I must apologize to my many readers. The last few years have been as painful as the Bolshevik yoke for the church. Freedom for Orthodox in Russia is a curse as well as a blessing. A blessing in that now the church is free, a curse in that old debates over Orthodoxy, unsolved both in the post-Nikon era as well as the Sergian era, have resurfaced, leading to a situation as confusing as ever. For those who have made a hasty decision after the defection of the late Metropolitan +VITALY from the ROCOR in 2000 should be held in suspicion. A hasty decision is almost always based on emotion. In my case, I’ve suffered with this issue, gone back and forth on the question of the ROCOR union, and have had little peace, unlike those who made quick decisions on the matter, with little reflection.
It is always useful on any question to be able to make arguments, equally compelling, for both sides. I think, at one time or another, I’ve done that. One can easily make the argument that only the MP has the resources to rebuild Orthodox Russia, and that the spread of converts can be best ensured by active engagement with the non-Orthodox world. There are ecumenist and traditionalist elements to that argument.
Nevertheless, far more important questions are brought up by the traditionalists, and by that term, I am referring to the two True Orthodox groups under +AGAFANGEL and +VALENTIN. Despite certain differences, they have an identical confession of faith. These are the question of integrity, and the relationship of the Orthodox struggler with the church.
Over the ast 15 years of full time research, I have come to the following conclusion: overwhelmingly, the main reason why the average churchgoer attends the mainline Orthodox church is that it is an “established” institution, large, with plenty of money and thus social respect. It is about acceptance, being “part of modern society,” and about the avoidance of the labels of “extremist” and “paranoid.” It has nothing to do with “canons” or the faith itself, but, in a society that worships structure, money, institutions and bureaucracies, the largest institution must be the right one.
Needless to say, this is a rather clamorous form of Baalism. Ultimately, those who fall into New Calendarism worship power. They worship institutions. It is the mass-society, “democratic” model of theology: those with the most votes win, and, further, deserve to win.
But the one place where this mentality, rather disturbing at any level, should not function is in reference to the church, which is identical with truth. Without the truth a church is just a slimy tax exemption. The main line of argument against J. S. Mill’s liberalism is that people do not have opinions based on research and logic, but they have opinions based on self-interest, or, barring that, the filling of some psychological void. If one believes this is true, one must, ipso facto, reject liberalism. Only a handful of independent specialists have actual “opinions,” which derive from years of research and struggle, rather than mass-prejudices, which animate the remainder of society.
As a result, in the age of massification and media-manipulation, the truth is usually buried, usually completely outside of the constricted mainstream vision. I became part or the True Orthodox Church of Greece because I saw a group of people who make the Orthodox life the center of their being, and were willing to take all risks to make that real. I saw integrity, an integrity which fully integrated the truth with its attendant pain and struggle. With the New Calendarists, I saw opportunism and an unreflective attachment to institutions and offices. I saw this even among my many friends with in “world Orthodoxy.” Where in the former I saw struggle, the latter I saw smug triumphalism. With the former, I saw a group of people who the world hated; they were persecuted, called filthy names, assaulted in every conceivable way. Today, when the TOC is not under physical attack, the OCA and the Salibites (AOC) have resorted to rumor-mongering and name-calling. For the New Calendarist, the world has accepted them. The New Calendarists do not suffer for their faith, as the world not only loves them, but, as in the case of the OCA and the former Soviet MP, bankrolls them. Hence, as the scripture says, “love for the world means alienation from God” (James 4:4).
The same can be applied to the Russian situation. The compromise of Sergius, starting in 1927 and ending only at his death in 1944, was the exact opposite of Christianity. Christianity does not make compromises, and is willing, despite everything, to embrace suffering if need be. Sergius and his friends thought only of survival, not of integrity. They worshiped the golden image on the plain of Dura, while the three children went into the catacombs; like Solomon, whose political alliances with the great powers of the Levantine world led to the worship of Baal in the temple, Sergius’ alliance with the USSR led to the elimination of Orthodox social teaching. St. John the Baptist preached until the women attached to Herod demanded his death. St. John Chrysostom preferred exile to accommodation with Eudoxia. All of the apostles, except St. John, were murdered. St. Joseph of Petrograd preferred death to accommodation with the USSR. Jeremiah and Isaiah all risked everything in preaching the truth to Israel. The court prophets, condemned by God in the Old Testament, preferred accommodation. Thousands of saints went to their death rather than worship the image of the Roman emperor. Why should the Patriarch of Moscow be any different? Or myself, for that matter? Abraham even was willing to sacrifice his own Son out of obedience for God. Yet I am to believe that Sergius’ pro-Soviet stances were legitimate because they were “well intentioned”? The church rejects accommodation. Among the Serbs and Montenegrins, Sergius would be placed in the category of those who converted to Islam to avoid the civil disabilities of Christians.
Sergius, from his infamous letter in 1927 to his creation of “patriarch” under Stalin in 1943, condemned all catacomb Christians and regularly passed along information to the NKVD concerning their whereabouts. While he stayed out of Soviet jails, he assisted in the persecution of his opponents, many of whom rotted in his place. He anathematized them, and, indeed, anathematized several people who later were canonized as Saints and Neo-Martyrs, in particular St. Joseph of Petrograd.
Sergius, under Stalin’s collectivization drive that ultimately killed 5 million people through starvation and destroyed Russian agriculture, anathematized everyone who refused to join the kolkhoz. For the True Orthodox, joining a collective farm was cohabitation with anti-Christ. But since Sergius was already doing this, he, without pressure from the NKVD, made it a central concern in the mid-30s to issue harsh condemnations of all who refused to join the collectives. This was done out of personal conviction, not out of necessary collaboration.
Sergius, when informed of the mass arrests of believers, ordered that local parish organizations were not allowed to offer memorial services for them, or for any believer who perished in the camps. Again, here, there was no state pressure. This is what the Moscow metropolia under Sergius had created. In an encyclical of 1930, Sergius openly claimed to the Orthodox world that there was no persecution of Orthodoxy in Russia. By the middle of the decade, the church, loyal to Ss. Tikhon and Joseph, had nothing to do with Sergius. Nearly all the bishops still alive from Tikhon’s time condemned Sergius and his policies. The majority of the faithful were either followers of the Jospehites, Tikhonites, the Buevitsy, the wanderers or of the TOC in Hiding. These were not sects, but simply local organizations of the Orthodox faithful. Eventually, after World War II, these local groups, according to NKVD estimates numbered maybe 10 million faithful, eventually merged into a loose organization that still exists today under +VANENTIN and +AGAFANGEL, the True Orthodox Christians. All were hunted by NKVD with the active participation of the Sergians. The NKVD also noted that nearly all the priests active in the camp system openly hated Sergius. Sergius, prior to World War II, only maintained a small organization of bishops personally loyal to him and screened by the intelligence services. Overwhelmingly, the Orthodox church supported to TOC in one form or another. For more information, see the well known work, The Russian Orthodox Church Underground by William Fletcher (Oxford, 1971). Dr. Fletcher came to the same conclusions given an exhaustive treatment of primary source documents.
St. Viktor of Glazov the New Martyr writes: “What is the benefit if we, having become, by God’s grace, temples of the Holy Spirit, become ourselves suddenly worthless, while at the same time receiving an ‘organization’ for ourselves? No. Let the material world perish. . .but the hardness of your heart has traversed far and there remains no hope of repentance for you. . .” This was addressed the Sergius and his declaration.
And again, “The Orthodox Church is the sole grace-giving church, in which by God’s grace out salvation from the life of perdition is accomplished. The falling away from Orthodoxy of the 'Renovationists’ as well as the perversion of the apostasy of the church by the ‘synodalists’ [i.e. Sergius and his group] deprive a man of the grace of salvation."
St. Joseph of Petrograd, the New Martyr writes: “In order to condemn and counteract the latest actions of Metropolitan Sergius, which are contrary to the spirit and the good order of the church, under present conditions we must depart from him and ignore his orders.”
St. Hierotheus the New Martyr of Nikolsk writes concerning Sergius: “. . .he has made use of deceit, calling his synod ‘Orthodox’ and Patriarchal, while in reality it is an organization that tramples down the canons: Metropolitan Peter, the Locum Tenens, did not give his approval for such a thing. . .” The revered new-martyr Alexis Bui (founder of the Buivestii) writes, “By his actions against the spirit of Orthodoxy, metropolitan Sergius as torn himself away from the unity with the Holy Catholic and Apostolic church and has forfeited the right of presidency of the church.”
Concerning those bishops who continued to commemorate Sergius, Neo-martyr Archbishop Pachomius (who later broke with Sergius) wrote: “Why do they not protest? Because they are isolated, and, as a result of this they are insufficiently informed, and they are not able to decide to express themselves in a final way with sufficient facts, all the more they know what significance will be given their response.” Of course, he is implying that all bishops who know all the facts have split from Sergius.
It behooves us to realize that on July 24 (os), Sergius declared that the sacraments of those who joined with Joseph or Pachomius are “without grace.” So again, like the Greek New Calendarists, it was the innovators who claimed that the resistors were graceless. Yet, the current MP (allegedly) venerates the “neo-martyrs,” all of which, to a man, were anathematized by their own organization. At the same time, those anathematized by the Sergians, the ROCOR, has now joined with the organization that has anathematized them and those who they revere as new martyrs. More than anything else, this is the reality of a “good canonical order” in the Russian church today. Even Kyrill of Kazan, a moderate on these things, eventually joined with the “schismatic and graceless” followers of St. Josef of Petrograd near the end of his life.
