Kostyuk K. N. Istoriya sotsial'no-eticheskoi mysli v Russkoy pravoslavnoi tserkvi [History of social and ethical thought in the Russian Orthodox Church]. Saint Petersburg: Aleteya Publ., 2013, 448 p.

Konstantin Kostyuk began writing ^{about social and political thought in Russian Orthodoxy, as well as the social teachings of other Christian denominations, as early as in the late 1990s},

and he was one of the few authors who responded vividly to the appearance of the document "Fundamentals of the social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church"in 2009. In 2002, he defended at the Catholic University in Eichstedt (Germany) a large dissertation in German "The concept of the political in the Russian Orthodox tradition. The relationship between Church, State and Society in Russia"⁸. And finally, the Russian reader has the opportunity to get acquainted with the results of the research conducted by K. Kostyuk, next to which today it is hardly possible to put anything of equal value.

The first thing that comes to mind as a comparison after reading the book is, of course, G. Florovsky's "Ways of Russian Theology" (whose work, by the way, the author quotes from time to time). In the case of K. Kostiuk, we encounter the same large-scale, but even broader, historical coverage of Russian religious thought.

But the difference is also obvious. It manifests itself not only in the fact that in this case we are dealing with a very balanced, detached analytical approach, free from the emphasized sharpness and subjectivity in assessments that are characteristic of Florovsky's famous work. The main thing is the subject of research itself. Kostyuk set himself the task of extracting from the same tradition and history of ideas precisely the "socio-ethical" dimension - something that "is rarely thematized in the history of Orthodox thought, and almost never comes to the surface as an independent phenomenon" (p. 1). There is also an objective reason for this, since, as the author reminds us social ethics is a relatively new discipline, and what it does (man and the state, man and power, man and the social system), in the pre-secular era, was embedded in the system of religious (Christian) ideas. Moreover, " the categories of social ethics are read not only in theological works, but also in general in the structures of traditional society that has existed for centuries, in the entire history of the people, their way of life."

The book, which consists of eight chapters, can be divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 - 2) is devoted to the "cultural and historical roots": features of Eastern and Western church traditions, including pla-

^8. Published as a separate book: Kostjuk K. Der Begriff des Politischen in der russisch-orthodoxen Tradition. Zum Verhaltnis von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft in Ruffland. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2005. [Politik- und Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Veroffentlichungen der Gorres-Gesellschaft, Band 24.] - 409 S.

tonal and Aristotelian heritage in Orthodox theology, as well as the main elements of socio-Christian thought in Byzantium, which became the main source of Christian meanings and values for Russian Orthodoxy.

The second, strictly historical part (chapters h~6) covers the period from the adoption of Christianity to the XX century. The author examines in detail the Moscow period , an epoch about which the author writes: "The thinking of the Moscow state formed an ideal type of social thought of Orthodoxy, which was later interpreted as a certain unshakable set of principles that are true for all times. Despite the fact that the network of concepts and representations was only slightly outlined in a theological and theoretical way, it was later mythologized and turned into the legendary canvas of all church thinking " (p. 144). In a special section, the author, based on ancient monuments and works of Russian historians, describes this "canon of values", which includes such elements as "orthodoxy", "tsar", "service, sacrifice, patience", "honor and duty", "veche and volya", "pravda", "mercy", "thunderstorm" ("the concept of thunderstorms was identified with the concept of power and its power", as well as "order in the state"), "Holy Russia", "starina".

Next, we consider the "socio-cultural representations" in Russian Orthodoxy (Chapter 4), that is, concerning the court, everyday life, economics, education, and in addition, the socio-prophetic function of the church and, finally, the phenomenon of falling away from the church of the upper stratum.

With Peter, the era of Russian secularization begins. The author explores this three-century period by referring to the works of Orthodox hierarchs and theologians, state ideologists, religious philosophers and writers, tracing the" development of the idea of social Christianity " in the XIX century and extracting the socio-ethical dimension of Russian Orthodox-oriented thought in a later era in various contexts (including pre-revolutionary, Soviet and emigrant).

The third part of the study is devoted to the post-Soviet period, which the author considers the most productive in terms of the development of social ideas of the Church (p.336). The seventh chapter examines the positions of "church ideological leaders whose views on matters of faith and society have become a guide and position for many millions of believers": Metropolitan John (Snychev), Archpriest Alexander Me and Mi-

Metropolitan (now Patriarch) Kirill (Gundyaev), who represent, respectively, the right-wing conservative, liberal and liberal-conservative trends.

The last chapter is mainly devoted to the analysis of the social concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (2000), concerning the appearance of which the author writes: "For the first time, the church realized its right to have its own ideas about a properly organized society and to communicate them to society itself. After centuries of the absence of this right, such a request sounded truly revolutionary" (p.359). The author analyzes the content of the concept, highlighting such topics as" Politics and political ethics"," Society and social Ethics "and" Attitude to life and bioethics", and also draws attention to the absence in the document of many elements of Christian social teaching that he considers necessary.

