Vernost' Number 55

The Editorial Board is glad to inform our Readers that this issue of “FIDELITY” has articles in English, and Russian Languages.

С удовлетворением сообщаем, что в этом номере журнала “ВЕРНОСТЬ” помещены статьи на английском и русском языках.

2. "БЛЮДЕЧКО ГОТОВО, НО ОНО РАСПЛЕСКАЕТСЯ". Николай Казанцев

4. "РЕШЕНИЯ ВСЕЗАРУБЕЖНОГО СОБОРА НЕДЕЙСТВИТЕЛЬНЫ". Валентин В. Щегловский

As the so-called “All-Diaspora Sobor” drew near (comprising only the Lavra-ite part of the Church Abroad), excitement on the part of “unia” change agents was clearly evident. Once the Sobor began, these “unia” proponents gleefully expressed their desire for union, excitedly running about like a young girl invited to her first ball. They had no doubts of their impending victory over the “white-guard and schismatic” church, fugitives and traitors of the homeland.

Within a short time, the neo-communist press was filled with articles, which suggested the desirability of a “unia” between the “two parts of the Russian church” and of the resulting political consequences. Concerning the kind of consequences that will be in store for all of the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches and for the faithful in the homeland, the proponents of the “unia” had nothing to say and, as it appears, this was of no concern to them. It would have been erroneous to expect the MP to stand in defense of Holy Orthodoxy. The rights of the faithful and assaults against the Orthodox churches are of no concern to the Patriarchy. For example, recently the administration of the city of Khabarovsk, Siberia, replaced the cross above the church of the Blessed Innocent of Irkutsk, which was positioned on a half-moon. Arrows were added to the two half-moon edges making the cross appear as an anchor, while the MP showed no intent to protest. Nor will the MP protest if there will be any need to defend the Russian churches abroad. The MP and the neo-communists are merely interested in the opportunity to send their agents and agitators to the parishes annexed to the Patriarchy. They are not, in the end, interested in the mission of Orthodoxy and the fulfillment of spiritual needs of the faithful.

The editorial board of “Fidelity” is grateful to Dr. Elena Andreyevna Baranova for her kind consent to write an analysis of the neo-communist assault on the free part of the Russian Church.

In the period preceding the Fourth All-Emigration Council, on March 24, 2006, there appeared on the official ROCOR site the following declaration in the English and Russian languages – “An information site has been opened devoted to the process of reconciliation of the Russian Church Abroad and the Moscow Patriarchate” with the much-promising title, ‘Let us with one mind confess’. We are given to understand that this initiative was blessed by the clerical leadership of ROCOR. From its external appearance the site looks like an identical twin of the internet-journal of the Meeting of the Lord monastery – pravoslavie.ru, which is published under the direction of Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov, one of the main initiators of the union of the MP with ROCOR. In their introduction to the site, the editors inform us that the aim of this enterprise is “coverage of the dialogue” between the MP and ROCOR and to be a forum for the publication of various points of view “belonging not only to supporters of the process of reconciliation, but also those who in one way or another are critical of it” and which represent ‘various opinions’ on this question.

However, on examining the site, it became clear that instead of “a variety of opinions” precisely the opposite is the case, that is, a uniformity in the articles and opinions supported by official interviews with Patriarch Alexis and various representatives of the MP, active defenders, like Metropolitan Sergius, of the participation of the MP in the ecumenical movement, as well, of course, as supporters of the union with ROCOR. Instead of the promised “coverage of the dialogue”, the site published articles berating all those who have doubts about or disagree with the union as retrogrades who live only in the past, prodigal sons of Russia, servants of western intelligence services, etc. Naturally, Patriarch Alexis and the supporters of union, together with the present leadership of ROCOR, are presented as far-sighted, wise, progressive, liberal actors, who are moving in step with the times and are forward-looking patriots of the RF (Russian Federation).

The appearance of this “information site” disturbed the Russian flock of ROCOR, and protests flew to the Synod concerning the primitive-propagandist content of the site and the complete absence of epistles, articles and interviews of church-servers, public activists and laymen having their own opinion and worthy of being heard. Although the ROCOR Synod officially advertised this site as a place for discussions and exchanges of opinions, the editors from the Meeting monastery, being its true owners, decided otherwise and presented space only to those who stood for the “union”.

After a long silence the editors of the site replied to the protests in the following way: “… We have been reproached because on the site devoted to the mutual relations with the Russian Church Abroad, the opposite opinions have not been presented… We understand the dissatisfaction of our readers, but, frankly speaking, we did not at first want to publish such materials for at least two reasons. The first… is that many of these articles suffer from their, to put it mildly, weak argumentation in demonstrating their theses, and also at times from evident unscrupulousness in their exposition of the facts of history, which makes discussion with such authors of little interest. The second reason consists in the fact that there exist several well-known sites whose professional speciality is negative information about the ROC.”

Thus the editors praised themselves and again abused those who think differently.

However, insofar as the Sobor had not yet taken place, one of the editors of the site “Let us with one mind confess” decided nevertheless not to go too far and not to show their true face completely. As a result, a selection of several interviews and epistles was published: for example, of Bishops Gabriel, Daniel, Agathangel, Eutyches, Protopriest Valery Lukyanov, Protodeacon Ivanov-Trinadtsaty. However, against these few publications of our respected church servers, the editors of “Let us with one mind confess” immediately let fly a noisy volley of criticism from various kinds of “historians”, “professors” and even a deputy of the State Duma. Probably using their old Soviet experience, the editors decided to “beat up” their opponents from abroad by the quantity of utterances from the supporters of the union and published three or four angrily reproachful articles for every oppositional one.

And so it will be appropriate to gain a closer acquaintance with the materials that have appeared in this join (ROCOR and MP) site and learn who these reproachful authors from the MP are.

One of the articles published on the “Let us with one mind confess” site entitled “When will the real day come?” belongs to the pen of N.A. Narochnitskaya, a deputy of the State Duma (the “Rodina” fraction), a historian and specialist in international relations, law and world economics. This article appeared for the first time on the site of the “Rodina” fraction on April 28 of this year and was immediately taken up by a series of newspapers in Russia, and was then published on the site “Let us with one mind confess”. A significantly shortened and ‘purified’ translation of the article also appeared in the English-speaking press and on the internet. However, all the sharp accusations and odious attacks against the Russian emigration were prudently removed from the translation variant. This decision was probably elicited by the fact that in the west there exist laws against slander and the blackening of people’s reputations, and Mrs. Narochnitskaya decided not to rise a public scandal.

Deputy Narochnitskaya writes as a politician – in a twisted, not always very literate way, and loves to use verbal acrobatics such as: “the okhlos, the mob, remaining in hedonistic lukewarmness and illusions of people power”, or “the destiny of the self-confident demos and its supposed kratia”. She knows the history of the Church, and especially ROCOR, only by hearsay, but unashamedly takes it upon herself to judge that which she does not know. If we throw out the verbal shell in the form of “okhlos” and “demos”, then the essence of this article, published on a site approved by the clerical leadership of ROCOR, comes down to the following:

1. The reunion with the MP is an historical opportunity, and the [Russians] abroad, those prodigal sons of the Homeland, have finally turned out to be “worthy of this kindness” from the MP, and, consequently, must unite immediately, while there is time.

2. Sergianism is a positive phenomenon and there is nothing sinful or shameful in it. After all, “the service of, and obedience to, the pagan Roman empire not only for fear, but also for conscience, was [part of] the ethics of the first Christians” and “it is vain to look for people among the first Christians who would have hurled an anathema on that state which crucified them and threw them into cages for the lions.” And in general sergianism is nothing by comparison with the crimes of ROCOR, to which one could “present an account of its sins and falls, disturbances and catastrophic political blindness! But we are ready not to reproach you for cooperating with Hitler and his pagan doctrine of the innate inequality of people and nations…”

3. The opponents of union are the enemy West and its special services, which “have exerted unseen pressure on the Russian Orthodox Abroad”. The servers and flock of ROCOR fear the anti-Orthodox world and are under the control of “the political state of affairs”.

If we translate into Russian the last point, Deputy Narochnitskaya is accusing ROCOR of fawning upon the western intelligence services and being a lackey of the western governments, that is, it is also sergianist, only in a western way.

Besides this article, Deputy Narochnitskaya has also recently given a series of interviews in which she has time and again authoritatively explained the aims of union. Thus on May 13, 2006, in an interview to the Novosti agency, she declared that “the participation of the ROC in the work of the World Council of Churches (WCC) is not an obstacle to the union of the two parts of the one Russian Church”, because “the question of the work of the WCC is a question of the Church’s external politics, but in no way a question of her teaching of the faith”. The deputy simply shrugged off the question on sergianism and the Church’s cooperation with the God-fighting government with the phrase: “This is a biased attitude. How is it possible to live in a state without having any relations with it?”

Who is this Mrs. Narochnitskaya? What is the “Rodina” fraction? Why has a politician and specialist in international affairs and economics taken such an active part in the process of ecclesiastical union?

According to the official data on the biography of Deputy Narochnitskaya, she is a typical representative of the highest level of the Soviet nomenklatura. She was born in Moscow, studied there and graduated from the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MSIIR). In the Soviet Union MSIIR was considered a super-elite academic institution, under the administration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in contrast to all the other higher education institutions in the system of education). Entrance into the MSIIR was possible for the children of party leaders of the USSR and the union republics, of senior diplomats, of worthy chekists and the leaders of foreign communist parties. This Institute was considered the forge of cadres for the higher party leadership of the USSR and the best academic institution in the country for future diplomats and specialists in regional studies of the KGB. Among those who graduated from MSIIR were the sons of Mikoyan, Ordzhonikidze, the present president of Azerbaijan Aliev, the former minister of foreign affairs Kozyrev, the former first secretary of the communist party, and then president, of Kirgizia Akaev, the oligarch Potanin, the present minister of foreign affairs Lavrov and other representatives of the authorities like them.

It is an interesting fact that on graduating from MSIIR in 1982, the young alumnus Narochnitskaya immediately received an appointment abroad, in the West, and not in some Bezi-Zambezi, nor even in civilized Scandinavia, but immediately in the lair of world capitalism, the USA, in the city of New York, as the representative of the USSR in the United Nations Secretariat. We must suppose that Mrs. Narochnitskaya was already in excellent favour with the party and was considered a completely reliable, well-grounded cadre. As is well known, honoured Soviet diplomats were checked for decades before being sent to the USA, and especially to such a responsible post.

Having worked for seven years in the UN, in 1989 Mrs. Narochnitskaya returned to the USSR to continue her activity in the sphere of international relations. Soon there began to appear from under her pen publications on questions of geopolitics and economics. After perestroika, Mrs. Narochnitskaya moved into the political sphere and at the present time is a deputy in the State Duma from the “Rodina” party.

And what is “Rodina”? It is a fraction that split off from the old communist party and acquired a certain populist colouring. The role of Orthodoxy, according to “Rodina”’s interpretation, can be reduced to complete support for the state and the strengthening of the international position of Russia, that is, Orthodoxy and the Church are needed in order to strengthen the neo-communist ideology. Among political commentators, Narochnitskaya is considered to be an ideologist of the “Rodina” fraction, and also an apologist of the restoration of the glory and might of the Soviet Union. Like Putin, Narochnitskaya proudly points out that to this day she has kept her [communist] party card.

In 2005 Deputy Narochnitskaya published a book timed to coincide with the 60^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Its aim was to present the Yalta agreement and the role of Stalin in a positive light, to justify the occupation of Eastern Europe and to rehabilitate the politics of the Soviet Union in the post-war period. That is, Deputy Narochnitskaya was speaking as a defender of the neo-stalinist and neo-communist interpretation of history. As an example of her world-view, let us cite some of her pronouncements:

· Stalin was a great leader, the defender of the oppressed, the continuer of the work of the Russian tsars.

· There was no occupation of Eastern Europe, all the actions of the Soviet government were lawful and corresponded to the norms of international law.

· “All insults directed even at the symbols of the USSR must be cut off”, that is, it is wrong to remove or act irreverently towards the hammer and sickle, to red stars, the mausoleum of Lenin and the names of streets in honour of regicides, chekists and other revolutionaries.

· The Soviet Union fought against the Fascists for the preservation of all the peoples of the world.

· “Paradoxical as it may seem, that part of the Russian emigration which calls itself white and seethes with disdain for Soviet power is also struggling to devalue the Great Victory and justify Vlasovschina. The soldiers of that army [General Vlasov’s anti-Soviet Army of Russian Liberation] were banal deserters, … while General Vlasov is subject to the judgement of history. In the memory of generations he will forever remain the traitor who helped the enemy to torture and kill the Mother-Homeland.” (The newspaper Trud, May 19, 2005).

In an interview she gave to the news agency RIA on May 13 of this year, Narochnitskaya, as a deputy of the State Duma, categorically declared that “the participation of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in the work of the World Council of Churches (WCC) is no hindrance to union”, since “the question of the work of the WCC is a question of the external politics of the Church, but in no way a question of the teaching of the faith”. In reply to the question of the significance of the sergianism of the MP and its cooperation with the godless authorities on the spiritual level, Narochnitskaya expressed a social point of view, saying: “How is it possible to live in a state without having any relations with it?” A few days later, on May 16, one more interview of Narochnitskaya was published, this time together with Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov, in which they both commented on the results of the Fourth All-Emigration Council of ROCOR for Radio “Lighthouse”. The similarity of these pronouncements leaves no room to doubt that they are people who belong to one circle and have the same world-view.

Like a red thread running through [their pronouncements] are their declarations that “the union of ROCOR and the MP is important for the state”, while “the merging of ROCOR with the MP will strengthen the international position of Russia” and will help “the consolidation of the national community around the state”. That is, the main aims of the union are the political ambitions of the government. Archimandrite Shevkunov said about the divisions of the 20^th century that “the hierarchs of ROCOR separated from the MP for political reasons”, creating a schism. The respected archimandrite puts on the same level the tragedy of the killing of the tsar and of the civil war: “There was a civil war, there were whites and reds, there was a row” – that’s all. In general, one can make many claims against ROCOR – they in their time ran away, they abandoned their flock and their Church. ROCOR is like the prodigal son, who ran away, squandered all his goods, became poor and now is returning home, into the bosom of the MP.

As they say, there’s no need for commentary. Oh, and practically nothing was said about the spiritual aspects of the question.

Of course, not all the articles on the site “Let us with one mind confess” merit such an analysis. However, the speeches of Deputy Narochnitskaya quite accurately reflect the content of the majority of the articles on the site and formulate the basic categories of accusations hurled by the MP at ROCOR. Besides, Narochnitskaya is a kind of mouthpiece of the ruling circles, and by using her powerful nomenklatura connections she is able to give a wide currency to the views of the neo-stalinists with their nostalgia for the Stalinist epoch and their use of the Church and Orthodoxy for political ends. But we in the West, as a rule, not knowing the true essence of many supporters of union, often continue naively to believe the beautiful words about the Mother-Church and that believers in Russian are thirsting for union with ROCOR.

I will stop briefly on one more author who has written numerous articles on ROCOR – Protopriest George Mitrophanov, a theological academy professor, an ecclesiastical historian and an active participant in the union process, yet another defender of Metropolitan Sergius, who has been many times to the USA.

Four articles of Protopriest Mitrophanov have been published on the site “Let us with one mind confess”. In them he slanders those who think differently from him in a completely Soviet manner, accusing them of “propaganda”, “tendentiousness”, “incompetence” and of “schism”. In Protopriest Mitrophanov lies and historical truth are cleverly mixed in a vinaigrette in which St. John of Shanghai and Metropolitans Anthony, Anastasy and Philaret are presented as supporters of union with the MP, while Metropolitan Anthony is especially singled out as a fan of Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky. However, Protopriest Mitrophanov cunningly declines from giving references and cites no proofs of his declarations. We can see one example of the evident mendacity of his writings in the article entitled “The experiment of the existence of the Russian Church outside Russia has come to an end”, in which Professor Mitrophanov labels those who think differently from him as follows: “… the opponents of union at the Sobor (are) not abroaders in the full sense, that is, descendants of the first and second waves of the Russian emigration, who were born in the Church Abroad and constituted the overwhelming majority of her clergy and laity. The main opponents will be those who went over to ROCOR from the Moscow Patriarchate… some of them… preferred to depart into the schismatic group ROCOR (V), which is led by Metropolitan Vitaly, the former president of the Synod of the Church Abroad, and now banned by it from serving”. Lies, lies, and again lies. Protopriest Mitrophanov has been often enough in the ROCOR Synod and cannot not know that nobody has banned Metropolitan Vitaly from serving. Moreover, among the opponents of union there are enough right-thinking abroaders from the first and second waves of emigration, as is witnessed by many articles and communications in the press in the West.

Narochnitskaya and Protopriest Mitrophanov are presented to the readers of the site as “historians”. However, the onesidedness of their evaluations, their lack of objectivity and false affirmations, which go right against well-known facts, put their professional competence as scientist-historians in doubt. What can such “professors” and “historians” teach their students? We recommend abroaders who continue naively to believe that the MP will value their experience of keeping Orthodoxy unharmed and of faithfulness to the Church, to direct their attention to the publications of the not unknown Protopriest Alexander Shargunov, yet another passionate defender of Metropolitan Sergius and the ecumenism of the MP. Let us present the word to Protopriest Shargunov from the article “Union in Oneness…”, in which he writes: “In spite of ROCOR’s vaunted uncompromising Orthodoxy, it is doubtful that she can teach the Moscow Patriarchate resistance to corruption and Satanism… The members of ROCOR have experience of coexisting with these phenomena (Satanism, sodomy, vice, Masonry, Zionism, the cult of money, individualism) in their own state… In the USA, for example, Protestant organizations fight against corruption and sodomy. But there is no trace of any similar activity in ROCOR that is in any way noticeable. It would be strange to reject cooperation with Protestants as a kind of ecumenism.” Further on, Protopriest Shargunov writes that the sins of the West, and correspondingly of ROCOR, “are not on the same level as sergianism: we want to be Orthodox and at the same time recognize the Soviet Union as our homeland, the joys and successes of which are our joys and successes, and its failures are failures”. For Protopriest Shargunov this is not only a desirable, but also necessary condition of the Church. In spite of “the sin of coexistence”, the union of ROCOR is nevertheless desirable, since she will help the MP in her struggle with world evil – but what world evil exactly [he is talking about] is not quite clear.

When he accuses ROCOR of coexisting with Satanism, Zionism, Masonry, sodomy, vice, corruption of minors, etc., Protopriest Shargunov is probably suffering from memory-loss or does not want to see that for many years now Russia has stood in one of the first places in the world for the quantity of suicides, and is the world leader in the production of child pornography, the exploitation of children in this area and in the trade in living human beings. Incidentally, these revolting phenomena were already present long before the fall of the Soviet Union, and it is simply frivolous to complain about the corrupting influence of the West.

This is how the Russian authorities support the union of ROCOR and the MP! Do we have “oneness of mind”?

НИКОЛАЙ КАЗАНЦЕВ, Член Правления Общества Митрполита Антония

На вопрос, кто победил на Всезарубежном Соборе, ответ весьма ясен и давно предвиден: те кто его оргнизовали и манипулировали.

Им правда не удалась «программа максимум», задуманный дерзкий прорыв: провозгласить унию с МП уже там, в Сан Франциско. Однако после обоих Соборов – Всезарубежного и Архиерейского - сняты все формальные препятствия для ее достижения: подавляющее большинство делегатов проголосовало за «уврачевание ран» и объявило, что подчинится воли архиереев, прекрасно сознавая, что среди них почти нет противников унии. Собор же предоставил Синоду, - то-есть еще более узкому кругу соглашателей, - выбрать момент принятия «Акта о каноническом общении».

На самом Всезарубежном Соборе, сей «Акт» явно бы не прошел: ведь даже Резолюцию пришлось менять трижды, из-за давления части делегатов. Теперь же он будет принят в бюрократическом порядке, келейно, без того неудобства, которое собой представляло присутствие просочившихся на Собор несколько десятков делегатов несогласных с немедленной унией.

Чем же объяснить, что люди убежденно выступавшие против немедленной сдачи позиций, затем проголосовали за капитулянтскую, - хотя и завуалированную обтекаемыми формулировками, - «Резолюцию»?

Во-первых, здесь не обошлось без нечестных приемов. Вместо тайного голосования, делегатов заставляли подымать руки, на виду у всех, по советскому образцу. Что - принимая во внимание тот страх, которым в большой степени обуяно наше духовенство, - несомненно могло повлиять на результат. Кроме того, подсчитать на глаз поднятые или неподнятые руки, когда в помещении находится почти полторы сотни людей, задача не из простых. Следовательно, весьма возможно, что против всех параграфов «Резолюции» высказалось все-таки более тех шести человек, о которых официально сообщалось.

Но самая главная причина в другом. Видя, что «Акт» им не протолкнуть, весьма искусным маневром организаторы расслабили «оппозиционеров», внушив им, что они мол победили. Для этого они использовали так называемую «группу Магеровского», известную тем, что она играет одновременно двойную роль: и оппозиционеров и лоялистов. На сайте Магеровского одна за другой стали появляться победные реляции, которые из-за царившего информационного голода мгновенно воспроизводились всеми церковными или около-церковными сайтами, в частности – влиятельным «Порталем Кредо-Ру».

Ложному чувству некой достигнутой победы среди оппозиционеров способствовал и доклад против экуменизма, прочитанный идеологом группы Магеровского, служащим Ньюиоркского Синода о. Виктором Добровым.

В своей статье «Ни волки не сыты, ни овцы не целы» Кирилл Крастелев пишет: «Был ли доклад о. Виктора Доброва случайностью, или запланированным ходом? Все доклады заранее представлялись на одобрение в Синод. По одним данным, этот доклад был задуман в качестве повода для внесения в Резолюцию параграфа об экуменизме, позволяющего Синоду тянуть время. По другим, о. Виктор представил в Синод один доклад, но прочел другой».

Увы, эта последняя возможность исключается всеми опрошенными мною делегатами. Как только любой оппозиционер, - будь то протопресвитер Валерий Лукьянов, будь то начальник Российского Имперского Союза-Ордена Г. А. Федоров, - начинал говорить, его грубо обрывали (как было и на пастырском совещании в Наяке). Совершенно немыслимо, чтобы о. Виктор Добров мог прочитать свой пространный доклад без апробирования организаторов. Вообще-то, его посадили возле микрофона и предоставили возможность выступать столько раз, сколько ему заблагорассудится, - привилегия, которой на Соборе пользовались лишь союзники соглашателей.

Необходимо помнить также, что сей синодальный клирик стоит у истоков раскола в Обществе Митрополита Антония, нанесшего огромный удар движению сопротивления унии: это именно он составил пресловутое «Послание верных чад», в котором призывалось к самороспуску Зарубежной Церкви, взятое затем на вооружение группой Магеровского.

Разумеется, тот факт, что принятие евхаристического общения с МП отложено на короткий срок (вероятнее всего – на три-четыре месяца – это отнюдь не та 5-летняя отсрочка, на которую надеялись иные делегаты Собора) никакой победой оппозиции и отдаленно не является. Хотя понятно чувство облегчения верующих: можно будет еще некоторое количество раз пойти на литургию, до того как за ней начнут поминать сексота КГБ «Дроздова».

Как ни странно, триумфализм группы Магеровского ввел в заблуждение даже столь высокоумного обозревателя как игумен Григорий Лурье (РПАЦ), написавшего на «Портале-Кредо. Ру», совершеннейшую чушь: «Оппозиция смогла нанести уже на Соборе ответный удар «объединителям» - а именно, создать собственную структуру».

Ничего подобного, конечно, и в помине не произошло. Однако следует признать один факт, который в будущем, уже после оформления унии, сможет сыграть важную роль в становлении «маленькой, но кристалльно чистой», Зарубежной Цекркви. В Сан Франциско, своя своих познаша. Каждый противник немедленного соединения услышал и оценил всех других не принимающих оного и мог составить себе идею: на кого есть шансы положиться.

Например, на таких как буэноссайресский митрофорный протоиерей Владимир Шленев, присутствовавший там на правах делегата Третьего Собора, бесстрашно обличивший теперешнюю власть РФ как безбожную.

Или на таких как рочестерский настоятель, протоиерей Григорий Науменко, успевший бросить такой упрек: «Вы говорите, что нам надо присоединяться к МП из любви к ним. А почему вы не проявляете никакой любви к несогласным с вашим решением, презрительно называете их «южными баптистами», недалекими людьми, всячески третируете их, избегаете даже с ними здороваться?». Многие прихожане о. Григория – стойкие последователи Св. Новомученика Митрополита Иосифа Петроградского. Они намерены уйти из РПЦЗ(Л), как только уния будет формально принята.

Все эти выступления, хоть и скомканные нахальными цензурными окриками: «Четыре минуты; следующий!», были тщательно скрыты от паствы и прессы протоиереем Виктором Потаповым, ответственным за немедленное опубликование протоколов.

Как был скрыт от паствы и прессы протест монахов Св. Троицкого монастыря в Джорданвилля, иные из которых уже заявили о своем намерении покинуть обитель.

Обманом и подвохом были пропитаны и документы последовавшего Архиерейского Собора. Нас, противников унии, повергло в уныние увидеть подписи всех архиереев под посланием, в котором говорится о необходимости установления евхаристического общения. Однако теперь выясняется, что тяжело больной Владыка Даниил покинул Сан Франциско до окончания Собора и даже не видел этого текста, - не то что его подписал! Нечто похожее видимо произошло и с епископом Агафангелом Одесским, - на Всезарубежном Соборе не раз выступавшим против унии, - который 23 мая заявил: «Мне не совсем понятно, откуда исходит утверждение, что «Акт о каноническом общении" был в принципиальном плане принят и одобрен". Также не соответствует действительности сообщение, что "окончательное утверждение текста Акта, как и детали проведения его торжественного подписания, поручается Архиерейскому Синоду". Вопрос об "окончательном утверждении Акта Архиерейским Синодом" действительно поднимался (без упоминания "деталей проведения его торжественного подписания" — это словосочетание я впервые прочел на Интернете), но из-за наличия разных мнений был отложен без окончательного решения Собора. Голосование по этому вопросу также не проводилось. Поэтому текст сообщения о завершении Архиерейского Собора РПЦЗ от 19 мая 2006 года, размещенный на официальном сайте нашего Синода, вызывает, по меньшей мере, недоумение».

Загадочным остается поведение епископа Гавриила (Чемодакова). Как известно, он порою высказывается против унии с МП, но продолжает верно служить своему начальству, оную унию проводящему. На этот раз, в узком кругу близких людей в частном доме в Сан Франциско он категорически заявил, что не будет поминать Алексия Второго: «Пойду работать в Tower Records (крупный магазин по продаже музыкальных дисков) и буду совершать богослужения на стороне».

