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Christian Social Doctrine East and West:the Russian Orthodox Social Conceptand the Roman Catholic CompendiumComparedOlga Hoppe-Kondrikova , Josephien Van Kessel & Evert Van DerZweerdePublished online: 18 Jun 2013.

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Christian Social Doctrine East and West: the RussianOrthodox Social Concept and the Roman CatholicCompendium Compared

OLGA HOPPE-KONDRIKOVA, JOSEPHIEN VAN KESSEL &EVERT VAN DER ZWEERDE

ABSTRACT

This article highlights some specificities of the Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian OrthodoxChurch, as well as of the later document on human rights, by comparing them in some key points withthe social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church as made public in the Compendium. The guidinghypothesis is that four specifically Orthodox theological principles - pomestnost’, symphonia, sobor-nost’ and bogochelovechestvo - are at work in the Social Concept and determine its distinctivecharacter. A central aspect of these principles is their function to balance a dualism – of divinity andhumanity, of collective and individual, of state and church, and of territoriality and universality. Thisarticle shows how these principles are at work in the Social Concept, how they are applied tocontemporary secular and modern society, and how they determine the attitude of the ROC tocontemporary problems, for example in the area of human engagement in nature, economy, civilsociety, human rights, politics, war and bioethics. First and foremost, the Social Concept is aChristian social doctrine and in many cases it is similar to the Roman Catholic Compendium. Inthe areas mentioned, however, the Social Concept shows itself to be more conservative than theCompendium and more reluctant to accept secular civil society and biomedical technologicalpossibilities or to speak out for existing human rights or democracy.

Introduction

This article compares, on a number of key points, the document The Basis of the SocialConcept of the Russian Orthodox Church (Osnovy sotsial’noi kontseptsii RusskoiPravoslavnoi Tserkvi) (henceforth Social Concept or SC), published in 2001 (SC, 2001)as a contemporary counterpoint to the official social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church(RCC) contained in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (henceforthCompendium or C). In addition to the Social Concept, we make reference to a more recentdocument that deals specifically with human rights: The Russian Orthodox Church’s BasicTeaching on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights of 2008 (henceforth Human RightsTeaching or HRT) (HRT, 2008). Against the backdrop of the Orthodox Christian traditionmore generally, the emphasis is on the by far largest member of the Orthodox family oflocal (pomestnyye) churches, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The article consists ofthree parts. After a brief introduction of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in general and of thecontext in which the Social Concept has been created in particular, a discussion follows of

Religion, State & Society, 2013Vol. 41, No. 2, 199–224, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2013.800777

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four central theological principles in the social doctrine of the ROC, followed by a chapterthat addresses six specific applications. In this manner, ten sections discuss ten importantsub-themes, and each of them is contrasted with the Compendium of the RCC to put it intoperspective. The article concludes with a brief evaluation.

In our analysis, we approach the Social Concept from a double perspective. On theone hand, we approach it from the perspective of the inner dynamics of the Orthodoxtradition characterised by a need to reconcile three underlying dichotomies: indivi-dual–collective, divine–human and sacred–profane. This need relates to the predomi-nantly dualistic world view of this tradition (Novik, 2001, 2002; Kostyuk, 2000),which is certainly not exclusive to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, but stronger than inWestern Christianity, which rather tends to perceive the human world as a res mixta– a place of evil, but also a place for good works by, in principle, good people.Western and Eastern Christianity differ in their predominant ways of dealing with theduality of a theocentric and an anthropocentric world view which, in a sense, belongsto the very core of Christianity. The Orthodox tradition further tends to apply to thechurch and its members a division into a ‘secular’, worldly side and a spiritual(dukhovnaya) side, rather than perceiving parish life as a place where these twosides interact. It is tendentially hesitant to invest spiritual energy into ‘this world’.On the other hand, there is the interaction between a tradition and the changingpolitical and social conditions to which it must relate. This interaction generates atension between traditionalist and modernist trends within the ROC, and engendersisolated attempts, in thought as well as practice, to develop a more socially engagedchurch life. To highlight this dimension, we also compare the social doctrine of theROC with the positions of two important modernising Orthodox thinkers: VladimirSolov’yev (1853–1900) and Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) (see also Valliere, 2000).

The article assesses the Orthodox social doctrine mainly by comparing it with the socialdoctrine of the RCC on a number of crucial points, and partly by contrasting it with actualpractices within the ROC or by the ROC within the context in which it operates: the churchpolitics of the state and the politics of the church strictu sensu fall outside the scope of thisarticle.

Context and Text

Orthodoxy and Social Doctrine

In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington distinguishes the ‘World of Orthodoxy’as one of the world civilisations (Huntington, 1996, pp. 45f., 157–63). In geographic size,this ‘world’ is one of the largest, extending from Kotor on the Adriatic and Pechenga on theBarents Sea to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. It is also a relatively homogeneous space:Orthodox majority countries border on each other and, in most cases, their populationidentifies itself largely with the Orthodox religious tradition, even if they are not practisingbelievers. In addition, there is a sizeable Orthodox diaspora in many countries: in theNetherlands, for example, there is a diocese of The Hague and the Netherlands of the ROC(Moscow Patriarchate) and also an archbishopric for Benelux of the EcumenicalPatriarchate, and even some relatively small towns have their Orthodox parish. As a resultof the accession to the European Union of several Orthodox majority countries (Greece,Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania) and several countries with Orthodox minorities (Finland, thethree Baltic republics, Poland, Slovakia), as well as partly seasonal labour migration fromthese countries to Southern and Western Europe, the Orthodox presence in Europe hasbecome both more visible and more diverse.

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The ‘ortho-dox’ (‘right-believing’) and ‘ortho-practical’ character of the Orthodoxbranch of Christianity is related primarily to its historical background. Orthodoxy considersitself the sole legitimate heir of the first seven Ecumenical Councils (the seventh was theSecond Council of Nicaea in 787), and will not accept changes to the content of thereligious tradition as laid down at those councils. The principle of immutability of traditionis nowhere more evident than in icons, which, in principle, are ‘written’ today in exactly themanner as they were in the past – artistic innovation, for example, is strictly speakinginappropriate. Another consequence of this traditionalism, which is much stronger than inCatholicism or Protestantism, is a return to the Church Fathers (especially those ofByzantium) and to the Seven Councils as the only authoritative sources besides HolyScripture itself: the idea of theological renewal, though not absent, is hard to accommodatein the Orthodox tradition. What, finally, unites the Orthodox is the use in the liturgy ofkoine Greek and Church Slavonic, rather than the national languages, although not all thechurches are equally consistent on this point.

In the late Roman Empire, the Christian Church was divided into five Patriarchates(Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria). In the eleventh century, froman Orthodox perspective, the Patriarchate of Rome transformed itself into the Papacy ofWestern Christianity. The two branches, at that time, were numerically and politicallyroughly equally important. It was mostly Western European colonialism which turnedRoman Catholicism – and the Protestantism of the Church of England – into a globalreligion. Today, the ‘Patriarchate of Rome’ – as Orthodoxy understands it – is much largerin number of believers than the other Patriarchates together. Among the OrthodoxPatriarchates, quantitative relationships have changed too. Some Orthodox Churches havebecome very small: the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, for example, has a mere 150,000 faithful;that of Alexandria (not to be confused with the Coptic Church) has 250,000. The domina-tion over Eastern Christianity of the Ottoman Empire has led to a situation in which thePatriarchate of Constantinople, though formally still primus inter pares, has jurisdictionover only a relatively small group of believers (3.5 million). The ROC is by far the largestof the Orthodox Churches: of the world’s approximately 250 million nominally OrthodoxChristian believers, roughly a third live in the Russian Federation. The ROC speaks onbehalf of an estimated 80–85 million believers in Russia itself, and, according to its formerofficial representative to the EU, Bishop Ilarion (Alfeyev), on behalf of a total of 160million (Bishop Hilarion, 2006), while the second Orthodox Church in size, the Romanian,has around 20 million followers.

The general principle of classification of the Orthodox Churches is geographic andnational (see the subsection Pomestnost’ below), canonical territory sometimes exceedingnational borders: the Patriarchate of Belgrade, for example, includes not only Serbia, butalso Montenegro, Macedonia, the Republika Srpska in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Overthe centuries since the original five Patriarchates, the Russian, Serbian, Romanian,Bulgarian and Georgian Orthodox Churches have become autocephalous, each with itsown patriarch, while others are headed by a metropolitan or an archbishop – for example,the Cypriot Orthodox Church. There are no hierarchical relations between the OrthodoxChurches; they function according to the principle of mutual recognition, which is not amatter of course.1 The patriarch of Constantinople formally has the status of primus interpares, and his depiction as ‘pope of the East’ is therefore misplaced.

If the relationship between Orthodox Churches is not hierarchical, the internal structureof each of the Churches, by contrast, is: the ROC, for example, is divided into eightmetropolitanates, which in turn consist of archdioceses and dioceses. The nationalOrthodox Churches are thus not comparable with the provinces of the Roman CatholicChurch: rather, the ‘Orthodox world’ looks like a loose conglomerate of mutually

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recognising Churches that each has a structure roughly similar to that of the RCC.Although it is certainly not the case that all Orthodox Churches defer to the MoscowPatriarchate, the ROC clearly has great political weight, and it is not surprising that it oftenacts internationally as the voice of Orthodoxy and as an important interlocutor for theVatican and the EU. While the Moscow Patriarchate does not have any formal authorityover other Orthodox Churches, which all function on the basis of mutual recognition, itsvoice is loud and widely heard.

