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The church had different relationships to the state at different times of its existence. The First Church initially treats the pagan state as a beast, having a diadem with blasphemous names inscribed on it. This kingdom of the beast is waging war on the saints and persecuting the Church. The attitude towards this kingdom remains irreconcilable and eschatological: “the image of this world is passing away,” and soon everything will end. However, both this eschatologism and this intransigence are combined with the acceptance of the state in terms of history, since there is history. This transition from eschatologism to historicism (which can be internally combined) is outlined in the epistles of St. Paul, especially in chapter 13. Epistle to the Romans, where in the face of Nero’s empire the principle was proclaimed: “there is no power except from God” and the positive significance of the state in the historical paths of the Kingdom of God was recognized. This corresponds to the general, both Old Testament, prophetic, and New Testament views that the paths of the Kingdom of God include both the destinies of the pagan world and the natural forces operating in history, in particular the state. However, the relationship of the Church to the state remains purely external as long as the state power is pagan. When she bows under the shadow of the cross in the person of Emperor Constantine, the situation changes in the sense that the Church becomes much closer to the state and assumes responsibility for its destinies. This rapprochement was expressed in the position of the king in the Church. When he became a Christian sovereign, the Church poured out her gifts on him in the sacred anointing of the kingdom and loved her anointed not only as the head of state, but also as the bearer of the special charisma of kingship, as the bridegroom of the church, having the image of Christ himself. The king took his special place in the church hierarchy. This place is difficult to determine with all precision, because it combines different meanings: on the one hand, the king was revered as a special charismatic, on the other hand, he was, as it were, a representative of the church people, the lay element, “the chosen people, the royal priesthood,” and finally, as a bearer of power, he was the first servant of the Church, in his person the state crowned itself with a cross. Constantine the Great himself defined himself as a bishop for external affairs, thereby returning to the title of bishop the limited meaning of a steward overseeing the financial and administrative affairs of the community, which belonged to it in the apostolic age. The influence of the tsar in the Church was actually determined by the state power that he had at his disposal. Therefore, the position of “external bishop” in Byzantium gave him the opportunity to exercise the broadest influence in the Church, right up to convening and presiding at ecumenical councils, which did not cause the slightest objection either in the east or in the west. The relationship between the Church and the state in Byzantium was fundamentally determined by the type of symphony, i.e. mutual agreement with the independence of each region. The state recognized church law as its internal guidance, while the Church considered itself obliged to obey the state. This was not Caesar-papism, by virtue of which the king would have the primacy in the Church. Caesaropapism was always only an abuse and never had dogmatic or canonical recognition for itself. However, the “symphonic” relationship between the Church and the state meant that the emperor, managing all branches of life, also ruled church life within the limits of his state administration. When this symphony was disturbed by dissonances, and the kings tried to dogmatically lead the Church, imposing on it their dogmatic heresies (Arianism, iconoclasm), then the Church found itself in persecution, and its real relationship to the state was revealed, which was never dogmatic Caesaropapism. However, the Church extremely valued its union with the state, since it served the Church, and the presence of the royal head of the entire Orthodox world, the Orthodox Tsar, was revered as an essential attribute of the Church. He was a symbol of the conquest of the world by the cross, the builder of the kingdom of God on earth. When Byzantium fell, a replacement for its Orthodox emperor was already ready in the person of the Russian Tsar, who was crowned with the Byzantine crown and was considered as the direct successor of the united Orthodox kingdom. On Russian soil, in the era of modern history, the doctrine of the Tsar no longer had the simplicity and consistency that it had in the East. Here, starting with Peter the Great, it was complicated by elements of the Protestant teaching on the primacy of the monarch in the Church, and this, from the church point of view, an incorrect and unacceptable principle even penetrated, albeit with due restrictions, into the basic laws of the state, although it was never proclaimed as church law. Therefore, the well-known elements of Caesar-papism here were only an abuse, as was the actual transformation of the Church into one of the state departments, into the “department of the Orthodox confession.” Despite these abuses, the idea of ​​the Orthodox Tsar and his place in the Church and in Rus' remained essentially unchanged and had nothing in common with papism in the person of the Emperor, i.e. Caesaropapism. The Orthodox Church, in turn, has always wanted to influence state power as much as possible, although not from the outside, but from the inside. The papal theory of the two swords, according to which the pope establishes monarchs through coronation and deposes through excommunication, i.e. is the supreme sovereign over state power, has never had a place in Orthodoxy. When the state in the person of Emperor Constantine, glorified by the Church as “equal to the apostles,” recognized itself as Christian, it could seem that the issue of the relationship between the Church and the state was resolved, and the state ceased to be a “beast,” lost its natural pagan nature, and entered the realm of the Kingdom of God. At the same time, the issue was also resolved church-hierarchically through the introduction of the tsar’s personality into the circle of the church hierarchy