We should not be surprised that there is a religious dimension to Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Orthodoxy has been re-established as a foundation of Russian culture under President Vladimir Putin and features prominently in Ivan Ilyin’s writings. Oligarchs have rebuilt its churches to maintain status.
Kyiv is the spiritual home of Russian Orthodoxy and the recognition of an autocephalous (independent) Ukrainian Orthodox church in 2018 by Istanbul’s Patriarch Bartholomew may have made the conflict inevitable.
But there is another religious dimension. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, its Christian church, through facing the German tribal invasions and general anarchy after the death of Charlemagne, developed along very different lines from that of the Eastern church, securely based until 1453 in Constantinople. The former confronted temporal rulers when they strayed from “God’s Law”, while stressing the uniqueness of every person’s immortal soul. The latter maintained tradition in an almost ancient Roman way, deferring to temporal power.
Over the centuries, the Western church gave the modern world individuality, personal conscience and a work ethic, in effect creating our free market system. The Eastern church, spreading to what is now the Russian Federation, concerned itself more with bolstering an elite that resembled the old Roman senatorial class. Thus there were serfs in Russia until the late 1800s, followed by a communist oligarchy, followed in short order by a slightly different one under Putin.
It is these alternative mindsets that are fighting on Ukraine’s battlefields, where the defenders receive support from the West while Russian troops are sacrificed wholesale to stamp out a perceived heresy. Ukraine is not only a disputed geographical borderland, it is also one in the realm of ideas.
James Cunningham
Camps Bay
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.