ВЕРНОСТЬ - FIDELITY № 56 - 2006

June/Июнь 14

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.

CONTENTS - ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ

1.  "Is unification of the Church Abroad with the Moscow Patriarchate Necessary?"  DANIEL, BISHOP OF ERIE

2.  "Bishop Agafangel’s response to priest Nikolai Artiomov’s article “Regarding post-sobor reinterpretations” "

3.  "CHRIST AND THE NATIONS". Dr. Vladimir Moss

4.   "КОВАРНЫЙ ГРАД КИТЕЖ".  Константин Преображенский

5.  "Учение Божественного Откровения о спасительном значении Слова Божия". Митр.  Антоний (Храповицкий

+

 RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH ABROAD

DANIEL, BISHOP OF ERIE

246 EAST SECOND STREET

ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA 16507,  tel: (814)452-0845

May 9/April 26, 2006

Is unification of the Church Abroad with the Moscow Patriarchate  Necessary? *)

Many people expect a formal unification of the Church abroad with the Moscow Patriarchate from the forthcoming Pan-Abroad Sobor.  Is such a unification necessary for the benefit of the Church?

For more than eighty years now, the Church Abroad  has been independent and is subject to no one, in other words in essence it is autocephalous.  In this there is nothing incompatible with the Orthodoxy of this Church.  On the contrary,  independence, otherwise known as the autocephaly of individual churches is a normal condition for Orthodox churches.  The number of such independent or autocephalous churches has never been a subject of dogma and could vary on different periods.  If these churches strictly adhered to the Orthodox faith, then they belong to the “One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”, no matter how many there might have been.

The Church Abroad became independent not of its own doing but through sheer necessity.  When it became independent no one could have presumed that this independence would last so long – more than 80 years! In those distant times when they spoke of a “temporary” independence of the Church Abroad, it meant that this independence would last a few years, after which the situation would improve, refugees would return home, life would return to normal and there would no longer be any need for a “church abroad”.  But this did not happen. Hopes for a short-lived soviet regime were not realized and decades went by.  It seemed that this regime had seized our fatherland forever.  Many Russian émigrés passed away without seeing the fall of the soviet regime.  But it finally did fall.  Prior to its fall it exerted much effort to muddle church affairs:  Metropolitan Sergii (Starogorodsky), “deputy locum tenens of the Patriarchal throne” issued his infamous “Declaration” in 1927, in which he called for service to the soviet regime “not out of fear but because of conscience” and said that the joys of this regime were “our joys”, and this being at a time when the regime was militantly atheistic.  For this servility to the regime, Stalin “mercifully” permitted the “election” of a patriarch in 1943, who not coincidentally turned out  to be metropolitan Sergii himself. His successors were to also become such appointees of the soviet regime, including Alexii II (Ridiger) who currently occupies the patriarchal throne.  These “elections” or more correctly appointments have never been recognized by the Church Abroad as being lawful.

Meanwhile the Church Abroad lived its own inner life under the spiritual leadership of its metropolitans:  Anthony (Khrapovitsky), Anastassy (Gribanovsky), Philaret  and others, not submitting to or taking heed of any secular government and focusing only on the spiritual well-being of the Church.  But time went on and finally, the soviet regime collapsed.  When this happened, the flock abroad did not rush “home” except for isolated cases.  (I personally know of only one (!) such case.)  And this is not surprising since by the end of the 20^th century when the soviet regime finally fell, the flock of the Church Abroad was no longer the same:  these were no longer the same people for the fulfillment of whose spiritual needs this church had been established, but their children and grandchildren.  The soviet regime no longer exists, and glory be to God, but the new generations of Russian émigrés have not flocked “home”, since practically all of them were born outside Russia and felt “at home” in various countries of which, for the most part they were citizens. Besides this, the Church Abroad had been joined  by many converts not of any Russian descent whatsoever, for whom the notion of “returning to Russian” is not at all applicable.

If there existed some sort of “Russian Orthodoxy” to which it was imperative to belong in order to save one’s soul, then the desire to belong to it at any cost would be justified, and the apostasy from it  would then be viewed as apostasy from the true religion.  But there is no such narrow nationalistic Orthodoxy.  The Orthodox Church consists of many independent churches, the number of which was never a subject of dogma, consisting of  various nationalities who in their totality comprise the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”.  Therefore, in belonging to any one of these churches, as long as we continue to confess the unadulterated Orthodox dogma, we belong to this One Church.

Improvement in conditions for the existence of churches on a territory which was just recently under the power of the godless should be cause for joy, but this improvement does not make us schismatics without grace.  It would even be ridiculous to think this!  If we were able to exist independently for more than eighty years, then we can continue to exist independently.

If we were to unify with the Moscow Patriarchate now, then we would immediately face a series of issues which are difficult and perhaps even impossible to resolve.  For example:  what should our attitude be toward Metropolitan Sergii (now deceased), who through his “Declaration” in 1927, launched an era of servility and ingratiation, austensibly on behalf of the Orthodox Russian Church, before the godless soviet regime?  Subsequently he became the first soviet patriarch and it was from him in 1943, with the “blessing” of Stalin that the current Moscow Patriarchate began, a merger with which is currently being discussed.  Was he the lawful head of the Russian Church, or merely an opportunist who took advantage of the difficult situation of the Russian Church, only to become its head?

In this regard it must be determined whether he had the right to call himself patriarch, as did his successors, including the current Alexii II, all of whom were appointees of the soviet regime.  But if they did not have this right, then can the church which they headed be called a patriarchate?

Next, can the participation of the Moscow Patriarchate in the ecumenical movement which contravenes the prohibition for us, Orthodox, against having communion in prayer with the heterodox be justified?  The extent to which  this communion has gone must be determined in order for us to consider the possibility (or impossibility) of our joint concelebration with them. If such episodes did occur, then were the perpetrators punished?  If they were not, then it makes the entire leadership of that church guilty of violating church canons.  In actual fact, if the Moscow Patriarchate unlawfully permitted the violation of these canons by its subordinate clergy, then this would be equivalent to us concelebrating with the heterodox, for instance, with Protestants.

At one time the Moscow Patriarchate “gifted” the status of autocephaly to the American Metropolia, which previously had been a part of our church.  What will be the relations of our church with the American Metropolia in the event of unification with Moscow?

We must not fling ourselves into the embrace of the Moscow Patriarchate without examining these questions.  But even in the event that there are no obstacles found impeding our unification with them, we have no need to unite with the Moscow Patriarchate.  The Church Abroad has become acclimatized in its situation.  In being small in size and financially poor, it has the priceless gift of freedom from any dependence on outside authority and can build its life completely on the precepts of spiritual benefit for its flock.  If we, the Church Abroad unite with the Moscow Patriarchate now, this would be a big step backwards from correct decision-making in Church life, resulting in a highly dubious situation as the church in Russia was at the time communism fell.

If we were to unite with the Moscow Patriarchate, we would make a big mistake by going in the opposite direction, not from a problem to its resolution, but from a resolution to a problem.  During the many years of its existence the Church Abroad found correct solutions to many of life’s problems.  In the event of unification, the Church Abroad will have to measure up against the Moscow Patriarchate, certainly not the reverse, since the Moscow Patriarchate exceeds us in number many fold, and the title of metropolitan can in no way compare to patriarch.  Therefore, in the event of unification, everything would belong to Moscow, and nothing would belong to us.

This does not mean that we should not attempt to improve relations between our churches.  But this must be done in the proper sequence, and not backwards.  First we must clarify what separates us and only then seek paths toward reconciliation, and not the reverse:  unite, despite existing obstacles, and later attempt to regularize everything post factum, which will likely be doomed to fail.  For now, our churches are in such a mutually hostile situation which makes reconciliation very far off.  One must begin with a gradual elimination of these obstacles, not with union despite existing obstacles, which will be doomed to fail.

Unification with the Moscow Patriarchate is unacceptable for many; just recently the Moscow Patriarchate had been in service to the soviet regime and people within the Church Abroad will view it with mistrust for yet a long time fearing eventual subjugation to it or to yet some other force which it will represent. One must begin at the beginning and not at the end; with improving relations, but not with a formal unification.  If we improve our mutual relations, then this will be a step toward  our reconciliation and will be better than any coerced union.  Unification with the Moscow Patriarchate will be unacceptable for many, particularly if it is conducted by coercion. On the other hand, improvement in relations, even though it may take a long time, will not have negative consequences. Right now our churches are very far apart from each other, i.e. on opposite poles and they will need time to at least familiarize themselves with each other.  This could lead to improved relations, without which any agreements will not have weight.   For improved relations our churches must take a closer look at each other, and this cannot be achieved instantaneously. 

In the event that certain clergy and laity of the Russian Church Abroad choose “unification” with the Moscow Patriarchate, they must then be viewed as having left the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and will have no right to use its name. They must then be viewed as part of the Moscow Patriarchate.

Bishop Daniel  

*) This document was given at the Bishops Council this May in San Francisco to every Bishop. (Editor).  Russian text is in FIDELITY No. 53.

* * *

Bishop Agafangel’s response to priest Nikolai Artiomov’s article “Regarding post-sobor reinterpretations”

In his note, Protopriest Nikolai Artiomov, whom I respect, in my opinion either through misunderstanding or perhaps by mistake placed me as well as Bishops Daniel and Gabriel no less than in opposition to the IV Pan-Abroad Sobor and its subsequent Hierarchical Sobor.  This is a very serious accusation, similar to the Dread Judgement Day, if you think about it.  Why did I fall victim to such disfavour?  Because, according to Father Nikolai, I have my own opinion which is “separate” from the opinion of the two sobors!  “Bishop Agafangel’s opinion appears indeed “unique” compared to both sobors.”  I will repeat, this is a very serious accusation.

However, in reality, if one delves deeper, I expounded my personal opinion on only document (besides which this document is not even an official document developed by either of the sobors) and this is the Act on Canonical Communion.  I was completely in agreement with all the summary documents adopted at the Pan Abroad and Hierarchical Sobors and my signature appears where required.  Therefore I cannot accept this accusation against me made by Fr. Nikolai.

The aforementioned Act speaks about a practically unconditional inclusion of ROCOR into the structure of the MP.  While recognizing the desire for the unification of the two parts of one Church, I protested then and protest now that form of unification which is laid out in the Act.  In my individual proposal I suggested a different form and scenario for the unification of the severed parts of the Russian Church.  I quote:

“Until a Pomestny Sobor is convened we can only temporarily mutually recognize or not recognize the lawfulness of the existence of various parts of the Russian Church with their existing church leadership, on the condition that we recognize that to date there is an absence of a legitimately elected Supreme Church Authority… after achieving unanimity on the issues of ecumenism and sergianism and upon mutual recognition of the supremacy in the ROC of the forthcoming Pomestny Sobor, naturally, as the common Supreme Authority.” 

This will then constitute our canonical and eucharistic unification, which according to Fr. Nikolai is imperative for mutual participation in the II Pomestny Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Thus, my proposal regarding the unification contains no impediment to convening a Pomestny Sobor, of which Fr. Nikolai reproves me.

The dubiousness of the Act is evidenced by the fact that any mention of it was removed from all summary documents of both Sobors and thereby the supreme church authority did not sanction putting it into effect.

I am not attempting to interpret on behalf of our entire Church (unlike Fr. Nikolai) what  conforms or “does not conform to the conciliar accord and spirit”, for I merely expressed that which for me appears obvious.  I fully admit that I could be mistaken in something.  However, as far as I am aware the majority of the members of the recent Pan-Abroad Sobor were in agreement with my understanding of the Sobor decisions.  It’s another matter that the Truth is not always on the side of the majority.  Nor is it always with the minority.  Truth, as is known, is only with Christ.  The fact that  at the Sobor attempts were made, not to the honor of the Sobor organizers, to influence the course of the Sobor (even to the extent of a purchased biased speech by B. Jordan) as well as the fact that all of these actions (including funding by the same Jordan) did not yield the desired results, clearly speak to the reality that these people did not express the Truth in addressing the Pan-Abroad Sobor.

The assertion by Fr. Nikolai that the Pan-Abroad Sobor “did not resonate” the opinions of “Bishop Daniel who did not participate in the Pan-Abroad Sobor because of illness and Bishop Gabriel” likewise is not factual.  “This did not happen”, states Fr. Nikolai. On the contrary, this did actually happen! Except it is very regrettable that Fr. Nikolai Artiomov does not wish to admit this to himself at all.

This is understandable. As a participant of the dialogue commission it is difficult for him to say that the commission made a mistake.  But since the question of the fate of our Church is very important, we must be extremely objective.  It is indeed imperative to clarify who it is that is actively involved in “shifting accents”.  And it is imperative to place these accents correctly.

I did not find anything in Fr. Nikolai’s note which could refute the meaning of my notification to the flock of my diocese either overall or point by point.  Also I would be appreciative to Fr. Nikolai if he would express his understanding of the sobor decisions in a free exposition, and not in the form of a polemic with me on the internet, especially on such a biased web-site.

+Bishop Agafangel

June 2, 2006, Odessa

* * *   

CHRIST AND THE NATIONS

Dr. Vladimir Moss *)

Words such as “universalism” and “cosmopolitanism” have acquired bad connotations among the Orthodox – and for understandable reasons. For they are associated with such undoubtedly evil phenomena as Russophobia, Ecumenism and “the (masonic) new world order”. Nevertheless, in times such as these, when “the rulers of the darkness of this world” are directing so much of their attention to the destruction of patriotism and the last vestiges of the nations that still bear the name of Orthodoxy, it is easy to forget that one of the greatest achievements of Christianity was its breaking down of national enmities and its creation of a new, universal Christian nation.

The Christian Nation

Of all the divisions created by sin, the divisions between the nations were the last to be healed in the economy of God’s salvation. Already at the Annunciation the gulfs between God and man, between man and woman, and between man and the angels had been bridged when the Word became flesh, the new Eve was united with the new Adam and the Archangel Gabriel took the place of the fallen angel as man’s nearest counsellor and minister. And yet at the Crucifixion it looked - temporarily - as if all this had been destroyed. And by what? By nationalist passion. For, as Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev demonstrated, it was the nationalist pride of the Jews that was their primary motive in killing their King.[1] For “if we leave Him alone,” said the chief priests and Pharisees, “all men will believe on Him: and the Romans shall come and take away our place and nation. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 12.48-50).

But Christ rose from the dead, destroying the death caused by sin through His own sinless and sin-destroying Death, and reaffirming in His own incorruptible flesh the unbreakable union of the Divine and human natures. Once again the angels approached the women, and once again the new Adam spoke words of joy to the new Eve in the garden. And then, at Pentecost, when “men out of every nation under heaven” (Acts 2.5) were gathered for the feast, the Holy Spirit came down and created out of these many nations one nation speaking one language: a new nation – the new Israel, the Church of Christ, and a new language – the language of repentance and faith, hope and love. As we chant in the kontakion for the feast of Pentecost: “Once, when He descended and confounded the tongues, the Most High divided the nations; and when He divided the tongues of fire, He called men into unity; and with one accord we glorify the All-Holy Spirit”.

Only in the Church, the Body of Christ, is a true union of nations possible, for in Christ “there is neither Greek nor Jew” (Galatians 3.28); the non-Jewish peoples “are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2.19). In the communion of Christ’s Holy Body and Blood all nations literally become of one blood and one spirit with each other. For “you have the Son within you,” writes St. John Chrysostom, “and are fashioned after His pattern, having been brought into one kindred and nature with Him… He that was a Greek, or Jew, or slave yesterday, carries about with him the form, not of an Angel or Archangel, but of the Lord of all. Indeed, he displays in his own person the Christ.”

Of course, we are of one blood already through our common descent from the old Adam; for as St. Paul says, God “hath made of one blood all nations of men” (Acts 17.26). However, the blood of the old Adam has been poisoned by sin and become the nourisher of the passions, passions that divide and destroy; and it is of these passions that the apostle says: “Flesh and blood cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (I Corinthians 15.50).

So it is not enough to say – as, for example, the leaders of the French revolution said - that since the brotherhood of man is a biological fact, it must necessarily become a spiritual and a political fact. It is not enough to say – as the modern ecumenists say – that we are all children of the Heavenly Father, so we must just ignore all the divisions between us as if they were unimportant or did not exist. For biological brotherhood is of no avail where there is no spiritual sonship; the fact that we are all created by one Creator will not help us if we all together rebel against the Creator. Were not Cain and Abel brothers – and Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau? And do they not represent the eternal enmity that exists between the spiritual man and the carnal man? We have to be reborn in the Son to become true children by adoption of the Heavenly Father; we have to become “a new creature” in the new Adam in order to be recognized by the Creator of the old Adam. The humanists exhort us to be one simply because we have a common mortal father, without having even the beginnings of a notion of how to make this pious wish a reality. But Christ does not simply exhort us: through the life-creating power of the Spirit He makes us one in the most concrete way, by grafting us onto the true Vine of His Body and Blood. In this way does Christ become the new and immortal Father of a new, immortal race of men, being “the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace…”(Isaiah 9.7).

Thus the unity of the nations is not achieved horizontally, as it were, through bilateral or multilateral talks or negotiations. It is achieved vertically – that is, sacramentally – through each nation emptying itself, as it were, and receiving a new faith, a new nationality and a new blood, the Nation and the Blood of Christ. As St. Paul says to the Gentile nations: “At that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus ye who at one time were far off are made nigh by the Blood of Christ. For He is our Peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in His Flesh the enmity,… for to make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace; that He might reconcile both unto God in One Body through the Cross” (Ephesians 2.12-16).

And yet this supreme achievement, this dream fulfilled of the brotherhood of all men in “One Body and One Spirit,.. One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One God and Father of all” (Ephesians 4.4-6), has been clearly seen only fitfully and fleetingly. Even in the early Church in Jerusalem, which has been for all succeeding generations the image par excellence of Christian love and unity, we read that “there arose a murmuring of the Greeks against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration” (Acts 6.1). For when grace begins to depart, it is the divisions of race that re-emerge first of all; when men begin to complain of their lot, they will first of all blame the stranger in their midst, and only when no such stranger is found will they blame their own – and last of all, of course, themselves.

The Lord said to the Pharisees: “Why do you not understand My speech? Even because ye cannot hear My Word” (John 9.43). In other words, our failure to understand others – even when we speak the same natural language as they - is the result of a lack of spiritual perception in ourselves. “For the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (I Corinthians 2.14). This lack of mutual spiritual comprehension is found even between people of the same nation (as were Christ and the Pharisees). How much greater is the possibility of such misunderstanding when the parties belong to different nations!

To overcome racial suspicion and hatred a special force of love is required. It is always easier to sympathize with, and to see the point of view of, our own kind; with them we have language, culture, memory and so much more in common. On the other hand, it is easy to misunderstand the foreigner, to see coldness where there is no coldness but only an inborn reserve, to see rudeness where there is no rudeness but only different habits of social communication. We must strive to enter the soul of the foreigner, penetrate beneath the strange exterior to the soul within, which has not only been created in the image of God but which – if he is a member of the Church – has been reborn in Christ, chosen by Him from before all ages, his name inscribed by the angels in the Book of Life. If we cannot see and sympathize with the humanity he has in common with us, then our own humanity has clearly been impaired; if we cannot see the grace that he has received from the same font and the same chalice as we, then it is clear that we are quenching the grace that is in us.

The Roman Nation

It is perhaps in order to teach us this love that the Lord so often brings people of many different nations together in one local Church. At the Tower of Babel the Lord scattered the nations and divided their tongues, so that they could not understand each other and the evil of one nation could not spread – or could spread only slowly – to another. But as the time of His Coming drew near, when He was to call all nations together again through the Cross, a certain providential cosmopolitanism is discernible, a cosmopolitanism having three main sources.

First, in both Israel (among the later prophets) and in the pagan world (among the Greek Stoic philosophers) the unity of mankind begins to be stressed more and more. Thus the Lord through the Prophet Malachi says: “From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same My name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto My name, and a pure offering; for My name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts” (1.11). For “have we not all one Father? Hath not one God created us?” (2.10).

As for the Stoics, their essential idea, as summarised by Copleston, was as follows: “Every man is naturally a social being, and to live in society is a dictate of reason. But reason is the common essential nature of all men: hence there is but one Law for all men and one Fatherland. The division of mankind into warring States is absurd: the wise man is a citizen, not of this or that particular State, but of the World. From this foundation it follows that all men have a claim to our goodwill, even slaves having their rights and even enemies having a right to our mercy and forgiveness.”[2]

Secondly, the Jewish diaspora planted the seeds of the true faith throughout the Mediterranean basin, and many pagans from many nations began to accept circumcision. Of course, some of these conversions were not to the pure faith of Ancient Israel, but to the hate-filled nationalism of the Pharisees, of whom the Lord said: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves” (Matthew 23.15). Nevertheless, the Jews of Gentile blood were to prove an important element in the rapid spread of Christianity through the Mediterranean in the first century, as we see in the story of the Roman Centurion Cornelius (Acts 10).

Thirdly, the cultural unity of the Mediterranean world in Hellenistic civilization and its political unity under Rome began to draw men closer together. This unity, being as yet not spiritual, had its dangers for the people of God; which is why the Maccabees fought, and fought righteously, against the penetration of pagan Greek culture among the Jews. Nevertheless, when the Jews fell away from God and the Church began to spread her influence westwards, the common Greek language, supported by a common Roman legal system and political framework, greatly assisted the work of the missionaries.

The Romans did more: they adopted the creed of cosmopolitanism more deeply than any ancient people; which is perhaps why their empire, though pagan in essence, was chosen by God as the first earthly home of His Church. Thus the universalist religion of Christ, in which “there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither circumcised nor uncircumcised, neither barbarian nor Scythian, neither slave nor freeman, but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3.11), grew and prospered in the universalist civilization of Rome. The Jews were not inclined either to accept or to propagate this creed; for in spite of the universalist hints contained in the prophets, the racial distinction between Jew and Gentile (or goy) became the fundamental divide in Jewish thought, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Similarly, the Greeks, even in the persons of their greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, looked on slaves, women and barbarians (i.e. all foreigners) as unable to partake fully in the splendours of Hellenic civilization. True, as we have seen, there was a universalist, cosmopolitan element in the Hellenistic philosophy of the Stoics. However, it was not the Greeks, but the Romans who adopted Stoicism most eagerly, demonstrating thereby that typically Roman trait of being able, in Polybius’ words, “more than any others before them have ever been to change their customs and to imitate the best”.

But it was the Romans’ embracing of Christianity in the person of St. Constantine that was the critical event giving birth to Christian civilization, that combination of Romanitas and Christianitas that has been the inspiration of all truly Orthodox social and political thinkers ever since. For, as Sordi writes, “the Romans and the Christians, albeit in different ways and from different points of view, both represented a way of overcoming the Graeco-Barbarian and Graeco-Jewish antimony which the Hellenistic culture, despite all its ecumenical claims, actually contained within itself.”[3]

The Romans were able to create a political framework that gave practical expression to the universalist leanings of the Roman and Christian soul. The classical Greek concepts of citizenship and equality before the law were now given a vastly deeper connotation and wider denotation. While a purely ethnic snobbery was not completely eliminated, Rome was soon offering her subject peoples equal rights with her own native sons, which meant that these subjects could both identify with the empire as their own country – one of the keys to Rome’s stability and longevity - and rise to the highest positions within it.

