Russian Orthodox Thought in the Context of Modernity

 Kristina Stoeckl

Orthodox “Collectivism” Revisited Collectivism is often taken to be an intrinsic feature of Orthodox culture, a kind of national characteristic that becomes most visible during Communism throughout Eastern and Southeastern Europe but represents in reality the social, political, and cultural legacy of the Orthodox religion. Soviet academic Jurij Lotman has expressed the view that Russia and the West are bearers of two distinct religiously motivated cultural patterns, which in the West give rise to individualism and a continuous cultural development from Renaissance to Reformation to Enlightenment, while the Orthodox East remains caught in collectivism, passivity, and a medieval mindset with outbursts of radical modernization.1 Orthodoxy is said to have prevented individual expression, political emancipation, and modernization. In contrast to this generally held opinion may be juxtaposed a more differentiated analysis of the confrontation between the Orthodox spiritual and intellectual tradition and modernity. In this case, Communist totalitarianism represents a watershed for Orthodox thought, and as a result of its impact, Orthodoxy today should be interpreted as distinctively modern, even though it has often been regarded, and has regarded itself, as pre- and antimodern in confrontation with the West. Instead of documenting modern/pre-modern divides, the task of scholars of Orthodoxy should be to study how and with what consequences Orthodox thinkers today partake of modernity – rendered problematic and ambiguous through the experience of totalitarianism. 

Projections of Western Decline Looking at the larger picture, it should be noted that comprehensive theories of the rise and decline of world civilizations are a scholarly phenomenon of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Works like Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926) and Arnold Toynbee’s The World and the West (1953) are the clearest examples of this genre, which in 1993 was unexpectedly revived by Samuel Huntington. A brief review of their works will reveal that they share basic views on Orthodox Eastern Europe and on the Western experience of modernization. 

Spengler, Toynbee, and Huntington on EastWest Incompatibility 

“Semi-occidental” was Spengler’s judgment of Russia in The Decline of the West, a work that exemplifies the cultural pessimism of the early twentieth century. Spengler was clearly fascinated by Russia and by the Orthodox religion, which he credited with the potential to reject the modern social paradigm.2 Toynbee shared Spengler’s assertion that Russia was not a full member of Western civilization, instead seeing it as a “sibling” Byzantine civilization. This Byzantine legacy was not only responsible for Russian anti-Westernism; it also determined Russian political culture, which Toynbee described as totalitarian and autocratic.3 Huntington, in his reflections on the world order after the Cold War, shared Toynbee’s view. According to Huntington, the Cold War ideological divide obscured an issue which was historically pertinent for Russia, namely, the question of its belonging to the West or to a distinct Slavic-Orthodox civilization. Huntington developed the image of a distinctively Orthodox civilization in Europe, incompatible with Western values of liberty and democracy.4 

What all these works have in common is the argument that Orthodox Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular, is essentially different from the West, and that attempts to become more like the West, to modernize, have produced ambiguous results. The reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, they hold, like those of Alexander II and Mikhail Gorbachev, did not penetrate Russian society. 

The Eurasian Movement 

The Eurasian movement, akin to the thinking of Spengler, Toynbee, and Huntington in certain respects, was founded in 1921 by a group of young Russian émigrés who sought to formulate an alternative both to the restoration of the old regime, as was the program of the White Guards during the Russian Civil War, and to the social, political, economic, and cultural program of the West. The cornerstone of their theory was the idea that Russia, defined by its Orthodox heritage, ought to take a leading role in the formation of a new geopolitical space called Eurasia, inaugurating a new epoch in world history which would end the domination of the West.5 

Overcoming Soviet-Era Intellectual Isolation 

Unlike Russian émigré thinkers, Soviet scholars of a philosophical and theological inclination were severely restricted until the end of the 1980s in their access to works in philosophy and theology from the West and from Russia’s pre-revolutionary past. “Suspect” works were kept in special sections of state libraries, the speckhran (from special’noe khranenie, special storage), which could only be accessed with special permission. Academic Sergei Khoruzhij recalls that during his student years in the 1960s, everybody interested in philosophy was aware of these “hidden treasures.” Especially the study of the Russian religious philosophers of the Silver Age was almost imperative, and despite their forbidden nature and the difficulty of obtaining their texts, these authors were read and discussed. 

