In modern society, the word “crisis” has become so common that it has largely lost its meaning. Scientists and publicists talk about the crisis of civilization; articles and monographs are written about it. Having discussed this problem for quite a long time, we have gradually become accustomed to thinking that we live in a state of crisis.
This crisis is manifested in many areas, the negative processes are obvious, a lot is said about them: this is the almost complete loss of moral orientation, especially among the younger generation, these are various social ills that have become almost commonplace - a sharp increase in the number of people suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction, number of suicides. Despite all the efforts of law enforcement agencies, medicine, public and religious organizations, the diseases of society are rapidly spreading and intensifying throughout the world.
All this indicates that a crisis of civilization is indeed taking place. What civilization? I believe, the one that has developed over the last century: it is usually called “post-Christian”. This very word contains a deep untruth, because “post-Christian” is, as it were, a civilization that came “after Christianity”: that is, it is assumed that Christianity has successfully outlived its time and some other era has begun.
This is wrong. Christianity, the Church, are the same as Christ Himself—the same yesterday, today, and forever (see Heb. 13:8). Today, like many centuries ago, people come to churches, meet the Living God, and take the path of salvation. But that part of humanity that not only forgot Christianity, but deliberately renounced Christ - it did everything to prove to itself and the world that the profession of Christianity has nothing to do with today. It is this civilization, anti-Christian in essence, that challenges not so much religion as itself, deliberately violating the basic principles of the relationship between man and God, which is actually the cause of the deepest crisis.
The fact is that man as a biological, social object, using technical terminology, “does not imply existence in such a regime”: man cannot live without God! Tertullian's words that the human soul is by nature Christian are very accurate. And if the bulk of humanity renounces God, begins to resist Him, and even more so challenges its Creator, such a civilization is doomed.
Even if we leave aside the religious component of the problem, a civilization that proclaimed hedonism, the cult of pleasure as the ultimate goal of human life, also cannot exist for a long time, because it is simply unviable.
History teaches us several similar lessons; among them is the collapse of the great Empire: the Greco-Roman civilization fell precisely because it bowed to the idol of hedonism. A society enslaved by the cult of pleasure loses heroism, self-sacrifice, a sense of responsibility - everything that seems “superfluous”, unreasonable, ideal.
It is also necessary to remember Bazarov’s “burdock on the grave”: from it grows a disdainful attitude towards Christianity in modern Russia; its roots are in the crude positivism of the second half of the 19th century. Our contemporaries only picked up and developed to the extreme the thoughts that were quite naive, stupid and impudent, which seemed to be the “great rise” of human thought a century and a half ago.
I really liked the words of Deacon Andrei Kuraev (and this is an author who loves paradoxical statements) that atheism is a dead-end branch of evolution; after all, atheism is also one of the most characteristic features of the civilization we are talking about: atheistic, anti-Christian, hedonistic. And we are truly living in a period of crisis.
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How does this affect Orthodoxy? Does it change over time? Yes and no.
From the point of view of the history of the Church, of course, changes have occurred and are occurring. Thus, at each Ecumenical Council, dogmatic definitions were developed, one or another side of Revelation was revealed, which before that, perhaps, remained in the shadows. Church practice and forms of church art change over time. From such positions, one can talk about Orthodoxy of the 21st century, the same way, for example, as about Orthodoxy from the times of the Roman Empire, or Byzantium, or Ancient Rus' - each time period has its own characteristics. And the external features of our existence, the language of preaching, the problems of spiritual life, of course, are connected with the way of life that a person leads.
On the other hand, Orthodoxy is unchangeable, since it is God’s Revelation of Himself. It is unchangeable, just as God Himself is unchangeable. His attitude towards man does not change, what He expects from His most perfect, beloved creation.
Therefore, we can say that in the Church there is temporary and eternal. In general, a Christian is a person who recognizes himself as standing before the face of God, before the face of eternity. It is precisely this—eternal—side of the life of the Church that the secularized world cannot understand and accept, reproaching the Church for conservatism and archaism.
These concepts themselves are not equivalent. The Church is truly conservative in the first sense of the word (conservative - defending immutability), without any negative connotations. The true conservatism of an Orthodox believer is manifested in fidelity to Christ, in conscious and constant adherence to the Gospel commandments.
The de-churched world puts a different meaning into the concept of “conservatism”: “that which pulls back into the irretrievably gone past.” It is not difficult to notice that in the “system of coordinates” of a society that deifies progress in the field of technical achievements of the human mind, there is no place at all for “eternal values.” Any reminders that the basis of human existence are feelings of love and fidelity, and not the currently dominant slogan “Take everything from life!” seem “untimely” to him. The denial of anything eternal in principle - and the Church is called upon to tirelessly remind people of eternity - gives rise in the secular world to a sharp feeling of rejection towards it.
Archaism is a different concept; it is an “internal” danger of the Church; it arises where blind adherence to external traditions and a predilection for the archaic in church life are manifested.
There is an example that the Lord allowed for our understanding - the Old Believers. There are sundresses, caftans, and loose-fitting scarves. There is strictly canonical iconography, there is magnificent spiritual singing without any Italian partes... In general, there are many good and good things, but there is no Church. This is especially obvious among the priestless people, who refused to celebrate the Divine Liturgy and replaced the Sacraments with customs. This is the logical conclusion of the path of following the requirements of the archaic, an example of the fact that external traditions, in general, something external can really obscure Christ and hide the truth.
Traditions are just a vessel that must retain life-giving moisture, for this reason it was made. But if this is a very beautiful, precious vessel, there is a great temptation to take care that moisture “does not interfere” or spoil the product - pour out its contents, and carefully wipe the vessel itself, put it in a place of honor and protect it. But does an empty shell retain its meaning?
“What is most precious to you about Christianity?” - the central question of the work of the philosopher V.S. Solovyov "Three Conversations". “A Brief Tale of the Antichrist” contains a brilliant insight - a situational model that points to certain pain points in the Christian consciousness. Those for whom “the old symbols, the old songs and prayers, the icons and the order of worship” are most important are being deceived by choosing the “World Museum of Christian Archeology” instead of the living Church, the Body of Christ. I think every person needs to get acquainted with this work in order to approach the issue of the relationship between the external and the essential sensibly, soberly, “with reasoning”; do not try to reduce Orthodoxy to an ethnographic set of rituals and traditions, much less restrictions and prohibitions.
Is Orthodoxy outdated?
Essentially speaking, Christianity at no point in its history corresponded to its time. It was always either inconvenient, or incomprehensible, or - as for the first time in its centuries - it seemed to society as something dangerous and hostile.
The illusion that Christianity was “relevant” at some point in its history, but is not now, is based only on the fact that in certain centuries the state system fully accepted the Church. Most often, this happened for political reasons (the Church united and is uniting millions of people and the authorities benefit from an alliance with the Church). Sometimes the first government officials were truly deeply religious and even gave their lives for their faith.
But all this does not negate the fact that the truths that Christianity preaches have always gone more or less against the interests of “today.” Words that are unusual for us now were also unusual then - in the 19th, 15th, 10th and 5th centuries.
“Since things have an end, one thing is subject to us: death or life, and everyone must retire to “his place.” For there are, as it were, two coins: one is God’s, eternal, and the other is worldly, and each has its own image on itself. Unbelievers bear the image of this world, but believers in love bear the image of God through Jesus Christ.”
St. Ignatius the God-Bearer, 1st century
If you read the sayings of the saints, it is clear from them: at all times they called people to the same thing: to turn their gaze inward and see in themselves a person not made of flesh, but an eternal person. A person who is so easy to lose, and whom Adam and Eve lost so easily in their time.
The language of prayers is outdated only in the sense that they are in Church Slavonic, but in all other respects the situation remains the same: people at all times, for the most part, did not understand why they need to live righteously. And those who understood or sought their spiritual path - there were always fewer of them. And there were always those who outwardly followed all the traditions, went to temples, but for them this was a phenomenon divorced from their real life - their life also remained unspiritual.
From this side, the 21st century is exactly the same. And the Church in relation to society is still the same.
With the only nuance - never, unlike now, have people seeking their spiritual path had any requirements for religion. People have always understood that spiritual life is not easy. Whereas now people, searching for their path and their religion, seek convenience or “justice” from it. That's how it often seems, at least.
Let's take a closer look at what this is about.
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Christianity has always been foreign to the world: If you were of the world, then the world would love its own; and because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you (John 15:19); all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution (2 Tim. 3:12). What the Gospel says is confirmed by the entire history of the Church. An example of this is the emergence and flourishing of monasticism and hermitage in the most seemingly prosperous, most glorious times of Christianity. IV century, persecution ended, the powerful Roman Empire became Christian - it would seem that a period was coming when Christians could only experience a feeling of joy, and wide opportunities for social activity opened up before them. But it is at this time that the desert begins to “fill up.” Why? We have before us an antinomy that is irresistible to the end. A Christian living in the world is still a person who makes compromises. Compromises can be of different levels; they always have to be sought, at different times, under different conditions. And it is not true that in the 4th-5th centuries the need for concessions to the world was less than today.
In general, we don’t know history well: it seems to us that the world in which we live is monstrous, that right now the most difficult, terrible, tempting times have come. This is not entirely true. Much of what we see in modern society has already happened. But just like centuries ago, every day, in every action, a Christian is in a situation of choice. One more thing you need to understand is that you cannot measure the whole world once and for all with the Gospel: take the Gospel as a kind of measuring instrument and correlate all life situations with it. But it is necessary, as St. Seraphim of Sarov said, “to be imbued with the spirit of the Gospel” in order to be guided by it throughout your life and in the world to preserve the spirit of Christ within yourself.
Under the dome of the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, by order of the Emperor Justinian, an inscription was placed: “Thine from Thine is offered to Thee for all and for all.” Just as the temple of God is dedicated to God, so a Christian devotes any work of his hands, his very life, to the Creator: “You entrusted me with this great gift, but my life is Yours, Lord, I commend it into Your hands.” Thus, under any conditions, in society or in the desert, in a monastery or in the world, we come closer to making our existence a service to God and our neighbors.
Problems of modern Orthodoxy
We need to start with the question: what is the Church for?
2000 years ago God came to earth, taking on human nature. In Himself, through the Cross and Resurrection, Christ accomplished our salvation. But the question is: how can we take it? How to touch Christ? We know that Christ ascended to Heaven and sent down the Holy Spirit from the Father. And He assimilates to each of us, by faith, those fruits of salvation that the Lord accomplished.
Accordingly, the main thing in the Church is two things. 1) Sacraments and 2) Holy Scripture. The sacraments are what the Holy Spirit works through. The Holy Scripture gives us, so to speak, instructions for life - how to live with God.
The Church, therefore, is not an instrument, not a mediator, but the immediate environment of Christian life. In addition to personal communion with Christ, the Church in Christ through the Holy Spirit also unites people, both those still living and those who have already departed, who have participated in the Resurrection of Christ.
This is the essence of the Church. Such, on the one hand, lofty, and on the other hand, humble teaching (humble because it is “not of this world”), requires from Christians a certain way of thinking and a certain amount of work for its identification and actualization. This work can be reduced to four things: participation in the Sacraments, study of the Holy Scriptures, prayer and fulfillment of the commandments of God. Sobriety and adequacy are also necessary - qualities that are few in the Orthodox environment.
So, the main problem in modern Orthodoxy is that the essence of the Church is not revealed in the lives of Christians. The Church itself carries an irresistible persuasiveness; and when claims are made against the Church today, in almost 100% of cases they do not refer to the Church of Christ, but to a substitution, to something that obscures, infringes, and does not reveal the Church. Let's look at the reasons for these substitutions.
There are two such reasons: historical and national.
Historically, since 313, the Church has existed in symphony with the state. This had both positive and negative consequences. What is important for us is that this period ended in 1991. But church ideology has enormous inertia; it has not yet accepted this change. This leads to the fact that today’s church life most often “explicitly” offers not Christ and life with Him, but something completely different. Let me explain what I mean.
1) The motivation for life in the Church most often seems to be that “we are Russian, which means we are Orthodox.” From this point of view, the Church is an integral part of the national mentality, the custodian of statist and social traditions, and so on and so forth. and so on. It is quite obvious that within the framework of such a concept, Christ, that is, the essence of the Church, does not stand in the main, central and exclusive place, but somewhere on the side, as a certain factor in the existence of Great Russia. A person who has come to the Church to God discovers that in fact, church people do not really need Christ and His commandments, but they need completely different things... which is why disappointment in Orthodoxy often occurs, and people leave the Church.
2) Although not officially, but according to the mood of the church environment, it is required of an Orthodox Christian that he certainly shares monarchist views. Many Orthodox Christians actually yearn for a Tsar. In itself, such a desire may have a right to exist (unless, of course, it goes beyond medical limits, which is often observed); but the whole trouble is that it is presented to people entering the Church as something almost obligatory, dogmatic for them. Associated with this is an extraordinary nostalgia for the past. We walk “with the backs of our heads first” all the time; our whole life is in the past; even when we talk or think about the future, we want the past to return to the future. In addition to the fact that this is a completely unrealistic dreaminess, this poses an obstacle to an adequate evangelical understanding of our time. Having come to the Church as the custodian of the Gospel truth, thinking to find in it a sober and correct view of the world, people are disappointed to see that the majority of Orthodox Christians are in some kind of virtual reality, which they, in addition, quite aggressively impose on others. Reluctance to enter this unreal world forces people to leave the Church.