Thus already from the beginning of the second century, we find non-Roman emperors of Rome; they came from as far afield as Spain and Arabia, Dacia and Africa. This international variety in the choice of Emperors continued after the conversion of St. Constantine. Thus Constantine himself was a Roman, but Theodosius I was a Spaniard, Justinian I was a Slav or Illyrian (Albanian) from Skopje, Maurice and Heraclius were Armenians and Leo the iconoclast was Syrian.

Again, as early as the first century we see in St. Paul a member of a savagely treated subject nation, the Jews, who could nevertheless say without shame or sense of contradiction: “Civis romanus sum”, “I am a Roman citizen”. The poet Claudian wrote that “we may drink of the Rhine or the Orontes”, but “we are all one people”. And it was Rome that had created this unity among the nations:

She is the only one who has received

The conquered in her arms and cherished all

The human race under a common name,

Treating them as her children, not her slaves.

She called these subjects Roman citizens

And linked far worlds with ties of loyalty.[4]

It was more accurate to say, however, that this unity among the nations had been created by Christ, Who simultaneously founded the Church as the spiritual core of this unity and the Roman Empire as its social-political guardian. For His Birth, which marked the beginning of the Eternal Kingdom of God on earth, coincided almost exactly with the birth of the Roman Empire under its first emperor, Augustus. For several of the Holy Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, this coincidence pointed to a certain special mission of the Roman empire, as if the Empire, being born at the same time as Christ, was Divinely established to be a vehicule for the spreading of the Gospel to all nations. The Roman Empire came into existence, according to the Fathers, precisely for the sake of the Christian Church, creating a political unity that would help and protect the spiritual unity created by the Church. The one rule established by Augustus over the whole civilised world was both an image of God’s rule over the whole universe, and as it were a ladder helping men to ascend from the earthly homeland below to the Heavenly Kingdom.     

Thus in the third century Origen wrote: “Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, the one who reduced to uniformity, so to speak, the many kingdoms on earth so that He had a single empire. It would have hindered Jesus’ teaching from being spread throughout the world if there had been many kingdoms… Everyone would have been forced to fight in defence of their own country.”[5]

Again, in the fifth century, St. Leo the Great wrote: "Divine Providence fashioned the Roman Empire, the growth of which was extended to boundaries so wide that all races everywhere became next-door neighbours. For it was particularly germane to the Divine scheme that many kingdoms should be bound together under a single government, and that the world-wide preaching should have a swift means of access to all people, over whom the rule of a single state held sway."[6]

This teaching was summed up in a liturgical verse as follows: "When Augustus reigned alone upon earth, the many kingdoms of men came to an end: and when Thou was made man of the pure Virgin, the many gods of idolatry were destroyed. The cities of the world passed under one single rule; and the nations came to believe in one sovereign Godhead. The peoples were enrolled by the decree of Caesar; and we, the faithful, were enrolled in the Name of the Godhead, when Thou, our God, wast made man. Great is Thy mercy: glory to Thee."[7]

Within this single Judaeo-Christian, Greco-Roman civilisation there was only one Christian people, the people of the Romans; and Greeks and Latins, Celts and Germans, Semites and Slavs were all equally Romans, all equally members of the Roman commonwealth of nations. Together with this unity of faith, culture and citizenship in Rome there came a new patriotism, Roman patriotism. Thus St. John Chrysostom, though a Syrian Greek by race, did not call himself Greek, but Roman: “Greek” was for him synonymous with “pagan”. It was only towards the end of the Byzantine empire that the word “Greek” again became a term of honour, although the empire was still officially “Roman” to the end; while the inhabitants of Old Rome, having fallen away from Orthodoxy, were not called “Romans” but “Latins”.

There also came a new definition of political legitimacy: that power is legitimate which is Roman, or is recognized by Rome, or shares in the Roman Faith, Orthodox Christianity. Thus the British apostle of Ireland, St. Patrick, called the Scottish chieftain Coroticus a “tyrant” because his power was not from Rome, and considered himself and all other Britons to be still citizens of Rome although the last Roman legions had left the island in the year 410. British and English kings continued to use Roman and Byzantine titles and symbols until late in the tenth century.

Thus Fr. George Metallenos’ words concerning the Eastern Empire could be applied, without major qualification, to the whole vast territory from Ireland and Spain in the West to Georgia and Ethiopia in the East: "A great number of peoples made up the autocracy but without any 'ethnic' differentiation between them. The whole racial amalgam lived and moved in a single civilization (apart from some particularities) - the Greek, and it had a single cohesive spiritual power – Orthodoxy, which was at the same time the ideology of the oikoumene - autocracy. The citizens of the autocracy were Romans politically, Greeks culturally and Orthodox Christians spiritually. Through Orthodoxy the old relationship of rulers and ruled was replaced by the sovereign bond of brotherhood. Thus the 'holy race' of the New Testament (I Peter 2.9) became a reality as the 'race of the Romans', that is, of the Orthodox citizens of the autocracy of the New Rome."[8]

Christian Rome was both an arena of struggle in which the nations learned to live together and love each other, and a demonstration that international peace and harmony is not an unattainable ideal, but possible in Christ God for Whom all things are possible. It had obvious defects. And yet Christian Rome has continued to be for all later Christians the model and inspiration of that unity of all believers of all nations in Christ that we are called to achieve.

Anti-Roman Nationalism

However, the nations did not disappear within the one super-nation of Christian Rome. National self-assertion appeared at times; for although nationalism as such is usually considered to be a modern phenomenon stemming from the French Revolution, something similar to nationalism is certainly evident in antiquity. Significantly, however, it almost always appeared in the wake of religious schism or heresy…

The first and clearest example is that of the history of the Jews after Christ. In the Old Testament, the faith of the Jews, though necessarily turned in on itself in order to protect itself from the pagan nations surrounding them, contained the seeds of a truly universalist faith. Thus God commanded Abraham to circumcise not only every male member of his family, but also “him that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed” (Genesis 17.12). The Canaanite Rahab and the Moabite Ruth were admitted into the faith and nation of the Jews. Solomon prayed that the Lord would listen to the prayers also of non-Jews in his holy temple, “that all people of the earth may know Thy name” (II Chronicles 6.33). And by the time of Christ, as we have seen, there was a large Greek-speaking diaspora which was spreading the faith of the Jews throughout the Greco-Roman world.

However, the Pharisees, who came to dominate Jewry, were interested only in converts to the cause of Jewish nationalism. It was the Pharisees who incited Christ’s death because He preached a different kind of spiritual and universalist Kingdom that was opposed to their nationalist dreams. And after His death the Jews became possessed by an egoistical, chauvinist spirit that is so strongly expressed in their “sacred” book of the Talmud that, as Rabbi Solomon Goldman put it, "God is absorbed in the nationalism of Israel."

The Jews especially hated the Romans, and in spite of the fact that the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Christian, granted special concessions to Judaism (until 634, when the Emperor Heraclius ordered all Jews to be baptized because they had welcomed the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614 and slaughtered Christians), they continually strove to undermine the Empire. The Jews alone among all the nations of the Mediterranean basin refused to benefit from, or join in, the Pax Romana. Having asserted, before Pilate, that they had no king but Caesar, they nevertheless constantly rebelled against the Caesars and slaughtered thousands of Christians.

A somewhat similar process is discernible in the history of the Armenians. Armenia can lay claim to having been the first Christian kingdom, having been converted by St. Gregory the Illuminator in the early fourth century. However, in the middle of the fifth century, in the wake of the Byzantine Emperor Marcian’s refusal to support an Armenian revolt against Persia, the Armenian Church ignored and then rejected the Council of Chalcedon. From this time the Armenian Church was alienated from Orthodoxy, but not completely from Romanity. Thus in the council of Dvin in 506, they sided with the Monophysites who were being persecuted by the Persian government at the instigation of the Nestorians. As Jones writes, they “affirmed their unity with the Romans, condemning Nestorius and the council of Chalcedon, and approving ‘the letter of [the Monophysite] Zeno, blessed emperor of the Romans’.

“However, when Justin and Justinian reversed [the Monophysite Emperor] Anastasius’ ecclesiastical policy, they were apparently not consulted, and did not follow suit. This implied no hostility to Rome, however, for when in 572 they revolted against Persia they appealed to Justin II. He insisted on their subscribing to Chalcedon as a condition of aid, but they soon went back to their old beliefs. Maurice [an Armenian himself] again attempted to imposed the Chalcedonian position upon them, but the bishops of Persian Armenia refused to attend his council, and excommunicated the bishops of Roman Armenia, who had conformed. It was thus not hostility to Rome which led the Armenians into heresy… But having got used to this position they were unwilling to move from it.”[9]

After the Muslim conquest, the Armenian Church became more and more entrenched, not only in anti-Chalcedonian Monophysitism, but also in a nationalism that made it the first national church in the negative sense of the word – that is, a church that was so identified with the nation as to lose its universalist character. In this way the Armenian Church contrasts with other national Churches in the region, such as the Orthodox Georgian, which did not allow nationalist pride to tear them away from the greater society of Christian Rome.

Another, rather clearer example of doctrinal discord becoming entwined with national hatred and leading to a schism from Romanity was the Celtic Church of Wales (Western Britain) in the seventh and eighth centuries. Unlike the neighbouring Irish Church, the older Church of Wales so hated the pagan Anglo-Saxons, who had conquered Eastern Britain and driven them to the West, that they refused to undertake any missionary work to convert them to Christ.

Thus when the Roman St. Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury, sought union with the Welsh, asking only that they adopt the Roman-Byzantine Paschalion, correct some inadequacy in their administration of the rite of Baptism, and cooperate with him in the conversion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, the Welsh refused. St. Augustine prophesied that if the Welsh did not help in the conversion of the pagan English, they themselves would be punished by God at the hands of the pagans. This prophecy was fulfilled when the pagans destroyed the great monastery of Bangor and killed hundreds of monks. But two generations later, the Welsh still stubbornly rejected the decrees of the Synod of Whitby (664), which brought about a union of the Celtic and Roman traditions in the British Isles through the acceptance of the Byzantine-Roman Paschalion. As a seventh-century Irish canon put it, “the Britons [of Wales] are… contrary to all men, separating themselves both from the Roman way of life and the unity of the Church”.[10]

This multi-ethnic character of Orthodox England in its “golden age” is characteristic of almost all the flourishing kingdoms of Orthodox history - Bulgaria in the tenth century, for example (Bulgars, Slavs and Vlachs), or Georgia in the twelfth (Georgians, Alans, Abkhaz, Ossetians, Mingrelians, etc.) - and not only of the Orthodox empires. It is as if the Lord’s words, that “where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am with them” (Matthew 18.20), apply to nations as well as to individuals. It is as if the schooling in the love of one’s neighbour which having to live together under one roof with “foreigners” provides, stimulates a more general flowering of Christian faith and love. On the other hand, living in “pure” isolation appears to generate feelings of nationalist pride and hatred of other races.

From about the death of the Emperor Justinian late in the sixth century, the universalist ideal of Christian Rome began to weaken in the hearts of many of her constituent peoples. In the East, the Monophysite Copts and Syrians, although not explicitly anti-Roman, nevertheless caused grave problems for the Orthodox autocracy centred in Constantinople, and soon their lands were swallowed up by the Muslim hordes. In the West, political leaders such as the Frankish Emperor Charles the Great and religious leaders such as the Roman Pope Nicholas I, while not abandoning Roman universalism, nevertheless tried to create a new definition of the Roman people and State, locating its political and spiritual capital, not in Constantinople, but in Old Rome or even in Aachen.

By the late eleventh century the West had fallen away from Orthodoxy, which left only the Greek core of the old Empire centred on Constantinople, together with some Slavic, Romanian and Georgian dependencies – although, as often as not, the Slavs (especially the Bulgarians) were at war with, or at any rate independent from, Constantinople. Increasingly the once mighty and multi-ethnic empire of Christian Rome was reduced to a very small, predominantly Greek remnant. And by 1453 that, too, had gone.

Russia: The Third Rome

Was universalism dead? Was the ideal of the political and cultural, as well as the religious unity of Orthodox Christendom, now unattainable? Were Christians of different nationalities, instead of fighting together against their non-Christian or heretical enemies, now destined to fight no less often against each other - a thought that would have horrified the holy apostles?

Where the Romans and the Greeks had failed, the Lord now raised a third race to carry the burden of the universalist ideal – Russia. The calling of Russia to become the Third Rome had been prefigured as early as the time of Constantine. For the holy emperor saw the sign of the Cross in the sky with the words “By this sign conquer” three times – first before conquering Old Rome, secondly before conquering the Greek city of Byzantium, and thirdly before defeating the Scythians, who occupied the lands around the northern shores of the Black Sea which were later occupied by - the Russians.

In many ways, the Russian Great Princes and Tsars inherited the legacy of both the Old and the New Romes. Thus Gytha, daughter of the last Western Orthodox king, Harold II of England, married Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh; while the niece of the last Eastern Orthodox emperor, Sophia Palaeologus, married Tsar Ivan III. Again, the major struggles of the Russian Tsars were against the powers that had overcome those Orthodox autocrats – the Popes in the West and the Sultans in the East. Thus Russia as the Third Rome, the third incarnation of the universalist State called to defend God’s Church on earth, was called to finish, and bring to a triumphant conclusion, the struggles begun but not completed by the First and Second Romes.

It is sometimes asserted that Russia was a national State which happened to grow very large by territorial conquest, rather than an international empire from the beginning, like St. Constantine’s Rome. That is not true. From the time of its founding under Rurik in the ninth century, the Russian State encompassed, not only the various tribes of the Eastern Slavs, but also the Finno-Ungrian tribes – and, as its ruling class, the Scandinavian Varangians. As time passed, this multi-ethnic character of the Russian State increased rather than diminished, as waves of Pechenegs, Polovtsians, Mongols, Khazars and Caucasians from the East, and (on a smaller scale) Germans, Poles, Swedes, Balts and Magyars from the West, settled within its boundaries. We only need to look at the very large number of Russian saints of foreign origin to see that Russia, even while ecclesiastically still only a metropolitan province of the Great Church of Constantinople, was already, politically speaking, an international empire. Of course, it is possible grossly to exaggerate this non-Russian element in the Russian Church and State, as Monk (now “Archbishop”) Ambrose von Sievers has done in his attempt to show that most of the Russian saints were in fact German! Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that, however “Russianness” is defined, it cannot be done in strictly biological terms, insofar as most Russians are now, and have been for many centuries, to some degree of mixed blood.

After the time of troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Russian realm contracted in on itself and for a short time took on the character of a purely national State, whose first aim was survival and the “gathering of the Russian lands”, not the recreation of a single Christian Empire embracing all the Orthodox lands. At such moments in a nation’s history, a fierce and defensive nationalism is not a negative phenomenon; as in the case of the Balkan peoples under the Turkish yoke, it helps to preserve those values without which the nation will spiritually die.

At the same time, it runs the risk of narrowing and coarsening the nation’s vision – “where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29.18). Hardly coincidentally, therefore, in the seventeenth century there broke out the first, and perhaps the only, nationalist schism in Russian history – the schism of the Old Ritualists, who placed Russian Orthodoxy, as symbolized by the decrees of the Stoglav council, above Ecumenical Orthodoxy. But this temptation was overcome by the Russian Church and State; the universalist ideal of the Greco-Russian Church under Moscow as the Third Rome was embraced by Patriarch Nicon, while Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich told Greek merchants that he had not abandoned the dream of reconquering Constantinople for the Orthodox.

In the eighteenth century, beginning with the reforms of Peter the Great, there was a tendency towards the opposite and no less harmful anti-national extreme of placing everything that was foreign above native Russian and Orthodox values. But, as Hieromonk (now Bishop) Dionysius (Alferov) points out, “the service of ‘him that restraineth’, although undermined, was preserved by Russian monarchical power even after Peter – and it is necessary to emphasize this. It was preserved because neither the people nor the Church renounced the very ideal of the Orthodox kingdom, and, as even V. Klyuchevsky noted, continued to consider as law that which corresponded to this ideal, and not Peter’s decrees.”[11]

By the middle of the nineteenth century “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Narodnost’” became the official slogan of the Russian Autocracy, with “narodnost’” understood in a non-racial sense and definitely subordinate to Orthodoxy. For “if,” writes M.V. Zyzykin, “it is possible to call the fact that Christianity has become the content of a certain people’s narodnost’ the national property of that people, then such a property belongs also to the Russian people. But we should rather add the term ‘universal’ here, because the very nationality is expressed in universality, universality has become the content of the narodnost’.”[12]

And if the majority of the educated classes did not understand this ideal and warred against it, preferring the universalist, but also anti-national and anti-Orthodox ideology of western democracy, in the masses of the people the simultaneously universalist and patriotic ideology of Holy Russia – the Third Rome continued to live.

And it lived to the greatest degree in the last Tsar Nicholas II, who, though only 1/256th Russian by blood, was more Russian than the “pure” Russians in his love of Russia and Orthodoxy. Nicholas II displayed in himself that correct relationship between patriotism and the higher ideal of citizenship in the Heavenly Kingdom which St. John of Kronstadt had defined in 1905 thus: “The earthly fatherland with its Church is the threshold of the Heavenly Fatherland. Therefore love it fervently and be ready to lay down your life for it, so as to inherit eternal life there.” In other words, the earthly fatherland is not to be loved as an end in itself, but for the sake of Christ, as a ladder that leads to our true and eternal fatherland in Heaven.

How inseparable Russianness is from Orthodoxy, and how far, therefore, it is from any narrow nationalism, is illustrated by the words of Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) written in 1916: "If you take away Orthodoxy from our Russian people and our Russian life, as Dostoyevsky justly observed, nothing specifically Russian will remain. In vain have people begun to talk about some kind of national Russian Church: such a Church does not exist, only an ecclesiastical nationality exists, our ecclesiastical people (and to some extent even our ecclesiastical society), which is recognized as our own and native only to the extent that it is in agreement with the Church and her teaching, and which does not recognize the Russian Stundists as Russian, but sees no difference between itself and foreign Orthodox - Greeks, Arabs and Serbs. Tell our peasant: 'Do not curse the Jews, you know - the All-Holy Mother of God and all the Apostles were Jews'. And what will he reply? 'That's not true,' he will say. 'They lived at a time when the Jews were Russians.' He knows very well that the Apostles did not speak Russian, that the Russians did not exist at that time, but he wants to express a true thought, namely, that at that time the Jews who believed in Christ were of that same faith and Church with which the Russian people has now been merged and from which the contemporary Jews and their ancestors who were disobedient to the Lord have fallen away.”[13]

Conversely, for those Orthodox people of other nations who accepted Russia as the Third Rome, the Russian Tsar was not simply the Russian Tsar, but also the Greek Tsar – and the Arabic Tsar. “Don’t think,“said an Palestinian Arab after the revolution, “that the Russian Tsar was only Russian. No, he was also Arabic. The Tsar was the all-powerful protector and defender of the Orthodox East.”

On the eve of the revolution Russia had built up the greatest empire the world had ever seen, spreading the Gospel in over a hundred languages from the Atlantic to the Pacific, supporting and protecting the Orthodox in the Near East and Eastern Europe, and with strong missions in China, Japan, Persia and the United States. This was justifiable cause for intense patriotic pride; and yet Russian patriotism – in contrast to the patriotism of some of the smaller Orthodox nations – never lost its universalist dimension, a dimension which may yet manifest itself again in the future, in a last great missionary outreach to the non-Orthodox world.

Nor did Russia lack that capacity for self-criticism which is so essential to the spiritual health both of nations and of individuals, as described by the Russian religious philosopher I.A. Ilyin: "To love one's people and believe in her, to believe that she will overcome all historical trials and will arise from collapse purified and sobered - does not mean to close one's eyes to her weaknesses and imperfections, perhaps even her vices. To accept one's people as the incarnation of the fullest and highest perfection on earth would be pure vainglory, sick nationalist conceit. The real patriot sees not only the spiritual paths of his people, but also her temptations, weaknesses and imperfections. Spiritual love generally is not given to groundless idealization, but sees soberly and with extreme acuteness. To love one's people does not mean to flatter her or hide from her weak sides, but honourably and courageously criticize them and tirelessly struggle with them."[14]

Russia and the Comintern

By the beginning of the twentieth century we see a sharp divergence in views on the significance of the nation, patriotism and Christian universalism in the Orthodox world. On the one hand, in 1900, 222 Chinese Orthodox Christians of the Russian Mission in Peking gave their lives in martyrdom for Christ, thereby exhibiting the wonderful fruits that the true universalism of Russia – the Third Rome had produced in the last and most nationalistic of the great pagan empires. But on the other hand, in 1912-13 Greek, Serb, Bulgarian and Romanian Orthodox fought two bloody wars against each other, stirred up by that nationalist spirit which the Ecumenical Patriarchate had anathematized in 1872 as the heresy of phyletism (nationalism). Meanwhile, and in opposition to both, there arose the pseudo-universalism of the communist international, which was to become the vehicle of the revenge of the most fiercely dangerous nationalism of all – Jewish nationalism.

The October revolution in Russia and the promise of a homeland to the Jews in Palestine were reported in a single column of newsprint in the London Times of November 9, 1917. This extraordinary “coincidence” pointed to the spiritual connectedness of the two events: the death of the Third Rome was at the same time the birth of the Jewish Antichrist. For while Holy Russia gradually descended into the catacombs of obscurity and martyrdom, Antichristian Israel ascended from the ghettoes to take control of the destinies of the apostate peoples.

The London Times correspondent for Central Europe, Douglas Reed, proved this point in relation to Russia with some statistics: “The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprised 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People’s Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly ‘Socialist’ or other non-Communist parties… were 55 Jews and 6 others.”[15]

Even the “pro-Semite” American historian Richard Pipes admits: “Jews undeniably played in the Bolshevik Party and the early Soviet apparatus a role disproportionate to their share of the population. The number of Jews active in Communism in Russia and abroad was striking: in Hungary, for example, they furnished 95 percent of the leading figures in Bela Kun’s dictatorship. They also were disproportionately represented among Communists in Germany and Austria during the revolutionary upheavals there in 1918-23, and in the apparatus of the Communist International.”[16]

The revolution strove to destroy the collective personality of each nation, just as it strove to destroy the image of God, the individual personality of each man. Thus Lenin said that the aim of socialism was not only the drawing together of the nations, but also their fusion – i.e. their destruction. For, as Dostoyevsky wrote, “socialism deprives the national principle of its individuality, undermining the very foundations of nationality.” Of course, Lenin was not averse to approving of and stirring up the nationalisms of the smaller nations of the Russian empire in order to destroy the God-bearing nation that he hated and feared the most. But having stirred up nationalist feeling, he then tried to destroy it again, subordinating the nations to the only nation and caste of which he approved – the nation of Jewish internationalism, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The paradox that socialism both incites nationalism and destroys the nation is one aspect of the general paradox of the socialist revolution, that while preaching freedom it practises slavery, while proclaiming equality it creates inequality, and while dreaming of brotherhood it incites fratricidal war. In the same way, the French revolution proclaimed the freedom and equality of all nations. But its first appearance on the international arena was in the form of Napoleonic imperialism, which strove to destroy the freedom of all the nations of Europe.

