Читать книгу The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity - Regina Elsner - Страница 4

Modernity passes through three stages. First, Enlightenment imparted a sense of human perfection and a belief that people can reasonably judge their present conditions, plan something new, and successfully implement these plans. Second, the age of capitalism gave a dizzy feeling of a bomb explosion, captured in slow motion: indeed, “all that is solid melts into air,” and splinters are still flying by. Finally, the advent of nation-states, and later on—globalization and multiculturalism, raised the question of homogeneity and difference. These three stages are connected by the same striving to rescue and rework the idea of unity—spatial and temporal equivalence of a community to itself. Regina Elsner offers an excellent examination of how the idea of unity has been reconceptualized in the Russian Orthodoxy. The theological take, provided by this book, is not only fresh and original, but it also gives conceptual depth and substantiation to otherwise intuitive views that Orthodox theology affects Russian political culture.

In spite of Russia’s retarded entry to modernity, the Orthodox Church sensitized Russian thinking to the idea of preserving the unity already in the 15th century. Additionally, the sweeping Westernization of the 18th century gave Russia the historically first and unique experience of meeting with a “superior civilization”, as well as coping with Russia’s own fractured past.1 The intellectual history of conservatism illustrates the impact of Peter’s reforms on the Russian thought. Conservatism is a modern ideology, which specifically deals with social changes. It privileges “organic” changes and criticizes “artificial”, planned reforms.2 Westernization under Peter the Great destroyed the unity of Russian history and made conservatism both urgently needed and impossible. As a result, conservative intellectuals moved in two opposite directions, both of which led away from the core of “normal”, European conservatism: either towards a fundamentalist striving to return to the imaginary past, or towards the full identification with the state and its modernizing reforms.

The book demonstrates that this dilemma: either to side with the state against the country’s past, or to side with the past, against the state—has even deeper roots, namely in the history of Church-state relations in early modern Russia. The book convincingly exposes the process of this double alignment: between the Church and the most anti-modernist, reactionary streaks of ideology, and between the Church and the state. At the same time, the book avoids monochromous depictions. It makes clear that by addressing the issues of unity and difference, the Church inadvertently becomes part of the project of modernity.

Thinking together with Regina Elsner, it seems reasonable to assume that Orthodox theology and Russian political culture have many “selective affinities”, and this prods us to ask further questions: what is the causal relation between them, and how exactly does the conceptual transfer between theology and politics takes place?

One of the approaches for understanding this correlation is the path-dependence argument. It claims that authoritarian institutions reproduce themselves throughout Russia’s long history, and it is logical that these institutions embark on essentially the same ideational means of self-legitimation, such as collectivistic and xenophobic ideologies with a predilection for a strong state.3 Orthodox theology in this sense is one of the instruments of authoritarian legitimation. Indeed, a powerful redistributive state in a vast continental peripheral empire was fated to assume a role of a chief modernizer,4 and by extension—to enter into the center of the ideological and theological thinking.

However, Regina Elsner develops a different and more nuanced approach, which provides for a greater agency and independence of the theology thinkers. She weaves together the Orthodox intellectual tradition with the conceptual reaction on modernity and with Russia’s specific historical experience. The book is cautious enough not to make broad generalizations, but it helpfully opens a possibility to think, to which extent the early modern Russian state was the result of a specific theological constellation, not the other way around. In other words, in the framework of Regina Elsner’s longue durée approach, it is legitimate to assume that the debate between the Iosephites and the nonpossessors in the late 15th century constitutes a sort of the critical juncture, and the victory of the former was not programmed by the logic of the history of Russia and the structure of its polity.

Another approach for interpreting interrelations between theology and politics addresses political concepts as rhetorical devices and purports to uncover meanings and rationales behind the decision to use some specific concepts among the endless variety of other concepts.5 The book by Regina Elsner importantly elucidates channels, which connect theology, lay philosophy and the public sphere, giving, thus, grounds for analyzing, how specific theological terms (such as sobornost’) were flowing back and forth in public and professional debates. The picture, which emerges by the end of the book, is that theology has provided a considerable part of the political language in Russia to the day. This way of interpretation avoids the unfruitful question about the direct ideological influences, but rather traces how concepts, taken from one context, structure debates in the other context.

