Christianity: First 3000 years – Transcripts Part 5 & 6 – Orthodoxy

Video 3, Part 5 of the series

Orthodoxy

Here in the Church of the Holy Wisdom  in Constantinople, on 16 July 1054, a disaster unfolded for Christianity. 

It was actually during a service  that a papal delegation swept  up to the altar and placed on it a document excommunicating the leader  of the Church in Constantinople,  the Patriarch. The Patriarch  excommunicated the Pope in return. 

The moment has come to be remembered  as the Great Schism, a split between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Western Catholic Christianity. At the time,  it seemed like one petty incident  in a whole series of disagreements. But the fact remains that  a thousand years later that split  between East and West is still there. 

Today, Eastern Orthodox Christianity  flourishes in the Balkans and Russia.  And it has over 150 million worshippers worldwide. But much of my third programme  charts its fight for survival. After its glory days in the Eastern  Roman Empire, it stood right in  the path of Muslim expansion, suffered betrayal by crusading Catholics, was seized by the Russian  Tsars to ally with tyranny and faced near-extinction under Soviet Communism. So what is Orthodoxy? And what is the secret  of its endurance?  

I’m the guest here of the  congregation of the Greek  Orthodox Cathedral in London. What you get in any Orthodox act  of worship is a fragment of a vast annual ballet of worship, carefully choreographed and woven into a texture  of ancient music to reflect the timelessness of  God’s imperial court in Heaven.

On that spoon,  bread and wine mingle to symbolise the indivisible nature of Christ  who is both human and divine. All around us are the symbols of  1500 years of Orthodox tradition. The deeply venerated icons.

And this fierce-looking bird,  the double-headed eagle. What story is this ancient,  passionate drama trying to tell us? 

It pulls us back to one of the great  crises of Mediterranean civilisation. The greatest empire which the West had ever known  seemed to be tottering into ruin. From the beginning of the 4th century,  the Roman Empire was Christian. But then the Christian God  seemed to give up on it. In the West, barbarians overran it.

In 410, they seized Rome itself. Yet still, in the Eastern half of the  Empire, there was another capital beyond the invaders’ reach. Today we call it Istanbul,  but that’s just a version of its original name, Constantinople, given it by its founder,  Constantine the Great. Constantine had founded his city on the site of an old Greek  fishing port called Byzantion. His dream was for Constantinople to become the perfect Christian capital. Indeed, he thought of it  as the new Rome.  

Two centuries later, the dream lived  on for a husband and wife who took power  in the Eastern Empire in 518. Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora. They were one of the most unlikely couples ever to rule in Constantinople. He was a peasant from the Balkans. She was a former circus artist of  allegedly daunting sexual prowess. Together, they set out to  regain the lost territories of  the Christian Roman Empire.  

Instead, they created something new, the Byzantine Empire. Justinian moulded his new Christian  Byzantine Empire round one church.  Put up in just under six years,  it was far and away the largest religious building in the  Christian world. The Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia. When Justinian entered the  building for the first time  he was heard to murmur, "Solomon, I have surpassed thee." That’s the sort of  ambition we’re seeing here.

An emperor who can outdo the  Bible’s most glorious king of Israel. For nearly 1000 years, this was the scene of a constant  round of sacred imperial ceremony.  The Emperor and Patriarch  were the leading actors in the drama, a union of church and throne. 

Today, Hagia Sophia is  clogged with scaffolding. And frankly,  there’s a sadness about the place. It takes you a while to get over that  and see one of the most sumptuous  spaces ever created by human beings. The dome covers  a vast congregational space, trying to bring Heaven  into daily worship. Because the dome IS Heaven, the sky  above turned into human architecture. And that’s the key difference between  Eastern Christianity and the  Christianity of the Latin West. The Western Church has insisted  that original sin opened a great gulf between God and humanity. But Eastern Christianity  tells its followers that God and human beings  can meet, even unite. It’s a risky, exhilarating thought. And nothing expresses that mystical  urge to make the invisible  visible  more than Byzantine Art. 

Even though it’s an art which is the  result of a theological compromise. The solution to a big headache  which all Christians face – how to make a picture  out of the divine. The archaeological museum in Istanbul  is full of sculpture from the  Greek world before Christ. Greeks took it for granted that  you represent gods and goddesses with as much beauty as you can. Christianity took shape  in this Greek world. But Christians also believe  that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. That points to a great fault line  running through all Christianity. Greeks thought it natural to portray  the divine as human but Jews came  to find it profoundly shocking. Jews stuck to their second  commandment – "You shall make no graven image  for yourself, you shall not  bow down to them or serve them." Who were Christians to follow, Jews or Greeks? The Western church tied itself  in knots on this question.  

But Eastern Christians did  something rather ingenious. They simply created art  that was not graven.

In other words, nothing sculpted,  just flat surfaces. The busy jewelled walls of mosaics,  or paintings on wood  and those wooden painted tablets  became the defining feature  of the Orthodox Church, the icon.

This is not just art, it’s a three-way meeting,  between artist, worshipper and God. 

Very few of the first icons survive. To see them,  I’ve had to travel to the fringes  of the old Byzantine Empire. The Sinai Peninsula, in modern Egypt. Here at the foot of Mount Sinai s one of the most ancient Christian monasteries in the world. Back in the 6th century,  it was a frontier-post  for the Byzantine Empire and another proof  of the Emperor Justinian’s  enthusiasm for Christian building. Within its great fortress walls is the world’s  oldest collection of icons. The word icon  means just what it says. The Greek word for "image". A face, a person, a scene painted on a portable wooden panel  in special, prescribed ways. God, Christ,  the saints of the Church. Icons invite the worshipper  to stand not before a painting,  but a real person.

Each of them is an invitation  to climb a ladder to Heaven. Icons are focal points  in every Orthodox church. They cover a screen in front of  the altar called the iconostasis. Today, you couldn’t imagine  Orthodox tradition, so mystical,  so ancient, without icons. But it wasn’t always so. 

From the 7th century a series of  emperors did their best to wipe  out icons from Byzantine religion. And strange though it may sound,  it was because they’d begun to  doubt that God was on their side. There was a good reason to worry,  a sudden and unexpected challenge to the Byzantine Empire  from a new religious force, Islam. 

By the middle of the 7th century,  Muslim armies had snatched two  thirds of Byzantian territory, including the great holy cities  of Damascus, Antioch and Jerusalem. Twice, Islamic armies reached  the outer walls of Constantinople. And as the Byzantines brooded on why  God might have switched sides,  they made a connection. A big difference between  Islam and Orthodoxy. Muslims never make  a picture of the divine. The holy book of the Qur’an forbids  Muslims to make images of the sacred. The divine cannot be represented.

And Muslims were winning  campaigns against the Byzantines. Put two and two together, Christians, like Muslims, must destroy their  images to win back God’s favor.  

And so, with the survival of his empire at stake, the Emperor Leo III ordered the wholesale removal of icons from all Byzantine churches. At the present day of course,  the Ecumenical Patriarch of  Constantinople presides over a church rich in icons. His own Church of St George  is full of them. So what brought icons back?

It was clear that, in destroying  them, Leo was asking for trouble. Riots broke out across the Empire. It was a full-scale backlash. Amid argument and  violence, iconoclasm was born. The word means "smashing images". It was one of the great  traumas of Christian history, and it soaked up energy in Byzantium for more than a century. Painting or venerating icons  led to torture, sometimes death. And many were prepared to die rather  than see their churches stripped  of this divine gateway to God. 

It was an Empress, Theodora,  who at last stopped iconoclasm  in the year 843. She commissioned a new liturgy,  The Triumph Of Orthodoxy. It acclaims those who defended icons  and it gleefully names their enemies. So the very worship of the Church  enshrines the memory of  that traumatic century. The violent reaction to Iconoclasm  demonstrated that Orthodoxy was not  just a religion of the powerful It was the possession of  ordinary people too. Future rulers would forget  that at their peril. 

