11/07/2017, 11.22
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Kirill: The Bolshevik Apocalypse caused by the betrayal of intelligentsia

by Vladimir Rozanskij

The Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow is among the few voices that seek to deepen the historical causes of the October Revolution, 100 years after its inception. In general, the Russians prefer the soap-opera of historical re-enactments full of intrigues and love affairs of the Tsarist past. The Russian soul polluted by the Western Enlightenment. 

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Today, November 7, is the anniversary of the October Revolution, the dramatic and apocalyptic event that changed the history of Russia and, to a large extent, that of the entire world. After a year of strenuous debates and embarrassed revelations, Russia has finally succeeded in burying the ghost that haunts its nights and blurs its future horizon.

It could be said that the heated debate surrounding the jubilee year in the country concerned the vacuous movie "Matilda", which is in reality little more than a cinematic transposition of soap opera clichés, with costume reconstructions of court intrigues and love stories of the bygone past. From the Tudors to the Borgias of Western TV series, following the historical re-enactments broadcast on a daily basis on TV screens, Russians are anxious to reclaim their history after so much Soviet censorship. And they like to see the reproductions of the Norman Varangian conquests, the cruelties of Ivan the Terrible, and the amphibious doubts of Boris Godunov, to once again witness the vicissitudes of the Romanov Tsar, the great Peter I to the many women of power of the eighteenth century, known as "the century of lovers", especially those of Catherine the Great.

Instead, the revolution and the grim communist regime, even though continually diminished in its magnitude, does not excite the fancy of the spectator. And the more in-depth reflections of gossip, such as those of the few philosophers or religious leaders, certainly not politicians, have fallen amid general indifference.

The pseudomorphosis of the Russian soul

Only the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev), the moral guide of post-communism, has again tried in recent days to recall the reasons that led Russia to deny its own history and, in his opinion, its vocation. Addressing the people after a liturgy in the cathedral of the Assumption at the Kremlin, the head of the Russian Church observed that "in the political situation of 100 years ago, unless we are conditioned by ideological perspectives, we can see and understand many things. The beginning of national diseases that led to that catastrophe must not be traced back to one or five or ten years earlier, but to at least 200 years before that again, and perhaps even more, when the spiritual foundations of the life of our highest level of society, the so-called elite, began to crumble. " The patriarch wanted to reiterate the classical thesis of orthodox public discourse that all began with the "pseudomorphosis" of the Russian soul, as theologian Georgij Florovskij said after the revolution.

The true Christian vocation of Russia was ruined by the infiltration of Western influences, the Scholastic school first followed by Enlightenment philosophies, when "people sold their souls and their own reason to what came from outside without any critical spirit, transforming and re-introducing their own faith, their own vision of the world, their own outlook on things under the influence of these ideas." The bearers of this infection, the ruling class to which Kirill refers, would not be so much politicians or aristocrats, but the so-called intelligentsia, the "traitorous" intellectuals who misled the people from the straight path.

This judgment recalls the reflections of Russian-post-revolutionary religious philosophers such as Berdjaev and Bulgakov, Frank and Losskij and many others who embarked in 1922 on the so-called "ship of philosophers", which created the great culture of Russian emigration to France and throughout the whole world. In Italy, for example, the poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov, a disciple of Vladimir Solovev, converted to Catholicism to testify to the need to breathe with the "two lungs" of Eastern and Western Christianity and defeat enlightened secularism in all its dimensions.

The same patriarch Kirill finally admitted that the Church has been reduced to silence in these two centuries not only by communist persecution, but also by the modern mentality that wants to confine it to the inner sphere of consciousness. According to Kirill, "even today there are certain powers in society that do not want the Church to proclaim the truth to its people ... they tell us: go into your churches and close the doors, and you can do what you like there."

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