"THE RIGHT WAY TO GLORIFY GOD"

It is curious, how Russia has been trying to protect her religious “Third Rome” purity from any association with the excesses of all other branches of Christianity, condemned by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, by identifying herself as a nation of the “Orthodox” faith, or Pravoslavie, in Russian, as opposed to what is almost derisively branded as “Christianity” (literally, the Messiah-centered religion, presumably similar, but actually not similar at all!) of the world’s “Christian” churches.

One may argue, of course, that Pravoslavie, which is a translation from the Greek word Orthodoxa (that is, “the right way to glorify God”), means nothing that special, referring either to established belief in general, or to the Christian faith of the so-called Eastern Rite, as formulated in the first seven ecumenical councils, from the First Council of Nicaea in 325, to the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD. However, the spice is not in the staple fact, but in the manner of its application and interpretation, and the unique Russian word “Pravoslavie,” different from Orthodoxalnost and Orthodoxia, is significantly more restrictive in its usage than its transliterated Greek counterpart, which is also in use, but in broader contexts, reaching beyond religion. In fact, it is commonly recognized that the meaning of the word Pravoslavie among the Russian believers has its core in the specific Russian Orthodoxy, and extends to the other Churches of the Eastern rite only conditionally, almost reluctantly, in so far as the supremacy of the Russian Church is taken for granted, which technically is not supposed to be the case.

On the other hand, there is a lingering ambiguity as to precisely which world Churches are embraced by the term Pravoslavie. Different counts have been done in this respect by the different Churches of the Eastern rite. The Russian Church recognizes fifteen autocephalous Churches and four autonomous Churches. (The former are formally independent Churches, whereas the latter are canonically dependent on their mother Churches among the former.) The autocephalous Churches are those of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Georgia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Albania, Poland, Czech Lands and Slovakia, and America and Canada. The autonomous Churches are those of Sinai (Jerusalem), Finland (Constantinople), Japan (Russia), and China (Russia, nominally in existence and even recognized as such, but effectively defunct, at least at the time of this writing).

Both the autocephalous and the autonomous Churches are normally delineated according to the national borders of each, but a curious situation currently exists as regards the Russian Church, in particular. In the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR and in the wake of a mass exodus of Russians going abroad, there is a global spread of the Russian Diaspora today, building countless churches in virtually every country of the world, in addition to the already existing ones in the post-Soviet space, where Russian Orthodox populations make up very sizable portions of the total populations there; and all these Russian expatriates with their churches are naturally covered by the authority of the Russian Church, all of a sudden having created a Russian Catholic (meaning worldwide) phenomenon, second only to the spread of Roman Catholicism, and making the Russian Patriarch second in international ecclesiastical importance only to the Pope. However, taking into consideration the Patriarch’s political clout in the Russian duumvirate of Church and State, his actual importance may have been seriously underestimated. I venture to say that indeed it is the Russian Orthodox Church which today exercises the most significant influence on world affairs, among all religious organizations, Christian or non-Christian. This fact may take a while to be recognized, because of its sheer novelty, but a couple of decades down the road it may well become common wisdom…