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Freedom and Responsibility
This is a remarkable personal vision of a 'multi-polar' future for the world by the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Two antagonistic systems are ranged against each other, onr liberal, secular and humanistic, the other religious and traditionalist. Rather than a struggle to the death between competing value systems, he proposes instead the way of co-existence, grounded in mutual respect for moral categories that are common to all.
136 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 2011
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December 31, 2016
This brief collection of essays from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia is a valuable contribution to a small-but-growing corpus of Orthodox social thought. It is, at bottom, an attempt to craft a political via media - or, perhaps more correctly, a different path - which takes certain basic assumptions of political liberalism and secular thinking with regard to human rights, and grounds them theologically in a framework of the 'positive liberty' afforded by traditional religious and cultural norms.
The political experiences of totalitarian Soviet tyranny and post-Soviet dissolution, humiliation and decadence are very rarely spelt out in full in this volume, but they clearly loom large in His Holiness's thinking on these questions. It is therefore difficult to 'pin' him onto an American political map. He combines a fiery radical critique of globalism and global capitalism (often reminiscent of Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky or Arundhati Roy) with an equally-impassioned plea for the traditional family which ought to be familiar to students of Pope Benedict XVI (whose work and partnership His Holiness indeed cites quite often). Additionally, he does it by allowing the former critique to speak directly to the human needs implicit in the latter: for him, the crisis in the family and in traditional social norms and values is the result of an overreaching economic and cultural colonialism powered by a secular (and Western-specific) language of human rights.
I do highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the questions of the post-Soviet religious landscape of Russia, and the direction in which Russian religious and social thought is now tacking. However, don't go looking in this book for proof of some sinister ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian government, or of (purely-imagined) military or geopolitical machinations against hapless Eastern Europeans. That's not His Holiness's project. Patriarch Kirill is concerned here with allowing the 'second' and 'third' worlds a more participatory role in articulating an approach to human rights and dignity which grounds them in virtue and responsibility, in the cultural lives of different communities.
The political experiences of totalitarian Soviet tyranny and post-Soviet dissolution, humiliation and decadence are very rarely spelt out in full in this volume, but they clearly loom large in His Holiness's thinking on these questions. It is therefore difficult to 'pin' him onto an American political map. He combines a fiery radical critique of globalism and global capitalism (often reminiscent of Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky or Arundhati Roy) with an equally-impassioned plea for the traditional family which ought to be familiar to students of Pope Benedict XVI (whose work and partnership His Holiness indeed cites quite often). Additionally, he does it by allowing the former critique to speak directly to the human needs implicit in the latter: for him, the crisis in the family and in traditional social norms and values is the result of an overreaching economic and cultural colonialism powered by a secular (and Western-specific) language of human rights.
I do highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the questions of the post-Soviet religious landscape of Russia, and the direction in which Russian religious and social thought is now tacking. However, don't go looking in this book for proof of some sinister ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian government, or of (purely-imagined) military or geopolitical machinations against hapless Eastern Europeans. That's not His Holiness's project. Patriarch Kirill is concerned here with allowing the 'second' and 'third' worlds a more participatory role in articulating an approach to human rights and dignity which grounds them in virtue and responsibility, in the cultural lives of different communities.
Displaying 1 of 1 review