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I should like to concentrate on the spirituality of the Russian Church partly
because I know it a great deal better than other Churches and partly because
next year, 1988, we keep the 1000 year of the conversion of Russia to
Christianity. And when I say, “the conversion of Russia to Christianity” I am
saying more than it was because to begin with it was a small community of people
in the city of Kiev that received Christ and were baptised together with their
prince. But it was the beginning, it was the first seed sawn, and it was a seed
that gradually produced a very rich harvest. I would like to think with you both
historically and theologically on the matter.
What strikes me in the conversion of Russia is that the Russians of that time
where a rather primitive kind of nation, very different from the Greeks or the
Latins, the Romans whom the Apostles had to convert. Their faith was a pagan
faith, they revered gods that were to them more a terror, stern and
blood-thirsty gods and they had no notion of a God or gods that would be
gods of love, gods of salvation.
The result of it was that after number of centuries when this was enough for
them, a time came when a spiritual hunger was awoken. They felt more and more
that these gods could not be the God or the gods of Heaven, that there
was another dimension in the divinity, that a god whom one had to fear and
only to fear without awe and love could not satisfy the inner need of
worship. And this is a moment when prince Vladimir who was then sovereign in
Kiev and whose grandmother Olga had already become a Christian before him, began
to send emissaries into different countries to find whether there was a religion
that could fill the souls of the people, his own soul and the souls of the
people around him ahungered for something greater, truer, deeper, more beautiful
than the pagan gods whom they feared. They went to a variety of places, they met
the Jews in the Crimea, the Tartars in the East, they went in the direction of
Poland where Christianity had been brought by Roman missionaries and in the end
also to Constantinople. And when they came back and were asked what they have
found, what they said is, “While we were standing there during the divine
services, we did not know whether we were on earth or in Heaven.” The first
impact of Christianity reached the Russians through awe, through the majesty of
God and through the unutterable beauty of worship.
And when I speak of the beauty, I do not mean that in terms of aesthetics. It
isn’t that they were impressed by the beauty of the rites or the beauty of the
music alone. Of course they were. But they were filled with a sense that in a
world that was full of ugliness, of fear, of cruelty, there was a place of
stillness, a place of the divine presence, a presence so intensely felt that one
could fall down and adore this God because of His greatness and His presence, a
real presence, not an imaginary one. This was a decisive turn because as Plato
has put it centuries before, beauty is a convincing power of truth; a truth
about which you can not say: how beautiful, how wonderful, how it opens my mind
and my heart — is not a truth that you can serve with all your life and all your
death. I am mentioning this because this is very much what is happening also now
in Soviet Russia. In early days, in pagan Russia, there were pagan gods of a
pagan society. Now in the last seventy years the secular society has created
also pagan gods, objects of worship, idols, and what you find all the time when
you visit Russia, not only when you visit congregations, but when you meet
unbelievers or just people in the street who would not define themselves either
as atheists or believes, what you find is a hunger: what we are given is poor,
there is in us a dimension which is never fed.
I remember Michael Ramsey when he was Archbishop of Canterbury saying, “There in
every soul a vastness and a depth, which nothing can fill but God himself.” And
this is something which people perceive and feel in Russia even if they do not
put it in such elaborate words as mine.
And another thing, which I have experienced myself on the first time when I went
to Russia was this sense, this contrast between the drabness, the ugliness, the
emptiness of a city of men emptied of the divine presence, and what happens to
you when you walk into a church, not only because the buildings erected in the
last seventy years are poor architecture, not any better than so many of the
things which we have created here in the West. But they are lifeless, they have
no soul, they are functional but they are not an expression of a spiritual
experience or simply of an experience of beauty. It is not the beauty of the
world collected by geniuses or by men or women of talent that have become
buildings, become places, become space. It is the beauty of the world made drab
and dead.
And when I first walked into one of the churches, I understood what believers
and unbelievers alike felt when they walked for the first time either in
Byzantine into a church or nowadays into one of the churches, which are still
open in Soviet Russia — it’s another world, a world of harmony, a place as one
workman said to me, a place and the only one, he said, where one never hears
anything except love and one meets nothing but human openness and brotherhood,
and also this sheer beauty of the place, the beauty that is in such intense
contrast with what you see around you. And I have met people who came and were
merged into this mysterious beauty. |
