USA BEWARE: PUNK-TRUE-ORTHODOXY IS HERE!

 

They have set their mouth against heaven, and their tongue roveth in the earth.

Psalm 72.9.

 

Let not the throne of iniquity have fellowship with Thee, which maketh mischief in the name of the law.

Psalm 93.20.

 

Introduction

 

     An Orthodox bishop once said: the lives of the saints reveal an infinite variety, in the image of God's infinity, but sin is always boring, always the same. Truly "there is nothing new under the sun," as the wise Solomon said, having tasted of almost everything this fallen world can offer.  However, we need to qualify this judgement somewhat.  Since sin is always boring, the sinner is always bored with himself, and so is always seeking new expressions for his everlastingly boring content. Moreover, Satan is always seeking to catch us out by presenting sin in new forms, new, unexpected and "kinky" combinations.

 

     Modern western culture revels in such shocking new combinations. Take the rock singer Marilyn Manson. A conventional Satanist, one might think. After all, one of his records is called "Antichrist Superstar", and he has large placards on stage while performing that red: "KILL GOD!" On the other hand, he wears a large cross in a prominent position over his demonic face, and has published an article entitled: "The Cross I bear". Does he respect the Cross even while trampling on it? Of course not... And yet the modern phase in populat culture, which may be said to have started in the 1970s with the rise of the punk movement in the West, and about ten years later during perstroika in the East, is definitely religious by comparison with its predecessor. Clearly Satan came to the conclusion that the frontal assault on religion - through the persecution of the faith in the communist countries, and through the preaching of unbridled licence and the relativisation of religion (ecumenism) in the capitalist countries - should now be brought to an end. It was time, while not completely abandoning the old methods, to combine communism with capitalism, licentiousness with asceticism, Christianity with Antichristianity.  And since that time Satan's agents have no longer striven to sweep the very name of God from off the face of the earth. Instead, the names of God and Christ and the Mother of God appear everywhere - but never in a holy context, always in combination with filth and blasphemy. Thus a singer in Los Angeles and London calls herself "Madonna" and spends millions on propagating the Kabbala, while a cult leader in Kiev with links to the KGB calls herself "Deva Christi", "Virgin of Christ".

 

     One of the first True Orthodox thinkers to study this phenomenon and write about it was Hieromonk Seraphim Rose. Having drunk deeply of the "delights" of hippy-nihilist culture before converting to Orthodoxy, he was in a good position to analyse it and anticipate the ways in which it might invade the culture of True Orthodoxy. His book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, touched a chord in the hearts of many, not only in America but also in Russia. 

 

     One of Rose's admirers is Igumen Gregory Lourie. Scion of a famous Jewish family (the Russian Jewish Encyclopaedia calls them "aristocrats among the Jews"), and a direct descendant of the foremost Kabbalist in Europe in the sixteenth century, Issak Lourie Levi (a link of which he is reported to be proud), he is a product of the Leningrad rock underground of the 1980s as Rose was of the San Francisco hippy scene a generation earlier. Like Rose, he has set himself the task of interpreting the nihilist culture of contemporary youth for a True Orthodox readership, and, vice-versa, of bring True Orthodoxy to the down and outs of the Russian cities. Unlike Rose, however, he has not fully broken with his past... The result is a horrific hybrid, a mixture of True Orthodoxy and nihilist art and philosophy - "Punk-True-Orthodoxy" - which has already created havoc (and some court cases) in Russia, and which he is threatening to bring to America through a proposed union with HOCNA - the "Holy Orthodox Church in North America". (see my "Open Letter to Fr. Gregory Lourie").

