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Basilica of Saint Bartholomew on the Island in the Tiber 1st July 2009
Resisting evil and violence
A presentation of the new edition of Andrea Riccardi’s book
“The century of Martyrdom”
Transcript of Adriano Roccucci’s presentation
I will be talking about martyrdom in the Soviet Union, and about the Orthodox Church in particular. It is a story which holds a significant place in the history of antireligious persecutions of the twentieth century, and it is no accident that the first chapter of the book deals with it. Riccardi rightly maintains that an actual massacre of Christians, above all Orthodox but others too, took place in Russia. The events of Russian history constitute one of the cruces to the history of the last century. I believe that it could be said to be analogous with the story of twentieth century Christianity. The persecution which carried a million Orthodox to their deaths according to the most reliable estimations, killed for their faith under the Soviet regime, struck a great Christian church that had been overturned by war, revolution and the Bolshevik experiment of constructing a new world and a new man.
The history of Russian Christians is the history of christian resistance to evil, which manifested itself in Russia with particular force and intensity. It is a story which in its way exemplifies persecution against Christians, as Riccardi underlines in the book, “the twentieth century shows an inhuman, violent and intolerant face”. It is an important starting point, not entirely acquired from storiography. The persecution of Christians really constitutes an expression of evil, one of the manifestations of violence in the course of the twentieth century. “The century of martyrdom” shows unequivocally that antireligious persecution has been a modern reality. It has been at the heart of the modern experience, thought and proposed as the avant-garde of modernity I.e. bolshevism. Anti religious persecution is not extraneous to modernity, but has accompanied the manifestations of violence which have profoundly marked the twentieth century.
This is very clearly the case for Russia. Yet the Russian experience is emblematic in another way, which seems to me to recur frequently in the events examined in the book. The persecution of Christians in the course of the twentieth century has been cultivated by modern war, mass war, total war in a society modelled on this type of war. The effect of the wave on European society brought about by the Great War, signalled a point of no return, including the twentieth century antireligious persecutions, in the European context at least. In fact, leaving aside the years of the First World War, European society was characterised by a process of brutalisation. It is hard to comprehend the appearance of antireligious violence in twentieth century Europe. Ernst Junger wrote at the end of the war: “This war is not the end of violence, but the prelude. War is a tough school and the new man will be of our time”. It has been the new man forged by war who has been the protagonist in antireligious persecutions.
The link between war and forms of violence and persecution seems to me a nexus that emerges in living form from the pages of the book. From the start of the twentieth century up to the first decade of the new century, this link has constituted one of the interpretive keys seen in the repression of religious groups. War, evil, persecution and martyrdom are dimensions deeply woven into the twentieth century.
Such weaving is evident in the Bolshevik experience in Russia. Without the war, we cannot understand the events of 1917 or the Bolshevik experience in it’s complexity. This is because the world conflict and its Russian prosecution of civil war, or more precisely the multiple wars that took place between 1918 and 1921 (with white Russians, with the peasants, with the Ukraine and Poland), are really terrains cultivated by Bolshevism. The experience of war, the category war, the mental outlook of war and the ingredients at the centre of Bolshevism infected with Marxist ideology and the peculiarities of Russian culture and history. The Soviet system was born out of war and for the war. It is in this context that the antireligious persecutions took place.
In this picture it seems to me that we can understand the figure of Christians’ resistance to evil of which “The Century of Martyrdom” deals with interpretive finesse and a great narrative capacity. The twentieth century was a time of persecution in Russia. A few old words, by Basil of Caesarea, which describe his city at the time of persecution by the emperor Diocletian, offer important hints: “Confusion and disturbance across the whole city; sacking to the guardians of mercy has taken place(…); there is no more compassionate youth, or venerated old age(…) The prisons have become all the more overcrowded; once prosperous houses stand deserted; the deserts are full of refugees. Mercy was considered the chief indictment against those who suffered all this. A sorrowful night covered the lives of men(…) the houses of prayer were knocked down by godless hands, altars ruined, no more incense, no more place to celebrate the holy sacrifices, but a horrible sadness that extended itself like a cloud taking control of everything. The lovers of God forced to flee, every religious community thrown into terror”.
These are words that could be applied with few variations to the many pictures which compose the fresco that our book has painted of the lives of many Christians in the course of the twentieth century. It is a description that corresponds to the reality of countries and cities devastated by violence, war and persecutions, many such places having been visited by Riccardi in the pages of this volume. Many scenes are analogous, despite being set in the heart of the contemporary era.
Basil called Christians lovers of mercy, and their communities-communities of mercy. Mercy in time of persecution became a means of indictment said the Church father. Christian resistance to evil takes on features of mercy, which is a presence that can humanise the most inhuman environments and situations. The resistance by Russian Christians took place in the spirit of the time, and the spirit of the time was that of brutalisation and the absence of mercy. It is significant that one of the heroes for children proposed by the Soviet education system was the figure (very probably imaginary) of Pavlik Morozov. He was a child during the years of famine, who denounced his father for having sold grain, hiding it from requisition, with the aim of feeding his family. The great Russian twentieth century poet Anna Achmatova, condensed the spirit of the time in a poem which evolved in the months of great terror, when she spent hour after hour alongside many other women queuing at the gates to the prison in Leningrad waiting to see her son who had been arrested: “It is confused forever and I cannot work out who is a beast and who is man”. Christians at this time, as observed by the sharp minded intellectual Sergej Averincev, manifested a spirit of resistance that was both peaceful and indestructible.
That resistance has been kept alight like the flame of faith beneath the icons, the flame which is also the flame of humanity. This was the belief of the bishop and martyr, Ilarion (Troickij) that he expressed to his companions imprisoned on the Solovki Islands: “We must believe that the Church will resist. Without faith one cannot live! If even miniscule flames can be kept alight, flames which manage to shine, from them one day everything can start from the beginning. Without Christ, men will devour themselves one after the other”.
Resistance in the name of Christ and of mercy. “Without Christ, men will devour themselves one after the other”. The Russian Christ is the Kenotic Christ, compassionate, the humble brother of the meek. Without Christ, without Christians there is no mercy. Michail Novoselov, the Orthodox thinker shot in 1938, wrote from hiding to his friends in January 1924: “The mystery of iniquity (2Ts 2, 7), which is being revealed in our days with exceptional force and in unusual ways, must not disturb the faithful of the Church, faithful in the indestructibility of God’s house…So my friends, do not be distressed (…) but instead be amazed by the great understanding of Our Lord, who transforms the work of the ‘mystery of iniquity’ into the triumph of the ‘mystery of mercy’”.
The martyrs whose resistance to evil is a triumph of “the mystery of mercy”, has checked the “mystery of iniquity”. The book is full of examples which represent such a reality. It is enough to think of the episodes narrated which detail events in the mother of soviet lagers, the camp of the Solovki Islands. Solzenicyn wrote that the presence of Christians in the soviet lagers crossed “the Gulag archipelago like a violent procession of invisible candles”, the presence of mercy which resisted brutalisation and violence. Silent and invisible mercy humanised the soviet camps. Here a witness describes a glowing twentieth century Russian Orthodox figure: “Father Arsenij, when he was in the camp, entered into the lives of people without them noticing; he helped prisoners, soothed their suffering and showed with his life that even in the camp under a hard regime the situation is not so terrible if God is with us”.
There is another aspect, which in conclusion I would like to mention. Brutalisation in Soviet society also manifested itself in the efforts to close the space for God, to close space for the spiritual. These efforts were undertaken with determination and in some cases with fervour. There is here an aspect of resistance to evil that is not secondary which emerges particularly in the experience of Russian Christians: Protecting space for the spiritual is connected to protecting mercy.
The work of uprooting religion from communist society was an aspect of the Bolshevik project to rebuild man and society. The “confessional”, “religious” or para-religious character of Soviet society cannot escape the attention of a history scholar. Riccardi comments on this astutely:
“Aside from the political objectives in the struggle with religion, exhausting itself in the affirmation of a strong communist power in the Soviet Union, other anthropological, ideological and symbolic objectives existed. One was specifically “religious”, or rather antireligious. The USSR, despite, the declared separation between Church and state, did not represent a typical lay or separatist regime of the western model. The Soviet state (…) is in its way, confessional, having an official position in religious matters, an atheist one which represented one of the decisive features of its ideological identity”.
The iconoclast which accompanied the different campaigns conducted against the Church is an emblematic feature of a kind of “mysticism” in the antireligious struggle. The destruction of icons, of churches, of bells and sacred objects, the numerous profanities in places of prayer and reliquaries were strong expressions of a religious like zeal. The beautiful and terrible image on the cover of our book represents part of this: the requisition of liturgical objects. This is something we find in other twentieth century contexts; the destruction of places of devotion and of objects of religious veneration. It happened for different reasons, some not entirely antireligious as in the case of national conflict. Yet, in all cases, the objective was to deny space for the spiritual life, space for prayer, which Christians defended in different ways with their acts of resistance. It could be said that the concentration on the liturgy has not been a refuge, but a strategy of resistance to soviet persecution. The Metropolitan of Leningrad Seraphim (Cicagov), who died a martyr during the great terror, addressing his priests at the end of the 1920’s, affirmed: “As long as the divine liturgy is celebrated, as long as the faithful draw near to holy communion, we can be certain that the Orthodox Church will be able to resist and triumph, that the Russian people will not be engulfed by evil and sin, by incredulity, by wickedness, materialism, pride and impurity, but can be reborn and our homeland will be saved”. Space for the liturgy, even if reduced, has represented in the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin (and in the following years), a space of alterity where the spiritual life, with it’s beauty and humanity were protected. A space where the Soviet reality was resisted.
Totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt observed, aimed “at the transformation of human nature which as it is, is opposed to the totalitarian process”. In her opinion, the anthropological challenge thrown down by totalitarianism and made explicit in the concentration camps has constituted what is at stake in twentieth century history. “Suffering is not at stake, there has always been too much of it on earth, neither the number of victims. What is at stake is human nature as it is”. Antireligious persecution and the persecution of man as he is often went together in twentieth century Europe. The defence of a space for mercy and the spiritual life are effective forms of resistance to evil that Christians have practised and the victims of persecution have been the most eloquent of interpreters.
This book speaks of how, in the most secularised century in history, Christians have not retreated to some corner of the world but have been present, often as victims at decisive or dramatic points in history, protagonists in a gentle and peaceful resistance to evil and violence. Elizaveta Juv’evna Skobcova, mat ’Marija, was a Russian poet who emigrated to Paris after the revolution where she became an Orthodox nun and died in a nazi camp for having sheltered some persecuted Jews at her hostel for the poor in Paris. She wrote in 1938, “Our era without God - not simply un-Christian - our materialist and nihilist time shows itself simultaneously as a Christian time par excellence, a time called to reveal and consolidate the Christian mysteries to the world…A morning of pain, torture, beatitude and liberation. It’s light clearly reveals the cross standing firm before the world. Man is nailed to the cross. Is it not perhaps a Christian era?” The century of Martyrdom is a response to this question and a confirmation of the intuition of this nun and martyr. |
Texts: Contribution of Roberto Saviano Contribution of Adriano Roccucci
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