Gedachten bij een millennium
Authors: van Agt F.J.Th.J. 
Published: March 2023

Reflections on the occasion of the Millennium

Confronted by the Soviet Stateʼs ideology-bound course towards forcing back and eventually eliminating all forms of religious „prejudice”, the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church has its hands tragically tied. On the verge of extinction in 1943, the Church, in recognition of its patriotic war efforts, has since been allowed a certain leeway enabling it to rebuild itself institutionally by sticking, at the same time, to a position of supporting at home and abroad the official Soviet policy-priorities of the moment. In the same way the Patriarchateʼs public pronouncements leading up to the Millennium, apart from their pastoral contents, abound with references to the Churchʼs patriotic role and to its historical contribution to the creation and defence of the Russian State.

By its abstention from any support for protests and actions like those of the well-known priest Gleb Yakunin and others demanding freedom for the Church to teach, to publish and to engage in welfare-work, the Church leaders, from the point of view of their longterm responsibilities, show understandable and wise distrust of the permanency and of the purpose of the so called „glasnost” and „perestroika” developments now taking place within Soviet society. Not only the ideological bul also the political priorities of the Soviet Government (to keep at bay the centrifugal forces within the heterogeneous Stateʼs inherited structure) seem at variance with the possibility of granting the manifold religions and institutional Churches any real freedom of action. The most that may be expected is a change of style but not of purpose or direction of the enforced limitations. In 1888, at the occasion of the 900th Anniversary of the „Baptism of Rus”ʼ, Vladimir Solovyov called upon the Church to become aware of its vocation as “Ecclesia Militans” and to add social and political dimensions to its activities. However, the fact that such dimensions at present are excluded, and that the authorities are bent upon forcing the Church into social and cultural isolation, has enabled the Church to concentrate on what it sees as its essential mission: to keep intact and to hand on to future generations the patristic heritage of its Faith and the liturgical traditions and beauty of its Worship. A yardstick of the Churchʼs success thus obtained, is the overall percentage of believers within the population (variously estimated at 10, 25 or even 50%) and also the ever-increasing number of young people finding their way to church and religion, motivated in the first place perhaps by an emotional appeal (the example of trend-setting friends, the beauty of the services) but, at the same time, certainly at pains to acquire the necessary doctrinal understanding, and trying to live up to it.

Nicolai Berdyayev having pointed out that the socially destructive influence of the Renaissance had only marginally penetrated Russian society, it may be argued that the Russian Church has kept many of the characteristics and much of the strength of the mediaeval structures in which the community prevails and the individual and his transgressions do not count that much. Similar to the Western Church of the Middle-Ages, the Russian Church has been able, and is able, to shrug off without much ado such abuses as may exist within. Apart from the beauty and the didactic content of its worship, the Russian Church derives strength from the fact that it has absorbed within its observances a number of elements deeply embedded in the popular conscience, such as the special attention for the dead, which the controversial layman-theologist Nikolai Fyodorov even considered to be the essence of the Christian vocation on earth.