Paradoxically, it was autocratic Russia, the conqueror of Napoleon, which guaranteed the survival of the nations of the West, and their freedom from totalitarianism, for at least another century. For the truth is that the revolution, while inciting the passions for personal and national freedom in order to destroy the old church and state structures, was aimed at the destruction of all freedom and individuality, both personal and national. And while hypocritically invoking those ecumenical ideals which Christianity gave to the world, it actually aimed at their complete destruction by destroying the pivot upon which they all rest – Christ Jesus.

Just as Soviet internationalism was founded on the ruins of Christian universalism, so the Soviet patriotism that emerged during the Second World War was founded on the ruins of the truly Christian patriotism of Holy Russia. Lenin openly despised Russia and killed her last Tsar; Stalin tried to revive the idea of Great (but not Holy) Russia and carefully studied the life of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, whom he called his “teacher”. Neither the sincere hatred of the one nor the hypocritical “love” of the other did anything but plunge Russia ever deeper into the abyss.

Soviet patriotism of the ecclesiastical kind – the “ecclesiastical Stalinism” exemplified by the Almanac Pravoslavie ili Smert’ and in the panegyrics to Stalin of such priests as Fr. Dmitri Dudko – believes that, in strengthening the state, Stalin (a Georgian) was also trying to create a powerful Russian Orthodox Church, so as to transform the Soviet state into an Orthodox empire, with Stalin himself as emperor. These “Orthodox patriots” do not seem to see any incongruity in the fact that the would-be Orthodox emperor, the protector of the faith, should have been at the same time the greatest persecutor of the faith in history! Fallen nationalist feeling has blinded them to the most elementary moral distinctions.

“Universal love” which hates one’s own country, especially if that country is Orthodox Christian, is but the reverse side of universal hatred. For as the English proverb says: “Charity begins at home.” On the other hand, love of one’s country which justifies mass murder and preaches hatred of other nations – as the hierarchs of the Soviet Moscow Patriarchate taught their flock to hate the Germans during the war – degrades the just war for national liberation into an orgy of fallen passion and makes the physically triumphant into the spiritually defeated. For Christ has taught us that, while fighting our enemies, we must still love them…

Russia and the Jews

Let us now try and apply the principles expounded in this essay to the most difficult and critical of all the national questions: “the Jewish question”. The problem can be stated as follows. On the one hand, the Jews were the first chosen people of God. The father of the Jewish nation, Abraham, is also the father of all the Christian faithful. Not only all the prophets and apostles, but also the Mother of God were Jews. Most important of all, the God Whom we worship, the Lord Jesus Christ, became incarnate as a Jew. “Anti-semitism” would seem to be totally excluded for Christians.

On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that it was the Jews who killed Christ – however much the Judaizing Christians of today’s ecumenical movement try to deny the fact. Moreover, they have never repented of that greatest of crimes; their “sacred” book, the Talmud, is filled with such hatred of Christ and Christians – and indeed, of all non-Jews - as to make Hitler’s ravings almost civilized by comparison.

Nor has this hatred been proclaimed in words only: for the last two thousand years the most persistent and savage persecutors of the Christians have been the Jews – and the Russians, as we have seen, have suffered more than any. Not without reason, therefore, the fiercest diatribes of the holy Fathers - those of St. John Chrysostom are particularly famous - have been directed against the Jews. And if that “Hebrew of the Hebrews”, the Apostle Paul, warned the Gentile Christians of Rome not to exalt themselves against the Jews, since they could fall away and the Jews return to Christ (Romans 11), he nevertheless did not refrain from calling his apostate countrymen “dogs” (Philippians 3.2).

So what should the attitude of Orthodox Christians be? The usual attitude, when presented with this problem, is to soften the paradox in some way, either by devaluing the place of the Jews in the early history of the people of God, or by providing various excuses for them in the later phase. Neither solution is admissible.

While the Church of the Gentiles preceded the Jewish Church of the Old Testament, and, as St. John Chrysostom says, “the Gentiles have the Patriarchs as their foundation”, there can be no question but that the New Testament Church has a Jewish root; so to try and excise the root would be equivalent to cutting down the whole tree. The Christians are “the new Jews”, “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6.16); and whatever evils the words “Jew” and “Israel” have been associated with since the Death of Christ, they cannot remove the spiritual heritage implicit in those titles. Besides, to “de-semitize” the Church would be to sin against the communion of saints in a serious manner; for there have been saints and martyrs of Jewish blood even since the fall of the synagogue, from St. Epiphanius of Cyprus to New Martyr Alexander Jacobson of Vyatka province.

On the other hand, to lessen the guilt of the Jews in their rejection of Christ would be an even greater sin; for it would deprive them of the possibility of coming to the truth and being saved. Of course, all rebukes must be given with meekness, without hatred, and with consciousness of our own sins. But that is no reason to imitate the pernicious ecumenist habit of denying the plain facts of history, of calling white black and black white.

And what if this elicits accusations of “anti-semitism”? Of course, Orthodox Christians are “anti-Judaists” rather than “anti-semites” because their criticism of Jewry is based on religious rather than racial grounds. Nevertheless, if all and any criticism of the Jews is defined as “anti-semitism”, it is better to accept the charge of anti-semitism than consciously to deny the truth. For as Rabbi Dr. Pinchas Hayman has rightly said, Christians must make a choice: “Either to retain their present belief system and be anti-Semitic or to form a partnership with the Jewish people. As long as Christians keep Jesus as God, they will be anti-Semitic because that belief must lead them to believe that those who reject Jesus reject God.”

And if someone objects that it is no use incurring the wrath of the Jews by telling them the truth, because the Jews cannot be saved since the Antichrist will be a Jew and the Jews will follow him, we reply: you know not the Scriptures nor the power of God. There are many hints in the Old and New Testaments, which are confirmed in the writings of the Fathers, that the Jews, after a long period of apostasy, will “look upon Him Whom they have pierced” and will repent (Zechariah 12.10; John 19.37); so that “all Israel” – the Church of the Jews as well as the Church of the Gentiles – “will be saved” (Romans 11.26). This spiritual resurrection of the Jews will not be total, and a large part of them will again apostasize and follow the Antichrist; but the fact of the resurrection cannot be denied and must modify our attitude towards this race, which, though cursed by God, has nevertheless not been totally abandoned by Him, and has preserved them in existence when many other nations have perished, for the sake of the promises He made to Abraham.

And who will convert the Jews if not the Russians, who have suffered so much from them, but whose history and culture has become the history and culture of a large part of the Jewish race itself (let us remember that one sixth of the population of Israel is composed of Russian Jews)?

If this seems fantastic in view of the present political, social and spiritual degradation of Russia, let us remember the interpretation of a passage from the book of the Apocalypse given by the holy new Hieromartyr Mark (Novoselov): "[St. John] with complete clarity speaks about the conversion of the God-fighting people to the Church of Christ, when she, few in numbers and powerless from an external point of view, but powerful with an inner strength and faithfulness to her Lord (Revelation 3.8) will draw to herself the ‘remnant’ of the God-fighting tribe. ‘Behold, says the Lord to the Angel of the Church of Philadelphia, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and make obeisance before they feet, and to know that I have loved thee.’

"Gazing with the eye of faith at that which the Lord has done before our eyes, and applying the ear of our heart and mind to the events of our days, comparing that which is seen and heard with the declarations of the Word of God, I cannot but feel that a great, wonderful and joyous mystery of God's economy is coming towards us: the Judaizing haters and persecutors of the Church of God, who are striving to subdue and annihilate her, by the wise permission of Providence will draw her to purification and strengthening, so as ‘to present her [to Christ] as a glorious Church, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but so that she should be holy and blameless’ (Ephesians 6.27).

"And in His time, known only to the One Lord of time, this, according to the son of thunder's strict expression ‘synagogue of Satan’ will bow before the pure Bride of Christ, conquered by her holiness and blamelessness and, perhaps, frightened by the image of the Antichrist. And if the rejection of the Apostle Paul's fellow-countrymen was, in his words, ‘the reconciliation of the world [with God], what will be their acceptance if not life from the dead?’ (Romans 11.15)."[17]

The famous monarchist writer Lev Tikhomirov agrees with this interpretation: “Is this conversion of the Jews that salvation of ‘all Israel’ which the Apostle Paul foretold? In the Apocalypse it is said that the saved will come ‘of the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie’. But not the whole of the ‘synagogue’ will come, but only ‘of the synagogue’, that is, a part of it. But even here, where the Apostle Paul says that ‘the whole of Israel will be saved’, he means only a part: ‘for they are not all Israel, which are of Israel… They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed’ (Romans 9.6,8).

“The opinion is widespread among us that the conversion of the Jews will take place at the very appearance of the Saviour, when they shall cry out: ‘Blessed is He That cometh in the name of the Lord’. But this is not evident from the Apocalypse. But if the Philadelphian conversion will bring ‘all Israel’ that is to be saved to Christ, then this will, of course, be a great event, fully explaining the rejoicing of the Heavens. Israel is a chosen people with whom it will not be possible to find a comparison when he begins to do the work of God. The Jews will, of course, multiply the forces of Christianity for the resistance against the Antichrist. ‘If the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world,’ says the Apostle Paul, ‘what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’ (Romans 11.15).”[18]

St. Seraphim of Sarov prophesied that at the end of the world there would be only two important nations: the Russians and the Jews, and that the Antichrist would be a Jew born in Russia. How fitting, then, that the nation which has suffered most from the antichristian Jews should finally convert them to Christianity, so that the former bitter enemies, reconciled in the Body of Christ, should fight together against the Russian-Jewish Antichrist! This would be the final triumph of universal love over national enmity, and the final manifestation of the all-embracing ideal of Christ, Who prayed that the Jews should be forgiven because they knew not what they did, and that they all, Jews and Gentiles, “may be one,… so that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me” (John 17.22,23).

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Редакция «Верности» благодарит К. Преображенского,  за его любезное согласие на нашу просьбу,  разделить с нашими читателями его мысли об опасности со стороны нео-коммунистической  МП  для свободной части Русской Церкви. Мы надеемся,  что и в дальнейшем,  он,  как лучше чем,  многие из нас  знающий,  будет знакомить  жителей Зарубежной Руси,  с происходящими изменениями и политикой  в РФ и республиках бывшего СССР.  Его статьи "Протоиерей Потапов обиделся за Путина", "Нам не нужен Патриарх Путин" и многие другие,  уже в прошлом,  предупреждали нас о том,  какая нам грозит опасность в случае слияния РПЦЗ  с МП. 

Сейчас еще есть время,  и мы должны решиь с кем мы: с Христом или с пособниками антихриста?Каждый из тех,  кто жил или ездил  в Свято Троицкий монастырь, знал наших духовных наставников  и в будущем опять их встретит. Что они скажут?: «Мы оставили вам ценное наследство, Русскую Церковь и Учение к спасению душ, а вы соблазнились?  Не знаем вас,  уходите от нас прочь…»

Поэтому каждый из нас и в особенности бывшие ученики, насельники и паломники в монастырь, должны вспомнить о возложенной на нас обязанности выполнить свой долг перед Святой Православной Церковью и нашими духовными наставниками.

Каждый раз, когда перед нами сложный вопрос,  нужно задуматься о том, как бы поступили о.о. Иосиф, Пантелеимон, Владимир и другие и  сразу же,  на душе станет легче,  и решение о затруднении станет простым.  И тогда,  последовав их советам,  мы сможем,  с Ангелами и с ними вместе,  торжественно воспеть: «Слава в вышних Богу и на земли мир в человецех благоволение»!    Г.С.

* * *

КОВАРНЫЙ ГРАД КИТЕЖ

Константин Преображенский

1.      От Дзержинского до Путина.

B русской эмиграции выросли целые династии агентов КГБ. Дед помогал советской разведке похищать белых генералов, сын растолковывал западным читателям прелесть советской жизни, а внук  борется за подчинение Зарубежной Церкви чекистской Москве. И при этом  все думают, что помогают России, хотя  помогают коммунистам. Даже сейчас, когда у власти находится уже не КПСС, а возродившийся КГБ.   

Это ведомство – вовсе не то же самое, что ЦРУ или Сикрет Интеллидженс Сервис, как полагают многие на Западе, а отдел ЦК КПСС. В советское время чекисты гордо именовали себя «вооружённым отрядом партии» и получали за это гораздо больше других военных. Закормленный и прогнивший,  партийный аппарат  не выдержал проверки на прочность в 1991 году,  сгинул в небытие, но его вооружённый отряд уцелел.  Идеология же  у них общая. 

Чекисты работают в эмигрантской среде беспардонно и грубо, словно вербуя заключённых  в российских  тюрьмах. Среди настоящих иностранцев они ведут себя куда осмотрительнее. Видимо, в глубине души чекисты  уверены, что эмигранты простят им любые огрехи из  патриотических соображений.

Cамоуверенно и нагло, почти не маскируясь, российская разведка  сейчас прибирает к рукам Зарубежную Церковь. И оказывается права в своей безнаказанности!   Многие из старых эмигрантов в  частных беседах осуждают поглощение Зарубежной Церкви путинским государством, а в публичных – поддерживают.

- Как же  я могу идти против России? -  разводят они руками.                

После войны советской разведке удалось выхолостить  самые боевые белогвардейские организации, из  антисоветских сделать их  просоветскими, как это произошло с НТС. Ветераны уцелевших объединений говорили мне, что КГБ и к ним часто подсылал агентуру. Эти люди представлялись выходцами из  белоэмигрантских семей, но их  выдавал  советский акцент. Тем не менее они внедрялись в белоэмигрантские организации и начинали всех ссорить, чтобы сбить антисоветский накал. Порой им это удавалось, поскольку  молодые эмигранты были слабоваты в подковёрной борьбе, не имея опыта работы в советских учреждениях. Вдобовок родители учили их помогать любому русскому,  не устраивая ему допроса. Выведывать прошлое нового  человека считалось в эмигрантской среде неприличным. Но агентов КГБ она всё же выдавливала, награждая их кличкой «подосланный».

Подсылал же их 4 отдел управления «К»:  контрразведки внутри разведки. Оно нейтрализовывало врагов КГБ,  вербуя иностранных  разведчиков и выискивая предателей в своей среде. 4  отдел работал по враждебной русской  эмиграции.

В 1978 году начальник разведки Крючков предложил создать ещё один отдел для работы по эмигрантам,  но уже не в рамках  управления «К», а в масштабах всего Первого главного управления КГБ. Он должен был вербовать  друзей Советского Союза.

-   Для чего нужен новый отдел,  если мы и так  занимаемся эмиграцией  с 1917 года? – удивился генерал Олег Калугин, возглавлявший управление «К».

-   Для  расширения рядов  наших сторонников,  создания «русского лобби» на Западе! - парировал Крючков и настоял на своём. Так появился 19 отдел ПГУ.

Незадолго до этого Крючков побывал в Сан-Франциско, где его тепло принимали русские эмигранты, и  решил их отблагодарить таким образом.

-  Зачем  КГБ нас вербовать, если мы  друзья России?- недоумевают многие эмигранты.

- Затем, что по вам  плачет 19 отдел! – отвечаю я им.

Сейчас он развёрнут в огромное управление,  поскольку  Путин провозгласил работу по эмигрантам одной из самых главных  задач  российской разведки. Называется она «линией ЭМ».

Ведь с крахом  советской идеологии вербовочная база за рубежом резко сузилась. Нынешняя Служба внешней разведки  уже не может привлекать к агентурному сотрудничеству идейных сторонников СССР и убеждённых  коммунистов, что называлось «вербовкой на идейно-политической основе».    Она не в состоянии предложить западному обывателю идею, ради которой тот согласился бы рискнуть головой, а денег на всех не напасёшься.

Хотя чекисты и сейчас в душе остаются коммунистами, они уже не рискнут предложить либеральному западному интеллигенту побороться за дело Ленина. Тот их  не поймёт, ибо свято уверен в том, что Россия покончила с коммунизмом. Правда,  теперь чекисты излагают вербовочное предложение по-иному: «Давайте вместе бороться с гегемонизмом США!»  На это многие соглашаются.

Путинская  разведка делает ставку на врагов Америки и патриотов  России. Она предлагает иностранцам шпионить в пользу Москвы из  любви уже не к Стране Советов, а к России как государству. А кто сейчас на Западе испытывает к ней сыновние чувства?  Одни только эмигранты.  

Они  -  головная боль Путина. Ведь их уже несколько миллионов, и число будет расти. Это целое русское государство, неподконтрольное Кремлю. А вдруг они начнут критиковать свою историческую родину, благо поводов для этого становится всё больше?

Окормляет  это государство Русская Зарубежная Церковь.

Поэтому Зарубежную Церковь надо срочно дезавуировать, подсоединив к  путинской государственной машине, подобно  Московской  Патриархии. Всем этим и занимается сейчас управление «ЭМ». Оно же проводит конгрессы зарубежных соотечественников.

Путин  на них  с удовольствием  выступает, словно покровитель всех россиян. Не  только  собственных, но и зарубежных, имеющих западное гражданство.  Подмяв под себя РФ, Путин взялся за царскую  Россию, никуда, как выяснилось,  не ушедшую и   раскинувшуюся ныне  по самым лакомым странам Америки и Европы. Он хочет прийти туда на правах  соправителя, с помощью подменённой Зарубежной Церкви, получающей указания из Москвы, и ручной    русской эмиграции, отдрессированной КГБ.

2. Как распознать разведчика.

Русская эмиграция наводнена агентурой со времён Гражданской войны. После развала СССР в 1991 году её количество не уменьшилось, как следовало бы ожидать, а  ещё более возросло.

Переселился на Запад  огромный отряд советских учёных, среди которых число агентов КГБ  всегда было особенно велико. Увы, так уж была устроена наша наука: не завербуешься – не выедешь за границу, не станешь заведующим лабораторией. Только гениям- одиночкам  позволялось быть выше этого, но они находились под неусыпным наблюдением агентуры из  числа своих же коллег.

Гуманитарии чаще всего были агентами идеологического Пятого управления, выявляли диссидентов в своей среде. Выезжая в загранкомандировки, они поступали в распоряжение политической разведки. Корифеи естественных  наук использовались в промышленном шпионаже, которым занималось управление «Т»  Первого главного управления КГБ. Большинство его отделов было нацелено на работу за границей,  но 3 и  7 отделы  вели научно-техническую  разведку  прямо на родине.

Офицеры 3 отдела вербовали московских учёных. Именно они, под видом клерков Иностранного  отдела Академии Наук, оформляли выездные дела советских учёных, выпуская их  в вожделенные  загранкомандировки. Условие  было одним – вербовка. Помню, как я не смог сдержать смеха,  увидав  список членов советской научной делегации, составленный для   начальника управления «Т»: он весь состоял из  агентурных  псевдонимов! Даже  знаменитые академики были агентами КГБ.

7 отдел управления «Т» вербовал учёных  в провинциальных  институтах, его филиалы имелись в КГБ всех союзных республик. Спасения не было нигде.

Массовое сотрудничество с КГБ – не только вина, но и беда советских учёных. Они стыдились его и скрывали. В том числе и от властей США,  куда многие эмигрировали в девяностые годы. Им казалось, что агентурная работа осталась в советском прошлом,  с которым  покончено навсегда. Но это прошлое ожило и вернулось  в Россию. И теперь многие из  учёных  с ужасом поднимают трубку телефона, ожидая услышать до боли знакомые слова: «Привет от Ивана Петровича!». Так КГБ восстанавливает связь с агентом. Прозносится  имя одного из  оперработников, у которых он был на связи.

Множество советских разведчиков  обосновалось на Западе под видом коммерсантов. Основу их  капиталов составило то самое «золото партии», о котором ещё недавно шумели российские журналисты, но потом неожиданно замолчали. Эти разведчики делают деньги для своих  начальников в Москве, покровительствуют русской мафии, но и о своей главной работе не забывают. 

Подалось в эмиграцию  немало настоящих  коммерсантов, потому что в России   честный бизнес задавлен налогами. Но российское государство «щиплет» их и на Западе. Для этого используется Служба внешней разведки.

Для вербовки коммерсантов она изобрела такой способ. На улице к  одному из них подходит сотрудник СВР и предлагает стать шпионом. Тот, конечно, отказывается. Тогда российский разведчик  говорит, язвительно улыбаясь:

-   А вот мы объявим тебя в международный розыск через Интерпол! Наврём им, что ты член русской мафии. Посмотрим, что станет с твоим бизнесом!..

И несчастный предприниматель сдаётся. Он уже знает, как безжалостно в России расправляются с его коллегами, и что Путин действительно использует Интерпол в борьбе с политическими противниками.

Сейчас в российских посольствах  стало модным устраивать  праздничные приёмы по случаю Масленицы с блинами, икрой и водкой. Трудно поверить, что за ними тоже  стоит  разведка.

Эти приёмы входят в операцию  по захвату Зарубежной Церкви. На них можно незаметно завести агента-священника в комнату, защищённую от прослушивания,  вручить ему пачку денег, не облагаемую налогом. Там же  разведчики знакомятся с заслуживающими внимания эмигрантами, приглашают  в  рестораны.

-    Где вы познакомились с этим  русским диплломатом? – спросят коллеги по работе.

-    В посольстве, на церковном приёме! – с гордостью ответят они.

Что же, звучит солидно, не подкопаешься. И выглядело бы совсем по другому, если бы разведчик позвонил  эмигранту домой и предложил встречу в ресторане.  Это бы походило на шпионаж.

Неужели все эти симпатичные молодые люди, расточающие вам улыбки на посольском приёме и предлагающие дружбу, – офицеры  разведки? Увы, да, ибо настоящему дипломату вы не нужны. А вдруг вы подосланы местной контрразведкой, и это повредит его карьере?

Кадровому дипломату опасны лишние знакомства. Его дело – прошелестеть бумагами в кабинете с девяти до шести и бегом домой, к телевизору. Можно пойти и на светский раут,  но вести себя строго по протоколу, чтобы не приняли за разведчика. Для дипломата это  самое страшное, потому если за оскандалившегося разведчика  вступится его ведомство, то чужому для него дипломату  оно помогать не будет.

Да, дипломаты тоже работают с русской эмиграцией, но только в общем и целом, в форме собраний и заседаний, без перехода на личности. И только разведчик норовит завязать с вами личную дружбу. Если он приглашает вас в ресторан в нерабочее время, тратит на вас выходные дни, то перед вами -  военнослужащий, чей рабочий день не нормирован. А сами вы находитесь в вербовочной разработке. Нужно рвать это знакомство как можно скорее. Но как?..

Ведь путинская разведка действует открыто и нагло. Она больше не боится Запада, потому что все его лидеры – путинские друзья. Они все у него в кармане.  Это в советские времена можно было пригрозить  чекисту-разведчику публичным разоблачением, и он в страхе ретировался, мысленно благодаря вас за то, что вы  не разрушаете его карьеру.

А сегодня ему шпионский скандал не страшен, потому что тогда Путин просто пошлёт его в другую страну. Недаром он добивается безвизового въезда в Европу для «некоторых категорий» российских граждан.  Да и скандал теперь не раздуешь! Никто не станет брать у вас интервью о российском шпионаже. Ведь Россия – союзник Запада по борьбе с терроризмом! Под видом этой мифической борьбы Путин активизирует разведку против Запада.

Как же отделаться от надоедливого друга-шпиона? Может быть, стоит  деликатно сказать ему так: «Я понял, кто ты такой... Но я не знаю секретов, ты зря тратишь на меня время. Давай,  забудем о нашем знакомстве?»

Разумеется, вами будет руководить  благородное патриотическое стремление избежать скандала, чтобы не  нанести ущерба престижу России. Но именно этой фразой вы сами запишете себя в агенты!  Ибо заявите о своей готовности держать  контакт с разведчиком в тайне от властей своей страны. А это – главное требование, предъявляемое к агенту!

В Москву  полетит ликующий отзыв: «Объект вербовочной разработки «Эмигрант» по собственной инициативе заявил о своей готовности  не разглашать факт знакомства с нашим оперработником». И ваша разработка пойдёт с удвоенной силой.

Многие эмигранты говорят так:

-    Да зачем я нужен российской разведке? Ведь у меня мирная профессия!..

Нужен тем, что американец, англичанин, француз. Вербовка граждан ведущих стран Запада считается большим успехом,  за неё положено повышение в должности или орден. А  вербовать людей русского происхождения легче, чем представителей коренных национальностей. Потому что они плачут благодарными слезами, едва услышав магические слова: «Помогите России!».  Хотя помощь может требоваться вовсе не ей, а карьере разведчика.

А уж цель вашей вербовки можно изложить на бумаге как угодно: агент влияния для  распространения слухов в эмигрантской среде, или «перспективный» агент.  То есть ваше использование предусмотрено лишь в  неясной  перспективе, но получить поощрение за вашу  вербовку можно уже сейчас.

Ведь разведку никто не контролирует. Гражданского контроля нет и в помине,  а ЦК КПСС, который инспектировал её в советские годы, больше не существует. Но даже   «липовая» вербовка для вас опасна. Потому что очередной перебежчик из КГБ может передать ваше досье на Запад, и вами займётся  собственная  контрразведка.

Впрочем, даже такая вербовка для России небесполезна. Она делает вас частью её государственной машины. Критиковать Путина вам уже будет не с руки.

2.      КГБ или родина?

Многие эмигранты уверены в том, что Россия считает их своими  в доску только лишь потому, что они русские.  И, кажется, сама жизнь подтверждает это: когда они посещают свою историческую родину, их там всячески привечают, хвалят за русскость.

Но происходит это  только потому, что они - американцы, англичане, французы. От них можно получить валюту, использовать их в пропаганде или разведке. Однако к русским жителям бедных стран, вроде Таджикистана, российская власть относится совсем по-другому. Я собственными ушами слышал, как милиционер в паспортном столе  говорил им так:

-   Да откуда вы взяли, что вы русские? Вы таджики, потому что там родились. Вот и уезжайте в свой Таджикистан!..

Спасла   положение только взятка.

Российская власть относится к зарубежным соотечественникам потребительски. И её можно понять: если она не заботится о своих жителях,  почему она должна печься об эмигрантах?  Каждый год Россия теряет около миллиона человек, но правительство относится к этому с олимпийским спокойствием: у него есть дела поважней.

Сейчас Москва отбирает у нас знаковые реликвии. Туда потянулась вереница  гробов деятелей Белой эмиграции, словно приносящих некое посмертное покаяние перед генералами КГБ, правящими ныне Россией. Так Путин подчиняет себе наше прошлое, нейтрализует его, перекрашивает в красный цвет. Ведь Россия по-прежнему поддерживает большевиков. Она так  и не уравняла белых с красными. Почётный титул Участника гражданской войны, дающий льготы,  относится только к ним.

Осенью 2005 года в московском Донском монастыре были перезахоронены генерал Антон Деникин и эмигрантский философ Иван Ильин.  Деникин теперь не  опасен большевикам. Он больше не сражается с Красной армией, а упокоился под её почётным караулом.  И одновременно Путин возвратил красную звезду на кокарды российских военных фуражек, убрав с  них двуглавого орла. Никакой Белой России не было. Она всегда была красной.

Кем станет Антон Деникин для нового поколения россиян, окончивших упрощённую путинскую школу? Думаю,  кем-то вроде маршала Жукова. А главное, они будут знать, что невозможно быть русским и выступать против российской власти. Она настигнет тебя даже после смерти и привезёт.

В России сейчас строят монастырь всего для одной иконы – Курской Коренной Божией Матери, чтобы вытянуть её, словно мощным магнитом, из эмиграции. Здесь она  - святыня Белого Движения, главная икона Зарубежной Церкви,  духовный центр Русского Зарубежья, его Одигитрия,  объединительный символ.

Станет ли она главной иконой  России?  Об этом и речи нет. Там она затеряется среди  других чудотворных икон. Наши белогвардейские реликвии Москве не нужны. Ей нужно, чтобы их у нас не было.

Потому что Зарубежная Русь растёт! Россияне бегут от Путина. Россия занимает первое место в мире по числу своих граждан, попросивших политического убежища на Западе. Поэтому Путин заранее хочет лишить нас духовной опоры, чтобы мы чувствовали себя  неуютно, стремились душой в Москву. Чтобы именно туда мы ездили поклониться святыням Белой России, под телекамеры КГБ.

Но это нам, здесь нужны русские чудотворные иконы!  Патриарх Алексий, пожертвуйте нам  несколько штук, ведь у вас их  так много! Но нет, пожертвования идут только в одну сторону. 

Мы хотим оставаться русскими вне контроля чекистов. У нас нет времени ждать, когда они отдадут государственную власть. Мы будет сами обустраивать Зарубежную Русь, ибо на родине наступил ледниковый период. Эта будет свободная Русь без вороватых начальников, продажных и запуганных  судей, без хамства. Такой, какой должна была стать, но не стала наша Россия.   

 * * *

Учение Божественного Откровения о спасительном значении Слова Божия

 Митрополит Антоний (Храповицкий)

Всякое учреждаемое общество находит интерес на своих собраниях в том, чтобы беседовать о деле, которое его совокупляет едино. Наше общество соединилось для великого дела- проповедания и слушания слова Божия. С этой же целью оно собрало нас и сегодня в эту светлую горницу, которая, подобно горнице Сионской, время от времени освобождается от дел мирских и заключает в свои стены людей различных полов, возрастов, положений и занятий, одних отрывая от мирского делания, других лишая отдыха после тяжелой дневной работы, и всем вместе вкладывая един дух и всех проникая жаждой слова Божия, как сказал псалмопевец: "благ мне закон уст Твоих паче злата и сребра, коль сладки гортани моему словеса Твоя, паче меда устом Моим" (Пс. 118; 72, 103).

Но в чем именно заключается эта таинственная сила слова Божия, которая привлекает нас сюда? Какие свойства его оказываются столь действенны и могучи? В чем заключается, наконец, действие слова Божия на сердца и жизнь человеческие- вот о чем послушаем сегодня в день годичного торжества, о слове Божием. Но кто научит нас этому? Может ли разум естественный объяснить действие божественного слова? Нет, душа наша только чувствует животворную его силу, но сама по себе никогда не в состоянии понять, откуда оно приходит, как сказал Господь: " голос его слышишь, а не знаешь, откуда приходит и куда уходит; так бывает со всяким, рожденным от Духа" (Ин. 3, 8). Но если наш разум не способен сам раскрыть законы слова,, то нас научит им откровение. Пусть само Слово, ставшее плотью, откроет нам действие слов Своих, и научит нас, во-первых, тому, какое значение в христианской жизни должно иметь слово Божие, а во-вторых- какие его плоды для верующих в этой и в будущей жизни.

Первое нам узнать необходимо уже потому, что многие считают чтение и проповедь слова Божия почти излишними для спасения, надеясь заслужить его добрыми делами и исполнением церковных постановлений, а другие готовы напротив все спасение сводить к изучению библии и не считают нужным упражнять свою волю в добродетели. Вопреки этим крайностям, божественное писание показывает чудное совмещение того, как усвоять слово и как нам укреплять его христианской жизнью. Если мы пожелаем услышать о самой необходимости проповеди слова Божия, как для начатка жизни христианской, так и для поддержки, то узнаем, что сама вера христианская, самое христианство называется иногда учением слова. Так, в Деяниях сказано, что после крещения язычника Корнилия сотника "слышаша апостолы и братие, сущие во Иудеи, яко и языцы прияша слово Божие" (Деян. 11, 1), т. е. христианскую веру. О ней же апостол Павел говорил в Антиохии Писидийской: "вам слово спасения сего послася" (13, 26). В той же главе говорится, что язычники "славляху слово Господне" (13, 18). Если принятие христианства называется в библии принятием слова Божия, то усовершенствование людей в христианской жизни именуется там возрастанием слова Божия, как неоднократно говорится в Деяниях: "слово Господне растяше и крепляшеся" (19, 20; 12, 24, ср. Тим. 2, 9 и т. под.).

Итак, если почти все содержание божественной веры разумелось как усвоение слова Божия, то весьма понятно, почему и насадители этой веры- св. апостолы главным делом своим считали проповедь, называли себя служителями слова и от дел управления внешнего отказались, повелев избрать диаконов и сказав: "мы же пребудем в молитве и в служении слова" (Деян. 2, 41; см. также 1 Тим. 4, 12; 5, 17; 2 Тим. 4, 2; Евр. 13, 7; Апок. 1, 2,9; 20, 4).

Но много ошибается, кто скажет, что слушанием слова Божия ограничивается жизнь христианина и жизнь церкви, что слово Божие само по себе, без наших усилий над собой, может освящать нас. Напротив, Господь в притче о сеятеле ясно показал, что одно только принятие слова живою верою без борьбы с собою не более прочно, чем тот росток семени на землице, лежащей поверх камня, который засох при солнечном зное,- что лишь те души могут быть годны для царствия Божия, которые, приняв слово, "творят плод в терпении", лишь тот строит здание спасения на твердом камне, "иже ко Мне грядый и слышай словеса Моя и творяй я (Лк. 6, 47). Божиим учеником будет лишь тот, кто в слове Его пребывает (Ин. 8, 31), кто его соблюдает (8, 52), кто приняв его в кротости (Иак. 1, 21), бывает творцом слова (1, 22), а не слышателем только (1, 23), ибо и евреи были слышателями слова, но сказано о них: не пользова оных слово слуха (Евр. 4, 12). Затем и между самими христианами явились многоглаголивые и одаренные словом возмутители, но апостол грозил придти к ним и испытать "не слово разгордехшихся, но силу" (1 Кор. 4, 19). О своей же проповеди он говорит, что "благовествование наше не бысть в слове точию, но и в силе, и в Дусе Святе, и во извещении мнозем" (1 Сол. 1, 5). Итак, спасительное значение получает для нас слово Божие лишь при твердом решении изменить свою греховную жизнь и при посильном стремлении человека исполнять свое решение. Пусть же умолкнут и все новые сектанты, которые, успокоив свою совесть в одной мертвой вере, говорят, что благодатное слово Божие само в них создает новую жизнь без всяких их усилий. Нас же верных само Слово научает о себе, что спасительным ббывает евангельское учение лишь тогда, если принимается соединенное с произвольной борьбой человека против греха, и потому последнее условие будем иметь в виду, поучаясь тому, какие спасительные действия должно оказывать слово Божие на жизнь христианина, дабы каждый мог по своей душе проверять получил ли он эти плоды и, следовательно, достойно ли он принимает насаждаемое слово, и если нет, то мог бы исправиться.

Итак первое действие слова Божия на нашей жизни сказывается в нашем духовном возрождении. Так, св. апостол Иаков говорит, что Бог "породи нас словом истины" (1, 18), а апостол Петр объясняет, что это рождение словом отлично от рождения тленного, потому что вводит нас в жизнь нетленную, вечную; люди, рожденные словом, должны, как новорожденные младенцы, совершенно отчуждаться от всякой злобы, лести, лицемерия, зависти и клеветы; возлюбить только то словесное млеко, которое дает нам возможность вкусить, "яко благ Господь" (1 Петр. 1, 24; 2, 4).

Испытал ли ты сие новое рождение словом? Был ли в твоей жизни момент, когда ты почувствовал в себе начало иной жизни, не той, которою живет твоя плоть, твои мирские расчеты, а той жизни благодатной, для которой не нужно ничего, кроме Бога, кроме исполнения Его заповедей, когда ради них человек бывает готов принять муки и смерть, когда он готов отбросить всю свою прежнюю жизнь и чувствует себя по слову апостола как бы новорожденным младенцем, чуждым всякой хитрости и зависти, которыми снедаются люди мирские, в которых ты сам когда-то погрязал? Можешь ли ты сказать, что ты возрожден словом? Бог дал тебе все, чтобы ты имел в себе совершенство сего рождения: Он очистил тебя водою и Духом во св. крещении, но знай, что это св. таинство принесет в тебе свой плод лишь тогда, если ты сам будешь сознательно возрождаться словом, ибо очищение и освящение церкви происходит через крещение, но не иначе, как посредством слова, как сказано в писании: Христос освящает церковь, "очистив ее банею водною посредством слова" (Еф.6, 26). Итак, если в жизни своей ты не испытал этой решимости, чтобы оставить себялюбие и грех, и жить для Бога, если не принял Христовых слов, что надо родиться свыше, если не испытал нашествия на тебя сей духовной силы новой жизни, которая, по учению Спасителя, как нежданный порыв ветра, вдруг охватывает наше сердце (Ин. 3, 8): то молись и проси Бога, чтобы Он даровал тебе полное возрождение словом, которого начаток дан тебе во св. крещении.

Но если ты испытал это, если проповедь слова Божия открыла тебе глаза на жизнь и смерть, на правду и грех и вызвала в тебе решимость жить для Бога, то смотри не потеряй этой жизни, питай ее и возвращай, чтобы она не осталась в тебе без плода. Как же ее питать? А опять через слово Божие. Вот как учит новый завет о значении слова Божия для возрожденных водою и духом, для христиан, которых Бог уже породил словом истины. Для поддержания жизни телесной необходимы питье и пища: так же точно духовную жизнь нельзя поддерживать без изучения или слушания слова Божия. О сем говорит Господь в беседе с самарянкой: "кто будет пить воду, которую Я дам ему, сделается в нем источником воды, текущей в жизнь вечную" (Ин. 4, 14). Сказав о сем питии Своего слова, Господь называет исполнение дела своего- пищею. Итак, как пища и питие поддерживают и укрепляют тело, так слово Божие и добродетели христианские питают жизнь возрожденную, духовную.Эту жизнь возращает в нас Бог, как бы какие-либо растения, а насаждают и поливают (1 Кор. 3, 5) служители слова. Слово Божие настолько необходимо для поддержки нас в благодатной жизни, что называется в св. библии то словом благодати (Лк. 4, 22; Деян. 14, 3; 20, 35), то словом жизни (Деян. 5, 20; 7, 38), то наконец самою жизнью или светом (Ин. 1, 4; 6, 63). Животворная сила слова Христова сказывалась в том, что народ, слушавший Его, сразу решил, что это есть слово Божие (Лк 5, 1), а Христос проповедующий-пророк (Ин. 7, 49), да и сам Господь называл слышавших слово Божие блаженными и очищенными "за слово, которое говорил Он им" (Ин. 11, 28; 15, 3). Затем апостол Павел еще выразительнее описывает действие слова, говоря: "живо слово Божие и действенно и острее всякого меча обоюдуостраго: оно проникает до разделения души и духа, составов и мозгов и судит помышления и намерения сердечные" (Евр. 4, 12). Почему так? А потому, что оно отвечает на те самые запросы, которыми исполнено само по себе человеческое сердце, как объясняет тот же апостол в другом послании: "близко к тебе слово, в устах твоих и в сердце твоем, т. е. слово веры, которое мы проповедуем" (Рим. 10, 8).

О, христианин! Насыщает ли тебя слово Божие, которое ты слышишь? Заставляет ли тебя чувствовать утоление всякой духовной жажды, проливает ли свет на твою жизнь и открыввает ли твою совесть для обсуждения всех намерений и действий? В запечатление сего духовного питания словом Господь дарует тебе в сендь под видом хлеба и вина Свое истинное тело и истинную кровь, но пользу от таинства ты получишь лишь тогда, если духовно принимаешь Христа словом, верою и жизнью, ибо одна "плоть не пользует ничтоже" (Ин. 6, 63). Или ты действительно питаешься словом жизни, или действительно евангельская проповедь тебе дает вкушать надежду жизни небесной, возносить тебя над миром плоти и страстей к духовной радости о Боге? Если так, то слава Богу, но знай, что за сие тебе нужно еще принять страдание от мира. Мы уже слышали, что слово Божие проникает до разделения души и духа: оно также разделяет и самих людей душевных от духовных и вооружаетодних против других, как предсказал прав. Симеон, держа в объятиях воплощенное Слово, как само Слово провозвестило о Себе, говоря: "не мир пришел Я принести, но меч, ибо Я пришел разделить человека с отцом его, и дочь с матерью ея, и невестку с свекровью ея. И враги человеку домашние его" (Мф. 10, 34-36). Еще при жизни Его начало исполняться пророчество о страданиях на земле за слово Божие, как Он и говорил о Себе врагам: "ищете Меня убити, яко слово Мое не вмещается в вы... яко не можете слышати словесе Моего (Ин. 8, 37-43); и об апостолах в молитве Отцу: "Аз дах им слово Твое и мир возненавиде их" (Ин. 17, 14). А тайнозритель будущих судеб церкви, св. Иоанн в своем Апокалипсисе видит тьмы праведников, избиваемых за слово. Итак слово, вместе с жизнью духовной, обещает нам болезни и скорби и даже смерть телесную. Убоимся ли мы их и устыдимся ли мирского осуждения за слово Божие? Да не будет сего, ибо Господь сказал: "иже аще постыдится Мене и Моих словес в роде сем прелюбодейнем и грешнем, и Сын Человеческий постыдится его, егда приидет во славе Отца Своего со ангелы святыми" (Мк. 8, 38). Но если так, то чем нам бороться в защиту слова? Ответ: самим словом, ибо оно, по уверению апостола Павла, есть "меч духовный" (Еф. 6, 17), оно непобедимо, ибо для слова Божия нет уз (2 Тим. 2, 9). Оно не боится мирского презрения, мирского осмеяния, мирского суда, ибо не мир произносит суд над словом Божиим, но сам судится от этого слова, как сказал нам Господь: аще кто услышит глаголы моя и не верует, аз не сужду ему... Отметаяйся Мене и не приемляй глагол Моих, имать судящего ему: слово, еже глаголах, то судит ему в последний день" (Ин. 12, 48). Как же слово судит мир? А именно в том смысле, что всякий, достойно изучивший слово Божие, ясно видит во свете благодати- кто прав и кто неправ; ему не страшны насмешки или презрение, или злоба, или гонение людей: он видит их безумие, видит грядущую казнь Божию и уже не чувствует наносимых оскорблений, но жалеет об ожесточении сердец гонителей и молится за них, как Спаситель и Его апостолы.

Итак вот третье действие слова — это его вечный и всегда присущий суд над миром, как сказано: "ныне суд есть миру сему" (Ин. 12, 31). Это разумели еще в ветхом завете, что слово Божие судит мир, ибо когда мирская неправда дерзко укрепилась над египетской землею и, несмотря на чудесные казни, грозила совсем воспрепятствовать исполниться воле Божией об изведении избранного народа в обетованную землю, тогда-сказано в библии-"сошло с небес от царственных престолов на средину погибельной земли всемогущее слово Твое, как грозный воин. Оно несло острый меч-неизменное Твое повеление, и ставши наполнило все смертью. Оно касалось неба и ходило по земле. Тогда вдруг сильно встревожили их мечты сновидений и наступили неожиданные ужасы; и будучи поражаемы один там, другой тут, полумертвый рбъявлял причину, по которой он умирал; ибо встревожившие их сновидения показали им это, чтоб они не погибли, не зная того, за что терпят зло" (Прем. 18, 15-19).

Но почему слову, или учению Божию, дана такая высшая сила? Откуда у него сие царственное право над жизнью во веки? Почему оно является судьей вселенной? А потому, что заповеди Христовы, или тажизнь, которая нам заповедана евангелием, или это слово Божие, не есть случайно данные постановления, но выражает собою свойства небесного Владыки: это слово Божие не есть кем-либо изобретенное узаконение, но вот что сказано о нем: "в начале было Слово и Слово было у Бога и Слово было Бог. Оно вначале было у Бога. Все чрез Него начало быть и без Него ничто не начало быть, что начало быть. В Нем была жизнь и жизнь была свет человеков. И свет во тьме светит и тьма не объяла Его... И Слово стало плотию и обитало между нами, полное благодати и истины; и мы видели славу Его, славу, как единородного от Отца" (Ин. 1, 1-6, 14). Итак разумеешь ли, почему словом Божиим судится мир? Потому, что принявшие слово приняли Того, кто принес сие слово на землю, приняли Того, который сказал: "Кто любит Меня, тот соблюдет слово Мое; и Отец Мой возлюбит его, и мы приидем к Нему, и обитель у Него сотворим" (Ин. 14, 23). Да, вот почему принявший слово Божие не боится мира: потому что он живет в общении с Богом-Сыном, который видится верующими очами, как всегдашний Судия мира, как видел Его Иоанн в откровении: "и увидел я отверстое небо, и вот, конь белый, и сидящий на нем называется Верный и Истинный, который праведно судит и воинствует. Очи у Него как пламень огненный и на голове Его много диадим. Он имел имя написанное, которое не знал никто, кроме Его самого. Он был облечен в одежду, обагренную кровию. Имя Ему: Слово Божие. И воинства небесные следовали за Ним на конях белых, облеченные в виссон белый и чистый. Из уст же Его исходит острый меч, чтобы им поражать народы. Он пасет их жезлом железным; Он топчет точило вина ярости и гнева Бога Вседержителя. На одежде Его и на бедре Его написано имя: Царь Царей и Господь Господствующих" (Апок. 19, 11-17). Вот с кем соединяет нас усвоение слова Божия: с самим превечным и неизменным Словом, от века царствующим над мирами. Посему Господь в относительном смысле называет приемлющих слово богами: "оных рече богов, к ним же слово Божие бысть" (Ин. 10, 35).

В этом-то богообщении и заключается четвертое действие евангельской проповеди, а пятое и последнее состоит в том, что поелику эта, усвояемая нами через слово, жизнь в Боге, жизнь божественная, есть неизменная, как Христос (2 Кор. 1, 18-21), и вечная,- то именно через слово евангелия, верою принимаемое и исполняемое, мы вступаем в вечную жизнь, как и сказал Господь: "аминь, аминь глаголю вам, яко слушаяй словесе Моего и веруяй Пославшему Мя имать живот вечный и на суд не приидет, но прейдет от смерти в живот" (Ин. 5, 24; ср. 6, 40, 47-74 и 12, 25).

Еще ли, братие, говорить о пользе слова Божия? Еще ли мы будем пренебрегать тем, что есть драгоценнейшего на земле и на небе? Еще ли будем тлен и суету предпочитать слову? О, да не будет так! А если мы малосильны и немощны к исполнению добрых желаний, то заключим наше слово молитвою к божественному Слову, чтобы само Оно укрепило в нас любовь к слушанию и возвещению, к усвоению и исполнению слова здесь на земле и удостоило нас к лучшему его усвоению на небе по исхождении из тела. -"О, Мудросте и Слове Божий и Сило! Подавай нам истее Тебе причащатися в невечернем дни царствия Твоего!"