In the 1960s, cultural scholar Sergei Averintsev was involved in the publication of the Soviet Philosophical Encyclopedia. Together with likeminded scholars, among them Sergei Khoruzhij and Vladimir Bibikhin, Averintsev worked on Western Christian thinkers and on Russian philosophers of the Silver Age. The project of the Philosophical Encyclopedia was important, Khoruzhij recalls, because it allowed researchers to read the works of Russian religious philosophers and Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, even if they then had to give a Soviet take on their writings.6 “This was our own little crusade,” Averintsev would later say about the Philosophical Encyclopedia. 7 

The Quiet Quest for Ideological Alternatives to Marxism

 Besides the encyclopedia, there were other government-sponsored projects in which scholars were employed translating and relating Western philosophy. Bibikhin recalls these episodes both fondly and critically. On the one hand, they offered an opportunity to read otherwise inaccessible literature and provided invaluable food for thought. On the other hand, these projects, especially when it came to Russian religious thinkers, seemed designed to shape their ideas into an official canon that could be read in support of Russian nationalism and, as an anti-individualist philosophy, of Communism. “The ones in power started to look for ideological alternatives to Marxism early,” Bibikhin writes in his article, “For Administrative Use.”8 As early as 1973 political strategists started to consider Orthodox patriotism an easy way out of the ideological dead-end. Especially with regard to an ideological underpinning for the Soviet army, state organs busied themselves with the elaboration of ideological alternatives. Scholars translated and reviewed speckhran literature, their texts being published in a series with the signature DSP (dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya: for administrative use), with numbered and limited editions carefully distributed among state officials. Since the authorities imagined that Orthodoxy could provide a particularly useful ideological background for patriotism, research in this field was intensified. Bibikhin recalls that at the end of the 1970s religion was a particularly wellfinanced part of the DSP series.9 

Besides Orthodox writers, Western authors also were being reviewed and translated. Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were translated for a publication on contemporary Protestantism. In 1974, Bibikhin began to translate Martin Heidegger, and together with his colleagues he also worked on Maurice MerleauPonty, Jose Ortega-y-Gasset, Jean Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1976, key authors of European structuralism and post-structuralism, Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida, were translated.10 The employees of the Department for Scientific Information and Study of Foreign Literature of the Soviet Academy of Sciences prepared digests of Western philosophy and social science that would then be studied and commented upon by “official” scholars. Bibikhin recalls that the translators were painfully aware that they were not writing for a reading public, and that, above all, they were working years behind scholars in the West.11 Despite reservations about the disjointed and ideologically restricted nature of the project, Bibikhin recognized that the work opened up a window on the West, especially for those who would not otherwise have received permission to travel to the West. 

Bibikhin’s memories make clear how immensely important access to Western human and social sciences was for those scholars working in the Soviet Union who found themselves at the margins of the official Marxist-Leninist canon. It provided them with an outside perspective on their own situation as scholars, and on the absurdity of being confined to a closed library, not even allowed to take home their translations and papers.12 

Fears of Religion Coopted for Secular Purposes 

In 1994 Khoruzhij published an article, “O Maroderakh [The Looters],” as a protest against the superficial re-appropriation of religious philosophers during the late-Soviet and Yeltsin period.13 The main point of criticism was the fact that Communist ideologues had turned themselves into Christian thinkers. In the 1980s Bibikhin was already suspicious of religious renewal under state tutelage. In a 1989 essay, for example, he criticized  the political use which was made of the Russian religious philosophers by rival circles of “patriots” and “cosmopolitans.”14 For its part, much of Russian Orthodoxy has moved along the well-trodden path of pre-revolutionary and pre-totalitarian models of defining an Orthodox identity in congruence with the Russian state and in contrast to a modernizing West. A considerable element within the Russian Orthodox Church today takes this position, its most radical formulation being Orthodox fundamentalism.15 