So, I named the historical roots of modern church problems. There is a second set of reasons, they are rooted in our mentality. To understand this, it is necessary to note that most of the problems of the Church are not church problems themselves, but problems of society. People do not fall into the Church from the moon, but enter from our society, and, consequently, the mentality of society flows onto the Church. Let's see what the ratio is here.
The Church is not naked spiritualism; it holistically covers a person, all spheres of his life. The Church expresses its spirituality through a certain culture, which is the culture of the word, logos, personal, independent and responsible reflection (not to be confused with the parish subculture). This culture is deeply traditional and - in the best sense of the word - conservative. Modern people, not only from birth, but also “at the genetic level”, live in a completely different culture - the culture of video and mass media technologies: cinema, “pop”, advertising, sports broadcasts, “clip-based”, imposing a certain way of life. Internet, etc. This is a culture of hedonism, relativity of values, superficiality, herdism, sameness; it not only does not contribute to the development of the qualities necessary for life in the Church - freedom, responsibility, a sober assessment of oneself and the world - but, on the contrary, in every possible way prevents this. It is the farthest thing from individual understanding of life, from logos, the word, its value and significance. The Church addresses people in its own language, and modern man is not that he is “bad”, worse than people of, say, the 14th century, but he simply does not perceive the culture and the words with which the Church operates. Therefore, it is difficult for people to read the Gospel, to perceive the traditions of the Church, and even more so to rebuild their lives in accordance with them. The ethical and cultural “reserve” of modern man is not able to accommodate this.
Of course, this does not mean at all that the Church should strive to become clip-mobile, although, of course, one should understand the features of modern culture and use them when speaking with people in their language. Something else is needed: church people need to understand the situation, and be sure to take two things into account. Firstly, the Church today is faced with an almost impossible task - to include “in-culturization” in churching; together with the teaching of churchliness, and sometimes even before it, to bring people into the mainstream of historical, traditional, fundamentally evangelical, European (I do not separate Russia from Europe) culture. Let me emphasize once again that by evangelical culture I do not mean monuments of church life that move a person from the present to the nostalgic ethnographic past, and not the mastery of the aesthetic heritage of humanity in the form, for example, of trips to the philharmonic or an art gallery (although this is far from superfluous, it must be said ). Christian culture is, first of all, a way of thinking, it is the foundation of ethics and aesthetics, based on personal responsibility and spiritual freedom, on education, on a non-herd worldview, feeling and understanding the versatility and complexity of Christianity and life in general.
Therefore, I believe that it is not necessary to start talking about the Church “head-on”, but first about the fact that a person is not part of the crowd, that before becoming a Christian, he needs to comprehend himself as an individual and become just a normal person. First, it is necessary to talk about human dignity, about common sense, decency, good manners and about many simple things about which our compatriots, alas, have very little idea - and then add to this the knowledge of church teaching and practice. Otherwise, instead of the broad moral and cultural channel in which Christianity flows, a person ends up in a kind of “box” closed on all sides, a stuffy and small world. He adopts narrow, difficult views of God, the Church, other people (and himself), acquiring completely opposite qualities instead of Christ’s love, freedom and evangelical reason. I'm not even talking about the direct flow of the characteristics of society into the church environment (Mercedes, etc.). I repeat once again that this is a “pre-church” issue, a problem of society and the mentality that has developed in it. When this mentality is superimposed on the historical features that I mentioned, the following happens.
1) A person who comes to the Church is instilled with an incorrect self-identification, as a result of which causes and consequences change places. That is: we are Orthodox because we fast, go to church, read the prescribed canons before Communion, etc. But not at all because we have found Christ in our hearts, become the Church, that is, the body of Christ, and with the help We fulfill Christ's commandments by the Holy Spirit. Of course, discipline is important and necessary, but only as a means to help our life in Christ. Spirituality must begin with the Gospel, and then, to the best of each person’s ability, the gospel life must be protected by the experience of the Church, expressed in certain disciplinary norms. With us it’s the other way around: the Gospel doesn’t come first at all. Instead, we burden a person with compulsory discipline, charge him with sin at the slightest deviation from it, and convince him that through fulfilling the form he will find Christ. That is, we instill the idea that living life with God is impossible, it is realized only through ritual. But this is a distortion of the hierarchy of Christian values, and therefore many people, having tried to live a disciplinary life and made sure that it did not bear the expected fruit, leave the Church.
2) Finally, what can be called “hype”. In church life for many Orthodox Christians, the main thing is not evangelical morality, not life with Christ, but something completely different: the elders, apocalypticism, Diveyevo legends, and so on, what the Apostle Paul called “women's fables.” As a result of this, many people in the church environment find themselves faced with a choice: either reject their socio-cultural “normality” or leave the Church.
Which exit? Once the reasons are indicated, the way out is seen in eliminating them, that is: 1) to believe everything that we hear about the Church, Holy Scripture, the true Tradition of the Church and the perception of all this in a historical context. And this will require us, in a sense, 2) to go against the flow, that is, against our herd paternalistic mentality, and to be independent, studying the essence and history of the Church, culture, and humanity. Until then, be sure to force yourself to become a decent, kind, honest, sober and adequate person.
As for life in the Church... In his Nobel speech, Joseph Brodsky said that in the modern world the best form of moral existence is the position of a private individual. So, in my opinion, in today’s conditions of misunderstood barracks “conciliarity” this is the only possible position. It does not require reformations and revolutions from us at all, but it requires an awareness of the essence of things, which is impossible without freedom and a certain individualism. The fight against liberalism and individualism is a striking feature of today’s social and especially church life; but you need to know that Christianity is freedom, not freedom to sin, but intellectual, spiritual freedom, and without it no Christianity is possible. Slave, barracks ideology, the readiness of the people (including the church) to sacrifice their freedom and dignity - this is the problem around which the questions we have voiced today are grouped.
Orthodoxy and the 21st century - what is really special about our time?
For some time, in the text about evidence of the existence of God, we described in detail the development of human thought over the centuries. There is no point in retelling this text here, but the final theses are as follows:
- The development of mass media has created an entire empire of the superconscious, which denies, if not God, then Christianity itself.
- The main values in society are human justice - that is, justice understandable by human logic.
- The very idea of comfort and a prosperous life becomes justice - it is such a life that is fair. The idea of absolutization of human rights is one of the sides of all this.
- In the assessment of all things, man and human logic are put in first place.
- Truth, according to the conditions of mass consciousness, must either be understandable by human logic, or give a person comfort.
- Everything that does not fit into these frameworks is called outdated and incorrect.
The last thesis is the cornerstone. Religion, according to the current mass consciousness, should be understandable logically, or provide objective satisfaction.
Christianity does not fit into this code of correctness.
But what is paradoxical is that at the same time, interest in religions from other cultures increased in society. For example, from China or India. Back at the beginning of the 20th century, the English writer Gilbert Chesterton wrote in his book “The Eternal Man”: if Christianity were Indian and remained exactly the same as it is, it would be accepted with joy - just because it is from India.
The very fact that religions came from other cultures gives people an illusory impression of them. Coming to us as a kind of souvenir, they find themselves in an adapted, “lightened” form - without all the complexities of asceticism and deprivation that they actually have. Like a beautiful marble sculpture that arose by itself, and not after many years of work on it by a sculptor.
Adaptation is the best option. Most often, we are talking about compilations of religions or simply about the most superficial concepts. Religion becomes a hobby rather than a work or a way of life.
But the truth is that Christianity is precisely the same ascetic religion from the East. A religion that lies outside of time and is above time. Adapting to each era with some of its external aspects, in essence it remains a treasury of mystical knowledge that came to us from the apostles and holy fathers - from the deserts of Palestine and Syria.
Perhaps it is not so easy to feel this now - too many external cultural layers are carried within today’s Christianity. These are also the influences of Russian culture and mentality itself, which made our religion overly dramatic where it could have been done without it. This is certainly the influence of the Latin (Catholic) view of Christianity, which became especially strong in the time of Peter - at that moment Christian rhetoric seemed to have lost part of its Eastern mysticism and began to more and more resemble ethical teaching: wise, complete, but all so ethical.
This is also the influence of the modern digital era, when essentially everything and everyone has become visible. And often the words of priests and pastors, spoken specifically for their audience, become public knowledge and therefore, at best, are misunderstood, and at worst, distorted.