as a charismatic. It seemed that the relationship between the tsar and the episcopate and the very place of the tsar in the Church represented its inviolable foundations that could not change. However, events showed the fallacy of the last conclusion: the Orthodox Church was twice deprived of an Orthodox king, first in the fall of Byzantium, and now in the fall of the Russian kingdom, and, in this sense, returns to the position in which it was in the pre-Constantine era (the Orthodox sovereigns of the Balkan states, of course, cannot be considered as the leaders of the Orthodox kingdom, which was Byzantium and its successor Russia). The Church now exists without a King, and its charismatic position, as well as the fullness of its gifts, has not changed because of this. What happened? The fact is that the transformation of a pagan state into a Christian one turned out to be not at all as easy and simple as it might seem. It was easy for the Edict of Milan to transform a persecuted religion into a tolerant one, and then into a state religion, and even clothe it in state armor. But the state itself throughout its entire life remained pagan from top to bottom, nurtured by Roman statehood and Eastern despotism. Byzantium, in the person of its emperors, made extraordinary efforts to bring civil and ecclesiastical laws closer together, but this was only the beginning of a long historical journey, which was interrupted by a catastrophe. The same thing happened in Russia. Ancient Rus' had many beautiful and touching features of patriarchal well-being, but, of course, here too there was such a deep layer of natural paganism, and in the Russian statehood - Prussian and, at the same time, Asian despotism, that here too it was premature to talk about Christian statehood. This was the lot of the entire Christian world, both in the east and in the west, which ascended to Christianity from primitive barbarism and pagan culture: the Orthodox Byzantine-Russian kingdom found itself in no different position than the Holy Roman Empire. It was only a commemorative-symbolic designation not of what already exists, but of what should be, and would, of course, be a grave delusion: to equate a symbol or a dream with real reality. Moreover, it became necessary that this discrepancy be exposed by history. Symbols have done their real work in history. Christian kings led their peoples to Christ as long as such leadership was possible. However, its time has passed, because life itself has abolished the reality of that representation of the church people in the person of the Tsar, on which the power of the Tsar and in the Church rested. And without such representation, it became a fiction, entailing the most severe form of tyranny - church, carrying out the oppression of Caesar-papism. The people began to live an immediate life outside of such representation, and the state can now be ecclesiastical not from the outside, but from the inside, not from above, but from below. This leads us to that new formulation of the question of the relationship between the Church and the state in which the new time finds us. There are two questions here: about the attitude of Orthodoxy, firstly, to the royal power and, secondly, to the state in general. Is there a definite, dogmatic pre-established connection between Orthodoxy and royal power (“autocracy”), similar to the connection that exists between Catholicism and papism, or is this a historical connection that arose in history and was abolished by it? During the long centuries of existence of the Orthodox kingdom, the first understanding arose and was widely spread, and the historically established order of things was considered as inviolable. Of course, this conviction never became and could not become a dogma of the Church simply because there is no basis for it in Christianity, and Orthodoxy was never moved to a kind of parallel to the Vatican Council as applied to royal power. As has already been said, the king, as the anointed of God, the charismatic of power, the charismatic representative of the laity, occupied a certain place in the Church. However, it is not as necessary for the very existence of the Church as the hierarchy of apostolic succession, the clergy and the episcopate, without which the Church cannot do. On the other hand, the laity, “the people of God, the royal priesthood,” represents an element as necessary in the Church as the hierarchy, the shepherds, who cannot exist without the flock. But this importance of the laity in the Church cannot be connected with their representation in the person of the tsar, and in general there may not be such personal representation at all, just as there was none in the primal Church. True, the potency of a king in the image of Christ is inherent in the Church. This is not a political idea associated with one form or another of the organization of power, but a purely religious one. This idea can find its realization in the presence of the most extreme democracy; it can be realized not in a political autocrat, but also in an elected representative of power, the president. This is generally the idea of ​​the sanctification of power in the person of its highest representative, the ideal of the holy king, foreshadowed in the Old Testament, in the psalms and prophetic books, and given in the image of the “meek King” who made His royal entry into the royal city. This idea has a connection with the promise of the “kingdom of the saints with Christ” in the “first resurrection” of which the Apocalypse speaks (Rev. 20:4-5). Historical royal power represented as much the implementation of this idea as its obfuscation and distortion. Perhaps she died as a result of this internal inconsistency with her idea. This apocalypse of power is, so to speak, a utopia of Orthodoxy, but it has its basis in biblical prophecies. This idea of ​​a “white tsar”, a holy ruler, by whom the Kingdom of God will be realized on earth, was born among the Russian people. This is a transformation of power, which no longer becomes the power of the sword, but the power of love. But this ideology of personal consecration of power has nothing to do with the adoption of a certain political regime, namely the police-bureaucratic monarchy. This substitution has been and is being made by supporters of a certain political party (“camelots du roi”), for whom religion is - consciously or unconsciously - a means for politics. In general, connecting Orthodoxy, which is a religion of freedom, with reactionary political or class aspirations is a blatant contradiction, which finds an explanation for itself in history, but not in the dogma of Orthodoxy. Of course, for many centuries Orthodoxy was associated with the monarchy, which provided irreplaceable services to the Church, although it inflicted serious wounds on it. “Christian” statehood, which ensured the “dominant” position of the Orthodox Church, also turned out to be shackles for it, delaying its free development, and much in the historical tragedy of Orthodoxy, both in the fall of Byzantium and in modern Russia, is explained precisely by this imbalance in the relations of the Church and the state. And it is wrong to turn this story, with all its bright and dark sides, into an Apocalypse and see in the past a lost paradise, the kingdom of God on earth. The revolution, at the terrible cost of innumerable victims, forever (one must think) freed Orthodoxy from excessive connections with monarchical statehood. This connection has never been exclusively decisive. The Orthodox Church existed in different countries under different political regimes, equally in the Novgorod and Pskov republics, as well as under the despotism of Ivan the Terrible, as well as under heterodox and heterodox authorities, and it did not lose its fullness and strength. So today the Church exists both under the yoke of communism, and in refugee, and throughout the world under different political conditions. There is no internal and unbreakable connection between Orthodoxy and one or another political system, and therefore Orthodox Christians may have different political views and sympathies. This is a matter of their political conscience and reason. Of course, under certain conditions, unity of political sentiments arises in groups that are religiously like-minded; This is facilitated, first of all, by the beginning of church love, but, we repeat, there is no dogmatic connection between Orthodoxy and a certain political form. Orthodoxy is free and should not be given into the service of one or another political regime. It has a religious, but not political ideal of the sanctification of power and its dissolution in the element of the Church, but this is not the ideal of possessing two swords or an ecclesiastical state in the form of a papal monarchy, which Catholicism does not want to abandon: neither papocaesarism nor caesarapapism. Historically, the relationship between the state and the Church remains volatile. Until the last revolutionary era, they were reduced to various forms of the “Christian state”, which was in alliance with the Church. In the newest state, which includes peoples of different confessions and even faiths, the confessional state has long been inappropriate to the state of affairs. At the present time, it has apparently become completely impossible. There was a separation of Church and state, to the mutual benefit of both, and instead of the previous union, there came a separation of Church and state in its various forms. The separation of Church and state, initially forced, has now been accepted by the Orthodox Church as consistent with its dignity and calling. True, there are still countries where this separation has not completely taken place, but even here the position of the Orthodox Church is completely different than in a confessional state. Orthodoxy thereby ceases to be a state Church, a position that is associated with various advantages, but also with a heavy burden (as is clearly seen in the example of the established church of England). The separation of Church and state can actually have different contents, from open persecution of faith, as now in Russia 38, to complete religious freedom (as in the United States of America). The latter is currently the most favorable and normal regime for the Church, which frees it from the temptation of clericalism, but provides the opportunity for unhindered development. Of course, this provision for the Church is valid only for the sake of historical expediency. But the Church, accepting legal separation from the realm of Caesar, from the state, as its liberation, does not at all abandon the task of influencing the entire life of the state, with its penetration into all its pores. The ideal of the Christian implementation of statehood through the power of churchliness remains in full force and without any restrictions even in the era of the separation of the Church from the state, which has become “legal,” for this separation remains only external, but not internal. At the same time, the paths of influence of the Church change; it comes not from outside, from above, but from within, from below, from the people and through the people. The representation that the people had in the Christian state and government during the era of the Christian state has now been abolished, and the people, without any external representation, are present as laity in the Church, which thereby exercises influence in the state through democracy. But this is democracy in souls. This path has its own dangers and difficulties, similar to those that existed during the union of the Church and the state: the involvement of the Church on the path of political partisanship, which, in turn, can deviate it from its path. But here one main advantage remains: the influence of the Church on souls is carried out through freedom, which alone corresponds to Christian dignity, and not by coercion from above, which can sometimes achieve faster results, but which is punished in history, as the modern history of both East and West tells us enough about this. We cannot close our eyes that the separation of Church and state in our century, with increasing disregard for personal freedom, becomes direct or indirect rape of the Church or even persecution. But one must believe that the paths of Providence, through trials, lead the Church to liberation from those historical growths that have formed over centuries, and through this to strengthening its influence on life, and, in particular, on statehood. The Soviet statehood, although it proclaimed de jure separation, is de facto the only confessional state in the world in which the dominant religion is the militant atheism of the communist sect, while other religions, at first only tolerant, become intolerant.