Orthodoxy in the Service of Russian Nationalism 

By way of explanation, a great number of religious dissidents were not liberal in their opposition to Communism, but nationalist. Nationalist religious dissidents saw themselves in the tradition of the Slavophiles, anti-Western in attitude and not strictly opposed to the Soviet regime. The authoritarianism and anti-Westernism of the Soviet government appealed to many Orthodox nationalists who asserted that Orthodoxy must be superimposed on existing structures.16 In the Brezhnev era this nationalist view of Orthodoxy moved into the orbit of government propaganda. Historians have explained this “policy of inclusion” by saying that Orthodoxy provided a welcome nationalist and anti-Western ideology at a time when Marxist-Leninist ideology was losing its mobilizing power.17 The promotion of Russianness and Orthodox religious identity, undertaken in journals such as Vekhe [Assembly] and Zemlya [The Land], naturally produced tensions in the multi-ethnic and multi-national Soviet empire. As a consequence, anti-semitism and tensions between Soviet Russian and Muslim citizens increased. Meanwhile, a whole new genre appeared in literature known as village prose, which mourned the passing of the Russian village and praised peasant values. A prominent representative of this genre was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Solzhenitsyn’s stand as a Russian Orthodox nationalist became ever more evident following his return to Russia in 1994. 

The Russian Orthodox Church, headed by Patriarch Pimen since 1972, wholeheartedly supported nationalist trends. Gradually, the Orthodox Church intensified its activities in parishes, religious themes became increasingly present in the media, and in 1988 the thousandth anniversary of the adoption of Christianity in Kievan Rus’ marked the culmination of the special relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet state, with a joint celebration by Patriarch Pimen and Gorbachev.18

 Against the background of the special state-church relations in the late Soviet period, it is quite plain that the Russian Orthodox Church met the collapse of the Soviet Union from a position of ambiguity. On the one hand, the end of Communism meant freedom in the practice and teaching of religion, previously confiscated property was handed back, churches and monasteries re-opened, and many citizens became interested in religion. On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet regime brought to the fore the extent to which the Church had compromised itself in collaboration with the authorities, causing a loss in image. The promise and peril faced by Orthodox in this new era was an object for sociological research and political discussion throughout the 1990s, which accentuated the fundamental contradiction between the Russian Orthodox Church’s self-image of being Russia’s national church and its largely ineffective claim to offer religious guidance in a period of economic and political transition.19 In general, the scholarly consensus is that the Church is mainly preoccupied with regaining power in the Russian state, playing on ideological schemes like symphonia and on the correspondence of religious and national identity, showing little concern for the individual needs of believers suffering from social injustice.20 

Making the Case for Orthodox Modernization 

More positively, the year 2000 marked the beginning of the inner renaissance of the Russian Orthodox Church with the issuing of a document called The Bases of the Social Concept for the Russian Orthodox Church. 21 The Social Doctrine, as the text is commonly known, lays out the Russian Orthodox Church’s position on a variety of sociocultural phenomena, encompassing a whole range of issues from state and law to secularism, from culture to bioethics.22 The mere existence of the text suggests the view that the Orthodox Church should modernize itself, that it should no longer remain in a position of rejection of modernity and instead take a stand on contemporary problems, has been gaining ground among Orthodox theologians.23 In substance, however, the difficulties which the Russia Orthodox Church continues to have in its confrontation with modernity are very apparent in The Social Doctrine. It is striking, for example, that in its definition of Orthodox community, the authors of the text do not draw on any of the twentieth-century theologians, not on Bulgakov’s vision of a socially active Church, and not on the ecclesiological theology of the Russian diaspora. Instead, they cite theologian Alexsei Khomyakov and other nineteenth-century sources. It thus seems safe to say that The Social Doctrine is above all a carefully weighted document which tries to steer clear between extreme conservatism and radical reformism. The fact that it won the support of both conservative and moderate forces in the Russian Church testifies to this. It illustrates the general strategy of the present Russian Orthodox Church to take a pragmatic stance on contemporary problems while in substance maintaining a conservative attitude. 

Orthodox Fundamentalism 

A serious issue for Orthodoxy today is fundamentalism within its fold. The Russian sociologist Aleksandr Verkhovskij explains that Orthodox fundamentalists rely on the notion of a “golden age” to which Russia must return. This implies the restoration of the pre-1905 Russian empire, full-fledged autocracy, imperial structures, a privileged status for the Russian Orthodox Church, and state-Orthodox paternalism.24 Another critical observer of Orthodox fundamentalism, Konstantin Kostjuk, points out that a key concept for this ideology is pravoslavnaya derzhavnost’, only inadequately translated as “Orthodox state-power.” 

Russian Orthodox fundamentalism is based on a theocentric understanding of the world according to which Church and state are interpreted as intrinsically related, and Orthodoxy is understood as a cultural and geo-political concept, providing ideological justification for Russia’s claim to renewed superpower status in the world.25 Kostjuk even suggests that Russian Orthodox fundamentalism is, from a historical point of view, really at its strongest today, prepared by the nationalization of the Orthodox religion already during the Soviet period.26 Needless to say, this understanding of the role of Orthodoxy comes hand-in-hand with Russian nationalism and anti-semitism.27 Russian Orthodox fundamentalists have also made ties with ex-Communists. The link here is Stalinism, in itself profoundly anti-semitic, autocratic, and nationalist. Thus today the Moscow Patriarchate is best characterized by its striving for power, its pragmatism, and its religious nationalism. 

In Summary 

In summary, Russian Orthodox thought in the twentieth century witnessed diverse trajectories. Today in post-Communist Eastern Europe, in an atmosphere of political, philosophical, and theological renewal, different trends from the history of Orthodox thought are being revived, including Slavophile and Eurasian ideologies, Russian religious philosophy, patristics, and debates relating to émigré theology. My main assumption has been that what we are dealing with is Orthodoxy’s confrontation with modernity, sharpened by its experience with totalitarianism.28 Contemporary Orthodox thought can reach from an outright rejection of modernity to an informed and challenging engagement with it.

 Orthodox thinkers are faced with the challenge of having to formulate an understanding of the Orthodox tradition in between the extremes of Orthodox fundamentalism and Western-style modernization. Post-totalitarian Orthodox thought is conscious of the totalitarian potential inherent in religious fundamentalism as well as in the modern political project, and against this background some Orthodox thinkers try to give a double response, no to fundamentalism, and no to political modernism.

Notes: 