Подводя итоги можно сказать: объединение верхушки РПЦЗ(Л) с МП теперь ближе, чем никогда. Но митрополит Лавр и его сообщники не смогут преподнести Путину на блюдечке всю Зарубежную Церковь. Блюдечко по дороге неминуемо расплескается.

By 1789, and especially after the first phase of the French revolution reduced the power of the French king to that of a constitutional monarch, liberalism was the most popular political theory among the educated classes of Europe. Liberalism in politics seemed the natural counterpart of reason and enlightenment in philosophy, morals and theology as a whole.

The popularity of liberalism has remained strong to the present day. In spite of the shocks of the French revolution and other national revolutions in the nineteenth century, and the still greater shocks of the Russian revolution and the other communist revolutions in the twentieth, liberalism today appears stronger than ever. But how sound are its foundations in actual fact?

Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), explained both the positive teaching of Orthodoxy on political authority and why, for the Orthodox, liberalism rests on shaky foundations: “In the Christian order, politics… was founded upon absolute truth… The principal providential form of government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical social structure… On the other hand… a politics that rejects Christian Truth must acknowledge ‘the people’ as sovereign and understand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally ‘egalitarian’ society. It is clear that one is the perfect inversion of the other; for they are opposed in their conceptions both of the source and of the end of government. Orthodox Christian Monarchy is government divinely established, and directed, ultimately, to the other world, government with the teaching of Christian Truth and the salvation of souls as its profoundest purpose; Nihilist rule - whose most fitting name… is Anarchy – is government established by men, and directed solely to this world, government which has no higher aim that earthly happiness.

“The Liberal view of government, as one might suspect, is an attempt at compromise between these two irreconcilable ideas. In the 19^th century this compromise took the form of ‘constitutional monarchies’, an attempt – again – to wed an old form to a new content; today the chief representatives of the Liberal idea are the ‘republics’ and ‘democracies’ of Western Europe and America, most of which preserve a rather precarious balance between the forces of authority and Revolution, while, while professing to believe in both.

“It is of course impossible to believe in both with equal sincerity and fervor, and in fact no one has ever done so. Constitutional monarchs like Louis Philippe thought to do so by professing to rule ‘by the Grace of God and the will of the people’ – a formula whose two terms annul each other, a fact as evident to the Anarchist [Bakunin] as to the Monarchist.

“Now a government is secure insofar as it has God for its foundation and His Will for its guide; but this, surely, is not a description of Liberal government. It is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God; God Himself is a ‘constitutional monarch’ Whose authority has been totally delegated to the people, and Whose function is entirely ceremonial. The Liberal believes in God with the same rhetorical fervor with which he believes in Heaven. The government erected upon such a faith is very little different, in principle, from a government erected upon total disbelief; and whatever its present residue of stability, it is clearly pointed in the direction of Anarchy.

“A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied it, cannot be stopped halfway; it is a force that, once awakened, will not rest until it ends in a totalitarian Kingdom of this world. The history of the last two centuries has proved nothing if not this. To appease the Revolution and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done, thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose it, is perhaps to postpone, but not to prevent, the attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical Revolution with a Revolution of one’s own, whether it be ‘conservative’, ‘non-violent’, or ‘spiritual’, is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first principle of the Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a new truth must take its place.”[1]

Just as the basis of authority was transferred by liberalism from the grace of God to the will of the people, so the whole basis of political argument was transferred from the order ordained by God to the order created by men in order to satisfy the demands of their fallen human nature – that is, from theology to psychology. This transition is most clearly seen after the collapse of Cromwell’s dictatorship in 1660 and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in England. Before that, both Anglican monarchists and Independent radicals had based their arguments on the Bible, on the state of man in Paradise and the Fall. Thus the monarchist Filmer held that kings held their patriarchal power by rightful inheritance from the first patriarch, Adam; while the Independents asserted that communism had been the original prelapsarian state and would be so again in the coming millenium. However, after the struggle between monarchists and radicals had been resolved in a compromise leaving the aristocratic landowner-capitalists in effective power, the English political philosophers, abandoning arguments based on Holy Scripture, based their arguments on a purely mythical social contract for which they did not even begin to claim authority in the Bible, and, more importantly, on the purely utilitarian principle of the rational maximisation of personal interest, or desire.

The theory of the social contract essentially comes down to the idea that the state began through the citizens getting together and making a contract with their future rulers, giving power to the rulers in exchange for certain elementary rights for their subjects. This contract is the foundation of political legitimacy. On the foundation of this shaky, and purely mythical social contract the English political philosophers sought to build the ideal polity and the structure of rights and laws which would hold it together. They differed on the nature of that polity: for Thomas Hobbes desire is maximised in an absolutist State; for John Locke – in a constitutional monarchy. But for both thinkers the main purpose of the State was security of life and property together with a minimum of freedom in which to enjoy that life and property.

“In all its forms,” writes Roger Scruton, “the social contract enshrines a fundamental liberal principle, namely, that, deep down, our obligations are self-created and self-imposed. I cannot be bound by the law, or legitimately constrained by the sovereign, if I never chose to be under the obligation to obey. Legitimacy is conferred by the citizen, and not by the sovereign, still less by the sovereign’s usurping ancestors. If we cannot discover a contract to be bound by the law, then the law is not binding.”[2]

Consequently, a basic objection to social contract theory put forward by Hegel is that this original premise, that “our obligations are self-created and self-imposed”, is false. We do not choose the family we were born in, or the state to which we belong. And yet both our family and our state impose undeniable obligations on us.

Of course, we can rebel against such obligations; the son can choose to say that he owes nothing to his father. And yet he would not even exist without his father; and without his father’s nurture and education he would not even be capable of making choices. Thus we are “hereditary bondsmen”, to use Byron’s phrase, and the attempt to rebel against these bonds only accentuates their existence.

In this sense we live in a cycle of freedom and necessity: the free choices of our ancestors limit our own freedom, while our choices limit those of our children. The idea of a social contract entered into a single generation is therefore not only a historical myth (as many social contract theorists concede); it is also a dangerous myth. It is a myth that distorts the very nature of society, which cannot be conceived as existing except over several generations.

But if society exists over several generations, all generations should be taken into account in drawing up the contract. Why should only one generation’s interests be respected in drawing it up? For, as Scruton continues, interpreting the thought of Edmund Burke, “the social contract prejudices the interests of those who are not alive to take part in it: the dead and the unborn. Yet they too have a claim, maybe an indefinite claim, on the resources and institutions over which the living so selfishly contend. To imagine society as a contract among its living members, is to offer no rights to those who go before and after. But when we neglect those absent souls, we neglect everything that endows law with its authority, and which guarantees our own survival. We should therefore see the social order as a partnership, in which the dead and the unborn are included with the living.”[3]

“Every people,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “is, first of all, a certain historical whole, a long row of consecutive generations, living over hundreds or thousands of years in a common life handed down by inheritance. In this form a people, a nation, is a certain socially organic phenomenon with more or less clearly expressed laws of inner development… But political intriguers and the democratic tendency does not look at a people in this form, as a historical, socially organic phenomenon, but simply in the form of a sum of the individual inhabitants of the country. This is the second point of view, which looks on a nation as a simple association of people united into a state because they wanted that, living according to laws which they like, and arbitrarily changing the laws of their life together when it occurs to them.”[4]

Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow criticised social contract theory as follows: “It is obligatory, say the wise men of this world, to submit to social authorities on the basis of a social contract, by which people were united into society, by a general agreement founding government and submission to it for the general good. If they think that it is impossible to found society otherwise than on a social contract, - then why is it that the societies of the bees and ants are not founded on it? And is it not right that those who break open honeycombs and destroy ant-hills should be entrusted with finding in them… a charter of bees and ants? And until such a thing is done, nothing prevents us from thinking that bees and ants create their societies, not by contract, but by nature, by an idea of community implanted in their nature, which the Creator of the world willed to be realised even at the lowest level of His creatures. What if an example of the creation of a human society by nature were found? What, then, is the use of the fantasy of a social contract? No one can argue against the fact that the original form of society is the society of the family. Thus does not the child obey the mother, and the mother have power over the child, not because they have contracted between themselves that she should feed him at the breast, and that he should shout as little as possible when he is swaddled? What if the mother should suggest too harsh conditions to the child? Will not the inventors of the social contract tell him to go to another mother and make a contract with her about his upbringing? The application of the social contract in this case is as fitting as it is fitting in other cases for every person, from the child to the old man, from the first to the last. Every human contract can have force only when it is entered into with consciousness and good will. Are there many people in society who have heard of the social contract? And of those few who have heard of it, are there many who have a clear conception of it? Ask, I will not say the simple citizen, but the wise man of contracts: when and how did he enter into the social contract? When he was an adult? But who defined this time? And was he outside society before he became an adult? By means of birth? This is excellent. I like this thought, and I congratulate every Russian that he was able – I don’t know whether it was from his parents or from Russia herself, - to agree that he be born in powerful Russia… The only thing that we must worry about is that neither he who was born nor his parents thought about this contract in their time, and so does not referring to it mean fabricating it? And consequently is not better, as well as simpler, both in submission and in other relationships towards society, to study the rights and obligations of a real birth instead of an invented contract – that pipe-dream of social life, which, being recounted at the wrong time, has produced and continues to produce material woes for human society. ‘Transgressors have told me fables, but they are not like Thy law, O Lord’ (Psalm 118.85).”[5]

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment developed and deepened the trends towards utilitarianism and “psychologism”.

Thus J.S. McClelland writes: “The springs of human behaviour (the phrase is Bentham’s) were the passions, or, as in the primmer language of utilitarianism, the desires to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The passions were implanted by nature. They were what gave human life its vital motion, and the operation of the passions could ultimately be explained in physical, that is, physiological, terms. The faculty of reason which nature had implanted in the minds of men had as its function the direction of the human passions towards the accomplishment of desirable ends, though there was in fact no agreement in the Enlightenment about what the relationship between reason and the passions exactly was. Some thought, like Rousseau, that all natural desires were naturally virtuous, and that only living in a corrupt society implanted '’unnatural’, that is wicked, desires. Others, like Hume, thought that reason was the slave of the passions, by which he meant that the ends of human conduct were provided by the desires, and all that reason could do was to show given desires how to accomplish their ends. The consensus of Enlightenment opinion seems to have been that reason could in some sense control and direct the passions towards ends which were ethically desirable. The passions were by their nature blind, even part of brute nature, and they were certainly shared by the other animals. Natural reason must therefore have been given to man to counterpose itself to the passions, either because the passions themselves could not know how to satisfy themselves without guidance, or because the passions themselves became fixed on ends which were undesirable on a rational view of the matter.

“In the field of moral philosophy, Enlightenment’s goal was a rational system of ethics which would at the very least modify, and perhaps completely replace, the existing systems of ethics derived from religion, custom, and accident. Some forms of human conduct, and some of the ends of human conduct it was hoped, could be rationally demonstrated to be preferable to others. Reason must have been implanted by nature to point these differences out. There must be a way of showing that true human happiness was attainable only through the attainment of virtuous human ends. The culminating point of moral philosophy would be reached when reason could demonstrate that the truest form of human happiness consisted of the encouragement and spectacle of the happiness of others. It is notorious in the history of ethics that the Enlightenment project failed to show that it was in fact possible to derive from reason a set of ethical principles capable of sustaining the loyalty of all rational men, and there is a notable irony in the fact that it was Hume, at the very heart of the Enlightenment, who showed why the enlightened project in ethics was bound to fail…”[6]

In the field of political philosophy, it became axiomatic that the maximisation of desire, or, more simply, “the pursuit of happiness”, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, could be achieved only through government of the people, by the people and for the people – in other words, in a democratic republic, or, failing that, in an enlightened despotism or constitutional monarchy which placed the happiness of the people as a whole as its aim and justification.

This was a distinctly unromantic view of human nature, and the arrival of a more romantic view of human nature towards the end of the eighteenth century, in the writings of such men as Rousseau and Hegel, made possible the emergence of a more revolutionary model of democracy to rival that of Anglo-Saxon liberalism. This model led, not to liberal democracy, but to fascist totalitarianism.

Let us now examine one attempt to compare the Anglo-Saxon and Hegelian models of democracy.

The End of History and the Last Man by the Harvard-trained political scientist Francis Fukuyama represents probably the best-known and best-articulated defence of the modernist world-view that has appeared in recent years. In view of this, any anti-modernist world-view, and in particular any truly coherent defence of our Orthodox Christian faith, must take into account what Fukuyama says and refute it, or, at any rate, show that his correct observations and analyses must lead to different conclusions from the ones he draws. What makes Fukuyama's thesis particularly interesting to Orthodox Christians is that it is possible for us to agree with 99% of his detailed argumentation, and derive considerable profit from it with regard to our understanding of how the modern world really works and where it is heading, while differing fundamentally from him in our final conclusions.

Fukuyama's original article entitled "The End of History?" argued, as he summarized it in his book, "that liberal democracy represented 'the end point of mankind's ideological evolution' and 'the final form of human government,' and as such constituted 'the end of history'. That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today's stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on."[7]

Fukuyama's original article appeared in the summer of 1989, and it received rapid and dramatic support from the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe almost immediately after. Thus by 1991 the only major country outside the Islamic Middle East and Africa not to have become democratic was Communist China - and cracks were appearing there as well. Not that Fukuyama predicted this outcome: as he honestly admits, only a few years before neither he nor the great majority of western political scientists had anticipated the fall of communism any time soon. Probably the only prominent writers to predict both the fall of communism and the nationalist conflicts and democratic regimes that followed it were Orthodox Christian ones such as Gennady Shimanov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, neither of whom was noted as being a champion of democracy. This is in itself should make us pause before trusting too much in Fukuyama's judgements about the future of the world and the end of history.

