Читать книгу The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity - Regina Elsner - Страница 6

“Not only practicing believers, but also a quite broad strata of society, which can be described as Orthodox only to a very limited extent, hope that the Church is a force that will help Russia to overcome the ideological and social decay, that will help Russia to progress on the path of democratization and modernization.” (Filatov 2012, 9)

The sociologist Sergei Filatov used these words in 2011 to describe the hopes that accompanied the election of Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev) as Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in 2009. From a sociological perspective, the ROC represented an important social resource in post-Soviet Russia with a promising potential for the stabilization of Russian society after the troubled 1990s. Metropolitan Kirill was internationally known as the head of the Church’s Department for External Church Affairs and was considered an educated representative of the more liberal, cosmopolitan wing of the Church. In 1994, Assen Ignatow attested to Metropolitan Kirill’s “constructive and balanced program” in contrast to the forces in the Church, which would pursue nationalization of the Church, pseudo-theological justifications of Great Russian nationalism and a politically fundamentalist theology (Ignatow 1994, 6). The ROC’s policy documents on social doctrine and human rights, developed under Kirill’s authoritative editorial office, as well as his engagement in dialogue with Russian society, opened up new opportunities for the Church to take part in the social discourse, accepting in principle the structures and language game (Sprachspiel) of modern societies. Also initiated by Metropolitan Kirill was the establishment of ROC permanent representation to the bodies of the European Union, and the intensive ecumenical contact under his chairmanship showed his interest in exchanges with the Western, liberal world.

At the same time, some programmatic articles of Metropolitan Kirill made it clear that he sees in the "resistance of the conservative principle and a traditionalist worldview to the enforced, not to say violent, affirmation of neoliberal values" (Kirill 2014a, 27) the central conflict of the present times. In doing so, he leaves no doubt that he sees the Church's place on the side of conservative preservation of traditional values, and that the harmonization of the neoliberal and traditionalist imperatives he calls for is to be achieved through the adherence to traditional moral values (Kirill 2014a, 2014b, 2002).

The debate about values is the dominant theme of Patriarch Kirill's term in office, and it shapes the perception of the ROC both in Russia and abroad as an institution that is critical of any modernization and modernity itself. The closing of ranks with Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime further reinforces the impression of a pre-modern state church, contrary to the separation of state and church guaranteed by the constitution; a development oriented more to the past greatness of the Russian empire than to the requirements of a modern society shaped by globalization, market logics and individualization. This perception is confirmed by the parallelism of political processes and church official positioning, as is evident in the case of "Pussy Riot" or the discrimination against homosexuality.

While a great deal of scholarly work focuses on the political interdependence of the ROC (as examples see Papkova 2011, Malashenko/Filatov 2012, Richters 2012, Curanović 2012; Adamsky 2019), theological inquiry into the Church’s current position remains largely absent. The ROC's resistant stance against modern values (Russian: sovremennye tsennosti), which it describes as individualization, liberalization and secularisation, is often linked to its historical entanglement with the State and a rigid traditionalism, but rarely is the theological basis of its criticism questioned.

It is therefore the task of this work to explore the theological foundations of the ROC’s critical attitude towards modernity. This will be accomplished by evaluating the theological core in the various lines of argumentation of the public church statements and analysing it in the context of Russian Orthodox theology.

This task is realized in two steps: A historical reconstruction and a theological analysis. First, Russian Orthodoxy's confrontation with elements of modernization and modernity is examined in the historical context in order to classify the emergence and formation of the central lines of argumentation. At the same time, historically significant moments of the external and internal modernization of Russian Orthodoxy as well as the theological and ecclesiastical reaction to these events are analysed. The selection of these historical moments is exemplary and based on their lasting significance and reception in ecclesiastical theological discourse. The aim is not to provide a detailed historical account, but rather to highlight certain patterns in how the Church dealt with elements of modernization and the corresponding reception in subsequent developments. I assume that some central leitmotifs of the Church’s argumentation will become clear, which are also reflected in the current discussion about the ROC’s relation to phenomena of the modern world. The investigation of the historical development of these leitmotifs provides the basis for understanding the current debates and embeds them in the history of theology.

This historical reconstruction helps to work out the genuinely theological foundations and to relate them to the political and social factors. This is of particular importance given the fact that in the current discourses, both within the ROC and in the external perception of the Church’s statements, a mixture of political-societal and theological arguments can be observed, which makes an objective discussion of the genuinely theological foundations more difficult. Neither the political role of the ROC nor its entanglement of self-assertion are the focus of interest here, but the theological justification of its respective positioning.

Accordingly, the focus in the second step is on the theological analysis. It should be noted that questions of human coexistence in the Russian Orthodox understanding are not a decided task of theology in the sense of a faithful speech about God.1 Theology in the narrower sense of the Orthodox tradition consists primarily of the dogmatic themes of the knowledge of God, the Incarnation and soteriology, as well as their appropriation by the theology of the Church Fathers.2 It is therefore necessary to place the ROC's critique of modernity in the context of dogmatic questions about God. Consequently, the hypothesis of this work is that the Orthodox concept of unity plays a central role, since it is a leitmotif that shapes the discussion of certain modern phenomena and values and is presented as fundamentally contradictory to modern notions of plurality and diversity. The topics of tradition, anthropology and a specific Orthodox Russian civilisation and culture that dominate the public debates can be traced back theologically to certain notions of unity. The use of the unity argument as an opposing pole to the pluralizing tendencies in modern society in recent years is in some respects due to the political and social circumstances and strategies of various actors, but—according to the hypothesis—also represents a narrowing of the theological foundations. In order to give a comprehensive answer to the question of the incompatibility of Russian Orthodoxy and modernity, the following study presents a fundamental examination of what space the concept of unity in its various theological dimensions holds for legitimate diversity. It thus aims to identify what potential the Church’s own theological tradition offers for a constructive engagement with the modern world.

Finally, the theological baselines developed through the historical reconstruction and theological analysis are put in relation to the current debates in Russian society, providing the starting point for a discussion of the ROC's positioning that does justice to its own theological claims.