Russia’s destiny
Every Russian, wherever he may be, – in the Fatherland that was seized by the godless Communists or on the Babylonian rivers of the great Russian diaspora, – cannot but ponder the destiny of Russia.
Our suffering homeland is undoubtedly experiencing the most responsible time in its history. Neither the fratricidal strife of the medieval period of principalities, nor the centuries under the evil Tatar yoke, nor the first Time of Troubles, nor even the invasion of Napoleon can be compared in the slightest degree with our terrible times.
In those times it was mainly the body of the nation that suffered, while now there is a struggle for the soul of our people. Satan has now openly come out against Christ and has chosen the wide open spaces of Russia as his battleground. This fearsome and intelligent spirit knows what he is doing. He understands quite well that in order to achieve victory over mankind, he must destroy his main adversary – the Russian people, who for such a long time have been known as “the God-bearing people.”
Thus, for forty long years Satan’s faithful servants – the godless Communists – have been trying to eradicate God from the soul of this people, to take Christ away from it. For forty long years the mighty and dreadful machine of the state apparatus, armed with the most modern technology, has been eradicating from the Russian soul all that is sacred and spiritual.
What can the Russian people expect of the future? Is there any hope of salvation?
“The Lord’s destinies are a great abyss!” – says the holy psalm-writer King David. However, armed with humble prayer and placing hope in God’s mercy, one can resolve to look into the misty distance of the Russian future.
Three paths seem to stretch out before Russia.
The first path, onto which the godless are pushing it, is a strengthening of Communism and the world revolution, with the establishment of an illusory paradise on earth without God.
The second path, which represents the dream of many Russian pro-Western liberals, is the gradual replacement of the Bolshevik dictatorship with a Western-style, for example American, capitalist democracy.
These two paths are purely human. But I believe there is another, third path, a unique and divine path for the Russian people. The purpose of this essay is to clarify the nature of this path.
The history and fate of each major people is always to a certain extent tied in with the history and fate of mankind. The best thing that mankind possesses is, undoubtedly, Christianity. For us, Christians, this is perfectly understandable. The Lord Christ became incarnate and appeared in the world with His wondrous teaching in order for it to become the legacy of all peoples, of all mankind. “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28:19-20).
The Lord did not say to His disciples: go and teach individual select peoples, but all nations. This means that it is not only individuals who must live according to God’s word, according to Christian precepts, and to attain salvation in Christ, but all social groups, and more than that – entire nations, i.e. state formations. And if that is so, then the state system, state laws, and the very form of government must be infused with a benevolent Christian spirit.
As soon as the persecutions ended and Christianity came out of the catacombs, from the time of the holy equal-to-the-apostles Emperor Constantine the Great, the issue of the Christianization of social and state life presented itself to mankind which had converted to Christianity, and many large and small nations tried to resolve it in some manner or other.
By this time the Church founded by Christ – this divinely human establishment, this actual and material, i.e. visible on earth form of the Heavenly Kingdom, as philosopher Vladimir Solovyev called it, – already became a powerful factor in the life of the peoples who had converted to Christianity.
Being an establishment sui generis, i.e. a special kind of organism, the Church in principle did not aspire to replace the state apparatus. “Render unto God that which belongs to God, and to Caesar – that which is Caesar’s.” However, being an “organization of true life,” the Church tried to create this true life within the state.
On a historical plane certain collisions sometimes arose between Church and state. In the West the Church began more and more to suppress the state, appropriating Caesar’s functions for itself.
This manifestation is called theocracy by historians. For the almost 2,000 years of Christianity’s existence, theocracy was unable to achieve complete development and took on the somewhat bizarre form of papal Caesarianism.
In the East, in Byzantium, the opposite could be observed, alas! – a certain suppression of the Church by the state, which is customarily called Caesarian papism.
In their struggle against this similarly-bizarre spiritual manifestation, the best minds of the Church and state crystallized a unique and truly divine system of mutual relations between the Church and the state, which came to be known as symphony, or, in other words, accord or concordance.
The essence of this symphony is as follows: the Church and the state each proceed to fulfill their missions independently, the Church on a divine plane and the state on a human plane, and if these planes should collide, the two entities synchronize their actions in such a way as to produce true symphony or harmony.
If the state, in the person of its monarch – the anointed one of God – deviates from divine law, the Church, in the person of its hierarch, uses its right of counsel and instruction. When the state’s violations of the law were especially flagrant, the hierarchs applied church sanctions: they excommunicated the emperors and other figures of authority, and did not even allow them to enter the church. Thus it was, for example, with Emperor Theodosius the Great, to whom St. Ambrose of Milan denied entry into the church for his order to execute all the inhabitants of a city that had revolted.
In Byzantium the idea of symphony achieved concrete, almost finite forms. Periods of symphony between the Church and state sometimes lasted for decades, and at such times Byzantium could rightly be called a churched nation, a preview of life in the Heavenly Kingdom.
Alas, external and internal circumstances prevented Byzantium and its statehood to attain world-wide importance. Hellenic wisdom helped the Church to create a profound and orderly system of Christian religious teaching, but the inheritors of glorious Byzantium, the Greeks of the second millennium of the Christian era, already did not have sufficient spiritual strength to implement in practice and to the very end the system of genuine Christian life, genuine Christian statehood. It appeared that the realization of such a system required greater spaces, a nation of greater proportions, a larger field of experience. And as the Byzantine Empire and the Hellenic culture declined, there appeared in its place and began to flourish a new state formation to the northeast, founded upon wide boundless spaces and populated by a young nation full of fresh mental and physical powers.