 

Lourie's Punk Orthodoxy

 

     In order that we may better understand the essence of this horrific hybrid, here is an extensive quotation from an article on it by N.D. Nedashkovskaya, former Director of the Centre of Orthodox Enlightenment in St. Petersburg entitled "Taking Inspiration from Emptiness, or: The Theology of the Gutter":-

 

     "First: blasphemy against God as the Creator of a perfect and beautiful world that has not finally lost these qualities even after the fall of Satan and man. As it is written in [Lourie's] "Swiss Time": "You want to be a good person? I do not, whatever this 'goodness' may consist in. But if after all I have to be a man, then I would do better to try and become the kind of man I myself want to be, and not the kind that someone here (even God) would consider to be 'good'. But if I were to set about thinking even harder, then I would not find in the idea of 'man' (any man, 'man generally speaking') anything for the sake of which it would be worth living, even on the condition of immortality: the senseless does not acquire sense if it becomes infinitely long... Such a picture of Paradise - in the form of an infinitely long and infinitely happy human existence - begins very much to smack of Mohammedan dreams of blessedness beyond the grave. But the Mohammedans have in mind the usual physiological 'pleasures' raised to an infinite degree, while with the Christians it turns out to be something closer to psychodelics: some special kind of 'kick' which you don't find in everyday life (the same 'psychodelic paradise' that Yanka Dyagilev [a Russian pop star' rejected!). One can't help thinking at this point that the Mohammedans nevertheless have something healthy. "

 

     "I should like immediately to point out either the illiteracy or the deliberate distortion of concepts in Fr. Gregory Lourie, who is advertised as a 'theologian' or 'patrologist'. He substitutes for the positive infinity of being, well-being, of the creature in the Kingdom of Heaven the "bad" infinity. The latter will be realised in hell. By the way, in this extract we have a vivid example of the characteristic style of our author: mocking and overstrained, the exact opposite of the style of the Holy Fathers, which is full of seriousness and weeping. 

 

     "The failure to distinguish between the "heights" and the "depths", the substitution of the one for the other, and demagogic play on the antimonies: the world as the sum total of God's creation, created as a mirro in which His all-perfection is reflected for the Noetic Powers and for man; and the world in the ascetic sense, as the name of the sum total of the demonic and human passions. In this consist the spirit of the world-view of "Luciferyanism" (we retain Fr. Nektary [Yashunsky]'s term). However, for the author we have his own name for himself: "punk-orthodoxy": "I am conscious of, and recognise in myself, something of the rocker and even... of 'punk-orthodoxy', writes Fr. Gregory Lourie.

 

     "Second blasphemy: a blasphemous distortion of the lofty patristic teaching on the final end of the existence of the world and man - deification. As Fr. Nektary writes in the above-mentioned work: "... Once the daystar 'said in his heart, 'I will ascend to heaven: above the stars of God I shall set my throne... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself equal to the Most High' (Isaiah 14.13-14). But Hieromonk [Gregory] truly aspires to become equal to the Most High.  He writes: 'Being with God is not the infinity of unlimited human existence, but real eternity, which has not only no end, but also no beginning'. He apparantly hopes to excel in deification even the Son of God Himself, or at least he ascribes this to the Holy Fathers, who, insofar as 'in them the real aim of the Incarnation of Christ has been completely accomplished', 'themselves became primary sources of the teaching of the Church' ('Swiss dogmatics')..."  

 

 

     Nedashkovskaya continues her article: "Thus we see a direct merging between the theology of Luciferyanian "deification" and the "simple" Luciferyanism of the punk-nihilists... That is Fr. Gregory Lourie's Orthodoxy!...

 

     "But of course the apotheosis of his theology is his insinuation of a "discovery" of the unfortunate Nietzsche, who died of syphilis. In the course of eighteen and a half centuries there was nothing that was not thrown at the Church: both heresies and schism. But neither they, nor the most savage enemy of Christianity, Talmudic Judaism, ever thought up such a blasphemy against the Life-Giver Christ as was born in the rotting brain of the made Nietzsche and which is now being taken up as a revelation of Fr. Gregory Lourie's "purified" (from Christianity "direct path". It is terrible even to repeat this blasphemy, but the Internet is teeming with it: Christ committed... suicide: "The image of the death of Christ, to which our death must be conformed, has long ago been named in the unbelieving world: suicide (F. Nietzsche)" ("Let's try this").

 

     "Here is some correspondence between Fr. Gregory Lourie [and someone else] in the "suicides' club":

 

     "Someone: They say that if a person believes in God, it's kind of more difficult for him to decide on the step [of suicide]. Tell me, please: do you believe that this is true?

