by Stefano Caprio

In a new essay, Aleksandr Šipkov goes so far as to point the finger at the philologist who, in the 1990s, helped Russia rediscover both Eastern and Western Christian traditions through his lectures. Why does today's Russia reject any convergence with the Christian culture of Eastern and Western Europe, presenting itself as the only true Church entrusted with a universal mission?

One of the leading ideologues of contemporary Russia's “Orthodox sovereignty”, Aleksandr Šipkov, rector of the Orthodox University of St. John the Theologian in Moscow and professor of philosophy at Lomonosov University, published an essay in the magazine “Vita Internazionale” entitled “The crisis of culturalism, or the Averintsev case”, explaining the reasons for the spread in Russia of the “Western model of development” to which Russians are now trying to react, both with war on the ground and with the recovery of their “cultural identity”.

Europe has sought to impose its own worldview since the Enlightenment, and according to Šipkov, “today Russia is trying to erase that influence” by recovering its own tradition of civilisation “different from Protestant modernism”, thus harking back to controversies of the last five centuries. This requires a “different assessment of values, rules and norms of daily life”, decreeing the “death of unfounded expectations and overcoming existential frustration, the feeling of an ideal void, such as that which today envelops Western man”. This condemnation of external influence has been decisive for Russian politics over the last thirty years of Putin's rule, and particularly in the last decade, in which every effort has been made to reject any expression of ‘foreign agents’, an action that is particularly common among sovereignist movements worldwide, as in the recent sensational decisions by US President Donald Trump to try to exclude foreign students from American universities.

As the Russian philosopher points out, this influence spilled over into the country “during our identity crisis in the late 1980s, dating back to the period of Gorbachev's perestroika and the end of the Soviet system, which was considered 'consistent” with traditional Russian identity. It is precisely the principles of the ideology of the “Russian world” of Vladimir Putin and the “Orthodox revival” in the interpretation of Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev) that express the underlying reasons for Russian hostility and military aggression towards the West, using the controversial relationship with Ukraine as a battleground that in reality extends far beyond its borders, the subject of unlikely negotiations in recent months.

The weakness of the Soviet regime in recent years, according to Šipkov's reconstruction, has exposed Russia to the “trap of globalist universalism”, which has led to total moral, cultural and social disorientation. Russia's current condition, thanks to its military response, can therefore be defined as “the beginning of the exit from the dead end, putting the scattered pieces back together”, but this requires a careful analysis of past mistakes. The “names of things” must therefore be “restored”, starting with the cultural-humanitarian sphere, as “the dismantling of the Soviet project began with changes to humanitarian standards and the imposition of new definitions of humanitarian space”. The Soviet Union did not in fact allow for the possibility of external “humanitarian aid”, whether in the social, health or economic fields, or especially in cultural and educational projects, as was the case in the last decade of the last century.

The philosopher and state theologian believes that “it all started with culture” in the last decades of the Soviet era, with the dissent of the samizdat, the theatrical avant-garde, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradžanov, and the whole new “cinematic trend” that invited the Soviet viewer to “repent”. Indeed, we remember the sensational effect of the 1989 documentary Ispoved (Confession), for which Paradžanov wrote the screenplay, which attracted huge audiences in the Soviet Union and won numerous international awards, recounting the lives of young drug addicts in the Soviet Union at that time and demolishing the image of the “socialist paradise” propagated for many decades. Šipkov's criticism is even more radical towards Tarkovsky's work, which, as early as 1962, during the 'Khrushchev Thaw', had made his debut with Ivan's Childhood, the story of a child during the Second World War, alternating the raw realism of war with continuous dreamlike digressions, distancing himself from the Soviet cinematic landscape that only exalted the heroism of the victors, a theme that has become highly topical again in Putin's Russia. And even in his subsequent masterpieces, from Andrei Rublev in 1966, Solaris in 1972, The Mirror in 1974 and Stalker in 1979, Tarkovsky reconstructs in an absolutely original, autobiographical and critical way the entire path of Russian consciousness, destroying Soviet stereotypes, not to mention the films he made in exile, such as Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). Šipkov defines these examples of cultural reworking as “streams of milk of rediscovered freedom, which ended up on the shores of consciousness like sour curds”.

