normal, albeit perhaps different from the old tradition, Orthodox spiritual domination. The Challenge of Pluralism and the Polemics over Legislation The 1997 Russian “Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations” was largely considered more restrictive than the previous one, dating of 1990 and said to have been drawn upon the U.S. pattern, and adopted at the peak of the liberal wave. The debates over this legislative change highlighted an essential cultural phenomenon for the whole of Russian society, which may be called the challenge of pluralism. Since the beginning of this century Russia has not known such a tremendous avalanche of ideas, opinions and activities as at the “big turn” of the 1980s–1990s. Pluralism in general and religious pluralism in particular, constituted a real challenge to the monolithic, officially uniform Soviet culture. There were two main opposite reactions to religious pluralism. One was inspired by the traditionalist concern with the danger that pluralism can bring to the monopoly of Orthodoxy and to the conservative integrity of the cultural tradition. On the other hand, the liberal side, mostly represented by non-Orthodox religious or lay writers, defended the pluralism in its 1990-law version for the sake of protecting minority rights. The debates between these two groups constantly shifted to the issues of openness, flexibility and tolerance of the Russian Orthodoxy, and to some extent, of Russian culture as a whole. Traditionalists. The traditionalist response proceeded from classical isolationism and xenophobia, most explicit in the nationalist and communist press. Three sources of danger to the integrity of Russian culture were said to be Islam, Western mainstream denominations (both Catholic and Protestant) and New Religious Movements of Western origin. But the West was by far the most frequent target of this defensive critique, much more so than Islam, the attitude to which varies substantially. The most right-wing extremist newspaper, Zavtra, reproduced an article from “an American religious journal” by a certain Cornelia Ferreira, who unveiled the long-range global Masonic plan of world order in the creation of a Unified Religion in California; the newspapers warned about the “invasion” of Roman Catholic priests after Gorbachev’s visit to the Vatican, the “new Western Crusade” against Russia in which the Orthodox Church became the main foe of the West after communism was defeated (ZVR, April 28, 1997; ZVR, March 20, 1998; PPI, July 28, 1997). Similar

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news came from the provinces: Mark, Bishop of Khabarovsk, called priests and lay people to declare war against the Protestant missions in the area, who profess the “pernicious Western way of life”; the dangerous “invasion” of foreign missions was reported from Tiumen’ and Rostov, as from many other places (RTE, February 4, 1998; KDA, March 24, 1998; NR-REL 12, 1997). Even the liberal MK tabloid held that foreigners “inculcate their sweet beliefs into credulous Russian souls”, and referred to the Greek anti-proselytism legislation as suitable for Russia. As the newspaper put it, the final goal of the foreign missions was to “remove the pivot” of Russian society (MKO, November 29, 1998). The most detailed exposition of this anti-Western attitude was found in the writings of the late Archbishop Ioann of St. Petersburg and the then editor of the Rus’ Pravoslavnaia (Orthodox Russia) newspaper, Konstantin Dushenov, who believed the Russian Orthodox Church to be the last “reliable barrier against the destruction of Russian statehood, the ideological aggression of Westernization and liberalism”, and then turned against any kind of Western religious presence as conveying “values openly contradictory to the most important Christian principles and to sacredness” (ZVR, November 28, 1997). The religiously illiterate public did not distinguish between Western mainstream confessions and new religions coming from the West; both were “alien”, and in many cases the two were mixed in the general notion of “sects” (with the exception of Roman Catholicism). Still the “totalitarian sects”, which became the most frequently, used negative term in the religious discourse of the 1990s, hinted at New Religious Movements that were sometimes said to include also charismatic groups and even such denominations as Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons.7 The wave of anti-cult publicity swept over the mass media in the mid-1990s, the resistance to these cults being mentioned as the main reason for adopting the new religious legislation. An article reprinted from the Patriarchate official journal stressed the similarities of the “cults” to “generically sectarian” communism (TRD, October 28, 1998). Newspapers were full of case reports describing the psychological traumas, child abuse, divorces and even major crimes and suicides connected with the sects’ activity in Russia.8 A strident anti-cult law-suit against the Jehovah’s Witnesses that started in 1996, initiated by the Committee for Protecting Youth from

7 8

The White Brotherhood, the Mother of God (Theotokos) Center and some other indigenous cults are certainly included in this list, but generally the Western influence in the NRMs is never denied. SGD, May 1, 1996 (against Unification Church), SGD, July 18, 1996 (suicides), KPR, October 31, 1997 (against Family), TRD, June 2, 1998 (child abuse), IZV, June 4, 1998 (against Living Faith charismatic community).

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Totalitarian Sects, catalyzed strong anti-cult sentiments; even an expert court witness, a psychology professor, proclaimed anybody opposing the prosecutor to be unpatriotic, for “Russia has to be saved, and saved as soon as possible” (SGD, November 23, 1998). The anti-Western and anti-cult state of mind dominated, and thus helped to justify the more rigid 1997 law, both before and after it was put into force. The traditionalist position combined two things: patriotic resistance to outside influences and the view of the Russian Church as the last shelter of self-identity. The central point of the new legislation debates was the issue of whether Orthodox dominance should or should not be defined by the law. According to an article, the “historically Orthodox country” cannot yield to foreign faiths, especially in public schools where “God’s Law” (a religious subject which existed in the pre-1917 schools) should be reintroduced immediately (NGA, March 28, 1996). A “far right” newspaper published a strong fundamentalist argument against “prophets from overseas” and reminded its readers that: It is well-known that the world will dissolve when any single point in the Holy Bible changes … Since one of the main tasks of the state is to stabilize society, the state system must resist any kind of religious transformations … [So] the talk about religious freedom surprises true believers … Fidelity to one’s God and to one’s land, containing the ashes of our ancestors, is the pillar of our statehood. (ZVR, August 14, 1998)

In a more moderate newspaper we find a similar idea that, even for the sake of religious freedom, the Russian Orthodox Church cannot avoid being “responsible for the faith” in an Orthodox country, and “in times of democracy” all religions should admit the choice of the (Orthodox) majority (NG-REL 11, 1975). In yet another case a theology professor called into question the widespread assumption that Russia was a multireligious country 9. The Moscow Patriarchate, officially considering Russia its “canonical territory”, took in these debates a position that was both cautious (so as not to violate a legal distance that the Church must keep from the State) but, at the same time, unequivocally ambitious. The hierarchy was even said to be in favor of canceling the new law’s provision that “it is forbidden to accord any privilege to, or any restriction on, one or several religious organizations” (NGA, November 28, 1996).

9

Vladimir Makhnach, NG-REL 1, 1998. Approximate figures show that the Orthodox Christians make up about 75 percent of believers, Muslims 18 percent and others 7 percent (see Prusak and Borshchev 1996: 10).

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Patriarch Aleksii II himself, who was very active in public when the law was discussed and in the months that followed, cautiously but strongly articulated the claim for domination or even monopoly. In a remarkable interview speaking of political reconciliation, he referred to St. Gregory the Great, who said that everyone “should yield in secondary matters to achieve unanimity about what is most essential”. He also added that the Russian people would surely be confident in their spiritual and cultural tradition (certainly meaning Orthodoxy), and would protect themselves from destructive sects (KPR, February 17, 1999). The Patriarch might be more outspoken and less cautious in other cases, when, for example, he called on the state to “protect every person and the whole people from the importunate propaganda of aggressive pseudo-teachers most of whom came from abroad” (RVE, May 1, 1997). How could one reconcile the domination of one faith with the multireligious reality of the country? A moderate compromise was invented in the form of a concept of traditional and non-traditional confessions, it was intensively discussed and finally, in an indirect way, employed in the preamble to the law of 1997. 10 The former category included Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism, and, not without reservations, Judaism. 11 Thus the major Western Churches, new religions and even other Orthodox denominations were relegated to the “non-traditional group”. 12 This distinction was one of the main tools of the discussion. Remarkably, an author supporting the law invited the state to interfere in the management of religious pluralism: The Russian state must structure, by its own decision, the “religious space”, and fix legally the “priorities” of several confessions, depending on the depth of their cultural roots, their historical contribution, their participation in nation-building, etc. … These priority grades should show the new image of Russia as a democratic European country where the rights of minorities are respected, but at the same time, some state priorities are established. (NGA, November 12, 1996)

10 The public debate both before and after the passing of the law used the terms “traditional” and “non-traditional”; however, the law itself opted for a different language: it divided religions onto those which could be seen as “inalienable part of Russia’s cultural legacy”, and those which could not. 11 At some point, the first draft of the law did not mention Judaism, and it was included after certain debate and lobbying efforts. 12 In the text of the law the preamble worded this preference in a less obvious way: it singled out Russian Orthodoxy (pravoslavie), and then, in the next line, listed Christianity (khristianstvo), Islam, Judaism and “other religions”. “Christianity” technically could mean any Christian denomination. Yet, in the public debate, surrounding the law, the Western Churches, in most cases, were not included in the group of “traditional religions”.

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Federal and local authorities propagated this twofold division of denominations: the Moscow government financed the pretentious complex of the Victory Park with a church, a mosque and a synagogue located in proximity to each other; and the same was done in a northern Moscow suburb of Otradnoe with the money of a wealthy Muslim businessman, who called the site the “Spiritual and Education Complex of Traditional Religions of Russia”. The newspapers widely reported these facts, emphasizing the blessing for such an “official pluralism” by the Moscow Patriarchate, which thus showed its support to this kind of limited pluralism, without however losing its own supremacy (SGD, August 8, 1998). While the official hierarchy tried to keep political correctness in dealing with other “traditional” communities (and much less so with those considered as “cults”), the strong conservative wing within the Church constantly forced the Patriarchate to move to a tougher attitude in the issues of foreign missions, legislation, and ecumenism. The press mirrored this trend, with a polemical peak attained in 1997, at the time the new law on religious freedom was publicly and internationally discussed. Liberals. The opposite party of the lay public responded with a strident critique of the Orthodox Church and with references to democratic liberties. A prominent philosopher Grigori Pomerants, in an interview, formulated the liberal approach: Russia’s national revival would only be possible if all religious communities cooperated with each other. He continues with a candor that may seem provocative against the generally cautious consensus: I am very optimistic about the influx of non-Orthodox religious teachings into Russia, because it forces the Orthodox priests themselves to move on. I think we’ll witness several religious patterns in the future, for we live in a country with TV, computers and Internet, so it’s absurd to hold on to the domination of one religion. (VMN, October 8, 1998)

According to a religious law specialist, the arguments against the cults were strongly exaggerated – there was no one cult deserving persecution or even any kind of control. Moreover, the Russian civil and criminal legislation contains appropriate norms to resist “destructive religions”, so the real motive looming behind the new law is simply the desire to secure the monopoly of the dominant Church (NGA, August 30, 1997). A Baptist deacon argued in the same way when he questioned the general assumption that Russians are massively Orthodox (NGA, August 30, 1997). The critics found the roots of anti-pluralism within the Church. Some evoked the term Vizantizm (or Vizantinizm) to explain the Church’s isolationist position and the reluctance to accept any different view (OGA, March 18, 1999). One of the bestknown defenders of pluralism, Alexander Nezhnyi, traced the tradition of spiritual

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authoritarianism back to Russian history of the sixteenth century; he bitterly noted that the tradition of St. Josef Volotsky (leader of the Josephite party that called for fierce persecution of heretics and dissenters) was dominant in the Russian Church and in the public, while the tradition based on St. Nil Sorsky (Josef’s adversary and advocate of tolerance) was forgotten. Defending the cults and the sects which are under Church’s and State’s pressure, he concludes that the only true “totalitarian sect” in this country was the Orthodox Church itself, at least its nationalist and fundamentalist wing (MNO, December 1, 1999). Contrary to the general negative wave against the New Religious Movements of the mid-1990s, the liberal voices in the press strongly supported these minorities: it was common to find in the liberal newspapers articles defending Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Unification Church in the Moscow court trials (MNO, March 7, 1998; MNO, June 2, 1998; OGA, October 8, 1998; KPR, November 21, 1998; VMN, August 4, 1998); or supporting, or at least neutrally describing, the life of the communities and movements like Hare Krishna, New Age, and even the publicly infamous Vissarion’s cult of Minusinsk, or the People’s Temple (MNO, June 2, 1998; NG-REL 12, 1997; MNO, June 23, 1998; NGA, September 10, 1997). Surprisingly, the final adoption and implementation of the new law after 1997 did not dramatically limit religious freedom, as minority communities, the human rights activists and the international observers had predicted. There actually were many reports from the provinces on “violations of religious rights” (as internationally defined), but violations were also reported before 1997, and many local laws anticipated the norms that finally became valid nationwide.13 Most local state officials showed, as one newspaper put it, “the inertia of the totalitarian era and monoideological state; [the officials] can hardly understand and accept the fact of ideological and religious pluralism in the country” (MNO, February 10, 1998). Given the general manipulative character and casual interpretation of the Russian law, this particular legislation had primarily symbolic significance. The debate made explicit the common assumption that the Western norms of pluralism did not work in the Russian context: both the traditionalist and the liberal public seemed to agree on this point. This idea was clearly formulated by two prominent political writers, Alexander Tsipko and Andranik Migranian, who seemed to belong to neither of the two camps and claim to represent conservative interests of the “strong Russian state”: The idea of the free market of religions vindicated by our “young reformers” and the US president, that was unfortunately imbedded in the 1990 law on religious freedom, from 13 By summer 1996 at least 15 of the federal units adopted local laws hampering the work of the foreign missions (NGA, December 11, 1996). See also Shterin and Richardson 1998.

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the very beginning distinctly contradicted Russian historical specificity and the interests of the spiritual and moral health of its people. (NGA, August 20, 1997)

This assertion would probably satisfy most discussants. The idea that in Russia Western pluralism does not work theoretically was another paradigm of public discourse. It is also true, however, that another paradigm was nevertheless undisputed by the majority: namely, that a measure of pluralism should be accepted, and that it cannot be completely prohibited. But, once again, this kind of measured pluralism must be somehow regulated and controlled by the law and by the state. The state was thus endowed with a role which was more than just setting up and maintaining legal rules: it was seen as an arbiter and a referee in religious issues. Religion and State: A “Symphony” Debate. The “symphony” was the favorite notion used by journalists with reference to StateChurch relationships. The word refers to a traditional principle of Eastern Christianity, first formulated in Justinian’s Code, meaning close interaction of secular and sacred authorities in a Christian society. Although the principle has never been fully and directly applied in Russian history, it is generally assumed in the public discourse of the 1990s that it was generally rooted in Russian tradition, and that it really existed before Peter the Great or, in more simplistic interpretations, even up until the revolution of 1917. The use of the word “symphony” in a schematic sense of Church-State union automatically raises two constitutional problems: firstly, it questions the principle of secularism (declared in article 14 of the 1993 Constitution); secondly, it questions religious pluralism (in the same article) by advancing the Orthodox Church as the only serious religious force. Thus the problem induced acute controversies between the critics and the sympathizers of the exceptional role of Orthodoxy. The principle of separation of the Church (and religion) from the State, which in Russia was first introduced by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and then confirmed in the late Soviet and in post-Soviet legislation, was sometimes criticized as inappropriate for Russia. The 1990 law was once called an “American model, promoted by some lobbyists” (meaning the Protestants and other minorities) (NG-REL 11, 1998). Other authors have cited the decisions of the Local All-Russian Church Council (Pomestnyi Sobor) of 1917–8, which sought a Muscovite “symphony” opposed both to the full submission of the Church to the State, in a model introduced by Peter the Great, and to full separation of the modern secular type. Another thinker, Ivan Il’in, combined

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an idea of the strong state with a principle of an Orthodox Christian ideological foundation for secular power (Presbyter Vladislav Tsipin: NG-REL 4, 1998; Andrei Okara: ibidem). In a similar vein, one author wrote of a unique “imperial theology” which was manifested in the symphony principle; and it is the Church that is “the only institution of public law going back directly to the pre-Revolutionary legal system” and thus possesses the power to legitimize the rulers (NG-REL 3, 1998). Another author referred with nostalgia to the epoch when “social life was a mere derivative of religion”, and commented regretfully that today “it is out of fashion to speak of the cooperation between the Church and the State”, for the “symphony” principle is associated with, and discredited by, the notion of “State Church”; although he admitted the idea of symphony having been “historically defeated”, he still hoped to see some new forms of such a union (NG-REL 12, 1997). The Patriarch Aleksii II himself was as usual very diplomatic and cautious: in an interview he noted that “the interaction of the Church and the State is not as elaborated in Russia as in most countries of Europe and the world”, and then suggested that an “active partnership” should be the norm of their relations (KPR, February 1, 1999). It is true that the Church demonstrated a distance from democratic politics: the Synod prohibited priests from running for elective offices (and those who did not obey were defrocked). But despite withdrawing from public politics, the Church stills manifests its desire to affect political life. In the 1993 political crisis the Patriarchate unsuccessfully attempted to mediate between the President and the Parliament, and in the 1996 presidential campaign clearly supported then President Yeltsin against the communists. A conference of the political elite sponsored by the Church in the Patriarch’s residential monastery and called “Russia’s Way to Salvation” brought together all major political parties and leaders. Later metropolitan Kirill Gundiaev created the Council of Russia’s Religious Leaders, which was reported to be aimed at the coming 1999–2000 elections (NG-REL 9, 1998; MKO, February 9, 1999). The state itself, on the other hand, demonstrated reciprocity. Evidently, the authorities needed the Church as a source of legitimation. High-ranking priests took part in most national celebrations, just as high-ranking state officials attended church on Christian holy days. The same was true at provincial and local levels, as the press frequently reported. Local authorities were said to provide public money for the renovation and construction of the churches in the Kuzbass region. This case was not unique, for in an interview the Patriarch answered back at the “indignation of taxpayers against subsidies to the Church by local authorities” (MNO, March 17, 1998; TRD, March 19, 199). The Orthodox Church was granted special (unofficial) tax privileges, in addition to those afforded all religious organizations (KDA, November 5, 1998).

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Other notable issues concerned the army and the schools. The Church-army special relations have been widely discussed in the press; despite the Law on the Status of the Military (1998) that prohibits any state-sponsored religious participation in the army, local commanders have often invited Orthodox priests to celebrate different ceremonies. Both the military districts’ staffs and the Moscow Defense Ministry had “agreements for cooperation” with Church hierarchies, and the debate on introducing the institution of army chaplains continues, the idea being justified by the old tradition of “Orthodox warriors”. The issue of religious education in the public schools provoked another debate. Almost half of the parents and even children called for introducing religious hours led by Orthodox priests14. The secular principle of “separation of religion from public education” was actively criticized as “restraining the rights of believers” and leading to “weak morality” in schools, and this Western liberal principle was said to be inappropriate in a country “living in a different legal and spiritual space”. From the other camp, however, the Orthodox claims, as well as the cases of their support by the official authorities, were severely criticized as jeopardizing secularism and religious plurality. All these examples of a tentative mutual “rapprochement” between the Russian Orthodox Church and the State were often interpreted as a certain return to a “symphony” tradition. The drastic attacks on this tendency came from two sides: the liberals saw the danger of clericalism and new Orthodox totalitarianism, while the traditionalists accused the Church of docility and submission to the authorities. In an article entitled “Second Coming of the Third Rome” a liberal author wrote: The things are moving towards restoration of an unforgettable triadic formula of Count Uvaroff [a nineteenth-century Minister for Education]: “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality”, simply replacing autocracy with something like “territorial integrity”.. By the way the Bolsheviks had the same kind of official formula: “Marxism, party rule, proletarian internationalism”. This interesting regularity relates … to the deepest traditions of the national mentality. The Russian state cannot endure an ideological void: this void has to be filled with something – religious or “scientific” – but always totalitarian. (NGA, March 23, 1996)

Although the nineteenth-century slogan “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality”, the sixteenth-century Philotheus’s idea of Moscovite tsardom as a Third Rome, and the 14 Mikhail Mchedlov (NG-REL 11, 1998: 10) referred to a sociological survey; and Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Kirill (NGA, November 28, 1996) cited a Moscow opinion poll to support the idea of “Church hours” in schools.

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Byzantine “symphony” of Church and State are all different and particular constructs, liberal polemists attack them together as ideas opposed to Western secularism. The fundamentalist clergy were said to have pressured the usually delicate Patriarch to achieve the status of “State Church” for Russian Orthodoxy; the Church was suspected “not only of loyalty to the Russian State, but of reckless devotion to it, fidelity to its imperial mission”; and the Church’s claims to obtain an official State Church status were said to be its “tragedy”, going back to St. Constantine’s notion of the “Christian State” still shared by the “backward” Russian Church (NGA, October 9, 1996; NGA, September 10, 1997; NG-REL 12, 1997). For liberals the “symphony” is unattainable. Moreover, any movement in this direction is seen as dangerous both to society, which may lose its newly acquired freedom, and to the Church itself, which would inevitably fall under state control. But the last position is paradoxically close to that some of the Rightists who treat rapprochement as sign of dependence and weakness in the Church. The newspaper Zavtra accused the Patriarchate of “Sergian compromises” with the state (referring to Patriarch Sergii’s controversial coexistence with the Soviet regime in the interwar period) (ZVR, November 28, 1997; ZVR, August 13, 1999). While generally the idea of “symphony” is a strong point of Russian traditionalists, they would never accept the Church’s contacts with this particular post-Soviet regime, which they see as criminal and/or liberal, and thus inimical to Orthodoxy. It is not surprising that the “symphony” thesis is taken seriously by different sections of the public: the general conservatism of the Russian Orthodox Church, the fragility of legislation in support of pluralism, the cognitive entropy among the political elite, and old habits have produced together a special atmosphere, mediated and reinforced by the press, that make likely a project to establish a “national Church”. Religion has a negligible relevance to democratic politics in Russia; however, it is deeply involved in wider political discourse. Religion and the National Idea This wider political discourse in Russia usually takes the shape of a cultural debate, which uses large historical and geopolitical arguments, and employs the term “national idea” (or “Russian idea”) as the pinnacle of national identity. This discourse began in the nineteenth century, was then interrupted, or rather forced into the emigration, by Bolsheviks in the beginning of 1920s; however, the Russian communism was in fact one of the most vigorous and daring projects of national idea that ever existed. Free discourse was fully resumed in the late 1980s with Gorbachev’s liberalization. Religion was always among its major factors.

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The new political strategies after the break-up of the Soviet Union were necessarily speculative, and they first mentioned religion as a means of legitimizing the change of power and elite reorganization. Then progressively religion (in a particular confessional form) was included in the debates as a source of arguments, meanings and attitudes, supporting different positions. For instance, the rise of the new religious movements could be interpreted as either a spiritual decay or an encouraging advance of liberty. While for certain theorists the Russian national idea was conceivable without religion, those who included religion in their argument certainly dominated. Most intellectuals engaged in the debate were sure that a certain “sacral vertical line” was needed, because a society had to be tightened with a “civilizational consensus” which secures its progress.15 When they mention religion as a part of the “national idea”, they mean Russian Orthodoxy in most cases. If it is relevant to a project for Russia’s future, then in what way? As one writer asked in his Easter column, is Orthodoxy doomed to marginality? … Has the Orthodox faith a fate of strange-looking eccentrics, an ethnographic-historical phenomenon? We wouldn’t like to believe it is. Orthodoxy is so deep inside Russians that it cannot be knocked out of their heads even by the centuries of licentious godlessness … (Maxim Shevchenko, NGA, April 13, 1996)

There were several frameworks to which this ineradicable impact was referred. One was “nationality” equated to the Russian ethnicity: many discussants believed, and some declared that the religious and ethnic identities, with respect to the Russian Orthodox faith, were indissoluble, and many reports of the press proved the same.16 It could take an extreme form in a call by the passionate nationalist and anti-Semite Igor Shafarevich: “Let’s finally learn from the Jews – not what they say but what they actually build in Israel: a national state with a state religion” (ZVR, December 10, 1996).. Another type of traditional framework is “Slavic civilization”. The Slavic identity was mentioned much less than the national one, and it was stimulated by the

15 Aleksei Kara-Murza (NG-REL 1, 1998) opened a discussion of experts with references to Toynbee and Danilevsky, who based their concepts on such a sacral consensus; he then asked (without mentioning Max Weber) “how can the market and capitalism be possible in Russia on a non-religious basis?” 16 The surveys led by a joint Finnish-Russian team in 1999 confirmed this fact: the percentage of those self-identifying with the “Orthodox” is higher than that of “believers” – 75 percent against 40 percent (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000a and 2000b); this clearly proved that “Orthodox” here meant a national identity badge rather than a religious tradition.

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Yugoslavian wars, especially the NATO intervention in Kosovo. A nationalist newspaper recalled that historically Russia was the leader and protector of the Slavic peoples, and cited the nineteenth-century poet Fedor Tiutchev’s call to reconquer Constantinople (ZVR, May 21, 1999). Here, as in most other cases, the Slavic identity overlaps with Eastern Christian (Orthodox) ones. Still another reference for a cultural framework is Eurasia, a notion of the old continental cultural space of tradition opposed to the “Atlantic civilization” of Modernity. Also Eurasia is the place of Christianity’s encounter with Islam. While the usual stereotyped attitude toward Islam is unfavorable, in the public discourse Christianity and Islam were sometimes drawn together: Russia is a unique combined Eurasian civilization of Orthodox Slavs and Muslim Turks, and therefore the “Western democratic standards cannot be fully transferred into Russian reality”; this idea was the mainstream of a conference on Islam in Russia (NG-REL 12, 1997: 1). V. Polosin, a former Orthodox priest converted to Islam, defended the idea of a “social alliance” of the two religions to create a Eurasian identity (NGA, July 7, 1999). These forms of the national idea do not always elaborate what kind of specific culture Russia has and should have in future. However, a few substantial themes can be identified. As is seen from some of the above quotes, the religious discourse was often conducted in an elevated style, with the use of allegories and epithets of historical or even cosmic scale; Russia, in an old tradition of religious thought, is endowed with a special world mission, which is spiritual par excellence. According to the late Archbishop Ioann (who in fact repeated the old metaphoric language) Russia is “the pedestal of the Lord’s throne” (cited in Wozniuk 1997: 198). The present disaccord of humanity, our planet and the cosmos, said one of the writers, should be restored with the help of the Russian spiritual tradition; another one spoke of the twenty-first century as a “century of the spirit, not the golden calf”, and the Second Coming is possible only where the people “have drunk the full cup of woe”; and in the same style there was an appeal to mass penitence and christening of the people whose mission is (evoking Dostoevsky) suffering for the whole of humanity (NGA, April 2, 1996; NGA, April 26, 1996; PPW, January 9, 1998). This first accentuated point of unique combination of spirituality and providential suffering ultimately leads to recognizing the centrality of Orthodox religious culture. The second theme, that of collectivism, fits absolutely into the same framework, and is rationalized religiously: an author cited Lenin’s companion Nikolai Bukharin who believed that “communism was fortunate to build on the ground” of Christian togetherness or conciliarity (sobornost’), mercy, and unanimity; as well as the philosopher Igor Chubais who placed collectivism along with Orthodoxy among the

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major principles of the Russian tradition (SPV, July 29, 1998; SGD, January 30, 1997). The Patriarch himself eloquently stressed this point: The West and the whole world, which are going through a spiritual, economic and ecological crisis, can continually call upon the Russian cultural tradition based on priority of the spiritual over the material, sobornost’, community spirit and mutuality, self-restraint and self-sacrifice for the other. 17

The third theme is authoritarianism, though labeled with euphemisms such as “strong statehood”, “social unity”, “great power” or even “great Russia” (sometimes, however, the authoritarian character of the tradition is stated quite openly 18). Religion plays here again the role of the cultural catalyst, either by the fact that, as one journalist says, “spiritualization of values is one of the ways to overcome anomie”; or through the notion of the State Church (see the previous section) (NGA, January 16, 1997). The weak State and the weak Church of today’s Russia, it is argued, must be replaced by a strong State and strong Church, otherwise “we will never … overcome our identity crisis and build a great power” (NGA, August 20, 1997). As one can easily guess from the previous quotations, the Orthodox identity is mostly seen in the press as mainly and consciously anti-liberal. It is virtually always opposed to the Western modern and post-modern cultures, which are seen as predominantly post- or even anti-Christian. It seems axiomatic that this identity could not be formulated at all without such an opposition. The “aristocratic” Orthodox tradition cannot fit into the “new world order” dictated by a “liberal legal catechism” of “universal human values”; Orthodoxy is the “only and the last obstacle to the Godless world order”; “true [Orthodox] believers and liberals are incompatible in their views” (NGA, April 13, 1996; NGA, August 16, 1997; PPW, February 27, 1998 – in connection with the scandalous TV show of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”). Still there is a stream in the discourse attempting to reconcile Orthodoxy and liberalism. The founder of the All-Russian Christian Union, Mikhail Men’, son of the famous Orthodox reformer priest murdered in 1990, said the Russian national idea must be only Christian and only democratic (NGA, December 1, 1996). There appear to be attempts to go beyond the usual opposition of Christianity and liberal-

17 Interview in KPR, February 17, 1999. See another speculation on building an Orthodox-based civil society by Kharkhordin (1998); this kind of utopian concept of building a stateless society based on spiritual communities-brotherhoods is analyzed by van der Zweerde (1999). 18 Viktor Aksiuchits (NGA, December 15, 1996) did not hesitate to say that “normal” Russia would be authoritarian.

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ism, and to elaborate a Christian (even Orthodox) foundation for liberalism. One author recalled the Western thinkers who took centuries to build a Christianity-based “liberal-personalistic foundation of the democratic state”; he spoke approvingly of similar attempts by Russian liberal patriots (neither Westernizers nor Slavophiles). Criticizing equally both atheist liberals, who carry out hopeless reforms, and antiliberal Orthodox who are unreceptive to all liberal values, he argued for finding the “transcendental basis for the so-called universal values”, as had the American founding fathers (Sergei Nikolaev, SGD, May 16, 1996). In another elaborated article Oleg Mramornov discerned two sub-traditions in the Orthodox culture: the “authoritarian, Byzantine-Russian messianic” and the one connected to Christian liberties. He also tried to find a “third way” between Orthodox anti-liberals and secular “groundless liberals”, and he argued that this path should be based on supranational and universal “popular moral and religious traditions” similar to those that had nurtured civil societies in Europe (Oleg Mramornov, NGA, December 3, 1996). Another writer tried to show in a more practical way that the Russian liberal politicians should and did made efforts to maintain a dialogue with all religions, including the Orthodox Church (Evgenii Poliakov, NGA, August 14, 1998). However, these attempts to formulate an “Orthodox liberalism” seem to have remained in the margins of the discourse. 19 In a bitter essay about “Russian Weberiana”, Alexander Morozov concluded that Russia did not possess any strong ethics appropriate to modernization; he said the post-Soviet “new ethics” of criminals and nomenklatura was a deadend, and contended that the pre-Revolutionary Russian religious entrepreneurial ethics had been mostly connected to Old Believers and Protestants and not to mainstream Orthodox. Finally, he claimed there were no prerequisites in Russia for this Weberian balance of individual freedom and ascetic selfrestraint (Alexander Morozov, NG-REL 9, 1997). Kirill Gundiaev, then a Metropolitan of the Moscow Patriarchate, held a very special position in this controversy. In a programmatic statement he formulated a program for the twenty-first century: The old competition of ideologies is now replaced by another complicated competition: between the global and general as manifestations of the principle of universality, and the conservatism and traditionalism as manifestations of the principle of uniqueness and singularity…The Godlike man [in the West] is placed in the core of the anthropocentric cosmos, as a measure of all things … Rooted in the theocentric spiritual tradition as we are, and considering anthropocentric humanism as an alien worldview, we respect it but 19 See van der Zweerde (1999: 26 and 31) for more details about the “progressive (or democratic) Orthodox intelligentsia”, whose intellectual and social attempts contribute to the formation of civil society.

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would never accept it as an absolute positive value. We also believe that universal [liberal] standards, leading intentionally or unintentionally to demolition of national, cultural and religious identities of different peoples, will inevitably result in the impoverishment of God’s world, its unification [here seen in negative sense. – A.A.] and its final ruin. (NGA, May 6, 1999)

In the framework of Russian religious discourse this program could be classified as moderate, for it at least leaves room for dialogue, although Kirill rejects any real synthesis of liberal and Orthodox “values” as inconceivable. Most Orthodox traditionalists are less tolerant and more fundamentally anti-liberal. Summing up the developments of the 1990s, Konstantin Dushenov predicted that the Russian Orthodox Church would become ever more “surely anti-liberal and national-conservative”. He added that “the cunning Russian democracy lost the fight for the Church”. According to another discussant, the Church is the last impediment on the way to a “liberal utopia” (NG-REL 2, 1998; NG-REL 5, 1998). Thus everyone – the “liberals” themselves, the Church hierarchy, and the traditionalists – see the prospects of “Modernity-with-Orthodoxy” as quite obscure. The widely admitted conclusion at this point seems to be an assumption that the “liberal project” in Russia was a failure, and one reason of this result was the lack of religious legitimation. “The program to build the civil society in Russia failed … So, we are bound to find an organic way of development” (NG-REL 12, 1997). This organic way certainly means here a religious one, in one way or another. In this discourse organic is the positive euphemism for “traditionalist”. It refers to the Romantic allegory of a nation (or culture) as an organism widely used by the Slavophiles in the nineteenth century. If a nation is an organism it must keep its integrity and its identity, consolidated by the “national idea”. Orthodoxy can naturally provide it with cognitive and symbolic material, eventually making the life of the nation organic and thus legitimate. In one of the most detailed programs to build up a specifically Orthodox political program (or “national idea”), Andrei Saveliev stated, “the Russian Church had definitely refused to join the ‘democratic movement’ and to serve its ideological interests”. However, the Church itself is too bureaucratized. It should be refreshed and supported by its ordinary members, an Orthodox “civil society” assembled in communities, brotherhoods and movements. What they will follow is an Orthodox worldview to be implemented in practice, namely: Spiritualizing politics, conversion of politicians … restoration of the historical continuity of Russian life … rejection of the atheistic type of state … state support to the Russian Orthodox Church and to traditional confessions (Islam and Buddhism) … blocking the

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religious invasion from abroad … recognizing the priority of social duties over individual rights; revival of communal traditions, national form of democracy, spiritual nationalism; restoration of the Russian state in its natural borders … introduction of spiritual censorship.

And he finished by admitting that at present there is no social base for such a movement in Russia, but that the Church should begin to “change the state and society, immersed in sin, preparing them for the Byzantine symphony” (NG-REL 1, 1998). Liberal skepticism appeared as a response to these speculations on the “Orthodox idea” for Russia. Its proponents simply questioned the plausibility of any use of religion for the “Russian idea”; or, in a more militant way, they fought what they called a “spiritual muzzle for the free Russia”, or warned that the concept of the “Orthodox state” might lead to a Russian form of National Socialism; or finally presented the new Orthodox nationalism as a “Neo-Pagan tribal religion, a Slavic form of Shinto”, as Lawrence Uzell, then director of the British Keston Institute, did in a Russian paper (NGA, June 17, 1997; NGA, August 30, 1997; NG-REL 1, 1998; NG-REL 5, 1998). As one of the skeptics put it: You can sew a costume or compose music by request; but to invent a national idea by request is not only useless but harmful. Any attempt to establish something like a symphony between power and the Church, never bore good fruit, and now again it is doomed to failure … [According to Georgii Fedotov] there is a terrible danger in substitution of the religious principle by the national one … and the “in-Church Orthodoxized evil is much worse than an outspoken anti-Christianity”. (Alexander Nezhnyi, NGA, December 10, 1997) 20

Conclusion: Public Religion in the Framework of Russian Ideocratic Tradition I began with the assertion (not new at all) that the communist ideology was a form of quasi-religion, or at least, a kind of civil religion. In the opposite manner, today’s religion in Russia is considered as being a form of ideology, or it is expected to carry out ideological functions. (It is worth noting how ideology and religion turn naturally into each other).21 One certain conclusion that can be drawn from the above narrative 20 Georgii Fedotov (1886–1951) is an émigré philosopher and historian. 21 The thesis about the “quasi-religiousness” of communism has a rather long history, going back to Nikolai Berdiaev’s “Origins and Essence of Russian Communism” (Berdiaev 1955); Alain Besançon (1986) proceeds from defining communism as a pseudomorphème of religion. This thesis was widely accepted in the 1990s, although not much elaborated; Salmin (1999: 41) spoke of communist pseudo-religion and pseudo-church. Filatov (1999: 138) clearly argued

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is the natural tendency to treat religion as an ideological construct which is instrumentalized in historical and political speculations. Let us now attempt to design a logical model of religious discourse. All are unanimous in taking as read that the general state of mind, particularly in religious beliefs, in post-communist Russia is close to “entropy”, i.e., lack of order. Almost all discussants presume that this “entropy” should be overcome, and some order reestablished. For most of them the pluralism of religions seems to be a manifestation of the same disorder, and they try to find more solid ground in the dominance of one (Orthodox) religion, defined, or at least assumed, in legislation. They then go further to endow the state with the function of controlling the religious field by supporting this chosen religion, and using the elements of this dominant religion to provide the state with a new ideology, a “national idea”. This approach demonstrates Russia’s “synoptic thinking” (Eckstein 1998: 373) and its inclination to “unitary and compulsory truth” (McDaniel 1996: 35f.). According to this logic, the only way to overcome the “entropy” is to establish a consensual state ideology (specific kinds can differ from monarchy to a kind of Orthodox liberalism), or, to put it differently, to create an ideological state. Those who openly disclaim the dominance of the Russian Orthodoxy or any State-Church symphony-like relationships constitute a minority even in the mass media, which is generally more liberal than the average public. And even many of those who belong to this group seem to be “playing on the same ground” and following the general rules of accepted discourse: they also assume that Russia is unable to accept religious pluralism, and that it must have (they may add “unfortunately”) a specific integral state-run idea (Filatov 1999: 145; Wozniuk 1997: 195; van der Zweerde 1999: 31). This general trend may be seen as a revival of an old Russian tradition that can be called ideocracy – the rule of an official consensual idea. An official ideology was viewed as the only way to guarantee order both in minds and in society. The state seems to be unable to maintain social order unless it is supported by an ideological order that is proclaimed as the state’s official credo, – whether it be a pre-Petrine “Third Rome”, post-Petrine imperial, nineteenth-century triadic “autocracy-Orthodoxy-nationality”, or post-Revolutionary communist idea. We witness in the first decade of post-communist Russia a certain quest for the same kind of national idea. Thus the question I posed in the introduction can be tentatively answered as follows: the striking disparity between the low level of religious practice and the high level of discussion about religion is explained by the fact that religion in late twentieth-century Russia functioned not so much as a source of beliefs, values, and social that Orthodoxy and communism were “two Russian historical ideologies”, thus equating them and finding key similarities between them.

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identities, but rather as public religion par excellence. Religion is “both the subject and the object of contestation and debate”. In Russia “the national church is in search of the state” (Casanova 1994: 66 and 218), and vice versa, for the state was in search of religious legitimation. The rise of public religion in post-communist Russia revealed the particular drama of the “challenge of pluralism” for a traditionally unitarian society. At the same time, whatever might be its particular national implications, it also offered another proof of the ambiguity of the secularization thesis as a monolithic and evolutional theoretical model.

Abbreviated titles of Russian journals and newspapers: AIF – Argumenty i fakty IAI – Interfax AIF ITG – Itogi IZV – Izvestiia KDA – Kommersant’- daily KPR – Komsomol’skaia pravda KZV – Krasnaia zvezda LGA – Literaturnaia gazeta MKO – Moskovskii komsomolets MNO – Moskovskie novosti MPR – Moskovskaia pravda NGA – Nezavisimaia gazeta NG-REL – NG-Religii NIZ – Novye izvestiia OGA – Obshchaia gazeta PPI – Pravda piat’ RGA – Rossiskaia gazeta RTE – Russkii telegraf RVE – Rossiiskie vesti SGD – Segodnia SPV – Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti TRD – Trud VMN – Vremia MN ZVR – Zavtra

5.

THE SEARCH FOR PRIVACY AND THE RETURN OF A GREAT NARRATIVE: RELIGION IN A POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETY

This chapter will attempt to use one particular episode to illustrate a few general trends found in the religious field of post-communist Russia. 1 From 14 to 18 January 2003, a small modern art exhibition opened just outside the center of Moscow under the provocative title “Ostorozhno, religiia!” (“Beware: Religion!”). The exhibit included avant-garde installations and paintings where religious subjects and characters, most of them Christian Orthodox, were parodied and mocked. The venue of the exhibit was symbolic in itself: it was the Andrey Sakharov Public Center that preserved the late Soviet tradition of militant human rights watchers and thus symbolized liberal opposition to both the communist Left and the nationalist Right. As the exhibit did not pretend to demonstrate a particularly high level of purely artistic performance – and, according to experts, it was really not the case – and given the venue of the exhibit, it was clearly conceived as a public and political declaration. A few days after the opening, a group of Russian Orthodox militants from a radical association 2 rushed into the exhibit hall and destroyed the displays that looked “sacrilegious” to them. This action was called a pogrom by the artists and their liberal supporters. The Sakharov Center tried to have the militants prosecuted, but the case was never accepted because the prosecutor did not find corpus delicti. Then the most interesting aspect of the whole story followed: the exhibit’s organizers, curators and artists were themselves accused by the prosecutor, most likely under pressure from Orthodox believers, of offending the believers’ feelings. The case received a lot of publicity and was often called a new “monkey trial”, referring to the 1925 Scopes trial in the United States. Experts in arts, ethnology and psychiatry were engaged on both sides of the case; open letters were published in support of each camp; the themes under discussion ranged from the subtleties of art history (for example, the acceptability of derogation of the sacred in popular traditions) to the notion of public space (for example, the space of the museum implied a form of artistic freedom within it) as well as to concepts of sacrilege, blasphemy, permissiveness, liberty and personal dignity. In February 2005 the prose-cutor demanded three years in jail for the Sakharov Center’s director, one for his aide and one for the artists; he also wanted the artefacts to be destroyed. The protracted and highly emotional court 1 2

I am indebted to Roland Campiche and James Beckford for their valuable comments; I am particularly thankful to Marat Shterin for his painstaking reading of this text and suggestions. Society for the Moral Revival of Fatherland (Obshchestvo nravstvennogo vozrozhdeniia Otechestva), led by Father Alexander Shargunov, a senior priest of the church of St. Nicholas Na Pyzhakh (Moscow), known for his monarchical and nationalist views.

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hearings ended on March 28, 2005: two of the three defendants were found guilty according to article 282(2b) of the Penal Code for “performing public actions which led to incitement to hatred and humiliating the dignity of a group of people because of their relation to an ethnicity or religion…” Both of the guilty parties were fined around €3,000 in place of a prison sentence; but the court did not order the destruction of the artefacts. (Later the case was further debated for years in the European Court of Human Rights). Cases of this type, which have become common in today’s Russia, seem to offer striking insights into major, fundamental trends in recent Russian religiosity. The Secular/Religious Divide My first point is that the case under consideration reveals the clear and profound divide between two extreme and self-determined groups: secular militants and religious militants. It illustrates the fact that militant, marginal groups can shape the public climate and acquire a particular profile for both secular and religious expression. As the groups involved tend to be categorized as “marginal”, the events they are involved in become court cases. Yet, the rarity of direct clashes does not mean that the divide itself is unimportant. On the contrary, the secular/religious divide is deep-rooted and reflects a wider, fundamental cultural divide in Russian society, namely, between the pro-Western liberal drive and the “culturalist” conservative response. This division became topical again after the communist ideology collapsed, and its forms of expression seem to bring outdated forms of both utopian Westernism and utopian nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries back to life. As a result, notions of “secular” and “religious” in opposition to each other are conceptualized – and indeed mythologized – in an outdated way that is reminiscent of “High Modernity” in continental Europe, with its aggressive, head-on secularism struggling to create a monopoly in the public sphere and a romantic, historicist resentment of “traditional forces”. It is no surprise that the language of “tradition” has indeed become a dominant symbolic resource for established religious institutions. In particular, the Russian Orthodox Church made extensive use of this language of “tradition” in forging a basic concept of “traditional religious civilizations” that could resist the “rootless secular liberalism” or “secular Modernity” that was associated with the West and globalization.3 3

This theological and ideological vision was constructed by a few thinkers and hierarchs within the Moscow Patriarchate in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the most prolific role being

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The concept of “traditional religions” became a common device for structuring religious policy and legal debate, with an attempt to preserve some privileges for “traditional religions” in what can be called, in a rational choice theoretical perspective, the market for salvation goods. This strategy of controlling the “religious market” is clearly opposed to the notion of unlimited religious pluralism, which is seen by religious establishments as an attribute of secular disbelief. Instead, religions compete for acquiring the status of “traditional” – or at least “recognized” religion – in order to claim some legal and symbolic privileges within the framework of a certain limited pluralism, thereby creating protective entrenchments against advancing “secular Modernity” (see Agadjanian 2000a). It is no accident that all the faiths categorized as, or pretending to be, “traditional” (Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and others) have resolutely condemned the “blasphemous” art exhibit, thereby supporting the outrage of the Orthodox militants. The creation of the category of “recognized faiths” is a common practice in various countries. In Russia this practice is supported by an entire theo-ideology of “tradition” in which secular Modernity is represented in a highly abstract, fantastic way (it is rootless!) and globality is simplistically reduced to this “modern secular” abstraction. There is an impression, however, that the secular “camp” behaves in a similar, implacable fashion, presuming that the marriage of Modernity and secularism is inevitable and conceptualizing “religion” in the same fantastic way as irremediably anti-modern, monolithic and parochial. Both sides in this ongoing culture war tend to dramatize the antagonism and to co-produce each other through mutual stereotyping and aggrandizement: a phantom of secularism against a phantom of religion. These grand fantasies seem to have originated from a specific post-communist naïveté, from inflated expectations of these new realities constructed in the imagination. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union, religious culture emerged as profoundly damaged. It was a society with a severe “crisis of religious transmission” and an “atomization of collective memory” – indeed une société amnésique (Hervieu-Léger 1999: 62–8). However, secularism barely existed, either, because the thing that gave it meaning, religion, had been artificially suppressed. The post-Soviet “religious revival” and the secular response to it were both artificial and grotesque to some degree; each camp stigmatized the other as either “clericalism” or “licentiousness” – or worse as “obscurantism” or “satanic decay”, and this led to, respectively, “a new totalitarianism” or “national degradation”. The militancy at both extremes and the very dualistic notion of the religious/secular divide seem to be sharply at odds with a number of trends that include: 1) the played by Metropolitan (and later Patriarch) Kirill Gundiaev. For the analysis of this concept of “traditional civilization”, see Agadjanian 2003a; Agadjanian and Rousselet 2005.

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profound global transition that was already underway to a new setting which is sometimes called “post-secular”; 2) the trend toward the “de-secularization of the world” (Robertson and Chirico 1985: 225; Berger 1999) which makes the classical-modern notions of both “religion” and “secularity” largely irrelevant; 3) religion’s new role as a genre of individual or collective identity (Garrett and Robertson 1991: ix–xxii) recognized within the global regime of multiculturalism; 4) the “laïcisation de la laïcité”, which makes secularism more flexible and inclusive (Willaime 1996; Baubérot 1990); and 5) a parallel process of accommodation of religions to the secular order. In addition, the discourse of “tradition” ignores a shift, to use the terms of Danièle Hervieu-Léger, from la tradition pour mémoire to new patterns of pèlerin et converti (Hervieu-Léger 1999); while the discourse of “secularism” ignores a shift to post-secular society (Habermas 2001). In the next section we will, of course, check whether these shifts have really affected the Russian religious landscape. What still needs to be interpreted in our example of the art exhibit are legal results: the prosecutor’s refusal to charge the religious militants for attacking the exhibit and the sentence handed down to the exhibit’s organizers. In combination, these facts amount to an important legal precedent and reveal a distinct tendency in the legal system and in public opinion; they show that “offending against religion” is seen as a worse offence than even a violent expression of religious feelings against secular “offenders”. The sentence against the exhibit organizers has been echoed in a number of similar cases that led to the cancellation of, or public protest against, “blasphemous” concerts, performances, movies, and other exhibits.4 In the religious/secular divide, religion seems to be on the rise, at least in a few notorious cases. The general consensus seems to favor religion instinctively identified with Russian Orthodoxy. What is behind this?

4

Besides the Sakharov Center exhibit there have been a few events which provoked similar reactions: one held in Moscow in February 2003 and called Non-Normative Exhibit by a scandalous artist Avdey Ter-Oganian who became known for the first time a few years before by his public performance of chopping up icons with an axe; an exhibit of interactive icons (called “Cosmopolitan Icons”) by Oleg Yanushevsky in St. Petersburg, February 2004; the exhibit Angels of Vice in February 2005 in St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg; the ballet Rasputin that featured Tsar Nicholas II, now (since 2000) a canonized Russian Orthodox saint, dancing on the stage, which was considered sacrilegious by the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods; the exhibit Russia-2 in Gelman Gallery, Moscow, in early 2005, and others.

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The Real Impact of Religion: A Semiotic Religiosity? It is worth emphasizing that in our art exhibit case it was religious sensitivity that operated as one of the mechanisms thematizing the limits of freedom. The ability of the “sacred” to operate in such a way means that the “sacred” is publicly recognized – at least tacitly – as a “working” symbolic resource which is still “good to think with” concerning the basic foundations of society. This symbolic resource does work, we can say, not only because religious militants attack things that disparage the “sacred” but also because secular militants chose the sacred as an object of their parody – a parody that turned out to be a serious challenge or, perhaps, had been deliberately pre-conceived as such. The “sacred” was taken seriously by both sides, although the artists might have explained their enterprise in terms of “ideologically innocent” post-modern playing with symbols. Experiments with the taboos – blasphemy and sacrilege – have long been a part of underground folk and elite counterculture in all traditions, while the Bolshevik state encouraged it as a widespread attitude in early communist Russia after the Revolution. Destroying religious objects after 1917 symbolized the dismantling of the whole ancien régime because religion – particularly the Orthodox Church – was its “sacred canopy”. It was a war against powerful symbols as well as a war against the symbols of power. Why has religion become an object, if not of “class anger” but at least of parody and scorn again at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Perhaps, the reason is that religious symbols, in some sense, recovered their powerful symbolism after the end of the Soviet Union, or better, because they now pretend to be the symbols of power once more. To understand this development and to assess the real degree of religious sensitivity in society, we need to consider some basic figures. The number of those who reported “belief in God” has risen dramatically from around 30–40 percent in the early 1990s to around 60–70 percent in the early 2000s. This is close to, if still a little lower than, the European average (77.4 percent) and world average (86 percent).5 Answers to questions about the “importance of religion” and the “importance of God” figures have a similar relation to average patterns.6 Assessments of “religion’s 5

6

The figures for Russia vary significantly within this average; for surveys results I used the following published data: Inglehart et al. 2004; Halman 2001; Furman and Kääriäinen 2003; Dubin 1999; Dubov 2001; Greely 1994; Mchedlov and Filimonov 1999. The real rise started before regular survey reports became available; the rise would be still more impressive if we possessed data for the 1980s. A local survey in Moscow showed that only 10 percent “believed in God” in 1988. According to the World Values Survey figures only, the change in the decade 1990–2000 in Russia was 26 percent, but only 10 percent across the world. Religion was reported to be important by about 44–45 percent (the European Values Study data as of 1999/2000 is confirmed by a more recent 2004 survey by ROMIR [Halman 2001;

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adequacy” to spiritual, moral and family issues in Russia, as in most Eastern European countries, exceeds the world and European average; however, it is important to note that this gap has shrunk since 1990, as if some exaggerated expectations faded within a decade.7 Overall, all these indicators show that Russia tends to be close to mean European standards, but the change over the last ten to fifteen years has been clear. We encounter a quite different situation when it comes to figures for religious observances. The church attendance rate (those who go to religious services at least once a month) varies between 5 and 9 percent, most frequently staying at 6–7 percent, which is one of the lowest in Europe (and comparable to some countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Estonia or the Czech Republic) and next only to China on the world level. 8 The rates of receiving the Holy Communion, prayer, fasting and other observances are also well below European and world averages. What is particularly interesting is that there is no noticeable change in these figures over the post-communist years.9 There is a striking gap between both the dynamics and the values of these two sets of data: ideational religiousness has rapidly risen and come close to European and world averages, but practical religiousness has not changed much and remains one of the world’s lowest. The damage done to religious culture, the crisis of religious authority and the lack of flexibility in religious institutions all persist as clear obstacles to the restoration of regular observances; yet, expectations and public recognition of religion are definitely on the rise. Although a certain gap between ideational and practical religiousness is a universal phenomenon, the Russian dynamics show this in an especially clear way, for this new configuration emerged across the board. It amounts to a case of what Grace Davie (1999) called “believing

7

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ROMIR 2004]) compared with a mean of 50.7 percent in Europe (Halman 2001). “The importance of God” was reported by 38 percent in 2000 with a somewhat bigger difference from a world total of 66 percent (Inglehart 2004). In 2000 religions provided adequate answers to moral problems for 71 percent of Russians (compared to 88 percent in 1990); to family issues for 55 percent (74 percent in 1990); to spiritual needs 74 percent (92 percent in 1990); while the world average grew in a decade but is still lower than the Russian figures: 58, 53 and 73 percent respectively (Halman 2001; Inglehart et al. 2004). Local surveys show 6–7 percent (Furman and Kääriäinen 2003; Dubin 1999; ROMIR 2004); EVS/WVS give higher figures of 8–9 percent (Halman 2001; Inglehart et al. 2004: table F028). Average rates are 32 percent in Europe and 41 percent in the world (in 2000). Both Furman’s and Dubin’s surveys show figures usually varying by one per cent back and forth since 1991 when the surveys started to 2004; in both cases 6–7 percent is a common rate (Furman and Kääriäinen 2003; Dubin 1999); the WVS shows a certain growth from 6 percent in 1990 to 9 percent in 2000 (Inglehart et al. 2004).

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without belonging” and indeed, in this sense, traditional religious institutions operate as vicarious religions for a large majority of self-declared Orthodox Christians or Muslims. However, these formulae need precision: we need to understand the precise meaning of “believing” and “belonging”, for each of these terms reflects a range of states and situations. With regard to self-declared Christians or Muslims we are dealing not only with different degrees or patterns of commitment but also, in each individual case, with a fluctuating religious identity, the intensity of which can change, in different circumstances, from slumber to radical fervor. For example, this identity could be intensified in the case of an art exhibit that apparently desecrated religious symbols. Yet another term – semiotic religiosity – helps to describe the above configuration in more detail. Religion re-emerged in Russian society as a grand récit whose content was highly imaginative and largely fantastic, but this amorphous grandeur can turn religion into a symbolic resource, a depository of inflated expectations, very much independent from systematically observed traditional forms of religious behavior. A continuous semiotic process of creating individual identity and forms of participation in imagined communities (believed to be) based on religious references and symbols is associated with this symbolic resource and drawing upon it from time to time, for various motives and by various means (references or actions). Baptism, hajj, or kashrut (just like any other religious acts) may be seen as badges of belonging (Roof 1999: 135) or signs through which individuals position themselves in society and culture. It goes without saying that the imagined communities set up by this semiotic religiosity are not exclusively religious. To cite the most massive case in Russia, any verbal or behavioral reference to Eastern Orthodoxy often operates as a sign of extrareligious identities. The connection between religiosity and cultural identity is, of course, the most common. 10 In Russia, ethno-national identity is even more important: the text of the court indictment in the case of the art exhibit mixed religious and national feelings. The exhibit had allegedly “humiliated the national dignity of a

10 Lambert (1995: 97) distinguishes, in a similar way, between Christianisme confessant and Christianisme identitaire in the case of France; drawing on this distinction and the idea of “a diffused habitus of Catholicism as a culture” (Poulat 1986: 68), Willaime (1998: 160) writes that even if a person does not practice religion, he/she retains a “cultural Catholicism” that “has pervaded for centuries the mentalities, land and history of the whole nation [and] cannot disappear overnight”. In a similar way, we can speak of “cultural Orthodoxy” and “cultural Islam” in Russia.

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large number of believers because of their belonging to the Christian faith, especially to Orthodox Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church”.11 Russian “semiotic religion” also has strong political connections. There is evidence of a definite correlation between Eastern Orthodox identity and more conservative and authoritarian political attitudes (Dubin 1999; Furman and Kääriäinen 2003). Criticism of Orthodox symbols, through the mechanism of social semiotics, conveys criticism of certain political values associated with the Church; a political divide is therefore another dimension of our case of “sacrilege”. In Search of Privacy and the Self The complex transformation of religiosity and Russian society at large cannot, however, be reduced to these political semiotics. Another look at our art exhibit case from a different angle would suggest that an intensive process is underway in this society towards marking out a zone of free individual expression. Several facets of this process can be discerned in this one single case of our art exhibit. First, it is a positive, active expression that takes the form of “teasing the sacred” – the act which is perceived to be a yardstick of self-realization. Second, it is a negative or passive expression of being violated and offended by an act which is felt as “sacrilegious” and thus intruding upon the integrity of a person who associates himself or herself with the “sacred”; this is by itself an example of a heightened sense of personal vulnerability. Third, it is a radical self-expression because it protects the “offended self” by means of direct violence – destroying the offending objects – and legal procedure. Finally, it is a form of defense that was mounted in court and in the press by the organizers and the liberal supporters of the exhibit. As such, it placed the case in a broader framework of civil liberties. We have here various strands of one large discourse – somewhat belated in the post-communist world – about the freedom of self. What is tolerated and what is prohibited in this celebration of self-expression? In the late 1980s and early 1990s Russia, like other communist nations, was a laboratory of privacy. As the state-promoted institutional and ideological structures crashed with a bewildering rapidity, a normative and axiological anomy developed, which was both a traumatic and an inspiring experience. This anomy was not a vacuum, as has sometimes been suggested. It was the result of an unhindered, unlimited explosion of the previously shadow individual self. It coincided with three concurrent and connected circumstances: the dismantling of the old institutional frame; the virtual absence of an intermediary layer of voluntary associations as the subjects of 11 For the full text of the sentence, see URL: http://www.netadvocate.org/node/230 (accessed on July 30, 2013).

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collective solidarities; and a relative weakness of nuclear family and family values.12 Metaphorically, we can say that the post-communist individual was left on her own with neither strong Gemeinschaft nor efficient Gesellschaft as resources for social networking. In the religious field, the “privatization” of religion was the absolute rule in the Soviet Union. The experience of “compulsory privacy” might have provided, among other things, a fertile ground for flourishing religious individualism and constructivism right after the compulsory restraints had been removed around 1989. The following years saw thousands of small groups emerging, and, in urban settings, there was a soaring increase in individualistic quests similar to those found in the West and referred to by scholars of religion as “late modern” or “post-modern” religiosity, with its symbolic eclecticism and egocentric lifestyles. 13 These urban, young, and single-minded subjects of a new religiosity also regarded “religion” as a symbolic resource for their reconstructed identities – a resource that was especially attractive because it constituted a spiritual alternative to the dismantled machine of communist ideology. For these people, religion was not a semiotic resource that served to connect them to collective (first of all, ethno-national) identities but, rather, a genre of individual self-expression. This pattern of religiosity is completely “privatized” and “constructivist” in the Western European sense; it is close to the pèlerin et converti of late modern religiosity. It was enhanced by factors associated with the post-communist syndrome: the weakness of religious institutions and religious normativity, the high level of societal atomization, and an extraordinarily positive view of privacy and individualism in post-communist mass culture. However, there are at least two strong limitations on this type of religiosity in comparison with well-known Western patterns. One limitation is the lack of the institutional, legal and cultural framework of a developed civil society, which makes individual self-expression, both in secular and religious forms, a feasible, tolerable and well-regulated practice. For, to admit and permit the right to any extreme form of individual creativity or “extravagance”, a society must possess not so much a free wild space – which was indeed the case in Russian society after the crash of the 12 The last point is suggested by the average divorce/marriage ratio: in the first half of the 1990s the number of divorces amounted to about 60 percent of the number of marriages (Sem’ia v Rossii 1996). 13 See the description of ultramodernité religieuse in Lambert 2000. For an account drawing on US data, see Roof 1999. Hervieu-Léger (1999) also gives one of the best and comprehensive descriptions. Campiche (2004: 38ff.) writes of Dualisierung – the coexistence of two religions: “institutional” and “universal”, the second of which is the late modern private, “diffused” religion reduced essentially to belief.

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Soviet institutional framework – but rather a high number of vacant niches built into an elaborate system of cultural and political regulation. The second limitation – or a certain imposed frame – was purely economic: a period of extreme material hardships after the downfall of the planned economy of socialism left very little space for what Ronald Inglehart (1997) called “postmaterial values” based on “human choice”. Indeed, “survival values” dictated post-communist life. Consequently, a ruthless pursuit of material gains, supported by the overall decline of norms, was the most common form of individual self-expression. The Russian self, so to speak, threw all its newly acquired freedom into the pursuit of once forbidden wealth and pleasures, while the society had no efficient mechanism for regulating the process. Religious Feelings and Religious Presence at the Public Square Our story of the art exhibit reveals fluidity in the very definition of the “public square”, the haziness of the boundary between private and public. If an exhibit hall is a public space, some limits of private expression must apply. But can the exhibit hall be considered a “museum space” which creates a particular cultural and normative regime extending protection for artistic self-expression? 14 Or, on the contrary, is the very fact of organizing an allegedly anti-religious burlesque in a place that pretends to be public – which is what the “museum space” is by definition – such an offence against a religious community? In what sense, after all, is the space of an NGO (such as the Sakharov Center) “public”? It is not public in the sense of belonging to the state; but is it public in the sense of belonging to the Öffentlichkeit, an intermediary space between state and family? These questions underscore the pertinence of James Beckford’s (2003: 63) suggestion that “What is needed is a careful analysis of the processes whereby the definition of the private and the public is constructed, contested and constantly negotiated in different places and circumstances”.15 Let us focus first on the distinction between the two meanings of the term “public”. They are sometimes confused in the West, but this confusion may be less innocent in Russia. Indeed, the communist legacy has profoundly marked the content of the distinction between public and private. Within the Soviet habitus, the entire realm of the public was associated with the state’s hegemony. Consequently, when a 14 Compare similar stories related to Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, etc. 15 This suggestion comes after a critique of José Casanova, who “tries to apply a would-be universal distinction between the private and the public, whereas the definitions of these concepts and of the boundary between them varies from society to society … his notion of public/private distinction appears to be irremediably modern in a Western sense” (Beckford 2003: 63).

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space is free from state control, it automatically acquires a sense of privacy. By analogy, if we consider the term “private” in its economic sense (as in “private property”), any collective property in the Soviet Union was, in fact, dependent on the state. Therefore, the subsequent (post-Soviet) privatization, as is well-known, became a black hole that totally evaded public control. In the same vein, anything that escapes direct state control enters a “private realm” with little public regulation. Therefore, the perception of the public/private boundary is closely associated with the weakness of the public in the sense of “civil society” or a space that does not belong to the state, the corporate world or the family and that functions as a selfregulated “free realm” where various symbolic orders meet and compete. At the same time, the reaction of religious militants against the art exhibit has clearly shown that our case belongs without doubt to the public square. It ought to be comprehended as such; and it needs appropriate regulation. Theoretically, we may question the private/public distinction as such because it was a Western concept with origins in Calvinist and Pietistic notions of inner (inward) “belief” as distinct from the outward “cult”, which was further stereotyped as, respectively, true and ostentatious (or false) religiosity. This socially and culturally constructed dichotomy of private/inward/true versus public/outward/false religion is now contested everywhere, as the global religioscape becomes more diverse and interconnected. The late modern converti, a type of intense religious commitment described by Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1999: 120ff.), does not necessarily match this dichotomous pattern and can combine deep interiority of faith with an active public disposition. Nor is privacy confined any longer, in Beckford’s words (1989: 127f.), to a “residual category for denoting the territory in which religious and secular authorities were willing to place restrictions on their own power”. Even if this approach, when applied to the regime’s policy, were partly true in the Soviet case, with its compulsory privatization of religion, it becomes less relevant in the situation of post-communist normative confusion.16 Our case showed yet one more important development: that Russia faces a common, if not a global, quandary: a conflict between the freedom of speech and cultural (ethnic, religious) feelings. It turns out, as our case testifies, that one man’s freedom is another man’s blasphemy. This is also a conflict 16 Beckford cites Foucault’s argument that the private/public distinction is a product of a historical discourse. See further elaboration on the same critique in Beckford 2003: 86f. The private/public distinction in the religious field was earlier questioned by Dobbelaere 1985. The European religioscape shows, however, the operability of the distinction and provides certain statistical proofs that the values denoted as “private” (mostly family values) are more strongly correlated with religion than so-called “public values” (such as equality, freedom and responsibility) (Halman and Pettersson 1999; Dobbelaere, Gevers and Halman 1999; Halman, Pettersson and Verweij 1999).

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between liberal individual values and the “claims of culture” (Benhabib 2002). It acquired a prominent place in public debates worldwide under pressure from globalization, with its newly intensified sense of otherness. The conflict between individual freedom and collective cultural “feelings” became a subject of ongoing litigation in national and international courts. It is interesting that courts often tend to make decisions in favor of religious communities that are allegedly offended, and in this sense our Russian case is in line with this trend.17 The conflict we encounter in our Russian case resonates with the tension existing within the framework of the European Convention of Human Rights, namely, between article 9 (freedom of religion) and article 10 (freedom of expression). Yet, the legal rulings in Russia show a substantial asymmetry in the treatment of different religions, and the trend I have identified refers almost exclusively to Russian Orthodoxy. 18 The dominant confession has now developed a sort of public vulnerability by using a new code of political correctness in combination with the “by default” high prestige of religion. In this Zeitgeist, totally at odds with the atmosphere that prevailed in the Soviet Union, it is an atheist persuasion that would rather be kept in private. If Russian society, as we have seen, is overwhelmingly secular in its behavior, it seems to be “ashamed” of its secularity and would not admit to it. For the purposes of this chapter, we need to stress the fact that religion is far from being secluded in a private reservation: rather, it operates on the moveable and still uncertain boundary between private and public, thereby existing in a “tensional mode” (Cochran 1990) of relationship with the larger society. The overall trend is for private religious convictions, just as in our case, to become a public affair. This trend is amplified by the recognized religions’ search for greater weight or a certain “responsibility for the public sphere” (Öffentlichkeitsauftrag, to use a clear German term). The explicit claim to being publicly present and responsible was clearly expressed in the Orthodox Church’s “Social Concept” of 2000, which sharply criticizes the principle of “freedom of conscience” as relegating religion from the “common cause” to a “private cause”. It then marks out a large area for “co-operation” between the Church and the State (Osnovy 2001: III.6–III.11).

17 See Otto-Preminger Institut v. Austria, 13470/87 [1994], European Court of Human Rights 26, September 20, 1994 (URL: http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=00157897#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-57897%22] (accessed on July 30, 2013); see also Levinson 2005: 70f. 18 On related legal issues, especially the impact of cultural assumptions on religious legislation, see Shterin 2002.

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I have already mentioned the political aspect of Russian religious semiotics. Through the 1990s Russian Orthodoxy became a semi-official “community cult” associated with a quasi-sacralized national identity and a recurrent point of symbolic reference in public rhetoric.19 The Moscow Patriarchate, being a powerful institution that enjoyed special legal and political privileges, became an active ideological player in the reconstruction, beginning at the end of the 1990s, of a stronger presidential regime in Moscow and at all local levels. This is why the Church can be said to be “partially established” (Bacon 2002: 106). Yet an even more practical influence of religion is felt in various societal fields such as education and other fields. Finally, religions are involved in moral debates in conjunction with the “semiotic religiosity” described above. In no way can postcommunist Russia possess a continuous tradition of a religiously formulated “common good” rhetoric, such as in the United States (Williams 1999). Nor is there what José Casanova described as the new involvement of religions in civil society providing “new types of immanent normative critiques of specific forms of institutionalization of modernity” (Casanova 1994: 220). Moreover, Russia has no “civil religion” that could function as a framework for religion’s existence within res publica. What we do find, however, is a clearly conservative and more or less politicized discourse of moral decay/revival, which started at the beginning of the 1990s and created a comfortable ideological background for defining certain cultural events as blasphemous and for securing favorable court rulings, such as the one that came out of our art exhibit case. Conclusions: Two Overlapping Patterns There have been two overlapping patterns of religious presence in post-communist Russian society. The first pattern is connected to what I would call a syndrome of missed Modernity. It consists in the reenactment of the modern secular/religious divide, the reification of “secular space” and “religious space” as two opposed “squares”. One of them is, in accordance with the classical view of Modernity, more or less equated with the public, while the other is consigned to the private. An old

19 Beckford (2003: 106) writes about the “re-sacralization of national identity” as a defensive reaction against global forces; cf. Beyer (1994: 108) speaking of how in the late twentiethcentury identity concerns became related to power discourses and competition for the benefits of global society. For further elaboration of the issue of religious identity politics in Eastern Europe vis-à-vis “globality”, see Agadjanian 2004; and on Russian Orthodoxy as a “community cult”, see also Kantor 2003.

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fashioned anti-clericalism is confronted by an old fashioned religious anti-modernism in oppositional forms and style originating in the “High Modernity” of the nineteenth century. Within this paradigm, religion was revived from Soviet oblivion, by both religious and secular camps, as a grand narrative believed to be full of strong symbolic content available for collective identity quests (first of all, in the search for a “national idea”). This paradigm can be interpreted either positively (national empowerment) or negatively (anti-Modernity). The image of religion was inflated by the mass media, and exaggerated expectations (or misgivings) were intensified by transitional stresses and uncertainties. This imagined grand narrative – or, in a certain sense, a simulacrum – of “religion” operated in parallel with another massive social process related to the missed Modernity syndrome – a hasty, almost obsessive search for privacy. The second pattern that overlaps with the first one in time and substance is a late modern (or high modern) condition, which affected the post-communist world both latently, before its breakdown, and subsequently, at an unusually rapid pace, after the breakdown. Russian society was exposed to an entirely new configuration of secularism and religion and of private and public. This new configuration presumed the growing awareness of what Hervieu-Léger calls un univers d’incertitudes (HervieuLéger 1999: 40); or, in the words of Giddens, a stronger “skepticism about providential reason” and an understanding that the “secular risk culture is inherently unsettling” (Giddens 1991: 27f. and 181). To be sure, these uncertainties and risks were sharply exacerbated by the communist system’s institutional and symbolic collapse. This configuration means further individualization, but also makes religion resonate with public sensitivities and serve as a semiotic resource for various kinds of publicly expressed individual and collective identities (not only strictly “religious” in the classical modern sense). This new situation makes “privacy” publicly visible and publicly accountable, and the “religious feeling” ceases to be a remote corner of one’s psyche but rather a palpable object of public management. Consequently, the public/private boundary becomes blurred once again even before it was set up after decades of a unique communist hypertrophy of the (almost) totally state-controlled public square. In other words, the privatization and the de-privatization of religion coincided in one contrived tangle. The overlap between these two patterns in post-communist Russian society creates a mixed, “hybrid” picture (“hybrid” only in the sense of its deviation from accepted ideal-typical models). A list of some salient features of this “hybridity” includes: a particularly wide gap between practicing religion and claiming its imagined symbolic resources; a contradiction between a monolithic, community-centric, Durkheimian perception of religion and its fragmented, individualized perception; a mixture of a rather dogmatic (in a sense, quasi-Marxian) discourse of laïcité and a very

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resilient regime of de facto religious presence in public and state domains; a combination of the anti-global, conservative position of major denominations with their definite desire to be part of the “global order” and to use its conceptual and legal framework. The general backdrop and, indeed, the causal root of all these hybrid mixtures included a weak civil society, the lack of experiences and skills in the independent public management of religious issues in a pluralistic context, and the embryonic state of up-to-date legislation.

PART III

RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY AND THE CHALLENGES OF LATE MODERNITY

6.

THE SOCIAL VISION OF RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY: BALANCING BETWEEN IDENTITY AND RELEVANCE

Introduction: The Problem, the Sources, and the Method Liberated from the distorting pressure of an atheistic state, the Russian Orthodox Church found herself before a fundamental dilemma of preserving identity and/or becoming relevant to the changing world. The dilemma is by no means unique to the Russian Church; a classical question common to all religions can be formulated as follows: how to innovate the message, how to adapt to the world without losing a particular identity, the self of a tradition? The goal is complicated by the fact that the innovation must be authoritative, and this authority cannot be found but within the body of tradition itself. This fundamental functional triangle of relevance-authority-identity contains an unavoidable clash between two strategies, identity-preservation and relevance-seeking. All religions go through a narrow path between two dangers: either they risk becoming irrelevant, or, hurrying up with self-adjustment to the world, they risk dissolving into nothing. During the last century, it was the vision of society, the social teaching, that became a field of dramatic expression of this dilemma; both relevance and identity were increasingly perceived in social categories. The Russian Church was relatively late to address the “social issue”, but she did it in a thoroughly systematic form. Sources “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” was one of the major official documents adopted by the Bishops’ Council in August 2000 in Moscow (Osnovy 2001). It is a product of collective work of a number of authors brought together by the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, headed by Matropolitan Kirill Gundiaev (Patriarch since 2009). 1 By its conception and genre, this was a truly novel project, accomplished by well-educated writers addressing various cutting-edge issues of contemporary society. At the same time it was an energetic bureaucratic document destined to provide a thorough and definite guide for the Church’s otherwise fluid and fuzzy visions of 1

The work on the Social Concept was conducted since at least 1996 and involved more than 25 people, including both clerical authors and lay experts. The fact that the document was drafted in Metropolitan Kirill’s office rather than in the Theological Commission of the Holy Synod, suggests at least three things: its bureaucratic destination; its appeal to a foreign audience; Kirill’s leading and prospective position within the ruling body of the Patriarchate.

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society and polity, and thus preventing the development of many risky tensions and conflicts over these issues within the clergy. 2 As a whole, the Social Concept is an unprecedented attempt within Eastern Orthodoxy to formulate an authoritative vision of contemporary society and, simultaneously, of the Church’s self-identity within this society. This intellectual and bureaucratic effort is, however, but a corollary (or just a separate chapter) of a broad and comprehensive process of what can be called applied hermeneutics, aimed to redefine the identity and vision of the Church in a chaotic and inextricable post-Soviet context. By the term “applied hermeneutics” I mean a large variety of forms of interaction between clergy and laity, through which the Church tests relevant responses to new social circumstances and formulates, on a case-to-case basis, a new social message. There are many forms containing this message, both verbal and operational: sermons, catechisation, mission, charity, congregational (post-liturgical) activities, etc. One form of this applied hermeneutics are small popular booklets usually sold on small counters inside the churches or in special stores along with candles, icons, church plates and other paraphernalia. These publications will constitute the second source of this study. Printed in various cities and by various publishers (see the bibliography at the end of this chapter), they contain didactic treatment of particular issues whose official interpretation is found in the Social Concept of 2000. 3 The booklets, however, are different in many respects. They are supposed to mirror a diversity of views rather than a single and authoritative interpretation; this diversity may depend on authors (some of the books are, however, anonymous), ideological stance, and a target audience. Therefore, they may reveal more or less visible deviations from what has been ultimately generalized in the official Social Concept. What is common to all of them however, whether it be an essay on a new complex issue

2

3

The 1990s was the time of organizational loosening up in many respects and the Jubilee 2000 Bishops’ Council’s main goal was, perhaps, to stop a further disintegration and a threat of schism by adopting, in addition to the Social Concept, a new Charter, a document regulating the Church’s relations with other Christian denominations, the canonization of more than one thousand new saints, including the last Tsar and his family, and a few more urgent resolutions. All these provisions are very much permeated with in-Church politics. The Social Concept itself bears the stamp of ideological controversies and strained compromise over a number of issues. Most of the publications studied in this chapter predate the official Social Concept and thus reflect the state of the art as existed before the 2000 Council; in no way are they commentaries or explanations popularizing any official documents or guided in a centralized manner.

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(like bioethics) or a sermon-like admonition (e.g. about the sin of flattery), is their accessibility, in terms of size, circulation, and price.4 Furthermore, not being bound, unlike the Social Concept, by the super-task of authoritative pronouncement, these “applied” publications are usually much more straightforward, sharply expressive and definitely more outspoken, even if they are generally less smooth and not so well-arranged in terms of style and composition. Finally, the booklets are addressed to certain audiences – various groups of lay believers – rather than urbi et orbi, as the Social Concept itself intended to be. Method In this chapter, instead of analysing the content of approaches towards the social reality expressed in the Social Concept (which is a larger, and perhaps, more productive task for a future study) I will restrict myself by a quantitative analysis of authoritative references – to the Bible, saints, religious writers, canonical documents and historical precedents – used by the authors. I think that the structure of references reveals, first of all, the borders of what the Church leadership and average believers consider to be the Russian Orthodox Tradition. We can judge about the semantic and symbolic content of Tradition from the relative frequency and combination of references reputed as bearing authority, and thus to detect major focal points, or landmarks of Tradition as it is understood now. The study will show, secondly, the way the Social Concept understands the social stream within this Tradition, the specific patterns of understanding society and polity, that are considered as appropriate to define the principles of dealing with the contemporary world. I will compare the message expressed in the Social Concept adopted by the Bishops’ Council with the messages found in booklets addressed to simple believers: once again, through a comparative analysis of references. It is easy to presume, in terms of a working hypothesis, that the Social Concept is an innovative rational (and “Westernized”) text contrasting with a less systematic and more conservative background drawn from popular readings. But through contrasting the two types of sources we will be able to detect those particular crucial points where the Social Concept breaks with traditional popular background and creates new interpretations, 4

The average size of the booklets of this sample is 50–150 pages; average circulation is around 15 thousand copies. Many of the brochures (about three quarters of my sample) bear the blessing of Patriarch Aleksii II or a bishop. Some of them are compilations from Church Fathers and other old Orthodox authorities mixed with anonymous contemporary parallels. Some of the publications are reprints from pre-Revolutionary originals.

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as well as other points where it shows and wittingly protects its immutable continuity. Analysis of References in Official Documents and Popular Books Contemporary society, which is the main analytical object of the Social Concept, is seen as deeply corrupted and dangerously degraded, as a result of the post-Enlightenment theomachism and “mangodhood”, and sharply opposed to the Church. However, while the Social Concept certainly attempts to surmount this fundamental dualism by an explicit rejection of “Manichaean disdain of the world” (I.3),5 the popular readings are unconditionally permeated by it. Still, overall, in this respect both the official and popular texts share a world-rejecting assumption.6 Therefore, the Church in both cases maintains a defensive stand against the degrading world, as a conscious minority persevering against the assaults of the inimical environment, though at the same time trying to save it (I.2). Although the term “Church” in the Social Concept retains a deep theological meaning as “the unity of Divine grace”, it also has in many places a distinct institutional connotation, with frequent references to corporate unity and hierarchical subordination. 7 It goes without saying that popular readings are even more sensitive to the boundaries separating the Church from the world, even if they stress to a lesser extent the institutional aspect. 8 The enduring concern of preserving this boundary, or demarcation line of the Church, is further seen in strong sensitivity to denominational frontiers obvious in all publications. The Social Concept is constantly balancing between Christian universalism and Orthodox identity. Both terms Christian and Orthodox (pravoslavnyi) 5 6

7 8

Here and hereafter the references to the Social Concept include chapters (Roman numerals) and sections within chapters (Arabic numerals). The Social Concept is much more pointedly focused on contemporary (social) world, thus introducing a certain historicism and ideological sensitivity. When the authors speak of mass apostasy (III.6), fatal lack of morality (IV.3), degradation of the family (X), drug addiction (XI.6), rise of abortions (XII.2) or ecological catastrophe (XIII.1,5), they mean contemporary vices. The world-rejection in popular readings seems to be more pristine, more ontological, although in some of them one can find obvious allusions to most recent roots of “degradation”. For example, the hierarchy (sviashchennonachalie) is mentioned as the only authority in dealing with politics (V.2) and the mass media (XV.2). The shame of being believers (of looking archaic and démodé) is frequently mentioned as a common disposition that the booklets call to overcome: for example, Ioann Krestiankin (1999: 80) sees this shame as a form of the sin of apostasy. Believers are called to keep children away from some commonly accepted cultural form (such as studying Leo Tolstoy in schools or celebrating the New Year), thus automatically constructing rigid barriers for socialization (see Chto posovetuete, batiushka? 1998: 11 and 53).

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are deliberately used interchangeably, and placed them semantically on the same level; but the very fact of using both, helps to emphasize a distinct identity when needed. 9 The popular readings retain an even stronger sense of identity, at times consciously (in apologetic comparisons),10 or simply proceeding from a given equivalence of Christianity and Orthodoxy (with or without emphasis on a specifically Russian sub-tradition). These emphasized institutional and denominational borders imply the preservation of a certain semantic content, a Tradition, as a source of identity. The first question that arises is how open the Tradition is to change. The documents of the Bishops’ Council of 2000 touch upon this question in several places; the Social Concept reads: By preaching the eternal Truth of Christ to people living in changing historical conditions, the Church uses various cultural forms proper to a time period, a nation, various social groups … The verbal and imaginary language of the Gospel naturally evolves in the course of history depending upon national and other context. At the same time, the changing moods cannot be a reason to reject the decent legacy of the past centuries and especially to forget the Church Tradition (Predanie). (XIV.2) 11

9

The use of two words (Christian and Orthodox) allows to play with semantic accents making denominational emphasis weaker or stronger: you can speak of “Christian nations” (in universal terms, e.g. IV.5.) or strongly emphasize particularity speaking of traditional relations between the Church and the Army in Russia (VIII.4.), or introducing such expressions as “Orthodox physician”, “Orthodox politician”, or simply “Orthodox point of view”. The denominational sensitivity is quite expressive in another document adopted by the same 2000 Bishops’ Council, “Basic Principles of the Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church with Other Christian Confessions” (inoslavie). It reads: “The Orthodox Church cannot recognize the ‘equality of confessions’”; it denies the theory of “Invisible Church” and the “Theory of Branches”, and introduces a subtle and hardly defined notion of the “difference in the experience of faith” that complicates attempts to overcome denominational barriers (Osnovnye printsipy 2001: 2.7, 2.4, 2.5 and 2.11). The document further provides principles of sacramental communication and strong reassertion of the ban to proselytism on canonical territory (ibid., Chapter 6). It cautiously admits the “variety of cultural forms”, in which “the universal catholic truth and norm” can be expressed, but immediately calls to be vigilant in defining the “limits of [this] variety” (ibid., 4.7). 10 Books such as: Vasiliev and Alekseev, 2000; Kontsevich, no date (comparing Orthodoxy with Roman Catholicism and Buddhism respectively). 11 Similarly, the document on Inoslavie opens a window for change by admitting the variety of cultural expressions of Truth and calling to “constant and creative comprehension of our own tradition” (Osnovnye printsipy 2001, in the section entitled: “On the Participation in International Christian Organizations and the Dialogue with the so-called Ecumenical Movement”).

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This cautiously-liberal overture to the possibility of interpretation is a necessity prerequisite for a document, which is wittingly hermeneutic and which addresses some remarkably new subjects. The popular readings, conversely, never speak overtly of a hermeneutic option; for them Tradition is not subject to change to any extent. In a popular summary of anti-Roman criticism the changes adopted by the Roman Catholicism (both after the schism of 1054 and after the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65) are said to have transformed it into a “new anti-Christian pagan religion”; it is the point of the straightforward conclusion in the question/reply form: Question: Is it possible to modernize Christianity, adjusting it to changing historical, social, religious, philosophical and other conditions and teachings? Answer: No, it is not. Christianity is the true religion of Divine Revelation, and any human effort to introduce changes into it transforms the true religion into a false one. 12

The Divine Revelation in Orthodox tradition is never reduced to Scripture (Pisanie); “transmission” – Predanie, – the totality of faith going from generation to generation, is always seen as another part of Revelation and of Tradition as a whole. 13 The corelation of these two terms is quite seminal for understanding the nuances of contemporary hermeneutics. The popular booklets give a certain priority to transmission (Predanie) over the Scripture (Pisanie): in my sample the ratio of Biblical and nonBiblical references is 1.25:1 in favour of the former. 14 We have a distinctively reverse priority in the Social Concept: the ratio is 1.89:1.0 in favour of the Bible (278 Biblical

12 Vasiliev and Alekseev 2000: 4. The absoluteness of truth and the goodness of dogmatism are pointedly accentuated (Chasovnikov 2000: 122f.). Another booklet, answering the question whether “life and property insurance are sins for Orthodox Christians”, quotes Ambrosius, a starets (elder monk) of the Optina Pustyn’ Monastery as follows: “No advice can I give about life insurance, I have read nothing about it in the Holy Scripture … I cannot forbid, nor can I advice or bless” (Chto posovetuete, batiushka? 1998: 44). 13 According to Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov), Predanie is “what the true believers and Godlovers transmit to one another, from forebears to descendants: the teaching of faith, God’s Law, the Sacraments and the holy rites” (Filaret 1995: 8); Pisanie (the Holy Scripture) cannot be understood without the Predanie (ibid., 9). 14 A certain embarrassment with the Holy Scripture may come from contradictions between the two Testaments: one of the booklets solves this confusion by partially denying the authority of the Old Testament (Chto posovetuete, batiushka? 1998: 66). Moreover, the multiple translations of the Scripture create another problem of distinguishing between the right and wrong translations (ibid., 90).

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against 147 non-Biblical references). This contrast with the popular publications is quite significant.15 Another interesting difference is that a natural prevalence of New Testament over the Old Testament as a source of references is much more obvious in the popular books (3:1) and more balanced in the Social Concept (1.75:1), which may be seen as a certain trend to overcome a traditionally sharp contraposition of “law and grace” (as the two Testaments were defined in the famous eleventh-century sermon by Metropolitan Hilarion of Kiev). Let us now turn to a closer analysis of non-Biblical references. How is the power of sacred authority distributed among the centuries and names in popular and official texts of the Church? The first striking impression is the unquestioned prevalence of early Church Fathers, to the point that in a booklet all other readings besides Scripture and Fathers are simply rejected as unnecessary (Chto posovetuete, batiushka? 1998: 40).You would never find such a conclusion in the Social Concept, but the Fathers dominate there too.16 Being unanimous in their Patristic emphasis, the popular readings and the Social Concept sharply disaccord in another point: the ratio of Russian and non-Russian Orthodox names among authorities. This ratio is obviously in favour of non-Russian names in the Social Concept (references to them make up almost three quarters of all personal references: 17 68 out of 94), while in the booklets the ratio is virtually reverse, in favour of Russian names (about 70 percent). The contrast suggests a certain aspiration to openness and universalism of the document, and a certain parochialism of the mass religious literature. Who are the most quoted non-Russian authorities in both cases? A striking unanimity between the two sets of texts is the majestic dominance of St. John Chrysostom (347–407) over all other authorities of two Christian millenniums; not considered to be a great theologian (in a scholastic “Western” sense), the “golden-mouthed” John, author of zealous and clear instructions and the mightiest liturgical authority,

15 Nevertheless, the Report of the Chairman of the Synodal Theological Commission to the same Synod of 2000 states the task of interpreting Predanie (first of all, Patristic studies) as preceding the Biblical studies in the list of further objectives of theological research. See Vakhromeev 2001. 16 The emphasis on early Church Fathers may be accurately confirmed by the “Neo-Patristic synthesis” dominating the Eastern Orthodox theology through the second half of the twentieth century, from George Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky to John Meyendorff, and the Greeks John Romanides and Christos Yannaras (see Ware 2000). 17 Besides personal references there are also references to particular institutions, texts, or events (see below).

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is undoubtedly the central symbolic figure in Orthodoxy. 18 Basil the Great, the Cappadocian (329–79), is the second most cited Father, and another point of similarity of popular and official reverence.19 Also prominent in both cases is the position of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the only Latin Father who always had a considerable impact on the Russian Orthodox tradition. 20 Along with these similarities, there are significant differences, too. The first is the relative prominence in the Social Concept of such persons as Clement of Alexandria (150~215) and Tertullian (155–220) (4 and 3 times), who are never mentioned in popular booklets. The second difference is an extraordinary emphasis on John Climacus (Lestvichnik, 579–649), a Sinai saint, author of the famous Climax tou paradeisou, a highly influential handbook of Orthodox ascetic mysticism. Climacus is never mentioned in the Social Concept, but his presence in the ”socially oriented” popular readings – second only to that of St. John Chrysostom – probably means the persistence of a tradition to view social ethics as derivative from virtuoso ascetic Selbst-Bildung.21 It is confirmed by the prominence of such other mystics as Simeon the New Theologian (949–1022) and Isaac the Syrian (7th c.). Finally, the popular booklets abound with references to saints and monks of Mount Athos and other monastic authorities in general; once again, none of them is mentioned in the Social Concept.22 The prevalence of monastic authorities is by no means surprising; but this

18 There are 13 references to Chrysostom in the Social Concept out of total 68 personal nonRussian references; in the popular readings that I included in this study Chrysostom is referred to 52 times out of 290 references to non-Russian personalities; in both cases the “share” of his presence is similar: about one-fifth of the total. 19 With 9 references, St. Basil is in second place in the Social Concept (among all personal names) and third in the top-list of popular references (among the non-Russians, yielding only to Chrysostom and John Climacus, and sharing the third place with Simeon the New Theologian). 20 See Tataryn 1999; Jones 2000. St. Augustine is in third place among the names mentioned in the Social Concept (4 references) and in fifth in popular readings (10) In the Social Concept, St. Augustine is referred to in connection with a theory of “just war” (VIII.3.), the rejection of (religiously) mixed marriages (X.2.), the denunciation of homosexuality (XII.9.), and, occasionally, in a critical (although not negative) way, as a founder of the “two swords theory” of ecclesiastic and temporal authorities (III.4.); at one place Augustine is clearly identified with the “Western Christian tradition” (VIII.3.). 21 In the booklets Climacus is second after Chrysostom with 23 references; only partly can this high place be explained by the preferences of the particular compilers in the editions included in this study. 22 In the booklets Simeon is mentioned as many times as St. Basil (14), and Isaac comes next (13). Another Syrian, Ephraem (306–73), a didactic poet, is equally popular. There are altogether about 30 references to Athos monks, with the primacy of Siluan the Elder (12). Monks

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makes it all the more obvious how the authors of the Social Concept attempt to (or they simply have to) break away from the tradition of monastic exemplary didacticism and contemplative mysticism, to become more “cataphatic”, to rationalize “the social vision” instead of using common patterns of seeing the world. To move now to the Russian authorities cited in the Social Concept, there are two persons who are relatively prominent: Tikhon of Zadonsk, Metropolitan of Voronezh and then a spiritual elder in Zadonsk (1724–83), and Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow (1782–1867); both saints were champions of the Russian translation of the Bible and outstanding preachers, deeply involved in a fruitful interaction with the laity. 23 Filaret, and to a lesser extent, Tikhon, are also much quoted in the booklets. However, in these popular texts they unconditionally yield to other figures. Feofan the Recluse (1815–94) is certainly the first quoted authority there, comparable in influence only to Chrysostom (about the same number of references), while Feofan is never mentioned in the Social Concept. The significance of this pointedly ascetic and “otherworldly” moralist author of The Path to Salvation, who emphatically went to his seclusion in time of general increase in social concerns and yet kept enjoying great authority in society, is quite expressive. Such figures as Ignatii Brianchaninov (1807–67), Ioann of Kronstadt (1829–1908), and Serafim of Sarov (1759–1833) follow in the top-list of “popular” references. 24 Finally, a significant emphasis in the

such as Barsanuphius, Macarius (300–90) and Antonius (250–356), are mentioned 24 times altogether. 23 Tikhon was the first to translate into modern Russian the Psalter from Hebrew and the New Testament from Greek; he was “born popular preacher”, who had an excellent knowledge of Holy Writ and the Fathers, and “knew the art of linking Church dogma with a practical sermon” (Smolich 1997: 8 and 30). Filaret, who was Godfather of the Synodal Russian translation of the Bible (now still the only one retaining official authority), was also a renowned master of the homily, which was intellectually rich and sensitive to a broad range of social problems. 24 Ignatii was a highly revered monk-bishop distanced from the “learned”, academic monastic clergy who made up the majority of Russian hierarchy, and his main written work was Ascetic Essays. Ioann was a charismatic minister, “perhaps, the most significant figure in the religious life of the country” (Smolich 1997: 49), a passionate anti-liberal and monarchist. Serafim, one of the most respected Russian saints, was famous for his fifteen-year-long hermitage with assiduous Hesychast practice, and his subsequent preaching of silence and celibacy. Both Ioann and Serafim acquired a special popularity in the 1990s with ultra-conservative Church circles, because of their connection to the revived Orthodox monarchical ideal. Each of them is cited once in the Social Concept: Ioann in the passage about patriotism (II.2.), and Serafim in the chapter on law and morality, with his famous dictum: acquiring sainthood by one righteous man leads to salvation of thousands, and the sin of one wicked, to the fall of many (IV.3).

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booklets is placed on startsy (monastic elders). 25 Apart from some particular names, the whole subculture of ascetic spiritual morality, in which the “social” was traditionally dissolved, is almost ignored by the Social Concept: another proof of its attempt (or need) to achieve a certain emancipation and to constitute an independent intelligible sphere of a “social world”. In the Social Concept, in its turn, we see another expressive tendency: it often relies upon the authority of canonical and official documents, rather than upon personalities; by contrast, popular readings clearly neglect this latter part of the Tradition, with quite a few references to early Church Councils, very few to recent church documents, and absolutely none to Church-related documents adopted by the state. On the other hand, non-personal references in the Social Concept make up 36 percent of all non-Biblical references (53 out of 147), comparing to only 1 percent in the booklets (7 out of 707).We can call it an emphasis on institutional authority. Another interesting bias in the Social Concept: documents adopted by the Holy Synod in recent times (related to the period of Patriarch Aleksii II, since 1990) seem to constitute the main source of this institutional authority. 26 Yet another strong focus of authority is the imperial, or Synodal, period of Church history (from Peter the Great to the Revolution of 1917), compared to only a few references to early Councils, non-Russian or pre-Petrine legal and canonical texts. 27 One common feature in both the Social Concept and popular texts is a significant absence of, or relative inattention to, some elements that might have been more prominent. For example, the Local Church Council of 1917–8, which was so seminal in introducing the Church into a new era, has a relatively low profile with only two references in the Social Concept and two in the booklets.28 25 Optina startsy are mentioned 21 times in the books included here in the bibliography; other monks and startsy are referred to twice as much. The startsy are never mentioned in the Social Concept. 26 The Social Concept contains 14 references to recent Synod documents and 2 more to recent state legislation on religion, which makes about 30 percent of all non-personal, i.e., institutional references (including Church Councils, particular canonical or state documents (53 in total). 27 The Imperial (Synodal) period with 10 references of various kinds (decrees by the tsars, decisions of the Synod) comes next after contemporary documents in this hierarchy of authority. There are, by contrast, only few references to early Councils and such texts as Epanagoge, Constitutiones apostolicae, Nomokanon (Kormchaia kniga), Russkaia pravda, Stoglav 1551 and Sobornoe ulozhenie 1649; the only exception is the Codex Justinianus (529–34), which is mentioned four times as an important source of canonical law. 28 It should be said that the Social Concept makes two strong references to the famous Local Church Council of 1917–8: one, while speaking about Church-State relations (“the Council made an attempt to restore the ideal of the symphony in a new setting…”, III.4.); and another,

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Another thing, although less surprising, is the total absence of references to Western theologians or Church leaders (except for early Fathers); the authors of popular readings and even of a rationalized official text apparently disregard the tradition of social thought in Western Christianity, thus preserving the purity of Orthodoxy. 29 Yet another striking absence of emphasis is that on Russian religious philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (from the Slavophiles to the emigration). The Social Concept that might have appreciated and used this huge part of Russian’s theological and spiritual legacy, with its deep interest in the social world, mentions only once a solitary name of Aleksei Khomiakov, although in a very important place.30 Popular books rarely refer to these authors; the only exception is Dostoevsky and, to a much lesser extent, Ivan Il’in.31 Overall, in spite of a certain indirect impact, this layer of Russian history of ideas seems not to be integrated in what is considered to be the Russian Orthodox Tradition. Another point of interest, that cannot surprise but is still worth noting, is a general rarity of contemporary names and a strong bias towards the past. The latest nonRussian name mentioned in the Social Concept is Matthew Vlastaris, a fourteenthcentury Greek monk and author of an important code of canonical law Syntagma. Post-war Greek or Romanian theology of the twentieth century do not appear as a referring to the Council’s wide list of accepted grounds for divorce (X.3.). Overall, it seems that, in reality, the influence of the Council of 1917–8 on the Social Concept is stronger than it may appear from these modest figures of references. Metropolitan Kirill, introducing the first printed publication of the document in the journal Tserkov’ i mir (the same introductory text was presented to the Christmas Lectures of 2001), ends his presentation with a strong citation from the Council of 1917–8, calling it “historical” and directly claiming the succession between it and the work on the Social Concept; earlier he emphasized the same succession in his statements (see Gundiaev 2000a). Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev), then member of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate and himself one of the authors of the Social Concept, also specially emphasized the indebtedness of the authors to the experiences of the Council of 1917–8. For some reasons, however, this obvious continuity is not stressed in the text of the Social Concept itself. 29 In the anti-Catholic brochure of Vasiliev and Alekseev (2000), the Second Vatican Council is only mentioned with the purpose of blatant criticism of its decisions and for confirming the conscious conservatism of Orthodoxy. 30 Khomiakov is mentioned indeed in the very beginning of the first theological chapter with his definition of the Church as “the unity of Divine Bliss, which lives in the multitude of rational beings, submitting to Bliss” (I. 1). 31 References to Dostoevsky are on the same level as to Basil the Great, Simeon the New Theologian, or Tikhon of Zadonsk; this fact places Dostoevsky apart from all other modern and contemporary writers or philosophers. Gogol, Kireevsky, Solov’ev, Tolstoy, Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Rozanov, Frank, V.N. Lossky and N.O. Lossky are mentioned only once or twice each in the booklets.

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visible source. Among the Russian authorities, St. Ioann of Kronstadt, St. Elizaveta Feodorovna, Grand Duchess (murdered in 1918) and St. Patriarch Tikhon (died in 1925) are the only twentieth-century names in the document. Religious “social” thought, and the Tradition in general, seem to be cut off from both pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary (émigré) tradition. The lack of recent names in the popular booklets (of which many are simply reprints of the old editions) is no less obvious: the only two recent writers found more than once in popular publications are Serafim Rose (Platinsky), an American Orthodox convert, and Andrei Kuraev, religious thinker and publicist. 32 Still, beyond this outward similarity of official and popular texts in terms of general absence of emphasis on recent developments of Tradition, we can speak, in an interpretive way, of a hidden, or anonymous, presence of this legacy in the Social Concept. It is quite obvious, that the Social Concept (in contrast to the popular booklets) is not a monochrome and monotone text (though just the reverse might seem more natural), but rather a polyphony of various discourses. Some places contain specific religious vocabulary or obvious archaisms, which instantly evoke traditional connotations, while other passages represent a model of a “normal” contemporary quasi-secular prose. 33 But what is even more important than this linguistic polyphony is that the text, along with obvious “traditional” interpretations, includes allusions and latent citations from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century. In the first theological chapter, as well as in some other places, there are hidden citations from prominent religious thinkers. 34 The whole enterprise of surmounting the “Manichaean disdain of the world”, as a raison d’être of the Social Concept, would be impossible without a profound perception of the legacy of Russian religious thinkers. Another hidden yet obvious impact on the Social Concept, but clearly not seen in the popular literature, is that of Western Christian religious thought, especially its 32 Occasionally, there can be found single references in the booklets to some Russian priests or monks of the twentieth century (Luka Voino-Yasenetsky, Valentin Sventitsky), as well as one reference to Christos Yannaras, a prominent figure of modern Orthodox theology. 33 In my opinion, the text is made up of four discursive styles: that of academia, mass media, officialdom, and of the Church tradition proper. Some archaisms and highly emotional judgmental paragraphs alternate with technical up-to-date terms such as “group of risk” or “financial pyramid”, as well as some cold academic passages. 34 Father Aleksei Gostev points out that in the theological chapter one can detect allusions to Vladimir S. Solov’ev (1853–1900) and Anton Kartashev (1875–1960), especially to the latter’s article “The Church as a Factor of the Social Recovery of Russia”; one of Solov’ev’s ideas is almost directly cited in chapter IV on ethics and law: “The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell”; Solov’ev’s and Il’in’s opinions about the limited value of pacifism are used (without citing them) in chapter VIII on war and peace (see Gostev 2001: 142f. and 148).

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social component. The study of this impact goes beyond my present scope and certainly deserves separate research, but, to mention just one point: the Roman Catholic “Social Doctrine” was clearly a source of inspiration for the authors of the Russian document. Not only because the central idea of the latter, setting up of the “social” as a separately intelligible epistemological space, was pioneered by the Roman Catholic Church at least since 1891 Rerum Novarum, but because the treatment of many particular issues and many Biblical citations in the Social Concept are either close or similar to corresponding passages from the current edition of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church.35 Concluding Discussion: A New Silhouette of the Russian Orthodox Tradition This analysis of the structure of references of the new major text of the Russian Orthodox Church (without going into a study of the content as such of the document)36 reveals an intricate relationship between its two strategies: to protect the identity of Tradition and to provide authoritative legitimation for novelties needed to make the Tradition relevant in a changed world, and thus workable. The Social Concept seems to place the focus of traditional authority on Biblical, Patristic and pre-twentieth-century Russian ecclesiastic legacy, apparently ignoring more recent theological developments. All these sources are symbolically efficient for the purposes of delineating the boundaries of Tradition and also confirming its continuity. The concern to preserve traditional identity, a self-protective strategy, is crucial and perhaps predominant. It is achieved, in some sense, at the expense of the second hermeneutic objective, the search for relevance, because neither of the mentioned sources supply coherent, elaborated and sufficient answers, relevant to contemporary social challenges. But let us have a look at the issue from a different angle, placing the studied text against a broader background of current popular readings related to “social issues”. 35 Though these similarities should not be overestimated, they are obvious in some places. Metropolitan Kirill himself referred to the “experience” of non-Orthodox (Western) Churches in the preparation of the document (Kirill’s interview to Nezavisimaia gazeta, August 9, 2000). Although, as V. Novik supposes, the document is originally called “Bases of the Social Concept”, rather than “Social Doctrine”, to avoid too visible allusions to the Roman Catholic texts (Novik 2000: 256), the erudite authors have been certainly and profoundly aware of the developments of social thought both in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and their particular treatments are often formulated in latent dialogical relation to Western patterns. 36 My abstaining from analysis of the content, which seems crucial to evaluate the meaning of the document, is only dictated by a particular methodological conception of this study and by the natural limits laid on the length of the present chapter.

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The defensive “identity preservation” strategy certainly prevails in popular booklets as well as in the Social Concept. However, the contrast is obvious: the popular booklets, with very few exceptions, simply ignore relevance as an independent hermeneutic task. They do not conceptualise “society” as a specific object, and their routine method is restricted to direct quotations of, and references to, old authorities, emphasizing the traditional discourse of salvation: acquisition of bliss, concentration on sanctity and piety, as the only prerequisite of dealing with “social issues”. Conversely, the Social Concept makes a conscious effort to create such a new object and to analyse it. In a few crucial ways its reference structure, as we have seen, emblematically varies from the routine background, including different ratios of references to Old Testament versus New Testament, Biblical versus non-Biblical sources, Russian versus non-Russian authorities. And the most important stream, the mystico-ascetical and didactical stream permeating the Tradition as expressed in the mass readings, is surmounted and cut off in an effort of emancipation. Of course, this rapture leads, as its by-effect, to a substantial weakening of that peculiar flavour, that unique charm, which is so tangible in the cheap mass literature. However different are the genres, the motives and the target audiences (which in sum certainly explain the differences to a large extent), we can definitely posit that the spirit of the Social Concept deviates from the typical image (which is a self-image, too) of the Russian Orthodox Tradition as it is mirrored in the booklets and as it reigns in public opinion. What is irresolvable in this innovative enterprise, however, is an automatically occurring clash between the identity-preservation and relevance-seeking strategies. To put the case at a more abstract theoretical level, the authoritative references that I have studied carry out two inter-related functions: first, they provide a symbolic confirmation of identity, and thus offer a symbolic legitimation of a hermeneutic effort as such; and second, they supply a particular content as interpretative material to “produce” an innovation. The clash occurs precisely in the ways the new themes are treated. The use of traditional references both emancipates and binds: it emancipates by providing a symbolic legitimation for the whole of the document, and thus to its new themes and their “audacious” novelties; it binds by the very texture of these traditional references and by the burden of connotations they imply when interwoven into new interpretations. (In this sense, a shift in the document to the ultimate authority of the Scripture – typologically congruent with the leitmotif of the European Reformation – is certainly a way to escape the binding authority of post-Scriptural tradition). The result of this releasing technique is inevitably incomplete. The Social Concept certainly achieves an emancipation from the monastic and exemplary vector of Russian Orthodoxy (prevalent in popular booklets), but, as the structure of the references has shown, it is still bound by another one, which can be called the Josephite-

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Nikonian-Synodal (hierarchical and ideological) vector. If it manages symbolically to legitimize an intellectual improvization in such issues when the fettering weight of authoritative judgment simply does not exist or is obviously insufficient (for example, in chapters on medicine, bioethics, ecology, mass media), it remains inexorably constrained by traditional assumptions and sources in treatment of other issues (state, nation, pluralism, civil society, gender, etc.) where it either cannot, or is simply unwilling, to go too far, thus avoiding a serious risk of a too radical, too identity-threatening rupture. Overall, the positions expressed in the Social Concept are moderately conservative and institutionally-oriented. It attempted to create a cautiously innovative and canonically valid document. In doing so, it is constantly squeezed between identity and relevance (aggiornamento), a permanent tension affecting its vision of the “social world” and the practical ministry. On the conceptual level of the document, this tension is made explicit in the main dichotomy that runs all through the text from the beginning to the end: between particular and universal, between traditional cultural individuality and the globalizing liberal civilization that effaces the boundaries of identity; whereas the popular booklets simply and vehemently reject “universalism”, the Social Concept attempts to find a conservative balance between the two.37 The label “conservative” is, after all, becoming essentially relative. When placed against a background of the popular literature, the Social Concept of the Russian Church, which seemed to be at first glance nothing but another bureaucratic opportunistic document, appears to be, nolens volens, a complex intricate hermeneutic project of redrawing the silhouette of the Orthodox Tradition. A project, which proves to be much ahead of the prevailing Church practice.

37 See chapters on nation (II), law (IV), marriage (X), culture (XIV), and especially the last chapter on problems of globalization and secularism (XVI).

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“Popular Booklets” used in this Study Antikhrist v Moskve. Materialy obshchestvennogo komiteta “Za nravstvennoe vozrozhdenie Otechestva”. Moskva: Novaia kniga, 1996. Chasovnikov, R. (sost.), Rossiia — posledniaia krepost’. Moskva: Khristianskii Pravoslavnyi Blagotvoritel’nyi fond “Preobrazhenie”, 2000. Chetverikov, Sergii, protoierei, Kak sokhranit’ veru v Boga u detei. Moskva: Sretenskii monastyr’, Novaia kniga, 1999. Chto posovetuete, batiushka? Otvety na zatrudneniya khristianskogo byta i tserkovnogo blagochestiia. Moskva: Syntagma, 1998. Dobrosotskikh, A. (red.), Voskresni, Rus’! O patriotizme, dostoinstve russkogo cheloveka i pravoslavnom ponimanii voiny. Moskva: Danilovskii Blagovestnik, 2001. Kontsevich, I., Pravoslavie i buddizm. Moskva: Podvor’e Russkogo na Afone Sviato-Panteleimonova monastyria (no place). Krestiankin, Ioann, arkhimandrit, Opyt postroeniia ispovedi. Moskva: Sretenskii monastyr’, 1999. Ledin, Panteleimon, ieromonakh, Kozni besovskie. Ob oderzhimosti dukhami t’my. Moskva: Blagovest’, 1999. Lokhanov, Aristarkh, igumen, Chto nado znat’ o pravoslavnom tserkovnom etikete. Moskva: Trifonov Pechengskii monastyr’, 1999. Moroz, Aleksei, sviashchennik, Chelovecheskie sud’by. Zapiski sel’skogo batiushki. Moskva: Pravoslavnoe bratstvo sv. Apostola Ioanna Bogoslova, 2000. Mozhno li spastis’ v miru? Moskva: Blago, 2000. Nikolaev, Sergii, sviashchennik, Esli tebia obideli. O grekhe nevezhestva. Moskva: Danilovskii Blagovestnik, 1998. O lesti. Tak li ona bezobidna? Moskva: Blago, 2000. O pravoslavnom brake i obiazannostiakh muzha i zheny. Voronezh: Modek, 2000. Pestov, N., Chto takoe poslushanie pravoslavnogo khristianina? St. Petersburg: Satis, 2001. Pravoslavnaia zhenshchina v sovremennom mire. Moskva: Blago, 2000. Rose, Seraphim, ieromonakh, Chelovek protiv Boga. Moscow: Russian Branch of the Valaam Society of America, 1995. Rostunova, S. (sost.), Spasiotsia li bogatyi?. Moskva: Blago, 2000. Sergii, Arkhiepiskop Prazhskii, Dukhovnaia zhizn’ v miru. Moskva: Russkoe zertsalo, 1998. Siluianova, I. V., Iskushenie «klonirovaniem», ili, chelovek kak podobie cheloveka. Eticheskie problemy sovremennoi genetiki. Moskva: Moskovskoe podvor’e Sviato-Troitskoi Sergievoi Lavry, 1998.

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Sokrushi satanu. O charodeistve i o tom, kak borot’sia s kozniami vraga spaseniia. Naberezhnye Chelny, 1998. Titov, V., Igra v zhizn’. O virtual’noi real’nosti. Moskva: Moskovskoe podvor’e Sviato-Troitskoi Sergievoi Lavry, 1998. Vasiliev, V. / Alekseev, G. (sost.), Sovremennyi katolitsizm. Voprosy i otvety. Moskva: Odigitriia, 2000. Vlast’. Osnovy otnosheniia k vlastiam, obshchestvu i gosudarstvu. Moskva: Blago, 1998. Za kazhdoe slovo otvetim Bogu. Sostavleno po poucheniiam sv. Ottsov (no place, no date). Zakharov, Aleksandr, sviashchennik, Slovo ob abortakh. St. Petersburg: Satis, 1998. Zakharov, Aleksandr, sviashchennik, O zlykh vinogradariakh. Evreiskii vopros i puti ego Razresheniia. St. Petersburg: Slovo pastyriia, 1999.

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Addendum References to traditional authorities in the text of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church 1. Bible (a) New Testament Epistles Matthew John Luke Acts Mark Revelation Subtotal

106 27 15 13 6 6 4 177

(b) Old Testament & apocrypha Genesis Exodus Psalms Deuteronomy First Kings (First Samuel) Jeremiah Leviticus Third Kings (First Kings) Isaiah Sirach (All-Virtuous Wisdom of Joshua Ben Sirach) Fourth Kings (Second Kings) Judges Proverbs Second Kings (Second Samuel) Ezra Job Numbers Nehemiah Wisdom of Solomon Subtotal

21 15 10 7 5 5 5 5 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 101

Total

278

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2. Russian personalities Filaret Drozdov Tikhon of Zadonsk Sergei of Radonezh Dmitrii Donskoi Dmitrii of Rostov Elizaveta (Feodorovna) Feodosii Pecherskii Ermogen, Patriarch Innokentii of Kherson Ioann of Kronstadt Iosif of Volokolamsk Aleksei Khomiakov Kiprian of Moscow Kirill Belozerskii Mikhail Lomonosov Maxim the Greek Mikhail of Tver Nil Sorskii Seraphim of Sarov Tikhon, Patriarch Vladimir of Kiev, Prince Total

3 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 26

3. Non-Russian personalities John Chrysostom Basil the Great Byzantine Emperors Augustine Clement of Alexandria Gregory the Theologian (of Nazianzus) Gregory of Nyssa Justinian Tertullian Athenagoras

13 9 5 4 4 3 3 3 3 2

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Ignatius of Antioch (“Theophoros”) Ambrose of Milan Anthony of Egypt Basil the Macedonian Cyprian of Carthage Cyril the Philosopher Dimitrios of Thesssaloniki Ephraem the Syrian Gregory the Conqueror Irenaeus of Lyon John the Faster Justin the Martyr Matvei Vlastar’ (Matthew Vlastaris) Maximus the Confessor Modestinus Photius Theodoret Timothy of Alexandria Total

2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 68

4. Councils, codes & legal acts Synod after 1988, Acts Synod of Imperial period, Acts Bishops’ Council of 1994 Code of Justinian Constitutiones apostolicae Bishops’ Council of 1997 Council of Chalcedon, 451 Council of Trullo, 692 Local Church Council of 1917–8 Alexander I, Acts Alexander II, Acts Bishops’ Council of 1989 Bishops’ Council of 1995 Catherine the Great, Acts Charter of Spiritual Consistory, Russian Empire

6 4 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

The Social Vision of Russian Orthodoxy

Code of Laws of the Russian Empire Constitution of the Russian Federation, 1993 Council of Antioch, 341 Council of Carthage, 318 Council of Gangra, 340 Council of Laodicea, 364 Council of Sardica, 347 Epanagoge Land Council of 1990 Law on Freedom of Conscience, 1997 Nomocanon (Kormchaia kniga) Peter the Great, Acts Procheiron (by Basil the Macedonian) Russian Pravda (legal code) Seventh Ecumenical Council, 787 Sixth Ecumenical Council, 680–81 Sobornoe Ulozhenie (Muscovy Code of 1649) Stoglav (Code of Council of 1551) Syntagma (Canon law code) Trebnik (service book) Total

141

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 53

7.

BREAKTHROUGH TO MODERNITY, APOLOGIA FOR TRADITIONALISM: THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX VIEW ON SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Introduction This chapter will explore the fundamental views of Russian Orthodox Christianity on the contemporary world and its own place in it, and will then inscribe these views within a broad narrative of Western thought of recent centuries. I proceed from an assumption that the main objective in Western religious thought over the last three centuries was the construction of subtle bridges and continuities linking “this world” with the transcendental, identifying as its central concern man’s relationship to “this world”, and further associating “this world” with new epistemological fields of “culture” and “society”. Russian religious thought was definitely a part of this process. Thus my purpose here is to approach the issue of where Russian Orthodoxy stands today in its vision of the whole complex of world/culture/society. The main source for this study is a document produced by the Russian Orthodox Church, the “Bases of the Social Concept” (BSC), officially adopted by the Bishops’ Council of 2000 1 (Osnovy 2001). The word “social” in this document covers a variety of socio-cultural phenomena, encompassing a whole range of issues from state and law to culture to bioethics to secularism. The very fact of formulating these objects of theological quest as an official authoritative endeavor is unprecedented in 1

Osnovy sotsial’noi kontseptsii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi (Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church) was first published online on the official site of the Moscow Patriarchate (URL: http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/141422.html, accessed on July 30, 2013) and later in a volume of Council documents (see Osnovy 2001). The document was written by over 20 authors, including members of the Church establishment and academics, under the aegis of the Department of External Church Relations headed by Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Kirill (Gundiaev). The fact that the document was created by the administrative body of the Church’s “foreign office” rather than by the Theological Commission suggests that the document has strong ideological and bureaucratic underpinnings, providing a rigidly articulated official line on some burning questions which are dividing the episcopate, the clergy and the laity. The adoption of the document was certainly related to high Church politics, as were some of the other resolutions of the Bishops’ Council of 2000, such as the canonization of the Tsar Nicholas II and his family and the adoption of an official document on ecumenism. Important resolutions such as these are supposed to be taken by a Local Council (Pomestnyi Sobor) of the whole Church rather than by a Bishops’ Council (Arkhiereiskii Sobor) only; the failure to convoke a bigger forum has been said to diminish the legitimacy of the text and, more generally, to be fraught with the danger of growing “clericalism” (Gostev 2001: 155, with a reference to Aleksandr Kartashev).

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Eastern Christianity; the document can be seen as the first official, though indirect, response to independent theological modernism in the Christian East, to mainstream trends in Western culture, and to (Post)Modernity as a whole. 2 While drawing a comparative background for the ideas vocalized by the “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, I chose as a main point of reference another official and authoritative document – the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) (Catechism 1997). This text is far larger than the Russian text and by definition cannot be seen as a direct counterpart to it. The Russian document under study can be compared to it only in what both of them say about social/cultural topics, which is just a small part of the Catholic Catechism. 3 Nevertheless, I chose to compare these two documents of different genre and scale because no other authoritative Christian Orthodox catechism addresses most of the topics that interest me in this chapter. This question of genre is significant in itself. In the BSC, the theological foundations of a social vision are singled out in the first, relatively short chapter. Although each of the subsequent chapters contains some elements of theological argument, the first chapter serves as a theological prolegomenon to the rest of the document, while all other issues are classified and addressed on the basis of their own logic, rather than congruently included in a broader theological framework. 4 In contrast, the social vision of the Catholic Church, as seen in the CCC, is interwoven into its dogmatic body, which is thoroughly systematised around traditional theological paradigms: the members of the Profession of Faith (the Apostolicum and the Nicene Creed), the seven Holy Sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. In fact the social teaching is scattered across the text of the Catechism

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See the Appendix for the contents of the BSC. The social teaching of Catholicism is expressed in several documents, starting with Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum (1891), and minutely elaborated in the1960s, especially in two documents of the Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes (see Abbot 1966: 14–101 and 199–308). It is self-evident that the response to (Post)Modernity, as we can call it, as articulated in the “Bases of the Social Concept” by no means represents the practice of Russian Orthodoxy at the level of local congregations; nor does the Catechism of the Catholic Church provide an adequate description of the practices of Roman Catholicism throughout the world. (Russian Church practice is in general more “traditionalist” than the views expressed in the BSC, while Catholic practices vary dramatically among countries and communities.) Our comparison belongs rather to the history of ideas than to the evolution of religious practices. However, the documents, grosso modo, do mirror the changing ethos of both institutions and Church cultures.

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and subordinated to its ultimate logic. 5 The social issues are “digested” by Catholic tradition and fully integrated into the summa theologica. The Russian document is a separate, novel item of thought, correlating only roughly with the body of dogmatics. In this sense the BSC is conceptually and stylistically still quite alien to the whole body of dogmatics, which has not officially changed since the time of Metropolitan Filaret’s Large Catechism, written in 1823 (Filaret 1995). The very autonomy of “social teaching” in Russian Orthodoxy thus reflects the general structure of the established theology and can be explained with good reason by the inherent “anti-theological” disposition of Orthodox spirituality, or rather by its specific theological tenor, with its apophatic disposition. 6 At any rate, this specific autonomy of social teaching has at least two important consequences: it gives this teaching more freedom of interpretation, but makes it theologically less grounded and authoritative. Here are the questions to be addressed in this chapter: What are the major trends in Russian thought as reflected and interpreted in this relatively brief but ideologically suggestive text? How does this tilt toward modern thinking correlate with the evolution of Eastern Christian and Western religious thought of the last few centuries? What does the Russian Church perceive as its major contemporary challenge and how does it respond? Where can this response be placed on the innovation-conservatism scale? 7

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The section of the CCC called The Social Doctrine of the Church relates to particular issues of poverty, economic relations and justice, in line with the classical “social” encyclicals of 1891 through 1967; the placing of this section under the Seventh Commandment rubric (“you shall not steal”) delineates its thematic contours and limits. This narrow socio-economic meaning of the “Social Doctrine” in Roman Catholicism is only a part of the “social teaching” as conceived by the Russian document under study; this is the reason why it is misleading to use the term “Social Doctrine” in reference to the Russian document. See the classical work by George Florovsky (1981, especially Chapter 9); Felmy (1999, Chapters 1 and 2). Reproaching the Russian Church for theological failure became a mass media cliché used by its critics: Innokentii Pavlov, for example, believes that the Church simply does not possess any theology (Segodnia, May 18, 1999); another newspaper article, written by Konstantin Zhegalov, speaks of the lack of an intellectual and rationalist tradition and refers to Alexander Schmemann’s dictum about “a stubborn resistance of the Russian soul to logos”, which was “one of the most deep causes of the fatal failures and crisis in the Russian history” (Interfax-Argumenty i Fakty, March 12, 1999). I do not intend in this chapter to deal with all the particular issues addressed by the BSC, such as Church-State relations, labour and property, attitudes to family, gender equality, abortion, homosexuality, etc. (see the Appendix to this article), although I may refer to some of them for illustrative purposes. Instead, my task here is to reveal the most general paradigms, to which all these specific topics are subordinate. For existing analyses of the document, see Thesing and Uertz 2001; Mchedlov 2002; and a few journal articles I cite in this chapter.

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Vision of the World The main theological motive of the whole document is, in my view, the justification of the world as a legitimate object of the Church’s specific activities. Several major postulates are formulated to meet this goal. The classical thesis of two natures, divine and human, operating in the Church provides the main starting point and a rationale for the interaction of the Church and the world/culture/society. The Church is a divine-human organism…The Church relates to the world through her human, created nature. However, she interacts with it not as a purely earthly organism but in all her mysterious fullness. It is the divine-human nature of the Church that makes possible the grace-giving transformation and purification of the world accomplished in history in the creative co-work, “synergy”, of the members and the Head of the Church body. (I.2) 8

Through “synergy (from the Greek synergeia, working together), God relates to the Church, and through it, to the world.9 Another passage reads: “In the Church the creation is deified and God’s original design for the world and man is fulfilled by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (I.1) To relate to the world, the Church goes through the “process of historical kenosis fulfilling her redemptive mission.”10 Further, the Church is called to imitate Christ, and at the same time to serve Him, by serving “the hungry, homeless, sick, and prisoners”, by fulfilling the commandment of compassion expressed by the parable of the merciful Samaritan. (I.2) And then comes another crucial thesis: “Christ calls upon His disciples not to shun the world, but to be »the salt of the earth« and »the light of the world«” (ibid.). The next link is a well-known idea that goes back to the letters of St Peter and St Paul: the recognition of the variety of men’s gifts, and hence the variety of forms of 8

A Roman numeral is the number of a chapter and an Arabic numeral that of a paragraph. Citations are taken from the English translation of the document published at the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate. 9 Synergy is an important notion of Eastern Orthodox soteriology; however, it is generally understood as being absolutely a product of God’s grace, with man’s co-action in this case consisting in simply addressing God, inviting Him to bestow grace (for atonement and deification) (see Felmy 1999: 158f.); thus traditionally man has been seen as largely a passive partner in the common task. 10 Kenosis (producing the derived term kenotic Christianity), the Greek term for the self-humiliation or self-reduction, is the word St. Paul uses in Phil. 2:8 to speak about the very meaning of the mystery of incarnation; the term is also widely used in Orthodox theology, for instance by Georgii Fedotov, Vladimir Lossky and others, in a broader sense, as meaning a Christian exploit of self-sacrifice.

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service of God, can work as a general basis of religious legitimation of society in all its diversity. It also serves for distinguishing and fully acknowledging the equality between three main Church-related social categories: the clergy, the monks and the laity (I.3). The Church calls its members to participate in social life, in accordance with what Jesus, in his High Priestly Prayer, said about his disciples: “I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil …As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:15, 18). There then follows another programmatic passage: It is inadmissible to shun the surrounding world in a Manichean way. Christian participation in it should be based on the awareness that the world, society, and state are objects of God’s love, for they are to be transformed and purified on the principles of God-commanded love. The Christian should view the world and society in the light of his ultimate destiny, in the eschatological light of the Kingdom of God. (I.3)

The Church, with its mission “to save the world”, is called to interact with the state (“even if it is not Christian”), associations and individuals (“even if they do not identify themselves with Christianity”), “without setting herself the direct task to have all converted to Orthodoxy”, but with the hope of restoring piety, peace and well-being as prerequisites for the ultimate task of salvation (I.4) It looks like the principal purpose of the whole chapter is to create a theological basis for a world-affirming strategy, and to articulate a repudiation of a world-rejecting strategy. This is done with a clear polemical overtone: twice a position “to shun” the world is emphatically repudiated, as if the text were aimed (as it really was, at least partly) at ultra-conservative “black clergy” from powerful monasteries and at some priests who maintain a clearly world-rejecting stance. 11 The concepts of kenosis, synergy, variety of gifts and services, and God’s compassionate love toward the 11 The resurgence of conservative clergy and their resistance to any form of aggiornamento in the Russian Church can easily be followed in the Russian press and some official documents of the Council. Newspapers reported the growth of a split between the liberals and conservatives through the 1990s (see for example Nezavisimaia gazeta, April 13, 1996; Novye izvestiia, July 24, 1999; Interfax-Argumenty i Fakty, March 12, 1999). One central issue, a litmus paper, was ecumenism; many bishops were reported to have opposed ecumenism at the Bishops’ Council of 1997 (NG-Religii 3, 1997); vehement criticism of the hierarchy’s alleged ecumenism by the monks of the Valaam Monastery became widely public and raised the question of a possible split, or even a full-scale schism within the Church (see NG-Religii 5, 1998; 8, 1998). Another interesting phenomenon was that of the mladostartsy (“young elders”), a new type of guru-like charismatic priest-monk with groups of followers around them who were to

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weak (and the latter can certainly apply to the whole society of sinners) aim at one basic objective: theologically to elevate the world/society and the Church’s social involvement. There is a temptation to disclose this conclusion by simply ascribing it to the political ambitions of the current Church leadership, which would be partly true, but only superficially true, because as a matter of fact this issue of involvement has been a perennial and fundamental dilemma in all Christian Churches. The controversy of involvement in Russia dates from the fifteenth century, with Iosif of Volokolamsk’s ecclesiastical strategy of social service opposed to the principled a-sociality put forward by the trans-Volga “Non-Possessors” (a controversy not completely dissimilar to that between Conventials and Spirituals in the Franciscan order). Iosif, in this sense, was certainly a predecessor of Kirill Gundiaev in formulating a strategy of involvement. 12 The controversy came to the fore during several critical moments of Russia’s history, and in an especially dramatic way during the church reforms of the 1860s (with their ambiguous results) (Rimsky 1999: 270ff. and 564ff.) and in the Renovationist movement of 1905 (the Group of 32) and 1922, which revealed, as a rule, the deep tension between white (parochial) and black (monastic) clergy. 13 The Local Church Council (Pomestnyi Sobor) of 1917–8 was a powerful example of the all intents and purposes independent of the Church hierarchy and practised a rigorous exclusive Orthodoxy; this was seen as creating a “danger of totalitarian sectarianism” (NG-Religii 4, 1997; 7, 1999) and was condemned in special official resolutions by the Bishops’ Council in 1997 and the Synod in 1999. These monk-confessors were reported to interfere brutally in family life, treating sensitive issues such as abortion, contraception and divorce in an extremely hard-line way (NG-Religii 11, 1998; 8, 1999). The existence of this extreme rightwing resistance reveals itself in the text of the BSC: defending marriage as a good thing, the authors openly argue against the anonymous confessors who “compel” their married followers to abstain from sexual relations (XII.3) and who maintain a relentless repudiation of civil marriage (X.2); the document refers to a special resolution of the Synod of 1998 against a “negative and arrogant attitude towards marriage” (X.1). These are just few examples disclosing strong tensions behind and between the lines of the text under study. 12 This does not mean, however, that the case “Josephites versus Non-Possessors” is analogous to the case “Kirill versus conservative monks” of the 1990s. In particular, in their doctrinal stubbornness and intolerance the contemporary monastic conservatives are the successors of Joseph rather than of the Non-Possessors. We cannot go further into this question here. On the subject of Conventials versus Spirituals, see Turner (1969: 147ff.), who refers to Lambert 1961. 13 See Pospelovsky (1995: 89–91), especially on theologically bona fide reformers such as Antonin Granovsky, who without rejecting monasticism (unlike other radical and politically engaged reformers) sought for a close union of laity and clergy as the principal goal. In an extreme form the post-Revolutionary Renovationist movement was called “the revolt of powerlonging white clergy” (ibid., 92).

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Church’s exposure to society at large.14 Theoretically, the message of world-affirmation and world-involvement was certainly not new, and the theology of Fedor Bukharev (in the mid-nineteenth century) was followed by several works by Orthodox philosophers (Vladimir S. Solov’ev and Sergei Bulgakov, among others) who worked in the same direction. 15 Practically, the most immediate influence was certainly that of Nikodim Rotov, the powerful metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod between 1963 and 1978 and the teacher of Kirill.16 Nevertheless the text we are studying here is the first official document of an Eastern Orthodox Church that responds to all these trends and apparently assumes a pro-world stance. 17 The assertion of this pro-world strategy seems to be indispensable in every respect, both theologically and pragmatically. In asserting it, however, the authors seem to struggle with themselves, trying to reconcile contradictory impulses and to overcome ruptures within the ecclesiastical community, which was for so long deprived of any experience of free expression. The document forcefully attempts to break away from a number of frustrations: the inexperience inherited from the ghettotype isolation of the Church; a certain complex of guilt for institutional servility (in the Soviet Union); a challenging vertigo resulting from instantly acquired freedom 14 John Meyendorff (1996: 190) writes of the “inner, spiritual aggiornamento” of that Council. The authors of the BSC, including Kirill, do not fail to stress their indebtedness to the first post-imperial, and also the last pre-Soviet, free Council of the Russian Church (Gundiaev 2000a). 15 See Valliere 2000. Father Aleksei Gostev asserts that the text of the BSC contains, in this respect, some implicit references to Vladimir S. Solov’ev and Aleksandr Kartashev, especially the latter’s article “Tserkov’ kak faktor sotsial’nogo ozdorovleniia Rossii” [The Church as a Factor of Social Recovering of Russia], written in the beginning of the 1930s, where he describes “social service” as a continuation of the Church’s mission (Gostev 2001: 142f.). 16 On Nikodim’s pragmatism, his “decisive influence upon the selection of bishops” and his extraordinary ecumenical energy, see Tsypin 1997: 413f. and 443–5. Alexander Morozov calls Nikodim a “successful man of the sixties” (the “shestidesiatniki” were those inspired by the political thaw of the late 1950s) (NG-Religii 11, 1997). The Church integrists would rather speak of the “Nikodiman mafia within the Church”, accusing it of ecumenism and liberalism (see the article by Konstantin Dushenov in Zavtra, November 19, 1997). Nikodim himself was not a “liberal theologian” or a dissident of any kind, but rather an administrator looking for compromises with the regime; nevertheless, his administration, relying as it did upon openminded graduates of the revived Church academies (especially the academy in Leningrad), was seminal for the opening-up of part of the episcopal hierarchy. 17 Overcoming what can be called a liturgical reductionism of the Church has been a great theme in post-communist religious debates. Patriarch Aleksii II has polemically rejected the idea that the Church should stay “within the temple” and refrain from involvement in anything outside (see his article in NG-Religii 11, 1997). The newspaper columnist Mikhail Antonov warns that if it is not open in this way the Church may transform itself into a sect (NG-Religii 9, 1997).

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and weighty moral authority; and the threat of marginality in a new realm of sweeping secularism (since the end of the Soviet Union). The traces of this inner quandary are quite palpable in the text of the BSC. 18 The pro-world stance, affirmed in the beginning, is constantly questioned through the rest of the text. It is surprising, with the kind of premise we have just discussed, how dominant and overwhelming, throughout the entirety of the document, is the theme of the degradation of the world, and more specifically, of the contemporary social world. Mass apostasy is seen as the ultimate root of increasing social disorders; demographic crisis, family breakdown, multiplication of sins in the “industry of vices”, moral degradation manifest in the rise of abortions and drug abuse, dangers of technological interference, catastrophic ecological distortion produced by “modern civilization” (III.6; XI.4; VI.5; XII.2; XI.6; XII.4; XIII.1) – and all this is exacerbated by the “spiritual void, the lack of meaning of life, the erosion of moral guidelines” (XI.6). In some cases, the very language of the document induces apocalyptic overtones. The world/society that the Church is intending to deal with is profoundly damaged and indeed inimical: in this sense the text retains a classical Christian prophetic tone that has largely withered in Western discourse. Indeed, this sort of controversy seems to have become outdated in the West. The relation of Christianity to modern society has been strategically, if not practically, redefined after the long journey started by the “new Christianity” of Saint-Simon and his followers in nineteenth-century Europe, by Horace Bushnell, by early Unitarians, and by the later liberal Protestantism of the “gilded age” America, which poured out into the Social Gospel movement. In Roman Catholicism the social involvement of the Church does not need much justification because of the breakthrough accomplished by Pope Leo XIII in his Rerum novarum (in 1891 this was still an area of “new things” for Rome, as the title of the document clearly suggests) and the “Social Doctrine” elaborated by his successors; the problem for the Catholic Church in the twentieth century was rather to delineate the limits of this involvement. 19 In Protestantism, strictly speaking, any special “Social Doctrine” of the Church would seem

18 One of the leading figures in the whole project, Metropolitan Kirill’s aide Father Vsevolod Chaplin, confessed a few weeks before the Council of 2000 that there had being serious disputes not only amongst Church parties involved in the creation of the BSC (“they all are too engaged”) but even within the Synod. “It is not very easy for the Church and the lay Orthodox public to reach agreement, and this makes the whole process very complicated” (NG-Religii, July 26, 2000). 19 See the discussion in Calvez and Perrin 1961: chapter III.

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superfluous, for Protestants tend to assume that “the Church does not have, but is, social ethic”.20 Western Churches went through a very complex and profound theological journey in order to be able finally to comprehend and totally absorb this social openness. Let us compare the results of this journey with what we have seen as the Orthodox Christians attempt to catch up. In Protestantism there was a growing focus on “humanity” after Schleiermacher postulated a decisive turn to inner self, and it continued with an emphasis on human experience (manifest in the experiential approach of William James and “empirical theology”) and on the historicity of Christianity (beginning with Hegel’s view of the human world as essential for God’s self-realization, or Ernst Troeltsch’s idea of the figure of Christ as conceivable only through the whole (human) history of “tradition”.) The powerful and deep anti-liberal revolt by Karl Barth, with his view of God as “wholly other”, was strongly counterweighted by Emil Brunner’s concept of “divine-human encounter”, by Friedrich Gogarten’s idea of “divine intention” to grant the world to men (which became the basis for a passionate affirmation of secular culture in Harvey Cox’s The Secular City), and by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s conception of the radical “worldliness” of Christian experience (“belonging wholly to Christ [means to] stand at the same time wholly in the world”) (see Livingston et al. 2000: 6f., 26–9, 34–47, 80, 86–93, 122). In fact, even the “anti-liberal” (in the narrow theological sense) elements in the thought of Barth, Bonhoeffer, Protestant existentialists and Reinhold Niebuhr were driven by an overall concern about human autonomy in the world, and consequently by their incontestable affirmation of the social realm. 21 There were, it is true, in Protestantism powerful streams of conservative evangelicalism, fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, which were less influential theologically but which defined, at times, the background moods of premillenianism and anti-modernism; however, the evolution of all these three “movements” in the twentieth century, each in its own way, made them a major part of a complex general landscape that they, nevertheless, did not define. 20 A quotation from a prominent Methodist theologian, Stanley Hauerwas, cited in Hastings, Mason and Pyper 2000: 676. This should not be understood as meaning that in his writings Hauerwas is advocating a full and unconditional embrace of the social world, but it shows the inner legitimacy of the social world as such and its unquestionable centrality to Church ministry. 21 Some similar trends in Jewish theology, in close interrelation with Protestant developments, can be traced back to the Jewish existentialists Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, with the concept of the I-Thou dialectic; to the “living God” of Will Herberg; and to Mordecai Kaplan’s innovative vision of God’s dynamic Revelation within nature and history, in his Judaism as a Civilization (1934) (see Gillman 2000: 442–50).

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The Catholic theology of the twentieth century was, in toto, a complex response to Neo-Scholastic dogmatism as established in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), the Code of Canon Law (1917), and the Antimodernist Oath (1917); it was an overcoming of the stubborn emphasis on the clear and inexorable distinction between nature and grace, nature and the supernatural, a response to the strong priority of “angelic” Thomistic rationality over the Romantic (and partly Modernist) accent on emotions and experience (Livingston et al. 2000: 197–9). La nouvelle théologie of Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), through an Augustinian interpretation of Aquinas and a “post-critical” approach to the Bible, marked a trend to revive “the sense of the sacred” by extolling the dynamic aspiration of human intellect and human spirit toward God, and thus the “restoration” (as de Lubac saw it) of a dynamic continuum, rather than a deep divide, between man and God (nature and supernatural). 22 Karl Rahner (1904–84) completed this turn by incorporating Heidegger’s Existentialism, in order to create a theology of correlation (of human and divine), and especially by introducing the Heideggerian notion of Vorgriff (pre-apprehension) (of God), which according to Rahner is an innate faculty of humanness and a condition sine qua non of Revelation (an “implicit religiousness” of all human beings); thus, nature and grace become once again united.23 These and other similar developments in Roman Catholicism have influenced the Roman magisterium and the theological constitution of the Second Vatican Council in its entirety. These ideas are very close in their intonation to the humanization impulses of Russian religious writers such as Bukharev, Bulgakov and Meyendorff and also quite congruent with what we have seen in the theological clauses of the BSC (although the terms “synergy” and “kenosis” are not used in Catholic arguments). 24 However, this trend seems to be more fundamentally implanted in Catholic thought. It would be erroneous to reckon that the modern Catholic vision embraces the liberal worldview or even the Enlightenment paradigm in their entirety: such full embracement would simply mean the elimination of Christian identity, and many post-Second Vatican Council documents, including the encyclicals of John Paul II, contain strong criticism of post-Christian humanism; but Catholic thought firmly upholds the assumption that the Christian nature of the world prevails. This assumption is buttressed by the understanding of creation – perhaps the central notion in the Catholic Catechism. “God creates by wisdom and love” (CCC 22 See de Lubac’s Le Surnaturel (1946), quoted in Livingston et al. 2000: 203–5. 23 See Rahner’s fundamental Theological Investigations, as referred to in Livingston et al. 2000: 207–11. 24 Rahner does, however, use the figure of Christ as a perfect symbol of God-man unity, although he does not mention kenosis (see Livingston et al. 2000: 212).

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295); 25 he “creates the visible world in all its richness, diversity, and order” (337). In many places, therefore, the text extols the “beauty of the universe” (341), the “goodness and perfection of all creatures” (339), and the domination of good over evil in the world (412). The idea of creation works as a key concept that makes the world good ex definitio. There is also stress on man’s being created in God’s own image (Gen. 1:27) (355), and thus man belongs to nature and shares its initial goodness. “Laws of nature” that govern the world are in no way opposed to God; as the thesis of creation suggests, they are God’s laws. The created world is also ordered, and the idea of the “orders of creation” (also adopted in Protestantism since Luther’s time) is used to embrace the totality of the natural world. The idea of original sin seems to be attenuated in post-Second Vatican Council documents: although “sins put the world as a whole in sinful conditions” (408), God did not prevent the first men from sinning because, as Thomas Aquinas wrote, “God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good” (412); in another place (in the chapter on marriage) it is said that “the disorder we notice so painfully does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin” (italics in original); and then, “nevertheless, the order of creation persists, though seriously disturbed” (1607– 8). Thus sin is clearly juxtaposed to nature; the sources of sin are outside nature, so the ordered natural world, although damaged, can be considered inherently positive. In this positively ordered world, man is “entrusted with the responsibility” to dominate; God “enables men to be intelligent and free in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony…[Men] fully become ‘God’s fellow-workers’ and co-workers for his Kingdom” (307). The idea of cooperation, as well as an explicit rejection of Manicheanism (285), are consonant with what we have seen in the Russian BSC, but the ground of worldaffirmation is considerably weaker in this latter, if only because the key concept of Creation, with all its effects, seems to be peripheral. Consequently, the natural world is not seen as positive and ordered, and not elevated over sin. A tension between God and the world persists, and world-affirmation remains considerably strained and partial. God himself, of course, comes to the rescue of the world through his incarnation, kenosis and atonement; indeed, “the world, the society, and the state are the objects of God’s love” (I.3); however, they constitute just the objects, rather than being enhanced or valorized in their proper nature. Their alienation from God is much

25 Here and hereafter I refer to the paragraph numbers as given in the standard edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Catechism 1997).

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stronger in the Russian text, and therefore Christ’s enduring kenosis is required constantly, whereas in the CCC the created world tends to be affirmed ontologically, by definition, while the sin is partly marginalized.26 The Main Cause of Worldly Problems: Apostate Anthropocentrism The main concept used by the Russian social document in explaining the degradation of the world is irreligious anthropocentrism (the word itself is not used but is implicitly omnipresent). The BSC reads: “Seduction by the achievements of civilization moves people away from the Creator and leads to a deceptive triumph of reason, which attempts to arrange the world without God” (VI.3). The profound critique of the liberal notion of freedom as “self-will” or “license” (svoevolie) (IV.7), and of humanism as an insufficient ethical foundation (XIII.4), implies the same idea. The treatment of bio-ethical, medical and ecological issues is based on a classical antimodernist assumption of “intervention” by (godless) human reason into “the design of the Creator of life” (XII.4), which amounts to theomachism (bogoborchestvo). The Church refuses to recognize “a world order in which the human personality, corrupted (pomrachennyi) by sin, is placed at the center of everything” (XIV.4); therefore the Church rejects the whole project of Modernity and its more recent form, globalization (“a universal de-spiritualized culture” (16.3)), as intrinsically corrupted by an uncontrolled anthropocentrism. 27

26 The traditionally rather strong emphasis on creation in Eastern Christian theology is downplayed in the BSC. Moreover, there have been some important modern developments that the contemporary Russian theologians might have, but did not, use to ground their views: the sophiology of Vladimir S. Solov’ev and Sergei Bulgakov, postulating Sophia as partly the world’s response to creation (see Valliere 2000: 159f. and 260–6); the idea of logoi, inner divine principles manifest in all creatures, developed by Dumitru Stăniloae after Maximus the Confessor; and the Palamist theory of the immanence of energies (energeiai). All three of these provide ways of establishing a stronger immanent ground for a world-affirming strategy, based on creationism (see Ware 2000). 27 Some further theological elaboration of the anti-liberal discourse can be found in the report of Theological Commission delivered by Metropolitan Filaret (Vakhromeev), a member of the Synod. Speaking of the main thesis of the Social Concept, Filaret denounced “contemporary civilization” based on liberal ideas, “which combine pagan anthropocentrism, entered European culture since Renaissance, along with Protestant theology and Jewish philosophical thought; these ideas were finally shaped by the end of the Enlightenment as a set of liberal principles” (Vakhromeev 2001: 109).

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In this respect the BSC inherits the old Russian anti-modernist and anti-liberal discourse of man-godship against God-manship28 of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Fedor Dostoevsky, Sergei Bulgakov and others), which was widely heard in the late Soviet period in assessing communism as an extreme form of the same modernist “Tower of Babel project”. However, the document seems to overlook the complexity of an approach to “humanism” as worked out by Russian thinkers such as Sergei Bulgakov, who saw in humanism both the spiritual empowerment of man and his errancy. 29 The idea of apostate anthropocentrism is common to Christian (and generally religious) anti-modernist discourse, initially going back to the anti-Enlightenment writings of Joseph de Maistre, who exerted a significant influence both on Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century and on Western Christian thought. The discourse has changed in the twentieth century, in line with the general trend to reinterpret autonomous human activity as co-creation. To be sure, this change was not irresistible. One powerful critic was Reinhold Niebuhr. However, his brilliant anthropology equating sin with man’s intrinsic drive to self-aggrandizement and pride was free from any religious apocalyptism in the style of de Maistre. The anti-Prometheanism of later anti-liberals such as Alasdair MacIntyre has tended to move to the margins of public influence (see Niebuhr 1941–3; on anti-Prometheanism see Holmes 1993: chapters 4 and 5). We have seen this new paradigm of co-creation as clearly present in the Russian document, but it is counterbalanced by passionate philippics against “man-godship”. The CCC completely avoids any reservation of this kind. Contemporary society is not an object of bitter criticism at all, so there is no need to evoke the old “Tower of Babel argument”; it seems that the Roman Catholic Church, at least on the level of the magisterium, has largely rejected the anti-Enlightenment discourse, although by no means accepting the Enlightenment discourse in its entirety. 30 28 Paul Valliere uses “Humanity of God” to translate the famous Russian term bogochelovechestvo, popularized by Solov’ev; this translation, although it clarifies the author’s argument (Valliere 2000: 11–5), reduces the Christological weight of the term. 29 On Sergei Bulgakov’s concept of “two cities” (theism versus pantheism; Christianity versus man-godship), see Bulgakov 1997: 12f. Bulgakov’s view on humanism is ambiguous: he does call it the state of being a “prodigal son”, but he also speaks of a “rebellion of humanity, now conscious of its power, against the medieval ascetic worldview, which is mistakenly confused with the true, universal Christianity”. Thus humanism in Russia was “a natural revolt against Filaret’s catechism … and Pobedonostsev’s police clericalism, confused with real ecclesianism” (Bulgakov 1997: 345). 30 The variety of views within Roman Catholicism includes, at the unofficial level, some enduring articulations of anti-Enlightenment attitudes. To take just one example, the small-circulation local quarterly bulletin of a southern French congregation published an article by a local

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Ecclesiastical and Denominational Sensibility As we have seen, in the Russian Orthodox social vision an initial world-affirmation is strongly outweighed by the concept of the world’s insurmountable depravity. The Church loses its intended affinity with the world and becomes estranged again. Although not quite pure, because of its terrestrial component, the Church is a body opposed to the fallen world (IV.4). The theological framework is, quite significantly, ecclesiocentric; the concept of the Church is central and is understood in a specific way that I will now analyze. Firstly, it is perceived as an institution, a social body, rather than anything else. Starting with more inclusive, spiritual and sacramental definitions by Aleksei Khomiakov and Maximus the Confessor, the text then clings to a more exclusive, border-cognizant self-perception: the Church goes through kenosis, descending to the rest of society (thus being inherently distinct from it); the Church consists of “clerics, monks, and laity” (thus opposed to all the rest); the Church is “interacting” with the State, social associations and individuals (thus being separate). Throughout the document this institutional and sociological self-consciousness persists: for example, the position on political issues can be only the one and “official” position and never articulated “without a control by the hierarchy” (V.2, V.4); the hierarchy defines the means of cooperation with social bodies and the Church’s “official position” in the mass media (XV.2). The pragmatic intent of the document is obvious here, but more importantly, the whole theological plan of the reinchurchment of the world is weakened by an institutional self-isolation: thus a program of involvement generates its own limits. Secondly, this specific institutional and social body, as the Church tends (partly involuntarily) to be represented in the document, is also perceived as a minority. The document addresses the clergy, the monks and the laity (believers), who are supposed to serve God in a largely secular, apostate society. “The state, the associations, and the individuals” the Church is called to deal with are dubbed “nonchristian”. The document calls on Christians to be moral in politics, without mentioning all the rest, whose morality seems to be out of the Church’s competence (V.3). In a largely secular Modernity, the document requires nothing more than just “recognizing religious worldview … as a substantial factor” of social life (XVI.4). This self-understanding as a specific social minority, a sober and courageous acknowledgment as it seems to be, leads at the same time to a further involuntary self-isolation. priest who quoted Cardinal Rouco Valera, Archbishop of Madrid: “Immanentist humanism makes up contemporary culture, with its nihilism in philosophy, relativism in epistemology and morality and pragmatism, or cynical hedonism, in its approach to everyday reality; it also accentuates the individualism that reigns in today’s society…” (Voix 2000: 8).

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Thirdly, this minority institution that the Church turns out to become is opposed to an increasingly inimical environment. The Church is represented as being an exclusive locus that retains the purity that the world has lost; it is juxtaposed to the world as another reality, thus restoring the breach between the divine it claims exclusively to represent, and the profane, which is by itself inexorably doomed. Related to this highly protective stance is also the high denominational sensibility of the BSC. The document is full of denominational overtones; an Eastern Orthodox flavour is conveyed through the very language (with a few elements of Church Slavonic and archaic Russian vocabulary) 31 and the selection of authoritative references, quotations and historical examples (almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox).32 The document can mention “Orthodox politicians” (also painters, philosophers, musicians, architects, and even physicians) (V.3, XIV.2). In other cases, however, we find the words “Christianity” and “Christian”. It seems that the text vacillates between Christian universalism and Eastern Orthodox particularity: the authors “play” by alternating the sequence of these two concepts (“Orthodox” and “Christian”), either stating their equivalence or their semantic variance; for example, in the chapters on bioethics and law (IV, XII) the denominational accent is relatively weak, while in the passages on the army and state it becomes clearly strong (III, VIII.4). Denomination thus becomes another boundary that the “only true Catholic and Apostolic Church” creates around itself to oppose the corrupted world beyond its fences. Compare this denominationalism with the sensitivities of the Western Churches. In Protestantism, Churches are by definition centered upon and as congregations. This does not completely invalidate the question of the boundary between the Church and the secular world, between the sacred and the profane: suffice it to mention how this basic Protestant idea, galvanized in the Social Gospel movement, was at odds with the principle and the practice of the separation of Church and State in America (see Johnson 1940: 153). Overall, however, equalizing religious ethics with a social 31 Overall, the text is written in a good contemporary Russian prose, combining academic and mass media styles; its language definitely sets the text aside from mainstream religious publications and reprints, pervaded with archaic vocabulary and the nineteenth-century intonations. When it occurs, then, the use of old-style Church epithets and expressions becomes all the more remarkable: some old linguistic forms serve, perhaps, as conspicuous markers of denominational identity. 32 There are only seven references mentioning Latin Fathers (Augustine and Tertullian) out of 147 references to various figures; all the rest are to Greek Fathers, Byzantine and Russian saints, Byzantine and Russian Emperors, Orthodox Church Councils, and institutional documents of the Russian Church, both old and more recent. (Elsewhere I analyzed the quantitative breakdown of references in the Social Concept, as compared to popular religious literature, see Agadjanian 2003b).

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normative framework, and thus overthrowing the concept of Church exclusivity, was a strong and fundamental trend in Protestantism. A comparison with Roman Catholicism will be more telling at this point. It seems that Roman Catholicism is not as definitely ecclesiocentric as it used to be a century ago. To be sure, the theology of the Church is probably one of the most elaborated and pervasive themes in the CCC: the Church is a thoroughly organized and authoritarian institution; in fact, much more so than any Eastern Orthodox Church. At the same time, in the twentieth century Catholicism went through a major evolution in this respect, trying to comprehend and to adjust the “border relationships” between the Church and the world. A powerful challenge to Neo-Thomistic rigidity was made by Yves Congar (1904–94) in what can be called communio ecclesiology, which was eventually adopted by the Second Vatican Council (Livingston et al. 2000: 235–9). According to this cardinal change, the Church is centered (at least in theory) not so much upon the hierarchy as upon a local communio of believers, performing the communio with God through the Holy Eucharist. Lumen gentium, a document adopted at the Second Vatican Council, spoke of the Church as “the people of God”, including the laity (thus responding to the growing involvement of the laity after the Second World War). This significant shift blurred the previous clear-cut boundary of the Church.33 Roman Catholicism attempts to go still further. Transcending its own denominational limits, it posits that “all men are called to the catholic unity of the People of God” (836), 34 recognizes the “goodness and truth in all religions” (843), and proceeding from the common origin and goal for all nations (842) acknowledges the possibility of eternal salvation even for those who “do not know the Gospel” (847). Vatican’s willingness to be inclusive seems unlimited. At some points, however, the denominational consciousness becomes manifest: Rome and the “successor of Peter” are declared as presiding in all Christian Churches, uniquely offering the “fullness of the means of salvation” (834, 816), and the Gospel is the only truth all peoples should finally embrace. Comparing this claim to the tonality of the Russian document, we see in Roman Catholicism no trace of a minority complex, but rather a conviction of

33 See similar arguments in a recent study of American Catholicism: “The Church has redefined itself, toning down its earlier emphasis on the Church as the ‘people of God’”; it has become less centralized and more collegial; the number of priests has fallen and the role of the laity, including women, has markedly increased; the Church has become integrated into society rather than segregated from it (D’Antonio et al. 2001: 3f.). See the same emphasis on “no dichotomy” (between Church and secular society) in post-Second Vatican Council Catholicism in a sketch on Social Doctrine (Roets 1999: 17). 34 Significantly, the word “catholic” is not capitalized here.

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superiority and a trend toward boundless inclusiveness. The Catholic Church, in contrast to Russian Orthodoxy, seems to be full of confidence about itself, because, in contrast again, it appears to be clearly optimistic about the world in general. The Russian document, however pragmatic it may seem, retains strong eschatological overtones, and clearly occupies a defensive, protective posture. 35 It is interesting that the Russian Church, willingly or unwillingly missing the trend towards ecclesiological inclusiveness, virtually overlooks the clear prerequisites existing within its own intellectual experience. Aleksei Khomiakov’s religious philosophy of the mid-nineteenth century contains a powerful innovatory drive, making the Church a sobor, a “gathering”, softening the border between the “church that teaches” and the “church that learns” (see Meyendorff 1996: 185–8). As I mentioned, the BSC does include a quotation from Khomiakov, one of his spiritual definitions of the Church, 36 a remarkable sign per se, but one which is not developed in the rest of the text. The text does not mention the concept of sobornost’, deduced from Khomiakov’s writings by his followers, and this omission greatly weakens its totality. Another major trend, the “Eucharistic ecclesiology” elaborated by George Florovsky, Nikolai Afanas’ev and Alexander Schmemann in the twentieth century, would lead to a further de-institutionalization and a growing inclusiveness. Paradoxically, this profound liturgical (sacramental) ecclesiology, developed by Russian thinkers (with an additional contribution by the Greek theologian John Zizioulas), had a direct impact on the Second Vatican Council (Felmy 1999: 172ff.), but was not appropriated (simply overlooked, or perhaps rejected?) by the Russian hierarchy. The Russian Church, on the contrary, seems to have become Romanized in this respect. Identity, Nation, and Culture: A Protective Traditionalist Response to Globalism We have seen in the previous paragraphs how Russian Orthodoxy, although trying to come to terms with the new Lebenswelt surrounding it, still remains in the final analysis a largely isolated and self-protective subculture, prophetically critical of the 35 It goes without saying that Catholic optimism and inclusiveness may be misleading about the real and profound tensions with the world that the Roman Church experiences no less than the Russian Church. In this sense, the eschatological attitudes expressed in the Russian document seem to be more authentic and genuine in reflecting general Christian concerns. It is another matter, however, to construe how these concerns in fact relate to the intentions of the document’s authors. 36 The Church is the unity of “the new humanity in Christ”, “the unity of God’s grace dwelling in the multitude of rational creatures who submit to grace” (I.1).

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world as it is. We are going to see now how this stance affects, or simply becomes manifest in, an array of issues treated in the text under study. Let us review some of the strikingly prominent discourses permeating the text. One of them is the strong emphasis on the “uniqueness of personality” and the “dignity of the human person”. Uniqueness is mentioned five times, once in the chapter on law and ethics and four times in the chapter on bioethics. Personal dignity is mentioned twelve times in different contexts, from a formula legitimizing private property to discussions on gender equality, medical treatment and again bioethics. This motif, which is elaborated within the tradition of modernized Christian personalism in the West (and which occurs in the CCC dozens of times in many contexts), is certainly new for Russian Orthodoxy, and its use indicates exactly those parts of the text that are most innovative and “modernized”.37 It is important to mention right away that the emphasis on personal dignity and uniqueness does not imply, as we have seen, an acceptance of “humanism” in the sense of the intrinsic natural goodness of human beings and does not lead to a recognition of “human liberties”. Rather, the BSC treats the “unique personality” as resisting, as seeking for protection against an expanding godless civilization (for example, the technologies of assisted reproduction). Uniqueness is endangered by the “contemporary world” and must be saved.38 A second pervasive motif of the document, directly linked to the previous one, is the conservation of diversity. As cloning threatens the diversity of beings, so catastrophic ecological trends “result in the suppressed biological activity and the steady shrinking of the genetic diversity of life” (XIII.1). This idea of “diversity under danger” takes a powerful turn in the last chapter on international relations and globalization. Globalization is treated extensively and profoundly. Although the document admits some advantages of globalism, its whole pathos really consists in warning about the dangers that globalism brings. The Russian Church is primarily concerned with “maintaining the spiritual, cultural, and other identity of …countries and nations” (XVI.2). Political international structures and transnational corporations are 37 The text of the document is polyphonic (see Novik 2000: 261). Such new intellectual spaces as bioethics or secular law create a vacuum of authority and a potential for emancipated thinking; thus it is not surprising that the sections dealing with them reveal new motifs and use new vocabulary: for example, the motif of uniqueness is used in rejecting cloning, extracorporal insemination and transplantation. At these points the discourses are similar to equivalent Western religious discourses. These sections stand out against the more traditional stylistic backdrop of other parts of the text. 38 The Roman Catholic Church also denounces assisted reproduction, as “morally unacceptable”, or in fact threatening the “origin and the dignity of the human person” (Catechism 1997: 2376f.). Sharing at this point the same conservative attitudes, the two Churches, as we have seen, have different positions on the overall issue of “humanity”.

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qualified as inimical to diversity, with a barely hidden reprimand toward the ruling elites of the Western nations. Globalization is further linked to the “domination of a universal culture devoid of any spirituality and based on the freedom of fallen man unrestricted by anything…” (XVI.3). Overall, therefore, The spiritual and cultural expansion fraught with total unification should be opposed through the joint efforts of the Church, state structures, civil society, and international organizations for the sake of asserting in the world a truly equitable and mutually enriching cultural and informational exchange combined with efforts to protect the identity of nations and other human communities. (XVI.3) 39

We have here a clear and logical sequence: as an individual person must be protected from overwhelming unification, so also must an individual community. The notion of individuality, no matter what it relates to, is in focus, and actually the center of gravity is not the person (whose goodness, rationality and liberty do not receive a special elaboration), but rather the community. Protecting a communal identity against a sprawling, inimical godless universalism seems to be the main rhetorical figure and a quintessential matrix of the whole text.40 39 Patriarch Kirill, the main inspiration behind the BSC, elaborated the issue of globalization in a series of articles and interviews that predate and anticipate the document under study. Kirill respects “the achievements of liberal civilization”, but postulates “the decline of its dominance”; the conclusion is the need to “harmonize the liberal-secular and religious-traditional approaches”, or, in another context, to “harmonize the secular law and religious traditions” (Gundiaev 2000a). In another place he speaks of the challenge to “religious-historical identities” offered by the liberal ethos that “emerged outside any tradition” (predanie, which means a specifically religious tradition). Although Kirill accepts the liberal emphasis on the “absolute value of the human person” he regards secular liberalism as unsustainable per se and once again proposes a selective synthesis (Gundiaev 2000b). It is clear that Kirill’s stance is articulated polemically towards both integrists and modernists in the Church. In a third publication Kirill writes about “an aggressive globalizing monoculture, dominating and assimilating other cultural and national identities…” and sets forth a theological thesis about national culture as the principal vehicle of Christian tradition (Gundiaev 1999a: 66 and passim). On the evolution of Kirill’s views, see Kostiuk 2002. 40 The romantic anti-Enlightenment idea of protecting diversity was first creatively linked with Christian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century by Konstantin Leont’ev in his strongly antiliberal glorification of “exuberant complexity” which he saw as threatened by liberal-egalitarian progress and soulless universalism coming from Western Europe. In his view liberal individualism ruins the “individuality of men, regions and nations”. Inequality, diversity and complexity, being both aesthetic and moral categories, were for Leont’ev closely linked to the Byzantine substrate of Russian culture, epitomized in the institutions of monarchy and Church (Leont’ev 1996: 107ff. and 129).

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What is this community that needs to be protected? It would be more understandable to see here a direct concern about the Church itself, the hierarchy, the institution that is trying to escape a growing marginality. But the Church understands itself as a tradition, and thus links itself to the whole of traditional culture, which is also a national culture. Thus, the Church associates itself with the nation, and it is this durable link that it tries to save in the conflict of diversity versus unification. The chapter on nation is second in order, next to the theological prolegomena (see the Appendix to this article), and this is significant in itself. It starts with postulating the innate duality of the Biblical people of Israel. As a prototype of the Christian Church, Israel, in the light of Christ’s atonement, is an absolutely universalistic entity. On the other hand, Israel is a chosen people, and as such it is opposed to all other peoples (as ‘am versus goyim in the Jewish Bible and as laos/demos versus ethne in the Septuagint) (II.1). This basic duality is crucial for all further interpretations. Israel was not only “God’s people”, whose unity was based on sacral covenant, but also a community tied together by ethnic and linguistic bonds, as well as by “being rooted in a particular land, the Fatherland” (II.1). 41 The Church therefore has a similar duality: it is “by its very nature universal and supranational”, because the spiritual fatherland of Christians is not earthly, but Heavenly Jerusalem, and because the Gospel is preached in all languages. At the same time, this universalism does not mean to deny the right to national identity and national self-expression; in fact, the Church is both universal and national (II.2). Jesus himself was both supranational and still obviously linked to his people: He identified Himself with the people to whom He belonged by birth. Talking to the Samaritan woman, He stressed His belonging to the Jewish nation: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know: for salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22). Jesus was a loyal subject of the Roman Empire and paid taxes in favor of Caesar (Mt. 22: 16–21). St Paul, in his letters teaching on the supranational nature of the Church of Christ, did not forget that by birth he was “an Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Phil. 3:5), though a Roman by citizenship (Acts 22: 25–9). (II.2). 42 41 The Russian original, unlike the official English translation posted on the website of the Moscow Patriarchate, speaks about “tribal” rather than “ethnic” community. “Tribal” has a stronger connection with the idea of primordial blood bonds. All three elements of the extrareligious unity of Israel – blood, language and land – are dealt with in detail. 42 All three of the quotations here seem to be significantly misaccentuated (or reaccentuated). Talking with the Samaritan woman, Jesus did not mean to stress anything other than the fact that he belonged to God’s people. The premise that Jesus was a “good citizen” is not obviously supported in the Gospels, nor indeed by the famous coin parable from Matt. 22: 15–22. As for the citation from the letter to Philippians, it may be said to be decontextualized: for what Paul

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After these comparisons and considerations, the BSC postulates the legitimacy of “national Christian culture” and “Christian patriotism”. Christian patriotism, supported by a number of examples from Russian history, is said to be expressed “with regard to a nation as an ethnic community and as a community of its citizens” (II.3); finally, “when a nation, civil or ethnic, represents fully or predominantly a monoconfessional Orthodox community, it can in a certain sense be regarded as one community of faith – an Orthodox people” (II.3). The chapter ends with an energetic rejection of aggressive nationalism and xenophobia (II.4), but its main emphasis lies in stressing the link between national identity and religion – a real theological challenge to the usual discourse of Christian universalism. 43 In my view, this emphasis on an ethnically and religiously defined nation is the climax of the general paradigm of the document: protecting the particular traditional identity (of a person, a nation or a Church) against the pressure of global secular universalism. In Western religious thought, the discourse on unique individual identity and personal dignity entered the mainstream long ago. The Russian document, introducing this discourse for the first time on behalf of the whole Church, appears to represent a considerable shift in its overall ethos moving closer toward Western Christian attitudes. However, we will not find in the Russian text the positive implications of “dignity” which are confirmed in contemporary Western thought, for example in such concepts as “human rights” or “humanism” that embrace the post-Enlightenment notion of individual freedom corroborated by, rather than opposed to, a rediscovered (and reified) Christian personalism and following the thread in modern times leading from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Henri Bergson and the Existentialists, with the contributions of the Pietists and Methodists in the middle. A synthesis of Eastern Christian personalism developed by Nikolai Berdiaev, Fedor Stepun and members of the émigré Novy Grad movement in the 1930s was a part of this process, but it was not appropriated by the official social teaching discussed here. 44 is actually stressing at this point, in the words that come right after the cited passage, is precisely his rejection of his Jewishness for the sake of Christ (Phil. 3: 7–9.). The reaccentuations here are quite telling, however. 43 Father Veniamin Novik points out the non-universalist bias of the document (Novik 2000: 258). 44 According to Fedor Stepun, “[a] social system ought to be personalistic and conciliar [sobornaia] at the same time”. The word sobornost’, introduced by Aleksei Khomiakov in the nineteenth century to mean people seeking God in free organic unity, was endowed by Stepun with a stronger personalistic content, so that the concept is opposed to “impersonal collectivity”. This is in line with contemporary Existentialism and in response to the sweeping collectivistic conformity of Bolshevik Russia (Stepun 1938). See also Nikolai Berdiaev’s Filosofiia neravenstva, written in 1918 and first published in Berlin in 1923, where he synthesises an

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As for the notion of diversity, it was vehemently protected by Romanticism and Existentialism and became one of the axioms of contemporary Western religious thought, which does not see diversity as being threatened. In mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic social teachings, diversity (of individuals, communities and cultures) does not contradict universalism, but is rather one of its principles. The conflict between traditional identities and globalism is usually neither dramatized nor elaborated. The topic of nation and nationalism, so crucial for the Russian Church, is largely left behind in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century; significantly, it is almost completely ignored in the CCC. The mainstream Western Churches try to negotiate a place in global processes and do not treat new liberal universalism as obviously inimical to religion, nor do they have a tendency to identify religion with “traditional values” in a clear way, as is being done by the Russian Church.45 Conclusions The Russian Church is facing a classical problem of religious ecology: 46 how to respond to constant changes in the Lebenswelt, the surrounding social world, while still retaining a cognitive identity and institutional vitality. What the officially engaged religious thinkers are trying to do, in the “Bases of the Social Concept” of 2000, is to catch up with Western thought in a tremendous effort to rehabilitate the world, to create a new legitimate language of world-affirmation instead of the traditional world-rejecting paradigm. In doing so, they rely upon Scripture and Tradition, as well as upon ideas (in most cases implicitly present, rather than explicitly quoted) drawing upon the traditions of Russian and Western theology and the historical experience of the Church. This world-affirming strategy is, however, only half-successful: its foundations are less solid than in the Western theologies, and the motif of rejecting the degenerated contemporary world (perhaps, partly, a sublimated aversion to both Soviet and post-communist Russian reality) remains extremely strong and at times traditionally apocalyptic; the main reason for degradation is defined, in line with religious antiapology for diversity (inequality), which has some similarity to Leont’ev (see note 40 in this chapter), with a new strong emphasis on individual freedom (Berdiaev 1970). 45 A positive discourse about “global community” has been present in Catholic teaching since at least John XIII’s encyclical Pacem in terris (1963) (see Roets 1999: 96ff.). 46 The term “ecology of religion” is used by Jacob Neusner to mean “the study of the interrelationship between the religious world a group constructs for itself and the social and political world in which that same group lives” (Neusner 2000: 7).

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Enlightenment Romanticism, as a mass apostasy and anthropocentric self-elevation, the Tower of Babel obsession of godless humanism. The document introduces into official Eastern Christian theology, for the first time, a clearly articulated personalistic discourse (on the uniqueness and dignity of the individual), of a kind which is profoundly developed in the West. However, the emphasis on individuality, in the context of the entirety of the text, is not elaborated for its own sake (as a new anthropology), but rather serves as just one element in a dominant strategy, which is the protection of traditional identity (individual, denominational, cultural) through resistance to global liberal secularism. It is this strategy, in the final analysis, that provides a coherence to the major attitudes and definitions in the document. Nevertheless, the Social Concept remains an intrinsically torn and polyphonic document. 47 It does discover, for the first time at the level of an authoritative document of the Russian Church, the issues of culture and society in all their complexity, emphatically articulates them, attempts to resolve them in a fresh way, and in some instances certainly succeeds (for example, the sections on marriage and bioethics present relatively balanced and lenient approaches). However, a particularistic strategy of identity-protection definitely prevails and conveys a strongly conservative agenda on some crucial issues such as nation, state and culture. An agenda of this kind is not idiosyncratic to the Russian Church and can be found in many religious communities in both Western and non-Western contexts; it may be partly inscribed into a contemporary “anti-global” protective agenda, while, on the other hand, it pertains indeed to the very identity of the Christian ethos. This very identity, from the beginning of Christianity, has been articulated through an inherent ambivalence toward the world, the ambivalence of contempt and love, of withdrawal and ministry, of alienation and affinity, of detachment and confluence. In this risky venture at the edge of identity, the Russian Christian tradition is still trying to grope for subtle ways of negotiating the dialectic of being-in-the-world.

47 See my study of the references in the BSC, as compared to the structure of references in popular mainstream religious literature (Chapter 6). The comparison shows that the BSC is clearly striving for emancipation from the monastic-ascetic historical paradigm and parochialism, and yet develops a strong constraint in relating itself to more liberal paradigms found in both Western and Eastern Christian thought.

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Appendix Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (Adopted by the Bishops’ Council, August 13–16, 2000, Moscow) Contents I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI.

Basic Theological Provisions Church and Nation Church and State Christian Ethics and Secular Law Church and Politics Labor and its Fruits Property War and Peace Crime, Punishment, Correction Personal, Family and Public Morality Personal and National Health Problems of Bioethics The Church and Ecological Problems Secular Culture, Science and Education. Church and Secular Mass Media International Relations; Globalization and Secularism.

8.

LIBERAL INDIVIDUAL AND CHRISTIAN CULTURE: RUSSIAN ORTHODOX TEACHING ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIAL THEORY PERSPECTIVE

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview and an analysis of the recently propounded Russian Orthodox teaching on human rights: the origins, purposes and significance of this teaching within the Russian ecclesiastical, social and cultural context. Then in the last part of this chapter I will place the entire discussion in the broader context of two social theoretical perspectives of democracy: by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, two thinkers who similarly, although with some clear differences, have tried to respond to the recent public claims of religion. The main source reflecting the Russian Orthodox teaching on human rights is a document called “Bases of the Teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church on Dignity, Freedom and Human Rights”, adopted by the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2008. This document was the outcome of decade-long discussions reflected in a number of previous texts. From the late 1990s the notion of “human rights”, or what we may call the “human rights discourse”, was used increasingly frequently in the publications and discussions of the Russian Church establishment, mostly at the Department of External Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, headed at that time by Kirill Gundiaev.1 What is the significance of the content of this “teaching”? And what is the significance of the very fact of the appearance of this “teaching”: what are the reasons that brought it into being, and what is its purpose? 1

The main text is Osnovy ucheniia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi o dostoinstve, svobode i pravakh cheloveka (Bases of the Teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church on Dignity, Freedom and Human Rights) (Osnovy 2008). Earlier reflections on related matters can be found in another important Church document, Osnovy sotsial’noi kontseptsii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi (Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church) (Osnovy 2001). The translations in this article from both these documents are from the original Russian, although official English translations of both documents exist; see Osnovy 2001 and Osnovy 2008. Relevant issues were also treated in a number of conceptual articles published in the late 1990s and the early 2000s; then in a series of discussions in the mid-2000s, of which the most interesting was a round table on July 1, 2004 at the Moscow Danilov Monastery entitled “Svoboda i dostoinstvo lichnosti: pravoslavnyi i liberal’nyi vzgliad” (“Freedom and Personal Dignity: Orthodox and Liberal Visions”) (Svoboda 2004). There was also a short Deklaratsiia o pravakh i dostoinstve cheloveka (Declaration on Human Rights and Dignity), approved by the World Russian People’s Council (Vsemirnyi Russkii Narodnyi Sobor) in April 2006 (Deklaratsiia 2006). The Congress was set up in 1993, and according to its charter its head is, ex officio, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

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Starting on a pragmatic note, there is a temptation to reduce this “teaching”, including the main 2008 document, to the outcome of purely political causes: bureaucratic zeal on the part of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Relations (which under Kirill Gundiaev was a very performance-driven institution), or attempts by the Church hierarchy to promote itself in the public square and have its say in the intensive discussions about the involvement of religion in the European integration process; or, alternatively, we can see behind this endeavor a politically-motivated request by a Russian ruling elite looking for a set of concepts which they could use to counter the arguments of liberal human rights groups and which might eventually serve to prop up an updated version of a “national ideology”. And indeed, in the beginning the discussions on human rights were polemically targeted against liberal NGOs which according to Russian Church writers had unlawfully usurped the entire ideology and practice of human rights: instead, the Russian Church intended to propose its own alternative vision of human rights, with a different foundational approach and with different orientations and emphases. In the words of Father Vsevolod Chaplin, second-in-command in the Department of External Relations, human rights activity and discussion about rights “should cease to be a monopoly of humanist-liberal circles” (Svoboda 2004). In my view, however, it would be a mistake to reduce the whole thing to the outcome of immediate pragmatic causes. I see the main impetus coming from various Church ambitions rather than from requests on the part of the state. The teaching seems to have been formulated within the Department of External Relations, the main think-tank for most official ideological and theological endeavors within the Church. The Russian Church aspired to make new claims in the public sphere and to empower its public stature as a dominant religious institution claiming to possess moral authority. Using the language of “rights, freedom and dignity” would mean that these claims would gain public weight and resonance, enabling the Church to negotiate a stronger place in “global Modernity”. 2 It is very likely that the Russian Orthodox thinkers have been affected by the evolution of their main alter ego, that “significant other”, the Roman Catholic Church, and specifically by the tradition of social thought that began with the Second Vatican Council and the increasing public 2

There is much evidence in the writings of Patriarch Kirill and others of a clearly expressed will to interact with the secular and liberal world. An active participatory strategy is a crucial stance of Kirill’s party within the Russian Church, as reflected not only in the text of the “Bases of the Social Concept”, where the world-renouncing position is polemically and consistently rejected (Osnovy 2001: I and passim), but in the very fact that the documents of 2000 and 2008 were produced at all. Not only is classical world renouncement rejected as a strategy, but the very secular principle of private, or privatized, religion is criticized. Instead, there is a strong desire to bring religion back to activity in public life (see Agadjanian 2003a).

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role of Roman Catholicism. More generally, this strategy for public empowerment on the part of religion has been a global trend widely recognized in academic research.3 Moreover, by choosing the topic of rights the Russian Orthodox authors have stepped into a wider and deeper social theory debate about the very foundations of “global Modernity”: the fate of cultural traditions; the bases of democracy and civil society; the debates on human nature and the human person; and the conflicts of values. The very idea of focusing on the issue of rights, in the most general terms, is an attempt by a religious tradition to challenge the dominant global secular discourse, the new semantic universe dominated by “rights talk” at least since the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. 4 This challenge has been similar to criticism initiated in earlier decades by socialist governments, by Islamic and Asian thinkers and politicians, by Western Marxists and post-modernist intellectuals. The Russian Orthodox challenge the discourse that they see as having emerged in Western European culture but pretending to be universal (Gundiaev 2006: 7; Bulekov 2006a: 16). This search for an alternative to “humanrightism” is but the most recent – and perhaps a somewhat belated – example from this list of cultural responses to Western secular liberalism. The issue of rights is not, indeed, just abstractly theoretical, but quite practical, and this practicality may be not only political but also religious. As Kirill stressed in his commentary at the 2008 Bishops’ Council when introducing the document, human rights discourse has acquired a soteriological significance. Why is this so? Because some of the rights, which contradict the Gospels and Christian morality, are being established as legal norms in some countries; these supposedly anti-Christian norms are imposed upon believers, who are citizens and must comply with changing legislation; therefore the believers’ salvation prospect is directly threatened. This point, simple as it is, is in fact a tangle of pragmatic and ultimate concerns, a crystalclear concentration of the entire complexity of the debate: the status of the Church in society, the tension of symbolic universes, the conflict of values, and the claim of cultures within the global world. In addition to pragmatic and soteriological contexts, Russian Orthodox teaching on human rights also has a theoretical context. John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas are 3

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A common reference is to Casanova 1994, but there have been a number of other studies registering this trend, including early reactions to Muslim revival, such as Kepel 1994, debates around desecularization (Berger 1999), debates around deprivatization (Beyer 1994), and even the idea of clashes of religiously-defined civilizations (Huntington 1996). Compare with Elie Wiesel’s definition of human rights as a “world-wide secular religion” (Wiesel 1999: 3), and Michael Ignatieff’s as “the lingua franca of global moral thought” (Ignatieff 2001: 320).

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two social thinkers who have struggled in their writings with a question crucial to this article: how can a number of fundamentally different visions of human nature, often involving mutually exclusive existential strategies and cultural values, coexist and negotiate in a given society? These two authors touch, among other issues, on the question of how religious values can be integrated in liberal pluralistic democracy. This article will assess how the Russian Orthodox intellectual challenge suits these two theoretical models. “Dignity”, “Freedom” and “Human Rights”: Their Christian Origin? The Orthodox teaching, which is the subject of this article, is based on three key concepts: dignity, freedom and human rights. In their approach the Russian Church thinkers have assessed these concepts using one major criterion: their compatibility, or affinity, with the Christian symbolic and doctrinal framework. Are they a part of the Christian legacy; or do they at least have Christian roots? In the 2008 document (Osnovy 2008) it is clearly stated that dignity and freedom are certainly connected with, and derived from, Christian doctrine, but that later, under non-Christian influences, the original Christian meaning in these concepts has been profaned and therefore distorted. As for the concept of human rights as such, this has no direct Christian origin, for it is found neither in the Scriptures nor in Church Tradition. The idea of human rights is thus based not on Christian, but on already modified and distorted notions of dignity and freedom. 5 Let us consider more closely the interpretation of the key notions of “dignity” and “freedom” – because it is here, over these notions, that “the conflict of interpretations reveals the conflict of worldviews and anthropologies” (Kyrlezhev 2006: 33). The 2008 document emphasizes that it is operating with the Eastern Christian meaning of “dignity” (Osnovy 2008: I.2), which is related to God’s creative act, to God’s image and likeness, which was then damaged but not erased by the Fall. Through 5

In some of his earlier pronouncements Kirill was more positive towards the concept of human rights, saying that the concept of human rights and individual liberties had “a spark of Divine truth” (Gundiaev 1999b); later he even called the concept of human rights “one of the most powerful, positive ideas of the modern world” (Gundiaev 2005). I think that Kirill’s ideas reflect the fundamental ambivalence which I describe later. He swings from more positive to more negative assessments of human rights and back, partly because he is predominantly a pragmatic political rather than a theological thinker. I would say that the overall trend has been towards a more negative view, in line with the evolution of the Russian political context to a more nationalist and anti-Western position, and along with the parallel evolution of the Russian Church’s self-affirmation as the national institution par excellence.

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theosis (deification) the adept seeks to discover the Divine image in himself or herself. The notion of dignity is thus moral (nravstvennoe); it always remains within this moral scale and is not morally neutral. Theosis means restoring the primordial image that existed before the Fall, and therefore the notion of dignity cannot apply to anything that is related to sin in the Christian sense. Freedom is the second important category, and a correct understanding of it relies upon the distinction between two kinds of freedom. Freedom which can be understood as a value for its own sake – the “neutral” freedom of choice – cannot be accepted as a Christian category. Freedom as a Christian value is precisely freedom from sin, not freedom to choose either virtue or sin: it is thus not the freedom to be sinful. The text of the 2008 document introduces two Greek terms used in the Eastern Orthodox tradition to distinguish two kinds of freedom: autexousion (freedom of choice in a neutral sense) and eleutheria (freedom in the true Christian sense, freedom from sin, which is related to dignity in the sense described above) (Osnovy 2008: II.1).6 The 2008 document then moves on to the concept of human rights. This concept cannot be a dominant cultural paradigm, for it has no direct Christian roots. Rights cannot be higher than the spiritual goals set in Christian teaching (Osnovy 2008: III.2). The moral scale, accordingly, is higher than the law; Divine truth is higher than all human laws, establishments and institutions, within which “human rights” are exclusively conceived. Therefore, for example, says the document, there can be no justification for offences against the feelings of believers by reference to freedoms

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This understanding of freedom is in line with discussions found in earlier publications on the subject, which are in fact at times much harsher in their critique of the “liberal ethos” and, specifically, of the liberal meanings of dignity and freedom. The liberal ethos is called, for example, a “universal non-spiritual culture grounded upon fallen man’s unlimited freedom which is conceived as the absolute value and the measure of truth” (Osnovy 2001: XVI.3). Liberalism, writes Kirill, places “fallen man”, who “abides in sin”, at the center of the “anthropocentric universe” (Gundiaev 1999). This “unlimited freedom” is in fact the “emancipation of the sinful individual, and therefore the release of the sinful potential of the human person. The free person can reject anything that binds him, everything that prevents him from the affirmation of his sinful self” (Gundiaev 2000). Freedom in this case equals “freedom of sin”, “self-will” (svoevolie); the human self becomes an autonomous subject of individual rights divorced from reference to the Divine (Osnovy 2001: IV.7). Liberalism is an emancipation of the human being from the Divine image (Nikiforov and Markish 2004). According to Nataliia Narochnitskaia, liberalism’s last and now dominant “stage of degeneration” is libertarianism, a manifestation of apostasy (Svoboda 2004). Igor’ Shafarevich says that this extreme liberalism/libertarianism goes as far as negating the reproduction of life through its acceptance of the rights to abortion, homosexual union and euthanasia (Svoboda 2004).

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of speech, creativity or expression.7 Other examples of unacceptable “rights norms” that contradict Divine truth and Christian morality are those that “support sins” like sexual license and perversions, the cult of profit and violence (kul’t nazhivy i nasiliia), abortion, euthanasia, the use of human embryos in medicine and experiments changing human nature (Osnovy 2008: III.3). It seems that the concept of rights has no Christian basis. It claims to be related to the notions of dignity and freedom – but which dignity and which freedom? It seems to be incompatible with the Christian meanings of these two key concepts and to be related only to their neutral, de-Christianized versions. How then is any religious version of rights possible? Harmonizing Human Rights with Christianity? “Recognized” Rights and Their Interpretation What happens next is that, in spite of such a clear opposition – Christian Orthodox values versus secular human rights values – the document’s next step is to try to harmonize them! The intention of “harmonization” is in itself emblematic: the very term “to harmonize” (garmonizirovat’) has been crucial from early publications on the subject. The strategy of “harmonizing” seems to have been prevailing over the past decade and was officially integrated into the 2008 document (Osnovy 2008: III.1).8 Opinion on this question has never been unanimous, however: there have been disagreements concerning the degree of compatibility of these two sets of values. Some have simply denied any affinity, any synthesis, or, indeed, any connection between liberalism and Christianity. 9 The “Bases of the Social Concept” of 2000, as an 7

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Here certainly we can sense an allusion to the scandal caused in Russia by anti-religious works of art, in Russian versions of cases which in other parts of the world related mostly to blasphemy against Islam. On the most celebrated case, the “Danger: Religion!” art exhibition, see Agadjanian 2006. Patriarch Kirill himself has said, quite radically, that the presumptions about freedom as “both the goal and means of human existence” and about the “absolute value of the human person” are common to liberalism and Christianity (Gundiaev 2000b). Andrei Kurayev has stressed the Christian origins of the freedom of religion (freedom of conscience), which is the source of all other individual freedoms (Svoboda 2004). Duma deputy Sergei Popov has pointed out that the liberal “harm principle” (freedom may be limited only by another’s freedom) is simply a form of the “golden rule” of Christian ethics, and that the ideas of democracy and pluralism come from the same source (Svoboda 2004). Some prefer to see liberalism and Christianity as “two opposed religions”, with the “religion” of liberalism aggressively targeted against Christianity (Shafarevich and Osipov at the 2004

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official text, is restrained and cautious about the possibility of “combining” the liberal and the Christian Orthodox ethos. All this having been said, the final verdict, as expressed in the 2008 document, is that some kind of harmonization could and should be found. How, then, is this to be done? The answer is as follows: there should be, first, a differentiation within the scope of human rights between those that are admissible and those that are not; and second, there should be an established hierarchy wherein human rights are subordinate to the higher, Christian values. The condition for rights to be recognized is that they “do not contradict the divinely instituted moral norms and the traditional morality based on these norms”. And the 2008 document continues: Individual human rights cannot be opposed to the values and interests of the Fatherland, the community and the family. The realization of human rights cannot serve to justify offence against sacred objects (sviatyni), cultural values and the people’s identity (samobytnost’). (Osnovy 2008: III.5)

This citation highlights another theme: the individual nature of rights in the liberal understanding. The limits of acceptability of rights into the Christian value system are, therefore, of two kinds: a) they can be accepted only when they are based upon Christian (rather than “distorted”) notions of dignity and freedom; and b) they can be accepted only when they are not reduced to the rights of an individual. Nevertheless, the 2008 document recognizes some rights in principle in Christian terms; and overall the document assigns to rights a preparatory, auxiliary function, praising their “possible role in the creation of favorable outward conditions for the enhancement of the person on his or her path to salvation” (Osnovy 2008: IV.1). Recognizing a few rights as valid and legitimate in Christian terms, the 2008 document provides interpretations for them; and the interpretations are, indeed, the most important thing here. Let us overview these recognized rights as they are listed in the document. The right to life comes first (Osnovy 2008: IV.2). Life starts at the moment of conception; therefore abortion is murder. On the other hand, the death penalty is not round table: Svoboda 2004): if liberalism is an apostasy, a deviation, there can be no way for Christians to negotiate with it. It is interesting that Kirill has sharply criticized this type of nihilism: defending “harmonization”, he said: “…some forces propose rejecting the concept of human rights and declaring it the biggest foe of the traditional Christian consciousness. The millennial Church tradition, however, suggests that we deal differently with various systems of views that contain some sound thoughts close to Christian ideas. The Church’s principle has always been a careful collecting of the smallest grains of truth scattered within the human experience of learning” (Gundiaev 2005). Yet in spite of his “harmonization” strategy, Kirill himself has at times been very ambivalent, agreeing that liberalism reflects an apostasy that goes back to three sources: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and late medieval Jewish philosophy (Gundiaev 1999b, restated in Gundiaev 2004).

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rejected in principle, because, says the document, such a rejection is not confirmed by the Scriptures; rather than rejecting the death penalty, the Church should provide generous support and solicit mercy for the convicted. Overall, it is stated that the earthly life of the individual is not an end in itself; and in fact there are “heavenly values” or the “values of one’s Fatherland” that may be higher “for Orthodox Christians” (dlia pravoslavnykh khristian) than the value of an individual life. 10 Freedom of conscience comes next (Osnovy 2008: IV.3), and the document reveals a very mixed attitude toward this notion (previous Church statements, including the “Bases of the Social Concept” of 2000, showed similar ambiguity). On the one hand, it is recognized that this freedom can be in line with the Divine will if it offers protection from arbitrary interference in the inner life of an individual; this freedom also helps the Church to preserve its independence from a secular state and within a secular society. However, the legal principle of the freedom of conscience as such is a witness to apostasy, and the Church cannot approve neutrality, relativity and the notion of the equal truth of all faiths. Freedom of expression (Osnovy 2008: IV.4) is also recognized as very important; however, the emphasis in the document is not on the right to pursue this freedom, but rather on the responsibility of an individual for his or her speech. Particularly, any freedom of speech is rejected if the spoken word may spread sin or instigate strife in society, and especially if they offend national and religious feelings. Freedom of artistic creativity (Osnovy 2008: IV.5) is subject to the same limits: artistic expression may not offend other people or promote cultural nihilism, or, in particular, involve sacrilege towards the holy symbols and objects of a religion. The right to education (Osnovy 2008: IV.6) means not only acquiring knowledge, but also the right to be brought up in line with the Creator’s design; education should correspond to the cultural tradition of a nation, and the believer must have the right to receive “knowledge about the religion that shaped the culture he lives in”. Civil and political rights – the core rights in Western “rights talk” – come next (Osnovy 2008: IV.7). In its opening paragraph the document does recognize the importance of civil and political rights. Then, however, it delves into the issue of the common good, which it values more highly than egoistic individual goals; it refers to the Russian Orthodox tradition of togetherness (sobornost’) which puts clear limits to the realization of civil and political rights: within the sobornost’ paradigm it is unity rather than strife in society which is crucial, and within this paradigm a good tradition has evolved of cooperation (sorabotnichestvo) between state and society “in the regions served (okormliaemykh) by the Russian Orthodox Church”; and although 10 This passage, with its failure to oppose the death penalty directly and to recognize the supreme value of life was sharply criticized by many commentators on the document.

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the danger of total unmotivated control over the individual may threaten the dignity of the person, in some situations, for the sake of the common good, some degree of such control can be required and accepted. Overall, in this section the central set of rights – rights which challenge state and society and which vindicate individual selfhood – are strongly limited, and the emphasis is placed on reconciliation rather than opposition, on unity rather than dispute, on cooperation with the state rather than the individual’s confrontation with the state.11 Socioeconomic rights come next (Osnovy 2008: IV.8). The document stresses the legitimacy of property rights, the right to work, the right to protection for employees, the right to free entrepreneurship and the right to a decent quality of life. The stipulation for the legitimacy of these rights is however that they retain their “moral dimension”: they are subordinate to religious goals. The crucial aim of these rights is “to prevent confrontation and disparity” in society. Collective rights (Osnovy 2008: IV.9) are discussed separately and are opposed to individual rights. Overall in the document there is an attempt to create a balance between individual and collective values, but the very fact of the introduction of this special paragraph implies an emphasis critically directed against the individual focus of Western rights. The critique of individualism has been central to the discussions from the very start, although the text of the document avoids any sharp polemics on this issue. Family rights seem to be the main form of collective rights; but then a few others follow, including, symptomatically, the right of a collectivity to “preserve its cultural legacy and inner norms regulating the life of various communities”, which is an obvious allusion to the protection of collective rights of religious communities. The document then goes on to outline the practical principles of human rights advocacy in Orthodox terms. Again we see a move away from classical Western “rights talk” (involving a clear juxtaposition of individual freedom to arbitrary power) to an entirely different approach. Some of the phraseology sounds implicitly polemical towards the Western approach: …in the contemporary world human rights are violated, and human dignity trampled on, not only by state authorities, but also by transnational corporations, economic organizations, pseudo-religious, terrorist and other criminal communities. (Osnovy 2008: V.2)

There follows a list of particular activities that the Russian Church would support. Religious freedom (in the particular understanding described above) comes first, and opposing crimes related to religion and nationality comes second. Only then comes the “classical” protection of individual rights against authority. Then follows a longer 11 Here we may compare earlier direct criticism of democratic competitiveness by Father Vsevolod Chaplin and Metropolitan Kirill: see Chaplin 2005; Gundiaev 2005.

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list of tasks: protecting the victims of conflicts and soldiers during their military service; and some other emblematic points, such as protection for the victims of “destructive sects” and “protection of right of nations and ethnic groups to preserve their religion, language and culture” (Osnovy 2008: V.3). The document ends with a statement showing that the main objective of Orthodox Christians, while respecting the opinions of other social groups, is …to retain the right to participate in society in such a way that would not contradict their faith and moral principles. The Russian Orthodox Church is ready to promote these same principles in dialogue with the world community and in cooperation with other faithful of the traditional confessions and religions. (Osnovy 2008: V.4) 12

Source of Ambivalence: The Dual Identity of the Russian Orthodox Church One important conclusion that we can draw from an analysis of the Russian Orthodox vision of human rights is that the whole project, as can clearly be seen in the 2008 document, has an ambivalent, protean intent: the whole project is oriented both inwardly and outwardly. On the one hand, it seems to be deeply inward-oriented. Its major objective is to create a clear frame of reference for believers – Church members, clergy and congregations – and to offer some guidelines on how to deal with “rights” and how to use this legal and ideological instrument with the purpose of protecting the rights of the Church and its members, and, on a wider scale, “to retain the right to participate in society” (Osnovy 2008: V.4). This inward orientation seems to be prevalent. It is expressed overtly in the resolution of the Bishops’ Council, which recommends that the document be used for reference in legal cases and that it be studied in seminaries. However, even more important are some ideas to be found in the text itself. The document sees intrusion into the right to believe and the right to perform religious rituals as a major violation of human rights. It warns about “interference in the inner life of believers”; it fights against the imposition of alien norms and moralities that contradict religious ones; it reiterates the threat to the integrity of religious and cultural traditions and makes the protection thereof a major human rights activity; it singles out offences against religious beliefs, religious feelings and the desecration 12 “Traditional” in this case refers to the semi-official classification used in Russian public discourse: “confessions” in this context include Christian denominations and some non-Christian faiths. I will not speculate here as to which confessions and religions the document might intend to be included in this case. There is an extensive literature on the notion of “traditional religion” and its implications for legal, political and inter-religious practices.

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of holy objects. Finally and most importantly, as we have seen, the soteriological significance of the project is central, because the ubiquity of the idea of rights and corresponding legal norms directly conflicts with some foundational Christian strategies aimed at salvation. All this shows that the document is addressed, first of all, to believers, and not to all the rest who do not have to face this crucial conflict in their life strategy. Although we can find references to wider notions of rights and a wider scope of application of rights, there is an unmistakable penchant in the document to create a meaningful modus vivendi for Christian Orthodox, a regime of coordination between Christian Orthodox values and the human rights discourse. On the other hand, as I say, the text is outward-orientated, for it contains the claim of the Russian Church not only “to retain the right to participate in society” but to be publicly present and visible, to play a leading social role and to acquire political and moral weight; it contains various declarations addressed to the wider national and global public. The Russian Church, sociologically (I am not here considering theological definitions of the “Church”), is a huge institution, with a large number of corporate “employees” (not only clergy, but all believers, however loose a term that may be). As an institution it therefore has its own particular “corporate interests”. This institution – we might even say this nationwide or, indeed, transnational corporation – has the right and the will not only to claim special treatment, but also to declare and assert its own vision and interests in the public square. 13 This internal ambivalence between the outward and the inward orientations of the project clearly reflects an ambiguity in the very identity and self-positioning of the Russian Church. On the one hand, the project seems to be rather modest and particularistic: not trying to create a predominant alternative vision of rights but rather trying to negotiate a place for the community of Russian Orthodox believers as a minority within the new secular universe, both national and global. This means self-positioning as an institutional, social and moral enclave, where the human rights rhetoric is used to create and protect its own niche, its own modest space within the global multicultural universe. The liberal human rights discourse is mostly seen as the legal environment favorable to protecting the religious rights of the community of Orthodox believers (along with other similar communities). On the other hand, however, there is another motive, which is less straightforward, is not promoted aggressively, but is obviously expressed in many ways. The authors of the 2008 document clearly want to remind state and society that the Russian Church has been a 13 Moreover, the Russian Church not only seeks to assert these “corporate interests”, but also is able to do so, for it is supported by some political elites, increasingly so since the early 2000s, with the rise of the Putin regime: the latter is actively seeking foundational national buildingblocks, powerful symbolic references affirming the continuity of the Russian tradition, and therefore Orthodoxy becomes a part of the political culture consensus.

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“formative factor” for the Russian cultural ethos; therefore Christian anthropology, the Christian vision of dignity and freedom, the Christian version of rights, must define – at least to a certain degree – the public discourse on values and morality. This reminder has a totally different tenor: it is not the protective position of a minority, but rather the claim to represent, as a dominant religious and moral force, the majority – be it implicit, latent, only potential – but still the majority of the Russian people. Hence the staunch refusal to accept the legal norm of religious freedom, this “sign of apostasy”; hence also the appeal to the state not to adopt a position of neutrality to all religions as equals. The Russian Church thus claims not just the protection due to a minority enclave but also religious, moral and cultural hegemony. Here are the roots of ambivalence: self-positioning as an “enclave minority” in one sense and as a “moral majority” in another. If Russian Orthodoxy is a minority faith, its approach to human rights represents a typically protective reaction against liberal tradition, with distinct overtones of an anti-Western, post-colonial reaction to the dominant language of human rights – a language that claims to be global and universal. To this global secular “monoculture” promoted by the West the Russian Church responds with a protective celebration of a parochial, particular tradition, a “cultural reservation”, within which “rights” are conceived to be different and the Western variety only partly applicable. Conversely, if Russian Orthodoxy claims to be a majority (in Russia, or among Russians worldwide), a “dominant moral force” (and, perhaps, globally, in alliance with all other “traditional” religions that are opposed to secular globalization), its engagement with the issue of human rights means a more determined and ambitious challenge to Western “rights talk”. In my view, these two positions are variable in their predominance, depending on the context – global or domestic – and the audience the Russian Church is addressing. In both positions, however – that of “self-protecting minority” and of “moral majority” – there is one common central issue: negotiating the normative space for religion in a diverse and mostly secular society. This is where some theoretical reflections can be introduced. Christian Orthodox Discourse on Rights in the Framework of the Theories of Democracy of Rawls and Habermas Let us now place this human rights debate in the framework of two well-known theoretical perspectives on modern democracy: those of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas.

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Rawls According to Rawls, a stable society can be secured only by “an overlapping consensus on a reasonable political conception of justice” (Rawls 1987; Rawls 2001: 184–8 and 192–5). This consensus, however, as Rawls specifies, “cannot rest on a shared conception of the meaning, value and purpose of human life” (Rawls 1987: 2). All “comprehensive doctrines” related to such ultimate meanings (that is, religions, philosophies or ideologies) should therefore be avoided in shaping the “conception of justice” in question, although democratic pluralism gives all these conceptions the right to exist and to participate in the creation of such a consensus. All “comprehensive doctrines” should find a space where they agree on some basic principles of justice which can be shared with other doctrines, while each of them should keep aside those ideas that relate to the ultimate meaning and thus are incompatible with other doctrines. In particular, Rawls refers to the idea of salvation: as each religion holds its own idea of salvation as uniquely true, it contradicts the principle of freedom of conscience, which is a part of the Rawlsian consensus (Rawls 2001: 14). In Rawls’ theory of democracy citizens and social groups are supposed, in the spirit of cooperation, to try to create a common space of shared values of justice; religions may participate in the “overlapping consensus” – but only in such a way that would exclude (put in brackets) “ultimate meanings”. The Russian Orthodox concept of rights demonstrates some procedures that would be compatible with Rawls’ strategy. For example, the texts we have been studying are trying to “transplant” some concepts (“dignity”, “freedom”) from one cultural context to another (or to “translate” them from one cultural language to another); in doing so, they need to make them intelligible to the secular ear. How can they achieve this? One possible way would be an elaborate intermediary reflection on “natural law” or “natural morality”. The authors of the texts under study often refer to “morality” (moral’ or nravstvennost’) as an essential dimension of the vision of man – the dimension that makes this vision truly Christian. Only such a “moral dimension” gives a Christian resonance to “dignity” and makes “freedom” a truly Christian category (by making “neutral” freedom of choice dependent on “moral” freedom in God). Only this “moral dimension” makes human rights compatible with Christianity. “Morality” thus serves as a linguistic tool to translate religious meanings into secular language. 14 By making a reduction of this kind, we could suppose, the text would “put in brackets” the ultimate values of Christianity and delineate a certain part of the Orthodox tradition that could become part of an “overlapping consensus”. 14 This idea about moral vocabulary as a “translation tool” was shaped in conversation with Aleksandr Kyrlezhev.

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What is incompatible with Rawls’ strategy, however, is the fact that the soteriological issue, the issue of salvation, which Rawls suggests must definitely be withdrawn from the consensual discussion, stands as an ultimate anchor of all reasoning. In many places the moral discourse is “upgraded” to the purely religious discourse of “spirituality” (dukhovnost’); as is clearly stated, “human rights cannot be higher than the values of the spiritual world” and the “Divine truth” is definitely higher than all human institutions (Osnovy 2008: III.2). The Orthodox teaching is certainly a two-storey building where the upper (divine) storey is the ultimate source of truth. The lower, human, storey of this building is a spiritually and morally neutral space which is devoid of cultural roots and cannot of itself produce any sustainable meaning system (such as, for example, a system of human rights). And on this last point there is an even more important incompatibility with the Rawlsian strategy, for, according to Rawls the “reasonable political conception of justice” is not, as he constantly repeats, a mere temporary, value-free modus vivendi, and it does not profess moral indifference and skepticism, for the very goals of this “conception of justice” (such as cooperation, fairness, stability) are deeply moral and based upon the “very great virtues” (Rawls 2001: passim). In a similar way, speaking specifically about human rights, Michael Ignatieff emphasizes that this concept is not value-neutral but has emerged as a strongly value-motivated response to inhuman developments in Western culture (from the Westphalian system of nation-states to twentieth-century totalitarianism) (Ignatieff 2001). Why do Russian Orthodox thinkers find no virtue, no moral depth and no roots in the idea of “rights”, whereas Rawls and Ignatieff do? The reason is that they reject the individual focus of reasoning. For Rawls the “full autonomy of democratic citizens” is an essential prerequisite of the political conception of justice (Rawls 2001: 15); his approach, as he presents it, is liberal, and his liberalism is by default based on individual subjectivity. 15 In the same way, for Ignatieff the human rights discourse is based on moral individualism; its main reference point and agent is the human subject whose moral choice may be informed by the cultural heritage but is expressed as a conscious, autonomous decision. Given the post-war context of the emergence of rights talk, this individualism is clearly a strong reaction against the horrors of Western collectivism and the idolatry of nation-states: “an attempt to reinvent the European natural law tradition in order to safeguard individual agency against the totalitarian state” (Ignatieff 2001: 329). 15 Even though, remarkably, he distances himself from the liberalisms of Kant and John Stuart Mill, because, according to Rawls, both these thinkers advanced “the comprehensive doctrines” with ultimate truth claims, which are to be avoided, as are religions, in building an “overlapping consensus”.

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By contrast, the Russian Orthodox teaching on rights is based on a culturalist rather than an individualist vision of subjectivity. According to this vision the enduring, substantial, true values stem from the cultural whole, the religious-cum-national tradition. This teaching extols pluralism of cultures and the liberal regime that allows this. At first sight, this pluralism is similar to the pluralism of comprehensive doctrines, which is Rawls’ point of departure. However, the ultimate watershed here is the place of the individual. The vision of rights remains culture-centered. 16 This emphasis on cultural tradition makes the strategy of the Orthodox thinkers relativist in the sense that they envisage a multicultural mosaic of equally autonomous religious traditions, although this celebration of global multiculturalism contradicts the Russian Church’s claim to cultural dominance within the Russian cultural space. Rawls (and Habermas, as we shall see) is trying to find a consensus based on a moderate communitarian quest, the main subject of which is the individual, not a particular culture. The Russian Orthodox critique of the extremes of secular liberalism and individualism may be valid: it not my task to develop this topic further here. What is certain is that in the Russian Orthodox discourse human rights, divorced from their individual underpinning, are thematized in a way very different from the way they are thematized in leading Western communitarian social theories. Habermas As we have seen, in its vision of human rights and the human person expounded in the official 2008 document the Russian Church tries to circumscribe firmly its own special institutional space and its interests, asserting the specific rights of Orthodox clergy and believers: the right to hold and observe Orthodox values in a world which is said to be dominated by the “secular liberal ethos”. At a more abstract level, this effort can be interpreted as an act of an ongoing communication between the secular and the religious cultural languages. We can frame the whole issue, using basic Habermasian concepts such as “public sphere” and “communicative action”. First, we have here the post-Enlightenment public sphere, Öffentlichkeit, dominated by the language of secular, legal and liberal democracy, of which one of the key elements is the discourse of rights. Second, we witness an attempt to introduce into this public sphere a particular system of values 16 See Filaret Bulekov’s strong defense of a culturalist reinterpretation of rights: “Whatever the adversaries of the so-called ʻcultural relativism’ would say, today the traditional concept of human rights should be correlated to the fact of cultural differences, their irreducibility to one legal denominator”. He further defends collective rights as cultural rights par excellence (Bulekov 2006a: 20f.).

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– Eastern Christian values – and to cause them to be heard and accepted as legitimate. The Russian Orthodox thinkers explicitly seek “harmonization” of these sets of cultural values. They take the first step forward, sketching a normative area where these two sets can be compatible (a certain meaningful space circumscribed by the notions of freedom, dignity and rights); they emphasize this compatibility. In a sense, this effort is exactly what Habermasian “communicative action” is supposed to be: actors in society seek to reach common understanding and to coordinate actions by reasoned argument, consensus and cooperation rather than acting strictly in pursuit of their own particularistic goals (Habermas 1984: 86). In engaging in this act of self-assertion, the authors of the Orthodox “human rights concept” cannot avoid drawing upon the constituent elements of the liberal secular ethos; they cannot avoid using the very language of rights. 17 Thus, ironically, and in a similar way to various other critics of the human rights idea from the West and other parts of the world, despite mounting the most virulent criticism, in the end the Orthodox critics, volens nolens, do accept and master this language of rights, the “rights talk”, in order to express their own tradition in terms of, and according to the rules of, the discourse they criticize. This is in line with what Robert Audi calls the “principle of secular justification” – the requirement to advocate religious ideas in secular terms and with secular reasons (Audi and Wolterstorff 1997). By accepting the “rights talk”, the religious writers inscribe themselves into the semantic universe they initially reject. More than this: actually, they use the essential constitutive liberal principle of rights to claim their own right to self-assertion; they use, so to speak, the language of rights to assert the right for a particular place, the right of a minority, the right to communicate as an equal partner and to offer their own system of values to the public debate. 18 They become – and they want to become – a part of the semantic universe even though they criticize and reject its foundations. I see in the whole project this paradoxical “acceptance-through-refusal”. But do the Orthodox thinkers expect any response from the secular liberals, who might be willing to adjust their own views accordingly? Hardly so: the movement of “harmonization” seems to be one-sided. In this sense, the situation once again fits the rules 17 Note for example the Russian language of the 2008 document and other similar texts: in its vocabulary and phraseology it is a modern, secular Russian language, only occasionally including traditional Orthodox terms and expressions; it is totally different from the standard language of contemporary theological, moral, hagiographical and pastoral texts, which are replete with Slavonic and old Russian elements referring to Biblical and liturgical traditions. 18 So for example Kirill: “Of course, as an Eastern Orthodox bishop, I would be very happy if the whole world were to become Orthodox! But today people should be given the right to live according to their own values … each civilizational paradigm and each model may coexist with others” (Gundiaev 2004).

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set by Habermas for secular-religious dialogue: according to Habermas, the secular language remains the universal environment, while religions are supposed to adjust themselves to it (not the other way round). Habermas (in line with Audi) believes that religious concepts should be translated into secular language without losing, presumably, the depth of their meaning.19 The “enlightened democratic mind”, in turn, should keep a communicative bridge with religious traditions, because democracy should “deal carefully with all the cultural sources that nourish its citizens’ consciousness of norms and their solidarity” (Habermas 1984: 46). It seems that the entire endeavor of the Orthodox concept of rights fits well into the Habermasian perspective. This is even more so in the light of the recent evolution of Habermas’ views (since 2000) towards a “self-criticism of the Enlightenment”, meaning the necessary recognition of religious world views within the liberal political culture and by the public reason, toward a “post-secular reason” (see Habermas 2002; Habermas and Ratzinger 2005; Habermas 2005a; Habermas 2005b). 20 In view of this recent evolution the entire theory of communicative action provides new opportunities for the engagement of religious world views in the space of “public reason”. Habermas rejects the anti-religious stance of “scientistic naturalism”. He also criticizes the excesses of liberal individualism and points out the crisis of solidarity, which stimulates the search for other “cultural resources that nourish democracy”. 21 The Russian Orthodox authors’ vision similarly stems from the critique of “aggressive”, extreme liberalism and individualism. However, at this very point there is an important distinction to be made: the Orthodox concept of rights is a long way from endorsing a moderate communitarianism of the kind which underlies the concern of Habermas (and others) about the lack of solidarity in liberal democratic society. The Orthodox teaching rejects the individually-based premises of human rights and of the democratic society. It seems to reject

19 Habermas warns about the difficulties involved in translating concepts from religious to secular language: he writes, for example, that when the idea that human beings were created “in the image of God” is rendered through the notion of “human dignity”, there is a risk of losing the original connotation of man having been created. Nevertheless, he concludes optimistically, “the core of its semantic content need not be lost” (Habermas 2009a). 20 In all these articles and speeches Habermas develops a new positive approach towards the legacy of religions. He has been strongly criticized for this new position as being blatantly contradictory to his own previous view that in liberal democracy all “comprehensive doctrines” (such as world religions) must be excluded from the democratic consensus. See criticism in Flores D’Arcais 2007, and Habermas’ response to this (2009a). 21 See similar discussion on the excesses of individualism in Putnam 2000, and in a special issue of The Hedgehog Review (Globalization and Religion 2002). See also Bellah 2002 and Etzioni 2002.

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not only the excesses of individualism, but altogether the very notion of the autonomous individual as the holder of inalienable rights.22 We therefore need to bring more precision to my thesis about how the Orthodox teaching makes use of liberal principles. The Russian Orthodox authors clearly draw upon one particular modus of liberal democracy – multiculturalism. Here is how the logic unfolds. Liberal democracy has created a regime that supports the claims of cultures. In the documents we have been studying the Russian Orthodox Church is presented as a culture, a cultural community. Hence the prominent role of national values, the right to hold them and the right to protect them; the nationalist vocabulary goes hand in hand with the religious vocabulary, “national rights” are thought as the ultimate manifestation of group, or collective, rights. (Predictably, the nationalist rhetoric is connected with an appeal to a strong national state23.) The entire social philosophy on which recent Orthodox documents are based is particularistic culturalism (in many ways akin to the essentialist philosophy of “civilizations”). Using the liberal regime of multiculturalism, the Orthodox thinkers, in the final analysis, seek not so much a part in an inclusive consensus but the right to remain a different community and to be accepted as such in the dominant normative and semantic order. These ways of thinking are clearly incompatible with Habermas’ concept of the communicative regime as the medium for negotiating values in pluralist democracies. Even given the recent “religion-friendly” tendencies in his thought, Habermas would clearly never support any claim by a Church for primacy of spiritual authority linked to cultural/national identity.

22 As I have noted above, in comparison to some of the previous texts I have studied the 2008 document tries to soften the opposition between individual and collective rights. They are said to be interrelated. I think that the Russian Church cannot deny the individual, personalistic aspect of the theological language of dignity and freedom, and the recognition of this language is by itself remarkable. Yet undeniably the authors’ goal is to address, first of all, the community; in the final analysis collective or group values certainly dominate. 23 In an earlier text Father Vsevolod Chaplin, who has been active in the discussion on human rights, put forward a much more radical idea of an “organic” symphonia between Church, Nation and State, “the ideal of a people-organism (narod-organizm), the whole conciliar body (sobornoe telo)”, whose differentiation into individual actors, involved in competition, is undesirable and should be rejected as a direct product of the “world damaged by sin” (“mir, povrezhdennyi grekhom”) (see Chaplin 2005 and 2007).

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Conclusion Let me briefly summarize the results of this study. The 2008 document on human rights promulgated by the Russian Orthodox Church is a quite new phenomenon in the history of Eastern Christianity: it is the first attempt at a direct, systematic, and deliberate negotiation between a traditional religious discourse and “rights talk”. This response to the challenge of the dominant secular worldview has a double objective. On the one hand, it circumscribes a spiritual and moral space – a cultural reserve – where the tradition can persist and resist the cosmopolitan, universalizing language of rights; and this space is defined with the help of discourse of nation and culture. To achieve this objective, the Russian Orthodox teaching rejects Western “rights talk”, but at the same time, ironically, it draws upon the same liberal idea of rights to promote the right of a culture to be autonomous within a multicultural, plural world. On the other hand, this response has its affirmative side: it attempts to encourage an active, meaningful engagement by the Russian Orthodox Church and Orthodox believers in this global order and to influence this order, to infuse traditional Christian values within the semantic universe dominated by liberal rights talk. In this way it goes beyond the protective negotiation and towards an active negotiation, which has as its vision the goal of changing the balance of values, first in a specific national space (that of the endemic Eastern Orthodox culture) and then globally (because major spiritual traditions allegedly dominate in other parts of the world). From the social theory perspective, the first, protective, modus of this communicative engagement between Christian Orthodoxy and liberal democracy would seem to be compatible with strategies (as described by Habermas and Rawls) to intertwine religious values within the framework of democracy and pluralism. The second, more active modus would, however, seem to be incompatible with the arrangements of this framework. Meanwhile on a deeper, substantive level, the main obstacle to any successful communication is the difference on one essential point: all theories of liberal democracy and of rights talk as such are focused on the individual; the Russian Orthodox teaching in principle rejects this focus.

9.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES IN RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY

(co-authored with Kathy Rousselet) Introduction: Russian Religiosity and Factors of Identity Formation This chapter explores the current trends within Russian Orthodoxy under one major angle: the formation of collective and individual identities and their interaction within and around the Church, and deals with both discursive and practical sides of the topic. It is based on an analysis of theological debates and recent fieldwork material; in particular, the practices related to the worship of the recently canonized Russian royal family will be a special case study integrated into this chapter.1 We would like to start by formulating a few key assumptions for this study. First, social reality cannot be reduced to certain types or forms that are either purely “collective” or purely “individual”, for there is a gamut of combinations when religion is practiced and perceived in both collective and individual ways, or when they transform each other. It is then more appropriate to speak of an “interaction”, of a hierarchy of identities, from most personalized and private to most general and public. It is exactly this interaction that we intend to study here. Second, we cannot accept the idea of a linear historical process of evolution from predominantly collective to predominantly individual forms, a sort of grand récit of inescapable individuation, for both patterns have always been necessary in the formation and maintenance of the social fabric. As Norbert Elias wrote, individuation is a universal process; “society not only typifies, but also individualizes”; there can be no zero level of individualization (Elias 1996); and thus we can find waves of individuation going back and forth according to changing social realities and cultural trends. 1

Fieldwork was conducted by Kathy Rousselet in Ekaterinburg in 2006 and 2007, centered on religious commemoration of the martyr death of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family; it was financed by the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques (Paris). Also, the authors have organized three conferences in Moscow in 2003, 2005 and 2006 on the general subject of “religious practices in Russia”; some papers originating from these conferences have been published in French, in a special issue of the Revue d’études comparatives est-ouest 36, no. 4 (2005), and then in Russian, as Agadjanian and Rousselet 2006. The conferences were not restricted to Eastern Christianity, which will be the primary focus of this text, but also covered Islam, Judaism, and new religious groups. For the anthropology of post-Soviet religiosity, see a special issue of Religion, State and Society 33, no. 1 (March 2005); especially the introductory paper by Douglas Rogers 2005; see also Kormina, Panchenko and Shtyrkov 2006.

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Third, rhetorical uses of “individualism” and “collectivism” are circumstantial and socially/culturally constructed, and each particular trend of, say, individuation, must be explained within a particular context. In this respect one can refer to Michael Herz-feld’s critique of the dogmatic concept of individualism as a core of the modern “Western ethos” and his analysis of the relativity of this concept (Herzfeld 2002); in the Russian Orthodox case, there may be found various types of individual identities that are quite different in their origin and nature, varying from old specific characteristics of Eastern Christian tradition to the impact of most recent trends of postsocialist disintegration, and even the trends of privatization and globalization of religiosity, typical to Western late modern religious landscape (Hervieu-Léger 1999; Beckford 2003) and now discernible in Russia after the post-Soviet opening. In all these cases “individualism” will have different meanings, and so will “religious community”. There are two sides in the post-socialist story of Russian Orthodoxy. On the one hand, the Church features an impressive restoration of a massive hierarchy, independent in the sense that it is not accountable to the state apparatus; the Church has regained a huge amount of real estate, renovated buildings, monastic and educational institutions, and is again welcome and visible as an almost official (in spite of the constitutional principle of secularity) component of the symbology of the state. The reconstruction of an imagined community of Russian Orthodoxy has been supported by a mass media narrative of “revival”. There is an impression of the revival of a massive, monolithic structure producing a spirit of a uniform collective body with a strong group identity tightly linked to national ideals and goals. On the other hand, behind the state-run, televized ceremonies and meticulously restored buildings is a Church that has undergone a real deregulation and is now characterized by thriving localism, small-group loyalties and individually focused beliefs and practices. This discrepancy of an official “monolithic” image and anthropological reality is by no means new, but it needs to be addressed, for in each particular case, including the current state of affairs, the combination is always unique. The diversity we observe produces a number of academic and meta-academic, political or ideological, stereotypes and controversies which refer to the very definition of what is the true Eastern Christian, or Russian Orthodox, tradition. What is the Church? What are the criteria of “churchliness” (votserkovlennost’ in Russian)?2 Elsewhere we have called these controversies “the competition for authenticity” within the tradition, which, in turn, produces various discourses over major sacred themes and objects (Agadjanian and Rousselet 2006). With respect to our particular subject here, multiple questions have risen among the believers over what are the 2

See the discussion of wider or narrower notions of “churchliness” in Chesnokova 2005.

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authentic forms of individual, family or small group ritual and social involvement, within the entire whole of the Church as a “collective body”. Basically, it is the issue of collective, shared “normative” values and the ways of their individual application, which operate not so much as “distortions” and “deviations” from the “norm”, but as spontaneous creativity of self-made norms and patterns of behavior, as normative and behavioral bricolage, described and conceptualized by Michel de Certeau (1994, I, 360 and passim); or we can follow Victor Turner’s description of culture as “an endless series of negotiations among actors about the assignment of meaning to the acts in which they jointly participate” (Turner 1985: 154). Consequently, of principal importance is also the issue of conflict of authority within the Church: which part of the full, true authority is vested in the Church as a whole, the hierarchy, a particular priest, a spiritual father, a starets (an “elder”), a non-priestly popular “traditionkeeper”, a group of pilgrims, a family, or a particular individual? To properly understand a particular national context that defines such diversity, we need to keep in mind the three cultural layers of the Russian religious landscape, – and therefore, of the competing discourses within religion and about religion – namely, to put them in a reverse chronological order: the post-Soviet (post-socialist) layer, the Soviet one, and the late imperial (pre-1917 Revolution) layer. The post-socialist period gave birth to a reified grand narrative of an “Orthodox Russia” linking religion to national identity and representing Russian Orthodoxy, as we have said, as a monolithic, well-ordered institution and ideology, perceived as a return to the pre-Revolutionary image and as “closing the parentheses of atheism”; at the same time, we can witness some new trends to a more selective, more individualized religiosity that have been, presumably, and at least partly the result of megatrends in Russia’s transition to market economy and a more pluralist, globalized culture. But we still need to assess the validity of this presumption. The Soviet period was strongly responsible for a discrepancy between the official grand narrative and the actual diversity. In the pre-war Soviet Union the institutional continuity was first severely disrupted, and religious traditions could only be transmitted through informal lines; even though later, since the 1940s, the institutions were partly restored, they remained under such governmental control that the real religious authority stayed outside the formal structures. The institutional atrophy of the Church was partly compensated by two streams: (1) a strongly anti-Soviet and other-worldly “catacomb” Orthodoxy, opposed to both the atheistic state and the “succumbed Church hierarchy” and considering itself the “true religion”, “pure Orthodoxy”; and (2) unofficial local resources of popular religiosity in the form of rural and urban networks emerging around old women or “elders”, some priests and intellectuals, extra-ecclesial sacred objects, and so forth (see, for example, Kononenko

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2006; Bezrogov 2006; Chepurnaia 2005; Panchenko 2005). Many social types of today’s religious identities come, then, from the Soviet past. Finally, many forms of group and individual religiosity may be explained through a logic that we can call genetic, referring to the longue durée of (Russian) Eastern Orthodox tradition hailing back to pre-Soviet, pre-Revolutionary Russia. This last point is something we believe to be deeply relevant and, at least, usually underrated. Since the early 1990s, historians of Russia have refocused their studies to what was called “lived religion”. They have criticized the scholarly perpetuation of a fixed image of what religion meant to Russia: “rigid, hierarchical structure; superficial conception of doctrine; and static, repetitive ritualism”. Instead, they have shown a diversity of collective and individual forms of worship and socialization both within and outside parish structure (Kivelson and Greene 2003: 4; see also Shevzov 2003 and 2004). This diversity actually reminds us of what we observe at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which leads us to assert that there are at least some fundamental features of Eastern Orthodoxy, which are embedded in the pre-Soviet “cultural layer”. Among these, we can refer to a relative looseness of ecclesiastic authority, the vibrance of small groups who are subjects of religious devotion, the significance of informal networks across and beyond the formal lines of the Church hierarchy, the vague boundaries of the notion of “churchliness” and of the status of being “churched” (votserkovlennyi), and a large latitude of the criteria for determining the orthodoxy of norms and rules We see, therefore, that in spite of the ruptures of the twentieth century, there was a certain continuity in patterns of institutional structure and forms of identity formation across all three of these cultural layers. To understand this complexity is a methodological challenge, but no analysis of trends can afford to overlook the legacy of the past. Understanding Person and Group in Russian Orthodox Discourse The tension between collective and individual religiosity in Russian Orthodoxy, first prominently raised in the mid-nineteenth century by the Slavophiles, has reappeared in totally new forms. One striking example is the debate around the concept and practice of human rights. This debate was initiated by the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church with the aim of finding an alternative to the “Western human rights” ideology. Over many years this debate acquired a wider scope and depth, touching upon the most profound discourses and meanings of religious and cultural

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tradition. 3 Much of the discussion has focused on the notion of the person and personhood, in opposition to the modern liberal concept of the individual. The Orthodox critique of the ideology of human rights alleges that to concentrate on the individual is to ignore the community, which is the bearer of common values and traditions. Therefore, if we talk about rights at all, group rights must be superior to individual rights. Secondly, for the Orthodox, when the individual’s rights, freedom and self-realization are considered the highest value, there is a danger of total anomie, a bellum omnium contra omnes, which is illustrated by the caricature “wild (rugged) individualism” picture of Western societies. Thirdly, as Western individuals are autonomous entities, they tend to be free from foundational meanings and norms, moral and divine; they are simply “mechanical atoms” whose freedom is only limited by the freedom of others. Fourthly and finally, although the human being is indeed central to the entire Christian tradition, a human being endowed with rights is not an individual who is “the measure of all things”, but a person, possessing personhood, whose dignity is not given as “natural and inalienable”, but bestowed by God through creation after His image and His likeness, as an ontological possibility, a potential, which may be fully realized only through communion with God. This polysemic word – communion – is central here, for the Eucharistic communion with God (prichastie) implies, in this Orthodox discourse, also communion in an ecclesiastical and wider social sense: “being part of” (prichastnost’). The ways through which the individual, as a person, is “included”, define the prescribed forms of religious identities that interest us here. This recent Russian debate confirms individualism as one of the main sins (or blessings) associated with Western Modernity. The themes are strikingly reminiscent of earlier anti-Western reactions in other cultures (Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, etc.), but also of critical streams within Western discourse, ranging from Marxism to PostModernism and highlighted in the sociological dichotomy of holistic and individualist societies in the Durkheimian tradition and beyond. The issue of individual versus corporate religiosity and the task of how to provide a religious, cultural legitimation of liberal Modernity have been widely addressed in modern Christian theology. We find a very profound rethinking of the individual in 3

The first reflections were found in the Social Concept adopted at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council in 2000 (Osnovy 2001); then in a few conceptual articles published in the late 1990s and in early 2000s; and finally in a series of discussions and pronouncements in the mid-2000s, of which the most interesting was a round table in August 2004 at the Moscow Danilov Monastery called “Freedom and Personal Dignity: Orthodox and Liberal Vision”; a Declaration on Human Rights and Dignity was approved by the World Russian People’s Council in April 2006; the debates went on into 2007 and a larger document on human rights was prepared in 2008 (Osnovy 2008; see also Agadjanian 2008).

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the works of such Catholic thinkers as Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) or John Courtney Murray (1904–1967). These people effected a personalistic reinterpretation of the Thomist theory of jus naturalis in such a way that in the Second Vatican Council and today’s Catholic teaching the individual person, bestowed with human dignity, has become one of the key notions. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, for many reasons that are beyond the scope of this chapter (see Kharkhordin 1998), either remained aloof from these debates or straightforwardly opposed them. Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948) (who influenced Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier) was one of the few exceptions in the emphasis he placed on individual freedom, as a direct link with the promised Kingdom of God, and in rejecting the eschatological significance of any collectivity (Berdiaev 1990: passim). Other Orthodox theologians sensitive to this personalistic shift included George Florovsky (1893–1979), who tried to formulate “catholicity” (sobornost’) as “concrete oneness”; Olivier Clément (1921–2009), Vladimir Lossky (1903–1959); and Florovsky’s leading disciple, John Zizioulas (b. 1931). These men are exceptions. The mainstream Orthodox tradition followed a different line. Both Orthodox and Catholic theologians considered the person to be a realization of the Divine potential. Yet the Catholic personalists emphasized the person as a concrete individual human being, placing this above social, communal forms and expressions of humanness. This emphasis was much weaker in Orthodoxy. Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–1860) had strong impact through advancing the idea of collective salvation: “We know that if any of us falls he falls alone; but no one is saved alone. He is saved in the Church, as a member of it, in the union with all other members” (Khomiakov 2005). It would be an exaggeration to assert that this radical soteriology of mystical collectivism is shared by the mainstream in the twentieth century. However, in clerical and lay perceptions, communion in a broad sense is indeed the main soteriological strategy; “people-organism” ideas are common, and individual differentiation and competition are undesirable (Chaplin 2005 and 2007; Anastasios 2003: 25ff.). This can be seen very clearly in the official document “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, which was adopted by the Church in the year 2000. This document addressed all kinds of social, moral, political, and publicly relevant issues for the first time in church history (Osnovy 2001). Reference was made for the first time to the “uniqueness of the person” (unikal’nost’ lichnosti) and “personal dignity” (dostoinstvo lichnosti), but the document was nonetheless quite clear in criticizing secular individualism and emphasizing the social and communitarian dimension of the Church’s mission (Agadjanian 2003a; Agadjanian and Rousselet 2005). As in the debate over human rights that we mentioned earlier, the individual

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is hardly articulated as a locus of morality or soteriology, and at times it is emphatically refuted. Forms of Collective Identities and Individual Religiosity in Russian Orthodox Practices of the 1990s–2000s: Worshipping the Royal Family In this section we set aside the theological debates and explore a striking example of contemporary religiosity – ceremonies commemorating the martyr death of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his family. The tsar, his wife, their five children, a servant and a family doctor were murdered by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg on the night of 16-17 July 1918. Twenty-four hours later in a suburb of Alapaevsk, the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna, her servant Varvara, and the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich and his personal secretary, as well as four Princes of the Romanov dynasty, were also executed.4 Whereas Elizaveta Fedorovna and Varvara were in 1992 among the first “new martyrs” (novomucheniki) to be canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, Nicholas II and the members of his family were canonized as passion-bearers (strastoterptsy) only at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council on 19 August 2000, on the feast of Transfiguration, after very long debates. Since that time, commemorative services are being held each year in Ekaterinburg, attracting thousands of local believers and pilgrims. The majority come from the region of Ural’sk, but many make their way from Moscow and St. Petersburg, from Ukraine and Kazakhstan. They attend the main night liturgy in the Church on Spilled Blood (Khram na Krovi) in Ekaterinburg, which was built in 2003 on the site of the actual murder (the original building, the Ipatiev House, was destroyed in 1977 when Boris Yeltsin, the future president of Russia, was First Secretary of the regional Party unit). Many pilgrims then participate early in the morning in the twenty-kilometer procession from the church to the Ganina Iama (“pit”), where the corpses, according to the Church’s official interpretation (contested by other sources), were thrown and then burnt. 5 On the following day some of these pilgrims head to Alapaevsk. The list of religious practices asserting the sense of the “We”, the collectivity, is overwhelming in these celebrations, in the surrounding discourses as well as in the forms of worship. However, all these discourses and forms are expressed through interpersonal relations, through groups of friends, and through strong ties between a believer and his/her spiritual father. There are many people, however, who take a skeptical 4 5

Prince Ioann Konstantinovich, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, Prince Igor Konstantinovich, and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Palei. According to the Church’s own data, in 2007 about 15,000 people attended the main night liturgy and about 6,000 participated in the procession.

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and even suspicious attitude toward the Church or particular priests. It is not unusual to hear statements, such as “There is nobody to confess to”, “we love God, not the priests” or “they build churches with dirty money”. Other believers, whom we can call religious virtuosi, gather in small groups that are real nodes of social life, centered on the priests whom they trust and blindly obey. These people need to get a blessing (blagoslovenie) before doing anything, and in their narratives they attribute their problems and grief to their failure to obey the starets (an elder, spiritual father). The narratives and practices recognized and approved by the Church are constantly combined with the individual stories and acts of particular believers. Initially, the worship of the imperial family, as it is now observed in Ekaterinburg, was very much a creation of the ecclesiastic institutions. The belief in the holiness of the imperial family permeated Russian Orthodox narratives, both written and oral, by the end of the 1990s. However, we should not forget the rather chaotic and fragmentary presence of the stories about the saint tsar and various forms of his popular sacralization that circulated in Soviet times. Many informants, today’s pilgrims, refer to how their grandmothers, aunts or mothers had discovered the real significance of Nicholas II even before he was officially canonized. One of the informants, whose conversion in the 1980s was prompted by the illness of her son, discovered the tsar in the 1990s thanks to the songs of Janna Bichevskaia, a singer of Russian folk songs and ballads, and to conversations with a priest and a member of her parish. The latter was introduced to this knowledge about the tsar by his history professor, back in Soviet times, who showed his students the places of the murder. The tsar may be represented in multiple ways: for example, some lay people and even some priests present him as the redeemer of sins (tsar-iskupitel’), although this is considered heretical by the Church hierarchy. Dogmatically, there can be only one Redeemer, but when knowledge of national history is unsteady the Church canons too may be easily ignored. As a result, various memory transmitters contribute to the multiplication of narratives and interpretations of the imperial family, which intertwine with and occasionally contradict the official discourses of both the State and the Church. The same diversity can be found in the forms of worship and the liturgical practices around the new imperial saints: while some of them are set up as canonical by the Church, others appear in an informal way. Thus, one of our informants, a priest from the Ekaterinburg region, who is a former dissident, a longtime admirer of Nicholas II, and a persuaded monarchist, gathers around himself followers from the entire region, who observe the imperial family according to a set of rituals that the priest partly invented himself.6 This group also worships Grigorii Rasputin, who has 6

See the liturgy on 18-19 July, the Day of Commemoration of the Holocaust Offering of the remains of the martyred St. Royal Family (Den’ pamiati vsesozhzheniia ostankov mucheni-

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never been canonized by the Church. Some pilgrims invent new symbolic gestures common to veneration of the saints, such as placing candles and flowers at the hole where the body of Saint Elizaveta Fedorovna was thrown or taking a handful of soil from this holy place. Many of those who come to the liturgy of July 16 can be considered “tourists” rather than virtuosi believers, for their main motivation is to see. We need, however, to take a careful look at the criteria used to distinguish “tourists” from “believers”. A woman who worked at the monastery described the visitors to the Ganina Iama as follows: “People discover the Tsar for themselves for the first time here. Sometimes they cry. The Lord gives upon everybody a measure of grace to bear, especially when one comes for the first time…Some see the churches … some see nature … some would stand before the Cross and find something there … some would go to a service and pray … There are some who don’t even speak Russian, [yet] they attend the service and pray … everybody in his own way”. Another woman who described herself as “not very observant”, explained that she did not go to the Church on Spilled Blood, as she believes this church to be a place for officials and the nonreligious (svetskie), but she eagerly goes to Alapaevsk where her mother lived. The place where Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna was assassinated was for her a namolennoe mesto – “a place imbued with prayers”, where thousands of people had prayed before her and where prayer had proved itself efficient thanks to this very intensity. Of course we need to be careful not to exaggerate this individual freedom of practice. Prayer itself is never solely an individual gesture related to purely personal needs; it is inscribed into a collective ritual process (Mauss 1909). All acts performed and words uttered draw on various traditions, more or less recognized by the Church as authentic. The range of practices that can be blessed or suggested by a priest, a spiritual father, or some other person is very wide. These now include practices dictated by the new economic context of market economy, to which the Church has been obliged to adapt itself. In July 2007, at the entrance to the monastery at Ganina Iama, the visitor had many opportunities to buy a bottle of water or a cake but also to order prayers. One could choose between various forms of prayers according to what one needed and could afford. Discounts were granted for multiple prayers. Many ordered prayers for relatives and friends unable to attend. The poor are well-served by this market, for they can reach the holy places without having to spend too much money thanks to various facilities and transportation offered by the Church. While medical care has become expensive and almost out of reach of the poor, pilgrimage provides an alternative means of healing and ultimately salvation. cheski ubieniia Sv. Tsarskoi Sem’i). In 2006 about thirty persons attended, a high proportion of them young.

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From Defending the Fatherland to Personal Salvation The worship of Tsar Nicholas II as saint could be seen by a superficial observer as an entirely political action and an indication of a worshipper’s monarchical agenda. However, political discourse is not emphasized by the believers themselves. Even monarchists tend to argue that Russia is not yet ready for this “true” political system, and that people need first to prepare themselves spiritually. 7 Certainly, the tsar and the whole royal family attract all kinds of “patriots” (patrioty) who eagerly engage in a discourse of nationalist revival and hold that Russia has been corrupted since the early 1990s by the United States and the ideology of liberalism. For example, the Cossacks are very much present at the Tsar’s Days in Ekaterinburg, and they are keenly involved in reinvigorating Russian ethnic traditions, folklore in particular. Tsar Nicholas II was canonized as strastoterpets (passion-bearer) not because of his skill in managing the affairs of the state, but rather for his fidelity to his religion and country until his exemplary death. The narratives present him as a sovereign who was close to his subjects, but misunderstood by the elites. The last Russian tsar is cast as a protector of a nation in danger; the message is that, as a sovereign anointed by God, he intercedes once again for the country that has been thrown into moral and spiritual crisis. In July 2007, in a small museum in Ganina Iama bearing the tsar’s name, there was a section called “A Chain of Time” (Sviaz vremen) that featured pictures symbolizing the greatest patriotic milestones of Russian history: Alexander Nevsky, the Battle of Kulikovo, Borodino, Marshal Zhukov, and the parade on the Red Square on November 7, 1942. This exhibition, portraying threats to the “Fatherland” and how they were overcome, derived from the collection of a military enterprise that was closed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some of its objects were transferred to Ganina Iama by the curator in charge of the museum there. The exhibition was considered by many visitors to be the central element of the museum, but its future was uncertain. The local ecclesiastic authorities were concerned that although the spirit of patriotism can well be a vehicle of religious feeling, there was a danger that too much of this spirit suppressed true religion. The image of the tsar is seen as uniting all Russians. The resulting community exists beyond the borders of the state, especially after the reunion of the Moscow Patriarchate with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in spring 2007. The 7

Most of the responses to a question probing political views can be summarized in three affirmations: “all powers come from God”; “we have a power that we deserve”; and “Vladimir Putin is not the worst solution”. The following reflections could also be heard: “For a tsar to rule Russia, it is first necessary that people would want to have him, would seek him; that people would feel how bad they are without the tsar … For the power of the tsar is like a symbolic power of God when people understand that there is no power higher than God”.

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latter was in fact the first to canonize the tsar, in 1981. According to Nina Schmit, “this transnational religious community has been formed as a result of exchanges of goods, ideas, and religious attitudes and practices. These reflect a particular social reality in a milieu that hopes ultimately to return not so much to the geographical territory occupied by the nation-state of Russia, but to a mode of religious consciousness known as ‘Holy Russia’” (Schmit 2005: 222). The veneration of the royal family means, above all, the restoration of a way of life permeated with religious values. Nicholas II and his family also became local saints in the region of Ekaterinburg, like Saint Ksenia in St. Petersburg and Saint Matrona in Moscow. The Tsar’s Days foster a form of local patriotism throughout the region of the Urals. To this “patriotic religion”, referring both to Russia as a whole and to the region of the Urals (“great and small fatherlands”), we can add another form of collective identity, based on Christian ethical standards and a moral ethos. Again, the individual defines him- or herself through a relationship with a collectivity. The royal family becomes a paragon, the exemplar of a perfect family: in the words of one informant, “The tsar’s family is love” (tsarskaia sem’ia eto liubov’). In the words of a priest, it is “an image of family, love, humility, and gentleness.” Children of this family were remarkably well-educated and, most importantly, they were brought up in great humility, regardless of their circumstances.The family is the primary link in patriotic discourse, and the education and upbringing of children figure as a priority in pilgrims’ narratives. 8 This clearly reflects the legacy of the Soviet ethical code, and it is no accident that many old Soviet films can be found at the Orthodox fair of Ekaterinburg, available for purchase from booths set up by devout Christians and admirers of the tsar. Behind the patriotic exaltation, thoughts about personal salvation in an unstable context where believers are in search of themselves, and of certainty can also be discerned. The worship of the saint tsar can provide a vehicle for both collective and individual aspirations to salvation. The following narrative of a young religious virtuoso is especially revealing in this sense: This man, sorry for putting it like this, the sovereign Emperor Nicholas II, he was indeed not an ordinary man. He is alive, he helps you as a man and as a sovereign, as an intercessor … it is just this prayer of the tsar which enlightens human souls, so that they can notice him, his help and, overall, his presence in our life. He is real, a tsar over Russia. He is invisible. And the one who prays has him above oneself, on oneself. 8

Anna, headmistress of a local Orthodox school, said that in her classes, she invited her students to look for solutions to problems of family life in the personal diaries of Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna. She entrusted her own children to the intercession of the royal family during the procession of the cross to Ganina Iama. Another informant said: “We pray the royal family and especially the Tsarevich [prince] Alexei to help our children to enter well into life”.

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In spite of the impact of Soviet propaganda, the royal family is venerated regardless of its actual historical role. It is common to assert a personal, individual relationship with the tsar and his family. A young woman, 33 years old, told of how distant she had felt toward the royal family in the past, and how difficult it was for her to accept the worship of its members after they were canonized. Eventually an icon of the new saints was, as she put it, imposed on her; and then she continued: “And always when the saints are repulsed, then [you are attracted] so strongly to them and [you feel] such love, simply understanding your mistake, your error”. For this woman, the tsar was somebody who knew how to forgive: The tsar, he forgave everybody, so this is not unimportant…For me, this is so simply human. And now as we have just followed the procession of the cross, I understood many things, that the tsar and his entire family are the passion-bearers [strastoterptsy] … They bore passions, and our task is to make peace with each other, also bear each other’s passions.

This narrative resonates with the official, clerical narrative, but in 2006 this woman walked from St. Petersburg to Ganina Iama for very personal reasons: “I had two daughters who died during delivery. I prayed to the new royal martyrs. This was connected. While praying, only they had an answer to relieve my pain. They are my protectors. They hear my prayer”. From Collective Responsibility to Personal Repentance Whether official declarations or personal revelations, forms of repentance give exceptional insight into religious identities. One of the most important collective religious practices during the Tsar’s Days is collective penance (obshchee pokaianie) for all the sins of the Bolsheviks, the cause of Russia’s great crisis. Starting in 1993, and then more intensively after 1998, Patriarch Aleksii II called upon the entire Russian people to repent.9 In Ekaterinburg the all-night vigil (vsenoshchnoe bdenie) and 9

“The Murder of the Royal Family is a heavy burden upon popular conscience that reminds us that many our ancestors are guilty of this sin, either through direct complicity, approval or toleration. The repentance of this sin must become a sign of the people’s unity which is reached not through limitless compromises but through a thoughtful understanding of what has happened with the country and the nation. Only then will it be a unity by spirit, not by form … We call for repentance by the entire nation, all its sons and daughters. Let our memory of the crime committed push us to performing today a universal repentance of this sin of apostasy and regicide (tsareubiistvo), followed by fasting and abstinence so that the Lord hears our prayers and blesses our fatherland with peace and prosperity” (Message by the Patriarch Aleksii II, 9 July 1998).

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the Way of the Cross on 16–17 July are believed to be helpful in purifying the nation. In summer 2007 the Cossacks were very active in promoting this movement of repentance: Godlessness led Russia to Revolution, to the murder of the Tsar as the One Anointed by God, and all his family, to the fratricidal Civil War, to Big Terror (repressiiam), to the foundation of the Soviet State … There is no future without God! With God only will Russia revive! Realization of this axiom leads us inevitably to understanding the tragedy of the twentieth century as our personal tragedy, and this means, in turn, that each of us understands a personal responsibility for Russia’s today and tomorrow … Realization of a personal participation in the history of your nation and of your kind (tvoego naroda i tvoego roda) can lead to understanding the unity of your nation, your kind, your fatherland (tvoego naroda, roda, rodiny), and the responsibility for them. Descendants in the third and forth generations are responsible for the sins of the ancestors … It is your personal repentance before God and before your kind (tvoim rodom), before God for your kind, before God for the Tsar, before God and the Royal Passion-Bearer, that is the only way to revive Russia. 10

This declaration insists on a collective responsibility of the Russian people for the “tragedy of the twentieth century”, but at the same time it stresses the importance of the personal acts in pursuit of collective salvation. Russia would not revive without everybody’s personal repentance. This idea is not accepted by everybody and annoys some: “Why should we repent for acts that we never committed?” exclaimed one believer participating in a debate on this precise subject, organized during the Tsar’s Days in 2006. The call for national repentance is expressed in a significantly different way in the documents of openly monarchical religious groups, such as the organization Za sobornoe pokaianie (For Universal Repentance). They define the nation’s tragedy with reference to the oath of 1613. 11 They prioritize a repentance on the part of the nation (narod) as a whole, which needs to perform what they call the “ritual of a universal repentance” (chin vsenarodnogo sobornogo pokaianiia). The term sobornyi, “universal,” used here, resonates with widespread theological concepts we referred to earlier: 10 O pokaianii (On Repentance), an official declaration of the Cossacks (Orenburgskoe kazach’e voisko) on 15 July 2007. 11 The oath of the Zemskii Sobor (Land Council) for “fidelity to the Romanov dynasty until the end of times” was taken at the coronation of the first Romanov.

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No matter how much we repent personally, we have no power to free ourselves from the oath taken by the Russian people in 1613. There is a curse lying on every Russian because of the violation of this universal oath (sobornoi kliatvy), and this curse can only be removed through universal repentance. 12

Aside from these acts of repentance for the salvation of Russia many other forms of contrition can be found among the pilgrims, generally determined by some aspects of social identity. In some cases, for example, repentance assumes a local flavor: the assassination of the royal family is considered by some residents of Ekaterinburg as their own sin, a stigma of disgrace (kleimo) that they felt in the Soviet times and continue to bear. One woman in her forties said: We felt a real shame. First, in a purely atheistic way … “Ah, you are from Sverdlovsk [Soviet name of Ekaterinburg]! From out there where the tsar was murdered!”… Then you start to understand that he was not only the tsar but an anointed, and so your pain becomes even stronger. When the construction of the church started, this was a great purity process.

Another woman, baptized in childhood, had been practicing her faith without being specifically devout in worshipping of the royal family. However, she said that the family of the tsar was “what brings us together in Ekaterinburg; it is our sad local point of interest.” The act of contrition can also help to expiate an ancestral guilt. A young girl told a story about her father, who had been a member of the team that had demolished the Ipatiev house, where the tsar was murdered. This guilt had provoked the disease of her father and her grandmother; her mother had therefore called all the members of the family to repent and purify themselves. Conclusion The example of the canonized monarchical family shows how religious feelings and behavior combine in a variety of patterns, both collective and individual. These practices give a sense of community and use a community as a reference point, whether it is an “imagined community” of the Russian nation, a politically bound religious movement (monarchists and/or patriots), a group surrounding a spiritual father, or a family. 12 From the leaflet “Za sobornoe pokaianie”, which was distributed during the procession to Ganina Iama in 2006.

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Yet individual bricolage is also omnipresent. Processes of individuation have been documented in numerous other studies. The veneration of icons has always had individual healing as a major objective, and new patterns of devotion are being developed to utilize the power of icons for individual success in private and professional affairs of various kinds: student exams, careers, and conflicts at the workplace (Chistiakov 2006). Worship of the relics of Saint Ksenia, who lived in eighteenthcentury St. Petersburg, is organized collectively by pilgrims, yet their participation is highly individualized, and they seek grace to support particular personal needs (Filicheva 2006). The same trend is manifested at the “Orthodox fairs” that have become a common feature of the religious landscape in post-Soviet Russia. These fairs are a mixture of two things in which Soviet public life was seriously deficient: religion and market economy. Inna Naletova (2006) views these fairs as places where the sacred is “thrown” from the church into the world; at the same time the fairs foster the commercialization of church activities. Products such as honey and decorations are sold alongside prayers for the dead and prayers for health. Each fair is a venue for free experiments with “lived religion”: parishes, monasteries, and brotherhoods use them to promote new local saints and new kinds of prayers. They attract visitors with extremely diverse individual motivations and demands: most are believers, but some are simply curious and keen to acquire goods that have been touched with “blessing.” 13 Although, as we have seen, no strong vision of the individual entered the mainstream discourse of Russian Orthodoxy, nonetheless the individuation of faith was well-rooted in tsarist times and continued throughout the Soviet period along with growing localism and destruction of institutions. The individuation characteristic of the post-socialist setting, despite the institutional revival of the Church, is a legacy of these earlier cultural layers. It applies to both “religious specialists” and ordinary believers, and it differs from the patterns of religious “privatization” found in the secularized societies of Western Europe. The worship of the Russian royal family shows a more traditional type of interaction between collective and individual religiosity, and the introduction of commercial elements have not led to dramatic changes. Individuation in the Russian case can be construed as a common “vector,” ever present within the tradition, rather than something radically new. It might be argued that a new type of individuation is developing in the guise of pilgrim-tourists. Boris Dubin (2006) speaks of the “weakness of imagined communities” in Russia, and of the multiplicity of individual religious motivations, which he equates with eclecticism and frivolity in faith, a “light burden,” as he calls it. The 13 A trend toward individuation of religiosity can also be observed in the Orthodox context of Greece. See Kokosalakis 1996: 146; Hirschon 2010.

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same data can be interpreted as proof of an ongoing individuation, especially characteristic of people who possess what we can call a thin religiosity. Eclecticism and hybridity exemplify this new pattern. Indeed, values and role models have been in flux since the 1980s. The former Soviet lands have experienced a mass media revolution, and these media (rather than memory, books, sermons, or experience) have become the main source of religious knowledge. Dubin suggests that for young people who are not very religious, Orthodoxy may be merely a part of a new trendy lifestyle. The impact of mass media is also strong among the enthusiasts discussed above, including those who link religiosity with patriotism. However, this community-oriented group is very different from those, for whom Orthodoxy is a “light burden.” In the worship of royal family we witness quite the opposite: a clear desire for a strong community. Therefore, when speaking of individualism in today’s Russian Orthodoxy we need to distinguish between at least two different types. The first pertains to virtuosi religiosity, or what we can also call a thick religious tradition, in which individual expression is tightly linked to collective identities centered around smaller or larger groups, and eventually, the “nation.” The second refers to the thin religiosity of people who seem to be much less bound to collectivities. Our data suggests that within contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, as a thick religious tradition, individuality, while always present, does not exceed the limits set by the tradition itself.

10. REFORM AND REVIVAL IN MOSCOW ORTHODOX COMMUNITIES: TWO TYPES OF RELIGIOUS MODERNITY This chapter 1 addresses the issue of “religious Modernity” in the current Russian Orthodox context; the term itself as it is used here can be understood within the frame set by Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1993 and 1999). Among the varied post-Soviet trajectories in the Russian religious field, this particular trend – religious Modernity – is just one of many expressions of religiousness, which make up a large range, stretching from detached, “unchurched” individual religiosity through the imperial, militant symbolism of a “national religion.” Within this range many Church life patterns can be found, which have opened up since the end of the 1980s. Post-Soviet religious liberty meant for some an emphasis on monastic ethos and ascetic otherworldliness; for others, a focus on popular worship of icons, relics and pilgrimages; yet for others, an ideological and nationalist agenda; finally, for some, active congregational life and social engagement. However, the trend addressed here has a particular importance, because the related phenomena are, as I believe, at the very edge of interaction between (Late) Modernity and Eastern Orthodoxy as a “chain of memory”, to use Hervieu-Léger’s catchy expression. I studied two groups (or rather two Church subcultures) that represent a relatively small segment of Russian Orthodoxy: they are in a way exceptional. And yet, they reveal very much. They both belong to the “active” and socially engaged type; they are strong communities, which are not many in Russia. However, even if we take these two, as we have done in this chapter, we can find both similarities and striking differences. What makes them similar is exactly their quest for a kind of “religious Modernity” (even though, generally, this term stirs up skepticism in Church circles). I am not going to define this particular type and tenor right now; I hope instead to grasp their content in the course of my study. As for the striking differences between the two groups, I will try to show how this contrast is poignantly expressive for refining the notion of “Orthodox Modernity” as such and for understanding the entire grass-roots life of the Church. At the end of this chapter I will also get back to the question of the real place and weight these subcultures occupy within the entire space of Russian Orthodoxy, and of society as a whole. The two subcultures in question, which I studied between 2008 and 2010 using participant observation and in-depth interviews, are the two Christian Orthodox communities in Moscow: Preobrazhenskoe (Transfiguration) Commonwealth of Small Orthodox Brotherhoods (hereafter Commonwealth) and the St. Cosmas & Damian 1

I am indebted to Jonathan Sutton (University of Leeds) for his careful reading of the English translation of this text and for his numerous important suggestions.

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parish (hereafter C&D). Both groups traced their formation back to Soviet times and then went through substantial growth in the 1990s and 2000s. The Commonwealth was created and led by the priest Father Georgii Kochetkov, who, at the beginning of the post-socialist era, launched the most daring reformist project in the Russian Church. The Commonwealth sprang from underground communities organized by Kochetkov since the 1970s and, after the liberalization, a few parishes in and outside Moscow where Kochetkov served as priest. Since the early 1990s, because of his reformist agenda, Kochetkov and his community came increasingly under pressure and then experienced administrative persecution from conservative Church forces and the Church hierarchy. He lost all the parishes he had founded, but managed to refashion his following as a “commonwealth of brotherhoods” (sodruzhestvo bratstv) not related to any particular church or parish. The second subculture was formed around Father Alexander Men’, a charismatic priest honored by the intelligentsia and murdered in 1990 amid a fabulous ascent of his popularity. In Soviet times, it was first based at the parish in Novaia Derevnia locality, outside Moscow, and an informal Moscow network of his disciples who, after the tragic death of their leader in 1990, rallied around other priests, Men’s disciples and spiritual children: Vladimir Arkhipov, Dean of Novaia Derevnia parish; Alexander Borisov, Dean of Cosmas & Damian parish (which features in this study); and Vladimir Lapshin, formerly second priest of C&D and then Dean of Dormition of Theotokos church, located not far from the C&D in Moscow’s city center. The C&D parish, led by Father Alexander Borisov, is seen as the main institutional legacy of Alexander Men’. Orthodox Modernity Since the end of the Soviet Union both our groups have been engaged in continuous efforts to recreate Christian communities relevant to a new social context and the new spiritual, intellectual and social needs of their potential congregation – urban educated middle class (by Russian standards) of the capital city of Moscow. This “ecclesiastic project” – if we can use such an expression – combined two central tasks: revival and finding relevance to the world here and now; it was a search for relevant revival. This meant building a subculture through a careful (not necessarily methodical or deliberate) selection of sources which link to an uninterrupted tradition and which are intelligible now; recreating a relevant “chain of memory.” This also meant formulating a few major formative points upon which this Church culture is built.

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There are a few such formative points which define these two groups. The first and the main such point is … Jesus Christ. Placing Christ figure at the absolute center of spiritual experience and ecclesiastic rhetoric is a distinguished emphasis of both groups which, ironically, contrasts them with mainstream Orthodox Christianity. Christocentrism, stressed by both Kochetkov and Men’ (and Men’s successors), means to create a clear hierarchy of meanings, thus downplaying other aspects which the mainstream Church is committed to: Tradition, post-Biblical texts, custom, cultural texture/cloth of faith. Both groups also refer to early Christianity, the time of the Apostles, as the main source of their ethos and praxis. Both groups, accordingly, view the Eucharist, Eucharistic communion, as an axis of their own ritual process and the deepest spiritual experience. This idea is validated not only by the reference to Apostolic times, but also by selecting a tradition of “Eucharistic ecclesiology” developed by the Russian émigré theologians in the mid-twentieth century. 2 Accordingly, both groups are generally distanced from (without totally dismissing them) such popular devotional practices which, for most other congregations and in the popular imagination, form the core of Russian Orthodox spirituality: the veneration of saints, miracle-working relics and icons, holy water, pilgrimages, votive supplications, healing, processions and even the “material” side of fasting – everything that may be roughly categorized as ceremonial devotion with “magical tendency”. Church sacraments are interpreted spiritually and therefore performed free of charge, in contrast to the common practice in other churches of assigning a fixed price for baptism or wedding. (However, the C&D accepts fixed money offerings for prayers – for healing and for the dead – and candles). Their ethos and praxis may seem sober and dry as compared to the sumptuous traditionalist ceremonialism of the mainstream. Both groups have been accused of being under Protestant impact. 3 In 2

3

Kochetkov himself would refer to the “Eucharistic ecclesiology” created by Father Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–1966); to Father Alexander Schmemann’s work on Eucharist (Schmemann 1988) and to similar ideas developed by Bishop John Zizioulas (Zizioulas 1997); he also referred to the practical experience of the communities based upon frequent communion (Kochetkov 2000: 91 and 110–113). This same emphasis can be found in the tradition of Alexander Men’ and in C&D community. Alexander Borisov wrote about frequent communion in his book (Borisov 1994: 42–3); he repeated this to me in an interview of 2008 (R-8 December 22, 2008]). (Here and hereafter the interviews are formalized with R – respondent – followed by a number and date. In most cases I do not give the names). See a polemical volume against both our groups: Sovremennoe obnovlenchestvo 1996. Obnovlenchestvo (“Renovationism”), a wide reform movement within the Church in the first decade after the 1917 Revolution, was greatly compromised by its links with the Soviet secret services which manipulated it to destroy the Church, and since then the term obnovlenchestvo acquired strongly negative meaning (on obnovlenchestvo, see Levitin-Krasnov and Shavrov 1996). References to Protestant influence may have some foundation: a few respondents got

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fact, these two communities, in contrast to most others in Russian Orthodoxy, are word-oriented; Scripture is definitely central in liturgy (readings from the Bible); a long catechization precedes baptism; most members make up special groups for detailed Gospel readings; the sermon is far more developed than in mainstream Russian Orthodoxy; both groups are active in Biblical and liturgical scholarship. A well-supplied church bookstore is the main source of C&D parish income. Reading is mentioned by many respondents as the main stimulus for conversion or “church induction” (votserkovlenie). 4 Clarity in faith, doctrine and liturgy is essential: both groups played a pioneering role in linguistic reforms, trying to introduce into the liturgy elements of current Russian language instead of Church Slavonic.5 Thus a new rationalized faith style has been created, which appealed to educated urbanites who tended to join religion consciously, by choice (and not belong to it ascriptively – for ethnic or cultural reasons). When speaking of such religious rationalization, of Weberian Entzauberung, we need to be careful not to overestimate this side: for, given the context and milieu we have described, longing for real religious experience was a key motive for conversion. Both groups are made up of those who are conscious converts (now, with their children as well), those who were baptized by choice and thus may be called bornagain (this evangelical allusion may not be entirely nonsensical here!); they share a neophyte mentality, with many people reporting a deep metanoia experience and a life-transformation incentive. A search for meaning, for many core members, combined both the search for verbal clarity with the search for deep emotional, mystical (thus, “supra-rational”) experience of faith. Faith worked, in fact, as an alternative to

4 5

their first encounter with the Gospel through Protestant missions and publishers, although the Protestant attitude to Scripture seemed “superficial”, not so reverential (trepetnoe) as in Orthodoxy (R-2 [March 24, 2008]). Interview: R-9 [December 24, 2008] (C&D deputy-warden for parish economy); interviews: R-1 [March 12, 2008]; R-3 [May 16, 2008]. Alexander Men’ encouraged his flock to read the liturgy and prayer book (molitvoslov) in modern Russian translation, but never did this other than for private use (interview: R-15 [March 18, 2009]). Today’s younger C&D people would certainly favor modern Russian (interview: R-10 [December 30, 2008]). Kochetkov went much further: he introduced full liturgy in modern Russian and was sharply criticized for that. Such a modernist undertaking as the translation of liturgy into modern languages, approved in Roman Catholicism by the Second Vatican Council, was absent from the Russian Church. Can we find here a direct or unconscious impact of obnovlenchestvo of the 1920s, especially of Metropolitan Antonin Granovsky’s liturgical reforms? (On Granovky, see Levitin-Krasnov and Shavrov, 1996). Kochetkov (1992: 37) himself denied this link in an aphoristic motto: “renewal without renovationism, simplicity without simplification” (obnovlenie bez obnovlenchestva, prostota bez uproshchenchestva).

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a modern rationalized Zeitgeist – either in the form of Soviet total bureaucratization or in the form of capitalist, materialistic pragmatism that came to replace it. Therefore, Entzauberung goes hand-in-hand with a sort of reenchantment – but rather in an interior, personalized form. Thus spiritualization of faith, its interiorization makes it “rational” in one sense; yet deep emotional commitment is (or may be) an important accompanying element. 6 As appears from the above description, members of both our groups in principle reject the culturalist type of religiosity – the one dominant within most official Church institutions and massively adopted in Russia by the large majority of people with thin religiosity. Faith in our two groups tends to be stripped of “culture” (in ethnic or national sense close to “folk culture”). Nationalism is very untypical of them. Although they do not reject confessional boundaries altogether and strictly follow the Eastern Orthodox rite and calendar, both groups promote open Christianity, stress the unity of Christendom and maintain relationships with Western Churches. (Please note that Eastern Orthodox confessional emphasis is much stronger in the Commonwealth, but it is still different from mainstream parishes). Many are intensely involved in links with the Taizé community in France. After all, the emphasis on Christ, on “meeting Christ” (a popular adage in these circles) that I mentioned before, relativizes confessional boundaries that go beyond this ultimate center of faith. Both communities – with this strong sense of commitment – also possess a strong and articulated identity which differentiates them from more mainstream parishes. This is based on shared narratives of origin centered on the founders – Georgii Kochetkov himself in the first case, and the late Alexander Men’ in the second. The founders, their charisma, worldview and pastoral style are central identity-making factors. Specifically, the tragic death of Alexander Men’ in 1990 contributed very much to creating an identity for the C&D subculture; the charisma of the founder has remained unquestioned, if only partly transferred to his disciples, the priests Vladimir Arkhipov, Alexander Borisov, Vladimir Lapshin and the late Georgii Chistiakov; at the same time, each of these four priests possess(ed) a personal charisma that contributed to the general identity of the subculture. Both founders, in turn, are retrospectively linked, in these shared narratives, to a particular chain of spiritual continuity, either recent (twentieth century) or going back in time. The selected chain is in many ways similar to both subcultures: for example, the Commonwealth traces back to Kochetkov’s spiritual father, Vsevolod Shpiller (died 1984), an open-minded Moscow priest who about the same time as Alexander Men’ 6

Grace Davie notes that the experience of the sacred, religious feeling, is crucial for many Western believers as well: the purely cerebral religion (such as, for example, Biblical exposition of liberal Protestantism) does not work anymore (Davie 2007: 146).

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addressed religious quests of non-conformist intelligentsia. Both groups highly respect Russian religious philosophers (Solov’ev, Berdiaev, Bulgakov) and émigré religious figures of the twentieth century. 7 Both groups also draw upon the lines of “catacomb” religiosity of the Soviet period – something that endows them with a warranty of purity of faith – to which the founders trace back their spiritual upbringing: for Georgii Kochetkov, these are Aleksii Mechev (1859–1923) and Sergei Mechev (1892–1942), father and son, famous charismatic Moscow priests, canonized as “new martyrs” in 2000. The Mechevs’ environment was as much important for Men’ (and his followers); he was baptized by Father Seraphim Batiukov (1880– 1942), who was a friend of Aleksii Mechev; also, monks and nuns close to Bishop Afanasii Sakharov (1887–1962), also canonized in 2000, were of major importance (Men’ 2007: 201 and passim). These two spiritual lineages often concurred in the Soviet period: as for example, are some overlapping circles of “catacomb” religion, such as the Moscow circle around a scientist and theologian Nikolai Evgrafovich Pestov (1892–1982), which was important for both Men’ and Kochetkov; the monkpriest Tavrion Batoz-skii (1898–1978), considered as a starets (elder), whose style of piety affected both leaders. The lineages coincided in a more remote past as well: both find links to the tradition of startsy (elders) of the nineteenth century. Both groups also refer to a few recent names such as the highly esteemed Metropolitan Antonii of Sourozh (1914–2003), who lived and served in London, and the literary scholar Sergei Averintsev (1937–2004).8 In both communities reference to the times of the Apostles is typically combined with “modern” sensibility. Reference to the ultimate source serves to legitimize open-minded thinking and negotiating with current patterns of changing life, absorbing spiritual quests of a vibrant urban milieu. Interestingly, these Church subcultures have a relatively balanced gender and age composition (women and elderly people dominate but not to the same extent as in other churches); as a few respondents said, gender differences in services, behavior or piety are played down, this issue is “simply unintelligible” (prosto neponiaten) (interview: R-10 [December 30, 2008]). These subcultures are not inclined to monastic or ascetic world-detachment and rather tend to be world-involved through missionary activities (developed catechetical programs, educational and publishing projects, sponsoring conferences, etc.); social/charity work (wide, intense, and multifaceted charitable programs); and civil engagement. Being generally aloof from ethnocentric Russian culture, both groups have shown openness to “culture” in a different

7 8

See note 2 above. A more detailed account of the spiritual continuity of both subcultures deserves a separate study which cannot fit into this chapter.

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sense – a set of modern resources related to sciences, art and humanities. 9 Openness to culture is a key quality in selective narratives of the group’s genesis. 10 Politically, most of the core members of these two groups have been either skeptical or overtly opposed to both Soviet regime of the 1980s and to Putin’s regime of the 2000s.11 Overall, the two subcultures seem to have stemmed from a common combination of religious and secular traditions and have addressed the needs of the same urban milieu. Yet the two groups evolved in quite different directions from each other in terms of structure, of identity and authority. In the next section we will move to their common associational patterns and then to the differences. Searching for Meaningful Sociality The lack of voluntary supra-familial sociality in the Soviet Union combined, since the 1990s, with a more general trend of the erosion of sociality in late modern Western societies. This general (and not that recent) trend found its way into the field of religion, too.12 This trend was captured as “invisible religion” by Thomas Luckmann (1967), “believing without belonging” by Grace Davie (1994), Sheilaism by Robert Bellah (1996) or as “everyday religion” in a volume edited by Nancy Ammerman (2006). This volatile religiosity may be partly formalized or remain completely informal; it may create a more or less temporary community or remain completely private. A type of individual, highly privatized religiosity – amidst dominating religious indifference – may well be found in Russia. Yet because the voluntary sociality in the Soviet Union was restricted, curtailed, or semi-underground, the longing for 9

One respondent said that this community solved for her two main problems she initially faced in the Russian Church back in her youth: her Jewishness and her artistic vocation. Both were met with suspicion in the mainstream, and both were welcome in Alexander Men’s subculture (interview: R-19 [May 6, 2009]). A young man from a provincial town said that in C&D he found “at least one normal, adequate parish! There you see freedom, you see Heaven, you see Christ. Man has value there, the person is the main thing!” (interview: R-20 [May 7, 2009]). 10 When Father Borisov mentions the spiritual continuity with the nineteenth-century startsy (elders) of the Optina Pustyn’ Monastery, he stresses their “openness to the world, to culture” (Borisov 2003). Russian philosophers of the past were “open” in the same way, in contrast to mainstream Orthodoxy. 11 Father Alexander Borisov was an active member of Moscow city parliament in the turning years of 1990–1993, but then he left any direct political involvement (Borisov 1994: 96). 12 Grace Davie (2007: 92) speaks of religious process as a particular case of this general trend: “Religious institutions, just like their secular counterparts, are undermined by the features of Late Modernity which erode the willingness of European populations to gather anywhere on regular and committed basis”.

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spontaneous, meaningful sociality – especially in the milieu we are dealing with here – became an important driving force of post-socialist life. Hervieu-Léger shows how “the protest against world disorder” among the “converts” leads to the creation of “refuge groups” (James Beckford’s term), attempting to create local “social utopias” (Hervieu-Léger 1999: 140–1). I see our two groups as certain socio-spaces with both world-rejecting and world-adapting mechanisms. And because of initial individualism amidst the milieu of our “converts”, these socio-spaces represent the “communitarian, or informal, regime of faith” (as opposite to “institutional”, or formal) (ibid., 184). Initially, in Russia there was an impression that a new religious associational life was possible within established institutional structures such as parishes. Parish revival became one of the key slogans in post-socialist Russian Orthodoxy. The 19th– early twentieth century imperial State Church, with its territorial parochial system, was the main reference point and an ideal model for the official revival project. 13 In most cases, however, parishes lacked real communal intensity. Sergei Filatov finds within parishes similar “atomized” religiosity not only among laity but also among most priests as well (Filatov 2005).14 What was happening in post-Soviet Russia was, in fact, a double process: restoration of institutional Church life and an innovating growth of thick religious associations based on a “communitarian regime of faith” developing either outside or, most likely, within the institutions. In line with this second trend, the parish model for people from our groups seemed to be linked to outward, ceremonial, and bureaucratic religion. Instead of looking at the nineteenthcentury Church, – and fully rejecting the model of the State Church 15 – in the process of referential selectivity, they would rather draw upon the Local Church Council of 13 The growth of parishes was referred to as the sign of an overall Church revival. About 30,000 parishes were reported by the official Church statistics in 2008 instead of 6,893 in 1988, with a really impressive four-fold or five-fold growth within about twenty years. See the official site of the Moscow Patriarchate. URL: http://www.mospat.ru/index.php?mid= 215 (accessed on February 26, 2009). 14 Sergei Filatov estimated that there were about 250 parishes of this kind in the Russian Church (Filatov 2005). These estimates are very approximate. Filatov lists a few active Moscow parishes founded by known priests: Dmitrii Smirnov, Artemii Vladimirov, Vladislav Sveshnikov, Tikhon Shevkunov, and Alexander Borisov (the Dean of the C&D). A few years earlier, Dmitrii Pospelovsky, in his open letter to the Patriarch defending Georgii Kochetkov, provided his own list of parishes with a strong missionary agenda, which also included both protagonists of this chapter (Pospelovsky 1998). 15 Georgii Kochetkov’s theory splits Christian history into three parts: pre-Constantinian (early Apostolic Christianity), Constantinian (State Church model) and post-Constantinian (our times). What he believes is needed now is the return to pre-Constantinian patterns (see Kochetkov 1991: 21–2).

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1917–8 which sought radically to democratize parish life, that is, to break with the “parochial civilization” of the past.16 Therefore, both groups are in principle a-territorial: members gather not because of territorial proximity but around leader-priests and the core religious agenda.17 With a particularly strong sense of identity and belonging, they seek to create a true community (obshchina), a Gemeinschaft-type of collectivity rather than to build a traditional parish: “not a parish in its traditional formal sense, not a church administrative unit, but a living organic cell of the Church: a community” (Borisov 1993: 94). The parish, a Commonwealth member said, with all its economic and administrative functions, diverts from what is the main thing (interview: R-7 [December 20, 2008]). The parish, if not rejected, should be filled with real, sincere, communitarian content: it should evolve into a “community” and finally a “brotherhood.” The early Christian ecclesia, once again, was chosen as an ultimate model, based on Eucharistic communion; the term used here was κοινωνία (koinonia), intimate participatory communion within a local church around this particular chalice, that is, a combination of Eucharistic unity with social, brotherly proximity. Both groups also appreciated and tried to introduce agapas – post- or extra-liturgical gatherings of Christian love, which go back to the same Apostolic times. Both Commonwealth and C&D have practiced, from the very beginning, so-called “small groups” as a major organizational pattern; “small groups” meet regularly to pray, discuss the Scripture and confess to each other personal problems, thus providing an immediate experience of sharing mystical and social solidarity, as well as a sort of psychotherapy. 18 Some liturgical modifications in both communities were supposed to boost the 16 The post-socialist myth of revival endowed “parish,” in line with the 1917–8 Local Church Council, with a supposed potential of democratization and “renewal from below”, but the restoration of a strong Church hierarchy, with a dependent status of parish, made such renewal impossible. At the same time, the restoration of the pre-Revolutionary, “synodal” system of parishes proved to be an illusion. A decline of the traditional parish system in the Roman Catholic Church was captured by scholars declaring the end of the “parochial civilization” that occurred throughout the second part of the twentieth century (see Lambert 1985; HervieuLéger 2003). 17 The Cosmas & Damian community operates as a formal parish within Moscow diocese, and there are certainly believers who come to the church from the neighbourhood; yet the majority travel on Sundays or other days from remote areas, thus preferring C&D to “territorial” Churches. Georgii Kochetkov’s Commonwealth has had no parish of its own since 1997 and operates as a network of tightly-knit brotherhoods representing Moscow and some other cities, but the territorial location is not at all substantial. 18 The large parish of C&D is made up of a number of smaller groups, both formal and informal. The pattern of the “small groups” (malaia gruppa) was first introduced by Alexander Men’ in 1970s–1980s for both pragmatic (the conditions of semi-underground) and spiritual considerations; by the time of his death in 1990, there were about ten such groups. About the same

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sense of sobornost’ (togetherness; Kochetkov proposed the term mestnaia sobornost’, local togetherness) and participatory involvement of the laity in the liturgy: for example, saying priestly prayers aloud (unlike in canonical practice); singing prayers together with the entire liturgical community (not just by the choir); introducing a sermon after each Gospel reading; etc. Over-emphasizing the gulf between laity and clergy has always been an object of criticism in the common rhetoric of these groups. Two Types of Authority and Community Searching for “relevant revival” requires not only a legitimating authority of a chain of memory (a selected chain of historical sources/references), but also a particular institutional authority that keeps a community together. We have seen that the traditional references invoked by both groups seem to be largely overlapping; by contrast, it is in the institutional structure, where we will find radical differences. It is true that in both cases we can see a similar emphasis on strong community and family-like “small groups”; but the understanding of how a community is organized (beyond its Eucharistic basis) and how the “small groups” are bound together, is essentially different. We will see that these two “alternative spaces,” as we defined them earlier, have had a different sense of boundary from the rest of the social space around. What, then, are the crucial differences between the two subcultures? First of all, Georgii Kochetkov’s Commonwealth has been much more radical and consistent in pursuing the project of revival-through-reform; it was a conscious and risky laboratory in creating a new ecclesia. Georgii Kochetkov was much more systematic and went much further in creating a community with strong identity and commitment; he invented a much more elaborate system of catechization and Christian education; he initiated much more radical liturgical reforms. Georgii Kochetkov’s radicalism and audacious intransigence led to severe administrative repressions by the Church hierarchy in the mid-1990s: the Patriarch accused the group of sectarianism, deprived it of centrally-located Moscow parishes, and temporarily

time a similar pattern was spread in the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. This pattern was much more common in Protestant denominations with a strong congregational penchant (“home churches”). According to my observation, there are up to three-four dozens of such groups called “Gospel groups” (evangel’skie gruppy) in C&D. For many respondents the small group is “my home”; one of Alexander Men’s followers who was rather skeptical of such groups and called them “collections of lonely, dispersed people” (sbor odinokikh, dispersnykh liudei) that provide a “necessary therapy” (interview: R-14 [February 27, 2009]).

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forbade Georgii Kochetkov from conducting divine services. The Commonwealth survived but its activities were curtailed; the priest never received his parish back. 19 About the same time as Georgii Kochetkov was repressed, the C&D also went through major troubles. The image of Father Alexander Men’, who was seen by Church extreme conservatives as a crypto-Catholic, crypto-Jew, ecumenist, and heretic, has affected the public image of C&D. The criticism of Alexander Borisov as being too “Protestant” and too liberal was also quite severe. At some point, the parish was on the point of being destroyed (simply by removing the priests with Patriarchal power). It was not destroyed precisely because it did not claim to be – and was not – a strong autonomous structure, a challenge to authority, as in the case of Georgii Kochetkov’s community. Nevertheless, Alexander Borisov was forced to change his policy and to find a compromise, the price being a shift to a more traditional, if not conservative, stance. He had to accept the nomination, by bishop’s decree, of two other parish priests (Ioann Vlasov and Alexander Kuzin) who were definitely not of the same “cup of tea”. Over the 1990s and 2000s the overall orientation of the parish changed: as the Dean confirmed to me in an interview (R-8 [December 22, 2008]), the parish continued to grow rapidly in size and diversity, and certainly evolved; and viewed from this point, we can talk about a weakening of the parish’s initial orientation towards the religiously sensitive cultural elite and intelligentsia, who certainly made up the core in the early 1990s. Of exceptional significance for maintaining the spirit of this subgroup was the deep and charismatic impact of another priest, Father Georgii Chistiakov (1953–2007), whose pastoral style uniquely matched the tastes of the parish intelligentsia; his service counterbalanced the trend just mentioned. However, although this subgroup certainly retained its core positions in the overall

19 At the diocesan meeting of the Moscow diocese in December 1997, the year of the repression against the community of Georgii Kochetkov, Patriarch Aleksii II said about this case: “The fact is that the pseudo-missionary activity at this parish was directed to attract spiritual seekers not so much to Christ and to the Church but specifically to their own parish community. What happened in this parish was the emergence of an absolutely intolerable cult of the leading priest, whose authority was considered higher than the authority of the Hierarchy. Therefore, the very principles of canonical order have been violated. Church liturgical traditions have been blatantly disregarded in this community. The community opposed itself to other parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church and was, in fact, evolving into a sect-type community” (“Radonezh” 21 (65), December 1997). In 2000 he again received the right to conduct priestly services and since then he co-served at various Moscow churches. He never got back the position of Dean. The activities of his followers have since been mostly performed by the Union of Brotherhoods and a college called the St. Filaret Institute.

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informal structure of the parish,20 they have now found themselves surrounded by large new groups of different social origin possessing various kinds of religiousness. Pavel Men’, Father Alexander’s brother, says about a general trend in Russian Church: the masses who joined the Russian Church in the 1990s, brought with them “pagan attitudes” to which the clergy has to adjust; the intelligentsia who were prominent in the late Soviet times were pushed aside (interview: R-5 [October 31, 2008]). Now C&D is a home for people representing the entire urban social spectrum. Accordingly, the dominant discourse in the parish has evolved. What you can now hear from C&D key people, including Alexander Borisov himself, is the idea of open Christianity, implying openness to various forms of worship and all types of believers. Father Alexander Borisov says that he himself became more careful to comprehend the “emotional, irrational side of worship: music, prayer, images…” (interview: R-8 [December 22, 2008]). It should be added that the successor at Alexander Men’’s parish in Novaia Derevnia, Father Vladimir Arkhipov, from the very beginning a more traditional priest, has backed a more orthodox and more Russian type of worship (interview: R-15 [March 18, 2009]). A few other respondents said they rediscovered, with time, the mysticism of icons and saints (interviews: R-3 [May 16, 2008]; R-5 [October 31, 2008]). This shift over time was scornfully referred to by some dissenters as concessions, betrayal of principles, moving to traditionalism, and so forth. A crisis in the parish was mentioned by many of my respondents. The crisis led to some splits. The church of the Dormition of Theotokos at Uspenskii Vrazhek (Khram Uspeniia Presviatoi Bogoroditsy v Uspenskom Vrazhke) headed by Father Vladimir Lapshin, represents an interesting contrast. Vladimir Lapshin was a priest in C&D and then received a new church where he maintained in more pure form the C&D traditions of the earliest period. Many parishioners of C&D, unsatisfied with what they believed to be a trend towards conformity, moved to Vladimir Lapshin’s new church (which is, by the way, 15 minutes’ walking distance from C&D). This parish is much smaller, but closer to the “reformist” line in terms of interior, liturgical innovations, and the composition of church-goers. In spite of this contrast, however, the priests of both churches maintain friendly relationships, and both parishes share a common identity with the tradition of Alexander Men’. Alexander Borisov’s loyal 20 This particular image and spirit were supported by a few factors: personal impact of the Dean (Borisov) and of the late Father Georgii Chistiakov; the key role of Alexander Men’s family (his brother heads the Men’ Foundation located in the church; his widow is the parish churchwarden (starosta); his son, who is a high ranking official, supported the parish); the key role of Alexander Men’s spiritual children (immediate disciples, dukhovnye chada) in the parish council and de facto defining the parish life (although they are split into a few groups who are not necessarily close to each other).

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followers would, on the contrary, praise the priest’s wisdom that allowed the parish to survive and to grow (the nomination of the new priests and stylistic looseness were seen as a price for survival). The feelings were complex: as one respondent rendered it, “Borisov somehow paused, we were even offended…But we understand now that it could not be otherwise…” (interview: R-19 [May 6, 2009]). Overall, in my opinion, there was a forced compromise here, but I would assume that a certain inherent flexibility, going back to the founder (Alexander Men’), explained the possibility of such a shift. This inherent flexibility of C&D became the main target of criticism by Georgii Kochetkov’s followers. The strategy of Kochetkov’s Commonwealth, in spite of the crackdown by Church bureaucracy, was – in sharp contrast to C&D – a further development of a rigid and identity-driven community. The Commonwealth is structured as a network and a hierarchy: it is divided into brotherhoods, and then down to communities – small groups (initially formed by people who together went through a very elaborate process of catechization). The membership is fixed (you never find this in parishes, including C&D). There is also a hierarchy of membership, depending on a stage of initiation (catechumen – “church members” – “full family members”); the type of membership defines access to various extra-liturgical meetings or events (Kochetkov 1991: 17–33). Although the structure has considerably changed over time – especially after Georgii Kochetkov was deprived of his own parish, and, therefore, the Eucharistic center – the organizational style persisted: a marked sense of openness/closeness, of us versus them. The main pillar of Georgii Kochetkov’s experiment, speaking in sociological terms, was, above all, his own strong personal charisma, which resulted in the emergence of an exclusive authority space. The commitment of members has been very much centered on Georgii Kochetkov’s leadership; the traditional mechanism of spiritual guidance (dukhovnichestvo) – spiritual father-son/daughter relationship based on confession – played a much more important role here. The conflict of authority has been essential in the events that led to administrative repressions by the Hierarchy; in fact, the main accusation was sectarianism. 21 The mid-1990s was the time when the Moscow Patriarchate made continuous efforts to restore administrative discipline within the Church; the case of Georgii Kochetkov coincided with the campaign against the so-called mladostartsy (“young elders”) – charismatic, authoritarian priests who were said to have abused priestly power to create groups of highly committed devotees. The “young elders” have been condemned by a special ruling of the Holy Synod (see Synod 1999). Georgii Kochetkov’s project of a new type of

21 See note 19 above.

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congregation – a communion-based-community – was clearly a challenge to the conservative Church mainstream, which opposed the pursuit of spontaneous solidarity. Yet the centrality of communion (the Eucharist), which by the end of the twentieth century has become a general trend – certainly so in the groups that inherited Alexander Men’s tradition, too – did not necessarily lead to such a radical challenge to traditional authority structure. In Georgii Kochetkov’s case, the spontaneous Eucharistic community was coupled with a distinctive strictness and leader-centered discipline. 22 The exclusive authority space, created around Georgii Kochetkov’s charismatic leadership, is responsible for general rigidity of the Commonwealth structure: fixed membership, hierarchy of communities, degrees of openness/closeness, etc. This strikingly contrasted to the looser, more flexible network of autonomous small groups and individuals making up the C&D congregation. 23 The reason for such contrast lies in an essential difference in the nature of personal charisma of the 22 Many parishioners of C&D believed that Georgii Kochetkov’s brotherhoods have “too much of communitarianism” (slishkom mnogo obshchinnosti); “too much of militaristic spirit” (slishkom voenizirovannaia); that it is therefore a certain “order” or a “sect” within the church (as we see, this opinion reverberates with the official justification for disbanding Georgii Kochetkov’s parish in 1997). For their part, the Commonwealth people have been skeptical about the looseness of the C&D community; as a Commonwealth respondent said, “When you come to liturgy in their [C&D church] nobody even notices you” [nikto tebia dazhe ne zamechaet] (interview: R-22 [March 10, 2010]). (In the debates between the two groups, it is interesting how both sides, in fact, reproach the other with the lack of personalism (bezlichnost’), although for two opposite reasons: rooted either in too much or in too little community). Some people from C&D, especially the younger ones, do admit this shortcoming; as one respondent says: “There is no real sociality in the church” (v khrame net nastoiashchego obshcheniia), and his response was to join, along with some parish friends, an ecumenical group for young couples, which offers this intense sociality they badly need (interview: R-18 [May 5, 2009]). Another respondent, who moved from Commonwealth to C&D, complained that in C&D “people get out of hand (raspuskaiutsia), and sometimes one would wish more strictness” (interview: R-7 [December 20, 2008]). Many young parish people join tightly-knit, “passionate” groups such as the one headed by a Moscow monk-priest Evgenii Peristyi, who uses elements of charismatic worship. 23 An exception within the C&D parish structure was a community called Hosanna created by Alexander Men’s lay disciples Karina and Andrei Cherniak; this was, as many respondents told me, the only attempt to build a real community. Karina in an interview referred to Father Men as saying that an Orthodox sense of sacraments should be combined with a Protestant sense of community (interview: R-13 [February 24, 2009]). In brief, many see the group as a separate entity with strong solidarity and religious commitment, and with Protestant-like practices (elements of charismatic “praise and glory” worship, etc.). The group went through its own crisis in the 1990s (some respondents believe that it was a crisis of authority) but then continued with various activities in a separate “Christian center” (without breaking off spiritually from the C&D parish). This group deserves special attention, but not in this chapter.

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leaders. Alexander Borisov has a reputation as a softer type of character. Respondents praise the C&D parish spirit for making no emphasis on rules, taboos, and restrictions (interviews: R-3 [May 16, 2008]; R-10 [December 30, 2008]). As for the community’s founding father and initial leader, Alexander Men’, who was a no less powerful personality than Georgii Kochetkov, he also had direct relationships with his followers which were the axis of the subculture; yet, as far as we know, he did not envisage – even after the restrictions on religion were removed in the last years of his life – to create a tight, rigid, membership-based community. “His parish was a free space (vol’nitsa), he did not create a community, he simply valued everybody” (interview: R-19 [May 6, 2009]). Alexander Men’ certainly preferred informal networking to any kind of formalization. He was certainly less selective and more inclusive in his pastoral and missionary practice. His personality kept this network of diverse people together, and after his death the network split into groups with different styles, each creating a different image of the late priest. Also, Alexander Men’ was never as radical in ecclesiastical and liturgical novelties: he preferred careful, step-by-step modifications to “reform” as a declared conceptual project.24 On a more general level, we can find the essential difference in the two leaders’ (and therefore, of the two communities’) relation to Russian Christian tradition as such. Both related to the “catacomb” churchliness of the Soviet times, and both reproduced the deeply informal, mystical pattern of spiritual guidance (dukhovnichestvo) which became, in the Soviet underground, the pivot of religious life. Both stressed the centrality of Eucharistic communion and both were open to Christianity beyond denominational borders. However, the roots were not identical. Alexander Men’ came from a very devout Christian background (through his mother and a “catacomb” network)25. By contrast, Georgii Kochetkov, coming from a secular back-

24 One weak point in this analysis is that we do not know how the changing circumstances and growing popularity would have changed Alexander Men’s vision and activities, were he not murdered in 1990, at the very start of a new era of Russian society and religion. We can only rely on his lifetime agenda and the witness of his followers to reconstruct his character as a man and a pastor. Yet, I believe, the evolution of C&D (also keeping in mind a somewhat stricter Uspenie parish of Vladimir Lapshin) may characterize the inherent type of the subculture. 25 The issue of Alexander Men’s Jewish background – both his atheist father and devoutly Christian mother were Jewish – deserves special exploration: how did this fact and identity influence Men’s worldview and work? One certain consequence was his ecumenical openness and lack of nationalism (neither Russian nor Jewish). Secondly, the fact of his origin would attract to him a large number of Jewish intelligentsia inclined to Christianity (see Kornblatt 2004). Thirdly, the same fact ignited special resentment against him in more conservative and ethnocentric Russian Orthodox circles. Fourthly, Alexander Men’s deep feeling of Judeo-Christian

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ground, became a self-made seeker-turned-neophyte constructing his spiritual ancestry from scratch, as a deliberate, rational (and passionate!) enterprise. This led to differences in the ecclesiological program and in the style of spiritual guidance. Both associated themselves with a tradition of spontaneous, grass-roots churchliness distanced from state-controlled, bureaucratic, “Byzantine” type ecclesiology. However, Men’ created a flexible network of followers, while Georgii Kochetkov launched an elaborate project of a tightly-knit, boundary-conscious, authoritarian community. Alexander Men’s inclusive ecclesiology accepted all who came; Georgii Kochetkov’s exclusive approach was selective, aimed at creating a homogeneous Church culture. Georgii Kochetkov was more conscious in inventing his “chain of memory”: he strongly referred to historical precedents of a strong, real, highly autonomous community. One can find this spiritual lineage in the writings by Georgii Kochetkov himself and his followers. In an historical account of brotherhoods and communities in the Russian tradition, Viktor Kott (who later broke with Georgii Kochetkov) refers to “confessional families” which, as he claims, have existed in Russia since the earliest times until around the reign of Peter the Great (early eighteenth century); spontaneous monastic communities of “Non-Possessors” in the fifteenth century; “Godlovers” in the seventeenth century; St. Paisii Velichkovsky’s community in the late eighteenth century; brotherhoods in the nineteenth century; a church community of Aleksii and Sergei Mechev in the early twentieth century (see Kott 2000). “Spiritual guidance” was conceived as more rigid and exigent in Georgii Kochetkov’s project – in this sense, he reproduced a more conservative authoritarian pattern found in Russian tradition and revived in post-socialist Russia. The Dialectic of “Centrality” and “Marginality” As I said in the beginning, the type of religiousness we have seen in this chapter can be best understood in terms developed by Hervieu-Léger’s research on religious Modernity. The core of both our subcultures belongs to what she called pèlerins (“pilgrims,” similar in this context to seekers) who became convertis (“converts,” who “joined” religion as an identité choisie, chosen identity26). The “internal imperative continuity (seen, among other things, in his Biblical scholarship) made him more conservative, more holistic in his perception of Church tradition, more careful in maintaining the fullness of orthopraxy, less radical in liturgical reforms; therefore, as a close disciple testifies, Alexander Men’ was pragmatic in terms of divine services: he did not pay much attention to liturgics as Church discipline (interview: R-15 [March 18, 2009]). 26 Hervieu-Léger (1999: 119–25) classifies converts into three categories: those who changed religion, those who came from no-religion, and those “internal converts” who changed from

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and personal choice” is what makes the basis of such religiousness (Hervieu-Léger 1999: 95) – in contrast to the default cultural identity of the mainstream religion and to those “traditional practitioners,” les pratiquants in Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s terms, with a different “type of sociability” based upon “obligation” rather than choice (ibid., 95 and 109). In the different context of the United States, Nancy Ammerman (1997: 353) speaks of “choice-based congregations”. Our two communities may be also dubbed “liberal” in conventional terms, and belonging to “religious Modernity”, for a number of reasons: because they address themselves to the intelligentsia; because they distance themselves from an official great narrative of the “national Church”; because they are relatively open to the experiences of other Christian Churches and because they seek to be socially relevant, active in missionary terms, and civically involved. This agenda of relevance seems to appeal to large numbers of urban, middle-aged and educated people, and, I would argue, the experience of these communities reflects some major – although not dominant – trends of Russian religious life (and society). Both subcultures absorb and produce a type of agency which wants the sacred to be relevant to the modern and post-modern social and cultural trends. They both are, to use Nancy Ammerman’s language (1997: 363), “generators of social capital,” “pockets of communal solidarity producing trust”. This social capital makes religious tradition adaptable to – yet not identical with – the secular, post-Christian society. At the same time, due to the different genesis and the contrast of the leaders’ personal charisma, the two subcultures’ modes of adaptation are quite different. The two groups differ in strictness, desired homogeneity, and in acceptance of free-riders (practically none in the Commonwealth and many of those in C&D). Their “liberalism” is, therefore, not the same: “liberal” in one case (Commonwealth) is construed as uniformity of an innovative agenda; while “liberal” in the second case (C&D) would rather mean diversity and flexibility. Dialectically, both groups are also conservative in their own ways: the Commonwealth, because of its strictness, and C&D, because of its flexibility (which means openness to traditionalistic forms of religiosity). Both groups may draw upon the same milieu, but, perhaps, each attracts people with somewhat contrasting disposition for stronger or softer sociality and a different type of guidance. Elaborating on this contrast’s social consequences, it would be appropriate to refer to Robert Putnam’s distinction between the two types of social capital, produced and possessed by a community: bonding and bridging. The bonding social capital relates to social forms that are “inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogenous groups”; this type of social capital is based on trust and networks within the community borders. By contrast, the bridging social nominal to committed belonging. In our case, the second and third categories, strongly overlapped in post-Soviet society, were certainly the majority in our groups.