Right at the heart of Istanbul  is a last word from the defeated  iconoclasts. The 8th-century Church of Holy Peace, Hagia Irene,  built by an iconoclast Emperor.  Now it’s a concert hall,  stripped of nearly everything  from its Christian past. Except for a heart-stopping remnant  from the fleeting era  of iconoclast Orthodoxy.

Up in the apse, at the far end, over  the altar, a simple black cross in  mosaic against a gold background. And that is iconoclastic art. That is what the iconoclasts  put in their churches. You don’t see this very often. 

800 years after the death of Jesus, Christianity was still expanding  across the known world and beyond. The Church of the East was  established in the Middle East, spreading its message from Baghdad  to the far ends of Asia. The Western wing of the Church,  the Latin Church based in Rome, was reviving and sending missions  south, west and north. And sandwiched between them was the  Orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire.

The Byzantine Empire might be  battered and bruised, but it was still the world’s  largest Christian power.  It had survived both Islam  and iconoclasm. The Church of the West  and the East were still united and the West had welcomed  the defeat of iconoclasm, which had always  horrified the papacy. But in practice, the gulf  between Rome and Constantinople  was deepening. 

Whilst the Orthodox had been  arguing about iconoclasm,  an ambitious ruler had united most of what are now France, Germany  and Italy into a new Latin Empire. Western Christians celebrate him  as Charlemagne, Charles the Great. Not the Orthodox. Charlemagne sent Catholic  missionaries to convert non-Christian Slavs in the no-man’s land between  his Empire and the Byzantine Empire. What was worse for the Byzantines?

Central Europe full of unconverted  souls ripe for hell, or central Europe full of devout  little Catholic Christian Slavs all grateful to Charlemagne?  Something must be done. The race was on to see who could get the Slavs to Heaven the quickest. East or West?

Today Velehrad is in Roman  Catholic territory, and this is an overwhelmingly  Catholic celebration  of Slavic Christian heritage. But it wasn’t always so. The men embroidered on those stoles  are heroes of Orthodoxy Cyril & Methodius. And they stole a march on  Charlemagne’s missionaries  in what was then Great Moravia. Because the crucial question arose  of which language the Slavs should  worship God in, Greek or Latin? And Cyril and Methodius  brilliantly outflanked the Latins by answering the  question with "Neither!"

The Slavs could worship  God in their own language. But now another problem. Slavonic languages had  never been written down. Cyril and Methodius had  an answer to that too. This is the answer to the problem –an entirely new alphabet with symbols  completely unlike Greek or Latin  because they’re meant to  represent the sounds of Slavonic. But actually  it was extremely difficult to use, so someone decided to start again  with characters much more like Greek. But with exquisite tact,  whoever it was, named their alphabet  after Cyril – Cyrillic.  And it’s the alphabet  still used by the Russians,  the Bulgarians and the Serbs.

Cyril and Methodius were getting  the Slavs to worship in the language  which they used in the marketplace. 

That’s what I find most astonishing. The cliche about Orthodoxy  is that it’s timeless, ultra-conservative, unchanging  but this was innovative, creative. The great contribution which Cyril  and Methodius made to Orthodoxy was to equip it to stay Orthodox  in a rich variety of cultures. Eventually even some which were not Slav at all, like the Romanians. This would prove absolutely vital  for Orthodoxy’s long-term survival

But the immediate result  was bitterness.  

Competition between Latin  and Orthodox missionaries in central Europe underlined the  growing distance between the two  wings of the old Imperial Church. For the first thousand years  of its existence, the Church in the former Roman Empire  had managed more or less  to keep the appearance of one Church. 

The Orthodox emblem on the  headquarters of the Patriarch in  Istanbul is the double-headed eagle. 

