Церковь и интеллигенция

The war was going on, but the hopes of the first time for the conversion of the Russian people, and especially educated people, to the Mother Church gave way to disappointment. Most Russians were more interested in the external political order than the internal spiritual order - rather in secular rights than in Christian duties, and much more willingly in profit than in truth. Spirituality is preferred, if not materiality, then soulfulness, poetic dreaminess or revolutionary rebellion (sometimes combined in a fantastic way, as, for example, in the work and life of Alexander Blok), one’s own will - the will of the Divine, temporary interests overshadow the eternal. There was no mass return of the intelligentsia from the Babylonian captivity of Western culture to ecclesiastical Jerusalem. The inaugural academic lecture of the future martyr, given on August 26, 1916, sounds like the last call to the Russian intelligentsia and at the same time the last warning. Its title succinctly expresses the main idea: “Sin against the Church.” The student youth from Leonid Andreev’s novel “Days of Our Lives”, who admire the ringing of Moscow bells calling the Orthodox to the Sunday all-night vigil, but do not rush to the service, but continue their picnic with beer on one of the cliffs of the Vorobyovy Gory, is, according to the lecturer, the most striking image expressing the retreat of the Russian intelligentsia from its church, and therefore, national roots. After all, “Russian” and “Orthodox”, “church” are almost synonymous. “The Russian national character was cultivated over the course of entire centuries under the leadership of the Church, and therefore a falling away from the Church for a Russian person is almost certainly a falling away from Russia. Russia can be imagined without parliament, without universities, but Russia cannot be imagined without the Church” 240. Petrine reforms split the Russian people, according to Konstantin Aksakov’s definition, into “people” and “public”: “When the public goes to the ball, the people go to the all-night vigil; when the audience dances, the people pray. The center of the public in Moscow is the Kuznetsky Bridge. The concentration of the people is the Kremlin" 241. The replacement of the worship of God in the Church with the worship of idols of Western European culture since then has been the main sin of the retreat of Russian educated society, now formed not in the image of God, but according to Western models alien to the Church. The unity of the pre-Petrine patriarchal Russian society, the life of which is inseparable from the life of the Church, was replaced by a severe split of this single society into the people and the public, which became the main misfortune of Russia, its painful wound, “which burns and does not give rest to the Russian people until now” 242. As an experienced spiritual physician, Archimandrite Hilarion clearly defines the diagnosis: “The Russian disease is based on sin against the Church. The attitude towards the Church is the touchstone of a Russian person. He who is faithful to the Church is faithful to Russia, he is truly Russian” 243. Having made a diagnosis, he also proposes a “course of treatment for the disease”: “To heal the wounds that are corroding the Russian soul, it is necessary to repent of the two-century sin against the Church, return to the faith of the fathers and give the Orthodox Church its former place in the life of the state and public” 244. Otherwise, the consequences can be very dire. After all, the one who renounced the Church, “renounced Russia, broke away from Russian soil, became a groundless cosmopolitan... A Jew... who renounced the Law of Moses is certainly a complete nihilist, harmful both for his people and for everyone else in which he lives. In parallel to this, it was the Russian intelligentsia that supplied the most radical deniers, nihilists and anarchists into European life. Tolstoy and Bakunin are ours. Russian revolutionaries are also persecuted in Western Europe. No person, perhaps, has looked into the abyss of denial like the Russian man” 245. First of all, Father Hilarion calls for the restoration of the patriarchate and the removal of the management of the Russian Church from the authorities, where the Church is no longer subordinate even to the Orthodox monarch, but to constitutional institutions, through which “now both Friedman 246 and Chkheidze 247 have received the right to legally discuss and resolve many issues of even the internal church life.” It was especially painful to watch at a time when schismatics and sectarians received complete freedom of action in Russia. Remembering his feelings experienced at the sight of the empty patriarchal seat in the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, Father Hilarion cannot resist exclaiming: “How long, Lord! When will the supreme shepherd of the Russian people ascend to this place, take the flute and club into his holy hands and gather all the Russian people into a single flock of Christ, including those pea-predatory sheep that have now scattered across the Sparrow Hills and are grazing in strange and harmful pastures?..” 249 Hilarion, (Archbishop of Vereisky), schmch. Sin against the Church // Aka. Without the Church there is no salvation. P. 562. Fridman Naftali Markovich (1863–1921) - Russian public and statesman, lawyer, one of the most famous Jewish deputies of the State Duma. Chkheidze Nikolai Semenovich (1864–1926) - political figure in Russia and Georgia, deputy of the 3rd and 4th State Dumas, head of the Menshevik faction, member of the Duma Masonic lodge "Rose" of the Great East of the Peoples of Russia.