1. Jurij M. Lotman and Boris A. Uspenskij, “Rol’ dualnykh modelei v dinamike russkoi kul’tury (do kontsa 18-ogo veka) [The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture until the End of the 18th Century]” in Trudy po Russkoi i Slavyanskoi filologii, ed. by V.I. Bezzubov (Tartu: Uchen. Zap. Tartuskogo Gos. Un-ta, 1977). 
2. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 2000), 792.
3. Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial and the World in the West (New York: New American Library, 1976), 159.
4. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 72 (No. 3, 1993), 22-50.
5. Sergej S. Khoruzhij, “Zhizn’ i uchenie L’va Karsavina [The Life and Work of Lev Karsavin],” Posle Pereryva. Puti Russkoi filosofii (St. Petersburg: Aleteiya, 1994), 160.
6.  Interview with Sergei S. Khoruzhij, Moscow, 15 June 2005.
7. Vladimir V. Bibikhin, “Dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya [For Administrative Use],” Drugoe nachalo (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2003), 196. 
8. Bibikhin, “Dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya.”
9. Bibikhin, “Dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya,” 193. 
10. Examples of titles include Contemporary Protestantism, 1973; The Dialectics of Hegel in the Contemporary Philosophical Discourse of the West, 1974; The Ontological Problematic of Language in Contemporary Western Philosophy, 1975; The Philosophy of Kant in the Present, 1976; Some Problems of Foreign Aesthetics, 1976; Contemporary Phenomenology: Its Current State and Perspectives, A Critical Analysis, 1977; and Contemporary Personalism and Religion, 1977. 11
11. Bibikhin, “Dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya,” 188. 
12. Bibikhin, “Dlya sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniya,” 189. 
13. Sergej S. Khoruzhij, Posle Pereryva. Puti Russkoi filosofii [After the Break. The Ways of Russian Philosophy] (St. Petersburg: Aleteiya, 1994), 256. 
14. Vladimir V. Bibikhin, “Svoi i chuzhie [Of One’s Own and the Foreign],” Drugoe nachalo (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2003). 
15. Christopher Selbach, “The Orthodox Church in PostCommunist Russia and Her Perception of the West: A Search for a Self in the Face of an Other,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 10 (2002), 131-73; Vasilios Makrides, “L’”autre” orthodoxie: courants du rigorisme orthodoxe grec.,” Social Compass 51 (No. 4, 2004), 511-21; Konstantin Kostjuk, “Pravoslavnyi fundamentalizm [Orthodox Fundamentalism],” Polis 5 (No. 58, 2000), 133-54. 
16. Zoe Katrina Knox, Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 56. 
17. Yitkzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia. Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 16. See also Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right: Right Wing Ideologies in Contemporary Russia (Berkeley: University of California, 1978). 
18. Thomas Bremer, Kreuz und Kreml (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2007), 136. See also Knox, Russian Society, 57-74. 
19. For a very informative and complete study of the development of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1990s, see Kathrin Behrens, Die Russische Orthodoxe Kirche: Segen für die ‘Neuen Zaren? Religion und Politik im Postsowyetischen Russland (1991-2000) (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2002). 
20. In 1992, the journal Voprosy Filosofii organized a round-table on the topic “Religion and Politics in Post-Communist Russia.” There, the sociologist Furman pointed out that Orthodox believers had a tendency to prefer authoritarian rule and restricted democracy and were generally anti-Western and nationalistic. Dmitrij E. Furman and Sergej B. Filatov et al., Voprosy filosofii 7 (1992), 6-33. In another study of the political positions of the Russian Orthodox Church, A. Ignatov sees mostly anti-Western, anti-democratic, and fundamentalist tendencies. “Pogoslovskie argumenty v politicheskoi bor’be [Theological Arguments in the Political Struggle],” Voprosy filosofii 5 (1997), 15-30. The main point of the article, “Religious Discourse in Russian MassMedia: Entropy, Simfonia, Ideokratia,” by Alexander Agadjanian is that there is a political consensus between the Russian Church and government about the necessity of order and a unified state ideology. Religion is seen in the light of a larger task of maintaining the integrity of the state. Starye tserkvi, novye veriushchie. Religiya v massovom soznanii postsovetskoi Rossii, ed. by K. Kaariainen and D. Furman (Moscow: Letnii sad, 2000), 116-47.
21. (https://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/141422.html.) 
22. For two insightful studies of this document by Alexander Agadjanian, see “Breakthrough to Modernity, Apologia for Traditionalism: the Russian Orthodox View of Society and Culture in Comparative Perspective,” Religion, State and Society 31 (No. 4, 2003), 327-46; and “The Social Vision of Russian Orthodoxy: Balancing between Identity and Relevance,” in Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Europe, ed. by J. Sutton and W. van den Bercken (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 163-82. 
23. An important figure in this respect is Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev) of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, former head of the Office for External Affairs, and now Patriarch. See Konstantin Kostjuk, Der Begriff des Politschen in der Russisch-Orthodoxen Tradition (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005). 
24. “The Role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Nationalist, Xenophobic and Antiwestern Tendencies in Russia Today: Not Nationalism, but Fundamentalism,” Religion, State and Society 30 (No. 4, 2002), 333-45; and “The Orthodox in Russian Nationalist Movements,” 2003; (https://religion.sovacenter.ru/publications/194EF5E/194F193). 
25. Kostjuk, Der Begriff, 122-28. 
26. Kostjuk, “Pravoslavniji fundamentalizm.” 
27. Not all Russian nationalism is religious. For a classification of Russian nationalist movements, see Alexander Verkhovsky, “Ultra-nationalists in Russia at the Beginning of the Year 2000,” 2000; (https:// www.panorama.ru/works/patr/bp/fin-re.html.) 
28. See also Kristina Stoeckl, “Modernity and Its Critique in 20th Century Russian Orthodox Thought,” Studies in East European Thought 58 (No. 4, 2006), 243-69; and “The Lesson of the Revolution in Russian Émigré Theology and Contemporary Orthodox Thought,” Religion, State and Society 35 (No. 4, 2007), 285-300.

Postscript: The author recommends a recently published article relating to Russian nationalism and Orthodoxy: Alexander Mikhailovsky, “The Pressure Valve: Russian Nationalism in Late Soviet Society,” Eurozine (9 December 2015); https://www.eurozine. com/articles/2015-12-09-mikhailovsky-en.html. Edited excerpts reprinted with permission from Kristina Stoeckl, Community after Totalitarianism; The Russian Orthodox Intellectual Tradition and the Philosophical Discourse of Political Modernity (Frankfort am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), from pp. 16, 24-26, 91, 110-13, 116-18, 120, 122-26, and 131-33.

Kristina Stoeckl is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria, and author of The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (2014).