One head for East, one for West. I don’t think that it’s coincidence  that Byzantine Emperors started using this symbol around 1000 AD, just when unity between  the Eastern and Western Churches  was draining away.

Separated by geography,  language and culture, East and  West had been drifting apart. There was in particular a little matter of words, in fact one little  Latin word – "Filioque". It means "and the Son". The Filioque was a tiny, Western  addition to the Nicene Creed which is a creed held in common  between the Western  and the Eastern Churches. It says the Holy Spirit  proceeds from the Father, but the Court of Charlemagne in the 9th century added "and the Son". The Holy Spirit proceeds  from the Father and the Son. This was the source of both tension  and then crisis for centuries. That one word, "Filioque",  escalated East-West tensions.

The Byzantine Church felt ANY  change to the Creed was blasphemy. This was not going to end well.  

The crisis point came in 1054. Envoys from the Bishop of Rome  arrived in Constantinople  to deal with the growing rift. They were spoiling for a fight. Matters came to a head in the middle  of the liturgy in Hagia Sophia. The Cardinal from Rome  lost his temper and took it upon himself  to excommunicate  the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Patriarch reciprocated. At the time, this melodrama  in Hagia Sophia seemed just  a passing diplomatic spat. But nearly 1000 years later,  the schism between the Latin West and  the Greek East has never been healed.  

And within 200 years  any chance of reconciliation was given a final, fatal blow  in one of the most shameful  episodes in Christian history.  

In the decades following the Great  Schism the Byzantine Empire was once more at the mercy of Muslim armies. The Byzantines swallowed their pride  and appealed to Western  Catholic leaders for help. And so in 1095 Pope Urban II  launched the first of many Crusades. The Latin Christian soldiers of the  Fourth Crusade turned out to be less  interested in defending the Holy Land than in their own wealth,  power and glory. In an astonishing act of betrayal,  they attacked the very people  they were supposed to protect – Christian Constantinople. The Crusaders broke through  the walls in spring 1204. Thousands in the city  died before it fell. The known world’s  wealthiest and most cultured city  was comprehensively trashed. And the rape of Constantinople was  carried out not by Muslims as  the Byzantines had always feared…..but by Catholic Christians. If 1054 had marked the formal  separation between East and West, then 1204 was the gut-wrenching  emotional point of no return. Constantinople was occupied by Western Catholic carpet-baggers  for 57 years. 

But even though Orthodoxy  snatched back its city,  the empire never recovered. For the first time, the Orthodox Church stood alone. Western Christianity had  broken Byzantium’s spirit and now another great power  would finish the job. During the 15th century,  the Ottoman Turks ruthlessly  gobbled up the Byzantine lands. Soon all that was left was the once  great city of Constantinople, now a collection  of shrunken villages, with Hagia Sophia still  looming over them all. Ottoman besiegers  snatched their chance. On 29 May 1453, the Ottomans  poured into the city. In Hagia Sophia morning service  bravely carried on while the Turks battered down the great door reserved  for imperial processions. The Sultan  gave orders that Muslim prayers be chanted out from the grand pulpit. Hagia Sophia had become a mosque! 

 

Video 3, Part 6 of the series 

But even though Orthodoxy  snatched back its city,  the empire never recovered. For the first time, the Orthodox Church stood alone. Western Christianity had  broken Byzantium’s spirit and now another great power  would finish the job. During the 15th century,  the Ottoman Turks ruthlessly  gobbled up the Byzantine lands. Soon all that was left was the once  great city of Constantinople, now a collection  of shrunken villages, with Hagia Sophia still  looming over them all. Ottoman besiegers  snatched their chance. On 29 May 1453, the Ottomans  poured into the city. In Hagia Sophia morning service  bravely carried on while the Turks battered down the great door reserved  for imperial processions. The Sultan  gave orders that Muslim prayers be chanted out from the grand pulpit. Hagia Sophia had become a mosque! 

It was a savage end to  the long Christian history of the Byzantine Empire. Now all the strongholds of Byzantine  Orthodoxy were under Muslim control, including four of the five  ancient Patriarchates.

Only Rome was free  and Rome was not Orthodox. For the next four centuries and more, Orthodox Christians were second-class citizens in the lands that their  Emperor had once ruled. 

In the mid-15th century, Orthodoxy  might seem to be fated to be pushed  into ever-narrower confines, like the Church of the East or the  ancient Churches of North Africa. But remember that mission of Cyril and Methodius  back in the 9th century? Now that came to the rescue  of the Orthodox future.

Cyril and Methodius had established  a lifeline for Orthodoxy in Moravia. Over the next 500 years, its spread north was to prove  vital in this new crisis. Orthodoxy’s future now lay  far from its origins in lands of an entirely different character. Its people lived in the darkness of  harsh winters, in communities often tiny, and widely separated. Orthodoxy didn’t just survive,  it flourished, moving out of the work of Cyril and Methodius east to Kiev, encompassing everything we now think  of as Russia to the frozen wastes of the Arctic in the far north. 

Ordinary people  took to Orthodox Christianity with a fierce commitment that shaped  and even defined a Russian identity. Their faith was brought to them by  lone individuals, wandering hermits and holy men who sometimes settled  in small communities. And gradually over two centuries  you had a great scatter of monasteries, perhaps 100 or more,  all over what is now northern Russia. But still there would be holy men wandering beyond those communities and that really is what  rooted Orthodoxy in the people. These ordinary men getting  close to those scattered, lonely  people over that vast territory made Orthodoxy people’s religion.

But this people’s religion was also  inextricably linked with the rise  of what became the Russian Empire.

Its rulers learned to use the Church  to expand and control the Empire and make their rule sacred. The Orthodox Church came to be at  the centre of a three-way tug of war  between the ambitions of the Tsars, the clergy and the devout  faith of the Russian people. 

During the 14th century, as holy  men and women spread Christianity  amongst the people, the rulers of a modest settlement  with big ideas were quietly turning themselves  into a power you couldn’t ignore. The settlement was Moscow. And the ruling dynasty  fashioned itself as  heir of the Byzantine Empire. Just to make sure of its claim, in 1472 the Grand Prince of Muscovy, Ivan III, married the niece of the  last Byzantine emperor and he adopted the double headed Byzantine eagle as  his symbol and just occasionally he  used the title "Tsar" which is simply  the Roman imperial Kaiser, Caesar. The first Rome had fallen  to barbarians and sunk into  Roman Catholic heresy. The second Rome, Constantinople,  was now in the hands of Islam. The Orthodox Church of Russia now  seized the title "the third Rome". Eventually it even gained  its own Patriarch in Moscow. 

But though Russian Orthodoxy’s  origins were in Byzantium,  the rule of the Tsars and the intense religion of its people created a Church which was  distinctively Russian in character. You can see that straightaway from a short walk through Moscow. Russia’s church domes took  on the shape of an onion. Some think the design was inspired by manuscript pictures of the Church  of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Others see it as just practical.  A way of stopping the  build-up of snow. Either way, the design  redrew the Russian landscape. 

The most famous of these churches  was built in the 16th century…..St Basil’s Cathedral  in Moscow’s Red Square. Its exterior is startlingly original. An eight-sided central church  rising into a spire, hemmed in  by eight smaller churches. Do you remember how Byzantine Orthodoxy looked to one great  church in Constantinople?

The Holy Wisdom  had been built by a great Emperor  and military commander, Justinian. Well, you could say that this church  was intended to do the same thing  for Russian Orthodoxy. The only problem was  that it was built by the maddest,  cruellest emperor in world history. Ivan the Terrible placed St Basil’s  in the centre of Moscow in 1552. And like Justinian  1,000 years before, he made his church the centrepiece  of his Russian  Orthodox Empire. 

