NEW ZION IN BABYLON The Orthodox Church in the Twentieth Century Vladimir Moss Copyright: Vladimir Moss, 2010 Thou hast perfected the New Zion instead of the old through Thy precious Blood. Octoechos, Tone 8, Sunday, Mattins, Canon, Canticle Six, Troparion. [In the Church] one must get to the bottom of the problems, so as to eradicate the sickness from its very root. St. Basil the Great, Letter 156. Having no strength in their own teaching, they [the heretics] hunt for it in our weakness, and for this reason, like flies settling on wounds, they settle on our misfortunes – or should I say, mistakes? St. Gregory the Theologian, Sermon 27, 5. A want of zeal in small matters is the cause of all our calamities; and because slight errors escape fitting correction, greater ones creep in. St. John Chrysostom, Homily 1 on Galatians. 2 INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................4 PART I. SOWING THE WIND (1901-1917) ...........................................................6 Tsar Nicholas II and the Collective Antichrist ..........................................................6 The Origins of the Antichrist: (1) Communism........................................................11 The Origins of the Antichrist: (2) Ecumenism .........................................................26 Nationalism and Regicide in the Balkans ................................................................33 The Orthodox Churches and “Proto-Ecumenism”..................................................36 The Russian Church and the Intelligentsia: (1) Church-State Relations ................44 The Russian Church and the Intelligentsia: (2) Tolstoyism.....................................48 The Russian Church and the Intelligentsia: (3) Monasticism .................................50 The Russian Church and the Intelligentsia: (4) The New Theology........................53 The Sarov Days ........................................................................................................56 The Russo-Japanese War .........................................................................................59 Bloody Sunday .........................................................................................................64 Pobedonostsev’s Last Stand.....................................................................................66 The April Decree and the October Manifesto..........................................................70 The Church and the Jews.........................................................................................79 The Pre-Conciliar Convention.................................................................................83 Turmoil in the Western Borderlands........................................................................86 Georgian Autocephaly .............................................................................................93 The Beilis Trial ........................................................................................................98 The Struggle against Rasputin...............................................................................108 The Name-Worshipping Heresy.............................................................................117 The Balkan Wars and Albanian Statehood ............................................................122 Sarajevo .................................................................................................................129 Germany and Russia..............................................................................................134 The War and the Revolution ..................................................................................139 The Plot..................................................................................................................146 The Abdication of the Tsar.....................................................................................150 The Church and the February Revolution .............................................................156 Three Visions of 1917 ............................................................................................162 3 INTRODUCTION The subject of this book is the titanic struggle between the Orthodox Church and the Revolution in the twentieth century – both the communist revolution in the East, and the liberal-ecumenist revolution in the West. This struggle has involved hundreds of millions of people on several continents, and produced millions of martyrs. And yet, considered as a whole, it has gone largely unrecorded, at any rate in the English language.1 There are several reasons for this. One is that the historical documents recording this struggle are to be found mainly in obscure journals written in Russian or Greek that are not accessible to many English-speaking writers. Another is that in order to understand this struggle, since it is a spiritual one, it is necessary to take part in it. In other words, this struggle is not a theme for objective historical research in the usual sense: while historical objectivity is necessary, it must be mixed with faith, faith in the truth of the Church and her ultimate triumph over falsehood and evil. Thirdly and most seriously, however, to many, even to many Orthodox Christians, it looks as if the struggle has been lost, that “True Orthodoxy”, that is, the Orthodoxy which refuses to compromise in any way with the Revolution, has failed in the Darwinian struggle for survival; which must give it, in their imagination, the aspect of a gallant, but essentially vain, even harmful, attempt to hold up the inevitable course of history and progress. The thought arising in the minds of many that True Orthodoxy has lost the struggle is elicited particularly by its sadly divided state today. And yet it must be remembered that such a situation is by no means unprecedented in Church history. Thus in the fourth century St. Hilary of Poitiers wrote: “Since the Nicene Council, we have done nothing but rewrite creeds. While we fight about words, inquire about novelties, take advantage of ambiguities, criticize authors, fight on party questions, have difficulties in agreeing, and prepare to anathematize each other, there is scarcely a man who belongs to Christ, Take, for example, last year’s creed, what alteration is there not in it already? First, we have a creed which bids us not to use the Nicene ‘consubstantial’; then comes another, which decrees and preaches it; next, the third excuses the word ‘substance’, as adopted by the Fathers in their simplicity; lastly, the fourth, which instead of excusing, condemns. We determine creeds by the year or the month, we change our own determinations, we prohibit our changes, we anathematize our prohibitions. Thus, we either condemn others in our own persons, or ourselves in the instance of others, while we bite and devour one another, and are like to be consumed one of another.”2 1 The present work is a greatly expanded and revised version of The Orthodox Church at the Crossroads, 1917-1999 (Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ na pereputie, 1917-1999 gg.), which was published in Russian in St. Petersburg in 2001 and Letopis’Velikoj Bitke (Chronicle of a Great Battle,) published in Serbian in Belgrade in 2006. 2 St. Hilary, Ad Const. ii, 4, 5; quoted by Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston in his “Statement on Grace, March, 2003”. St. Hilary’s younger contemporary, St. Basil the Great, spoke still more 4 This book is written in the firm belief that, however discouraging the present picture, the struggle for the True Faith is not over, and that this struggle is not only not vain, but of the very first importance; but that if True Orthodoxy is to triumph again, as the prophecies of the Holy Fathers indicate it will, lessons must be drawn from the history of the hundred years or so that have elapsed since it began – lessons that are drawn in the course of this book. These lessons are partly dogmatic in nature; for, like previous such struggles in the history of the Church, the struggle between Orthodoxy and the Revolution in the twentieth century has had the good consequence of providing the opportunity, through the necessity of struggling with heresy, of clarifying the Church’s teaching – in this case, the Church’s teaching on herself. For it has revolved around such questions as: In what sense is the Church One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, as the Nicene Creed defines her? Is she truly of Divine origin and nature, or is she a purely human organization? Does she evolve in her teachings and practice, or does she remain the same? What is the nature of her unity? What is her relation to the State and different forms of governmental power? Does she embrace all the vast multitudes who call themselves Christian today, or is she the gathering of a small faithful remnant on earth? Is she truly the only Ark of salvation, or only one of many roads leading to God? By the end of this book, therefore, I hope that clearer answers to these questions will have emerged. Since this work is confessional as well as historical in nature, I owe much not only to the historical sources I list in the footnotes, but also to my teachers in the faith, the Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Orthodox Church. And in particular I should like to dedicate this work to the hierarch who received me into the Orthodox Church and whose confession of the faith I have tried to emulate – Archbishop Nicodemus of Richmond and Great Britain of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad