The patriarch and the pope

Within the early Nineteen Forties, on the top of of the Second World Conflict, Pope Pius XII, who had virtually nothing to say in regards to the Holocaust going down on the time, delivered a number of impassioned sermons as regards to human dignity. Immediately as Moscow continues its assaults on Ukraine, Russia’s Patriarch Kirill not solely refuses to denounce the battle however has additionally brazenly justified his nation’s aggression. It’s intriguing that, just like the wartime Pope, Kirill too has contributed to a human rights discourse centred across the notion of dignity.

The speak about dignity coming from non secular leaders, who care little in regards to the dignity and struggling of victims of genocide or battle, shouldn’t be merely a matter of hypocrisy. It’s, in actual fact, very in step with a sure, intolerant elaboration of the idea of dignity. So, nevertheless totally different the 2 conditions are – the Nineteen Forties and now – what they share in widespread is an understanding of the dignity of man, which below the disguise of the language of Enlightenment philosophy, promotes a deeply conservative, intolerant challenge. In each instances, the idea of human dignity articulated is explicitly and deliberately used as a device in opposition to liberal political philosophies – that of the French Revolution in the course of the Second World Conflict and that of ‘the collective, liberal West’ (to make use of a standard trope of the pro-Kremlin Russian media) in our day. Certainly, the place of the Russian Orthodox Church now bears robust comparability to Catholic pondering from the years earlier than the top of the Second World Conflict. The present tendency to delve into Russian literature and tradition for elucidation of a few of the rhetoric coming from the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate has obscured what’s principally a standard theme among the many Christian proper, each within the West and in Russia.

In his ebook Christian Human Rights (2015), Samuel Moyn has proposed that the human proper discourse of the primary twenty years following the Second World Conflict was the invention of Catholic thinkers within the late Thirties and Nineteen Forties. Human rights, he argues, was subsequently a challenge of the Christian proper quite than the secular left. The secular, liberal vocabulary of the French Revolution, to which the notion of ‘rights’ belongs, was appropriated and Christianized in ways in which promoted non secular and conservative values. The emphasis, on this Christianized model of human rights, fell not on particular person emancipation, however on ‘policing the borders and bounds on which threatening enemies loom’.

Not surprisingly, Moyn’s thesis has provoked disagreements on varied grounds. There are, for instance, different variations of Christian human rights, which derive not from the appropriate, however from the left and are knowledgeable by varied types of Christian humanism. The bigger debate is past the scope of this evaluation. What’s thought-provoking is an commentary Moyn makes on two sermons given by Pope Pius XII on Christmas Eve, in 1942 and in 1944. In these addresses, the Pope emphasised the hyperlink between dignity and rights and, extra particularly, interpreted dignity as a basis for rights. There’s a lengthy historical past to the connection between human dignity and human rights. Within the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Catholic Church suppressed the language of rights due to the unavoidable affiliation of ‘rights’ with the liberal concepts promoted by the revolutionaries in France. Within the Nineteen Forties, the Pope re-introduced and popularized the notion of rights in Catholic discourse in ways in which shed its liberal connotations. The concept dignity is the inspiration of rights got here to be fitted into an total framework, shifting the emphasis from the person to the group, which grew to become the guardian of Christian morality and God’s pure legislation.

With out claiming any direct affect, I see the identical thought now underpinning the Russian Orthodox Church’s pondering on these points. The argument, elaborated in a number of necessary paperwork issued by the Russian Orthodox Church, is laid out as follows: dignity shouldn’t be merely one proper amongst others, it supersedes all different rights. However right here comes the twist – dignity implies dwelling a dignified life. These, who persist in sin, and so refuse to steer a dignified life, find yourself having their rights restricted, if not shedding them altogether. Humanity is cut up not solely into sinners and saints, however into those that deserve rights and those that don’t. The way in which that is elaborated and worded makes an intentional reference to the Jap Orthodox mental custom, thereby giving mental respectability to the place of the Russian Orthodox Church. Therefore a principle that’s – as I’d argue – each trendy and comparatively new gives the look of getting an extended and distinguished family tree.

There’s a distinction between tsennost’ (worth) and dostoinstvo (dignity), the Patriarch tells us. Each human being has tsennost’, however just some have dostoinstvo since just some select to steer a dignified life. This distinction is modelled on the ‘picture’/ ‘likeness’ scheme, which runs by means of some patristic texts and was borrowed from there by Russian non secular philosophers resembling Vladimir Soloviev and his followers.  The divine picture is inherent to each human being as such. Nevertheless, likeness to God is a risk open to man that he/she wants to realize.

Patriarch Kirill. Picture by way of Wikimedia Commons

The picture/likeness distinction is a component of the assumption, central to Jap Orthodox theology, that, on account of Christ’s Incarnation, man is God-like and as such has absolute worth (the Orthodox doctrine of theosis or deification teaches that humanity has the capability to take part in a course of resulting in an rising likeness or union with God). This concept loved an intriguing afterlife in Russian non secular philosophy by means of Soloviev’s idea of God-manhood (bogochelovechestvo). There’s a ‘divine actuality’ to man, Soloviev claims. The ‘human particular person has absolute, divine significance’ and that is ‘a vital reality implied by Christianity’.

Immediately, the Russian Orthodox Church has turned this theological and religious-philosophical custom – initially animated by concern with the sanctity of every particular person’s life – on its head. Nathaniel Wooden noticed lately that ‘the Russian Orthodox Church’s use of the picture/likeness distinction won’t solely justify restrictions on rights’, but additionally ‘threatens to cut back at the very least some individuals to a lesser standing’. This travesty of Orthodox non secular thought emerges from attitudes in direction of liberalism that the Russian Orthodox Church shares with conservative Catholic circles, energetic within the years earlier than the top of the Second World Conflict.

That is the background to the curious logic, underlying a few of Patriarch Kirill’s sermons for the reason that battle in Ukraine began. For example, on 6 March 2022, Forgiveness Sunday and two weeks into Russia’s invasion, the Patriarch delivered a sermon within the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Allowing for his earlier pronouncements, the truth that Kirill used the event to justify the Russian invasion got here as no shock to many. What could have been much less anticipated was that the Patriarch’s line of argument in assist of the battle was primarily based nearly fully on denouncing homosexual rights. Kirill was notably incensed by homosexual parades. It might not be instantly clear how a homosexual parade in Berlin, for instance, would possibly justify Russia’s shelling of Kiev, however anybody who had been watching carefully was unlikely to be stunned. The Russian Orthodox Church has explicitly said on quite a few events that homosexual rights and human rights usually symbolize the hallmark of a Western civilisation that threatens the very basis of Russia’s distinctive function on the earth. Thus, in its Fundamental Instructing, the Church warns that ‘human rights safety is usually used as a plea to appreciate concepts which in essence radically disagree with Christian educating’. The concepts cited embody ‘sexual lechery and perversions’, abortion, euthanasia, and so forth. In his sermons and writings, Patriarch Kirill at all times makes certain so as to add homosexuality to the record of transgressions.

It needs to be acknowledged that these concepts have an extended historical past in Russia and had been expressed, in a single type or one other, by thinkers with out whom it will be troublesome to think about trendy European tradition. Dostoevsky involves thoughts. On the similar time, it additionally must be acknowledged that, immediately, liberal rights stay below assault in lots of elements of the Western world, together with in nations on the forefront of the opposition to Putin’s unlawful battle. Contemplate some present developments in Poland, for example. There may be, on this sense, nothing sometimes Russian or Jap Orthodox in regards to the core argument inside this discourse, regardless of the Patriarch might want us to consider. The notion of a civilizational opposition between Russia and the West, ‘the conflict of civilizations’ relished by many Russian thinkers and, these days, popularised within the West, could be a lot overstretched. On this explicit case, it’s not Dostoevsky however Pope Pius XII who sounds closest to the Patriarch.

The competition that the rights of some people or teams, who don’t conform to the understanding of ‘dignified life’ prevalent in a society at any explicit time, ought to be curtailed has at all times been harmful and morally repugnant. In the course of the Second World Conflict, it gave the Pope license to ignore the genocide dedicated in opposition to Jews and others, and to focus as a substitute on basic problems with Christian morality that, in his view, would assure dignity. Now, within the face of the continuing battle in Ukraine, what weighs closely on the Patriarch’s thoughts is that in some Western nations LGBTQ+ individuals (who lack dignity in his eyes) have gained rights – a quite latest growth, to make certain, so hardly a trademark of Western civilization.

As a textbook instance of how simply depriving one particular person of rights can slip into depriving another particular person or group of rights, the Patriarch has ended up ignoring the rights and dignity of a few of his personal flock. There’s a sure sense of tragic irony in Kirill’s predicament. By selecting brazenly to assist Putin’s battle, he has given his blessing to 1 a part of his flock (Orthodox Christians in Russia) killing one other a part of that very same flock (Orthodox Christians in Ukraine). It ought to be famous that Ukraine is a majority Orthodox nation: in keeping with a Pew Analysis Centre ballot taken in 2015, 78% of Ukrainians recognized as Orthodox Christian. At the beginning of the battle, this sector of the inhabitants belonged to 2 ecclesiastical our bodies – one below the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and the opposite below the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate. In different phrases, in early March, when Kirill gave his sermon, he was nonetheless the accepted non secular chief of many Ukrainians and at the very least a few of them had been listening rigorously to what he needed to say.

No matter particular person members of the Patriarch’s Ukrainian flock could have considered homosexual rights, it was not misplaced on them that their ‘shepherd’ (as Kirill referred to as himself) had not a phrase to say in regards to the plight of his congregation in Ukraine. Ukrainians had been apparently unconvinced that the actual menace got here from homosexuals quite than from the invading Russian military that was committing day by day atrocities in opposition to them. On 27 Might 2022, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared its independence from the Moscow Patriarchate. In doing so, it made it plain that this choice was a direct results of Kirill’s clumsy and callous efforts to justify an unjustifiable battle. Recalling the Pope’s chilling silence in the course of the Holocaust, the Patriarch not solely did not condemn Russia’s army aggression but additionally had nothing to say in regards to the struggling of the Ukrainian inhabitants. The truth that nearly all of victims of this battle had been his personal individuals – Christian Orthodox Ukrainians who had been a part of the Moscow Patriarchate – makes Kirill’s stance much more disturbing.

The writer wish to acknowledge the chance to debate elements of this text with mates and colleagues resembling Randall Poole, Ivan Krastev, and Valentin Ganev.