A “new system of coordinates, based on scientific knowledge and not on political rhetoric, became necessary, and a humanitarian vision imposed itself”, a search for new foundations for society and the political system to replace the Soviet communist one.

Here Šipkov lists a number of names of exponents of Russian culture in this phase of change, such as the linguist and Americanist Vjačeslav V. Ivanov, one of the founders of the “comparative school” in Russian universities; Slavicist Vladimir Toporov, founder of the “fundamental myth theory” in the comparison between Indo-European cultures; the great architect of semiotics Jurij Lotman and Orientalist Lev Gumilev with his 'passionaria theory of ethnogenesis', and the Russianist Aleksandr Pančenko, who reinterpreted Russia's value system starting from the 18th century. All these intellectuals were defined as “masters of thought” who led authentic Russian self-awareness to the “decline of culturology”.

Even before the direct influence of Western associations and initiatives, back in Soviet times between Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, the Putin-Kirill philosopher highlights a “decline” of the true Russian spirit, identifying one particularly significant figure in this regard, the philologist and literary critic Sergei Averintsev, one of the most influential intellectuals in post-Soviet Russia.

Averintsev is heir to many other exponents of an “alternative culture” that was not openly dissident but very active in the academic world of the last decades of the Soviet era, despite all the limitations of censorship.

Now he is accused by Šipkov of having “assumed an aura of sacredness” for his lectures and conferences rediscovering the Eastern and Western Christian traditions, as evidenced in one of his few publications, “The Poetics of Ancient Byzantine Literature”. The work, which was widely circulated in the 1990s and published in many languages in 2004, after his sudden death in Vienna, considered by Šipkov to be a “new symbolic gospel of Russian Westernism”.

This examination of Russian culture highlights a factor that is truly decisive today for the self-awareness of political and ecclesiastical power, which supports the absolute purity and originality of the Russian variant of Christianity and its system of moral values, in opposition to that inherited from Western Catholicism and Protestantism, which, according to this interpretation, have “appropriated” even the Byzantine tradition, as Averintsev's work shows.

Šipkov's Russia therefore rejects the convergence of the great strands of Christian spirituality and culture in Eastern and Western Europe, presenting itself as the only true Church entrusted with a universal mission.

The philosopher expresses admiration for Averintsev's personality, capable of evoking the fathers of the Church and ancient Christian literature even in times of Soviet censorship, but in his opinion he was “an unwitting victim of the new ideology of liberal values”, against which Russia is forced to fight today.

In an attempt to link Orthodox symbolism with Western literature, in a “common vision of the ages” and a kind of “syncretism of pagan and biblical cultures”, Averintsev sought to harmonise Christianity and secularism, provoking a contradiction typical of the current worldview, which Šipkov defines as the “temptation of culturalism”, a kind of “contemporary heresy”.

The philosopher uses a term already employed by other Russian historians of theology such as Georgij Florovskij, that of “pseudomorphosis”, a denial and betrayal of authentic tradition that has crept into Russia since modern times, particularly through Petro Mogila's theological academy in Kiev in the early 17th century, which used Latin scholasticism.

This points to the deep roots of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which began to separate itself clearly from Moscow at that time, highlighting its own identity as a “bridge between East and West”.

It should be noted that Averintsev reinterpreted the Russian idea of the “Third Rome” by linking it to an ancient dimension of culture, ancient Rome itself being a “third figure” after Troy (the Eastern world) and Alba Longa (Latium vetus in the West), and also Constantinople as a descendant of Troy and Rome, to suggest that there is no single heir to Christianity and ancient culture, but that every expression in every part of the world makes an authentic contribution to universal consciousness, something that Russians refuse to admit under any circumstances.

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