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Brilliant! Met. Hilarion’s warning deals with what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values” — what his dark prophesy warned would happen in the West because “God is Dead,” by which he meant that Western culture was entering into a period where it functioned within the cultural structures shaped by Christianity but without concrete, existential communion with the Savior — the kind of communion that would lead to martyrdom if required. Those structures would weaken as the historical memory of Christianity grew increasingly dim from one generation to the next.
That is the period we are in today, call it secularism, but understand that secularism is just a layover from one city to the next. We have left the City of God (recalling Augustine) for what — Islamic domination? Perhaps. Man cannot live by bread alone, and that includes the secularist as well as the believer.
Met. Hilarion calls for nothing less than the spiritual transformation of culture. His clarity comes from the cleansing of the persecution of the Orthodox Church by Communism, that ghastly and barbaric attempt to build a Tower of Babel on materialist principles — principles in which God, and thus any appeal to transcendent values that shape morality and meaning, were violently expunged. It unleashed a horrible evil, and that experience of suffering contributes today to the clarity of vision and great boldness we see in Met. Hilarion’s call for renewal and accountability.
Compare this to the impoverished thinking on human value coming out of Constantinople that we have been discussing on this blog the last few days. The reason Constantinople’s compromise with the dominant culture concerning abortion is dangerous is this: If the devaluation of the human person is justified by any hierarch, the moral tradition that he represents and that the West so desperately needs for cultural renewal, is presented as a perversion of itself. Abortion is always the way that social engineers begin their retooling of society. Once society accepts the devaluation of unborn life, it is much easier to devalue all other life.
Russia already went through it. We are next. Don’t believe me? Read Solzhenitsyn’s warning years ago.
Let the discussion begin. (Meanwhile, some of you might be interested in an article I wrote several years ago that shares some of the ideas Met. Hilarion spoke about: The Artist as Vandal: Culture and the desecration of religious symbols.)
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9.03.2010 · Analitics, DECR Chairman Russian Orthodox Church – Department for External Church Relations
Metropolitan Hilarion
If it does not cooperate with the Church, culture today is at risk of turning into a destructive anti-culture carrying a negative moral message, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for external church relation, said in an interview to the RIA Novosti news agency.
Speaking about the Patriarchal Council for Culture established by the Holy Synod on March 5, he said, ‘The point is not control or censure. The point is constructive cooperation between the Church and those representatives of the world of culture who wish this cooperation. The Church does not impose anything on anybody; she only offers her participation and assistance to those who wish it’.
The Church does not have ‘an ideology’ of her own, he said, unless it is viewed as ideology that she ‘is called to save people, to make their life better, purer and brighter. And this is unachievable without having a spiritual and moral pivot’.
According to him, culture is not neutral spiritually and morally as ‘it can carry both a positive and negative moral message and can equally create and destroy’.
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