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that at the present time History appears to be going his way. It is another question whether this direction is the best possible way, or whether it is possible to consider other possible outcomes to the historical process.

Why, according to Fukuyama, is History moving towards world-wide democracy? At the risk of over-simplifying what is a lengthy and sophisticated argument, we may summarise his answer under two headings: the logic of scientific advance, and the logic of human need, in particular the need for recognition. Let us look briefly at each of these.

First, the survival of any modern State militarily and economically requires that science and technology be given free rein, which in turn requires the free dissemination of ideas and products both within and between States that only political and economic liberalism guarantees. "The scientific-technical elite required to run modern industrial economies would eventually demand greater political liberalization, because scientific inquiry can only proceed in an atmosphere of freedom and the open exchange of ideas. We saw earlier how the emergence of a large technocratic elite in the USSR and China created a certain bias in favor of markets and economic liberalization, since these were more in accord with the criteria of economic rationality. Here the argument is extended into the political realm: that scientific advance depends not only on freedom for scientific inquiry, but on a society and political system that are as a whole open to free debate and participation."[8] Nor can the advance of science be halted or reversed for an indefinite period. Even the destruction of civilization through a nuclear or ecological catastrophe, and the demand for a far more careful evaluation of the effects of science and technology such a catastrophe would elicit, would not alter this. For it is inconceivable that the principles of scientific method should be forgotten as long as humanity survives on the planet, and any State that eschewed the application of that method would be at an enormous disadvantage in the struggle for survival.

Fukuyama admits that the logic of scientific advance and technological development does not by itself explain why most people in advanced, industrialized countries prefer democracy. "For if a country's goal is economic growth above all other considerations, the truly winning combination would appear to be neither liberal democracy nor socialism of either a Leninist or democratic variety, but the combination of liberal economics and authoritarian politics that some observers have labeled the 'bureaucratic authoritarian state,' or what we might term a 'market-oriented authoritarianism.'"[9] And as an example of such a "winning combination" he mentions "the Russia of Witte and Stolypin" - in other words, of Tsar Nicholas II...

Since the logic of scientific advance is not sufficient in itself to explain why most people and States choose democracy, Fukuyama has resort to a second, more powerful argument based on a Platonic model of human nature. According to this model, there are three basic components of human nature: reason, desire and the force denoted by the almost untranslateable Greek word thymos. Reason is the handmaid of desire and thymos; it is that element which distinguishes us from the animals and enables the irrational forces of desire and thymos to be satisfied in the real world. Desire includes the basic needs for food, sleep, shelter and sex. Thymos is usually translated as "anger" or "courage"; but Fukuyama defines it as that desire which "desires the desire of other men, that is, to be wanted by others or to be recognized".[10]

Now most liberal theorists in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, such as Hobbes, Locke and the founders of the American Constitution, have focused on desire as the fundamental force in human nature because on its satisfaction depends the survival of the human race itself. They have seen thymos, or the need for recognition, as an ambiguous force which should rather be suppressed than expressed; for it is thymos that leads to tyrannies, wars and all those conflicts which endanger "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The American Constitution with its system of checks and balances was designed above all to prevent the emergence of tyranny, which is the clearest expression of what we may call "megalothymia". Indeed, for many the prime merit of democracy consists in its prevention of tyranny.

A similar point of view was expressed by the Anglican writer, C.S. Lewis: "I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they are not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a henroost, much less a nation. Nor do most people - all the people who believe in advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows..."[11]

But this argument is deficient on both logical and historical grounds. Let us agree that Man is fallen. Why should giving very many fallen men a share in government reverse that fall? In moral and social life, two minuses do not make a plus. Democratic institutions may inhibit the rise of tyranny in the short term; but they also make it almost certain that democratic leaders will be accomplished demagogues prepared to do almost anything to please the electorate. One man's thymos may check the full expression of another's; but the combination of many contradictory wills can only lead to a compromise which is exceedingly unlikely to be the best decision for society as a whole. In fact, if wisdom in politics, as in everything else, comes from God, "it is much more natural to suppose," as Trostnikov says, "that divine enlightenment will descend upon the chosen soul of an Anointed One of God, as opposed to a million souls at once".[12] The Scripture does not say vox populi - vox Dei, but: "The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever He will" (Proverbs 21.1).[13]

In any case, has democracy really been such a defence against tyranny? Let us take the example of the first famous democracy, Athens. In the sixth century B.C., Athens had been ruled by Solon, one of the wisest and most benevolent of autocrats, who showed his superiority to personal ambition by retiring into voluntary exile at the height of his fame. In the mid-fifth century, Athenian democracy was led by a good leader, Pericles. But by the end of the century Socrates, the state's most distinguished citizen, had been executed; Melos had been reduced and its population cruelly butchered; a vainglorious attempt to conquer Syracuse had been abandoned; and a futile and morale-sapping war against Sparta had been lost.

The lessons were not lost on the philosophers of the next century: Plato turned from democracy to the ideal of the philosopher-king; while Aristotle made the important distinction between "democratic behaviour" meaning "the behaviour that democracies like" and "democratic behaviour" meaning "the behaviour that will preserve a democracy" - the two usually do not coincide. The behaviour that democracies like is peaceful money-making and pleasure-seeking. The behaviour that will preserve a democracy is war and strict discipline, in which the rights of the individual must be subordinated to the will of the leader. Moreover, in order to attain democracy, the rights of individuals must be not only subordinated, but destroyed, sometimes on a massive scale.

Thus it is a striking fact that all the greatest tyrants of modern times have emerged on the back of violent democratic revolutions: Cromwell - of the English revolution; Napoleon - of the French revolution; Lenin - of the Russian revolution. And was not Hitler elected by the German democracy? Again, democracies have been quite prepared to throw whole peoples to the lions of tyranny for ephemeral gains. We think of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, by which the West legitimised the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe; or Taiwan's expulsion from the United Nations at the insistence of Red China.

On the other hand, the German idealist tradition, as represented by Hegel, attributed a more positive value to thymos. Hegel agreed with the Anglo-Saxons that democracy was the highest form of government, and therefore that the triumph of democracy - which for some reason he considered to have been attained by the tyrant Napoleon's victory at Jena in 1806 - was "the End of History". But democracy was the best, in Hegel's view, not simply because it attained the aim of self-preservation better than any other system, but also, and primarily, because it gave expression to thymos in the form of "isothymia" - that is, it allowed each citizen to express his thymos to an equal degree. For whereas in pre-democratic societies the satisfaction of thymos in one person led to the frustration of thymos for many more, thereby dividing the whole of society into one or a few masters and a great many slaves, as a result of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century the slaves overthrew their masters and achieved equal recognition in each other's eyes. Thus through the winning of universal human rights everyone, in effect, became a master.

Hegel's philosophy was an explicit challenge to the Christian view of political freedom and slavery, which regarded the latter as a secondary evil that could be turned into good if used for spiritual ends. "For he that is called in the Lord," said St. Paul, "being a servant, is the Lord's freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's servant" (I Corinthians 7.22; Onesimus). So "live as free men," said St. Peter, "yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God" (I Peter 2.16).

St. Augustine developed this teaching: "The first cause of slavery is sin; that is why man is subjected to man in the state of slavery. This does not happen apart from the judgement of God, with Whom is no injustice and Who knows how to apportion varying punishments in accordance with the differing deserts of those who do wrong.

"The heavenly Lord declares: 'Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin' (John 8.34). That is why when, as often happens, religious men are slaves of unjust masters, their masters are not free. 'For whatever a man is overcome by, to that he is enslaved' (II Peter 2.19). And it is better to be the slave of a man than a slave of lust. For lust is a most savage master and one that devastates the hearts of men; this is true, to give only one example, of the lust of mastery itself. But in the peaceful order of human society, where one group of men is subjected to another, slaves are benefited by humility and masters are harmed by pride. By nature, as God first created man, no one is the slave, either of man or of sin. But slavery is ordained as a form of punishment by the law which enjoins the preservation of the natural order and prevents its disturbance. Had that law never been broken, there would have been no need for its enforcement by the punitive measure of slavery. So the Apostle instructs slaves to be subject to their masters and to serve them wholeheartedly. Thereby, if they cannot get freedom from their masters, they can make their slavery into a kind of freedom, by performing this service not in deceitfulness and fear but in faithfulness and love, until injustice passes away and all dominion and human power are brought to nothing and God is all in all..."[14]

But this doctrine offended Hegel's pride, his thymos. So without arguing in detail against it, he rejected it as unworthy of the dignity of man. And he rejected Anglo-Saxon liberalism for similar reasons, insofar as he saw placing self-preservation as the main aim of life and society as effete and degrading. He would have agreed with Shakespeare's words in Hamlet, IV, 4):

For the greatness of man lies in his transcendence of self-preservation, in his capacity for self-sacrifice. And this is a manifestation of thymos.

Fukuyama develops the Hegelian critique of Anglo-Saxon liberalism as follows: "It is precisely the moral primacy accorded to self-preservation or comfortable self-preservation in the thought of Hobbes and Locke that leaves us unsatisfied. Beyond establishing rules for mutual self-preservation, liberal societies do not attempt to define any positive goals for their citizens or promote a particular way of life as superior or desirable to another. Whatever positive life may have has to be filled by the individual himself. That positive content can be a high one of public service and private generosity, or it can be a low one of selfish pleasure and personal meanness. The state as such is indifferent. Indeed, government is committed to the tolerance of different 'lifestyles', except when the exercise of one right impinges on another. In the absence of positive, 'higher' goals, what usually fills the vacuum at the heart of Lockean liberalism is the open-ended pursuit of wealth, now liberated from the traditional constraints of need and scarcity.

"The limitations of the liberal view of man become more obvious if we consider liberal society's most typical product, a new type of individual who has subsequently come to be termed pejoratively as the bourgeois: the human being narrowly consumed with his own immediate self-preservation and material well-being, interested in the community around him only to the extent that it fosters or is a means of achieving his private good. Lockean man did not need to be public-spirited, patriotic or concerned for the welfare of those around him; rather, as Kant suggested, a liberal society could be made up of devils, provided they were rational [italics added]. It was not clear why the citizen of a liberal state, particularly in its Hobbesian variant, would ever serve in the army and risk his life for his country in war. For if the fundamental natural right was self-preservation of the individual, on what grounds could it ever be rational for an individual to die for his country rather than trying to run away with his money and family? Even in times of peace, Hobbesian or Lockean liberalism provided no reason why society's best men should choose public service and statesmanship over a private life of money-making. Indeed, it was not clear why Lockean man shold become active in the life of his community, be privately generous to the poor, or even make the sacrifices necessary to raise a family.

"Beyond the practical question of whether one can create a viable society in which all public-spiritedness is missing, there is an even more important issue as to whether there was not something deeply contemptible about a man who cannot raise his sights higher than his own narrow self-interests and physical needs. Hegel's aristocratic master risking his life in a prestige battle is only the most extreme example of the human impulse to transcend merely natural or physical need. Is it not possible that the struggle for recognition reflects a longing for self-transcendence that lies at the root not only of the violence of the state of nature and of slavery, but also of the noble passions of patriotism, courage, generosity, and public spiritedness? Is recognition not somehow related to the entire moral side of man's nature, the part of man that finds satisfaction in the sacrifice of the narrow concerns of the body for an objective principle that lies beyond the body? By not rejecting the perspective of the master in favor of that of the slave, by identifying the master's struggle for recognition as somehow at the core of what is human, Hegel seeks to honor and preserve a certain moral dimension to human life that is entirely missing in the society conceived of by Hobbes and Locke. Hegel, in other words, understands man as a moral agent whose specific dignity is related to his inner freedom from physical or natural determination. It is this moral dimension, and the struggle to have it recognized, that is the motor driving the dialectical process of history."[16]

Now to the Christian ear there is an inner contradiction in this critique. While agreeing that there is something profoundly repellent in the bourgeois liberal's selfish pursuit of comfortable self-preservation, we cannot agree that the struggle for recognition is anything other than a different, and still more dangerous, form of egoism. For what is self-transcending in the pure affirmation of self? Patriotism, courage and generosity are indeed noble passions, but if we attribute them to the simple need for recognition, are we not reducing acts of selflessness to disguised forms of selfishness? Thus if Anglo-Saxon liberalism panders to the ignoble passion of lust, does not Hegelian liberalism pander to the satanic passion of pride?

It follows from Fukuyama's analysis that the essential condition for the creation of a perfect or near-perfect society is the rational satisfaction both of desire and of thymos. But the satisfaction of thymos is the more problematic of the two requirements. For while the advance of science and open markets can be trusted to deliver the goods that desire - even the modern consumer's highly elastic and constantly changing desire - requires in sufficient quantities for all, it is a very tricky problem to satisfy everyone's thymos without letting any individual or group give expression to megalothymia. However, democracy has succeeded by replacing megalothymia by two things. "The first is a blossoming of the desiring part of the soul, which manifests itself as a thorough-going economization of life. This economization extends from the highest things to the lowest, from the states of Europe who seek not greatness and empire, but a more integrated European Community in 1992, to the college graduate who performs an internal cost-benefit analysis of the career options open to him or her. The second thing that remains in place of megalothymia is an all pervasive isothymia, that is, the desired to be recognized as the equal of other people."[17]

In other words, democracy rests on the twin pillars of greed and pride: the rational (i.e. scientific) manipulation of greed developed without limit (for the richer the rich, the less poor, eventually, will be the poor, the so-called “trickle down” effect), and pride developed within a certain limit (the limit, that is, set by other people's pride). There are now no checks on fallen human nature except laws – the laws passed by fallen human beings - and the state’s apparatus of law-keeping. That may be preferable to lawlessness, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out in the 1970s, comparing the West with the Soviet Union; but it means that within the limits of the laws the grossest immorality is permitted. Truly a house built on sand!

“There are three kinds of obedience,” writes Metropolitan Philaret: “mercenary obedience that is for one’s own benefit, servile obedience out of fear, and vainglorious obedience for the attainment of privileges. But what must we say about their merits? It cannot be denied that they are all better than disobedience, they can all in various cases be successfully used against the temptations of disobedience; but is there any pure and firm virtue here?

“Virtue that is not sufficiently pure cannot be sufficiently constant, just as impure gold changes its appearance and reveals a mixture. Just as it is natural that every action should be equal to its cause and should not extend beyond it, so we must expect that obedience that is based only on fear, on mercenariness, on the satisfaction of vainglory, will be shaken when vainglory is not satisfied, either through the inattentiveness of him who bestows awards or through the greediness of the vainglory itself; when the obedience that is demanded by the common good is contrary to private advantage; and when the power that terrifies by lawful revenge or punishment is either not sufficiently strong or not sufficiently penetrating and active…”

Now there are two "thymotic" phenomena that will have to be controlled and neutralized if the democrat's ideal of a satisfied, isothymic citizenry is to be achieved: religion and nationalism.

Nationalism is a threat because it implies that all men are not equal, which in turn implies that it is right and just for one group of men to dominate another. As Fukuyama admits, "Democracy is not particularly good at resolving disputes between different ethnic or national groups. The question of national sovereignty is inherently uncompromisable: it either belongs to one people or another - Armenians or Azerbaijanis, Lithuanians or Russians - and when different groups come into conflict there is seldom a way of splitting the difference through peaceful democratic compromise, as there is in the case of economic disputes. The Soviet Union could not become democratic and at the same time unitary, for there was no consensus among the Soviet Union's nationalities that they shared a common citizenship and identity. Democracy would only emerge on the basis of the country's breakup into smaller national entities. American democracy has done surprisingly well dealing with ethnic diversity, but that diversity has been contained within certain bounds: none of America's ethnic groups constitutes historical communities living on their traditional lands and speaking their own language, with a memory of past nationhood and sovereignty."[18]

Since democracy cannot contain give expression to nationalism without contradicting its own egalitarian principles, it has to undermine it - not by force, of course, but in the democratic way, that is, by sweet reason and material inducements. However, sweet reason rarely works when passions run high and deep, so in the end the warring nations have to be bribed to keep the peace. This works up to a point, but experience shows that even economically advanced countries whose desire is near to be satisfied cannot control the eruption of thymotic nationalist passions. Thus "economic development has not weakened the sense of national identity among French Canadians in Quebec; indeed, their fear of homogenization into the dominant Anglophone culture has sharpened their desire to preserve their distinctness. To say that democracy is more functional in societies 'born equal' like the United States begs the question of how a nation gets there in the first place. Democracy, then, does not necessarily become more functional as societies become more complex and diverse. In fact, it fails precisely when the diversity of a society passes a certain limit."[19]

In spite of this fact, the ideologues of democracy continue to believe that nationalism is a threat that can only be contained by building ever larger supra-national states. Thus the European Community was founded in 1956 on the premise that, besides the economic rewards to be reaped from the Union, it would prevent the recurrence of war between the European states in general and France and Germany in particular. Of course, the bloody breakdown of supra-national states such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia does not speak in support of this argument. But the democrats riposte by declaring that it is not supranationalism as such that was to blame for these breakdowns, but rather the communist system, which suppressed the thymotic aspirations of its citizens and so fuelled nationalism instead of sublimating it.

So is the democratic model of supranationalism represented by the European Union solving the problem of nationalism? The evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. As the moment of the irreversible surrender of national sovereignties, i.e. monetary union, draws nearer, resistance seems to be stiffening in several countries, as witnessed by the majorities against it in many national polls. And as this resistance becomes stronger, so the sweet reason of the Eurocrats turns into the harsh language of threatened coercion. Thus the French Prime Minister has proposed that those countries who decide not to join the monetary union (he has in mind especially Great Britain, the most sceptical of the Union's nation states) should be subject to economic penalties. And the German Chancellor has said (again, his remarks are aimed particularly at Britain) that the result of a failure to unite in Europe will be war. This is in spite of the fact that there has been no war or even threat of war in Western Europe for the past fifty years!

So much for the "voluntary" union of states in the spirit of democracy and brotherhood! If you don't surrender your sovereignty, we will crush you! This is the language of nationalist hatred in supra-national guise, and it points to a central paradox or internal contradiction in democracy.

The contradiction consists in the fact that while democracy prides itself on its spirit of peace and brotherhood between individuals and nations, the path to democracy, both within and between nations, actually involves an unparalleled destruction of personal and national life. For much has been said, and truly said, about the destructive power of nationalism; but much less about how it protects nations and cultures and people from destruction (as, for example, it protected the Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe from destruction under the Turkish yoke). Again, much has been said, and truly said, about how democracy creates a culture of peace which has prevented the occurrence of major wars between democratic states; much less about how democracy has drastically weakened the bonds created by societies other than the state, from the ethnic group and the church to the working men's club and the mother's union, with the result that, deprived of community identities, atomized, democratic man has found himself in a state of undeclared war against, or at any rate alienation from, his neighbour.

This may explain why, at just the moment when democracies seem to have matured and solved all major internal contradictions and inequalities, new nationalisms are appearing - the Basque, Scottish and North Italian nationalisms, for example, in the modern European Union. For men must feel that they belong to a community, and not just to such an amorphous community as "the European Union", still less "the International Community". But to create a community means to create partitions - not hostile partitions, not impermeable partitions, but partitions nevertheless, partitions that show who is inside and who is outside the community, criteria of membership which not everyone will be able to meet. The resilience of nationalism in both its positive and negative modes is a sign of the perennial need for community, a need which democracy has abysmally failed to satisfy. And while Fukuyama fully accepts the existence and seriousness of this lack in democratic society, he still seems to think that the most important and powerful sources of community life, religion and nationalism, are either already out or on the way out.

Thus in an uncharacteristically bold and unqualified statement he declares that "contrary to those who at the time believed that religion was a necessary and permanent feature of the political landscape, liberalism vanquished religion in Europe [his italics]."[20] As for nationalism, he recognizes that this is likely to continue and even increase in some regions for some time yet. But in the end it, too, is destined to "wither away". Thus he considers the rise of nationalism in the highly cultured, democratic and economically advanced Germany of the 1920s and 30s to have been "the product of historically unique circumstances". "These conditions are not only not latent in most developed societies, but would be very hard (though not impossible) to duplicate in other societies in the future. Many of these circumstances, such as defeat in a long and brutal war and economic depression, are well known and potentially replicable in other countries. But others have to do with the special intellectual and cultural traditions of Germany at the time, its anti-materialism and emphasis on struggle and sacrifice, that made it very distinct from liberal France and England. These traditions, which were in no way 'modern', were tested by the wrenching social disruptions caused by Imperial Germany's hothouse industrialization before and after the Franco-Prussian War. It is possible to understand Nazism as another, albeit extreme, variant of the 'disease of the transition', a byproduct of the modernization process that was by no means a necessary component of modernity itself. None of this implies that a phenomenon like Nazism is now impossible because we have advanced socially beyond such a stage. It does suggest, however, that fascism is a pathological and extreme condition, by which one cannot judge modernity as a whole."[21]

Pathological and extreme Nazism may be, but it cannot be dismissed as simply an ugly but easily excised wart on the superbly toned body of Modernity. Hitler was elected in a democratic manner, and Nazism was the product of one of the fundamental internal contradictions of democracy, the fact that while promising fraternity, it neverthless atomizes, alienates and in many other ways pulverizes the "brothers", making them feel that life is a jungle in which every man is essentially alone. Sovietism was also a product of democracy, and an exposure of still more of its internal contradictions - the contradictions in and between the concepts of freedom and equality. These "deviations" to the right and left do not point to the righteousness of a supposed "royal way" in between. Rather, they are symptoms, warning signs pointing to the inner pathological nature of the ideal they both professed and to which they both owed their existence.

The European Union gives as its main justification the avoidance of those nationalistic wars, especially between France and Germany, which have so disfigured the region's history. But the old nationalisms show no sign of dying. And in traditionally insular countries, such as Britain, or traditionally Orthodox ones, such as Greece, attempts to force them into an unnatural union with other nations with quite different traditions appear to be increasing centrifugal tendencies. Moreover, the European Union has signally failed to introduce unity among the nations in other parts of the European continent, such as the former Yugoslavia. For pious exhortations are as useless in the faith of nationalist fervour as exhortations to chastity in the face of aroused lust. In both cases grace is required to give power to the word.

The problem is that when the grace that holds apparent opposites in balance is absent, it is very easy for a nation, as for an individual person, to swing from one extreme to the other, as the history of the twentieth century, characterised by lurches from nationalist Fascism to internationalist Communism shows. Late in the nineteenth century Constantine Leontiev saw that the nationalism of the states of Europe could lead to a no less dangerous internationalist abolition of states “... A state grouping according to tribes and nations is… nothing other than the preparation - striking in its force and vividness - for the transition to a cosmopolitan state, first a pan-European one, and then, perhaps, a global one, too! This is terrible! But still more terrible, in my opinion, is that fact that so far in Russia nobody has seen this or wants to understand it...”[22] “A grouping of states according to pure nationalities will lead European man very quickly to the dominion of internationalism.”[23]

The second threat to democracy is religion. Religion is a threat because it postulates the existence of absolute truths and values that conflict with the democratic lie that it doesn't matter what you believe because one man's beliefs are as good and valid as any other's. As Fukuyama writes, "like nationalism, there is no inherent conflict between religion and liberal democracy, except at the point where religion ceases to be tolerant or egalitarian."[24] It is not surprising, therefore, that the flowering of liberal democracy should have coincided with the flowering of the ecumenical movement in religion, and that England, the birthplace of liberal democracy, should also have supplied, in the form of the Anglican Church, the model and motor for the creation of the World Council of Churches. For ecumenism is, in essence, the application of the principles of liberal democracy to religious belief.

Paradoxically, Fukuyama, following Hegel, recognizes that the idea of the unique moral worth of every human being, which is at the root of the idea of human rights, is Christian in origin. For, according to the Christian view, "people who are manifestly unequal in terms of beauty, talent, intelligence, or skill, are nonetheless equal insofar as they are moral agents. The homeliest and most awkward orphan can have a more beautiful soul in the eyes of God than the most talented pianist or the most brilliant physicist. Christianity's contribution, then, to the historical process was to make clear to the slave this vision of human freedom, and to define for him in what sense all men could be understood to have dignity. The Christian God recognizes all human beings universally, recognizes their individual human worth and dignity. The Kingdom of Heaven, in other words, presents the prospect of a world in which the isothymia of every man - though not the megalothymia of the vainglorious - will be satisfied."[25]

Leaving aside for the moment the question whether this is an accurate representation of the Christian understanding of freedom and equality, we may note that, however useful this idea has been in bringing the slave to a sense of his own dignity, it has to be rejected by the democrat because it actually reconciles him with his chains rather than spurring him to throw them off. For Christianity, as Hegel - and, it would seem, Fukuyama, too - believes, is ultimately an ideology of slaves, whatever its usefulness as a stepping stone to the last ideology, the ideology of truly free men, Democracy. If the slaves are actually to become free, they must not be inhibited by the ideas of the will of God (which, by definition, is of greater authority than "the will of the people") and of the Kingdom of Heaven (which, by definition, cannot be the kingdom of this world). The Christian virtues of patience and humility must also go, and for very much the same reason. For the revolution needs proud men, greedy men, impatient men, not ascetic hermits - even if, after the revolution, they have to limit their pride and impatience, if not their greed, for the sake of the stability of democracy.

But this last point leads Fukuyama to a still more important admission: that religion is useful, perhaps even necessary, to democratic society even after the revolution. For "the emergence and durability of a society embodying rational recognition appears to require the survival of certain forms of irrational recognition."[26] One example of such a survival is the "Protestant work-ethic", which is the recognition that work has a value in and of itself, regardless of its material rewards.

The problem for the democrats is that the thymotic passions which were necessary to overthrow the aristocratic masters and create democratic society tend to fade away when the victory has been won but the fruits of the victory still have to be consolidated and defended. It is a profound and important paradox that men are much more likely to give their lives for unelected hereditary monarchs than for elected presidents or prime ministers, even though they consider the latter more "legitimate" than the former. The reason for this is that very powerful religious and patriotic emotions attach to hereditary monarchs that do not attach to democratic leaders precisely because, whether consciously or unconsciously, they are perceived to be kings not by the will of the people, but by the will of God, Whose will the people recognizes to be more sacred than its own will.

Fukuyama struggles bravely with this ultimately intractable problem: "The liberal state growing out of the tradition of Hobbes and Locke engages in a protracted struggle with its own people. It seeks to homogenize their variegated traditional cultures and to teach them to calculate instead their own long-term self-interest. In place of an organic moral community with its own language of 'good and evil', one had to learn a new set of democratic values: to be 'participant', 'rational', 'secular', 'mobile', 'empathetic', and 'tolerant'. These new democratic values were initially not values at all in the sense of defining the final human virtue or good. They were conceived as having a purely instrumental function, habits that one had to acquire if one was to live successfully in a peaceful and prosperous liberal society. It was for this reason that Nietzsche called the state the 'coldest of all cold monsters' that destroyed peoples and their cultures by hanging 'a thousand appetites' in front of them.

"For democracy to work, however, citizens of democratic states must forget the instrumental roots of their values, and develop a certain irrational thymotic pride in their political system and way of life. That is, they must come to love democracy not because it is necessarily better than the alternatives, but because it is theirs. Moreover, they must cease to see values like 'tolerance' as merely a means to an end; tolerance in democratic societies becomes the defining virtue. Development of this kind of pride in democracy, or the assimilation of democratic values into the citizen's sense of his own self, is what is meant by the creation of a 'democratic' or 'civic culture'. Such a culture is critical to the long-term health and stability of democracies, since no real-world society can long survive based on rational calculation and desire alone."[27]

Quite so; but is it rational to believe that telling the people that "they must come to love democracy not because it is necessarily better than the alternatives, but because it is theirs" is going to fire them more than the ideas of Islamic Jihad or "The Mystic Union of the Aryan race"? Is not loving an ideology just because it is my ideology the ultimate irrationality? Is not an ideology - any ideology - that appeals to a Being greater than itself going to have greater emotional appeal than such infantile narcissism? Moreover, the "purer" a democracy, the more serious the problem of injecting warmth into "the coldest of all cold monsters". For what "democratic" or "civic culture" can replace, even from a purely psychological point of view, full-blooded religion - believing in absolute truths and values that are not just projections of our desires?

Fukuyama discusses at some length how democratic society allows its megalothymic citizens to harmlessly "let off steam" - that is, excess thymos - through such activities as entrepreneurialism, competitive sport, intellectual and artistic achievement, ecological crusading and voluntary service in non-democratic societies. He has much less to say about how thymos is to be generated in relation to the central values and symbols of democratic society when that society is becoming - in this respect, at any rate - distinctly anaemic and "microthymic". Why, for example, should I go to war to make the world safe for democracy? To defend the good of "tolerance" against the evil of "intolerance"? But why shouldn't my "enemy" be intolerant if he wants to? Doesn't tolerance itself declare that one man's values are just as good as any other's? Why should I kill him just because, by an accident of birth, he hasn't reached my level of ecumenical consciousness and remains mired in the fanaticism of the pre-millenial, non-democratic age?..

The fact is that whereas democracy wages war on "bigoted", "intolerant", "inegalitarian" religion - that is, religion which believes in absolute truths and values that are valid for all people at all times, and which make those who believe in them and act by them better, in the eyes of believers, than those who do not, - it desperately needs some such religion itself.

It needed it at the beginning; for it was only through the quasi-religious fervour of the English, French and Russian revolutions that the old regimes in those countries were swept away - and since the end of democracy justifies all ends in the perspective of History, it does not matter to the democrats that this religion was much more like the bloodthirsty sacrifices of Moloch and Baal than the humble, self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. It needed it in the middle, when some kind of religious enthusiasm was necessary to whip up the peoples in defence of democracy against communism and nazism - an enthusiasm that was shown to have become dangerously weak at the time of the Vietnam war. And it needs it even more now, at the end, when the cancers of atomism, relativism and me-too-ism threaten to eat up the whole of democratic society from within.

But where, having spent all the vast propaganda resources of the modern state in preaching the superfluity, if not complete falsehood of all religion over a period of hundreds of years, are the democrats going to find such a religion? In Gaia, the ecologist's earth goddess, who gives birth to everything that the democrats desire, while punishing, through natural and man-made catastrophes, all those who, through unforgiveable megalothymia, disobey her commands (i.e. the ecological balance of nature)? In the New Age, which worships man in every aspect of his fallenness, not excluding his union with the fallen spirits of hell? If the vice-president of the world's most powerful democracy can believe in this, then anything is possible. And yet, and yet - how can modern man return to such atavistic paganism when it contradicts the very cornerstone of his philosophical world-view and the primary engine of his prosperity - the scientific method?

In the last section of his book, entitled "The Last Man", Fukuyama examines two threats to the survival of democracy, one from the left of the political spectrum and one from the right.

From the left comes the challenge constituted by the never-ending demand for equality based on an ever-increasing list of supposed inequalities. "Already, forms of inequality such as racism, sexism, and homophobia have displaced the traditional class issue for the Left on contemporary college campuses. Once the principle of equal recognition of each person's human dignity - the satisfaction of their isothymia - is established, there is no guarantee that people will continue to accept the existence of natural or necessary residual forms of inequality. The fact that nature distributes capabilities unequally is not particularly just. Just because the present generation accepts this kind of inequality as either natural or necessary does not mean that it will be accepted as such in the future...

"The passion for equal recognition - isothymia - does not necessarily diminish with the achievement of greater de facto equality and material abundance, but may actually be stimulated by it...

"Today in democratic America there is a host of people who devote their lives to the total and complete elimination of any vestiges of inequality, making sure that no little girl should have to pay more to have her locks cut than a little boy, that no Boy Scout troop be closed to homosexual scoutmasters, that no building be built without a concrete wheelchair going up to the front door. These passions exist in American society because of, and not despite, the smallness of its actual remaining inequalities..."[28]

The proliferation of new "rights", many of them "ambiguous in their social content and mutually contradictory", threatens to dissolve the whole of society in a boiling sea of resentment. Hierarchy has all but disappeared. Anyone can now refuse obedience to, or take to court, anyone else - even children their parents. Bitter nationalisms re-emerge even in "the melting pot of the nations" as Afro-Americans go back to their roots in order to assert their difference from the dominant race. The very concept of degrees of excellence as something quite independent of race or sex is swept aside as, for example, Shakespeare's claim to pre-eminence in literature is rejected because he is he had the unfair advantage of being "white, male and Anglo-Saxon".

Fukuyama rightly points out that the doctrine of rights springs directly from an understanding of what man is. But the egalitarian and scientific revolutions undermine the Christian concept of man which the founders of liberalism, both Anglo-Saxon and German, took for granted, denying that there is any essential difference between man and nature because "man is simply a more organized and rational form of slime". It follows that essential human rights should be accorded also to the higher animals, like monkeys and dolphins, who can suffer pain as we do and are supposedly no less intelligent.[29]

"But the argument will not stop there. For how does one distinguish between higher and lower animals? Who can determine what in nature suffers? Indeed, why should the ability to experience pain, or the possession of higher intelligence, become a title to superior worth? In the end, why does man have more dignity than any part of the natural world, from the most humble rock to the most distant star? Why should insects, bacteria, intestinal parasites, and HIV viruses not have rights equal to those of human beings?"[30]

The paradox is that this new understanding of life, human and sub-human, is in fact very similar to that of Hinduism, which has evolved, in the form of the Indian caste system, probably the most stubbornly inegalitarian society in history!

Fukuyama concludes his examination of the challenge from the Left: "The extension of the principle of equality to apply not just to human beings but to non-human creation as well may today sound bizarre, but it is implied in our current impasse in thinking through the question: What is man? If we truly believe that he is not capable of moral choice or the autonomous use of reason, if he can be understood entirely in terms of the sub-human, then it is not only possible but inevitable that rights will gradually be extended to animals and other natural beings as well as men. The liberal concept of an equal and universal humanity with a specifically human dignity will be attacked both from above and below: by those who asset that certain group identities are more important than the quality of being human, and by those who believe that being human constitutes nothing distinctive against the non-human. The intellectual impasse in which modern relativism has left us does not permit us to answer either of these attacks definitively, and therefore does not permit defense of liberal rights traditionally understood..."[31]

Fukuyama goes on to examine "a still greater and ultimately more serious threat" coming from the Right. This amounts to the accusation that when democratic man has won all his universal human rights, and become totally free and equal, he will be, to put it crudely, a worthless nonentity. For individuals striving for something that is purer and higher are more likely to arise "in societies dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal. Democratic societies, dedicated to the opposite proposition, tend to promote a belief in the equality of all lifestyles and values. They do not tell their citizens how they should live, or what will make them happy, virtuous, or great. Instead, they cultivate the virtue of toleration, which becomes the chief virtue in democratic societies. And if men are unable to affirm that any particular way of life is superior to another, then they will fall back on the affirmation of life itself, that is, the body, its needs, and fears. While not all souls may be equally virtuous or talented, all bodies can suffer; hence democratic societies will tend to be compassionate and raise to the first order of concern the question of preventing the body from suffering. It is not an accident that people in democratic societies are preoccupied with material gain and live in an economic world devoted to the satisfaction of the myriad small needs of the body. According to Nietzsche, the last man has 'left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth.'

"'One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

"'No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.'

"It becomes particularly difficult for people in democratic societies to take questions with real moral content seriously in public life. Morality involves a distinction between better and worse, good and bad, which seems to violate the democratic principle of tolerance. It is for this reason that the last man becomes concerned above all for his own personal health and safety, because it is uncontroversial. In America today, we feel entitled to criticize another person's smoking habits, but not his or her religious beliefs or moral behavior. For Americans, the health of their bodies - what they eat and drink, the exercise they get, the shape they are in - has become a far greater obsession than the moral questions that tormented their forbears."[32]

"Modern education… stimulates a certain tendency towards relativism, that is, the doctrine that all horizons and value systems are relative to their time and place, and that none are true but reflect the prejudices or interests of those who advance them. The doctrine that says that there is no privileged perspective dovetails very nicely with democratic man's desire to believe that his way of life is just as good as any other. Relativism in this context does not lead to the liberation of the great or strong, but of the mediocre, who were now told that they had nothing of which to be ashamed. The slave at the beginning of history declined to risk his life in the bloody battle because he was instinctively fearful. The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of pointless battles in which men fought over whether they should be Christian or Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, German or French. The loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices. Men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra says of them, 'For thus you speak: "Real are we entirely, and without belief or superstition.' Thus you stick out your chests - but alas, they are hollow!'"[33]

"A dog is content to sleep in the sun all day provided he is fed, because he is not dissatisfied with what he is. He does not worry that other dogs are doing better than him, or that his career as a dog has stagnated, or that dogs are being oppressed in a distant part of the world. If man reaches a society in which he has succeeded in abolishing injustice, his life will come to resemble that of the dog. Human life, then, involves a curious paradox: it seems to require injustice, for the struggle against injustice is what calls forth what is highest in man."[34]

For a man is in fact more than a dog or a log. Even when all his desires have been satisfied, and even when all injustices have been eradicated, he wants, not to sleep, but to act. For, unlike the plants and animals, he has a free will which needs nothing outside itself to feed on.

The basis of this irrational freedom was described by Dostoyevsky's underground man as: "one's own free, unrestrained choice, one's own whim, be it the wildest, one's own fancy, sometimes worked up to a frenzy... And where did these sages pick up the idea that man must have something which they feel is a normal and virtuous set of wishes? What makes them think that man's will must be reasonable and in accordance with his own interests? All man actually needs is independent will, at all costs and whatever the consequences..."[35]

Here we come to the root of the democratic dilemma. Democracy's raison d'etre is the liberation of the human will, first through the satisfaction of his most basic desires, and then through the satisfaction of every other person's desires to an equal extent. But the problem is that the will, thus satisfied, has only just begun to manifest itself. For the will is not essentially a will to anything - not a will not to eat, not a will to power; it is simply will tout court. "I will, therefore I am. And if anyone else wills otherwise, to hell with him! (And if I myself will otherwise, to hell with me!)"

So perhaps war (and suicide) must be permitted in the society whose purpose is "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Of course, this was not the Founding Fathers' intention. They were reasonable men. But perhaps they did not pursue their reasoning through to its logical conclusion. Perhaps they did not understand that those bloody Roman dictators were not stupid when they defined the desires of the mob as panem et circenses - bread and circuses, in which "circuses" had without fail to include some gladiatorial murder.

Hegel, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, did have a place for violence and war in his system - not war for war's sake, but war for democracy's sake. "A liberal democracy that could fight a short and decisive war every generation or so to defend its own liberty and independence would be far healthier and more satisfied than one that experienced nothing but continuous peace. Hegel's view of war reflects a common experience of combat: for while men suffer horribly and are seldom as frightened and miserable, their experience if they survive has the tendency of putting all things in a certain perspective."[36]

But for men who believe in nothing beyond themselves, whether democracy or any other value, there is nothing ennobling or purifying about war. It simply debases them still further. That has been the fate of those Russian soldiers, who, on returning from the war in Chechnya, continue the war in mindless murders of their own people. For such men, war has become an end in itself. In a world in which all objective values have been radically undermined, killing is the only way they have to prove to themselves that they exist, that they, at any rate, can make an objective difference to their surroundings.

For "supposing", continues Fukuyama, "that the world has become 'filled up', so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against that democracy."[37]

As examples of this phenomenon, Fukuyama cites the évènements in France in 1968, and the scenes of patriotic pro-war enthusiasm repeated in Paris, Petrograd, London, and Vienna in August, 1914. And yet there is a much better example much closer to home - the crime that has become such a universal phenomenon in modern democracies from London to Johannesburg, from Bangkok to Sao Paolo, from Washington to Moscow. It is as if Dostoyevsky's underground man has now become a whole class - the underclass of the metropolitan octopuses, whose tentacles extend ever wider and deeper into the major institutions and government itself.

Democratic man, unable to free himself from the shackles of democratic thought, superficially ascribes the causes of crime to poverty or unemployment, to a lack of education or a lack of rights. But most modern criminals are not hungry, nor are they struggling for rights. There is no need as such in most modern crime, no idealism, however misguided. Their only need is to kill and to rape and to steal - not for the sake of revenge, or sex, or money, but just for their own sake. And their only ideal is to express their own, "independent will, at all costs and whatever the consequences".

Thus the logical consequence of the attainment of full democracy is nihilism, the universal war of every man against every man, for the sake of no man and no thing. For "modern thought raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom. Relativism - the doctrine that maintains that all value are merely relative and which attacks all 'privileged perspectives' - must ultimately end up undermining democratic and tolerant values as well."[38]

Fukuyama should have concluded his superbly consistent argument at this point, saying: "Democracy is doomed; we must find some other truths and values - absolute truths and values, or we shall all perish in a morass of relativism and nihilism." But at this point the limitations of his democratic education - or is it just American optimism? - lead him to make his only act of mauvaise foi. Like a Shostakovich symphony, which, after plumbing the depths of tragic despair, must perforce have a bombastic finale, Fukuyama declares his faith that democracy will win out in the end, if only because all other systems are dead or in the process of dying. And in an aptly American metaphor he compares the progress of democracy to a wagon train that, having crossed the Rockies in a raging blizzard and having withstood all the assaults of wild Indians and howling coyotes, comes to rest in - smog-filled, drug-addicted, crime-infested Los Angeles?… Only in the very last sentence does he - very tentatively, as if fearing to have his head shot off by a last Indian sniper - recover himself somewhat and look over the parapet of democracy's last stand: "Nor can we in the final analysis know, provided a majority of the wagons eventually reach the same town, whether their occupants, having looked around a bit at their new surroundings, will not find them inadequate and set their eyes on a new and more distant journey..."[39]

Let us now turn to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose critique of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy comes, not from Hegelian presuppositions, nor from the slightest sympathy for totalitarianism (he was, after all, the author of The Gulag Archipelago), but from disillusion with the idea of freedom as the supreme value as it is expressed in the contemporary West.

For Solzhenitsyn, freedom is valuable and indeed necessary, but not as an end in itself. Rather, he sees it as a means to a higher end - moral perfection. And when he sees freedom being used to undermine rather than to support that higher end, he waxes eloquently scornful, as in his 1976 speech on receiving the "Freedom Fund" prize: "Freedom! - to forcibly defile postboxes and the eyes, ears and brains of people with commercial rubbish, and television programmes in which it is impossible to see any coherent sense. Freedom! - to impose information on people without taking into account their right not to receive it, their right to mental relaxation. Freedom! - to spit in the eyes and souls of those passing by advertisements. Freedom! - of publishers and cinema producers to poison the young generation with corrupt abominations. Freedom! - for adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 to get drunk on leisure and pleasure instead of concentrated study and spiritual growth. Freedom! - for young adults to seek idleness and live at the expense of society. Freedom! - for strikers, to the extent of allowing them to deprive all the other citizens of a normal life, work, movement, water and food. Freedom! - for justifying speeches, when the lawyer himself knows that the accused is guilty. Freedom! - to raise the juridical right of insurance to such a degree that even charity could be reduced to extortion. Freedom! - for casual, trite pens to irresponsibly slide along the surface of any question in their haste to form public opinion. Freedom! - for the collection of gossip, when a journalist in his own interests spares neither his father nor his Fatherland. Freedom! - to publicize the defence secrets of one's country for personal political ends. Freedom! - for a businessman to make any deal, however many people it may reduce to misery or even if it would betray his own country. Freedom! - for political leaders to lightmindedly carry out what the voter wants today, and not what from a longer-term perspective will protect him from evil and danger. Freedom! - for terrorists to escape punishment, pity for them as a death sentence for the whole of the rest of society. Freedom! - for whole states to parasitically extort help from others, and not to work to build their own economy. Freedom! - as indifference to the trampling of the freedom of others far from us. Freedom! - even not to defend one's own freedom, as long as someone else risks his life."[40]

Solzhenitsyn did not mention what is probably the greatest evil consequence of freedom in present-day democratic Russia, even more than in the West - the rise of organized crime. On March 27, 1994, James Woolsey, General Director of the CIA, told a senate foreign committee that the pervasiveness of Russian organised crime, fostered by the freedoms and restraint of security forces necessary for democratic reform, has contributed to the popular backlash against Yeltsin's policies and bolstered support for right wing nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Organized crime not only threatens all personal and commercial freedoms: it even threatens the life of the planet insofar as it includes potential trafficking in nuclear weapons.[41]

The only real defence of freedom against its own worst consequences - including, as in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933, a descent into a worse tyranny than that of any hereditary monarch - is a good set of laws and an effective system for enforcing them. However, democracy guarantees neither the one nor the other. For a good set of laws depends on the wisdom and morality of the lawmakers - and democratic lawmakers are elected to follow the will of their constituents, not the objective good of the country. And effective enforcement presupposes a generally high respect for the law in the population as a whole - a condition which is notably lacking in most democratic societies today. In any case, according to Solzhenitsyn, western democratic legalism has become, to a dangerous and debilitating degree, an end in itself. Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law, and voluntary self-restraint is considered out of the question. It is not enough to have a wonderful system of laws and every democratic freedom. If the people are selfish, then life will still be hell.

Pluralism, freedom of speech and the press and democratic elections are all fine, says Solzhenitsyn, but they only make the choice possible: they do not tell us what to choose. The decision of the majority is no guarantee against "misdirection"; fascists, communists, nationalists and unprincipled demagogues are frequently voted in by majorities. Even in an established democracy major decisions can be swung by the vote of a small, but determined and selfish minority which holds the balance of power and can therefore impose its will on the majority.

In an article entitled "The Pluralists", Solzhenitsyn writes: "They [the pluralists] seem to regard pluralism as somehow the supreme attainment of history, the supreme intellectual good, the supreme value of modern Western life. This principle is often formulated as follows: 'the more different opinions, the better' - the important thing being that no one should seriously insist on the truth of his own.

"But can pluralism claim to be a principle valuable in itself, and indeed one of the loftiest? It is strange that mere plurality should be elevated to such a high status... The Washington Post once published a letter from an American, responding to my Harvard speech. 'It is difficult to believe,' he wrote, 'that diversity for its own sake is the highest aim of mankind. Respect for diversity makes no sense unless diversity helps us attain some higher goal.'

"Of course, variety adds colour to life. We yearn for it. We cannot imagine life without it. But if diversity becomes the highest principle, then there can be no universal human values, and making one's own values the yardstick of another person's opinions is ignorant and brutal. If there is no right and wrong, what restraints remain? If there is no universal basis for it there can be no morality. 'Pluralism' as a principle degenerates into indifference, superficiality, it spills over into relativism, into tolerance of the absurd, into a pluralism of errors and lies. You may show off your ideas, but must say nothing with conviction. To be too sure that you are right is indecent. So people wander like babes in the wood. That is why the Western world today is defenceless; paralysed by its inability any longer to distinguish between true and false positions, between manifest Good and manifest Evil, by the centrifugal chaos of ideas, by the entropy of thought. 'Let's have as many views as possible - just as long as they're all different!' But if a hundred mules all pull different ways the result is no movement at all.

"In the whole universal flux there is one truth - God's truth, and, consciously or not, we all long to draw near to this truth and touch it. A great diversity of opinions has some sense if we make it our first concern to compare them so as to discover and renounce our mistakes. To discover the true way of looking at things, come as close as we can to God's truth, and not just collect as many 'different' views as we can.”[42]

Thus just as Western democratic pluralism would not save the West from Soviet totalitarianism, so Russia would not be delivered from the same totalitarianism by simply trying to make it more democratic. Solzhenitsyn did not believe that there was any realistic path of transition to a democratic republic without creating a number of nationalist wars - a judgement which we can now see to have been prophetically true. A multi-party democracy in Russia would be "merely be a melancholy repetition of 1917". For the failure of Russian democracy in 1917 was not the result simply of the immaturity of Russian democratic institutions, but rather of a fundamental flaw in the basic theory and spirit of democracy. Communism itself springs, not from traditional authoritarian systems, which, for all their faults, still recognized the authority of God above them, but from "the crisis of democracy, from the failure of irreligious humanism".[43]

At the time of writing (the beginning of the third Christian millenium), liberal democracy appears to have triumphed over all other politico-economic systems. It has survived the socialist and fascist revolutions of the period 1789-1945, and even appears to be on the point of “turning” the last and most powerful survival of the revolutionary ethos, Communist China. But in both Fukuyama, an avid supporter of democracy, and in Solzhenitsyn, a lifelong opponent of totalitarianism, we see similar doubts – even if these doubts are suppressed in the former by his conviction that democracy represents “the end of history”, the final, and best, politico-economic system.

The basic doubt can be expressed as follows: can a system built, not on the eradication, but on the exploitation and rational management of man’s fallen passions, and not on absolute truth, but on the relativisation of all opinions through the ballot box, bring lasting peace and prosperity?

In a sense there is no competition; for the only system that is radically different from liberal democracy, Orthodox Autocracy, sets itself a quite different goal: not peace and prosperity in this life, but the salvation of the soul in the next. Even if it could be proved that liberal democracy satisfied the earthly needs of men better than Orthodox Autocracy, this is no way invalidates Autocracy, insofar as the true, convinced subjects of Autocracy would gladly exchange happiness and prosperity in this life for salvation in the next. For while the purpose of democracy is the fullest satisfaction of man’s fallen nature, the purpose of Autocracy is the creation of the political and social conditions conducive to the maximum flourishing of the Church, whose purpose is the recreation of man’s original, unfallen nature.

But it may be doubted whether liberal democracy will achieve its own stated ends. The cult of reason and liberalism, writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “very much wants to establish worldly prosperity, it very much wants to make people happy, but it will achieve nothing, because it approaches the problem from the wrong end.

“It may appear strange that people who think only of earthly prosperity, and who put their whole soul into realising it, attain only disillusionment and exhaustion. People who, on the contrary, are immersed in cares about the invisible life beyond the grave, attain here, on earth, results constituting the highest examples yet known on earth of personal and social development! However, this strangeness is self-explanatory. The point is that man is by his nature precisely the kind of being that Christianity understands him to be by faith; the aims of life that are indicated to him by faith are precisely the kind of aims that he has in reality, and not the kind that reason divorced from faith delineates. Therefore in educating a man in accordance with the Orthodox world-view, we conduct his education correctly, and thence we get results that are good not only in that which is most important [salvation] (which unbelievers do not worry about), but also in that which is secondary (which is the only thing they set their heart on). In losing faith, and therefore ceasing to worry about the most important thing, people lost the possibility of developing man in accordance with his true nature, and so they get distorted results in earthly life, too.”[44]

Thus even the most perfectly functioning democracy will ultimately fail in its purpose, for the simple reason that while man is fallen, he is not completely fallen, he is still made in the image of God, so that even when all his fallen desires have been satisfied there will still be an unsatisfied longing for something higher. “Happiness” – the supreme “right” of man, according to the American Constitution – is unattainable as long as only our own, and not other people’s happiness, our own glory, and not God’s glory, is the goal; and even if attained on earth, it will only be brief and bring inevitable ennui; for it will immediately stimulate a desire for the infinitely greater happiness of heaven, eternal joy in God. The revolutionary age that followed the age of reason highlighted this truth, albeit in a perverted, demonic way; for it showed that there is more in heaven and earth and in the soul of man – far greater heights, as well as far more abysmal depths - than was ever dreamt of in the complacent psychology of the liberal philosophers.

[1] Rose, Nihilism, Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1994, pp. 28-30.

[2] Scruton, Modern Philosophy, London: Arrow Books, 1997, p. 416.

[3] Scruton, op. cit., p. 417.

[4] Tikhomirov, “Demokratia liberal’naia i sotsial’naia” (“Liberal and Social Democracy”), in Kritika Demokratia (A Critique of Democracy), Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 122 (in Russian).

[5] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), Moscow, 1877, vol. 3, pp. 448, 449; reprinted in Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 49, № 9 (573), September, 1997, pp. 3-4 (in Russian).

[6] McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

[7] Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, p. xi.

[8] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 117.

[9] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 123.

[10] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 146.

[11] Lewis, “Equality”, The Spectator, CLXXI (27 August, 1943), p. 192; The Business of Heaven, London: Collins, 1984, p. 186.

[12] Trostnikov, V.N. "The Role and Place of the Baptism of Rus in the European Spiritual Process of the Second Millenium of Christian History", Orthodox Life, vol. 39, № 3, May-June, 1989, p. 34.

[13] Lewis' Screwtape (an imaginative incarnation of the devil) writes: "Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether 'democratic behaviour' means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

"You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the most enjoyable) of all human feelings... The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you. The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie.

"Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it - make it respectable and even laudable - by the incantatory use of the word democracy." (op. cit., pp. 190-191).

In another place Lewis admits that "monarchy is the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship - loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic Statecraft" ("Myth and Fact", in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology, edited by Walter Hopper, Fount Paperbacks, 1979).

[14] St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 15; translated by Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer, Documents in Early Christian Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 241-242.

[15] Shakespeare was the favourite author of the German idealists. But a careful reading of his plays demonstrates that he was no democrat, but rather a convinced defender of the hierarchical order in society. See Richard II and Henry V.

[16] Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 160-161.

[17] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 190.

[18] Fukuyama, op. cit, p. 119.

[19] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 121.

[20] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 271.

[21] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 129.

[22] Leontiev, "Tribal Politics as a Weapon of Global Revolution", letter 2. Constantine Leontiev, Selected Works, edited and with an introductory article by I.N. Smirnov, Moscow, 1993, p. 314 (in Russian).

[23] Leontiev, "On Political and Cultural Nationalism", letter 3, op. cit., p. 363.

[24] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 216. Italics added.

[25] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 197.

[26] Fukuyma, op. cit., p. 207.

[27] Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 214-215.

[28]Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 294, 295.