 

     "Fr. Gregory: It depends how you look at it. You can also believe that deciding on this step would even be easier. On this subject there is a special song by Yanka Dyagileva, "The flocks are flying". But if you believe in an Orthodox way, then all problems are removed, while new ones (even worse?) appear (4 January, 2002).

 

     "Someone: I'm almost, I don't want to live... It's true, it's a great thing.

 

     "Fr. Gregory: One "wants" to live, but one mustn't." (5 January, 2002).

 

     Nedashkovskaya concludes: "How have we got to such a life?

 

     "Such a horrific phenomenon as Fr. Gregory Lourie's punk-Orthodoxy is not a chance phenomenon, just as the appearance of another horror, ecumenism, was not a chance phenomenon. Horrific not in an abusive sense: we call horrors the fantastic union of that which cannot be united by nature. And if ecumenism is justly called a pan-heresy, then we can call the newly-born chimera, "punk orthodoxy", a hyper-heresy. The essence of ecumenismis the bringing to earth of the commandment on love, bringing it down to the level of an earthly, non-spiritual phenomenon. The pseudo-struggle of "punk orthodoxy" with ecumenism leads to a denial of, and blasphemy against, all manifestations of love - except love for one's own pseudo-divine ego. The stages on the inglorious path of apostasy from God were indicated by Fr. Seraphim Rose in his work, Subhumanism..."

 

Lourie and True Orthodoxy

 

     So much for Lourie's Punk Orthodoxy, which, as should be clear now, is not only not Christian or Orthodox, but the purest Antichristianity. However, if that were all there is to the man, he would not represent such a threat to the True Orthodox. Surely he cannot enter among us, one may object! But he entered already eight years ago... How could such a bizarre, deluded man make serious inroads into our enclosed, traditionalist, anti-modernist world? By presenting himself as traditionalist and anti-modernist to some, while practising the destruction of tradition in the mot cynically modernist spirit in front of others...

 

     We must not underestimate what Lourie can achieve and has already achieved: his horrific hybrid "Punk-True-Orthodoxy" is spreading fast in Russia - and he plans to bring it to America through a secretly planned union with HOCNA... Fr. Panteleimon of Boston was already courting Lourie in the year 2000. In September, 2005 he went for three weeks to Russia...

 

     One of the reasons for Lourie's success is his ability to think strategically about Orthodoxy in the contemporary world in clear, coherent lines that seem to make sense of the present "time of troubles" while giving concrete indications as to how the Church is to survive in the 21st century. Such strategic thinking is very rare in True Orthodoxy today, obsessed as we are by tactical questions - that is, inter- and intra-jurisdictional issues. These cannot, unfortunately, be avoided; but for the soul, especially the young soul, they are meagre food. "ortunately, be avoided; but for the soul, especially the young soul, they are meagre food… As the wise Solomon says, "without a vision the people perish..."

 

     So let us examine some aspects of Lourie’s strategic plan for the Orthodox Church in the twenty-first century:-

 

1. Lourie’s Eschatology

 

     It is best to begin at the end, with Lourie’s idea of how things are likely to develop, because this to a large extent determines his outlook on other subjects.

 

     Lourie is resolutely opposed to the idea that there will be a restoration of the Orthodox monarchy (which he in any case considers to be an "Old Testament" institution!). Thus in July, 2003 the ROAC Synod, at Lourie’s prompting, declared: "The old 'Christian world' has gone, never to return, and that which is frenziedly desired by some, the regeneration of the 'Orthodox monarchy' in some country, in which the true faith will reign, must be considered a senseless utopia." Assuming that the signatures under this decree are genuine (which one can by no means assume in the ROAC), then we must conclude that the ROAC has officially rejected the hope of all truly Orthodox Christians in the resurrection of Orthodoxy under an Orthodox Emperor, and in particular the resurrection of Orthodoxy under a Russian Tsar.

