Kirill: Russian culture and the salvation of the world

by Stefano Caprio

Trying not to limit himself to the usual statements of state propaganda amid the universal conflict between Russia and the West, the Patriarch of Moscow spoke a few days ago in St Petersburg using philosophical and literary arguments to further explain the reasons why Russia today feels called to spread the “great values” that universal society has seemingly abandoned.

The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Kirill (Gundyayev) spoke at the 10th Forum of "Unitary Cultures" in St Petersburg, in the solemn hall of the Mariinsky Palace, home to the city's Legislative Assembly, centred on “Culture in the 21st century: sovereignty or globalism?" to reiterate the fundamental theses of the mission of the "Russian world" in our age.

Trying not to limit himself to repeating the usual statements of state propaganda in the context of the universal conflict between Russia and the West, the patriarch sought to further develop philosophical and literary arguments of why Russia today feels called to spread the “great values” that universal society appears to abandon.

It is, in some way, a matter of rediscovering the fundamental role of the Orthodox Church in militarist Russia, a role that Kirill had to yield to Putin in the phase of wars of the last 20 years, starting with the war with Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, and eventually the invasion of Ukraine.

The patriarch did not initially back the president in his radical confrontation, but in the last two and a half years of war he could not (or did not want) to do anything but support the justifications of the conflict in the defence of traditional values, which the degraded West would like to erase from the conscience of Ukrainians, Russians, and all peoples historically linked to the "spiritual beacon" of super-Orthodox Moscow.

The patriarchate has inspired this ideological line since the late 1990s, and now perhaps realises that it has gone too far in its claims to a global definition of “religious and cultural truth”.

It is no coincidence that Kirill began his speech by emphasising the identity of St Petersburg, whereby "the small homeland always remains the city on the Neva", which represents the westernmost part of the Russian identity, culturally even more than geographically. The people of St Petersburg, according to the patriarch, "have never lost their inner spiritual, cultural and intellectual bond with the city".

Unlike Kirill, President Vladimir Putin, who hails from Russia’s northern capital, represents the less evolved and erudite segment of the city, as Putin himself often claims, defining himself as a "man of the people" and certainly not as an intellectual from the aristocratic elites.

Thus, Kirill's speech takes on deeper and more courtly tones, stating that "a serious reasoning on culture must always be axiological, that is, about values", elevating the definition that concerns precisely "traditional values", reiterated by Putin and all Russian politicians almost without real content to the point of boredom.

Instead, "culture is what carries values within itself," explains the patriarch, otherwise, "without values no culture is preserved, which dissolves into dust... We know these cataclysms that have destroyed entire civilisations."

This is the challenge Russian Orthodoxy wants to throw at the whole world, namely the preservation of tradition as a guarantee of the survival of true civilisation, the “mechanism of transmission of values.”

Through a series of erudite quotes, Kirill comments on the very origin of the term "culture" starting from the concept of "cult", which justifies “the axiological approach: What has value is what is holy for society in its historical development.”

The prevalence of religion over philosophy itself is a theme very dear to Kirill, who in his argumentation criticises the main theorists of Western rationalism, from August Comte and Ludwig Feuerbach to Karl Marx, who is “well-known to us Russians.”




The patriarch has often linked this "positivist tendency" with the legacy of Latin scholasticism, a classic topic of theological polemics between Catholics and Orthodox, but now he is trying to go further, since "in our times this claim of philosophical superiority over religion is now recognised as inconsistent, especially after the end of the tragedy of humanist atheism of the twentieth century."

Today's challenge, according to Kirill, is to find a new meaning of life in world societies, dried up from the sources of true spirituality. Marxist philosophy stated that man “lives for future generations, but this is absurd, so what value can one’s personal life have?”

If man is only a "transmission belt", even those who come after us will live without giving any meaning to existence. This is "a destructive relationship with the human personality, with the rational being that God has destined for high purposes", says the patriarch.

There is a need for a new paideia, a process of education and rearing of man, the Greek term that gives rise to the very meaning of "culture".

Today's world is no longer capable of rearing, it does not even transmit "physical culture and the aesthetic sense"; instead, it is necessary today "to make every effort to defend and protect the very foundations of culture, like a farmer who does not forget the seeds in the ground, which would end up smothered by wild nature.”

This is precisely the image that the patriarch wants to promote, comparing the Russian care for values with the "uncultured forest" of the West and, in general, of universal society, in what he calls the raskulturivanie (раскультуривание), the “de-culturisation” of the world.

The Paris Olympics are an example of this degradation, with its irreverent symbolism and its gender diatribes. “When I looked at the images of the inaugural processions on the Seine,” the patriarch said, “I said to myself: ‘You cannot offend God this way! This is an incredible regression of Western civilisation, which seeks to smother all other cultures.”

People today, according to Kirill, "continue to use common words and follow habits, without asking themselves anything about their origin and meaning.”

To say thank you, Russians use the word Spasibo (СПАСИБО), which derives from Spasi Bog (СПАСИ БОГ), "God save”. There are many examples that the patriarch cites to indicate the roots of the sense of shared life, which must be found to avoid raskulturivanie, de-culturisation, and prevent it from becoming raschelovechivaniye (расчеловечивание), “dehumanisation” in which “culture loses its soul”.

The patriarch notes that "Christianity has never been the property of a single culture; it belongs to the whole world," and goes far beyond the concept of the "Christian world" because it values “every national culture as a treasure of the whole world”.

Russian culture is no exception, but having gone through particularly hard trials, "which it has been able to face with courage", it is today the culture that can "enrich the whole world" and counter “globalism that cancels and flattens different cultures, trying to make all men equal... These men will not be able to transmit values to future generations, in cancel culture, the culture of the click in which everything is allowed.”

Ultimately, Patriarch Kirill asks the question that divides the whole world today: “Should the culture of the twenty-first century be sovereign or global?” On a deeper level, “should it be a culture, or an anti-culture?”

It is a question of "what man must be today", and the answer he proposes is podvig (подвиг, feat), the monastic term that indicates the sacrifice a person makes for the common good.

Finally, turning to Pavel Florensky, martyr to Stalinist communism in the camps on Solovki Islands, he cites the words of the great Russian theologian: “Do nothing that does not have a true taste for life, because just doing things can make you lose the meaning of everything.”

Taking up the thoughts of other Orthodox ideologues, the Russian patriarch tries to avoid excessively trite and radical syntheses, turning to thinkers like the theologian and political scientist Aleksandr Shchipkov, whose recently published essay on the "Crisis of the theory and practice of actions to defend human rights" focuses on the “problem of conceptualising liberal (interpretations of) rights and the crisis of humanitarian institutions."

Russians insist on highlighting the weakness of the Western conception of freedom, which has been transformed into a "dogmatic doctrine", a "false metaphysics", that makes it impossible to regain the true freedom of the "values" for which Russia is fighting today.

There is a military war and an information war, but the Russian war is foremost a war of principles, calling for answers to the deepest questions in the contemporary world.