[29] On December 27, 1995, British Television (Channel 4) screened "The Great Ape Trial", a quasi-legal debate on the question whether apes should have human rights - that is, the rights to life, liberty and freedom from torture. Evidence was heard from a variety of academic "experts" from around the world who spoke about the apes' similarity or otherwise to human beings in tool-using and making, language, social relations, emotionality, and genetic makeup. The conclusion reached by the "jury" (with the exception of a journalist from The Catholic Herald) was that apes should indeed have human rights since they belong to "a community of equals" with us.

[30] Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 297-298.

[31] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 298.

[32] Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 305-306.

33] Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 306-307.

[34] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 311.

[35] Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, New York: Signet Classics.

[36] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 329-30.

[37] Fukuyama, op. cit, p. 330.

[38] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 332.

[39] Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 339.

[40] Quoted in Dora Shturman, Gorodu i Miru (To the City and the World), New York: Tretia Vol'na, 1988, p. 156 (in Russian).

[41] Woolsey, in Balkan News, May 1-7, 1994, p. 2.

[42] Solzhenitsyn, A. "Our Pluralists", Survey, vol. 29, no. 2 (125), 1985, pp. 1-2.

[43] See Kelley, D.R. The Solzhenitsyn-Sakharov Dialogue, London: Greenwood Press, 1982, pp. 75-87; also the dialogue on monarchism in Solzhenitsyn, Oktyabr' Shestnadtsatogo (October, 1916), Paris: YMCA Press, 1984, chapters 25-27 (in Russian).

[44] Tikhomirov, op. cit.

РЕШЕНИЯ ВСЕЗАРУБЕЖНОГО СОБОРА НЕДЕЙСТВИТЕЛЬНЫ

Валентин В. Щегловский, Секретарь Общества Митрополита Антония

Со времени завершения так называемого IV «Всезарубежного Собора» о нем с поспешностью было высказано много мнений и оценок. Неоднократно высказывалось упрощенное восприятие события и его возможных по-следствий, как будто вопрос касался выборов между двумя политическими кандидатами. Решения церковных вопросов не могут и не должны так рассматриваться. Оценка церковная должна согласовываться как со святыми канонами и догматами вероучения, так и с прецедентами практики. Нормой в Православной Церкви является "то, что Церковью всегда признавалось, всеми и повсюду" (Св. Викентий) То, что не соответствует святоотеческим заветам и преданию отвергается как новшество.
И, несмотря на то, что «времена меняются» - выражение одного из митрофорных протоиереев которое, к сожалению, тоже встречается в "Послании к боголюбивой пастве" Архиерейского Собора (19-5-06), сознательно или несознательно, заимствованное из популярной песни с революционным призывом написанной в 1964 г. (Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’), в последнем куплете которой слышится отклик «Интернацио-нала»:The line is drawn, the curse is cast…The order is rapidly fadin’. And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’

– следует отметить, что Церковь неизменно и всегда противостояла во зле лежащему миру.

Редакцию ряда пунктов "Резолюции" IV Собора (11-5-2006) мы считем неприемлемой для верных чад Зарубежной Церкви. Кроме того, весьма настораживает никем не подписанное сообщение с заголовком: Сан Франциско, 19 мая 2006 г. «Завершился Архиерейский Собор Русской Православной Церкви Заграницей». Это сообщение в кратце освещает некоторые этапы Архиерейского Собора. Одна из тем обсуждения – проэкт «Акта о каноническом общении» о котором не было ни единой ссылки ни в резолюциях, ни в посланиях. Из сообщения не сказано кем он был «в принципиальном плане принят и одобрен при необходимости завершения разработки некоторых его пунктов. Окончательное же утверждение текста «Акта», как и детали проведения его торжест-венного подписания, поручается Архиерейскому Синоду. Комиссии по переговорам с Московским Патриархатом было поручено достичь соглашения о совместной публикации проекта «Акта о Каноническом Общении» еще до его окончательного утверждения ради ознакомления с его содержанием клира и паствы обеих частей Русской Церкви.»
Далее в этом же никем не подписанном сообщении говорится о епископской «перестройке» и об «избрании нового состава Архиерейского Синода.» Духовенство ответственное за составление «сообщения» не только не сочло нужным его подписать, но и даже поведать о новом составе Синода.
Следует заключить, что текст «Акта о Каноническом Общении», по своему содержанию, настолько неприемлем для оглашения, что составители текста, во избежание «неприятностей», решили его утаить от духовенства и мирян.
По этой причине принятые Собором решения не могут считаться действительными.

Прочитали мы 54 номера вашей "Верности" и все в толк не возьмем: верность кому и чему? Вольно вам было, дорогие братья, из вашего благополучного зарубежья 80 лет разсуждать о сергианстве в России.

Поживите-ка теперь вы при нем, сушите сухари да идите в катакомбы - теперь ваш черед. Однако, видно, вы так ничего и не поняли, больно сладко вам жилось. И все ваши вопли и статьи - эмигрантская, простите, собачатина, любой простой русский человек только посмеется, потому что сами не ведаете, что по духу ничем вы от МП не отличаетесь, все тот же партком и Лубянка со спецбуфетом, только американским.

62 года ушло у вас (в тепле и сытости!) на осознание, что Царь - святой, а у МП 82 года - и чем же ваша РПЦЗ от МП отличается?

И сегодня вы считаете себя не подданными замученного Царя, а гражданами ваших евроамериканских жмеринок - вот где ваш изъян и ложь. Вы рабы не Иисуса Христа, а Малхи Анны и Каиафы, но не хотите изблевать свое рабство, а стонете, что ваши педики с нашими стукачами барахло делят. А ведь преподобный Сергий Радонежский с деревянным потиром Русь поднял, и потир сей доднесь стоит в Успенском храме Свято-Троицкой Сергиевой Лавры всем во обличение. Приезжайте и поглядите себе в назидание.И дура эта Гогенцоллернша (в России у ее сынка кличка - Гога Цоллерн)в родную ей кагальную прокуратуру обращается, чтобы убийцы свою жертву реабилитировали, а вы об этом пишите, как о правовой НОРМЕ. Ребята, оглянитесь, туда ли вы заехали?!

Интересно, поместите вы это письмо в рубрику "Нам пишут", или слабо?

Некоторые активные сторонники «унии» не раз критиковали нас (по телефону и по интернету) за то, что мы «односторонне» освещаем вопрос «сближения» МП с РПЦЗ.

Мы полагаем, что читатели «Верности» отлично знают то, что редакционная коллегия вестника «Верность» никогда не придерживалась узких взглядов. Несмотря на то, что мы далеко не всегда бываем согласны со всеми высказываниями авторов ряда присылаемых нам статей, мы добросовестно помещаем эти статьи целиком, без смысловых изменений, уважая авторское право на выражение своих мыслей без нашей цензуры.

Более того, мы неоднократно обращались к нескольким самым активным апологетам «унии» и, к примеру, предлагали им написать для нас статью на тему «Почему уния необходима сейчас?» Ни один из них, однако, под разными предлогами, ни разу не согласился написать статью ни на эту ни на другие мало освященные темы. Объяснений не требуется! Наши уважаемые читатели могут и сами догадаться почему целый ряд тем сторонники навязываемой ими «унии» всячески стараются обойти. Выступления даже самых «эрудированных» сторонников так упорно навязываемой «унии» также убедительны как, в свое время, были доводы партруков, проводивших антирелигиозные собрания. Горе, однако, в другом. В «те» жуткие для нашего Отечества времена у власти стояло Зло. Прекрываясь ложью, безумные насилия совершались под физическим давлением сатанинского богоборческого режима… А что-же теперь толкает на ложь? Соблазнам, как сказано Евангелистом Матфеем, суждено приходить. Но горе тем, через кого они приходят.

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ВЕРНОСТЬ (FIDELITY) Церковно-общественное издание

   “Общества Ревнителей Памяти Блаженнейшего Митрополита Антония (Храповицкого)”.

      Председатель “Общества” и главный редактор: проф. Г.М. Солдатов.

      President of The Blessed Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) Memorial Society and Editor in-Chief: Prof. G.M. Soldatow

     Сноситься с редакцией можно по е-почте: GeorgeSoldatow@Yahoo.com или

      The Metropolitan Anthony Society, 3217-32^nd Ave. NE, St. Anthony Village, MN 55418, USA

      Secretary/Treasurer: Mr. Valentin Wladimirovich Scheglovski, P.O. BOX 27658, Golden Valley, MN 55427-0658, USA

      Список членов Правления Общества и Представителей находится на главной странице под: Contact

      To see the Board of Directors and Representatives of the Society , go to www.metanthonymemorial.org and click on Contact

      Please send your membership application to: Просьба посылать заявления о вступлении в Общество:

      Treasurer/ Казначей: Mr. Valentin Wladimirovich Scheglovski, P.O. BOX 27658, Golden Valley, MN 55427-0658, USA

      При перепечатке ссылка на “Верность” ОБЯЗАТЕЛЬНА © FIDELITY

     Пожалуйста, присылайте ваши материалы. Не принятые к печати материалы не возвращаются.

Нам необходимо найти людей желающих делать для Верности переводы с русского на английский, испанский, французский, немецкий   и португальский языки.

Мнения авторов не обязательно выражают мнение редакции.   Редакция оставляет за собой право редактировать, сокращать публикуемые материалы.   Мы нуждаемся в вашей духовной и финансовой поддержке.

Any view, claim, or opinion contained in an article are those of its author and do not necessarily represent those of the Blessed Metr. Anthony Memorial Society or the editorial board of its publication, “Fidelity.”

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ОБЩЕСТВО БЛАЖЕННЕЙШЕГО МИТРОПОЛИТА АНТОНИЯ

По-прежнему ведет свою деятельность и продолжает издавать электронный вестник «Верность» исключительно за счет членских взносов и пожертвований единомышленников по борьбе против присоединения РПЦЗ к псевдоцеркви--Московской Патриархии. Мы обращаемся кo всем сочувствующим с предложением записаться в члены «Общества» или сделать пожертвование, а уже ставшим членам «Общества» напоминаем o возобновлении своих членских взносов за 2006 год.

Секретарь-казначей «Общества»   В.В. Щегловский

The Blessed Metropolitan Anthony Society published in the past, and will continue to publish the reasons why we can not accept at the present time a "unia" with the MP. Other publications are doing the same, for example the Russian language newspaper "Nasha Strana"(N.L. Kasanzew, Ed.) and on the Internet "Sapadno-Evropeyskyy Viestnik" ( Rev.Protodeacon Dr. Herman-Ivanoff Trinadtzaty, Ed.). There is a considerably large group of supporters against a union with the MP; and our Society has representatives in many countries around the world including the RF and the Ukraine. We are grateful for the correspondence and donations from many people that arrive daily. With this support, we can continue to demand that the Church leadership follow the Holy Canons and Teachings of the Orthodox Church.

Советуем нашим читателям читать газету "Наша Страна" а также на узлах интернета: Западно Европейский Вестник - www.karlovtchanin.com,                                                                   Церковные Ведомости РИПЦ - www.catacomb.org.ua и Вестника Запарожской Епархии РПЦЗ "Российское Православие" - http://rusorthodoxy.net

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БЛАНК О ВСТУПЛЕНИИ - MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION

ОБЩЕСТВО РЕВНИТЕЛЕЙ ПАМЯТИ БЛАЖЕННЕЙШЕГО

МИТРОПОЛИТА АНТОНИЯ (ХРАПОВИЦКОГО)

THE BLESSED METROPOLITAN ANTHONY MEMORIAL SOCIETY

     Желаю вступить в члены общества. Мой годовой членский взнос в размере $ 25

с семьи прилагаю. Учащиеся платят $ 10. Сумма членского взноса относится только к жителям США, Канады и Австралии, остальные платят сколько могут.

(Более крупные суммы на почтовые, типографские и другие расходы принимаются с благодарностью.)

     I wish to join the Society and am enclosing the annual membership dues in the amount of $25 per family. Students

       pay $ 10. The amount of annual dues is only for those in US, Canada and Australia. Others pay as much as they can afford.

(Larger amounts for postage, typographical and other expenses will be greatly appreciated)

ИМЯ - ОТЧЕСТВО - ФАМИЛИЯ _______________________________________________________________

NAME—PATRONYMIC (if any)—LAST NAME _______________________________________________________

   АДРЕС И ТЕЛЕФОН:___________________________________________________________________________

   ADDRESS & TELEPHONE ____________________________________________________________________________

Если Вы прихожан/ин/ка РПЦЗ или просто посещаете там церковь, то согласны ли Вы быть Представителем Общества в Вашем приходе? В таком случае, пожалуйста укажите ниже название и место прихода.

If you are a parishioner of ROCA/ROCOR or just attend church there, would you agree to become a Representative of the Society in your parish? In that case, please give the name and the location of the parish:

   ПОЖАЛУЙСТА ВЫПИШИТЕ ЧЕК НА:                                  Mr. Valentin W. Scheglowski

С ПОМЕТКОЙ:                                                                                           “FOR TBMAMS”

И ПОШЛИТЕ ПО СЛЕДУЮЩЕМУ АДРЕСУ:                                        P.O. BOX 27658

CHK WITH NOTATION:                                            Golden Valley, MN 55427-0658, USA

SEND COMPLETED APPLICATION TO:

_________________________________________________________________________                __________

Если Вы знаете кого-то, кто бы пожелал вступить в наши члены, пожалуйста сообщите ему/ей наш адрес и условия вступления.

If you know someone who would be interested in joining our Society, please let him/her know our address and conditions of membership. You must be Eastern Orthodox to join.

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