Concerns about social malleability, change and homogeneity pushed the Russian Orthodoxy to work out a recurrent set of theological responses. Elsner anatomizes dynamic theological doctrines, specifically the teaching about Trinity and ecclesiology of sobornost’, in order to show, how these ideas inspired, influenced or sometimes were directly converted into the secular language of political philosophy. There are four most central concepts here. The first is the idea about social unity and conciliarity, which at the same time would preserve and nurture individuality. The second is Messianism, depicting Russia as the last refuge of the authentic faith, fighting the godless and aggressive West. The third is the idiosyncratic perception of historical time, marked by visions of the “golden age” and Apocalypse. Finally, it is the vision of a special connection between the Orthodox Church, the state and the Russian people. Is it not an accurate description of the regime ideology of Putinism today?

Indeed, the book gives us an insight into how theological reflections on modernity are being translated into the ideology of populism, which is also primarily concerned with the issue of unity. The key point of populism is that a people has the historically stable identity and spatial cohesiveness, and this identity should directly determine political decision making, without any mediation by the representative or bureaucratic institutions. Populism is an essentially modern phenomenon, whose conceptual staple is the idea of popular sovereignty, but at the same time, it rejects modernity by representing society as a homogenous organic body, or a personality, not a fleeting combination of majorities and minorities, grasped by the democratic voting system.6 On a more ominous note, an organic vision of society is fraught with a paradox: an organic society implies that there are some non-organic elements inside this organism, which should be identified, excluded and exterminated. Populism likewise gives rise to a belief in some “natural” leaders, who have capacities—just like the brain functions in our body—to comprehend the actual wishes and interests of the whole society. It is also assumed that such leaders do it in a better way than representative democracy. If it is true that political concepts are by and large secular theological ideas,7 it would not be a stretch to claim that sobornost’ smoothly glides into populism. It is probably not by chance, that the first conceptualization of left-wing populism was the Russian Populist movement in the 1870s, whereas Russian right-wing populism has an even more impressive pedigree, stemming from the Slavophile milieu in the mid-19th century.

The case in point here is Ivan Il’in, who is often dubbed the “favourite Putin’s philosopher”.8 In his interpretation of Hegel, inspired by Orthodox theology, the most dramatic dilemma is separation of individuals from the state of unity and “wholeness” in God. Il’in starts his analysis with an attempt to strike a balance between individual’s freedoms and the need to restore the bygone unity and “wholeness”, and this leads him towards approval of national-socialism and creation of the project of an authoritarian corporate state, based on the pitiless purges against unwanted elements. Today, appropriated by the Russian political elite, and among others, quoted (twice) at the Church-inspired network exhibition “Russia—My History”, Il’in serves to the purpose of illustrating continuity of Russian history, "naturalness" of its communist period. For him, an ardent anti-communist, this is the worst that could happen. Revolutions devour their children, but it is even more so, that the anti-revolutionary longing for the lost unity does the same.

Thinking in line with Elsner’s book, one can posit the question, if concerns about unity can helpfully refresh our political thinking and practice—in tune with what has been proposed by some communitarian philosophers, or does it necessarily lead us away from human rights and liberal freedoms towards isolationism, scapegoating and reactionary utopianism? It seems that Regina Elsner agrees here with Habermas’ critique of communitarian multiculturalism,9 that any consistent claim for restoring the social unity tends to undermine itself, similarly to how the Russian Orthodox Church’s attack on modernity is sawing off the branch on which it is sitting.

Mikhail Suslov

University of Copenhagen

1 Cf. Zarakol, Ayşe. 2011. After Defeat, How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 Freeden, Michael. 1998. Ideologies and Political Theory. Oxford University Press.

3 Snyder, Timothy. 2018. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books; Eltchaninoff, Michel. 2018. Inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Langdon, Kate C., and Vladimir Tismaneanu. 2020. Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 113-152.

4 Pipes, Richard. 2019. Russia Observed: collected essays on Russian and Soviet history. London: Routledge.

5 Skinner, Quentin. 2002. Visions of Politics. Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6 Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What is populism? Philadelphia, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press; Mudde, Cas. 2004 "The Populist Zeitgeist." Government and opposition 39:4: 541-63.

7 Schmitt, Carl, 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 36.

8 E.g. Barbashin, Anton, and Hannah Thoburn. 2015. “Putin’s Philosopher: Ivan Ilyin and the Ideology of Moscow Rule,” Foreign Affairs, 20 September 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2015-09-20/putins-philosopher.

9 Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. "Notes on post‐secular society." New Perspectives Quarterly 25:4, 17-29.