Trying not to limit himself to repeating the claims of the usual state propaganda in the context of the universal conflict between Russia and the West, the Patriarch of Moscow wanted, a few days ago in St. Petersburg, to delve deeper with philosophical and literary arguments into the reasons why Russia feels today called to spread the “great values” that supposedly universal society has decided to renounce.
Patriarch Kirill Gundjaev of the Russian Orthodox Church spoke at the 10th Forum of “Unitary Cultures” in St. Petersburg, in the solemn hall of the Mariinsky Palace of the local Parliament, on the theme “Culture in the 21st century: sovereignty or globalism?”, to reiterate the fundamental theses of the mission of the “Russian world” in contemporary reality. Trying not to limit himself to repeating the assertions of the usual state propaganda in the context of the universal conflict between Russia and the West, the patriarch wanted to delve deeper with philosophical and literary arguments into the reasons why today Russia feels called to spread the “great values” that this universal society has decided to renounce.
In a way, this is about rediscovering the fundamental guiding role of the Orthodox Church in militaristic Russia, a role that Kirill had to cede to Putin during the conflicts of the last two decades, starting with the war with Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and finally the invasion of Ukraine. Initially, the patriarch had not supported the radicalisation of the confrontation decided by the president, but in the last two and a half years of war he could not (or did not want to) do anything other than support the justifications of the conflict for the defence of traditional values that the degraded West would like to erase from the consciousness of Ukrainians, Russians and all peoples historically linked to the “spiritual beacon” of super-Orthodox Moscow. The patriarchate has promoted this ideological line since the end of the 1990s, and perhaps now realises that it has gone too far in its claims to a global definition of “religious and cultural truth”.
It is no coincidence that Kirill began his speech by emphasizing the Petersburg identity, for which “the small homeland always remains the city on the Neva,” which represents the westernmost part of Russian identity, from a cultural rather than a geographical point of view. The inhabitants of St. Petersburg, according to the Patriarch, “have never lost the inner spiritual, cultural and intellectual connection with the city,” from which, moreover, comes President Vladimir Putin himself, who, unlike Kirill, belongs rather to the less evolved and less erudite segment of the northern capital, as Putin himself often claims, defining himself as a “man of the people” and certainly not as an intellectual of the aristocratic elite.
Kirill’s speech then takes on a deeper and more solemn tone, when he asserts that “serious reasoning about culture must always be axiological, that is, in the dimension of values,” elevating the definition that refers precisely to “traditional values,” repeated ad nauseam by Putin and all Russian politicians, which has almost no real content. On the other hand, “culture is what carries values within itself,” explains the patriarch, otherwise “without values no culture survives, and turns to dust… we know these cataclysms that have destroyed entire civilizations.” This is the challenge that Russian Orthodoxy wants to launch to the entire world: the preservation of tradition as a guarantee of the survival of true civilization, the “mechanism of transmission of values.”
With a series of scholarly quotes, Kirill discusses the very origin of the term “culture” from the concept of “cult,” which justifies “the axiological approach: what has value is what is holy for society in its historical development.” The prevalence of religion over philosophy is a very important theme for Kirill, who in his approach criticizes the main theorists of Western rationalism, from August Comte to Ludwig Feuerbach, passing through “as we Russians know well,” Karl Marx. The patriarch has often linked this “positivist drift” to the heritage of Latin scholasticism, a classic argument in theological controversies between Catholics and Orthodox, but now he tries to go further, since “in our times this claim of philosophical superiority over religion is now recognized as inconsistent, especially given the consequences of the drama of humanistic atheism of the twentieth century.”
The challenge today, according to Kirill, is to find a new meaning of life in global societies, which have lost the sources of true spirituality. Marxist philosophy claimed that man “lives for future generations, but this is absurd, because then what value can your personal life have?” If man is only a “transmission belt,” those who come after us will also live without meaning to their existence. It is “a destructive relationship with the human person, with the rational being that God has destined for higher purposes,” says the patriarch. A new spirituality is needed. paideiaa process of education and formation of man, the Greek word that gives rise to the true meaning of “culture.”
Today’s world is no longer capable of forming, or even transmitting, “physical culture and aesthetic sense,” and that is why it is now necessary “to make every effort to defend and protect the very foundations of culture, like a farmer who does not forget the seeds in the ground, because they would be drowned by wild nature.” This is precisely the image that the patriarch wants to convey when he compares the Russian concern for values with the “uncultivated jungle” of the West and of universal society in general, in what he calls the Raskulturivaniethe “deculturation” of the world. An example of this degradation was the last Olympic Games in Paris, with its sacrilegious symbolism and gender controversies: “When I saw the images of the inaugural parades on the Seine – the patriarch recalls – I said to myself: you cannot offend God in this way! This is an incredible regression of Western civilization, which tries to drown all other cultures in itself.”
Today’s men, according to Kirill, “continue to say the same words and repeat habits, without asking themselves anything about their origin and meaning.” To say thank you, Russians use the word Spasibowhich derives from Spasi Bog“God save you,” and there are many examples that the patriarch recalls to show the roots of the meaning of everyday life, which must be rediscovered to avoid Raskulturivanie and not allow it to become a despaira “dehumanization” in which “culture loses its soul.” The Patriarch recalls that “Christianity has never been the property of a single culture, it belongs to the world in its entirety,” and goes far beyond the concept of “Christian world,” because it values “each national culture as a treasure of the entire world.” Russian culture is no exception, but after having gone through particularly hard trials, “which it knew how to face with courage,” today it is the culture capable of “enriching the whole world” and of facing “globalism that nullifies and levels different cultures, trying to make all men equal… these men will no longer be able to transmit values to future generations, in the cancel culturethe culture of cancellation, the click culture where everything is allowed.”
In conclusion, Patriarch Kirill raises the question on which the entire world is divided today: “should the culture of the 21st century be sovereign or global?” and takes it to a deeper level: “should it be a culture or an anti-culture?” It is a question about “what should man be today,” and he proposes the answer of the 21st century: podviga monastic term that designates the sacrifice of the person for the common good. Finally, quoting the great Russian theologian Pavel Florensky, a martyr of Stalinist communism, he recalls his words from the concentration camp on the Solovki Islands: “Do not do anything without a true taste for life, because doing things in any way can make you lose the meaning of everything.”
The Russian patriarch echoes the reflections of many Orthodox ideologues, trying to avoid excessively banal and radical syntheses, appealing to thinkers such as the theologian and political scientist Aleksandr Shchipkov, who a few days ago published an essay on the “Crisis of the theory and practice of actions to defend human rights” in which he comments on the “problem of the conceptualization of liberal rights and the crisis of humanitarian institutions.” The Russians insist on demonstrating the weakness of the Western conception of freedom, which has become a “dogmatic doctrine,” a “false metaphysics” that makes it impossible to regain the true freedom of the “values” for which Russia is fighting today. There is a military war and an information war, but the Russians’ war is above all a war of principles and demands answers to the most profound questions of the contemporary world.
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