 

     How this renunciation of the hopes of the Catacomb Church and the old-style ROCOR can be reconciled with the many prophecies that speak of a restoration of Orthodoxy and the Orthodox monarchy before the end, has never, to my knowledge, been explained by Lourie. The authenticity of some prophecies may be doubted; the sanctity and true inspiration of some of the prophets may perhaps be challenged; but a rejection of all the prophecies, and the characterisation even of the hope of the resurrection of Orthodoxy as a "frenzied desire" for a "senseless utopia", indicates more than a cautious scepticism. It is as if Lourie does not want the resurrection of Orthodoxy, as if he is determined, for motives that are unclear, to root out this "superstition" from the minds of believers (who happened to include very many of the saints and martyrs of the twentieth century).

 

     In his most recent article Lourie also attacks the idea that Russia must undergo some kind of collective repentance in order to receive again an Orthodox monarchy. "The worst thing about this 'penitentialism'," he writes, "is that it blocks all thought about the regeneration of Russia as a State without her regeneration as an Orthodox State" (my italics -V.M.)… Lourie here forgets that St. John Kronstadt said Russia without an Orthodox tsar is "a stinking corpse"…

 

     "Perhaps," he continues, "such a destiny [having an Orthodox State] still awaits Russia. But for us now, who again find ourselves in about the first century of Christianity, such historical conjectures are of practically no topical interest. Whether we like it or not, we are living in the midst of an unbelieving people. If we do not consider that its unbelief is a reason for wishing it the speediest annihilation, then it would be reasonable on our side not to imitate the eschatological escapism of Old Ritualism…" ("Russkoe okaianstvo i pravoslavnoe pokaianstvo" (Russian pestilentialism and Orthodox penitentialism), portal-credo.ru, 3 October, 2005)

    

     One might think that Lourie simply believes, as do so many Orthodox Christians today, that the Antichrist is just round the corner, so there is no hope of a "Triumph of Orthodoxy" before the Second Coming of Christ; we must simply bunker down in our catacomb-like cells and wait for the end, renouncing missionary work and all long-term plans for the establishment of large-scale Orthodox structures – Churches or States.

 

     Not a bit of it! Lourie talks little about the Antichrist – he is much too anchored in the here and now. And he is the very opposite of a Catacomb Christian in his mentality and aspirations (which is why the Catacomb hierarchs of the ROAC have been trying, and now finally succeeded in obtaining his defrocking - whether canonically or not, as Lourie contends, is another matter). He is a media man, a performer, a "star", just made for the age of the internet. He and his very active disciples in St. Petersburg and elsewhere write articles, publish journals, speak on the radio, create web-sites and web-forums and even organise press conferences to propagandise their views. Lourie seeks publicity because, as he writes, "for the successful mission of the Church in the contemporary world the Church organism must be not only Spirit-bearing, but also dynamic and effective" – as if acquiring the Holy Spirit is not the ultimate and completely sufficient aim of the Orthodox Christian, but has to be supplemented by worldly "dynamism" and "effectiveness"!

 

2. Lourie and Politics

 

     This brings us to Lourie’s highly controversial relations with politics and politicians.

 

     Lourie believes that, even in this "post-religious" world, as he calls it, the Church should get involved in politics. This is made clear in his writings. "The True Orthodox Church should exert a strong influence on the religious politics of its State." "Her strategic interests coincide with the interests of any patriotic government of its country." (Interesting...) "The process of degeneration is unstoppable, and the Old Calendarist movement is no longer able to save itself…" (HOCNA, take note!) "Its only chance is to get hitched up to a tug-boat." (That "tug-boat" is the State – and Lourie is not too finicky about what kind of State: the Soviet State under Stalin and the neo-Soviet State under Putin are equally acceptable.) "For me it is evident that in Russia there is required a restoration of those relationships between the MP and the State that were bequeathed to us by the great Stalin."

 

     So Sergianism is just fine, and Stalin is “great” (in other places he speaks of his “respect” for Stalin, and the “genius” of his socialist realist art)! And yet in other works of his Lourie blasts both ecclesiastical Stalinism and the Sergianism of the MP! More than that: he blasts the pre-revolutionary Synod for being "Sergianist" before Sergius!

 

     In this amazingly hypocritical tactic Lourie displays a close kinship with the "Living Church" renovationists of the 1920s. Before the revolution, these heretics were among the foremost critics of the Church’s too-close dependence on the Orthodox Tsarist State, and were usually anti-monarchists. After the revolution, they immediately entered into an extremely dependent relationship on the antichristian Soviet State, and justified all the horrors of Lenin and Stalin in the name of Christ.

