by Stefano Caprio

There is an essential and original link between the Orthodox faith and power, as already shown in the 11th century by Metropolitan Hilarion's “Discourse on Law and Grace”, the “manifesto” of the Russian faith. Apart from Philip II of Moscow, who rebelled against the massacres of the first Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible at the end of the 16th century and was suffocated in his monastic cell as a result, there are no known cases of other ecclesiastical opponents of the monarchs' holy wars.

One of the most dramatic and controversial issues of Putin's Russia's war season concerns its religious foundation, the proclamation of “holy war” by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and most of the Russian Orthodox clergy, apart from a small minority of pacifist priests who were immediately marginalised, expelled from the clerical state and exiled abroad.

The impression is that this is a return to medieval interpretations of the religious war between Christians and Muslims, with rhetoric worthy of the Crusades of a thousand years ago, and there is certainly some truth in this view, but not as a Russian imitation of a Latin and Western past, rather as a return to its own origins of millennial baptism.

While Pope Urban II was delivering his homily to incite the conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Land at the Council of Clermont in 1095, Kievan Rus' was ending the first century of its history in fratricidal struggles between various princes, and shortly thereafter it would be submerged and invaded by Asian populations and Mongol hordes, disappearing from history for two centuries.

The reinterpretation of ancient history, imposed by today's leaders as an essential foundation for justifying the current war, focuses precisely on the events and testimonies of that early period, from the Baptism of Kiev in 988 to the Tartar invasion in 1240, because all subsequent periods in the history of Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia, and Kiev and Odessa in Ukraine, as well as Belarus, involving Poles, Moldovans and Romanians, Caucasians and Central Asians from the Tsarist and Soviet empires, depend on the interpretation of the first legendary “Russian century”.

Siberian anthropologist Roman Shamolin, rector of the Open University of Novosibirsk, proposes revising the “manifesto of Russian faith”, one of the most striking texts of Kievan Rus', namely the “Discourse on Law and Grace” by Metropolitan Hilarion, the first high-ranking ecclesiastical hierarch of Russian ethnicity imposed by Prince Yaroslav the Wise in the first half of the 11th century, without the canonical blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

It is a panegyric to Prince Vladimir the Baptist and the ‘new and blessed people’ of Rus', in comparison with all other peoples and those of ‘other faiths’, beginning with the ‘perfidious Jews’ according to the Pauline contrast between the ‘people of the Law’ and those of Grace that comes from God. Hilarion solemnly affirms that “the Law has passed away, but grace and truth have filled the whole earth, and faith has spread among all nations, even to our Russian nation”.

The anti-Jewish polemic, rather classic in medieval times, extends in this text to all peoples who have not recognised Christ, or who have in some way betrayed him, falling into heresy and regressing into idolatrous faith.

Thus, ‘God has laid down the law to prepare men to receive truth and grace; so that human nature, governed by the law, fleeing idolatrous polytheism, might learn to believe in the one God; so that humanity, like a contaminated vessel, after being washed by the law and circumcision as by water, might receive the milk of grace and baptism.’

And the baptism referred to is above all that of Kiev, the new beginning of Christian history, because ‘we do not write for the uneducated, but for those who have a deep love for books; we do not write for the enemies of God, the heterodox, but for his children; not for strangers, but for the heirs of the kingdom of heaven’.

Divine grace is reflected in the one true Orthodoxy, which elevates the Russian ‘heirs’ above the law and sin, and ‘Christian salvation is beneficial and generous, for it extends to all the ends of the earth’, and so ‘although the Jews were before the Christians, the Christians became greater than the Jews by the grace of Christ’.

Ilarion's Discourse then focuses on praising the powerful, and the great baptiser Vladimir of Kiev, the prince ‘equal to the apostles’, extending his praise to his son Yaroslav the Wise, who, by defeating his half-brother Svyatopolk, had restored peace between the principalities of Rus'.

There is therefore an essential and original link between the Orthodox faith and power, the so-called “symphony” of Byzantine tradition, but revised in the Russian “apostolic” version.

"And so it was: the faith that brings grace spread throughout the earth and reached our Russian people. The swamps of the Law have dried up, but the source of the Gospel has swelled with water and covered the earth, spreading to us," relying on the wisdom of the princes, who will be in some way compared or contrasted with the role of metropolitans and patriarchs only in brief flashes of Russian history.

In recent times, Patriarch Kirill showed Tsar Putin the way only in the early years, then submitted to his will and his ardour in the conflict with enemy peoples, from the West rather than ancient Asia, but without any major differences in content.

As noted by Russia's most renowned church historian and theologian, Deacon Andrei Kuraev, now exiled and transferred to the jurisdiction of Constantinople, ‘throughout the entire period of Kievan Rus', there was not a single year without internal wars between principalities and external wars with other peoples, and there are very few cases in which metropolitans tried to act as peacemakers, asking the powerful to reduce their ambitions and lay down their arms’.

The tendency was rather the opposite, and any conflict, even in the subsequent centuries of the tsars, was justified and ‘blessed’ as a defence of the true faith against enemies, as the 19th-century historian Nikolai Kostomarov writes, recalling when Prince Ivan I Kalita, who in the mid-14th century wanted to impose Moscow as the dominant principality, ‘raised the whole Russian land up to Novgorod to take up arms against Pskov, and Metropolitan Feognost launched a curse and excommunication against the enemies, blessing Ivan's armies’.

Apart from Metropolitan Filipp II of Moscow, who rebelled against the massacres of the first Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible and was therefore suffocated at the end of the 16th century in the monastic cell where he had been imprisoned, there are no known cases of other ecclesiastical opponents of the holy wars of the monarchs of Russia.

As Metropolitan Hilarion stated, ‘what was said of the peoples has been fulfilled upon us: “The Lord has bared his holy arm before all peoples; all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God”’. The greatness of Rus' was exalted as that of the people called to save the earth from all evil, for "Rome praises Peter and Paul, through whom it acquired faith in Jesus Christ, Son of God; Asia, Ephesus and Patmos praise St John the Theologian; India praises St Thomas; Egypt praises St Mark; every land, city and people honours and glorifies its teachers, who taught the Orthodox faith. We too, therefore, as far as we are able, will give praise, however small, to our teacher and preceptor, who accomplished great and magnificent deeds, the great prince of our land Vladimir, grandson of Igor the Old, son of the valiant Svyatoslav, who, reigning in their time, were famous for their courage and valour in many lands, and are still remembered and glorified today for their victories and their strength. In fact, they did not rule a poor and unknown nation, but the Russian nation, which is known and celebrated throughout the world."

In this universal memory of the ancient Christian kingdoms, Hilarion omits only the empire of Constantinople and the praise of the apostle Andrew, which had evidently been set aside by the Russians, having taken their place in the communion of defenders of the faith.

According to Šamolin, ‘in Russian religiosity there is a clear predominance of form over content, image over thought, object over subject, ritual over feeling, and submission to power instead of any reflection on the meaning of faith.’ Ultimately, ‘a dominance of the immanent over the transcendent’ since the origins of Christianity in Kiev, further exacerbated in the Muscovite variant and remaining in subsequent ones, from the “Western” empire of Peter the Great to the ‘atheist’ one of Joseph Stalin, who restored ecclesiastical structures to support the war against Nazism.

Whatever the regime in power, even that of Vladimir Putin's “illiberal” democracy, the guarantee of its correspondence to the history of the “Russian world” is always the obeisance of religion, revised according to the canons of the Russian mission to the whole world.

As Ilarion of Kiev recalled, 'if anyone was not baptised out of love, he did so out of fear of the one who ordered it, for in him true faith was united with authority; then the darkness of idolatry began to dissipate, and the dawn of true faith appeared, then the darkness of enslavement to demons disappeared, and the sun of the Gospel illuminated the earth'.

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