In addition, attention is paid to two other documents that are considered in line with the development of the social teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church: "Code of Moral principles and rules in Economic management "(2004) and "Declaration on Human Rights and Dignity" (2006), adopted by the World Russian People's Council. Unfortunately, the position of the Church on the issue of human rights is analyzed and discussed by the author exclusively on the material of the "Declaration" - a very short," thesis " text, moreover, which does not have the status of a proper church document. It is an obvious omission that the more recent and much richer in ideological and argumentative terms document "Fundamentals of the doctrine of Dignity, Freedom and Human Rights", adopted by the Council of Bishops in 2008, was ignored - precisely in the development of the social teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church. Throughout the book, the author provides an overview of political and socio-cultural processes, as well as brief characteristics of relevant people, thinkers and historical figures, in order to analyze the main trends and make appropriate generalizations at each stage. This strategy is quite justified in the current cultural situation. A reminder of many almost textbook figures and events seems appropriate and necessary if we keep in mind the new generations of readers. In this sense, K. Kostyuk's book has an educational significance and can serve as one of the textbooks on Russian history, the religious dimension of which has long been either distorted or almost ignored.

The author's" ideological " credo is not specifically indicated, but it is implicitly present in the assessments. It can be said that it consists of three elements: scientific thoroughness and impartiality in working with the material, historical realism (in the sense of evaluating ideas and ideas from the point of view of their correspondence to real social processes) and personal interest - as an Orthodox Christian - in clarifying and developing the social and ethical position of the Russian Church relevant to modern processes (which is already quite explicit in the author's Conclusion to the book).

What are the general conclusions reached by the researcher? "Orthodoxy seeks, while being and serving in the world, to start from it, and not to immerse itself in it... The Church wants to be and remain in the world, but as" not of this world", while maintaining the gesture of reproach... It can accept the world only by "churching" it... Therefore, the church sees its ethical mission not in "improving" the laws of this world, but in eschatologically transforming them"; "...centuries have not led to the development of an inner-world ethics: every Orthodox person today must measure his actions not according to the law of this world, but according to the highest divine law." "Church life has followed this model for centuries, and the fact that it implies the 'abandonment' of the world, the unkempt state of everyday life, the institutional weakness of the church and clergy, and finally, the thirst for freedom on the part of the world, and even the temptation to persecute the church, are external things for it that it cannot change" (p. 387).

As a result, there is no holistic socio - ethical teaching, but instead only an opportunity for the researcher, as he himself says, "to build a typology of views, which, in fact, was done in the work." These views relate to such diverse concepts as the state, the tsar, the fatherland, war, service, power, mercy, truth, and finally, work and family. It is easy to see that almost all of these very archaic concepts go back to the" canon of values " of Moscow Russia. Beyond the space described by these concepts " lies modern society - not the people, not the Fatherland, but a complex complex of heterogeneous social relations, interactions and groups. In the face of active Laicist thought, the church recognized him as a conciliator." The author believes that " conciliarity is practically the only and at the same time the most expressive co - existence of the church."-

a social concept describing the state of modernity", however, it remains undeveloped and undeveloped (p. 392). The same can be said, according to the author, about the social concept, the drafters of which "were so careful that they preserved almost all the norms transmitted by tradition, and only described, but did not set the state of things that the Christian mind requires" (p.393). In response, Kostyuk identifies five socio-ethical themes and problems that do not exist or remain undeveloped not only in the tradition, but also in the foundations of social doctrine: the concept of love ("it seems that the gospel message about love does not break through the boundaries of the social," the author notes); education and enlightenment; money and property; the worker and the trade union (the discussion of this latter topic develops into more general considerations: "The focus of Christian social thought should be a dynamic, institutionally differentiated society with a future. It is not enough just to talk about an abstract "world" that can be accepted or rejected" - p. 394); finally, the concept of secular modernity.

The latter point is very important, especially today, when both in Russia and in the world we are already seeing post-secular trends and processes. This disregard by the church consciousness of the meaning and problems of secularization - while simultaneously denouncing it (despite the fact that secularization in Russia began not in 1917, but with Peter ⁹) - is genetically connected with a certain theology of power (a special section is devoted to it in the book): "The theology of power, which was formed in Moscow Rus, was a pathos, the highest expression of the social ontology of the "sanctification" of being, which was hidden in the Orthodox consciousness. If in the Byzantine tradition the seed of "sacred power" was prevented from rising by the historical separation of powers, then in the evolution of Muscovy, tsarist power soon turns out to be not just a national political center, but the basis and stronghold of the church's presence in this world-a world surrounded by alien, satanic forces "(p. 126). " Due to the placement of political power in the center of Russian Orthodoxy formulated the concept of autocracy, which formed the main specifics of Russian religious culture... In the Orthodox Church itself

^{Secularization in} the Social History of Russia, Moscow: Academia Publ., 2004.

the figure of the tsar is transformed into a certain archetype of tradition and tradition, from the power of influence and charm of which the church cannot free itself to this day "(p. 149). At the same time, "in a new interpretation [of autocracy in the imperial version], the Russian rulers managed to combine the independence of the Protestant concept of an earthly ruler and the Orthodox claim to the totality of power" (p. 224)..