 

     There can be no doubt that when the time for the next State-sponsored persecution of the Church comes, Lourie will be on the side of the persecutors. After all, if, as he says, Bulgakov and Pasternak "should not have been left alive" by the "great" Stalin, what mercy can we, the True Orthodox Christians expect from him in time of trouble? Already, he has powerful protectors in high places, such as the Kremlin "polittechnologist" and betrayer of the dissidents, Gleb Pavlovsky, who provides him with money and lawyers and makes visits with him to the bedside of Metropolitan Valentine…

 

     Some have speculated that Lourie is a KGB agent. I have no proof of this, and just as we had to wait until 1992 for final proof that the leading hierarchs of the MP were KGB agents, so we shall probably have to wait until the arrival of a True Orthodox tsar before Lourie’s true status is elucidated beyond doubt. But his activities would seem to indicate that here is a new type of agent – not the crude Soviet mouth-pieces of the Brezhnev years, but a much more "flexible" force (the word was used of Metropolitan Sergius), more like an "agent of influence", that is probably given much more freedom to choose his own strategy, more rope with which to hang others – and himself. Lourie is no atheist planted in an already Sovietised institution, but a sincere "believer" – an eccentric and heretical one, but a "believer" nonetheless, whose ambition can be guaranteed to bring about the required results for the government without any (or only very little) instructions or encouragement. Lourie probably feels he is using the government rather than being used by it (again the parallel is with Sergius): the important fact from our point of view is that Satan is manipulating both of them.

 

3. Lourie and the MP

 

     So what is Lourie’s relationship to the MP? Just as Metropolitan Sergius, as Hieromartyr Damascene pointed out, took a suspiciously long time to leave the renovationists in 1924, so Lourie was remarkably late in leaving the MP in 1997. In the case of many, perhaps most, converts, this could be put down to ignorance of the true state of affairs. Not Lourie. A patrologist and Byzantinist, a former secretary of Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev) of St. Petersburg, he must have been well aware long before he left the MP that it was a thoroughly corrupt and heretical organisation. Certainly, the MP’s betrayal of the faith at Chambésy and Balamand in the early 1990s would have made him think of leaving (he appears to be a sincere anti-ecumenist), and he was prominent in the criticism of these unias within the MP. But precisely because he could still have influence within the anti-ecumenist movement in the MP, he was not going to leave it simply on anti-ecumenist principle immediately heresy appeared. Lourie never acts on principle alone…

 

     This lack of principle is evident in his ambiguous attitude towards the question of when the MP lost grace. There is an interesting parallel here (and not the only one) with Fr. Panteleimon of Boston. The Bostonites are usually considered very zealous anti-ecumenists, and I would not deny them that title. But why does Fr. Panteleimon consider that the new calendarists lost grace only in 1965, when the official position of the Greek Old Calendarists (and of Archbishop Auxentius, from whom Panteleimon’s bishops obtained their orders) is 1935, a full thirty years later, and a full fifteen years after Patriarch Athenagoras made his super-ecumenist declaration: "We are in error and sin if we think that the Orthodox Faith came down from heaven and that the other dogmas [i.e. religions] are unworthy. Three hundred million men have chosen Mohammedanism as the way to God and further hundreds of millions are Protestants, Catholics and Buddhists. The aim of every religion is to make man better."? The probable answer is that since Fr. Panteleimon left the new calendarists in 1965, to assert that the new calendarists lost grace before that would imply that Panteleimon – heaven forbid! – was once a heretic. Far better to say that the new calendarists lost grace precisely when Panteleimon left them! Then he can claim he had never been in heresy or a false church! Similarly, when the Bostonites left the ROCOR in 1986 (so as to save Panteleimon from a court trial and defrocking for immorality), they conveniently stated that the ROCOR had lost grace at that time. They could not say that the ROCOR lost grace earlier, for then the Bostonites would have been graceless at least for a time. But they could not say it remained Orthodox after they left, because it had always been a cardinal doctrine of Boston that one can leave a Church for no other reason than heresy, and leaving for any other reason constitutes schism…

 

     Lourie’s attitude to the question of grace is not so clearly defined, but no less opportunistic. He has carefully not subscribed to the view that the MP lost grace in the 30s or 40s, as the great majority of the New Hieromartyrs of Russia declared, nor even when the MP entered the World Council of Churches in the 1960s. In fact, it is not at all clear when, if at any time, he considers the MP to have lost grace.

 

     This makes sense in terms of his overall strategic plan, which is not to replace or convert the MP – he considers such an idea wildly unrealistic, even undesirable – but to keep it in place as the church for the uncultured masses. What, then, should the relationship of ROAC be to the MP, in his opinion? A form of "alternative Orthodoxy". For, as he said in a press conference in 2001, he regards the MP, the Old Ritualists and the ROAC as the three forms of Orthodoxy in Russia. The ROAC is not a rival, but an alternative to the MP. For whom? For those who are really serious about their Orthodoxy, for the elite believers…

 

4. Lourie and the Church of the Elite

    

     Elitism runs like a silver thread through all of Lourie’s writings. Now an éélite does not live in complete isolation from the common crowd: rather it is like the leaven in the lump, working to transform the lump while not being corrupted by it. It is useful to compare Lourie’s Church of the Elite with two other forms of quasi-élitist religious organisation: the Masonic lodge and the monastery.

 

     Lourie writes: "The True Orthodox Church is distinguished from a Masonic lodge by the fact that it is not an esoteric organisation: on no 'level of initiation' do they communicate something that contradicts what is communicated on lower levels." This reveals that for Lourie the TOC is in fact rather like a lodge, only more "open". And in fact the similarity, not of the TOC as a whole, but of his own sect within the TOC, to Masonry is remarkable. Like the lodges, the sect exists in order to subvert existing ecclesiastical authority, to effect a revolution in the Church. The élite who are privileged to be given access to this lodge are initiated into a series of "secret" doctrines, which it would be as well not to proclaim too quickly or too openly. For example, the doctrine that the Name of God is God, a heresy condemned by the Greek and Russian Churches in 1913. (It was for preaching this heresy that Lourie was defrocked by the Synod of the ROAC in September, 2005.) Again, the doctrine of "samobozhie", that all True Christians are gods, having no beginning or end (see the "second blasphemy" in Nedashkovskaya, above). Of course, pseudo-patristic arguments are cited in favour of these doctrines. For without such arguments the doctrines would not be accepted – and it is the purpose of the sect to spread their doctrines in the wider world, just as it was the purpose of the Masonic lodges to spread the revolution.

 

     Lourie combines quasi-masonic élitism with a strong emphasis on monasticism. But not Orthodox monasticism. The first book of his that elicited controversy within the True Orthodox Church, The Calling of Abraham, is a call to monasticism of a special, Manichaean kind, in which the monastic or virgin life is seen as the only possible way of life for the New Testament Christian, while marriage is for "Old Testament Christians", who live according to the law, not grace. Lourie himself abandoned his wife against her will in order to become a monk in the world – a way of life that he recommends for his closest followers (rock music is the preferred preparation for this kind of monasticism!). The present writer was contacted by Olga Mitrenina, his closest disciple, very shortly after the sect had joined the ROAC, and was exhorted to "slomat’sa (break myself)" and become a hieromonk. Olga, though half my age and knowing me not at all, did not bother to consider whether I or my wife wanted to be monastics, whether there was a monastery in England, whether I was worthy to become a priest, etc. No: the master calls, and the disciple (chosen to be such against his will, even his knowledge) must follow, must "break himself"…

 

5. Lourie and Globalism

 

     So far, Lourie’s cult is comparatively small – a few hundred people at most, - but with thousands of sympathisers - confined mainly to Russia. However, cults, like malignant cancers, have an inexorable tendency to grow – and Lourie’s influence is growing rapidly. In the present writer’s opinion, his defrocking is likely to be only a temporary setback on his road to religious superstardom, and may even be exploited by him to his advantage. For if he succeeds in having that decision reversed under a new first-hierarch, he may even gain complete control over ROAC – after the diehard catacombniks have fled in horror…

 

     Lourie’s appeal lies in his exotic mixing of many elements hitherto considered to be incompatible, and in his ability to appeal to strictly traditionalist "theologians", on the one hand, and punks, drug addicts and suicides, on the other. He is, or tries to be, "all things to all men" – except that, unfortunately, the purity of the Apostolic message is lost along the way. Moreover, he realises the full import of a fact too often lost sight of by the leaders of True Orthodoxy today: that almost all new members of the Orthodox Church today are converts, even if they happen to be Greek or Russian by origin, and have to be taught the fundamentals of Orthodoxy from the beginning. In this increasingly small and interconnected world, to retreat into an ethnic reservation, preaching Russian Orthodoxy to Russians only, or Greek Orthodoxy to Greeks only, is no longer an option, for the simple reason that young Russians and Greeks, for better or worse, already belong to a cosmopolitan culture in which internationalist science, internationalist art and international politics are the staple fare. This means that if the Church is to expand and flourish it must fulfil the command of Christ: "Go and teach all nations, baptizing them… and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you".

 

    Lourie is ready and able to do this – according to his lights. And so already his tentacles extend from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Paris and Berlin to Boston and New York…

 

The Lourie/HOCNA Connection: A "Fatal Attraction"

 

     If Lourie’s planned union with HOCNA takes place, this will unite two consciously cosmopolitan jurisdictions, one with its roots in Greek Orthodoxy and the other in Russian Orthodoxy, with a potentially global outreach and appeal. Lourie will accept HOCNA as his representative on the American continent and Africa, while HOCNA will accept Lourie as their representative in Russia and probably also in Western Europe (although this and other geopolitical questions will obviously have to be negotiated between them). For many, very many people just coming to the light of Orthodoxy, this genuinely global jurisdiction, transcending narrowly phyletistic divisions, yet with a traditionalist, anti-ecumenist ethos and a strong emphasis on the teaching of the Universal Faith, will be undeniably – fatally – attractive.

 

     But are there no theological differences between the two groups?

 

     There are. HOCNA will have to accept – or agree to ignore – Lourie’s name-worshipping and other heresies. And Lourie will have to accept – or turn a blind eye to - HOCNA’s veneration of Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky and his "Dogma of Redemption", which Lourie rejects. But these differences are not insuperable; for, for all their claims to strict, patristic Orthodoxy, Metropoulos and Lourie are pragmatists in theological matters; they can "drop" a theological crusade as quickly as they take it up if that is "for the benefit of the Church"…

 

     So how are we to combat this "fatal attraction"? Only by returning to the "basic instincts" of the Orthodox world-view. One of these is: never trust a morally corrupted person, however brilliant his talents and convincing his arguments (see www.hocna.info). Secondly: never trust a man or a movement that is not founded upon the rock of the confession of the Russian Catacomb Church – whose representatives in the form of the ROAC Catacomb hierarchs have delivered (however clumsily and even, from a formal point of view, uncanonically) a crushing verdict on the teachings of Fr. Gregory Lourie. And never lose the hope that God will save His Church - and without the help of man if necessary; for "not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord…" (Zechariah 4.6).

 

An Afterthought

 

     A final thought. Supposing Lourie succeeds in building up a flourishing Church organisation, perhaps in union with HOCNA. What will be the relationship of this organization to other Church jurisdictions in Russia?

 

      Lourie has already given an answer to this: the ROAC as he envisages it to be under his hidden or overt leadership will not be a rival to the MP, but an alternative. The problem with this is: the MP brooks no rivals, and no alternatives. So for its long- or even middle-term survival, Lourie’s sect will have to move closer to the MP, and eventually into union with it.

 

     But that will be no problem for Lourie. For, as we have seen, he wants to be head of an elite. But an élite presupposes a common mass of men who are not the élite, but who are in some kind of communion with the élite. So Lourie will return to the MP with which he has spiritually never really broken, having a position a good deal more influential than that which will be reserved for the returning Lavrites...

 

     And what will HOCNA do then?

 

Vladimir Moss

September 23 / October 6, 2005.

Conception of St. John the Baptist