Of course, Ivan is  better remembered for persecuting and  butchering millions of his subjects. And inside St Basil’s  you get an idea of his mindset. If you look at it on a plan  it looks perfectly rational and symmetrical but  no-one ever  did see it in plan apart from  the architect and the patron. Your actual experience of it, once you’re inside, is a combination of  vertigo and claustrophobia. I don’t think that it’s too  much to say it  feels…deranged. 

In Russian, the word "terrible" is better understood as "awesome" but the English translation "terrible" gets Ivan just right. Born in 1530,  he was crowned at the age of only 16,  as the first Tsar of Russia. And this gave him ideas  about the Orthodox Church. He became obsessed with making Russia  holy Russia, with himself at the centre as  God’s representative on earth. Early in his reign he was full  of energy, building churches, ordering exact rules for  how icons should be painted. That concern for holiness was  not necessarily a bad idea, but it was perverted into tyranny. 

During his 37-year reign, Ivan exercised absolute power through  atrocities on an insane scale.  And he clearly came to love  terrifying and hurting people,  just because he could. And yet the metropolitan bishop  of Moscow who crowned him left  him with a terrible sense of sin. Ivan once cried out in a letter,  "I, a stinking hound, "whom can I teach, what can I preach,  and how can I enlighten anybody?" Ivan’s concern for the welfare  of his soul was amply justified. His religious despotism reached  deep into the lives of his subjects, as he dictated  how Orthodoxy should be practised  down to the minutest detail. Not even men’s beards escaped his judgment. For Ivan, the beard was an  ornament given by God to Jesus, so he forbade the shaving of beards. And heaven help  anyone who went against him. Ivan was convinced that  God had made him Emperor when  the Metropolitan crowned him.  So that anyone who opposed Ivan  was a heretic and deserved the  punishment of death, preferably in as nasty  a way as possible. In the worst years of his reign, Ivan enforced his crazy tyranny across  the Empire through the Oprichniki… ..a perverted version of a religious order, robed in black cloaks as they  went about their inhuman business. Millions of Russians were killed in Ivan’s purges.  

And yet one man dared to  stand up to the tyrant. And St Basil’s Cathedral  is now named after this hero of humble Orthodox faith. St Basil was a very particular,  peculiar sort of hermit –  a Holy Fool. Holy Fools overturned all  the rules of normal society. They behaved like madmen  to show the power of God.

And St Basil showed that  very well because he was one  of the very few people who could stand up to Ivan the Terrible and get away with it. In the middle of Lent, the saint  once thrust some meat into the  hands of the astonished Tsar, telling him that there was no  point in him trying to fast since  he had committed so many  crimes. Ivan was humbled,  St Basil unpunished.  

St Basil’s story  is the perfect reminder of a repeated keynote in Russian Orthodox history. The depth of faith among  ordinary Russians was so profound  that whatever the Tsars did to them, they obstinately continued  to worship in their own way. Religion was woven inextricably into  the fabric of ordinary life, often in alarmingly eccentric ways,  as in the case of the sect  known as the Skoptsy. Well, they were devoted to  eliminating sexual lust  from humankind by cutting off their genitals. Their founder had read his  Russian bible but he’d misread it.

He read the word for  Jesus the Redeemer, "iskupitel" as "oskopitel" – castrator. 

A century after Ivan the Terrible,  another Tsar came up against that  strength of feeling with bloodstained results. Tsar Aleksei and his Patriarch both  wanted to tidy up the Church, take it back to  a pure Byzantine Orthodoxy. Take sacred blessings, for instance. In the Byzantine tradition,  clergy made the sign of the blessing using three fingers to  symbolise the Trinity. But in Russia, two fingers were used  to symbolise the two natures of Christ. Now, Aleksei ordered Russian clergy  to change the sign of the blessing  to three fingers.

It might seem utterly trivial  to us but in that world,  every detail mattered. Your average Russian couldn’t care less about being faithful  to Greek Orthodox tradition. They knew what Orthodoxy was –  it was Russian.

And this was heresy. So thousands, eventually  millions of them, defied the Tsar. Some left the Tsars’ Church and became known as "Old Believers." Many were burned at the stake  for their defiance. And some, rather than submit  to the Tsar’s heretical authority,  actually set fire to themselves.  

The Imperial Church was still there. It continued to serve the  people of this vast empire. But between Tsarist autocracy  and the lives of the people, there was that third force – the hierarchy of the Church… and a question that even the  Byzantines had never quite resolved. Who was truly God’s  representative on earth? The Tsar or the head of  the Russian Church, the Patriarch? 

In 1689, the throne of Russia  was inherited by Peter the Great. He settled that question  for the next two centuries. Where Ivan the Terrible had been mad,  Peter the Great was rational. But he was still a tsar.

He saw Orthodox Christianity  as just another useful tool to  control the Russian Empire. 

And this is his statue – one of  Moscow’s latest tourist attractions. It’s widely hated in the city but I’m going to be unfashionable. I rather like it. It’s quite fun. Peter astride his ship  from his brand-new navy. Peter was a moderniser and  a big part of his modernising Russia  was to seize control of the Church.

For nearly two centuries after  his time there was no Patriarch. The Church was run by  a set of state  bureaucrats. So now the Church had lost  control of its own decision-making. There was now no question as to who was in charge – the Tsar.

As usual, in Christian history,  the Church made the best of it. In fact, it prospered. In the 19th century Russian monastic life flourished. Churches actually got more crowded. And at least the Church was safe.

Orthodoxy had survived  a turbulent 1,300 years. But its next encounter  nearly wiped it out. 

At the start of the 20th century, Russia was a great European power  under Tsar Nicholas II. And yet by 1918 his world had been  overwhelmed in the Great War  and Revolution. And in the thick of it all  was a Russian peasant from Siberia… ..a wandering hermit who became  the focus of a public scandal  surrounding the Tsar’s family.  

The Tsarina believed that  God spoke to her, through the hermit. But his enemies  said he was a lecherous drunk whose  interference crippled the government. In the last days of the Tsars,  during the First World War, Grigori Rasputin gained  an extraordinary hold over Tsar Nicholas  II and his Empress because he appeared to be able to  stem the haemophilia of their son. Was Grigori Rasputin  a Holy Fool or a crazy drunk? Well, perhaps he was both. 

But his peasant faith  made a fool out of the Tsars  and helped to doom their regime. Russia was descending into nightmare. It was losing the war with Germany. Its people were starving  and turning to revolution.And the Rasputin scandal  became hugely symbolic, a dose of poison  for the Tsarist regime. As hundreds of thousands died  on the front, the troops  voted with their feet and mutinied 

In February 1917  there was revolution. The Russian Emperor was forced  to abdicate, bringing to an end nearly 500 years of Tsarist rule. For the Church, there was  a brief moment of hope. A liberal provisional government was formed, Russia’s  first real experience of democracy. In Moscow a council of  bishops, clergy and laypeople made plans for a revived Church,  free of Tsarist interference. Triumphantly,  they elected a new Patriarch,  the first since Peter the Great.  

But it proved to be a false dawn. In October of that year,  worldwide Orthodoxy  met its most terrible enemy so far. Soviet Communism. With Lenin at its head, the  Bolshevik Party seized the revolution and installed a dictatorship of  the proletariat, with absolute  power over all Russia. In this new world order  there was no place for God. Orthodoxy had shaped Russia  since the 10th century. But the Bolsheviks saw all religion   as the opium of the masses, a symptom of false consciousnesses  and, worst of all, an obstacle  to scientific socialism.  