In response to all this, Sergius, true to form, informed the GPU on thee activities in order to facilitate their arrests.
After the non-aggression pact with Germany, Sergius was dispatched to the newly acquired areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Poland where many Orthodox churches were still open. He was sent to neutralize these parishes and bring them all under his jurisdiction. When Hitler invaded the USSR, Sergius claimed that the USSR “fought under the sign of the cross,” and condemned those who supported the invasion.
Hence, it become nearly impossible to claim that the Moscow Patriarchate is in any way a successor of Tikhon. The synod that created the Patriarchate under Stalin was invalid in that it was entirely controlled by state forces for an atheistic agenda. And that Sergius was not accepted by any of the surviving bishops under Tikhon as a legitimate head of the church. Hence, the current MP is not Orthodox.
The organization of both the Old Believers after 1666 and that of the True Orthodox church should be teaching us something. That the healthiest model of church organization is the autonomous parish and skete, a large number of house chapels and a rejection of the world, wherever possible. Under the harshest conditions imaginable, the Orthodox faith was maintained by this structure (or lack thereof). If anything the experience of suffering made the faithful more fervent, while modernist Orthodoxy is purely the creation of comfortable hierarchs in the west, with substantial institutions and grants.
While Sergius and his successors had large parishes and a well organized institution, Orthodoxy existed in house chapels and underground sketes. Orthodoxy, for a very long time, has not been the provenance of organization, but of the organism, the truth in motion; the Logos manifest in time and space. As in Byzantium, where emperors persecuted Orthodoxy in the name of heresy after heresy, and the Russian Tsars assaulted the Old Belief in a regular basis, the institutional nature of the church is the least trustworthy, and can turn on the Orthodox in a moment.
Our era is no different. Though the Orthodox are not openly persecuted, the System has far more subtle methods to brainwash the population. Television, pornography, now mainstream and supported by corporate capital, and the corrupt university system have made certain that the old ways of thinking are buried under the crass appeal to passions and power. Fearful of open debate, they have created structures of social engineering that the USSR simply did not have. The result: 35,000 suicides every year in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of these by white males. A huge upsurge in female domestic violence with little state action against them. 3700 abortions per day in America. 118 million prescriptions in 2005 for anti depressants in the U.S. According to the British press, hospital admissions for abuse of illegal drugs have tripled over the last five years. However one looks at it, these are the results of “technological progress,” liberalism and modern culture.
At the present time there are many suicides taking place in the world. Both from disbelief and from lack of patience. They do not want to endure anything. If the Lord had not given to man the nature desire to life, maybe all would kill themselves–Elder Joseph of Optina.
Why do men learn through pain and suffering and not through pleasure and happiness? Very simply because pleasure and happiness accustom one to satisfaction with the world, whereas pain and suffering drive one to seek a more profound happiness beyond the limitations of this world–Fr. Seraphim Rose.
As a result, the retreat from the world, rather than “engagement” with it, as the OCA/MP complex demands, is necessary. The building of alternative structures of education, worship, economics and finance are absolute necessary to preserve the faith, not to mention our very health, both mental and physical. Among the Old Belief, this was successful, with fairly well off communities and a merchant class that was willing to finance them, the Old Faith retained its integrity almost completely outside of society. In America, the Amish and Hasidic Jews have done the same. The communities they control render the outside world largely irrelevant. Just in my own south Pennsylvania neighborhood, the Amish have their own schools, dairy farms, creameries and churches. Are the Orthodox so incompetent that this is out of the question for them? Is their faith so ephemeral and superficial?
The fathers say,
The modernists see these quotes, they ooh and ahh over them, but they do not penetrate. They are meaningless statements “from a long time ago,” in an era that is not ours. Hence, they are irrelevant. The True Orthodox must live them.
For our part, we are powerless against the System. The only way out is to build parallel institutions in every aspect of life. Pool our resources in our own credit unions and erect our own schools, parks, museums, coffee shops and bookstores, eventually with the goal not of overthrowing the System, but of rendering it irrelevant. Instead, the bulk of American Orthodoxy wants for the moment when Congress and the “Republicans” will come to save us. These people the world loves, and they have no enmity for it. As a result, they can no longer be considered Orthodox in any meaningful sense. To hold that the “rich tradition” of Orthodox enhances out “diversity” is to worship the world and its power over ideas.
This is beginning in Russia, where the synods of +VALENTIN and +AGAFANGEL are counseling their faithful to flee the world, and the increasing western domination over the Russian media and economy. For their part the MP is engaging in their normal compromise, talking about “engagement” with the world. Hence, the resistance synods are broke, while the MP is increasingly wealthy, and, as always, an integral part of the WCC and the ecumenical movement. I can no longer say that the modernist Orthodox are worthy of the name, they must be repudiated and avoided at all costs.