Immediately after the Russian Revolution, many people didn’t just stop being Orthodox, although the trend in hostility toward it magnified around the time of 1917. Many were martyred with their lands confiscated. This period also manifested an intense political hatred of the royal family who stood in the way of more radical ideas, probably because of their association with Christianity. Leo Tolstoy, as we read earlier, did not promote Orthodoxy but a kind of patriotic and intellectual ethnocentrism. Dostoevsky warned Russia of the revolution in his writings like a prophet. St. John of Kronstadt also had predictions about the coming disaster and he preached a return to the Orthodox faith. With the intelligentsia’s new ideological movements and the monarch’s failure in governing Russia was led to the February and then the October Revolution of 1917.
The poet, Mikhail Lermontov, foreboded in 1830:
The year will come, that black year for Russia,
When the crown of the tsars will fall;
The masses will forget their erstwhile love for him,
And death and blood will be the food of many;
When children and innocent women
Will no longer be protected by the law, trampled upon and rejected;
Metropolitan Hilarion doesn’t view this event as an “accident of history.” Consequences follow ideas isn’t a popular frame of mind today. Orthodoxy teaches that the real “godless enemies” are the demonic creatures, not human beings, even if they are vicious, ignorant, and sinful. This explains why the clergy and people were brutally murdered in Russia for their faith in God. In America, President Woodrow Wilson advocated for democracy, peace, open borders for free trade, free maritime navigation that set the stage for later American cultural development. For us Orthodox Americans, 20th c. Russian Orthodoxy has a huge potential to teach us how to preserve our identity in the Orthodox Church, and not to invest our whole life in the world of change, the tribal media, and revolutionary sentiments. From our previous chapters on Russian literature, the intelligentsia basically created another culture within the country. The American landscape might be creating a similar situation where we have different cultures, not based on ethnicity or language, but on values and philosophies. Those ideas either destroy or create beauty as we’ve seen with the flowering of literature, iconography, and sainthood in Russia as well as with the reign of Peter the Great and the Bolshevik revolution.
But more importantly and more beautifully, we can become transfigured during times of peace and flourishing renaissances, as we’ve read previously. We can also become transfigured through persecutions and rejection from our culture and government. There is some value in studying history. But the only stable philosophy is Orthodoxy and the path of deification (salvation) we take starting here in this life, as the holy fathers have instructed us in wisdom. The Bolshevik government established “pathological” programs to wipe out religion. Like the Roman empire, the revolutionaries sought to remake the country’s people into themselves. But in reality Bolshevism and atheism, like secular institutions we’re familiar with, become a form of religion with ritual behaviors, hierarchical authority, dogmas, sacrifices, and altars of worship. Like in Babylon, statues of men and their ideology were built to be worshipped. This chapter can give us a wiser and stronger perspective as American Orthodox Christians.
This chapter also covers the Russian diaspora and the renewal of Orthodoxy. The last two smaller sections deal with the ancient Eastern Patriarchates, Orthodoxy in Europe, and Orthodoxy in America, Australia, and Asia – the ends of the earth. These sections could be filled out in much more detail for oursleves in the western hemisphere. When Orthodoxy started to arrive in these parts of the world, we discern thst the promise has been being fulfilled that all nations will be his inheritance. It’s a promise that was given to our father, Abahram with whom we eat, drink, and worship at the altar of the divine liturgy every Sunday. He too is part of our geneology, inheritance and identity.
In Russia, three major church jurisdictions were created, or separated from each other, and these formed the diaspora. The first was the synod led by Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) had the most people in numbers. They separated themselves from communion with the Moscow patriarchate during Patriarch Tikhon’s time. They called themselves the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia or the Church Abroad. Some refer to this as the “Karlovtsy schism” because of the synod that decided to separate met in Karlovtsy, Serbia. The second was led by Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky). They separated from the Karlovsty group. The third, least popular, and smallest were led by clergy and bishops who remained loyal to the Moscow patriarchate. It grew in number after WWII and they were viewed as tainted by their associations with the revolutionary government. Despite all those antagonistic relationships, the diaspora began to renew itself in the second and third quarters of the 20th c. For example, many of the intellectual and artistic groups of Russian Orthodox congregated at St. Sergius Institute in Paris. Tech companies like the monarchical Meta, the royally popular Steve Jobs, the New York Times and the “cathedrals” such as Yale University function exactly like religions in American culture, and all of these groups somehow sound so “synoptic” and preach their own good news. Similarly, the Russian intelligentsia were the educated and powerful who swayed society one way or another like waves on the ocean. The Russian scholars, artists, iconographers, theologians, philosophers were as brilliant as they were courageous. They are some of the best examples of how to flourish in the middle of chaos.
The fact that many educated Russians were acquainted with the French language, western European culture and philosophy, up-to-date on political movements helped them adapt and find renewal within Russian Orthodoxy. Much of previous Russian theology influenced by Latin began at the Kiev Theological Academy. Diaspora writers such as Archpriest Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, Protopresbyter John Meyendorff, Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanasiev, Archpriest Sergei Chetverikov, Nicholas Berdyaev and Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov returned to studying the fathers of the eastern Church.
The Paris School and its Orthodox revival guided many Orthodox to study St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Gregory Palamas and other eastern patristic writings. During the 1950s, Russians from the Paris School immigrated to the United States. For example, Georges Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann, and John Meyendorff – almost common names among American Orthodox converts. St. Sophrony of Essex moved from France to England. He was also connected to the school in Paris, and he was close to St. Silouan of Mt. Athos. He has a spiritual and scholarly understanding of the Orthodox idea of personalism. He taught that God’s love and revelation of Jesus Christ is lived through personal communion with the Holy Trinity. That God is personal in relationship to us and also exists, He is Existence, as hypostasis (Greek word for substance or person). Love and hypostasis, or personhood, are one and the same. God never destroys his creation forever, as the demonic creatures would wish to happen.
For this reason, nihilism is best described as the anarchical philosophy of demons. It’s the same lie whispered and the same doubts put into the minds of men. That there is no morality. There is no meaning. There is no God. Except for what we will to create. But God doesn’t annihilate his creation; annihilationism is a heresy some Christians have believed. The wisdom books of scripture teach that human nature is like gold, silver or iron that might need to be beaten and placed in the fire for the metals to be formed and shine in the sun, and that may come as misfortune on the righteous and wise. Human nature is good; vices and ignorance darken and clog our minds, the holy apostles and fathers have always taught. St. Sophrony teaches that “God is Light, in which there is no darkness, and we are called on to become light in the divine eternity” (We Shall See Him As He is, Essex, 1985, 204). If men love darkness, they think that they love and do the good. They actually do the opposite. They lack wisdom, as the scriptures instruct us and St. Sophrony of Essex describes, and his teaching is in tradition with St. Symeon the New Theologian and the hesychasts of the 14th c. that we read in previous chapters of this volume.
St. Sophrony teaches about the divine light, “Sometimes one does not feel matter: neither one’s own, nor the reality surrounding us, and one sees oneself as if one were light … This holy light, which manifests its power, brings with it humble love, banishes all doubt and fear, and leave all earthily cares far behind … it gives our spirit knowledge of another Existence that defies description; the mind stands still, having transcended thought by entering into a new form of life … our spirit triumphs: this Light is God …”