In January 1918, Lenin formally   separated Church from State. And that was just the first step  in a systematic policy to  purge Christianity altogether from Russian life,  and force atheism on its people. But it was a policy Lenin  did not live to carry out. The task was followed through even  more ruthlessly by a man who, in just 10 years, brought Orthodoxy close to extinction – something neither Catholic crusaders,  Muslim armies, nor Russian  tyrants had managed to do in 1,000 years. 

Joseph Stalin was a Georgian gangster whose mother had once hoped  he would become a bishop. Instead, he had manoeuvred his  way up through the ranks of the  Bolshevik party to become supreme ruler  of the Soviet Union. A red tsar, one might say. His plan was to wipe out  all real life in Orthodoxy. In a society without God there was no need for churches.

This is the dynamiting  of Moscow’s Cathedral of  Christ the Saviour in 1931. Then there were the human victims –  the Orthodox faithful. Around 40,000 priests  and 40,000 monks and nuns, plus millions of laypeople died as a result of Soviet terror. There was a manic  thoroughness to the campaign. Some local Soviet  commanders  lined up icons, sentenced  them to death and shot them! 

By 1939 only a few hundred  churches remained open and only four bishops  were not in prison. And yet Russian Orthodoxy survived. In the Second World War, Stalin  was forced into a remarkable U-turn. Stalin needed the Church’s  support to win the war. And in order to use the Church,  he needed to recognise the Church. It was Orthodoxy’s patriotism  that saved it from extinction. Stalin had to accept  that for many Russians it wasn’t the state that embodied Russian culture  and national feeling… it was the Church. 

And so he allowed churches,  theological schools and monasteries to reopen. But after the war, it was Soviet business as usual. More persecution. At the end of the Second World War,  Soviet rule gripped  most of Eastern Europe. When Stalin died in 1953,  Russia was a world superpower. And for the next 30 years  it held Orthodoxy prisoner. Yet the Orthodox Church  kept its faithful followers, maintained its ancient liturgy and music through all the traumas  inflicted on it by the Soviet Union. Indeed, Orthodoxy outlived the communist world order. When General Secretary Gorbachev  tried to implement a more  humane communism, "glasnost," it turned into  an endgame for the system. By the 1990s it was all over. All the emotional power had  drained out of state communism. And nothing showed that more than the moment in 1991 when a crowd toppled  this statue, that of Dzerzhinksy, the architect of the KGB system, which is now relegated  to a quiet park – a sort of retirement home  for tyranny. 

For 70 years, the Soviets  had told their subjects that  communism was the future. Now communism had gone. What was compelling  enough to fill that gap? Orthodoxy. It has triumphantly seized back its  place at the heart of Russian life. In the 1990s, money  poured in from the public for the rebuilding of the  Cathedral of Christ the Saviour  in the centre of Moscow, the Cathedral which Stalin had  obliterated 70 years before. 

In its sufferings, Orthodoxy survived catastrophes quite unlike those faced  by Catholicism and Protestantism. Stripped of the power it knew under  the Byzantine Emperors, it saw its freedom stolen  by the Russian Tsars, its people nearly all expelled  from Asia Minor, its very existence  nearly destroyed by the Bolsheviks. But in 21st century Russia,  the double-headed eagle of Byzantium has once more became the proud emblem of modern Russia. 

There is still a legacy  for the Eastern Roman empire. But solve one question,  and another appears.  Can Orthodoxy survive its first  meeting with Western freedom? The world of capitalism, consumerism,  scepticism and sexual freedom? So far, the instinct seems to have been to reaffirm old certainties.

And you can understand why,  if you think back to all  those places I’ve been. The solemn unfolding of the liturgy,  the serene gaze of the saints, the experience of  God in wordless prayer. And yet for all that,

Orthodoxy may still have to  learn from western Christians how to cope with new challenges, which western Christianity itself  has helped to create. 

So, in next week’s programme,  we’re turning west again. We’re going to see how the great  monarchy which was the medieval  Western Church split in two in the Reformation. And then we’ll go on to meet  the forces of the modern world, from which no Christianity of  the 21st century can now hide.

 

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