In this regard, from a historical point of view, the following is important:: "At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, the life of the Church underwent more significant changes than at any subsequent time, including the time of its persecution. The Church, which has been the heart of public life for centuries, has ceased to be included in this life in just a few generations. The Christian era of Russian society is over. The life of the church as an institution was continued, but it was already subject to completely different social functions" - namely, "the social function of protecting, preserving the unshakable state of the rest of society", which was assigned to it, in fact, by the secular elite (p. 200).

As a result, in the 19th century, "the specific phenomenon of the' official church ' emerged, which, starting from this era, existed for the next two centuries, even in Soviet times. The constitutive element of this position was a careful distanced reproduction of the state political doctrine, distinguished by the color of theological vocabulary, while clearly delineating both external secular social party teachings and internal Christian ideological trends" (p.236). Social subjects were tabooed both for church hierarchs and for academic theology, where "the same departure into the traditional ethics of virtues was observed" (p. 234); "the social was perceived as an external environment that enveloped, but in no way entered into the system of Christian life" (p.247). This is also connected with another important point noted by the author (when analyzing the position of a prominent hierarch and theologian, Archbishop Sergius (Stragorodsky), the future Patriarch of the Soviet era) - a skeptical attitude towards law ,which "led not only to belittling the importance of law in comparison with morality, but also to attempts to transform law into morality" (p. 249).

On the other hand, " while school theology has not yet found a language that is adequate to the modern social process, this language is very different."-

It was developed within the framework of religious philosophy. At the cost of this, however, was the distanced attitude that the church took towards these philosophers" - since they "only appealed to the authority of the church to a certain extent, at their own "peril and risk"" (p.296). By the official Church, "religious philosophy, with all its wealth of ideas and the highest theoretical level, is usually not considered as an authentic source of Orthodox thinking" (p.270). At the same time, the author notes that "the main difficulty of theologians and philosophers for the development of social ideas in Orthodoxy was the lack of support for philosophizing, which for Catholicism served as natural law" (p.307).

The author gives an almost exhaustive overview of the social dimension of the views of the most prominent secular intellectuals, dividing them into "Slavophiles", "conservatives", fiction writers, liberal religious philosophers and emigrants of the XX century. Together with an overview of church authors and theologians, as well as various ideological trends, up to the official (and some "mirror", dissident) positions of the Soviet era, this creates a three-dimensional picture of religious socio-ethical ideas and representations in the XIX-XX centuries (note that the bibliography, Russian and foreign, takes 45 pages in the book pages).

However, the main advantage of the book, in our opinion, is not so much in the coverage of the material (which can always be increased or always considered insufficient), but in the author's empathic ability to penetrate the inner logic of religious consciousness - a particular thinker, an ideological trend or an entire era. In this case, we are talking precisely about a logical structure, which can be identified and described, and then evaluated, on the one hand, by a non-ideological research position, and on the other, by a certain logical engagement, that is, the interested position of a Christian intellectual. This is a fruitful (one might say "happy") approach, which, for example, was successfully implemented by Yaroslav Pelikan in his monumental "Christian Tradition". It is this approach that justifies the author's brief, sometimes aphoristic, but capacious characteristics (which is partly true in relation to the above-mentioned work of Fr.George Florovsky).

Despite the uncompromising assessments, the author's position is critical.

in a scientific sense, not in a polemic-journalistic sense. Therefore, Konstantin Kostyuk's research should be considered as a significant contribution not only to the understanding of religious and social processes in the Russian past and present, but, hopefully, also to the development and refinement of the social teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Speaking about the shortcomings of the publication under consideration, I would like to draw attention not so much to some errors and inaccuracies of the actual property ¹⁰, but to the more than negligent attitude of the publisher, who did not bother not only with literary editing, sometimes necessary, but also with just high-quality proofreading. At the same time, despite these sad manifestations of the general decline of the publishing culture in our country, we should thank everyone who ensured the publication of this wonderful book, which interested readers have been looking forward to for a long time.

^10. For example, the author confused the Orthodox American Seminary in Crestwood, which belongs to the Orthodox Church in America, and the seminary of the Russian Church Abroad in Jordanville; moreover, N. Afanasyev was never a professor at the American Seminary - p. 330.

Permanent link to this publication: