“Angel Unawares” by Timothy P. Schmalz depicting the Holy Family among migrants and refugees
The war, just as any organized killing, is madness by definition. Sometimes it is forced. And that merciless war that is being waged against peaceful people for the sake of protection from an enemy invented along the way challenges any rationality and humanity. Nevertheless, it is fully supported not only by the ossified brain of a geopolitician, but also by the pious heart of a believer. To understand that this is still possible is impossible to comprehend. If it happens, then to whom? And “is this even a person?” I want to ask in the words of Primo Levi's book about Auschwitz.
The other day I came across Andrey Kuraev's post about his disappointment in the church. Once he has joined one church, now it is something else.
“Today everything is different. Those humane ideas of Christian humanism have been rejected by the official church.”
If it hasn’t been written by the one claiming the glory of having read all the books, including those that expose “humanist ideas”, one could sympathetically smile at such naivety.
I try to fix my gaze on the Orthodox past, and I cannot find there the paved, trodden paths of "Christian humanism." We are not talking about compassionate people, “who laid down their lives for their friends”, who helped, sacrificed themselves, the righteous of the world and just the righteous, people, with or without religion, as there were, are and will be. But is there some special store of humanism in the church vaults?
What is humanism? How does it define a person? One defines a person as "the measure of all things, insofar as they exist," like Protagoras. The other defines a "shepherd of being", like Heidegger. And outside of philosophies, he is embodied in the statue of a beautiful young man named David, placed in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. In European history, humanism is sealed by the signatures of the nobles under the words of equality and fraternity, as in Pasternak. Or it simply responds with mercy to the fallen, like in Pushkin. Just grace that doesn't talk about itself. But these humanisms have no direct relation to church affairs. They don't dwell inside the fence.
Let’s say that “man is something that needs to be overcome,” in the words of Nietzsche, a passionate atheist. No, the Holy Fathers would correct, not to overcome, but to transform. The person who is, you, me, a passer-by is not real, not genuine. The genuine one is the one that God designed and created, and not a sinner who deviated from the path. Such, perhaps, is Orthodox humanism. Beautiful and deep. But if you read the Gospel, there Christ pities the passers-by. Straight from the street. He heals one, then another.
However, to be honest, the health of sinners is not of much interest to us churchmen. Nor are their rights and freedoms, citizenships, sacrifices, their miserable temporary well-being, their illnesses and other circumstances, in general, everything that constitutes their sinful life. We have our own purely spiritual rights, our own freedoms, especially in the field of the fight against sin, we have our own language and our own calendar, removed from the human “here and now”. And mercy is also slightly removed. So would we, both Sergianist and “true”, would live merrily, proudly apart from the world, and supporting our apartness with high theology, if, my brothers and sisters, it were not for the war.
But where does the war come in? Because it was the war that brought our Orthodox anti-humanism as “non-mercy” to its logical limit, leading far from what is to what seems to be and floats in an imaginary theological cloud. I am less wounded by the 70% of the pro-war, “patriotic” priests, because they are all people, all lovers of the sweetly surrendering to a myth, than by the words of a heavenly elder with a prayerful gleam in his eyes. He will not look with his prayerful gaze into the eyes of a raped child or a freezing old woman, because he does not take his gaze away from the “otherworldly parts”. Where they promise him victory over Ukraine as the center of evil. I will answer this promise, quoting a Soviet film character: “Have they invented a new way to fight?”
And then with the words of Jesus: "Truly, I say to you, because you did it to one of the least of these My brothers, you did it to Me."