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capital relates to networks that are “outward looking and encompass people across social cleavages;” they are more inclusive and less boundary-sensitive (Putnam 2000: 22–4), I would suppose that Georgii Kochetkov’s community displays more “bonding”, while the C&D demonstrates a more “bridging” type of social capital. In a broader sense, the two subcultures represent what Danièle Hervieu-Léger defined as two ideal-typical, contrasting trends in (current) religious Modernity: she calls them processual and substantive. The first is manifested in a type of community with unfixed borders and no imposed homogeneity, which operates as a fluid “process” of “mutually accepted ‘convergence’ of members’ individual acts and aspirations”27 (the C&D community in our case). The second trend, by contrast, produces solid, highly cohesive communities – “small worlds of certitudes which ensure an efficient way of putting-in-order individual experiences; therefore, such a community promotes a homogeneity of shared truths, a common code of both beliefs and practices, and fixed group boundaries” (in our case, the Commonwealth). 28 We see that both groups are quite “modern” in many ways and in the deepest sense: they are laboratories of religious Modernity. Like some American groups studied by Nancy Ammerman, they are neither “traditionalistic throwbacks” nor “lifestyle enclaves of individualistic religious consumers” – they are the “social creations of the modern world…” (Ammerman 1997: 352). Yet in the new context that offers new choices of belief and non-belief, they prefer to operate, albeit in very different ways, within Tradition, within a “chain of memory” which is both Eastern Orthodox and panChristian. How typical – or how exceptional – is a trend towards religious Modernity, represented by our two communities, as compared to Tradition at large? And how relevant are they, in the final analysis, to the entire Russian society? How to approach their real social weight? Are they “central” or “marginal”? In fact, these groups seem to be both central and marginal. They are central within the religious field because they belong to the institution that dominates this field – the Russian Orthodox Church, which claims to possess, in terms of Bourdieu, the monopoly for the “means of salvation”; they both are located at the very center of the capital city, of the Russian social and religious life; they both attract educated urban people who tend to be highly involved in modern secular activities and share many modern secular attitudes. They are, however, on the margins, because of some exceptional qualities they 27 See Hervieu-Léger 1999: 198: “…La ‘convergence’ mutuellement reconnue des démarches personnelles de ses members.” 28 Ibid.: “…petits univers de certitude qui assurent efficacement la mise en ordre de l’experience des individus. La communauté concrétise alors l’homogénéité de vérités partagées au sein du groupe, et l’acceptation de ce code du croire communautaire, qui embrasse croyances et pratiques, fixe en retour les frontières du groupe.”

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possess: indeed, being “liberal” in contemporary Russian Orthodox culture means to hold alterity: their culture – their articulated message, language, activities, their search for as much administrative and stylistic autonomy as possible (without breaking with the Church institution) – is clearly different from the mainstream. Viewing even more broadly, within societal scope, they are on the margins in a different, deeper sense, because the religious field to which they belong, is, after all, – in spite of an atmosphere tacitly or openly favourable to religion in post-socialist Russia – a marginal segment within the larger, secular society. But looking from yet a different angle, they are again “central” – or relatively central – in terms of their structural location within this predominantly secular society: indeed, being at the “liberal” margins of the Church, actively interacting with the rest of society (as these groups do) – means to be closer to the society’s structural center. In this sense these groups are, so to speak, at the cutting edge of religious change: they test the solidity of borders: borders between tradition and novelty; between Eastern Orthodoxy and the rest of Christendom; between Church and society; between the sacred and the secular.

PART IV

EASTERN CHRISTIANITY AND RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

11. EASTERN CHRISTIANITIES TODAY: EXPLORING MAJOR TRENDS General Overview of Eastern Christianity in Today’s World Eastern Christianity is an umbrella term covering a number of Churches historically spread and sometimes dominating in parts of East and Southeast Europe, Middle East, South Caucasus, Africa and Indian subcontinent. Some smaller communities of Eastern Christians have kept, since early Christian times, or have established, more or less recently, their communities in other parts of the world, amidst other dominant faiths, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Western Christian. Altogether Eastern Christians make up roughly 10 percent of all who claim to belong to Christianity, or about 5 percent of the world population. 1 The oldest communities can now be found in strongholds of early Christianity, such as modern territories of Israel and Palestine, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, but during the twentieth century the share of Christians in these lands have considerably decreased for a number of reasons such as higher birthrates of the surrounding Muslim populations, tensions, persecutions, wars, and rising radical Islamism; all these trends led to a massive immigration. Still, two countries of the region stand out in this respect: in Egypt we find a large Eastern Christian (mostly Coptic) community making up about 9 percent of the country’s population of about 80 million; in Lebanon Christians of various denominations are less in absolute numbers but have a higher share in population – about 40 percent. It has to be noted, also, that the oldest and most respectful Church prelates of the East, heads of the four traditional Patriarchates, still reside in the Middle East: in Istanbul, Alexandria, Damascus, and Jerusalem. 2 However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the largest communities of Eastern Christians lived in Eastern Europe. The first of these was based in Russia, with more than 75 percent of its population (more than 100 million out of 140–5 million) claiming to belong to the Orthodox Christian tradition; geographically the Church spread all over the vast European and Asian parts of the Russian Federation. Ukraine, formerly part of Russia and the Soviet Union and independent since 1991, comes second, with a huge majority of Orthodox of various denominations in a nation of about 45 million. Romania, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Belarus follow then, if we mention only the biggest communities. In the Caucasus, Armenia and Georgia each have a few million followers of their national blends of Easter Christianity. All 1 2

All demographic figures are given for the beginning of the twenty-first century and based on various surveys, mostly of the World Christian Encyclopedia. For a survey of Christianity in the Middle East, see Badr et al. 2005.

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these countries, however, have also generated major waves of emigration through economic strife and the communist persecutions of the twentieth century. The flows of Eastern Christians from all the historical lands of their settlement were mainly directed to the West, where many new diasporas have originated throughout the last century. 3 The Variety of Eastern Christian Identities and its Historical Causes How does one define “Eastern Christianity” as a religious tradition, culture, and “denomination” in today’s world? Or is it more appropriate to speak of Eastern Christianities in plural? If this sounds more accurate, is there any common denominator that would bring all the Churches called “Eastern” together in one group? The opposition of “Eastern Christianity” to “Western” goes back to the first millennium of the Christian era.4 This opposition was shaped during the dogmatic controversies at the so-called ecumenical, or universal, Councils, between the fourth and the eighth centuries CE. Already the First and the Second Councils (Nicaea, 325, and Constantinople, 381) revealed deep cleavages, but the formal unity of Christianity did not suffer; the Third Council (Ephesus, 431) introduced the first formal split and the appearance of what is now the Assyrian Church of the East; at the Fourth Council (Chalcedon, 451) a few other Churches split, and they are now called the Old Oriental Churches, including the Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox (in today’s Egypt), Syrian (Jacobite) Orthodox, and some others. The biggest split, however, occurred somewhere between the eighth and eleventh centuries. The Seventh Council (Nicaea, 787) was still common for West and East, but then came the major split in 800 with the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; finally in 1054 the prelates of Constantinople and Rome have exchanged formal anathemas (official denunciations), which is traditionally considered the date of the break between the Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Sometimes “Eastern Orthodox Churches” are inaccurately equated with the whole Eastern Christianity, while in fact they form only a part of it (certainly, the biggest part). Eastern, sometimes called Greek, Orthodox Churches make a cluster of more of less independent Churches, centered around the tradition of Greek (Byzantine) Christianity and the symbolic (not administrative) primacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople (residing in what is now Istanbul, Turkey). All these Churches identify themselves as a commonwealth, based upon the mutual acceptance of one 3 4

For a general survey of Eastern Christianity, see Parry 2007. See Schmemann 1997 and Ware 1993, for the best historical surveys of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

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another’s dogmatic, ritual and ecclesiastical uniformity of principles (in spite of many national and local differences that they consider of minor importance). The main unifying principle for these Churches is intercommunion, allowing each member of any Church of this group to receive communion (Holy Eucharist) at any other Church of the commonwealth. This sense of mystical unity does not prevent all these Churches from enjoying administrative autonomy, either complete (the so-called “autocephalous” Churches) or limited (the so-called “autonomous” Churches, partly subordinate to one of the larger, “mother” Churches). Other Eastern Christians (Assyrian and Old Oriental Churches, mentioned above) also accept the principle of intercommunion amongst them. These two “clusters” or “commonwealths” – (1) the Old Oriental and (2) Eastern Orthodox following the Byzantine tradition – keep separate from each other in terms of worship. However, in many ways they have large similarities between them, and the word “Orthodox” is frequently used in the official names of Churches belonging to both groups and in common language when all of them are been referred to. There have also been, throughout many centuries, many splits and schisms, caused by ecclesiastic and/or historical reasons that led to the emergence of a rather long list of smaller groups whose status is undefined and legitimacy sometimes questioned by the larger Churches from which they split. They call themselves “Churches”, but, in sociological parlance, would rather be called “sects”. Yet, in some cases, they possess a quite large number of adherents (for example, the Ukrainian Patriarchate, created after the breakup of the Soviet Union) or represent a strongly symbolic and distinct tradition that cannot be ignored in any picture of the Eastern Christian landscape (for example, the Old Believers in Russia or the Old Calendarists in Greece and other countries; both groups split from there mainstream Churches whose alleged modernism they rejected). There is yet another large group of influential Churches which are situated inbetween the Christian East and the Christian West – the so-called Greek Catholic, or Uniate Churches who in most doctrinal, ritual and structural ways tend to belong to the Eastern forms of Christianity, but for various historical reasons have administratively “united”, or are “in union” with the Roman Catholic Church. Being administratively subordinated to Rome, however, they can for equally good reasons be placed among the large and diverse spectrum of what we can call, in the plural, “Eastern Christianities”. Historically the deepest reasons of all the splits of Christian East and West were profound cultural differences between what were initially, in the early times of Christianity, Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire, with adjacent geographical areas; respectively, the differences between Latin and Greek literary and cultural traditions; between the Germanic world of “barbaric” freedoms and the Byzantine

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world of autocratic government. Since the seventh century another crucial factor of difference has been the impact of Islam, and, for many centuries, the direct Muslim domination in the Eastern parts of Christendom (especially after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453). The Christian East continued to be in direct and constant interaction with Islam for centuries. In contrast, the West escaped Muslim expansion (except the long Muslim domination in the Iberian Peninsula) and was an active force in conflict with the world of Islam (during the Crusades); only by the end of the twentieth century did Muslim immigrant communities become a substantial internal factor of European cultures. The Christian East was deeply saturated with the knowledge and culture of Antiquity, but the Renaissance of the West did not affect the East. Yet another cultural difference was the growth of new type of universities that introduced highly developed scholastic and legal education in the West, while the Christian East only later became a recipient of these traditions from the West, including those of systematic religious education. At the backdrop of these cultural differences there was also a crucial difference of trajectory in social evolution that led to what is called Western Modernity, which partly rejected the significance of religious traditions (Catholic or Protestant) and partly transformed them, introducing the era of secularization, Scientific Revolution, rationalist skepticism, and more privatized religiosity. The Christian East never experienced this evolution to such a degree. Modernity in the East was, to a large extent, a product of Western export. Although both Western and Eastern Churches reacted ambivalently and sometimes with hostility to modern developments, the reaction of Western Christians was a part of an internal dialogue within Western culture, while the Eastern Churches struggled and negotiated with the ideas coming from outside, and thus requiring more complex negotiation. In this sense the term “Westernization” is as much relevant to the Eastern Christendom as it is for other non-Western cultures, either Christian (e.g. Latin America) or not (Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc.). In light of this exceptional character of Western Modernity, the lands of Eastern Christians may have more in common with other non-Western civilizations than with their former “brothers in Christ” in the West. Many Eastern Christians lived in what has been considered in the nineteenth century “the Orient”, or, in the twentieth century, the “global South”. This attribution meant that these lands were seen as pre-modern and backward, and the Eastern Christian traditions themselves as correspondingly conservative, immobile, and legitimating the pre-modern sociocultural setting; irresponsive to such new developments as efficient modern economy and management, democratic government, rule of law, and civil society. This picture was partly true: both the internal histories of Eastern

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Churches and the histories of the respective societies did not produce widely accepted ideas and social mechanisms presuming changes similar to those which happened in the West; rather, they criticized the Christian West for abandoning, or even betraying, some foundational principles of Christianity (on a Western comparative perspective, see Clendelin 2003). There was another historical factor that deeply affected the fates of the Eastern Churches in the twentieth century: many of these lands became part of the socialist (communist) Bloc. The first communist Revolution happened in the largest Eastern Christian country, Russia, in 1917; after World War II many other Eastern Christians found themselves under communist regimes. There have been many speculations about an alleged link between a specific Eastern Christian tradition in Russia, with its Byzantine roots blended with Slavic cultural ethos, and radical Marxism (communism) that prevailed in this country. In particular, there has been argument about a more authoritarian and collectivistic penchant of this religious tradition (comparing to a more liberal and individualistic Western Christian tradition), which led to a wider acceptance of communist ideology. It seems, however, that most scholars now deny any direct connection of this kind; Russian communism cannot be “derived” from Russian Orthodoxy as the Nazi regime in Germany cannot be “derived” from Lutheranism or Catholicism. What is undoubtedly true is that Russian Orthodoxy, like all other Eastern Christianities, has lived through a long history of close relationships with traditional autocratic governments that certainly affected the character of the Churches and the principles of their relations with the state and society at large. In the late Roman Empire, after its Christianization, and then for about a thousand years in the Byzantine Empire, the Christian Church was the official State Church, closely linked to the government, dependent on its support and responsible for symbolic legitimation of the ruling power. The Church lacked such a strong independence and ambitions of superiority over the state as was the case of the Western Church. Later, under the Muslim domination since the fifteenth century for about 400 years the Eastern Christian Churches enjoyed a great deal of autonomy but never independence, and sometimes were bitterly oppressed and persecuted. The communist period may be added to the list of these traumatic experiences. They finally led to certain stagnation in theological and institutional development of these Churches. A revival movement similar to Reformation never occurred here. The maintenance of unchanged canonical doctrines and structures was the dominant policy of the Churches. Involvement with the social world and interaction with emerging modern political and cultural institutions has been limited and was not considered a separate, legitimate object of concern.

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In particular, the development of theology in Eastern Christianities, insolated within cultural and/or political ghettoes under Muslim domination and later under repressive communist regimes, or, in other cases, constrained by the autocratic governments, even if identified with Christianity (Byzantine or late Russian Empires), was very limited and lacked any strong innovative quest to adjust the religious tradition to changing historical and societal conditions. The rich monastic traditions were much more otherworldly, much less socially involved, in Eastern Churches than in their Western counterparts (e.g. the Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, etc.). The ritual, liturgical canons have been kept protected from any change. The methods of ministry, pastoral care and religious education were seldom consciously and deliberately modified. This lack of self-reflective, gradual “adjustment” in both theory and practice led to the situation when the Churches turned out to be not quite ready for the rapid advancement of Modernity and then globalization of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries: Scientific Revolution, growth of the cities, industrialization, unprecedented migrations and other developments. In many ways, the Eastern Churches had to compensate the lack of their own world-adjusting skills by borrowing ideas, methods and practices developed by the Western Churches. Throughout a few centuries of constrained existence, some of the Eastern Churches, as has already been mentioned, have directly joined the Roman Catholic administrative guidance (Uniates), and most others have experienced a profound impact of Catholic and Protestant theological, ritual, pastoral, and institutional forms while certainly retaining their own specific flavor. It should be added, however, that the overall institutional constraint and stagnation did not completely block the development of the Eastern Christian tradition as a whole; rather, they redirected this development to two other spaces largely outside the direct reach of established institutions – mystical spirituality and popular religiosity. On the one hand, a sophisticated, ascetic monastic tradition, inspired by the early Christian and Byzantine prototypes, was revived and maintained on Mount Athos (Greece), in the Middle East, in Romania, Russia and other places, and in some cases its social impact continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the more spontaneous, popular forms of Christianity, such as veneration of icons, local saints, water springs and other forms that can be said to be on the verge of the official teaching of the Church, continued to thrive and make more flexible and inclusive the scope of a more rigid canonical tradition (see Agadjanian and Rousselet 2006; Shevzov 2003; Stebbing 2003).

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Ethno-religious Particularism and Political Engagement One major structural and stylistic legacy of the Eastern Churches is their local and national particularism. Historically, comparing to the Roman Catholic Church, with its persistent claim to universality and monarchical institutional structure, the Eastern Christian traditions were lacking such an overwhelming, well-established administrative uniformity. Localism, starting at the level of individual parish communities, was a century-long feature of these Churches. The true center of Church life is usually such a particular local community, which has always been evoked by Eastern theologians as similar to early Christian communities. We know that Protestants have the same claim to reproduce this early prototype by rejecting rigid ecclesiastical subordination. Yet, the Protestant localism remains universalistic in its outward forms, as it is “portable” and can be theoretically reproduced in most cultural contexts. By contrast, the Eastern Christian localism is by its very nature woven into a particular regional, ethnic and national fabric. If there was any administrative uniformity in these Churches, it was always initiated by secular authorities concerned with bureaucratic accountability, control and use of the Church structure in political purposes. This was the case of the Byzantine imperial Church, of the Greek and Armenian Christian communities under the Ottoman Millet system, the Russian Orthodox Church under both Tsarist and communist regimes, and in most other cases. However, the uniformity never surpassed the national level. The Patriarch of Constantinople, especially after the end of the Byzantine Empire, has retained only a symbolic “ecumenical” leadership over the Orthodox Churches. In most cases the uniformity was even much looser at the levels lower than national. As the result of this combination of initial localism and broader historical circumstances, the Eastern Christianities are strongly imbedded in particular ethno-national traditions and tightly related to the sense of ethno-national identity; this became all the more manifest after the new religious resurgence in the post-communist Eurasia (see Johnson et al. 2005). This connection is definitively stronger in these Churches than in Catholicism or Protestantism. The link of ethnicity and religion in Eastern Christian Churches rather recalls the similar situation in such ethnocentric religions as Judaism or Shinto. For instance, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, or Ethiopian Church traditions, to name only a few, have always been and remain now a major factor defining distinctive ethnic identities. In some periods of history, when these peoples had no independent states of their own, the Church traditions were the main foundation (along with language) of ethnicity. The exceptions are now some historical Churches with a relatively small following that are less ethnically bound, such as the old Patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and some others,

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and certainly, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, even though it is associated with Greek tradition. In some other cases, the Eastern Church tradition constitutes a religiously defined sub-ethnos, such as Copts in Egypt, Maronites in Lebanon, Malabar Christians in Kerala (India), or Finnish Orthodox in Finland. Overall, the very strong link of ethnicity and religion is a dominant feature in the Eastern Christian world. This link may be dogmatically seen as contradicting the universalistic message of Christianity, and it was indeed often criticized as such. Officially, religious ethno-nationalism was condemned by the Orthodox Churches back in the nineteenth century as ethno-phyletism (the love of the ethnos/nation/race). Yet, nationalism and ethno-protective feelings have always been and are still very strong in these Churches. It was somewhat different within large Christian Empires such as were the Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian, or Russian Empires, who included various ethnicities, although even in those cases there was a strong perception of these Churches being Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian or Russian, respectively. After the gain of independence and the formation of modern nationalisms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the link between religion and ethnicity became even stronger, reinforced as it has been by nationalist political regimes (see Roudometof 2001). This characteristic link of religion and ethnicity led to the fact that most Eastern Christian traditions had an ambiguous stand toward the formation of modern nationstates and, later, toward globalization. While in many cases, as has been said before, these Churches supported and fomented modern nationalism and independent nationstates of the modern type (e.g. Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Greece in the nineteenth century; Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Macedonia, etc., in the twentieth century), conversely, through the same specific link of religion and ethnicity, they also hampered the formation of a democratic, non-ethnic political nation based on individual rights rather than particular ethnic belonging. This led to problems with including ethnic and religious minorities into these new nations. Later, with the coming of the era of globalization, Eastern Churches continued to be the bulwark of ethnic continuity opposing to, or even resisting, to cultural relativism and transnational mixtures. Ideology, institutional structure, some elements of worship and artistic style of each of the Eastern Churches contain a strong ethnonational flavor and a strong attachment to historical territories, obviously contrasting with the global trends of transnationalism and de-territoriality. It should be added, however, that various Churches may differ significantly in their sense of ethno-religious particularity: this sense is now much stronger, for example, in the Greek than in the Romanian Orthodox tradition. In the countries where Eastern Christians are traditional minorities (in Muslim countries or in India), their Churches still function as symbolic anchors of (sub)ethnic

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traditions and interests. In the cases where these Churches are dominant majorities, they continue to claim their definitive connection to national identity, and therefore their function of being an ideological pillar of the political regimes of the respective countries. Consequently, they protect their spiritual domination in these lands, impeding the influx of those social and cultural forces that erode the traditional unity of religion, ethnos, land, state and culture. The unwelcome global forces they resist against may include international businesses, geopolitical players, or Western Christian missionaries whose ever growing activities are seen as promoting alien values and/or relativistic global outlook, threatening the integrity of spiritual and cultural traditions. This resistance may be legitimately interpreted as a competition for the monopoly for the means of salvation. At the same time, we can with good reason translate this resistance into more pragmatic language: local Churches fight to protect their own positions on the religious field. The idea of ethno-national/religious identification is complicated by the fact that historically many members of the respective ethnoses have belonged to other religions. Yet, the situation is aggravated even more dramatically by another factor that cannot be ignored: secularization. Although not as lengthy and profound as in the lands of Western Christendom, secularization affected the Eastern Christians in the twentieth century. In many cases as a result of the repressive policies of the state, but in other cases also following the same mechanisms as in the West, religion became “privatized”, driven out of the public sphere, where it was replaced by civil ideologies (nationalism, communism, or, rarely in these lands until recently, democracy). Many people simply ceased to belong to Church institutions, while the intergenerational transmission of religious values was damaged. In spite of the reanimation of the religious life after the fall of communism, church attendance and other indicators or religiosity in some historically Eastern Christian societies are usually lower than the world average (see Kääriäinen and Furman 2007). Does this mean that, as a result, in these societies the old identification of a particular ethnos or nation with a particular religious affiliation may be seen as largely invalid? Indeed, none of the Eastern Christian Churches is fully established as the “State Church”. Most Constitutions directly declare the secular nature of national sovereignty and proclaim the separation of Church and State. However the degree of separation varies somewhat. The Greek Constitution provides an example of what can be called “semi-establishment”: it calls Greek Orthodoxy “the prevailing religion” and guarantees its special status, its administrative autonomy, and the protection of its sacred tradition and scriptures (Article 3), and proselytism is prohibited (Article 13:2); yet, the individual rights of all citizens of any religion are equally guaranteed (Article 5:2) and the freedom of religious conscience is said to be “inviolable”, all

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religions’ right to worship is protected by the law, and in no way can religious affiliation affect the government (Article 13:1–3). Apart from politics, public education is another field where a religious presence is contested, while the number of private religious schools and universities has quickly increased after the end of the communist era. In most traditionally Eastern Christian countries some optional religious education is offered, while there are continuous controversies between the dominant Churches, on the one hand, and both religious minorities and secular forces, on the other, over the degree and the way religion should be taught in public schools. In other cases, such as Romania, the Constitution clearly follows the “separation principle”, and the dominant Orthodox Church is not mentioned at all (see Article 29 “Freedom of Conscience”); yet, in contrast to many Western and other “Orthodox” countries, religious education in public schools is prescribed and guaranteed (Article 32:7). Overall, however, in Greece and Romania, as elsewhere, Christianity’s role in politics and public life, and therefore its significance for national identity, has been diminishing throughout the twentieth century. Yet, the last quarter of this century and the beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed the partial reversal of this trend in the traditional Eastern Christian lands, as in other parts of the world. As the ideological confrontations waned, ethnic, cultural and religious identities acquired a new significance and power. The divide between secular and religious elites and secular and religious worldviews became more pronounced as long as the Churches claimed a more active role in the public sphere. 5 The ruling elites tended to use these old symbolic resources for the purposes of legitimation, while the masses of the population also became more sensitive to these resources, even though their belonging to Church institutions was not as obvious as it was centuries ago. In contrast to Catholic tradition, the use of this political resource did not lead to the emergence of religiously defined political parties; instead, the parties or individual politicians may have referred to religious ideas and symbols as an additional tool of political mobilization (see Davis 2003; Knox 2005; Mitrokhin 2004). Some political leaders, while in power, use religious resources widely paying homage to dominant Churches and incorporating the high-ranking ecclesiastical authorities into the political elite of their countries, even though any formal participation of clergy in politics is constitutionally impossible. There is a large variety of cases in which Eastern Christian symbols and identities have been used in political mobilization and the legitimation of conflicts (see Makrides 2005b; Mitrofanova 2005). The examples of ethnic strife and violent military conflicts have shown the exacerbation of the sense of ethno-religious identity and the use of religious symbols 5

For such developments in Greece, see Roudometof and Makrides 2010.

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and discourses as political references. The examples from the second half of the twentieth century were plentiful and most of them are still relevant and not resolved: one such example is the Lebanese Civil War (started at 1975) where the ChristianMuslim divide became a major (although not the only) factor; the prolonged ethnic strife in Cyprus between the Greek and Turkish populations (especially after the Turkish invasion in 1974); the post-Soviet conflict for Nagorno-Karabakh between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis (since the end of 1980s and especially during and after the war of 1992–4); and finally, the most tragic and bloody conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s, where three religious traditions, Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim, have been widely used for legitimating political agendas and violence (see Ramet 1996; Moizes 1998; Makrides and Rüpke 2005; Buchenau 2006). An Important Example: Russia To take an example of the largest Eastern Christian nation, Russia, we can illustrate the just-described typical trends in combination with some exceptional features. Russian Orthodoxy is stereotypically identified both inside and outside Russia as the religion of the Russian people and the entire territory of the country. This stereotype ignores the fact that there are many Russians who now belong to other religions or do not belong to any. It is unlikely that the percent of Russian citizens who attend church services at least once a month is more than 7–9 percent. Yet, on the declarative level, between 70 to 80 percent of Russians associate themselves with Orthodoxy, which may be partly a result of the mentioned stereotype and/or partly a conscious choice of a symbolic, emblematic identity with no real consequences for attitudes and behavior. Still, the very fact of such a massive religious identification in Russia, which is related to what is sometimes called a “thin” religiosity, is a sociological fact that cannot be ignored. It demonstrates the classical link of ethnic and religious consciousness that has long existed in Eastern Christianity. This link is applied to a new, post-Soviet Russia, which intends to be, finally, a modern democratic state and clearly proclaims the ideas of “separation” (of Church and State) and of civic, equal citizenship for all. 6 As can be seen from the above discussion, however, there are serious complications to the ideal agenda of a “modern democratic state” that Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries are generally subscribed to. There are at least three problems that 6

See especially Article 14 of the Russian Constitution of 1993.

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arise here. First, the link of ethnicity and religion creates a problem with the inclusion into the nation of those ethnic Russians who are not Orthodox, as well as ethnic minorities who are either Orthodox or not – the problem that hampers the application of widely accepted Western standards of meta-ethnic equal citizenship. Second, a over-strong emphasis on the religious background of nationhood raises concerns of those who advocate such principles as “separation of Church and State” or laїcité, and warn about a possible “clerical intrusion” into the affairs of the state or the public square, including cultural life, moral discourse, and, most importantly, public education. Third, the link of ethnicity and religion and the location of the see of the Patriarchate in Moscow question the principle of national territorial integrity, because millions of Russian Orthodox live outside the borders of the Russian Federation, in the lands of the former Russian and Soviet Empires; this situation creates a confusion of loyalties in such countries as Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, and, most massively, Ukraine. There are both ethnic Russians who may be frustrated at being citizens of other countries but spiritually and culturally lean toward Russia, and, say, ethnic Ukrainians, who feel a necessity to withdraw their Church from the tutelage of Moscow and rather establish it as a “national” institution, although, in fact, this intention originates from the same ancient stereotype so typical to Eastern Christianity. The above example shows that the religion-ethnicity link, being generally valid, works in somewhat different ways in different lands and Churches. For example, the Patriarchate of Constantinople (in Istanbul) is called “ecumenical” not only because it is commonly accepted as the most ancient and respected, but also because it now represents, indeed, the most universal, transethnic and transnational religious affiliation, even though it is run by ethnic Greeks. The Church of Greece is, by contrast, much more tightly connected to Greek ethnicity and largely associated administratively with (although, in fact, not limited to) the realm of Greek national polity. Most of other Churches are also thoroughly ethno-national, such as, for example, the Armenian Apostolic Church or the Georgian Orthodox Church: it would be very unlikely to see non-Armenians or non-Georgians respectively, who claim to belong to these Churches. The same is mostly true of the rest of the Eastern Churches. The Russian case, which we have analyzed, is somewhat different: many centuries of imperial legacy made the Russian Orthodox Church more open and multiethnic; it is no surprise that we can find within this Church not only cognate Slavic people but also many of Baltic, Caucasian, Turkic, Siberian and Far Eastern origin, as well as a substantial number of ethnic Jews, converted, voluntarily or forcedly, throughout the last two centuries. However, the relative post-imperial openness of Russian Orthodoxy never goes as far as the transnational openness of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Since a last few decades of the twentieth century the ethno-national exclusiveness of Russian Orthodoxy became increasingly apparent;

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hence the claims for an unquestionable domination within Russia and resistance to the growing presence of other religions whose inflow started around 1990 (see Witte and Bourdeaux 1999). Eastern Christian Diasporas in the West The turbulent circumstances of the twentieth century and, more recently, the rapidly growing “global flows” of people, information and traditions, have strongly affected the Eastern Christian Churches. Most importantly, they created diasporas spread worldwide, beyond the traditional Eastern Christian lands – the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Predictably, the biggest diaspora emerged in North America, numbering, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, around four and a half million people claiming to belong to Eastern Christianities; about a half of them are ethnic Greeks, with the second largest group being Russians, the third, Ukrainians in Canada (many of them Uniates), and many others. Practically all national Churches are represented in the New World, most of them symbolically loyal to “mother Churches”, reproducing their sectarian splits in home countries but de facto autonomous. A similar situation, on a smaller scale, can be found in Western Europe. The spiritual ministry and social networks provided by these Churches have always played an essential role for the adaptation of newly arriving Greeks, Ukrainians, Armenians, and other ethnic immigrants in the West. The Churches have served a double bridge connecting the newcomer communities with both the new societies of residence and their native countries. Although some parishes were a place of ethnic mix (especially with Orthodox Churches, which maintained an intercommunion, that is, allowed each other to take the Holy Communion during the liturgy), in most cases each diaspora Church served one particular ethnic group, and this contributed to a consolidation of a sort of ethnic ghetto whose level of openness depended on a variety of circumstances: ecclesiastical policies and dispositions of the flock, or of a particular priest. The ways of these Churches in the Western diaspora have been distinctive. Some elements of institutional structure, worship, and everyday style have adjusted to the secularized Western society and to the dominant Western Churches. However, by and large, most of these Eastern Churches were anxious, and succeeded, to keep intact specific canonical traditions in liturgy, annual calendar, institutional organization, church architecture, and, in some cases, the language – all that distinguished them from other, especially Western, Churches. Eastern Christianities are characterized by the opulence and meticulous elaboration of church interior, priestly vestment, liturgical accessories, by the use of incense, kissing icons and crosses, kneeling,

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keeping a capella chanting (with no musical instruments), and many other special features sometimes originating in each particular national tradition, Serbian, Romanian, Ethiopian, or other. One particular feature that stands out in the Orthodox Churches is the high development of iconography and the icon worship (while there are no statues). Elaborated Eastern Christian liturgies seek to create an exceptional atmosphere of mystical communion with God, rather than emphasize the community of believers, tied together in their worldly activities; in a way, Eastern Christian piety still seems to be less practical, more other-worldly. As was said above, Eastern Christian monastic tradition has always had a similar contemplative inclination. Against the backdrop of the more consumer-oriented, commercialized, simplified religious landscape of the late modern West, the Eastern Churches seem to be, in a way, “exotic”, perceived somewhat in the same way as Asian religions; or, at least, not modernized and less adapted to the privatized, minimalist Western religious ethos. For a long time, this style has been associated with backwardness and archaism. Yet, in a new configuration of post-modern, global, multicultural society, archaism has been reinterpreted, in a positive way, as authenticity and purity; ethnic parochialism has been reinterpreted as the truth of cultural expression; and the “old-fashioned” other-worldliness has turned out to be a proof of a true mystical experience. The fact of being “maladjusted” to the modern world has become the “capital” with which to find a vital modus vivendi in the global culture. This explains both the conversions of Westerners to the Eastern Churches (Harper 1999) and the strong tradition-protecting and ethno-centric positions taken by most of these Churches. In the West, more liberal and modernized exceptions are the parishes belonging to the old Patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch and some autonomous jurisdictions such as the Orthodox Church in America. One interesting example of adjustment is parishes that accepted “the Western rite” in their worship. We can say that, generally, there is certainly a discrepancy between the Churches set in the Western diaspora and those operating in the home countries: the former tend to be more open to a pluralist and secular Western cultural context. Yet, overall, there has been a tendency among Eastern Christianities in the West during the last few decades of the twentieth century to more eagerly emphasize a particular religious style and even try to revive some elements of monastic tradition. This tendency has been partly reinforced by the inflow of new waves of emigration after the end of the Soviet Bloc in 1989–91; the tension between these new immigrants from Eastern Europe with earlier immigrant generations are reflected within the clergy, sometimes leading to conflicts between the priests born in the West and those sent by the home Church hierarchy which seeks to establish a more tight administrative control and promote a more nationalist agenda.

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Interacting with Secular World and Other Religions The worldwide “return of religion” as a factor of public life in the late twentieth century may be well-applied to Eastern Christianities; this became especially obvious after the fall of communist regimes. As in other places, religion in these lands became an important narrative and symbol empowering and legitimizing human mind and behavior. Related to this general process, a return to more orthodox, more conservative and nationalist ways, both in home countries and in the diasporas, became, probably, an overall trend in Eastern Churches. Their goal in this global era is to protect the spiritual and respective ethnic traditions and to negotiate a particular specific niche in the global concert of cultures. In this respect, the initiative of such a protective, sometimes almost isolationist position comes usually from a section of the clergy in home countries. Some of them, especially those coming from either monastic circles or mixed lay-clerical brotherhoods with a protective, fundamentalist outlook, are vehemently critical of the Western Churches (a repulsion that goes back to remote centuries), seeking to avoid, for example, the participation of their respective Churches in the Ecumenical Movement. However, the object of their strongest critique is “secularized, irreligious” Western society and its influences in the East. This stance was manifested in the writings of such theologians and ecclesiastics as Nikolaj Velimirović (1881–1956) and Justin Popović (1894–1979) in Serbia, John S. Romanides (1928–2001) in Greece, and others. Conservative circles within the Churches are following one of two strategies. One is self-isolation from the “corrupt secular world”, which is a more traditional strategy mostly linked to monasteries. Or, second, as a contrary, more recent trend, these groups try to actively interfere into the public square and to openly vindicate religious views, thus challenging the Western pattern of “privatized” religiosity and emphasizing the paramount significance of the spiritual tradition for national identity and secular policies. This strategy is adopted by a relatively new brand of mixed layclerical brotherhoods, sisterhoods, and NGOs, who combine a protective, sometimes fundamentalist outlook with the use of all available means of contemporary communication technologies: mass printing, television, and the Internet. The official leaderships of the Eastern Churches are usually more pragmatic and moderate in their views. Although all of them, to various degrees, subscribe to a traditional ethnocentric and conservative approach to Late Modernity and globalization, they have to conform their positions to changing international circumstances and the transformation of their own flock. Several predominantly Eastern Christian countries – Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Romania – have become members of the European Union, while some others either wait for their turn or voluntarily comply

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to international legislation that implies some normative requirements of the Churches. This process of integration is not entirely cloudless, and the adaptation is not easy. One striking example was a huge opposition in Greece against the government’s decision to remove the reference of religious affiliation from identity cards at the beginning of the 2000s. The government thus brought Greece into line with the EU requirements, and abolished the ID record which had long offended Greece’s religious minorities. The Orthodox Church of Greece headed the opposition of those who believed that such an abolishment would lead to a profound identity crisis. The Church succeeded to mobilize about a third of Greek population, which did not change the course of events but showed how deeply ingrained was the religious dimension of Greek identity (Kokosalakis and Psimmenos 2005; Makrides 2005b; Roudometof and Makrides 2010). Nevertheless, the ongoing social transformations and global interactions affected the bulk of fellow believers. Altogether, we can say that while all these Churches are “officially” critical of globalization and of the societal trends connected to it, there exists a process of “adaptation from below”, at the level of ordinary practices, which animates the “dialogical perspective” in the relations of the Churches with the world. The official position of the Churches is now to respect, at least in most cases, the principles of neutrality towards the state and religious and ethnic pluralism, and to adapt some elements of teachings and practices to contemporary life. In these Churches, there was no deliberate, more or less organized process of aggiornamento such as led the Roman Catholic Church to the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5. Eastern Orthodox theology was more indifferent to social and political issues, keeping its focus rather on maintaining unchanged forms of piety and ultimate spiritual themes. However, a few Eastern Christian thinkers were very creative in reacting to the changing world and addressing its burning issues. A whole new tradition of theology and religiously inspired philosophy was created in Russia in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century (see Valliere 2000); this trend was followed by such people as George Florovsky (1972 and 1974), Alexander Schmemann (1979 and 1988), John Meyendorff (1995), Dumitru Stăniloae (1980 and 1994; see also Turcescu 2002), John Zizioulas (1985 and 2006), Olivier Clément (1972 and 1996), Christos Yannaras (1984 and 2006), and others. Their position generally consisted in drawing upon early Christian (mostly Greek) Fathers (theologians of the first millennium of the CE) to provide a constructive critique of the modern Western teachings and practices, trying to revive the spontaneous, salvific, eschatological spirit of early Christian spirituality, concentrated upon the mystery of the Communion, as opposed to what they saw as rationalism and materialism of both Western religious and Western secular ethos. More recently, there have been some theological attempts

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to fathom most current, cutting-age issues such as bioethics or human rights (see Breck and Breck 2005; Anastasios 2003; Alfeyev 2006b). There are also processes occurring “from below” that provide the local Churches with a pragmatic vision of the world and such a measure of necessary adjustment that does not threaten the specific identity of the tradition. Among local priests there have been some who demonstrated an unusual openness and depth in their pastoral ministry, clearly standing out from a much more conservative environment; such a person, for example, was Father Alexander Men’ in Russia, whose energetic and enlightening ministry in the hostile years of Soviet atheism was interrupted by his murder in 1990 (Hamant 1993). There are, of course, thousands of less graphic and less dramatic examples of such work in many Eastern Christian lands. In many cases, the Orthodox institutions and initiatives became integrated into the civil society (Daniel 2006). Also, the Church leaders, being quite pragmatic themselves and making de facto part of the political establishment of some countries (even though the Churches are not de jure established as “national religion”), are trying to use the advantages of globalization. As was said before, they use the discourse of otherness and traditionalism to claim a particular unique voice in the global concert, or a legitimate niche in the global (dis)order. Accordingly, they react to modern challenges, such as ecology, bioethics, democracy and human rights from an articulate conservative position, trying to preserve the tradition as the basis of a particular cultural identity. They use what can be called a passionate rhetoric of difference to enable them to become a special part of the global mosaic (see Roudometof et al. 2005). There are some examples of updating the theological and ideological vision of the world coming from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Church of Greece and other Churches, who publish ad hoc documents on various topical issues. One example of a more systematic attempt of formulating the vision of the modern world comes from the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church whose official hierarchy has been extremely active in this respect since the turn of the century. An officially adopted text called the “Bases of the Social Concept” (Osnovy 2001) deals with a wide range of issues including nationalism, Church-State relations, political models, work ethics, property relations, family, bioethics, globalization, and others. The position taken on these issues, as was said above, is generally moderately conservative: for instance, democracy is criticized as a political model although its advantages over authoritarian regimes are recognized; religious pluralism, free competition of faiths, and religious liberty are criticized although this legal regime is recognized as “a mode of existence of the Church in an irreligious world”; liberal market economy is rejected as corrupted and corrupting although private property is accepted as God-

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given, and planned socialist economy is clearly repudiated; advanced biotechnologies are seen as a dangerous intrusion into the Divine order while scientific research is accepted as necessary within certain limits; abortion is rejected generally but some exceptional circumstances are said to make it legitimate, and there is no clear-cut ban on contraceptives; and globalization is criticized as a standardizing threat to cultural diversity, to unique national and religious traditions. Another example is an ongoing discussion of the issue of human rights. Eastern Orthodox theologians and thinkers criticize the liberal concept of individual human rights that have been a foremost expression of Western post-World War II ethos. Similar to Muslim or Asian critics, Eastern Christians reject the principle of individual autonomy and endorse group rights and the values of traditional community. They refer to ideas of universal togetherness, catholicity, or all-unity that have both mystical (Eucharistic) and pragmatic (sociological) aspects. They believe that the Western concept of liberty means egocentrism, either totally unlimited or limited only “mechanically” by the liberty of another individual “atom”. At the same time, they are trying to draw upon a tradition of Christian anthropology, partly developing the writings of Church Fathers and later Orthodox theologians, and partly inventing it with some borrowings from relatively recent Western theology and philosophy. They fully endorse such ideas as human dignity and the centrality of personhood, while opposing liberal egocentrism and individualism, for the dignity of a person is nothing but his/her full communion with God, realization of the Divine image bestowed by God upon human nature. Finding new ways in a global world for the Eastern Churches implies also defining a new position towards other religions. Most of these Churches are members of the Ecumenical Movement, although the extent of ecumenical openness may differ if we compare, for example, the attitudes of openness within Romanian Orthodoxy with more developed anti-ecumenism in Serbia, Russia or Georgia. Overall, Eastern Churches are very cautious in not considering the Ecumenical Movement as a forum to unify Christianity under Western Christian guidance or, even less, any kind of “global ethics”. Officially, participation in this movement is seen as a way to witness what they believe to be the true Orthodox faith to the “apostate world”, while contacts with other Christian denominations may be seen as a common alliance against the values associated with global secular order rather than as a tool to negotiate with these values. In particular, in spite of older hostilities with the Roman Catholic Church (most bitterly over the Uniate Churches), the Orthodox Churches concur with the Catholics in their common attempts to make the European Union recognize its Christian cultural origins, and to assign more prominent roles to Christian institutions.

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This position also affects the relations with Islam, which continue to be of vital importance for the Eastern Churches. In spite of old rivalries and bad memories of past conflicts, starting with medieval wars and ending up with wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and conflicts in Macedonia, Albania, Northern Caucasus and the Middle East, the leaders of Eastern Churches usually are more critical of Western secularism rather than the Muslim religion, for they positively admit the intensity of faith, commitment and public importance of religion in Muslim countries. In inter-religious dialogues and in some ideological writings the Eastern Christian leaders promote the idea of equal plurality of religious faiths (Islam included) joined together against “the global liberal ethos”. This common cause of withstanding a secularist siege positively affects the relations with Judaism as well. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in the Christian East, compared to Western Christianity, there were very few examples of post-Holocaust rethinking of traditional Christian anti-Judaism, and anti-Semitic attitudes may be clearly felt, especially among the more nationalist and conservative clerical and lay circles. Basic Orthodox liturgical texts, for example, still contain some anti-Judaic elements already expelled from Western Christian worships. Religious intellectuals are trying to lobby the respective changes and to encourage a dialogue with the Jews. Overall, to characterize the attitudes of Eastern Christian Churches, including ecclesiastical authorities, lay thinkers and the mass of ordinary believers, we can assume that all of them are more or less reluctant to accept what they associate with global secular values; more or less cautious in their inter-religious contacts; more or less “moderately conservative” in their views on cutting-edge modern issues. Nevertheless, the very language of the discussions they are involved in, and the very fact of addressing these issues show the intention of finding, as we said before, a convenient form of negotiation with the world and of securing a more active role in it – a position dictated by the search to maintain vitality and the intention – and need – to cope with the still vigorous secularizing processes and the atmosphere of a new global diversity.

12. EASTERN ORTHODOXY IN A GLOBAL AGE (co-authored with Victor Roudometof) In our century, religion has emerged as one of the principal agents for interpreting and comprehending our Global Age (Albrow 1997). Moreover, the study of religion can help social scientists develop theoretical tools suitable for analyzing and comprehending the entirety of what we call “global processes”. When clothed in religious categories and analyzed through religious phenomena, the dialectic of globality – with all its advances and controversies, its challenges and responses – appears in highly articulated and explicit ways (see Rifkin 2003). Although the religious response to globality is usually stereotyped as predominantly negative and anti-global, religion provides a crystal-clear expression of the entire dialectic of globalization, not just a negative reaction to it. Scholars studying religion in the globalizing context have emphasized that religion itself can “go global” and acquire traits making it structurally congruent to the condition of globality as such. While religion can be bluntly repulsive and self-protective against globality, it may also become involved into a complex and painstaking negotiation with globality. It is our purpose in this volume to explore this complex response within Eastern Christianity. In this Introduction we outline the conceptual and theoretical framework of this volume. We start with an overview of the present state of the field. Next, we present our own understanding of the intricate relationship between religion and globality. We develop an interpretation that accounts for the interplay between the two concepts and for the realities these concepts designate in contemporary life. Furthermore, we use our theoretical perspective to account for the crucial contemporary developments in Eastern Orthodoxy, as well as, for the evolution of recent scholarly perspectives toward this religious tradition. The Dialectic of Religion and Globality: Three Responses It is well-known that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century the word “globalization” (or its French counterpart “mondialisation”) completely dominates the social and political sciences and is usually construed in terms of an unprecedented growth of communications and economic and financial interdependence. What is less known, however, is that the first attempt to theoretically fathom and thematize globalization has been made within the scientific study of religion. Robertson and Chirico (1985) were among the very first to have introduced the term “globalization” into academic

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circulation, and their initial discussion was in the context of an essay devoted to religion. Other works on the subject followed, elevating the height of scholarly sophistication.1 Why did religion happen to be found in the very heart of social-scientific theorizing about globalization? There are several reasons. First, the 1980s and 1990s were the period of a highly intense and visible return of religion into the public square in many parts of the world. Second, religion came to be perceived, in a new fashion, as a quintessential ferment of “cultures and civilizations”, which were seen, after the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc, as major agents of global “clashes”. Third, some processes that were taking place in religions looked amazingly similar to the undergoing globalizing trends in the economic and financial field. This fact made it strikingly clear that these globalizing trends were not just the continuation of the past development, but rather went far beyond the economy and finances, and related with all fields of the human Lebenswelt, leading to some crucial shifts in societies and cultures. Therefore, religious phenomena – seemingly utterly remote from hardcore economic development – have stimulated theoretical generalizations about the notions of “globality”, “global society”, “global culture”, and “globalism” as an ideological discourse.2 Finally, prior to the age of Enlightenment, religion almost exclusively possessed the very idea of the universal. The problématique of “universal and particular” was expressed in the most poignant manner within religious traditions. Therefore, in a certain sense, the very notion of “globalization” has a quasi-religious meaning (Robertson and Chirico 1985). However, the meaning of globality, as applied to religion, has profoundly changed. As 9/11 has so eloquently demonstrated, it is necessary to draw a sharp distinction between the sheer experience of globality and its normative endorsement (or cultural acceptance as the human condition of our times). In this regard, we need to point out that a clear distinction should be made between two concepts: a global religion, on the one hand, and a religion in the global age, on the other. It is true that the global trends go across denominations or Churches, but not all of these denominations and Churches are equally perceptive and creative in their responses to these trends. In each faith we can find both a positive embracing of, and a negative protection from, globality; but each faith combines these reactions in a different ratio. We will find an ideal type of a global religion much more pronounced in new Pentecostalism, less in Roman Catholicism, and even less, say, in Shintoism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity. 1 2

See Robertson and Garrett 1991; Beyer 1994; from more recent works, see Bastian, Champion and Rousselet 2001; Berger and Huntington 2002; Rifkin 2003. For a general overview of the field, see the collected essays in Robertson and White 2003.

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Of course, all major “world religions” might also be called “global”, and they are so, in the sense of the universalism of their claims. In this sense, and depending upon the temporal dimension of the discussion, different terms can be applied in markedly different ways. In this chapter, the term “global religion” is meant in a narrow, limited sense, and refers only to the contemporary (post-World War II) period, the period Albrow (1997) has called the Global Age. During this era, the multifaceted processes of globalization, and the “condition of globality” have led to several major shifts in religion as a socio-cultural phenomenon. There are three major modes of expressing the reconfigured sense of religiosity in the Global Age of the twenty-first century. First, it is precisely the emergence of a type of religion that we might call “global” (in the sense delineated above). Second, one of the religion’s responses to globality is to be designated as “archaic” or “traditional” (and sometimes commentators would go as far as to claim the term “antiglobal” for some of them). Third, a religion might operate as a genre of identity, a concept we will explain later on. (a) Global religion. Drawing partly upon our predecessors in the field, let us summarize the trends of the first response, that of articulating “global religion” in our time. In other words, what are those features that pertain to the “globalization of religiosity”? First, there appears a realization that religion is becoming globally meaningful again. In the lively discussion among scholars of religion, it is the desecularization of the world that is rapidly becoming a mainstream, dominant view (see Berger 1999, 2001; Swatos and Christiano 1999). Hence, religion is rediscovered as a constant and increasing agency that retains a globally relevant symbolic capital. Berger (2002: 10) refers to only two cultural entities where secularism looks unchallenged: one is the subculture of the academe and another is the geographical – and perhaps cultural – area of Western and Central Europe (see also Voyé 1999; Davie 2002). If we accept these exceptions, they only confirm the rule; the religiosity in the rest of the world remains quite intense and sometimes growing. It is against the backdrop of these general trends that we have to locate the condition of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. To put it bluntly, is it the case that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is closer to its Western European counterparts? Or, is Eastern Orthodoxy closer to the worldwide trends toward the “return of God” into public life? Second, globalization of religiosity leads to the formation of a global religious market, increasingly subscribing to the principle of “free demand and free supply”. This global religious market is often also present on a local level through the renewed presence of missionaries, new sects, cults and other denominations into regions hitherto untouched by religious diversity. As notions of a closed space become essentially ungrounded (Beck 1997: 25), the compression of the world into “one place”

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brings all religions intimately face to face and lines them up in a row of equal and competing symbolic orders subject to individual choice. Therefore, we witness the de-territorialization of religion assuming the form of a “portable” or even “pocket” religion disseminated across the traditional confessional, political, cultural and civilizational borders. Similar to other cultural phenomena, religion becomes a sort of universal software, suited to translocal application (Saint-Blancat 2001: 78ff.; van der Veer 2002). As an economic and/or political form, religion becomes increasingly transnational and transethnic. It finds itself cut off from some definite historical roots, a Tradition, linked to a collective memory of particular communities. The most vivid examples of such “global religions” are believed to be Protestant Evangelical Churches, Pentecostalism, New Age, Bahá’í, and some others.3 The new institutional culture, the so-called network religion, is clearly different from a traditional hierarchical constitution with a single center. Instead, it features a series of virtually autonomous communities with mobile ties and a flexible, not-rigid authority structure. Such communities multiply by cloning and easily cross the borders of the old political and denominational loyalties.4 Third, stemming from all of the above, religiosity becomes more individualized. The individual increasingly becomes the subject and the agent of religious preference. He/she enjoys more opportunities and more rights to build up his/her identity according to one’s own decision, independently from ascriptive affiliation with a particular religious and ethno-cultural tradition. This is what may be called “privatization of the access to symbolic resources” (Hervieu-Léger 2001: 90; see also Beyer 1994). This individualistic style of religiosity is clearly opposed to the traditional hierarchical and collectivist style of older religious forms. 5 Moreover, the goal of religion as such, the “purpose of faith” tends to be reduced to an individual selfrealization. All this leads to a growing relativization of personal identity, as well as to a reconfiguration of the meaning attached to individual membership in a cultural3

4

5

Sometimes, by its general structure and ideational content, these religions are viewed as “spiritual, or religious, correlates” of economic, financial, and political globalization. For an excellent account of Evangelicalism as conveying an “unintended gospel of modernity”, see Yates 2002. Pentecostalism remains the best example. But similar processes may be found in Roman Catholicism, where the rigid traditional authority structure is undermined or, at least, paralleled by spontaneously emerging flexible forms: See an interview with José Casanova: Globalization and Religion 2002: 101. To describe this style, Smith (1996: 106) refers to the metaphor of “sacral umbrellas”: “In the pluralistic modern world, people don’t need macro-encompassing sacred cosmoses to maintain their religious beliefs. They only need ‘sacred umbrellas’, small, portable, accessible relational worlds – religious reference groups – ‘under’ which their beliefs can make complete sense”.

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religious or ethno-religious community. Consequently, religious identity becomes complex, eclectic, and highly contextual: religiosity à la carte might be a suitable phrase to characterize these trends. Fourth, the new forms of religiosity emerging within this framework are marked by several distinct traits. These traits include: a relatively high intensity of individual participation (set in sharp contrast to the routine religiosity of the traditional mainstream); a charismatic passion; emotional-somatic expressiveness (e.g. involvement and the centrality of the body, with prominent exorcist and orgiastic elements); mystical intimacy; a certain simplification of the belief system, when dogmatic theology tends to be reduced to some “minimal credos” (e.g. “Jesus is the solution!”); the cult of performance (success and efficacy); the employment of media technologies in the service of religiosity; and an almost unique ability to fuse archaism with hyper-modernity, prominently displayed in the mega-Churches in the US, in Neo-Pentecostalism, in the Brazilian Igreja Universel do Reino de Deus, African Zionist Churches, etc.6 (b) Traditional/conservative response. The second response to globality goes under the rubric of “traditional religion” (Robertson 2000) or simply “tradition” (Giddens 1994). Sometimes, Western-centered perspectives of the new global taxonomy refer, however misleadingly, to such forms of religiosity as conservative or even archaic. But, contrary to the meaning implied by this term, this religious response is neither derivate nor purely reactionary or inconsequential. To grasp the nature of this response, it is important to keep in mind that the new forms of global religion are not a feature that applies to all the religious landscapes over the globe. On the contrary, there are huge geopolitical territories – religioscapes, as Appadurai (1996) calls them – that are only passively involved in the construction of globality. Some of them are even completely detached from these new trends. As Castells (1998) has pointed out, the symbolic and cultural geography of networks across the globe is the outcome of social processes that register mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The black holes in the “information superhighway” are not empty spaces where nothing happens, but rather, different modes of interdependence that signal the construction of historical trajectories qualitatively distinct from the trajectories of the advanced industrialized countries of the twenty-first century. What does it mean, then, to be registered as “traditional” or “archaic” in a globalized world, in a world driven by post-modern or late modern attitudes? It is by no means to be rejected or ignored by the advancing Modernity, as it used to be within 6

For an analysis of the Candomblé (an Afro-Brazilian religion) and its comparison to Pentecostalism, see Motta 2001. The size of these Churches and their planetary scope do not contradict the individualist focus and the seeking of “sacral umbrellas”, as mentioned before.

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the framework of the classical episteme of Enlightenment. Being “traditional” and “archaic” now means to be accepted as such and to be offered a certain functional niche, if only in a passive way, within a Hellenistic polytheism of this age (cf. Berger 2002). Globality is the “spirit” of the age, and nothing can escape its vortex. Therefore, the traditional religious response to globality displays an astonishing dialectic of global and particularistic impulses. On the one hand, there is the standardization and unification of religious phenomena (as of other cultural forms). But, on the other hand, these forms of homogenization are accompanied and counterweighed by an emphasis on specific identities, by the worship, fashion, and even a positive evaluation of “difference” for its own sake. The revival of ostensibly traditionalist religious particularisms around the world is part of a broader reaction that involves the reassertion of local, religious or ethno-national identities (see Smith 1981; Castells 1996 and 1997). In spite of their self-proclaimed traditionalism and anti-globalist, protective rhetoric, these movements do – objectively – legitimize themselves through the globalized Western discourse of multiculturalism and the universal acceptance of individual and/or collective rights. From the anti-WTO protesters to pro-life activists, social activists use the latest organizational technologies; they position themselves precisely in opposition – but by this very fact they inscribe themselves into the new global taxonomy as its legitimate part (or party), as its counter fort. Global Islam is the most obvious – but by no means the only – example. Kurzman (2002) notes: “Osama bin Laden may have operated from a cave in one of the least developed countries in the world, but his radical Islamic movement is thoroughly modern. In many ways, radical Islamists are a mirror image of Islamic liberals, whose peaceful struggle to establish democracy is actually more popular”. This point holds true for other similarly violent, yet obviously less visible groups (see Juergensmeyer 2001). The outcome of these opposite processes is glocalization, the simultaneous blend of homogeneity and heterorogeneity into a whole (Robertson 1995). (c) Religion as a genre of identity. The third type of religious response to globality represents yet another dimension of this dialectic. It is not the creation of new institutional forms congruent with globality, as in the first case; neither is the newly strengthened traditional rigidity – as a way of resistance or self-protection – of the second case. To explain this third mode, we would refer again to Ronald Robertson who writes that, in the global age, religion may be admitted not so much as an institutional enclave, along with other institutional sub-systems such as politics, economy, family, etc., but rather as a “genre of expression, communication and legitimation” of collective and individual identities (Garrett and Robertson 1991: xv; Robert-

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son 1991: 282). In this manner, both groups and particular individuals may use religion symbolically. Both institutional avenues and private means might be employed in this symbolic appropriation, and such means are in turn usually interwoven into a web of other identities (ethnic, kindred, cultural, local). For many people in today’s world religion is rediscovered in precisely this manner, as a new narrative of, or a cultural resource for identity. Such a rediscovery can take place in a variety of contexts, in spaces formerly subject to forced secularism, in late modern “post-religious” contexts, or in religiously vibrant post-colonial setting. We can observe many examples of such a subtle mode of religious presence, often intermixed with two previous responses. At this point, let us briefly summarize the place of religion within the global culture: If we assume that this culture is predominantly secular, we would suggest that religion, in its conventional meaning at least, will in no way constitute their central normative and symbolic core. Nevertheless, we would equally reject the assumption that religion will be radically rejected and set aside by the forces of globalization, a forecast often proclaimed as the necessary corollary of the “Modernity project” since the late eighteenth century. Perhaps the most likely development is that a predominantly secular global culture will allocate certain unfixed, movable niches for religious groups and religious sentiments. Such niches can take the form of new (“global”) forms of religiosity; or the form of more rigid reinforced “traditions” (who will also accept, sometimes reluctantly, the rules of the global game); or, finally, the mode of a symbolic genre that helps (re)construct and express an identity as a counterbalance to the strong impulse of homogeneity brought about by McDonaldization (Ritzer 2000; Barber 1995). Eastern Orthodoxy within the Global Context It is within this complex general picture that we now turn to an examination of the Eastern Orthodox tradition in the last few decades of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Let us address some of the questions already raised in the preceding paragraphs. Namely, we should consider whether Eastern Orthodoxy has produced some forms of “global religion”; the manner in which this tradition has sought to inscribe itself within the global symbolic and normative order; the niches it has established; its response towards the process of globalization and the “condition of globality”; and finally, the institutional means through which Eastern Orthodoxy has maintained its role as an “genre of identity”. The overall answer would be approximately as follows. We would agree that the Eastern Orthodox traditions have created no substantive infrastructure of what we

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have just called “global religion”. This is our operating assumption: we believe that “global religion” is not a term that can be meaningfully applied to Eastern Orthodoxy, at least not in the same manner or to a degree analogous of other faiths (such as Roman Catholicism, several Protestant denominations and sects, some varieties of Islam, Buddhism, Neo-Hindu varieties, as well as a portion of the New Religious Movements). However, it would be too simplistic and unreasonable to infer that Eastern Orthodoxy has been outside the global processes or completely uninvolved in significant negotiation with the global discourses, or at any rate unwilling or totally unsuccessful in its search of a certain modus vivendi in the global context. And it is obviously true, at any event, that for many individuals, Eastern Orthodoxy functioned as a genre of identity, included into the multivocal, complex choir of local identities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We must supplement these introductory remarks with the acknowledgment that the dominant mode of Eastern Orthodox responses to globality has been self-protective and communitarian, rather than self-adjusting and individualistic. As a matter of fact, most of the studies of this volume would clearly suggest that this is a plausible generalization. Keeping the unbroken Tradition has been the conscious goal par excellence for the overwhelming majority of religious movements, authors, and activists of the Eastern Orthodox cultural religioscape. By and large, the faith itself and the whole symbolic order associated with and supported by it have been used to preserve or even enhance a sense of “proud difference” that remains rooted in Tradition. For the Orthodox cultural universe, this Tradition often weaves several symbolic referents into a single genre of identity, whereby Church, ethnicity or nationality become signifiers of a single collective entity. Over the last several centuries, the dominant role of Eastern Orthodox tradition has been over-determined by this creative use of Tradition. Consequently, to this day, Orthodoxy’s stance within the new global taxonomy has been shaped by its continuous adherence to the historical legacy of early Christianity. What were the reasons for this particular stance? What were the particular priorities that led to the adoption of such a strategy? There are at least two general causal threads that help answer these questions. The first one can be called genetic and relates to the fundamental spirit and institutional culture of Eastern Christianity, while the second one may be called circumstantial and relates to the legacy of the communism for the majority of the Eastern Orthodox nations. The first causal thread might refer to features that permeate the historical evolution of Eastern Orthodoxy as a religious tradition with its own specific ethos and spiritual content. Of fundamental importance for the formation of a special temper within the Eastern Church was the combination of Christianity with the Hellenistic culture since the late Roman era. This fusion between the two equally cosmopolitan,

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yet radically opposite, cultures of the Mediterranean provided the central foundation for the construction of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The long centuries – roughly from the time of Roman Emperor Constantine up until the end of Germanic invasions in the Western Mediterranean – were also the critical era when this fusion took hold and consolidated in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. With the onslaught of the Great Schism between the Eastern and the Western Churches (1054), this religious culture became identified with Orthodoxy at large. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church was never organized in a strict hierarchical fashion. The original institutional structure of the Christian Church at the time of the Roman Empire included the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome. Among them, the traditional leadership position belonged to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. In sharp contrast to the Papacy, this position has always been considered primus inter pares (e.g. “first among equals”). This institutional structure, inherited from early Christianity, remained the focal organizational point for the Eastern Church for several centuries following the Great Schism; for example, as late as 1439, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic bishops contemplated the reunification between the two rival traditions. In practical terms, the evolution of Eastern Orthodoxy has to be understood against the backdrop of the principle of complementarity between the secular and religious leadership. According to Church tradition, the religious establishment complements the secular leader in his execution of duties, providing spiritual leadership and exercising moral control upon state authority. On the other hand, secular leadership is often allowed and expected to play a role in protecting, expanding, and serving the religious institution. For several centuries, the Eastern Roman Empire, especially since Justinian (6th c. CE), provided the paradigmatic case of such a co-existence (symphonia) between secular and religious institutions (see Mango 1980). With the Fall of Constantinople (1453), however, the world power of a Christian Emperor vanished; its place was assumed by the worldly power of a Muslim overlord, the Ottoman Sultan. Consequently, the institutional structure of the Eastern Orthodox Church authority was radically reconfigured. Within the Ottoman Empire, the Patriarch of Constantinople remained, symbolically, primus inter pares. Still, for several centuries, the Patriarch was able to reassert a privileged position through the close physical proximity with the new authority structure, especially after the expansion of Ottoman power into the Middle East (whereby, the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch also fell within the Ottoman imperial boundaries). The policy of accommodation with Ottoman rule duplicated the symphonia of the earlier period; while, in order to justify submission to a non-Christian overlord, myths and

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legends postponed the overthrow of Muslim rule to the End of Time. But the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate (1589) represented the first step toward the fragmentation of the Eastern Orthodox cultural universe. In the centuries that followed, the Russian Empire claimed to restore the imperial symphonia of the Byzantine era, albeit with a strong national emphasis. It is worth pointing out in this context that the imperial projects of the Romanovs were frequently founded on the Russian mission of protecting the fellow Orthodox and liberating them from the Ottoman rule (see Jelavich 1991 for an overview). With the gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the territorial sovereignty of the new nation-states led to the construction of independent, autocephalous national Churches. It is worth recalling that the principle of complementarity between the secular and religious leadership provided the fundamental rationale for this institutional reorganization. Some of the new Churches assumed the status of junior (neogene) Patriarchates, supplementing the four ancient Patriarchates, while others assumed the more modest title of autocephalous Church. Among the junior recognized Patriarchates are Serbia (1920), Romania (1925), Bulgaria (1953) and Georgia (1990). Today, these Patriarchates accompany the Patriarchate of Moscow (1589), which, for several centuries, used to be the sole Orthodox jurisdiction outside Ottoman control.7 The construction of nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was coupled with the emergence of modern nationalism. The new ideology also influenced the nature of religious affiliation. Over the last two centuries, most of the new national Churches have been effectively “redeployed” along the new national lines, whereby belonging to them has also meant belonging to the Greek, Serb, Romanian, Bulgarian or Macedonian nations.8 This contested, yet ultimately successful, process of employing religious affiliation for signifying membership into new secular entities (ethnic or national groups) has been the hallmark of the transition of the Eastern Orthodox Christians into the modern era (Ramet 1988). It represents perhaps the most solid example of the creative use of Tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy at large. This entire history that we have only briefly outlined has led to at least two special characteristics that define

7

8

Below the level of the Patriarchates are several autocephalous Churches, of which the first to get autocephaly was the Church of Cyprus (in 431 AD). Other Churches received such autocephaly much later. Here, they are listed in chronological order: the Church of Greece (1850), of Czechoslovakia (1923) (now Orthodox Church in Czech and Slovak Republics), of Poland (1925), of Albania (1937), and the Orthodox Church in America. (1970). Then follow some “autonomous archbishoprics”, such as that of Mount Sinai (1575), of Finland (1923), of Estonia (1923), and of Japan (1970) (Oikonomou 1993). For details and further discussion, see Roudometof 2001.

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a special ethos of Eastern Orthodoxy: a crucial stress upon the immutability of Tradition and a critical link with national identities. The second causal thread that makes the difference for Eastern Orthodoxy pertains to a relatively recent experience of communism. Most of the Eastern Orthodox countries have been included into the Eastern Bloc, and following 1989, in the ambiguous category of “post-communist” Eastern Europe.9 There has been a longstanding assumption in the public and academic opinion that this very fact of communist domination was caused, at least partly, by Eastern Orthodox cultural legacy. Indeed, during the 1990s, a series of influential commentators (Kaplan 1993; Kennan 1993; Huntington 1996) have suggested a link between the cultural traditions of Eastern Europe and the failure of most of these countries to accomplish a successful transition to democracy or to successfully integrate into a new, united, Europe (Clark 2000). Communism was, according to this essentialist approach, a temporary form or reaction to Western Modernity, encoded in Eastern Orthodox spiritual and cultural tradition. This type of causality may be extended into the post-communist era: when the communist system broke up, this same spiritual and cultural tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, endorsed another form of the anti-Western and anti-modern reaction, which was ethno-nationalism and fundamentalist protectionism – an inference that can be supported by the special link of Eastern Orthodoxy with local national identities, which we have mentioned in the previous paragraphs. It is one of the major scholarly tasks to test this type of reasoning, which sometimes borders at simplistic stereotypes that have gained legitimacy among the informed public and policy makers. At the same time, we should consider communism in Eastern Europe not so much as a dependent variable, subject to long-running cultural factors, but rather as a crucial factor per se, a factor that has significantly affected not only the history of these peoples but also the religious tradition of Eastern Christianity. In the twentieth century, communism has affected the Orthodox spiritual landscape through direct repression or the promotion of an alternative ethos, through freezing any spontaneous development of theological, sacramental, and ecclesiastical forms of the Churches, and through the forceful separation of religious life from the larger society. Thus, religious tradition has been effectively prevented from consciously adapting itself to the social, cultural, and, indeed, global changes that have been unfolding throughout the last century. As a result, Eastern Orthodoxy 9

In no way can we ignore the exceptions such as the Church of Greece and some other branches of Orthodoxy developed outside the “Eastern Bloc”. However, Greece has long lived under autocratic regimes, and the end of the communist era in Eastern Europe strongly affected Greek developments (see Roudometof and Makrides 2010). Speaking of the Orthodox Christian diaspora in the West, we can certainly assume that its intellectual and spiritual expressions were strongly affected by the fact of communist domination in the home countries.

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came out of the communist ghetto with a limited ability to respond to rapid restructuring, with no elaborate forms of social and political involvement, with a relatively narrow intellectual outlook and ability to grasp the new geopolitical realities – including the “condition of globality”. Remarkably, these two causal threads we have just described – one centered on the “cultural genome” of Eastern Orthodoxy and another, on the experience of totalitarianism – have merged together in the discourses of the 1990s. Whichever of the two was the primal cause, we have to admit that there is a certain correlation between these factors. In the post-1989 period, the particular vision of Eastern Orthodoxy as a conservative social force, which inhibited liberal modernization, was revived, setting off a clash between the traditional communitarianism of the Orthodox Church and the neo-liberal developmental strategies that prioritize individual rights, privacy, democratization, and unimpeded transnational processes. If we assume that this orientation really exists and, indeed, defines an overall stance of Eastern Orthodoxy towards “globality”, we still need to explore a vast field opening before us. So far, most scholars have either taken the so-called “conservative” nature of Orthodoxy for granted or simply neglected to include Eastern Orthodoxy among their cases (see, for examples, Beyer, 1994 and Casanova, 1994). This is the gap is to be filled by futher research. First, we still need to explore, as we have already mentioned before, how this “conservative” and “protectionist” position is inscribed into the “global culture”. Second, we should analyze the varying degrees of this position and the specifics of individual cases. Third, we should see some universal trends and general patterns in religiosity going across continents and denominations and making Eastern Orthodoxy a part of a broader picture, rather than an idiosyncratic entity. For example, over the last two decades, the institutional and cultural framework of Church-State relations in the European states has experienced considerable changes, mostly in the direction of decreased control over religious institutions and increased availability of state funds for religious organizations (Madeley 2003: 13– 7). Although part of this trend is an outgrowth of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the general pattern is not confined either to Eastern European or solely Eastern Orthodox states. Rather, it is part of the broader intellectual and cultural trend that questions the so-called “liberal” doctrine of the separation of Church and State in Western societies. In large part, then, these trends are connected to the “identity issue” in contemporary cultural politics, and the subsequent “return of the God” into the political, civil, and cultural spheres (Bauman 2001). This process is just a muted European echo of a universal trend best expressed in the Third World

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countries where “God walks in history” (Friedland 1999). In this respect of maintaining and revitalizing an identity narrative, in the face of globality, Eastern Orthodoxy shares much of the same vigor as many religions in the Third World. Let us take another example: the rates of religious beliefs and practices as recorded by World Value Surveys (WVS) and The European Values Study (EVS). Interestingly, the belief in God rates appears higher in this area than in most of the advanced Western European democracies (see Therborn 1995: 275, for a comparison). In fact, poll results from Eastern European countries have experienced wide swings after the fall of communism. Table 1 below reports the percentage of those who declared they believe in God as well as the percentage of those who declared that they attend church more than once per month. Table 1: Patterns of Religiosity in Orthodox Countries, 1990–2000 1990–1991

Belarus

1990– 1991 Belief in God 43

1995–1997

Church attendance 6

1995– 1997 Belief in God 68

1999–2000

Church attendance 14

1999– 2000 Belief in God 82.9

Bulgaria

40

9

60

16

66.2

20.2

Greece

n/a

33.7*

n/a

34.8*

93.8

43.2

Romania Russia

94

31

n/a

n/a

96.3

46.4

44

6

60

8

70.3

9.2

Ukraine

n/a

n/a

65

18

80.3

16.9

Serbia

n/a

n/a

61

15

n/a

n/a

Macedonia

n/a

n/a

75

18

n/a

n/a

Church attendance 14.5

Source: WVS (1990–91, 1995–7) and the 1999–2000 EVS (Halman 2001). Values are percentages of total population. The Greek data are adopted from Georgiadou and Nikolakopoulos (2001). * The 33.7 percent is from a 1989 survey, and the 34.8 percent from 1996.

As the Table shows, in Bulgaria, according to the statistics reported at the 1990–91 World Values Survey (WVS), 40 percent of the public answered affirmatively when asked whether they believe in God and only 9 percent attended church at least once a month. In the 1995–7 WVS, these figures changed dramatically, with the first question gaining 60 percent of affirmative answers and with the second question climbing

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to 16 percent (WVS, 1990–1, 1995–7). Similarly, in Russia the WVS data reported from 1990–1 are 44 percent for belief in God and 6 percent for church attendance, while in 1995–7 the same figures climbed to 60 percent and 8 percent respectively. Hence, in terms of sheer numbers, it would appear as if a religious revival took place in the 1990s in the former communist countries, as the collapse of communism paved the way for the revitalization of religious ties. Still, this hypothesis is set against an alternative interpretation, namely, that, “the atheization of Eastern Europe, if anyone believed in it, was a myth” (Borowik 2002: 498). We also observe (as the table reflects) a certain weakening of a revivalist fervor by the end of the 1990s, with a progressing societal stabilization (especially in terms of religious practice). 10 Even more importantly, we notice a marked discrepancy between the figures of the declaration of belief (or of importance of religion in various aspects of life), on the one hand, and those of religious practice (church attendance and prayer), on the other hand, in most of Orthodox cases. This discrepancy reveals, in our view, a specific mixed type of religious identity, where the Western European pattern of benign indifference is increasingly manifested, while, at the same time, the semiotic significance of religion remains relatively important. This, of course, is the well-documented phenomenon of “diffused religion” or of “believing without belonging”. In other words, the existence of traditional Churches is coupled with a relaxation or a lack of strict adherence to the religious norms. Still, the ubiquitous presence of religious leadership in official and semi-official functions as well as the religious symbolism and ceremonies intertwined with various forms of commemoration strongly suggest that it is at best naïve to ascribe to church attendance the symbolic significance it has, for example, in the United States. What is important for our purposes here is the extent to which this is not a phenomenon that is observed in Orthodox Eastern and Southeastern Europe – but rather it is a feature of the broader European religious economy. This being said, it is necessary at this point to revisit both “causal threads” that dominate the academic and popular perception of Eastern Orthodoxy. We are very far from denying any of these two fundamental factors that determined the present state of this religious tradition: its cultural and historical roots and its recent com-

10 Moreover, the rates vary considerably from country to country: as for 1999/2000, Romania ranks among the most religious nations (similar is Greece; the case of Belarus needs special qualifications), while Bulgaria and Russia, in spite of the increase of the 1990s, still show numbers lower than the European average, close to those of France or Denmark (Halman 2001). The figures for France are 62 percent and 9 percent, for Denmark, 69 percent and 9 percent; average for Europe is 77 percent and 25 percent respectively).

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munist experience. We need a fresh exploration of these factors, in order to eventually inscribe this religious culture into the changing worldwide interaction of religion and globality

13. GLOBALIZATION AND IDENTITY DISCOURSE IN RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY (co-authored with Kathy Rousselet) Introduction: New Global Challenges for Russian Orthodoxy The main challenge that the Russian Church faced in the post-communist era was perhaps freedom. Not only was it unprecedented for the Church itself: freedom of institutional autonomy and freedom of expression. It also implied an equally unprecedented degree of (almost) free expression of other religions. The same condition of freedom from which the Russian Orthodox Church benefited also created an unrestricted diversity and competition in the religious field. The same freedom that was a source of Russian Orthodox revival created a problem of identity unknown thus far. Freedom, in its wider sense, created another big challenge: a new post-Soviet geopolitical configuration in Eurasia, the erosion and reshuffling of habitual alliances in the area, as, indeed, the world over. Alongside the emergence of new independent nations within the region came political and communicative openness and loosening of national borders in global interaction. This double condition had a double effect for the Church: creating a new national frame (the Russian Federation), different from the historical imperial scope, but, at the same time, undermining the traditional nation-centered model of the Church, with large Russian Orthodox communities now in the “near abroad” or in new emigration worldwide, and an open possibility of choosing other ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The third and the biggest challenge of all, also connected to this freedom syndrome, is probably a new situation of structural secularism, which came to replace the previous anti-religious atmosphere. As one of the grand narratives of Modernity, communism repressed and displaced all others, including religion. When communism significantly lost its legitimating capacity, its symbolic capital, and its ideological appeal, the new situation has temporarily led to an ascent of those discourses and movements that earlier were underground, including religion. Thus, the ideological and political context in the crucial time of the late 1980s was generally favorable to religion. But this rise of religion occurred in a quite new context, when the notion of “religion” itself assumed a new meaning. A form of monolithic, absolutistic narrative, of which the Russian Orthodox Church was a classical example, has largely lost its might. In line with a global trend that has partly affected the Russian cultural landscape, “religion”, in a significant shift, now became a highly individualized ex-

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pression of non-rigid, flexible quests that do not claim “universal and eternal” validity. According to Garrett and Robertson (1991: xv), religion becomes “a genre of expression, communication, and legitimation [of collective identities and individual needs] rather than simply an institutional enclave alongside political, economic, and familial entities, as was [religion’s common image] during the modern era”. Peter L. Berger (2002: 11) speaks of “religious preference”, a term that best reveals this new religiosity and is contrasted to the traditional term “confession”. As the process of globalization undermines the traditional monopoly of the national state, it also undermines the traditional monopoly of a “national Church” as the common “community cult” (Casanova 2001: 9, 12). In Russia, however, all these trends, far-reaching and obvious as they are in Western context, created a paradoxical combination with a Church reemerging as a dominant agent, claiming consensual normative authority in the nation and largely retaining an image of a unifying pan-national institution (Wozniuk 1997; Filatov 1999; Agadjanian 2001b). Nevertheless, it is true that the 1990s were marked by an exponential diversification and vibrancy of the Russian religious landscape. That was a time of an inflow of Western religious groups and individuals. For relatively educated people in Russia, the Western Churches and missionaries somehow possessed obvious advantages by virtue of their symbolic connection to the “democratic universe”. Also, the development of a non-denominational, small scale, or even individual religion and New Religious Movements, according to the Western pattern of “diffuse” or “patchwork” religiosity, was both a fashion and a sustained demand in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other big cities in those critical times. The Russian territory was rapidly becoming a part of global religious networks. Religion, in all its forms, was thus a part of a titanic process of inclusion of the nation into the new global taxonomy as a part of the “democratic West”. Overall, the complexity of the social, political, or religious context in post-Soviet Russia, consisted in a coincidence of two simultaneous transformations: the quest for classical, liberal Modernity (which was believed to have been missed because of the communist era) and the entry to the Late Modernity (or Post-Modernity), of which globalization was one fundamental feature. This coincidence reflected the real complexity of the evolution of Russian society as a whole. On the one hand, it implied a new wave of rapid modernization, with an erosion of traditional forms partly deepfrozen by the Soviet system, the growing new social differentiation, the explosion of individualism, the appropriation – by a limited but leading segment of society – of most recent technological and institutional innovations imported from the open global space; but, simultaneously, on the other hand, the dogmas of Modernity went under revision, which led to a revived quest for traditional “grand narratives” as sources of identity and the accommodation of these old forms into a new, plural

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gamut of options. Correspondingly, the reaction of Russian Orthodoxy was necessarily twofold. Its double task can be formulated as follows: how, first, to come to terms with secular Modernity (a classical quest for aggiornamento), and, second, how to achieve a congruence with the new frame of Late (Post)Modernity and to inscribe oneself into the new global context. In the following pages we will track these responses of Russian Orthodoxy through some authoritative texts and some significant events, mostly taken from the last decade of the twentieth century. The crucial themes that illustrate these responses will include the understanding of the human person and personal freedom, the notion of tradition, and the notion of sacral and cultural space. We will then insert religious discourses into a broader framework of the Russian nation. In the concluding section we will focus upon comprehending Russian Orthodox attempts to negotiate a place in the global world. The Discourse on the Human Person: Contesting Liberalism The official image of the Russian theological response to world issues is dominated by a group of leading clerics headed by Metropolitan (and later Patriarch) Kirill Gundiaev.1 In a series of writings and speeches Kirill and his aides articulated a tentative theological-theoretical comprehension of the new era, something that attended to sort of a Muscovite theology of (anti)globalism. The significance of these views is supported by the authors’ official weight and by their ability to reconcile a diversity of views within the Church in a certain resultant average. 2 Kirill’s leitmotif is a global divide between two mega-concepts or worldviews: (neo)liberalism and traditionalism:

1

2

It was Kirill’s office, the Moscow Patriachate’s Department of External Relations, that was the most vibrant part of the otherwise excessively prudent clerical bureaucracy throughout the 1990s. By definition, Kirill’s Department was acting at the edge of new challenges and produced some remarkable initiatives, including the Social Concept of the Church (see next note). The main contributions by Kirill were two large articles: “Obstoiatel’stva novogo vremeni” [The Circumstances of the New Era] (Gundiaev 1999b), and “Norma zhizni kak norma very” [The Norm of Life as a Norm of Faith] (Gundiaev 2000a). The second paper was converted, with certain changes, to a paper in The Ecumenical Review (Gundiaev 2001). Some of the ideas discussed in these writings were included in Chapter 16 of the “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, adopted by the Bishops’ Council in 2000 (see Osnovy 2001), and then in the “Bases of the Teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church on Dignity, Freedom and Human Rights” (Osnovy 2008).

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An implicit … real underpinning of all military, political, cultural, religious, national and other conflicts we witness in the post-communist era reveals a resistance of the conservative, traditionalist worldview against an accelerated, not to say forced, affirmation of neoliberal values. Such is the real script of the ideological drama of our days … A fundamental contradiction of our era and thus the main challenge to humankind in the twentyfirst century is the opposition of liberal civilizational standards, on the one hand, and the values of national cultural and religious identity, on the other. (Gundiaev 1999b)

Kirill provides an analysis of neo-liberalism in terms of metaphysics and history of ideas. “Liberal standards”, or values, are secular by nature, cut off from traditional spiritual, religious roots. Liberalism places the “fallen man”, who “abides in sin”, in the center of the “anthropocentric universe” (ibid.). By doing so, liberalism reflects a “spiritual involution” of Western thought from Christian values back to the “regressive pagan ethics and worldview”, the one that Arnold Toynbee called “idolatry in its worse form of human self-worship” (ibid.). Absolute freedom, or liberty, of the individual, which is the foundation of liberalism, goes beyond all limits, including the limits of sin, for the notion of sin as such does not exist in liberalism; thus liberalism supports the “idea of the emancipation of the sinful individual, and therefore, the deliverance of the sinful potential of the human person. The free person can reject anything that binds him, everything that prevents him from the affirmation of his sinful self” (Gundiaev 2000a). What happened in the Christian West (as opposed to the Christian East) was, according to Kirill, exactly this reception of the principle of human freedom as “supreme value”, and thus “the blessing of the union between a Neo-Pagan doctrine and Christian ethics”. The “liberal standard” thus combines Christian and pagan principles (Gundiaev 1999b). Besides Christian (both Catholic and Protestant) and “NeoPagan” components, Kirill refers to a third source of secular liberalism, the Jewish medieval and modern philosophy, especially the “free-thinkers, atheists, and pantheists, who deviated from traditional Judaism” (ibid.). This liberal individual is opposed to the “unique human person” as defined in the official Social Concept of the Church: the true “human dignity” is not derived from, but is opposed to, Western “liberal ethos”. The discourse appears most visible in the treatment of bioethics: assisted reproduction or cloning constitutes a threat to the “dignity of human person”, to “personal uniqueness” (Osnovy 2001: XII). As for globalization, it is unacceptable if it promotes a “universal non-spiritual culture grounded upon the fallen man’s unlimited freedom which is conceived as the absolute value and the measure of truth” (Osnovy 2001: XVI.3). In many other episodes of the continuous debates, the “liberal ethos” becomes the strongest threat to the spiritual realm of Russian Orthodoxy, and the final target of the threat is identified with the “uniqueness of the human person” and “human dignity”.

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To show how intricate the semantic puzzle of the “individual” and the “person” can be and how far an opposition to globalization can go, let us address a very revealing, if somewhat grotesque, example of a fundamentalist movement – the 1999 to 2000 campaign against the introduction of Individual Tax Numbers (ITN, or INN in Russian) – which significantly created a temporary embarrassment in the Church leadership, before it eventually repudiated the campaign and rejected any theological significance in the “codification”. This bureaucratic measure was represented as a totalitarian intrusion into privacy, construed as a by-product of globalization. An extreme “right wing” of the clergy suspected the presence of the apocalyptic number 666, the “Seal of Antichrist”, in ITN, and called for excommunicating those who accepted this innovation.3 In January 2001 a round table was reported as having been organized under the auspices of the State Duma with an active participation of the clergy. 4 The statement of the event called for federal authorities and President Putin to stop the introduction of the “electronic form of totalitarian control over the population”, “imposed from abroad”, such as personal identification codes or ITN; to abolish the newly adopted system of bar-coding EAN-13/UPC; and to develop a “national alternative” for codification. Throughout this and similar texts, Christian apocalyptic references were interwoven into a strong anti-globalist discourse. The entire statement we have just cited from was called “Globalization: Personal Codes as a Problem of Ideological (mirovozzrencheskogo) Choice of the People”; the first two clauses of the document went as follows: 1. Globalization is an anti-Christian ideology professing a utopian idea of a planetary state with a single transnational governing center…

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Some influential clerics were involved in this alarmist discourse, including starets (elder) Kirill Pavlov, confessor of the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra Monastery, or hieromonk Rafail (Segodnia, February 21, 2001). See also a 600-page volume with a subtitle “Globalism, Digital Personal Codification, and the Seal of Antichrist”, which methodically denounced globalization as directed to a “false carnal” project of world unity, as a fulfillment of the apocalyptic prophecy, with traditional references to “Judeo-Masonry”, “world government”, messianic patriotic rhetoric, and a respectful discord with the official position of the Patriarchate (Avel [Semenov] and Drozdov 2003). The “round table” was attended, according to Zavtra (February 9, 2001), by “the members of the State Duma, representatives of Orthodox associations, journalists of Orthodox and patriotic media, priests, monks, and lay people from ten dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church”.

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2. A participation of the Russian Federation in the building of this united world superstate contradicts Russia’s historical mission. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian State have always been historically the strongest barrier against any force seeking world domination. (Zavtra, February 9, 2001)

The official statement on the ITN issue by the Theological Commission of the Patriarchate rejected any apocalyptic significance of the case, but interestingly, it nevertheless did not fail to emphasize that: …[G]lobalization … can be used by the evil will in order to enslave people and communities. Thus it cannot be denied, that there is a threat of using various technologies to set up a system of total control, to violate the secrecy of private life, and to oppress a person’s right for religious and ideological choice. (NG-Religii, February 28, 2001)

For some participants of the debate, the opposition to ITN comes from the fear of disclosure of privacy, in the same way as the domination of the public sphere in Soviet times created an irrational fear of the state. Those who remember the surveillance of the Committee of Religious Affairs would advance an idea that the Christians could be totally controlled by the tax number. The ITN personal codes would be associated with the control of the individual in the Gulag. For others, the ITN and computer-based control produce fears of a new virtual economy, which could bring new individual failures. Ironically, the ITN fighters presented themselves as champions of individual freedom, freedom of conscience, and privacy. 5 The Orthodox fundamentalists’ affirmation of individual freedom against the threats of globalization looks paradoxical, for it is this affirmation that lies, apparently, at the very center of the Western global project. But this paradox can be easily untangled: The ITN fighters revolt not for, but against individual rights, as they are understood within the global project, because this project brings the de-sacralization of the human person, of his or her Christian identity:

5

The website “Russian Resurrection” published a declaration stating: “Introduction of the ITN is the economic and political course of the government, but also a legal and ethical issue, an issue of respect of civil rights and the freedom of conscience. The state has no right to require of the citizens the acceptance of the ITN, for they infringe the individual rights as they are guaranteed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation…”

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ITN is the code, the personal number of a person; as our startsy put it with their great wisdom, by accepting the number we reject the sacred name given to us through baptism, we reject God. 6

Although only a small minority of clerics and believers shared these apocalyptic misgivings, the example is quite poignant: it reveals something intrinsically ambivalent in the perception of globalization in traditional religious perspective. Associating globalization and liberalism in a single anti-Western impulse, Orthodox critics reject both the “depersonalizing monoculture” and the triumph of the individual freedom. They reject both “unlimited personal freedom” and a universalistic threat to this freedom. They reject both classical, Orwellian, collectivistic totalitarianism and the “new totalitarianism” of the atomized individuals (Kliuchnikov 2000: 246). Yet, while resisting the “unification” and the “aggressive monoculture” (to which liberalism is eventually reduced), the mainstream Russian Orthodoxy, in its authoritative documents at least, does not elaborate any consistent and positive notion of the personality; while the individual is passively protected from the leveling conformity, he or she is not entrusted with an active freedom of autonomous choice. What remains beyond (and between) the individual who is mistrusted and the universal which is resisted? The answer is a traditional community, either a Church, a nation, or a culture, or all three bound together (as in the expression “Orthodox people” used in the Social Concept, see Osnovy 2001: II.3). In other words, the individualistic-universalistic “globality” is rejected for the sake of a traditional cultural community, a “national alternative”, the uniqueness of national culture. And a human person is defined through his or her membership in such a community. 7 The Discourse of a Cultural Tradition: Contesting Secular Globalism According to the dominant theological discourse in Russian Orthodoxy, secular (neo)liberalism is the only “universal standard”, the only universal and global project of these days. Therefore, the postulated “fundamental contradiction” of this era may

6. 7.

A flyer entitled “Obrashchenie pravoslavnykh khristian Rossii po blagosloveniiu dukhovnikov izvestnykh monastyrei k Patriarkhu Aleksiiu” [Appeal to Patriarch Aleksii by Russian Orthodox Christians, Written with the Blessing of Confessors of Renown Monasteries]. Compare this position with the opinion of the French Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément. Although making many similar critical statements about globalization, he would nevertheless clearly emphasize the preponderance of personality over “nation” or “culture” (Clément 1998). Such emphasis is remarkably different from what we have just seen in the texts studied.

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also take another shape: “[G]lobalism … as an expression of the principle of universality versus conservatism and traditionalism as an expression of the principle of uniqueness and difference” (Gundiaev 1999b). Interestingly, Kirill straightforwardly allocates “universality” to secular liberalism, thus declining all claims for religious universalism and accepting the role of “traditional religion” in a new global taxonomy as utterly particularistic and local. “National culture”, “unique tradition”, historical heritage”, “cultural roots” are the most common phrases associated with religion in this discourse. The uniqueness paradigm is certainly a synthesis of another strong paradigm typical to post-Byzantine Eastern Orthodoxy: a dominant ecclesiology of the local Church as the only gate to the Universal Church.8 Overall, the discourse of the universal definitely yields to the discourse of particularism: the idea of uniqueness stands behind both the principle of autocephaly and the principle of national identity, thus creating a double and interconnected particularism of a Church and a Nation, a Church-Nation formula. The emphasis of “uniqueness and difference” leads Kirill to expound his central category, Tradition. He combines or alternates two Russian words with adjacent meaning: traditsiia (a generic term equal to “tradition”) and Predanie, in this case, a specifically religious “handing-on” (a calque from Greek paradosis, also rendered as “tradition” in Western languages, Tradition as opposed to Scripture). “Traditional religion” is a religion that follows a Tradition, the Tradition of the Church, the Predanie. Predanie is a norm-generating phenomenon, because Predanie is exactly the norm of faith … We understand any deviation from the Predanie as a violation of the norm of faith, or heresy … Following this norm not only does not constrain man’s freedom but protects him, as mother’s bosom, from death. (Gundiaev 2000a)

Kirill’s emphasis on Tradition is completely in line with Eastern Orthodox theological and historical ethos; as Konstantin Kostiuk insightfully observes, Tradition is as much a fundamental focus for Eastern Orthodoxy as Institution is for Roman Catholicism and Scripture for Protestantism (Kostiuk 2002). Indeed, there is a tendency in 8

This idea was clearly expressed in another document of the Church Council 2000, “Osnovnye printsipy otnosheniia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi k inoslaviiu” (Basic Principles of the Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church with Other Christian Confessions). [Russian inoslavie is lit.: heterodoxies, as opposed to Orthodoxy; see Osnovnye printsipy 2001)]. This document states: “It is only through the local community that each Church member relates to the entire Church. Breaking his/her canonical ties with the local Church (Pomestnaia Tserkov’), a Christian automatically damages his/her beneficial unity with the entire Church body, is torn off from it” (Osnovnye printsipy 2001: Ch. 1: 10).

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Eastern Orthodoxy to view Scripture as dominated by, or even a part of, Predanie (Tradition).9 For Kirill, this emphasis is not just a respectful Orthodox piety, but also the credo of the response to new global challenges. Tradition as a religious category, a Church’s Predanie, is a foundation of the tradition in a broader socio-cultural and ethno-national sense, the tradition of Russianness, and the two meanings of “tradition” correlate and sometimes merge. A “traditional religion” is precisely the one which follows the Predanie and creates a nation in a historical continuum. This combined religious-national identity appears as an immutable principle, while the tradition-Predanie functions as a guarantee of invariability. The emphasis on Tradition (in both senses) serves at least two momentous purposes. First, it refers to a collective memory of a particular community (a Church or a Nation) as opposed to the individual, “atomized” focus of liberalism; therefore, it generates an alternative communitarian instead of individual type of legitimation. Second, it refers to historical continuity, the roots as opposed to liberalism, which constituted itself through the rejection of Predanie, of Tradition in its normative aspect. If not uprooted or rootless completely, liberalism goes back, as we have quoted earlier, to the pagan anthropocentrism of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Jewish philosophy. Nowadays, nothing can protect peoples’ spiritual health and their religious and historical identity from the expansion of alien and destructive socio-cultural forces and a new lifestyle that emerged outside any tradition under the conditions of the post-industrial society. (Gundiaev 2000a)

Thus, Russian theologians create a typical conservative device of legitimation through roots, both spiritual and cultural. If the principle of faith is untouchable and normative, so equally is the Russian cultural tradition, which is called an expression of “the principle of uniqueness and difference” and presented as something that “protects as mother’s bosom”. However, they do not claim any Eastern Orthodox or nationalist exclusivity. They formulate the idea of multiple traditions as an absolute principle of world order, as opposed to the paradigm of universal globalization. This absolute principle of multiple traditions means that all cultures are rooted in immutable religious (spiritual) traditions – Predanies. It was remarkable that while speaking about the sources of liberalism in a passage we cited earlier, Kirill singles out dissident Jewish thinkers who “deviated from traditional Judaism”. It is by no means accidental that he binds 9

See hieromonk Sofronii Sakharov’s influential book on Siluan the Elder (Sofronii 2001; cited in Uliakhin 2003: 140f.).

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liberalism with apostate Judaism, thus indirectly vindicating “the true, traditional Judaism”, Judaism rooted in Predanie. This is an absolutely conscious and clearly articulated principle: In many instances he develops an utterly relativistic idea of equality of various traditions (Predanies). While other lifestyles are based upon their own traditions [predaniia – in plural (authors’ note)], in most cases they create no danger for Eastern Orthodox values. In Russia, historically, Christian Orthodox adjoin and interact with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and some other Christian denominations … Russian Orthodox have always lived peacefully with people of other ethnoses and other faiths. (Gundiaev 2000a)

In another case he praises the “monotheistic religions that are faithful to their religious identity and strongly protecting the rights of their adherents, as it is reflected in the legislation of Israel and Muslim countries”. All these religions can be “allies of [Christian] Orthodox in the debate with those who question the value of tradition” (Gundiaev 2000a). At another place he repeats that “Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist worlds have their own traditional value systems that have much in common with the values of Eastern Orthodoxy” (Gundiaev 2002a). Remarkably, and in sharp contrast with a widespread anti-Roman stance in the Russian Church, Kirill believes that Roman Catholicism is a well-deserving partner of dialogue precisely because it “does accept Predanie as the norm of faith”, while he questions the worth of Protestantism precisely because “the Reformation has rejected the normative significance of Tradition (Predanie)” (Gundiaev 2000a); tolerance to homosexuality and female priesthood are usually pointed out as examples of Protestant deviation. 10 This discourse of Tradition refers to the assumption that the Apostolic tradition can only be perceived as an immutable continuity going back to the kerygma (initial proclamation of the faith), the absolute root, which is opposed to the rootlessness of 10 Similar arguments have been used by other high hierarchs, such as, for example, Hilarion Alfeyev (a person close to Kirill) in his comments on the evolution of the World Council of Churches. First, he mentioned “a growing gap” between the Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox in the activities of the WCC; but he then immediately corrected himself, stressing rather an opposition between “two fundamental trends in Christianity, traditional and liberal”, thus qualifying Kirill’s anti-Protestant invective by accepting some Protestant Churches as “having traditional stand similar to Eastern Orthodox” (Alfeyev 1999). In another interesting commentary, Father Vsevolod Chaplin introduced a further qualification to the fundamental divide. Speaking about the debates over possible religious (Christian) references in the future Constitution of the EU, he opposed the positions of Roman Catholics, Orthodox, East European Protestants, Neo-Protestants, all taken together, to that of mainstream liberal Protestants. The cardinal criterion of the divide was, once again, the attitudes to sexual behavior (see the interview with Chaplin in Kyrlezhev 2003).

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a recent phenomenon of modern liberalism. However, as we have just seen, the Russian texts strikingly modify this paradigm by recognizing other traditions, having nothing to do with the evangelical kerygma, as (presumably) equal embodiments of the same phenomenon they call Tradition. This modification represents a striking departure from classic Christian exclusivism. In this discourse of Tradition the theological and geopolitical principles concur and become inseparable. A constant theme in Kirill’s writings is the idea of “multipolarity” of the world (as opposed to the monopolarity of Western-led globalization) (Gundiaev 2002b: 39) or the existence of several “great civilizational models” (Gundiaev 2002a) or “the beauty of plurality” (Gundiaev 1999b). This voluntary particularism, a surrender of the universalistic discourse to “neoliberals”, is by no means the only religious posture within Russian Orthodoxy. For example, in his response to Kirill’s publications, Vladimir Semenko 11 sharply criticized this particularism and instead advanced that in reality Orthodoxy (Pravoslavie) is the universal ethos rather than just a particular ethno-national tradition among many. Christian – that is, Christian Orthodox – Empire is an absolute, global project, a “universal territory of salvation”. The view of Orthodoxy as the universal spiritual ethos (rather than a tradition among others) has strong appeal. It is reflected in some official documents of the Church. One such document, directly dealing with relations to other Christian denominations, straightforwardly states: “Orthodoxy is not a ‘national-cultural attribute’ of the Eastern Church. Orthodoxy is the inner nature of the Church, preservation of the dogmatic truth, of the theological and hierarchical order and principles of spirituality” (Osnovnye printsipy 2000: 1.19). A lay author, close to Orthodoxy, builds the entire philosophical system of refutation to post-modernism through the assertion of “Orthodox civilization” as not just a civilization among others, in the sense of Arnold Toynbee or Samuel Huntington, but as a historical project expressing a profound quest of the majority of humankind (Panarin 2002: 246). Further close to the radical conservative extreme we would find the famous Ioann Snychev, late Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, and his followers. For them, the Russian people and the Russian state have a mystical mission to be “the only guardians and custodians of the holy faith”, while the world, in an extremely dualistic vision, is seen as completely corrupted and impossible to compromise with at any rate. This straightforward religious nationalism contains, however, a romantic universal claim: Russia suffers for the entire humankind, and Orthodoxy is the absolute alternative for all (see Snychev 2000). Here an extreme particularism and belligerent cosmic holism go hand in hand, and any negotiation within globality is unthinkable. 11 V. Semenko is a religious journalist, one of the leaders of the Union of Orthodox Citizens, representing a more conservative and radically anti-liberal stance than that of the Moscow Patriarchate. For a polemical piece to which we are referring here, see Semenko 1999.

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At the opposite end of Orthodox responses we would find the religious subculture epitomized by the late priest Alexander Men’. A highly educated enlightener, he attracted Orthodox intelligentsia relatively open to liberal interpretations of Tradition, with no claims of leaving it or rejecting it. Men’ seemed to be deaf to any kind of “national culture” discourse. The subculture that he represented (and that survived after his death) tended to go much further in negotiating with the liberal ethos and incorporating its personalistic and universalistic discourse. Throughout the twentieth century, this Russian Orthodox subculture, for obvious reasons, could be mostly found in major émigré circles, especially at such theological centers as those located in Paris, Oxford, and Crestwood outside New York. However, it also survived, although never dominant, in the post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy. 12 Territory of Salvation as Sphere of Dominance Indeed, what is significant, is that the theological discourse of a particular Tradition is in fact highly charged politically when it is transported into political or legal realms. The language of theological paradigms can be easily translated into the language of institutional and spiritual competition. The insistence on roots is especially important: It means a very strong sense of a particular territory, in which each cultural or spiritual “tradition” is supposed to be rooted. From about 1992 and 1993 the Russian Orthodox Church started to reaffirm its preeminence over other religions in the country and to fervently oppose the inflow of new religious groups into the Russian territory. The lobbying by the Church leadership of the new legislation succeeded in the adoption of the new law on religious freedom (the 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations), which introduced some legal restrictions on religious pluralism. The Church-Nation formula was thus a formula of domination on this particular territory. We can discern similar political semantics in the notion of “traditional religion”. Throughout the 1990s it became a crucial category of an extra-academic religious debate and legislative practice, and the very design of the 1997 law on religious freedom was based upon the distinction between the “traditional religions”, on the one hand, and all the rest, on the other (even though the term was not in fact used in the law). This legislation was adopted with the backdrop of a vehement campaign mostly targeted against New Religious Movements and some “non-traditional Protestant sects” (remember Kirill’s ecclesiastical criticism of Protestantism presented above).

12 For a closer study of Alexander Men’s subculture, see Chapter 10 in this volume.

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Later, there have been further attempts to formally legalize the notion of “traditional religion” as endowed with special privileges. 13 Therefore, the theoretical (theological) discourse of tradition serves, among other things, as an instrument of legitimation of dominance: The resistance to “neo-liberal globalization” means, in its political rendering, the resistance against the inflow of the burgeoning religious competitors; the protection of the “uniqueness and difference” means, when translated into the language of politics, the protection of a space and people, which were historically objects of the Russian Orthodox ministry. “Canonical territory” is another ecclesiastical and political category widely used to denote this space of domination. It refers to conventional delimitation of the geographical areas between autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Churches, recognized as a part of the historical ecclesiastical custom. Its canonical validity is based upon a number of texts, including Romans 15: 20f., the 8th rule of the First Church Council, and the 34th Apostolic Rule. Historically, this tradition of jurisdictional partition has occurred throughout centuries and has been fixed in a series of Church documents. In most cases, it reflected political borders and imperial spheres of influence and, at the same time, it reflected the fluctuating areas of ethnic distribution. The “canonical territory” of the Russian Orthodox Church has long been movable and was widening along with the Russian imperial expansion and the diffusion of Russian ethnic settlements. Now this “canonical territory” is usually identified with the former space of the Russian Empire or even the Soviet Union, perhaps, with the exception of Georgia (with its autocephalous, since 1917, Patriarchate) and Armenia (with its independent, and non-Orthodox, Patriarchate), and sometimes with addition of China and Japan.14 It was not a surprise that the notion of “canonical territory” became extremely topical after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the appearance of new independent states, and the emergence of a massive Russian Orthodox diaspora in the “near abroad”. There was here an interesting semantic shift: Suddenly, the Russian Church ceased to be limited to the Russian and Soviet Empire and became “transnational”, even if the administration of the Church was constrained within the framework of the Russian Federation. Ethnicity became a dominant focus in the

13 In 1999, a consultative body called the Interreligious Council was created by an initiative of the Moscow Patriarchate to include only “traditional religions”. A bill on “traditional confessions” has been worked up in the State Duma in 2002 (however, never discussed on the agenda). And in 2003 a public-parliamentary commission “In Support of Traditional Spiritual and Moral Values” was founded to lobby activities that would maintain the “spiritual security” of the nation (see Forum 18 News Service, March 30, 2003). 14 See Chaplin 2000. This attribution is, however, not recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

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Church. The connection of Russianness and Orthodoxy became by far more pronounced than ever before, and this connection created dilemmas with regard to a new configuration of citizenship in the post-Soviet space. After 1991 most clergy developed a sort of “Synodal piety” (to use a classification done by Mother Maria Skobtsova in 1930s: see Skobtsova 1997) where religion was seen as an attribute of the “Russian idea” and national identity was emphasized as one of the major religious values. This inherent link between religion and nationality invokes yet another one: It involves a larger ethnic community of Eastern Slavs (besides Russians, also Ukrainians and Belorussians) and thus operates through transnational religious networks. For the Russian diaspora, Russian Orthodoxy constitutes one of the main expressions and markers of ethnic identity, going across new national borders but also creating protective symbolic barriers. “Transnationalism” in this case is far from creating a “globalizing” vector. This kind of transnationalism is particularistic in two senses: by referring to a specific ethnicity (Russians and the Slavs) and to a specific territory (“canonical territory”). There have been a few direct institutional challenges from within the Eastern Orthodox world to the integrity of the “canonical territory”. The first was the division in Ukraine, where in 1990–2 the Russian Church lost the Orthodox monopoly after two other Orthodox jurisdictions emerged, claiming the subordination to Constantinople instead of Moscow. Another challenge occurred in Estonia where Constantinople reestablished its jurisdiction over Orthodox people, which led to a serious crisis between two Patriarchates. In Moldova, the Moscow Patriarchate disputed with the Romanian Orthodox Church, who since 1993–4 claimed its jurisdiction over Moldavian congregations through the Metropolitanate of Bessarabia. 15 A challenge within Russia proper emerged from some other Churches of the Russian tradition, which were legalized and even attracted some parishes under their jurisdiction, namely, the four smaller Russian Orthodox Churches outside the Moscow Patriarchate (altogether about 170 local parishes). However, the strongest challenge to the integrity of the canonical territory came from outside Eastern Orthodoxy. Hundreds of Christian and non-Christians groups and missionaries in the beginning of the 1990s represented the globalization of the Russian religious field. At stake was not just a spiritual, but also an economic and political competition “for souls”. The foreign groups possessed, especially in the beginning of the 1990s, certain financial advantages and a fresh dynamism that the 15 Imbedded in the same ecclesiastical policy was an initiative of the Moscow Patriarchate to create a large Metropolitan District in Western Europe, which was intended to be a prototype of a future united Local Orthodox Church. The initiative obviously went against the politics of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (Message by Patriarch Aleksii II from April 8, 2003). URL: http://www.sedmitza.ru/text/444993.html, accessed on August 23, 2013.

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Russian Church lacked. The Church supported a strongly critical anti-sect and antimission campaign in the media. Its own missionary activities, prohibited under the communists and restored in the 1990s, were largely devoted not to evangelization, a classical goal of the mission, but to the following, as exhibited by Archbishop Ioann, head of the Missionary Department of the Patriarchate: We realized … that Orthodox missionaries faced the task to protect the Orthodox flock in the canonical territory from the invasion, or better expansion, of the foreign faithteachers and sects. (Trud, March 30, 2000)

Here was the point where Russian Orthodoxy found allies in other “traditional religions”. Back in 1993, at a meeting with President Yeltsin, it was leaders of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of European Russia and, ironically, of the Union of Evangelical Baptists who supported the Moscow Patriarchate in demanding that the government prevent the inflow of (mostly U.S. Protestant) missionaries (Rousselet 2001: 190). Later on, heads of Jewish and Buddhist communities were engaged in the alliance, and the lobbies in all branches of power, both central and local, were mobilized to ensure the traditional denominational balance (although asymmetrical) within the “canonical territory”. Small evangelical groups, Pentecostals, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other Protestant and new religious groups were seen as the religious embodiment of the “rootless Western liberalism” as opposed to “traditional religions” rooted in the soil. Here “roots” and “traditions” assumed double semantic. They combined a metaphysical meaning we have discussed in previous sections with a specifically territorial connotation – lacking tradition in this land. Anti-sect sentiments were a counterpoint where the views of clergy coincided with positions of local authorities and, indeed, a large mass opinion (see examples in Filatov and Lunkin 1999). The attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church was more ambivalent. Although far from being a national Church, it certainly can be perceived as a “traditional religion” in the above theological sense, and, within the Russian context, it was, at least, a de facto traditional religion of some Russian minorities (such as Poles and Germans) and, historically, a major competitor for the land and the people. However, the Roman Church, as the self-proclaimed embodiment of a universal, global Christianity and the universal Church, was associated with global expansion. The most contentious issue was that of the Uniates (Catholics of Greek Rite), a centurieslong movement among the Orthodox to unite with Rome, which always was a stumbling block between the two Churches; there have been direct clashes in Western Ukraine in the beginning of the 1990s. This issue made impossible the visit of the

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Pope to Russia. Also, the official establishment of four Roman dioceses across Russia in 2002 has dramatically aggravated the sensitivity of the Russian Church to what was seen as a violation of canonical borders. The relationships went through ups and downs ever since. The issue of proselytism is central in keeping the integrity of the “canonical territory”. At a Catholic-Orthodox encounter in Balamand, Lebanon, in 1993, proselytism was directly treated in connection with Uniatism. The Balamand Statement rejects Uniatism because both Churches “discover each other once again as sister churches” (Balamand Statement 1993: Clause 12). Going even further on the level of theoretical ecclesiology, the Balamand Statement says: “…In search for reestablishing unity there is no question of conversion of people from one Church to another to ensure their salvation” (Balamand Statement 1993: Clause 15). The refusal from converting from one Church to another means the open rejection of “every form of proselytism” (Balamand Statement 1993: Clauses 18 and 22). Finally, both Churches promised to consult with each other: …[b]efore establishing Catholic pastoral projects which imply the creation of new structures in regions which traditionally form part of the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, in view to avoid parallel pastoral activities which would risk rapidly degenerating into rivalry or even conflicts. (Balamand Statement 1993: Clause 29)

Did the Roman Church thereby accept the notion of the Orthodox “canonical territory”? In fact, the Balamand document clearly demonstrated the differences in the two Churches’ approaches toward the issue of religious freedom and human rights. The statement refers to “Christian freedom” that enables everybody to choose according to what the text calls “conscience, motivated by an authentic exigency of faith” (Balamand Statement 1993: Clause 25). But there was a significant change of Clause 27 in the final text of the document: The phrase about “the right of everybody to belong to a church of one’s choice” was removed, and the following sentence was added instead: “It is the task of those in charge of communities to assist their faithful to deepen their loyalty towards their own Church and towards its tradition…” (Appreciation 1996). Communities are prioritized here over the individual rights and individual religious choice. The notion itself of “proselytism” is interwoven into a web of ambivalent semantics: Are millions of Russians indeed Orthodox, and, if they are, in what way do they belong to Orthodoxy? The Roman Catholics (as well as Protestant missionaries, for that matter) would reckon that, since most people living in the former Soviet Eurasia are not religious at all, the mission among them would by no means be dubbed proselytism (proselytism is, according to the Roman vision, only dishonest enticement of

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believers from one Church to another). In reverse, the Russian Church would consider Russians as being endemic Orthodox, by birth, by culture, and history, if not by faith and practice (since they were forcibly cut off from religion). With such a definition of “Orthodox population” any mission could be qualified as proselytism (see an official statement called Katolicheskii Proselitizm 2002). According to Ioann, head of the Russian Orthodox missionary work, the activities of foreign Churches and various sects were seen as always “destructive” when they appealed to people “baptized in Orthodoxy or connected to it by their historical roots” (Trud, March 30, 2000). Thus, for the Moscow Patriarchate, territory, nation, and the local Church are closely bound as aggregate entities, downplaying the discourse of religious freedom and of an individual as a source of the “authentic experience of faith”. The Russian Church clearly positions itself in connection to territorial and national collective identities, and this position is outspokenly protective. Any intrusion from outside is a potential danger. The idea of relativistic multipolarity that we described in the previous section can be thus deconstructed as a protective political discourse. It is worth mentioning, in this context, that in Orthodox anti-globalist circles nineteenth-century thinkers as Konstantin Leont’ev and Nikolai Danilevsky enjoy particular popularity. Leont’ev was a sarcastic and bitter critic, in an almost Nietzschean sense, of Western European liberalism. Danilevsky was a pre-Spenglerian founder of a theory of local civilizations that undergo bloom and decay. A publicist and scholar, Vladimir Maksimenko, analyzing Danilevsky’s 1869 bestseller “Russia and Europe”, writes: He is our contemporary in that he consistently proves: there was never any universal civilization in history and there is none today. Danilevsky foretold that a prophecy of a universal civilization will produce a tendency toward the world state and a regime of world government. (Maksimenko 2003)

The same emphasis on cultural diversity as opposed to unlimited individualism and secular universalism can be seen at many instances, not the least in the Church’s diplomatic relations. At a meeting with Iranian President Khatami in March 2001 in Moscow, Patriarch Aleksii II clearly alluded to Iran and Russia’s natural partnership as traditional entities resisting globalization: Our Church shares the certitude that the process of globalization ought not to lead to a dictate of one culture, one political and economic system, or one worldview … Only a free development of each nation, only an unfettered impact of all historical civilizations, can prevent a global conflict and to appease local conflicts. (Pravoslavnaia Moskva, March 1, 2001)

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All these examples show that the theological discourse of globality serves to delineate the space where Orthodoxy is trying to maintain its status as a dominant symbolical order that represents the continuity and coherence of a large collective entity, the “Russian Orthodox people”. This symbolic authority is supported by an institutional infrastructure of the Church and the corporate interests of the clergy as a social group. But, once again, what is the meaning of this main referent, the “Orthodox people”? And how far does the symbolical sway of Russian Orthodoxy really expand? The answer is far from being simple. There are at least three possible approaches. First, Russian Orthodoxy can be seen as embracing practicing believers. (Within this category, a further precision of a particular kind and intensity of practice need to be developed.) Second, its orbit of reference may include all ethnic Russians, if we follow a persistent tendency to perceive ethnic Russians (and Eastern Slavs) as Orthodox by birth. Third, in accordance with a habitual post-Byzantine matrix, its symbolic power goes hand in hand with the power of the Russian Empire, the state. All three options may contradict each other and are both transnationally open and circumscribing at the same time. For the first, “practicing believers” create a web of relatively small minority communities scattered the world over. For the second, the ethnic emphasis, partly reviving an old ethno-phyletism, refers to Russian diasporas everywhere, mostly in former Soviet republics, for whom Russian Orthodoxy constitutes the main expression and marker of ethnic identity, going across new national borders but also creating protective symbolic barriers. Finally, in the third approach, Russian Orthodoxy functions as a symbolic trace, perhaps the last one, of the Russian (and Soviet) imperial project that obviously goes beyond the current borders of the Russian Federation. It claims to embody a “spiritual commonwealth” encompassing the vast space bearing the phantom of Empire. This “spiritual commonwealth” concurs more or less with “canonical territory” and “traditional civilization” of the anti-globalist discourse. Ecclesiastic Discourse in a Broader Societal Context In spite of religious plurality and mass irreligiousness, the theological position of Russian Orthodoxy may be viewed as a metaphor of some collective representations, and, as such, it certainly mirrors some broader trends in the Russian society as a whole. Let us insert the Church’s responses into this broader frame. Speaking of the entire society, what happened during the 1990s in mass attitudes was a profound shift from the initial democratic euphoria, through disappointments borne out by systemic anomie and existential hardships, to a stabilization (in the early

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2000s) based on stronger identity concerns and a rather articulated anti-global disposition. The anomie and the hardships were key reasons for this shift, but even besides these immediate factors, there were some structural new counter-forces. The process of ethnification, inter-ethnic conflicts, a “parade of sovereignties”, and an overall exacerbation of identity discourse accompanied the process of opening, or overture, on the entire space of Eurasia. We can say that the narrative of identity competed with the narrative of democracy in mass attitudes and in the power legitimation discourse. Russians were divided, as were all societies integrating into the Western-led “global system”. Their preferences oscillated, and the politicians were out there to play with both narratives to secure support of the yet volatile electorate. The general trend, however, was unmistakable: less democracy, more identity. This trend was clearly expressed by both nostalgic post-Soviet communists and nostalgic anti-Soviet nationalists. Although the object of nostalgia in these two movements was initially different, the identity concern and the opposition to liberal openness was something that made them seem alike. But even beyond these two movements, the shift in the government (president’s administration, central and local bureaucracies) and the legislature (the Dumas) was heading basically in the same direction, in a more pronounced way with the Putin’s political regime since the early 2000s. Finally, general public sentiments were shifting accordingly. Overall, it was a moderate conservative resistance against what was perceived as uncontrolled liberalization and globalization. Sentiments within the Church (including the clergy and the laity) were evolving in the similar direction. Without tight alliance with any of the social forces, the Church hierarchy shared (an internal diversity of views notwithstanding) the same logic of self-determination. During the first years of openness, at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the Church responded with a cautious acceptance of new rules of the game: freedom, pluralism, and liberal universalistic discourse. At that time the reformist groups in Russian society were enchanted by the association of religion with “universal values” that were expected to get the upper hand over the aggressively particularistic communist ideology. When the “end of history” for the Russian idea-makers had moved from communist paradise to “Western democracy” – the normal way to which Russia was allegedly predestined to return –, religion was seen as a genuine embodiment of such “normality”, leading to “normality” by virtue of its association with “the universal and eternal truths”. The social capital of religion augmented dramatically, and the quasi-religious discourses were pervasive. Religion was perceived through this association with a larger discourse of “Western normality” and “the civilization”. Russian Orthodoxy was included in this discourse, and the indicators of its popularity soared. The hierarchs and the newly elected (1990)

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Patriarch supported the discourse of “universal values” that was promoted as a legitimizing narrative from the very top of political leadership headed by Gorbachev. However, it was clear from the very beginning that this affinity would be fragile and short-lived. While in the early 1990s the overt rejection of the liberal pluralist “project” was only limited to some marginal extremist groups, clerical or lay, in the course of time mainstream clerics and the laity have also gradually shifted to a more articulated position anchored at two identity markers: the Orthodox tradition and the Russian nation. 16 In the deconstruction we have undertaken in this chapter, we have seen how ecclesiastical discourse was overlapping with the discourse of dominance, and how the contours of the sacred, spiritual space were applied in categories of identity and then through such notions as tradition and canonical territory translated into political categories. Now, we would not go too far if we would make another step in this deconstruction. After revealing some latent principles of ecclesiastical politics in anti-globalist discourse, we can now indicate a striking similarity of these principles with secular politics in contemporary Russia. Since the mid-1990s, when Russia’s loss of superpower status became a commonly recognized fact, “world multipolarity” (as opposed to one superpower’s domination) has been a popular concept in the vocabulary of Russian politicians and “became a de facto official foreign policy doctrine” (Fedorov 1999). This stance reminds us of the vision of the Russian Orthodox Church: its quest for a place in the Huntingtonian multicivilizational taxonomy and rejecting universal claims of the “liberal ethos”, associated with the (mostly Anglo-Saxon, Atlantic) West. National-cultural anti-globalism within the Church, a sort of “semiotic resistance” through creating the anti-modern and anti-global discourse of Tradition (see Schreiter 1998), seems to be an expression of a broader quest for reaffirming identity, which was, at the mass level, a spontaneous resistance against the painful restructuring, and, on the level of power elites, a search for legitimation and influence. Russia’s anti-globalism seems to be inherent, both historically and geopolitically. It would be simplistic, however, to reduce the responses of Russian Orthodoxy to globalization to this quasi-political discourse, although it partly reflects the natural political impulses of ecclesiastical authorities. In a similar way, it would be simplistic to assess the general response of the Russian society to the years of post-communist openness as completely resistant and protective. It is remarkable that, on the average, 16 Once again, this position was generally concordant with the shifts in public attitudes. For example, Russians supporting the complete prohibition or the isolation of “religious sects” increased from 10 percent in 1989 to 18 percent in 1994 and up to 37 percent in 1999 (survey by the All-Russia Center of the Study of Public Opinion, VTsIOM; see Rousselet 2001).

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both Russian grass roots and elite responses to the nation’s involvement in globalization were by no means radically negative. New consumer and cultural standards, induced by such an involvement, have gathered momentum throughout the post-Soviet period. The elites, for their part, have been increasingly active in global political and economic power mechanisms. An instinctive resistance, stimulated by the identity quest, did not thwart Russians from gradually adjusting to the global normative Zeitgeist. Concluding Discussion: Negotiating With Liberalism and Globality? This leads us to the last point of this chapter. Similar to broader societal reactions, the authoritative and dominant discourse in the Church, in spite of all critique, is a discourse of negotiation rather than of confrontation with the liberal, secular world. Globalization is directly acknowledged as an “inevitable and natural process” bringing many positive results (Osnovy 2001: XVI.3). What Patriarch Kirill and his supporters in the Church are looking for is a cautious “combination” (or harmonization, as it is said elsewhere; Gundiaev 2000b) of what they call traditional (Orthodox) and liberal standards. Above all, the documents we discussed show a clearly expressed will to interact with the secular and liberal world. An active participatory strategy is a crucial stance of Kirill’s party within the Church as reflected both in the text of the “Bases of the Social Concept” (where the world-renouncing position was polemically and consistently rejected; Osnovy 2001: I and passim), and the fact itself that such a document was ever produced. It is not only the classical world renouncement that is rejected as a strategy. The very secular principle of private, or privatized, religion is criticized as well in favor of an active search for ways to bring religion back to public life. What are then the ways of possible interaction, or “negotiation”? First of all, it is postulated what any Orthodox theologian would agree with: a liberal presumption about freedom as “both the goal and means of human existence” and about the “absolute value of human person” (Gundiaev 2000a). Although, as we saw, any affinity beyond this point is clearly rejected, the idea of freedom creates a common genetic ground. It is also made clear at another text that the concept of human rights and liberties has on it “a spark of Divine truth” (Gundiaev 1999b). Similar to many Catholic and Protestant theologians and leaders, Russian leading ideologists point out at a Christian ferment in the Western “liberal standard”, thus creating a space of semantic ambivalence. Paradoxically, the very condition of secular liberalism, which was the object of systemic traditionalist critique, is accepted: partly theologically, with the notion of

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“Divine spark” in the source of liberalism, and partly pragmatically, as an environment, friendly to diversity (Gundiaev 2000a). At another instance, Kirill defends claims for a substantial religious role in education by the need to juxtapose “traditionalist values” to the liberal policy of the state, according to “a liberal principle of check and balances” (Gundiaev 2000a). He even refers to Karl Popper’s notion of diversity as a productive and constructive factor of an “open society”, applying this to various “national religious standards” (Gundiaev 1999b). What the Church leader really does here is legitimize anti-liberalism through references to liberal norms, postulating the right of anti-liberal (traditional) standards to exist according to the liberal standard: We cannot fail to respect achievements of the liberal civilization. It provided people with certain protection from arbitrary treatments by the authorities, employees, and other mighty of the world. But, to be consistent [italics ours – Authors], we have to admit that individuals and communities have the right to choose their own lifestyles … For example, we know from history, that not long ago Muslims in the Russian Empire had the right to practice Shari’ah, making corresponding arrangements in the education, personal relationships, economic activities, and the court under bilateral consent. (Gundiaev 1999b)

This particular issue of “harmonization” of the modern secular law and administrative practices with religious traditions and rules, legal traditions and practices, provides an apt illustration of his broader intellectual perspective. Even if Kirill does not call for a restoration of these particular Shari’ah arrangements in Russia’s Muslim areas, he clearly shows again by this example how liberal principles must be used for protecting the rights of maintaining traditional lifestyles, of preserving traditional religious and cultural identities. There is no question that his notion of diversity has nothing to do with individual human rights as such, but only with the rights of “traditional communities” or with the rights of individuals as members of such communities. Human rights in an absolute, personal, and non-traditionalist sense can by no means be accepted. For example, a human right for homosexuality can by no means be legitimized through the idea of a “Divine spark”.17 But as for traditional communities, they are certainly legitimized through the liberal principle. Compare the same logic in the “Bases of the Social Concept”: Although rejecting the principle of religious freedom as reflecting general apostasy, it accepts that “this principle has 17 In another example, Kirill supports the traditional validity of the prohibition to visit Mount Athos for women against the claims to overturn this norm by the defenders of humanistic laïcité. The values of a national community (here, Orthodox Greece) are juxtaposed to the dictate of individual human rights principle (see Kirill’s letter to Giscard d’Estaing: Gundiaev 2003).

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proved to be one of the means of the Church’s existence in the non-religious world, enabling her to enjoy a legal status in secular state and independence from those in society who believe differently or do not believe at all” (Osnovy 2001: III.6). At another level, Kirill makes a more daring hypothesis: [T]he main point … is not that the liberal standard as it was formulated by international organizations lies at the foundation of world politics, but that this standard is required as mandatory for fashioning the internal life of countries and nations, including those, whose cultural, spiritual and religious traditions were not represented in developing this standard. (Gundiaev 1999b)

Therefore, Kirill seems not to object to an international order founded upon liberal principles. He certainly admits that such an order can have positive features. He calls for a liberal-traditional combination (harmonization, adjustment) inside each nation; this internal, particularistic immunity to globalization would guarantee the difference. Thus, ironically, in this discourse of difference, protective traditionalist conservatism concurs with a post-modern particularistic strategy. Paradoxically, as it rejects the new conditions of the global secular order, the Church tacitly acknowledges it by accepting the new global taxonomy and the frameworks it offers or imposes. The Church accepts its own new spatial and functional coordinates defined by this new global order. The Church does inscribe herself into the definition of “traditional religion” as adopted within this new global order: a relic of a grand récit transformed into an autonomous expression of a particularistic strategy. The Church accepts “secular globality” not only for the sake of survival, but also in virtue of the benefits it offers: before all, the autonomy which the “secular globality” provides and guarantees for the Church, as it does for other players. The actual picture is yet more complex and diverse, if not even individualized. Orthodoxy is a cultural mirror capturing a variety of images and reflections of the dynamic society, of those practicing or wannabe Orthodox people who live within or beyond the Russian Federation. There is a spectrum of responses thematized by Orthodox religious or cultural references. We can find various strategies of using Orthodox identity vis-à-vis the global Lebenswelt. We can experience this plurality of perceptions while moving from the pole of intransigent, hard repulsion (a sort of Orthodox fundamentalism) to the opposite pole of a soft negotiable critique (a sort of Orthodox subaltern self-affirmation). What we will not find, however, within mainstream Russian Orthodoxy, is, perhaps, any strong impulse to fully embrace globality as it is. If it accepts “global culture” as an undeniable given, and if it operates within it for the sake of its own en-

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durance, it does not go beyond such an acceptance and such an operation. Mainstream Russian Orthodoxy does not engage in meaningful and articulated negotiation with contemporary global culture, especially when it comes to values and symbolic structures. The paradigm of individual rights and freedoms is rejected as irreligious (there is no profound elaboration of a Christian personalistic alternative). De-territoriality, a yardstick of the “global condition”, is rejected and opposed by a firm, territorially embedded notion of “tradition”. Multiple identity and growing hybridity, another indicator of “global” religiosity, directly contrast with the pure essentialism of distinctive, unaltered, unmixed religious civilizations. Rather, the negotiation of the Russian Orthodoxy with the secular global ethos dwells at the level of formal coexistence. A liberal and post-modern, relativisitic framework of multiculturalism is used instrumentally for legitimating a clearly particularistic claim for a separate, isolated niche within the global culture with no substantial internal change. Of course, all religious traditions are alienated by definition, and “globality” is just another environment to which they form a structural alternative. But each religious tradition possesses a different degree of receptiness and ability for negotiation, an ability to come to terms with the norms and values of the actual “world”. Global culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century is foreign to Russian Orthodoxy in both theological and cultural senses. This double alienation circumscribes the main paradigm outlined in this chapter. However, speaking at a yet higher level of abstraction, we would argue that this intrinsic alienation should not be exaggerated. Above all, globality sets up its own limits. It may cherish uniqueness, and it may encourage diversity by intensifying particular identities, even those that are foreign to globality’s own core normative and axiological content. Thus, globality plays an endless subtle game of universal and particular. There is yet another development that makes the story even more complex: After the “globalization of conflict” and the post-9/11 “clash of civilization” discourse, the Russian Orthodox paradigm of particularistic distance may acquire new validity and attractiveness. Even Western religions, culturally less foreign to West-centric secular globality, are becoming more conscious of difference. Further, even in the West, the relevance of the nation-states seems to be partly reaffirmed by an anti-globalist backlash arguiung for stronger national security. At least, globalist euphoria has been considerably weakened. Against this general background, Eastern Orthodox anti-globalism looks now less idiosyncratic.

14. RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IN EUROPE: SOFT OTHER WITH QUADRUPLE IDENTITY In this chapter my purpose is to monitor and analyze the recent policies by the Russian Orthodox Church with regard to European integration; its perception of “Europe” as such; its positioning within Europe as it is and as it is projected. In doing this, I will mostly rely upon official pronouncements and activities by the Moscow Patriarchate displayed on the European stage (even though I do understand that other sources and discourses are left beyond this chapter). Russian Orthodoxy’s growing public involvement has been a recognized fact: this was and is current Patriarch Kirill’s general strategy. He may not have read current research in the field of religion but he had an intuition of his own that religions were resurgent and increasingly visible publicly, that the world is somehow being “desecularized” (Berger 1999), and that Europe is no exception. Europe was one of the priorities since Kirill headed the Department of External Relations before he became Patriarch in 2009. For a few years the Russian Orthodox Church has had Representations in Strasbourg (at the Council of Europe), and in Brussels (at the European Union). Russian clerics and lay experts were often involved in events organized by various European institutions. They also regularly discussed European issues at the meetings of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) and at bilateral talks with the Roman Catholic Church, German and Finnish Lutherans, and others. But even beyond this direct involvement, the Church indirectly, through its documents on social issues and human rights – documents which are largely promoted internationally – was trying to voice a message related to Europe as a cultural project, an ethos, and a system of values. What is this general message – if there is one – of the Russian Orthodox Church in its involvement with Europe? I would not claim there is a deliberate, systematic strategy in this field.1 (Also, using other types of sources would certainly provide us with a more diverse array of attitudes within the Russian Church). Yet I believe we can draw out some significant trends and find some logic in them. My intention here is to place this Russian Orthodox “European message” in a more general frame of social theory, specifically, Jürgen Habermas’ thoughts about Europe as a “faltering project”, as he calls it (Habermas 2009b). I will start, therefore, with a discussion of this Habermasian frame and then will assess in what way the Russian Orthodox “European message” and “European presence” fit into this theoretical frame. 1

Father Filipp Riabykh, for example, one of the main speakers for Russian Orthodox European involvement, said there was never “strictly formulated policy” (zhestko sformulirovannogo kursa) (Riabykh 2007).

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Jürgen Habermas’ General Frame for Discussing “Europe” and the Place of Religions in it In an article devoted to the place of religious communities in Europe, Jürgen Habermas explores the current Kulturkampf in Europe in terms of the controversy between universalism and multiculturalism (Habermas 2009b). The break is between the “radical Enlightenment fundamentalists” defending universalism based on individual rights, and those who emphasize cultural communitarian identity (who profess the “politics of identity”). Interestingly, according to Habermas, the rise of European Islam ignited the attractiveness of “Enlightenment values” as specific European values, at the expense of the idea of their universality (ibid., 73). Speaking about the other camp of the Kulturkampf – the partisans of multiculturalism –, Habermas refers to Pascal Bruckner, who stresses the paradox of multiculturalism (in its extreme form of cultural relativism): its supporters, based upon a general legal principle of rights, stress the right of cultures and subcultures to be different, but they do not extend this right to particular individuals who form these (sub)cultures and thus may defect – who want, so to speak, to be different from the different (see Habermas 2009b: 71, and Bruckner 2007; formulation mine – A.A.). Habermas further criticizes “the radical reading of multiculturalism” as relying on a mistaken notion of the “incommensurability” of worldviews, discourses and conceptual schemes. From this contextualist perspective, cultural ways of life appear to be semantically closed universes, each of which holds fast to its own unique standards of rationality and truth claims. Therefore, each culture is supposed to exist for itself as a semantically sealed whole, cut off from discursive processes of reaching an understanding with other cultures … Given this premise, radical multiculturalists can see nothing in universal validity claims as the arguments for the universality of democracy and human rights – except for imperialist power claim of a dominant culture. (Habermas 2009b: 72)

Analyzing both sides – “universalists” and “multiculturalists” – Habermas proposes his way out of an ingrained contradiction: he speaks about complementarity between the principle of equal individual citizenship (or individually-based universalism) and the principle of multiculturalism; while doing so, he is careful in rejecting the extremes on both sides 2. The complementarity between the secular and religious “sides” is a particular case within this strategy. The goal is achieved through the 2

Habermas distinguishes between “secular” and “secularist”, the latter being related to “French Enlightenment fundamentalists”. The extreme from the other side is “radical cultural relativists”, including religious ones (Habermas 2009b: 74).

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“complementary learning process” from both sides: the secular side learning religious language/worldviews, and the religious (sub)cultures learning to accept the secular universalistic language/worldview 3 (Habermas 2009b: 75f.). He believes, in particular, that the political community should accept a “difference-sensitive inclusion” of (sub)cultures, while (sub)cultures, in their turn, should go through a liberalization “to a point where they encourage their individual members to exercise their equal right to participate in the political life of the larger community…” (ibid., 70). The central question for Habermas, within his general “communicative” approach, is language. Is it possible to find a common language, or at least a language of communication, between all (sub)cultures, and, most importantly, between religious (sub)cultures and European secular universalists? He is quite optimistic in this respect. He insists upon translations in both ways. Yet, Habermas seems to believe that, given the diversity of religions, the secular language has a priority, and religions must, eventually, present their views in a neutral secular language which remains the universal communicative environment. Related to this, Habermas strongly supports the secularity of the state as the main principle, and the necessity of a “filter between [state and civil society], which allows only translated, hence secular, contributions from among the confused din of voices…” (ibid., 76). Finally, the priority of individual subjectivity (over the subjectivity of “cultures”) in all these complimentary processes is never questioned. Russian Orthodox “Soft Otherness” in Europe, and its Four Facets Keeping in mind this theoretical frame, let us now look at the Russian Orthodox selfpositioning in Europe and its involvement with Europe. There is, certainly, the will to be involved, to be visible and to have influence; but the main issue is how to meaningfully relate oneself to Europe. This is a question of identity. Russian Orthodoxy feels itself both inside and outside “the Europe of meanings”. In most cases, it positions itself as an Other.

3

Here he gives a few examples of this learning process: the Second Vatican Council; decisions by German Protestant Churches; and – as a continuing painful process – the search for EuroIslam in Muslim communities (ibid., 75).

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Can we, indeed, speak of “otherness” in this case? This thesis may seem problematic: in fact, historically, Eastern Orthodoxy has always been part of a Europe of Empires and nations; now, Eastern Orthodox faithful are present directly as the majority population of a few member-states of the European Union with a significant diaspora elsewhere on the continent. The Russian case may be somewhat different, but still, the European modus of Russia’s history and culture cannot be contested. In fact, leading figures of the Church, as I said before, directly claim that the Russian Church wants to be European and to perceive itself as a part of Europe. The question is: to be a part of what kind of Europe? When analyzing current Russian Orthodox attitudes toward Europe we can always observe – and this has been certainly the case in historical perspective – various reservations and a very cautious association. The reasons of this caution and this sense of distance are obvious: Europe’s central, core values are presumed to be linked to Western (European) ones, which used to be associated, since the Slavophile romantic critique, with the Western Christian (Catholic or Protestant) tradition, and which are now associated with liberal/secular/modern polity and ethos. Precisely these fine associations form the sense of distance and “otherness”. Now, the main Other in today’s Europe is Islam, whose presence – through growing communities and the candidacy of Turkey to join the EU – has exacerbated a strident controversy between liberals and conservatives within Europe, between multiculturalists (cultural relativists) and faithful followers of “classical Enlightenment” (as in Habermas’ analysis, quoted above). Islam is indeed the hard Other for Europe. Compared to Islam, Orthodoxy is certainly a soft Other.4 This unspoken concept of “soft otherness” is what stands behind all reflections and movements in the Russian Orthodox identity quest. I think this “soft otherness” is a complex, multifaceted identity. It exhibits, more specifically, four facets; this is the reason I call it quadruple. The four facets are: Russian, Orthodox, Christian, and European. It goes without saying that these four terms are, indeed, just facets of one, complex whole; these four identity discourses overlap and interact with each other, and this division may be seen as mostly an analytical instrument. Let us briefly overview the logic of each of the four identity facets.

4

In fact, this comparison needs to be cautiously elaborated, too. Some forms (movements, communities) of European Islam (or Islam in Europe) may appear more sensitive to pluralistic norms and arrangements in Europe; more autonomous institutionally from their home countries, and therefore flexible in terms of integration, etc. In other cases, however, the conflicts and tensions are quite hard, and the “European Christian heritage” discourse is certainly less favorable to Muslims than to Eastern Orthodox.

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1. Russian Identity The Russian Orthodox Church is related to Russianness in two ways: through its association with the Russian nation-state and through its association with the Russian ethnos. The first connection means that the Church somehow follows the European policy of the Russian state. This policy has always been complex: active role in European institutions and business, but distancing itself from the EU and critical to (or at least exploring the break with) Europe’s Atlantic identity. The Russian Church Representations in Europe certainly coordinate their work with the Russian foreign policy institutions. 5 Speaking of a broader, ethno-national connection, the Russian Orthodox Church has always stressed that, first of all, it addresses the Russian communities in Europe. The main aspect of the European activities of the Church, says Father Philip Riabykh from the Patriarchate’s Department of External Relations, is “the consolidation of the Russian world” in Europe; he then emphasizes that “the “Russian world” is almost a synonym to “Orthodox world” for, as he says, Russia alone currently has a will “to postulate itself as a particular Orthodox European civilization” (Riabykh 2007). But what is the “Russian world”? It includes “all those who align themselves with Russian culture and its preservation”. The strategy is then to “bring together the parishes of Russian tradition” and in such a way to preserve this tradition; for the success of this strategy in Europe, the best model would be to keep Moscow as the metropolitan center of the “Russian world”. Within this strategy, the Church supports the so-called EU Russian-Speakers Alliance, whose head is Tatiana Zhdanok, member of the European Parliament from Latvia, and whose vice-head is Father Antonii Il’in, representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in Brussels (Riabykh 2007). Hegumen Filaret Bulekov, Church representative in Strasbourg, reflecting various aspects of Orthodox identity in Russia, has stressed: “We should not disregard the simple cultural belonging to Orthodoxy [among many Russians]. Christianity is not a spiritualistic faith; it is a religion of Incarnation” (Bulekov 2005). This theological argument (reference to Incarnation) is used to prove the importance of the cultural (viz., ethno-national) content of Russian Orthodox religiosity; the Christian tradition, he continues, is “an inalienable part of the culture, history, and popular life [of the Russians]”. Bulekov understands the danger of ethno-phyletism but argues that it can be avoided through the Church’s missionary work; in the meantime, he criticizes “Western Christians” who tend to exaggerate the danger of a “too ethno-cultural interpretation of Christianity” (Bulekov 2005). 5

Compare Patriarch Kirill’s reference to the concept of multipolarity widely used in Russian foreign policy rhetoric (Gundiaev 2002b: 39).

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A similar criticism is formulated by Philip Riabykh who rejects as erroneous the strategy of the Paris-based “Archbishopric of the Russian Tradition”, an ecclesiastic body uniting about 60 parishes under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Archbishopric’s strategy is “to use the Russian identity as a certain ferment [zakvaska], which is supposed to ferment the dough and then to go to the background [zakvasit’ testo i potom uiti na vtoroi plan]”. Such a kind of Orthodoxy, he believes, would lose its original identity and absorb Western European characteristics: “the language, tradition, and culture of Christian piety coming from the Catholic milieu”. As Riabykh emphasizes, this idea of a “local European Orthodoxy with a new national identity” can by no means be accepted by the Moscow Patriarchate (Riabykh 2007). As we can see, the whole issue is related to a conflict within the Russian Diaspora, in fact, between old and new immigrants, who have different understandings of Russianness and of how the national identity should be combined with the Christian one. After a large wave of new immigration in the 1990s, this conflict took a harsh turn in Britain’s Sourozh diocese in 2002 and developed into an open schism in 2006.6 The conflict clearly revealed differences in expectations and religious cultures between old and new (post-Soviet) immigrants, as well as between local “Westernized” clergy and the Moscow Patriarchate with its obvious emphasis on Russian cultural/national content within the Orthodox Christian mission. 2. Eastern Orthodox Identity The Russian identity is largely overlapping, as we know from sociological surveys and from public discourse, with the confessional, Eastern Orthodox one. Yet, in this case, the discourse moves to the perception of pan-Orthodox solidarity beyond purely ethnic/national arguments. This discourse starts with the understanding of a certain marginality: there is a presumption that “Europe”, as it is, is hereditarily bound to Western Christian traditions. Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev 7 complained that Islam attracted much more attention in Europe than Orthodoxy, and the very word “Orthodox” in the public European discourse was rather associated with Judaism than Christianity (Alfeyev 2004: 69). His question was: “Will the new Europe be a home for the Orthodox or will it be a 6

7

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev was appointed as vicar of the Moscow Patriarchate’s diocese of Sourozh in early 2002, but he had to leave as early as the summer of the same year; in 2006 Bishop Basil Osborne, then head of the diocese, broke with Moscow and moved to the jurisdiction of Constantinople. Elevated to Metropolitan in 2010.

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place where they will feel themselves as a marginalized minority?” (Alfeyev 2003). A firm attempt is made to overcome this marginality and to legitimize the Christian Orthodox presence as historically grounded and “equal” to Western Christianities and as an “inalienable part of the European identity”. 8 Patriarch Kirill, concerned with the same task of legitimation, gave a detailed account of how the Christian West and East were interrelated historically. 9 Being by far the biggest in size among sister Churches, the Russian Church has an ambition to be the leading witness of Orthodoxy in Europe. According to Riabykh, only Russia retained currently “the will to postulate itself as a sui generis Orthodox European civilization” [evropeiskaia pravoslavnaia samostoiatel’naia tsivilizatsiia] (Riabykh 2007). The impact of the Russian Church is respectively strong upon joint Orthodox activities in and towards Europe. In any event, in many cases the Russian Church shares some particular emphases within the joint pan-Orthodox voice. For example, let us consider the pan-Orthodox document entitled Conclusions of the Inter-Orthodox Consultation on the European Constitution (the meeting was held in Crete in March 2003). The document strongly insisted that the EU Constitution would refer, in addition to individual human rights, to their “collective and institutional manifestations” (e.g., the protection of the institution of marriage and family). The same document said that “religious freedom must be safeguarded not only as an individual human right but also as the right of traditional Churches and Religions of Europe”; related to this was the call (lobbied by the Russian representative, Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, with reference to Kirill Gundiaev’s open letter to Giscard d’Estaing) to incorporate the 11th Declaration of the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam on the status of Churches into the EU Constitution with a new wording that would ensure that the EU Constitution confirms the special legal arrangements on Church-State relations in each member-state. 10 8

Hilarion Alfeyev strongly makes this point in an article where he provides detailed statistics showing that about 209 million Orthodox people live in (larger) Europe; he notes that four “Orthodox nations” are members of the EU and seven more are in larger Europe and potential members of the EU (Alfeyev 2004: 69–71). 9 Kirill noted that Byzantium was an artificial name while in fact the Romean Empire was the heir of Ancient Rome; that Augustine was largely influenced by Eastern Neo-Platonism; that scholasticism was indebted to the Cappadocian Fathers and Corpus Areopagiticum; that the Western legal culture drew upon the Codex Justinianus; that even since the “tragic schism” of the eleventh century the traces of “Eastern” culture continued to have a strong impact on Europe (Gundiaev 2006). 10 The Crete document proposed the following: “The European Union respects and does not prejudice the national law in each member-state on the relation between State and Church and the internationally acknowledged principles of religious freedom for individuals and the churches” (Conclusions 2003: Clause 5).

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Another pan-Orthodox proposal from the same document shows, even in a more clear fashion, the same – and I would say, specifically Orthodox – concern about the status of traditional Churches; the Conclusions declared: It is necessary to establish stringent criteria both in respect of the inclusion of sects in the framework of religious freedom, and of the legitimacy of their activity and their engagement in illicit proselytism within the Member-States of the Union.

To ensure such special management of sects, the document proposed to include into the EU Constitution a phrase that would legally disable “sects” (without openly mentioning them) in comparison with the traditional Churches. 11 (The 11th Amsterdam Declaration indeed became a part of the EU Constitution under Article I-52; the panOrthodox proposals, however, were not accepted. 12) In spite of some joint pan-Orthodox moves and similar sensibilities, there are serious problems within the Orthodox commonwealth, and the main problem is, unquestionably, the tension, not to say competition, between the “Second” and the “Third” Romes: the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow. This conflict was exacerbated in the 1990s and 2000s in a variety of instances. The Patriarchate of Constantinople was accused of violating the conciliar (sobornaia) tradition of Orthodoxy by pretending to be the highest ecclesiastic authority similar to the authority of the Bishop of Rome in the Roman Catholic Church. The Russian Church opposed the process of transforming the “privilege of honor”, recognized in the Ecumenical Patriarchate, into a “privilege of power”. Also, it resisted the attempts by the Ecumenical Patriarchate to acquire a special status in Europe, to make Europe the “canonical territory” of Constantinople – a claim based on the 28th Canon of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), which was interpreted as the right of Constantinople to exercise ecclesiastic administration over all the lands that are not “Eastern Orthodox”,

11 The proposed text was: “The European Union, in the same manner, respects the status quo of philosophical and non-confessional unions, and acknowledges that the non-recognition by member-states of the aforementioned philosophical and non-confessional unions of the privileges that are recognized in respect of the Churches and Religions does not contravene the principle of religious toleration” (Conclusions 2003: Clause 6). 12 The Article I–52 of the final draft of the Constitution later integrated as Article 17 of the Lisbon Treaty (signed in 2007 and come into force in 2009), read: “Article I–52. Status of churches and non-confessional organizations. 1. The Union respects and does not prejudice the status under national law of churches and religious associations or communities in the Member States. 2. The Union equally respects the status under national law of philosophical and non-confessional organizations. 3. Recognizing their identity and their specific contribution, the Union shall maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with these churches and organizations” (Constitutional Treaty of Europe 2004).

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including those in Europe. 13 The official position of the Russian Church is that all local Churches are to be represented in Europe directly and equally, especially all those Churches that have large national diasporas (see a detailed discussion in Alfeyev 2004: 73–6). The Ecumenical Patriarchate is also criticized for stimulating schisms within Orthodoxy, most of them touching upon the interests of the Russian Church – when the Ecumenical Patriarch supports those who break with Moscow: in Estonia; in the case of the aforementioned case of Bishop Basil Osborne in Britain; and – potentially – in other places with schisms, especially in Ukraine.14 3. Pan-Christian Identity However important the Orthodox confessional identity may be, the Russian Church in some cases positions itself within an extra-confessional, pan-Christian tradition. It actively participates in the Ecumenical Movement on a global (WCC – World Council of Churches) and European level (CEC – Conference of European Churches15). It also keeps a rather active dialogue bilaterally with the Vatican and some Western Protestant Churches. Yet, as we shall see, this “pan-Christian identity” may be also problematic and fraught with a sense of “soft otherness”. Patriarch Kirill’s open letter to Giscard d’Estaing in 2003 makes clear an understanding of a common pan-Christian cause in Europe: (a) making Christian Churches be recognized as influential institutions within the European public sphere; and (b) promoting Christian values as a part of what is considered European values; Kirill then refers to “many ideas similar to our own position” in statements of a few Western Churches (Gundiaev 2003). 16

13 The 28th Canon of the Council of Chalcedon (not voted for by the Roman legates and never accepted by the Roman Catholic Church) elevates the Church of Constantinople to the same level as the Church of Rome and gives the right to the Patriarch of Constantinople to ordain bishops in “barbarian lands” (cf. Alfeyev 2004: 74). 14 There have been also some minor conflicts with other Orthodox Churches such as the one in Moldova between the Romanian and the Russian Churches over the Diocese of Bessarabia, declared in 1992. 15 The CEC has been created in 1959 and lacks among its members the Roman Catholic Church, as well as some recognized Orthodox Churches such as the Bulgarian and Georgian ones. 16 He mentioned the Greek Orthodox Church, the Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops, the Evangelical Church in Germany, the Lutheran Church of Finland, and “many other churches and communities” (Gundiaev 2003).

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The space of Christian solidarity was mirrored in the “Charta Oecumenica”, a document adopted in 2001 by the Conference of European Churches. 17 The Charta strongly asserts – in accordance with the Russian Orthodox general stance, mentioned earlier – the right and the duty of the Churches to “communicate the Gospel in the public domain, which also means responsible commitment to social and political issues” (Charta Oecumenica 2001: Section 2). In the section entitled “Participating in the Building of Europe”, the Charta calls “to represent in concert, as far as possible, the concerns and visions of the churches vis-à-vis the secular European institutions” (ibid., Section 7). While clearly juxtaposing itself to “secular Europe”, the Charta does not oppose it, sharing some of Europe’s basic attitudes: for example, the document calls “to resist any attempt to misuse religion and the church for ethnic or nationalist purposes” (ibid., Section 7) and “to recognize the freedom of religion and conscience of…individuals and communities” who in “growing numbers…reject the Christian faith, are indifferent to it or have other philosophies of life” (ibid., Section 12). In my view, in these two positions – rejecting ethno-nationalism and recognizing the individual freedom of choice – the Charta enters the space that potentially can be contestable from the point of view of the Russian Church in the prism of what I have discussed so far. Also, the Charta clearly lacks the discourse of the special rights of “traditional Churches” in particular national contexts – the discourse which, as we have seen, was included in the official pan-Orthodox reaction to the European Constitution. In fact, the limits of the ecumenical (pan-Christian) position appear quite obvious. Filaret Bulekov warns against “wrong and fruitless attempts to artificially construct some united non-confessional Christianity” opposed to European secularism; rather “profound links” should be revealed between various Christian cultures and Church traditions (Bulekov 2005). Limits are equally evident in relations with the Vatican, although both Churches agree in their efforts to promote the Christian heritage of Europe as recognized symbolic reference and to ensure efficient public visibility of the Christian Churches. An example of certain coordination was a jointly sponsored conference in Vienna in 2006, entitled “To Give a Soul to Europe: The Mission and Responsibility of the Churches”.18

17 As the document states, “it has no magisterial or dogmatic character, nor is it legally binding under church law” (Charta Oecumenica 2001, Preamble). 18 The conference in Vienna was co-organized by the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Relations and the Pontifical Council for Culture. The expression “the soul of Europe” is widely used in Roman Catholic discourse, but it may also contain a quote from the former head of European commission, Jacques Delors, to whom the expression is usually attributed. A special program of religious dialogue at the European Parliament from 1999 to 2005, called

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This coordination with the Vatican reflects an interesting aspect that gives us further understanding of the content of the “Christian identity” of the Russian Church. Hilarion Alfeyev advanced a strong message about an alliance between Vatican and Orthodoxy as two “Churches of Tradition” – a message that sounded quite challenging given the forum where it was launched – the Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Porto Allegre (Brasil) in February 2006; namely, he mentioned the necessity of: …forming a strategic alliance between the Orthodox and Catholics for the defense of traditional Christianity. No ecumenical organization, including the WCC, can turn back the process of continual liberalization of the Protestant churches of the North and their further estrangement from the “Churches of Tradition”. In defending traditional values the main ally of the Orthodox Church is the Roman Catholic Church. But the latter is hardly represented in the World Council of Churches. (Alfeyev 2006a) 19

At the Vienna conference a Catholic participant positively referred to Alfeyev’s idea of a “tactical alliance” (it was “strategic” rather than “tactical” in Alfeyev’s quote above). He then added that this alliance could ignore dogmatic differences but jointly resist, again quoting Alfeyev’s words, “militant secularism, militant Islam and militant Protestant liberalism” (Parraviccini 2006: 151f.). This idea was interpreted, in another place and in a slightly different form, as a possible alliance of the “conservative Christian confessions: Orthodox, Catholic and traditional Protestants” (Riabykh 2007). The Vatican seems not to have responded straightforwardly to this invitation (the Catholic strategy in Europe, as well as a degree of its European involvement, are considerably different). For our topic, however, the call itself is important: this discourse of “traditional” or “conservative” Christianity shows that the “pan-Christian identity” of the Russian Church has certain qualifications and a particular tenor; or, we can say, an internal tension: we see how the idea of “conservative alliance” is different from the content of both the Charta Oecumenica and the inter-Orthodox attitudes analyzed in the previous section.

“A Soul of Europe: Ethics and Spirituality”, was said to have been with no legal implications or intense dialogue (Leustean and Madeley 2009: 6). 19 In another place, Alfeyev (2004: 80) writes about the similarity in many fields of the positions of the traditional Churches (first of all, Orthodox and Catholic).

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4. European Identity Being Russian, Orthodox and Christian already creates three dimensions of soft otherness in Europe. The most profound and complex issue – and the one that actually is at the core of this analysis – is the Russian Church’s fourth, European identity. We move here to a different, and most general, plane – the one where religious and secular lifeworlds interact within Europe. The problem of affinity and otherness between these two lifeworlds appears on various interconnected levels of religious involvement in Europe: mere institutional; normative and discursive (within a legal and rhetorical environment); and, on the deepest level of epistemic involvement of the religious worldview. The whole issue is based upon three interrelated arguments which I would call, shortly: the argument of Christian roots; the argument of the Sonderweg; the argument of the post-secular era. Let us consider all three in sequence. (a) Europe’s Christian roots. First, according to Russian authors, Europe clearly has Christian roots: The Christian legacy is included in the European fundamentals along with the ancient legacy; these elements are Greek philosophy, Roman law and Biblical faith (Riabykh 2007; Bulekov 2005). In some cases, human rights are recognized as having Christian roots and as having historically started as religious rights (see Gundiaev 2006: 129; Bulekov 2006a: 17f.).20 In his letter to Giscard d’Estaing, Kirill writes that such values set in the European Constitution as human dignity, freedom, rule of law, tolerance, justice and solidarity “are not alien to Christian ethics” (ne chuzhdy khristianskoi nravstvennosti) (Gundiaev 2003). (b) Europe’s Sonderweg. The second idea, prominent in the Russian Orthodox discourse, is that Europe, however, defected from its Christian roots at some point in the course of history which gave way to what can now be seen as Europe’s Sonderweg – the overwhelming secularism contrasting with the rest of the world. It is a fact that Europe is secular by virtue of both legal norms and a shared ethos.21 Kirill, admitting the Christian roots of European values, adds that these values “have completely lost any connection to Christianity … They represent a secularized form (obmirshchennaia forma) of traditional European Christian values, and, in such a hollowed way (v takom vykholoshchennym vide) they often run against the Christianity that gave birth to them” (Gundiaev 2006). The Europe of the Sonderweg is the secular Europe that lost its “Christian soul” – as is well seen in the draft of the European Constitution; it is the Europe where “religious energy is extinguishing and the religious meanings are dying out” (Bulekov 2005); this Europe is an alien lifeworld 20 See my analysis of the Russian Orthodox conception of human rights in Agadjanian 2008 and Chapter 7 of this volume. 21 See a detailed analysis of Europe’s uncontested structural laïcité by Willaime 2009.

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for Orthodox Christians: “if we enter such a Europe, it will not be our Europe” (Gundiaev 2002b: 39).22 (c) Europe’s Post-Secularism. The third discourse, being a kind of synthesis of the two previous, encloses, so to speak, the discursive triad: secularism in Europe is still strong and dominating, but this state is probably coming to an end, and the Christian roots should be and can be reaffirmed. Changes since the last decades of the twentieth century led to what is now a new, post-secular Europe. This trend is observed in the growing public resonance of religious issues and the related enhanced involvement of religious institutions. Filaret Bulekov writes about the crisis of secularism (Bulekov 2006b); and, interestingly, he links this trend with Europe’s enlargement to the East: the Larger Europe, compared to the European Union, brings more religious vitality; and not accidentally, this Larger Europe, bearer of religious revival, is mostly Orthodox Christian (Bulekov 2005). 23 Sergei Khoruzhii, who positions himself at the intersection of professional philosophy and Christian Orthodox thought, speaks about the “crash of the Enlightenment worldview” – in particular, of what he calls the “classical European anthropology” of Aristotle-Descartes-Kant. The “crisis of the European man” produces what he refers to as “testing the limits [predely] of human nature”, trying to “go beyond these limits” – hence, a new interest in religious experience. Then, Khoruzhii questions rhetorically: Should we not try explaining to the neo-pagans of the “post-Christian” world that their own longing for boundary experience [tiaga ikh k predel’nomu opytu] still retains, in its depth, religious roots, and that this longing can find its highest fulfillment in the Christian experience of theosis [obozhenie] – the ultimate boundary experience [opyt, predel’nee kotorogo ne sushchestvuet]? (Khoruzhii 2006: 142f.)

Khoruzhii’s best recipe of such a return to the Christian roots by the Europeans is Orthodox Christian Hesychast practices and the related “energetic anthropology” 22 The fact of a more immediate past – the clearly Christian Democratic (mostly Roman Catholic) origins of the very idea of the European Union as such in the late 1940s and early 1950s – is understandably not stressed by the Eastern Orthodox; however, this fact, as Leustean and Madeley acutely point out, is also “little recognized by Europe’s contemporary liberal elites – it remains a sort of hidden history…” (Leustean and Madeley 2009: 4). 23 In a similar vein, Byrnes and Katzenstein write that “European enlargement will feed rather than undermine the importance of religion in the EU” because the religious communities of the European periphery “are introducing religion into the center of Europe” (Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006: 2); see also Herbert and Fras (2009) on how the eastward enlargement of Europe triggers a growing discursive presence of religion, a phenomenon which they call republicization of religion.

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which is to replace the already “untenable” classical anthropology of modern Europe (ibid., 145).24 Contesting European Values I have outlined so far the logical triad of the Russian Orthodox discourse of Europe: the Christian roots – the specific European secularism – the return to the Christian roots in a “post-secular world”. The entire discourse is based on a certain ideal model of “European values” – a model that can itself be an object of prolonged debate which is not my concern in this chapter. In what follows I will overview a few major themes where interpretations of values seem to be in clash. We have seen that the draft of the European Constitution was rejected by the Orthodox critics as non-Christian 25; indeed, the Preamble starts as follows: Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.

Although the draft made a religious reference, it thus failed to refer to Christianity; therefore, the “inviolable and inalienable rights” may not seem directly linked to the Christian roots, as the Orthodox Christian authors would require. The humanist inheritance, mentioned in the same line of the Preamble, is, according to these authors, a dominant motif throughout the rest of the Constitution draft and overall in the EU. Such a Europe is forced to live according to a hegemonic “humanistic model” which is recognized as having some advantages but being overall deficient for sequestering the Divine dimension and remaining anthropocentric (Alfeyev 2003). The Constitution reveals a “bias in favor of values of anthropocentric humanism at the expense of religious and national-cultural values”; this leads to the absolute diktat of an ideology directed exclusively toward worldly prosperity [zhiteiskoe blagopoluchie], material well-being, and free self-realization in worldly affairs, outside of any system of moral values. (Gundiaev 2003)

The Church’s task is to avoid this uniform “humanistic hegemony” imposed upon Europe; to avoid a “monopoly of one single worldview” (Alfeyev 2004: 79); or, 24 See the consonant idea and similar criticism of European subjectivity and the promotion of an alternative Orthodox anthropology (related to Hesychasm) in Kristeva 2000: 113–62. 25 We should remember a similar criticism of the Constitution coming from the Roman Catholic Church; a more subtle comparison, however, cannot be done in this chapter.

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sometimes even stronger – to avoid a new kind of “liberal totalitarianism” (Chaplin 2006: 136). We see that the Kulturkampf is waged over such opposing values as humanist (anthropocentric) vs. Christian (theocentric); materialistic vs. moral; worldly vs. non-worldly; moral vs. morally-neutral. One key example of this Kulturkampf is an interpretative clash over the meaning of such a universally recognized value as freedom. “Free self-realization in worldly affairs” (in the above quote by Kirill) is different from the Christian view of freedom. Two visions of freedom – and, wider, two worldviews – are fundamentally opposed (see the analysis in Kyrlezhev 2006). Christian freedom, speculates Philip Riabykh, is not just full emancipation (as promoted by European liberals) or an instrument of personal and common well-being (as promoted by European conservatives); truly Christian freedom is freedom from nature, freedom of being beyond nature, outside nature – being-with-God (Riabykh 2006: 164f.). In fact, freedom in Europe is largely an illusion; as the same author says, “people have warmed up in themselves the thirst for freedom without having achieved it in reality” (ibid., 168). An interpretation of freedom defines further clash-points of the Kulturkampf, of which the most heated is, perhaps, marriage (rejection of same-sex and “temporary” civil marriage), but also gender (in particular, rejection of women’s priesthood and refutation of the EU requirement to allow women to the Holy Mountain Athos) and bioethics (rejection of abortions, euthanasia, and genetic interventions) (see, e.g., Gundiaev 2003; Bulekov 2005; Alfeyev 2004: 79f.). Yet the ultimate clash over values – and, indeed, the one that, in my opinion, defines all the rest – is the issue of who is in fact the subject of values, the subject of rights and responsibilities in Europe. “European values” – in a general consensus further sharpened by Christian Orthodox critics – are referred to, and built around, the individual human being. Indeed, the Preamble to the European Constitution, cited above, puts “the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person” in the first place. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which was part of the Constitutional draft and then in 2009 became a legally binding document in the Treaty of the European Union (Lisbon Treaty), 26 states, in its Preamble, this individual focus even more clearly: Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity; it is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law. It places the individual at the heart of its 26 In principle, the “fundamental rights” set in the Charter are considered to be “general principles of the Union’s law” – that is, defining the entire legal system of the Union (Constitution Draft: I–9.3).

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activities, by establishing the citizenship of the Union and by creating the area of freedom, security and justice… [italics mine – A.A.]

Yet, the critique of this individualism dominates in Christian Orthodox writings. In fact, we can distinguish three different emphases in this anti-individualistic critique, corresponding to three of the identities we dealt with in the preceding pages. Within an ecumenical Christian identity, there is a radical cleavage between the two lifeworlds: in secular Europe “the human individual is not just the main but the ultimate meaningful element of social reality, a sovereign entity not subject to further division…”, while in the religious (Christian) worldview the human world “is both individual and supra-individual, that is, expanding to the scope of the universe and the entire humankind, created by God and including the Creator Himself” (Kyrlezhev 2006: 28f.). In other cases – and much more prominent in the official discourse – the confessional (Orthodox) and national (Russian) arguments against European individualism get the upper hand. Patriarch Kirill called the Union to create mechanisms to protect not only individual rights but also “specific cultures and religious worldviews” (Gundiaev 2003). The pan-Orthodox conference reminded that rights should be not only individual but also “collective and institutional” (Conclusions 2003). 27 We have seen similar ideas in the preceding pages. The Russian Church’s ultimate goal in these debates is to preserve, within the scope of “European values”, the other supra-individual identities – national, Orthodox and Christian – that is, so to speak, to qualify “Europeanism” with three collective references: Russianness, Orthodoxy, and Christianity. Defending the “Russian world”; lobbying for a special status of majority Churches in the European states; promoting active pan-Christian conservatism, etc. – all these and other examples stand for the same thing. To put it roughly, Europe for the Russian Orthodox is a Europe of communities-cultures rather than a Europe of individuals. Multiculturalism – in the sense of communitarian, rather than individualistic diversity – might be a better formula of Europe for them. Conclusions: Assessing the Russian Orthodox “European Message” Let us now look back at the Habermasian theoretical frame I outlined at the beginning. We can see that the Russian Orthodox “European message” may be well-interpreted through this basic tension between universalistic individualism and cultural communitarianism; and in view of Habermas’ recipe of “complementarity”. 27 It seems obvious that in this passage “collective” means the rights of peoples (nations) and “institutional” alludes to the rights of Churches.

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The Russian Orthodox Church negotiates its place in Europe – similar to Muslims and those who support their claims – in clearly communitarian, cultural terms, constructing their otherness within an imagined Europe of Enlightenment-driven individualistic fundamentals. These reduce Europe to a specific Western-European project which claims universality, but is not able – according to this criticism – to fulfil it. This constructed, imagined partner – secular individualistic Modernity – is viewed, according to what we have seen, just one of the presumed equal “cultures” in an ideal Europe of multiple cultures. Universalism (similar to the highly contested and rejected “globalization”) is here tacitly downplayed, and what comes in its place is, indeed, multiculturalism, if not cultural relativism. 28 As we remember, Habermas refers to the paradox of multiculturalism: defending the rights of cultures while being skeptical about the rights of individual members of these cultures. The Russian Orthodox politics of identity certainly reveals this paradox: religious revival in Europe is seen in communitarian terms – the Russian community, the Orthodox presence, the Christian tradition –, but by no means in terms of individual religious freedoms. Quite obviously, most official Russian Orthodox authors would refer to freedom of religions as a cornerstone of human rights; but what they mean by this reference is the right of religious communities to be equal with “humanists” within Europe rather than the right of an individual to choose his/her identity vis-à-vis religion (see e.g. Bulekov 2006b). The Russian Orthodox position may not be radically “relativistic”, for in fact the message is to find ways of dialogue and integration of worldviews. In some ways, however, this position is, indeed, vulnerable to Habermas’ critique of cultural relativism. This position questions the universality of human rights and strongly rejects 28 The use of both terms interchangeably (multiculturalism and cultural relativism) needs a commentary. The concept of multiculturalism has to be carefully interpreted: one of our Orthodox authors, Filaret Bulekov, criticizes multiculturalism as based upon secular values: “although this concept supposes the legal diversity of cultures, what indeed allows cultures to peacefully coexist, is common secular values”. Bulekov is against the “integration” of Europe on such secular principles and values; for him, the crisis of secularism is also a crisis of multiculturalism (Bulekov 2006b). In the same way, multiculturalism is viewed in the United States as a subsidiary instrument of temporarily tolerating cultures with an eventual goal to promote universal (American) citizenship; that is, multiculturalism is, in a way, a semblance of communitarian rights (see Bellah 2002: 27 and passim). Considering such an interpretation, a better term to express the culturalist/communitarian position – or at least its extreme version – would be, rather, cultural relativism. Interestingly, this term is more associated with a post-modern critique of reason, but at some point we find an unexpected affinity between post-modern and religious critics of the Enlightenment tradition: post-modern voluntarism here meets its deadly adversary, cultural essentialism! On the thematic similarities between religious and post-modern movements, see Eisenstadt 2000: 21f.

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the “imperial dominance” of liberal Modernity. The dialogue (between religious and secular worlds) as such is not denied, but, interestingly, this dialogue is said to be only possible if Christians are not obliged “to translate their words from a religious language to a secular one; for in this case the very essence of our message to the world is lost”. There is no common language; therefore “the secular reason should learn to grasp religious reason, its meanings and its logic”. “It is now time to rehabilitate the religious language, and, respectively, the religious worldview in the European culture space”. In addition, Christianity cannot be reduced to ethics; to a set of values outside faith, which would be intelligible to all Europeans. Christianity should be revived as a whole system, with all its attributes (faith, soteriology, ethics, and culture), and not as something disassembled, simplified, ready-to-use – so to speak –, adapted to be integrated within Europe (Bulekov 2006b). This discourse looks like it is directly addressed as an alternative to Habermas’ recommendations! The Habermasian recipe of being European is thus not easily acceptable for Russian Orthodoxy. Without claiming this recipe to be the best or unquestionable, I find that the comparison was indeed productive: it helped to emphasize and to comprehend in what ways the Russian Orthodox European identity continues to be the soft other.

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Erfurter Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des Orthodoxen Christentums Herausgegeben von Vasilios N. Makrides

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Vasilios N. Makrides (Hrsg.): Religion, Staat und Konfliktkonstellationen im orthodoxen Ost- und Südosteuropa. Vergleichende Perspektiven. 2005.

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Klaus Buchenau: Kämpfende Kirchen. Jugoslawiens religiöse Hypothek. 2006.

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Angelos Giannakopoulos: Tradition und Moderne in Griechenland. Konfliktfelder in Religion, Politik und Kultur. 2007.

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Kristina Stoeckl: Community after Totalitarianism. The Russian Orthodox Intellectual Tradition and the Philosophical Discourse of Political Modernity. 2008.

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Nicolai Staab: Rumänische Kultur, Orthodoxie und der Westen. Der Diskurs um die nationale Identität in Rumänien aus der Zwischenkriegszeit. 2011.

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Sebastian Rimestad: The Challenges of Modernity to the Orthodox Church in Estonia and Latvia (1917-1940). 2012.

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ukasz Fajfer: Modernisierung im orthodox-christlichen Kontext. Der Heilige Berg Athos und die Herausforderungen der Modernisierungsprozesse seit 1988. 2013.

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Alexander Agadjanian: Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning. Orthodox Christianity and Post-Soviet Experience. 2014.

www.peterlang.com

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Alexander Agadjanian, Prof. Dr., graduated from Moscow State University and worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and at the Department of Religious Studies of Arizona State University. He currently teaches at the Center for the Study of Religions of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. He has published extensively on religions in the modern world, including Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity.

Alexander Agadjanian · Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning

The book examines deep shifts in the religious life of Russia and the post-Soviet world as a whole. The author uses combined methods of history, sociology and anthropology to grasp transformations in various aspects of the religious field, such as changes in ritual practices, the emergence of a hierarchical pluralism of religions, and a new prominence of religion in national identity discourse. He deals with the Russian Church’s new internal diversity in reinventing its ancient tradition and Eastern Orthodoxy’s dense and tense negotiation with the State, secular society and Western liberal globalism. The volume contains academic papers, some of them co-authored with other scholars, published by the author elsewhere within the last fifteen years.

ERFURTER STUDIEN ZUR KULTURGESCHICHTE DES ORTHODOXEN CHRISTENTUMS

Alexander Agadjanian

Turns of Faith, Search for Meaning Orthodox Christianity and Post-Soviet Experience

www.peterlang.com

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