What further distinguishes the ‘Orthodox world’ from Western Christianity is the factthat large parts of this world have known long periods of political repression. After theconquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans (1453), many Orthodox Churches in South-Eastern Europe were in a situation in which, because of the millet system, they enjoyed acertain degree of internal autonomy. At the same time, the local population often – Greeceis the clearest example of this – explicitly identified the Orthodox Church with nationalawareness and independence. On the border or Latin and Orthodox Christianity, ChurchUnions (1596, 1646, 1699) in which Orthodox minorities such as the Greek Catholics inGalicia and Transylvania retained their Byzantine rite, but were incorporated in the RCC,were concluded as part of papal Counter-Reformation activities towards the East, and theOrthodox minorities in the later Austro-Hungarian Danube monarchy were Latinised asmuch as possible. After 1453, Moscow was ascribed the role of ‘Third Rome’, but the ROCalso could not develop in freedom over long periods either. In 1700, Peter the Great,inspired by the Lutheran model, decided not to appoint a new patriarch and thus began the‘synodal period’. This created the political and institutional conditions for the ROC’swithdrawal from ‘this world’ and allowed it to retain its independence in isolation. Thissituation lasted until 1917, when the Patriarchate was reinstated and the ROC lived a briefperiod of freedom. In 1918, however, state and church were separated, and systematicoppression of the ROC by the new Soviet regime set in. In 1943, the Patriarchate wasrestored again by Stalin who sought its support during the Second World War, and the ROCled a paradoxical, simultaneously privileged and repressed existence in its ‘golden cage’.The price that the ROC paid for its relative privilege included extensive infiltration by theKGB and the obligation to promote the Kremlin’s ‘peace policy’. In other Eastern Europeancountries, the situation was not much better. Political history, we conclude, has not exactlybeen friendly to Orthodoxy.

Although the ‘Orthodox world’ is a large world with a longstanding tradition,Orthodoxy remains the third and often forgotten branch of Christianity.2 Debatesaround political theology or the relation between politics and religion are oftencharacterised by a remarkable ‘Orthodoxy amnesia’. Even a classic work like ErnstTroeltsch’s Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Troeltsch, 1912)is mainly about Catholicism and Protestantism and limits its discussion of Orthodoxyto the early, Byzantine period. Max Weber, who criticised Troeltsch on precisely thispoint, and who emphasised the specificity of Orthodoxy, omitted Orthodoxy from hisReligionssoziologie (Weber, 1920). From the side of the Orthodox world itself, thisomission is usually interpreted as ‘repression’. It tends to see itself as the single trueCatholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church as the great ‘traitor’. Part of theexplanation for this ‘Orthodoxy amnesia’ is that the Orthodox Churches, both by theirown tradition and by the fact that most of them for long periods could not develop infreedom, are much less publicly visible. This situation has, with the exception ofGreece and Cyprus, only recently changed, and this fact must be taken into con-sideration when the social doctrines of the ROC and RCC are compared.

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Text and Context

With its Social Concept, the ROC has, for the first time in the history of Eastern OrthodoxChristianity and alone among the Orthodox Churches, dropped its isolationist attitude andissued a clear statement about the position of church and believer in the world, both forpost-Soviet Russia and for the world beyond. The authors of this article consider the SocialConcept, articulated in 2000 and published in 2001 in print and on the internet in severallanguages, as an attempt by the ROC to find its place in a modern, secular world. The textwas established after prolonged, secluded discussion under the responsibility of Kirill(Gundyayev), metropolitan of Smolensk and head of the External Relations Departmentof the Moscow Patriarchate, and it was adopted by the Bishops’ Council. The text is notwritten by an established ecclesiastical authority such as the Pontifical Council for Justiceand Peace of the Vatican that bears responsibility for the Compendium of the RCC, but isthe product of an ad hoc working group of the Moscow Patriarchate. The Social Concept,like the Compendium, does not have the status of an encyclical letter, but unlike theCompendium it is not based on encyclical letters either. The document in this respect isnot part of a tradition, but rather breaks with centuries of contemplation and of turningaway from this world, and hence should be seen as a first and innovative step.

It should also be borne in mind that it is only since the breakup of the USSR that theROC has been able to develop and manifest itself freely: from the abolition of thePatriarchate by Peter the Great around 1700 to the February Revolution of 1917, it wasentirely subordinated to the Russian state. During the so-called ‘Silver Age’ (serebryannyvek) at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Orthodox priestsand thinkers had begun to focus on society and culture, and important trends formed aroundsuch figures as Lev Tolstoy, Solov’yev and Bulgakov, but this period lasted only briefly. Inthe later Soviet period, the ROC, although in a relatively privileged position when com-pared with other churches, remained subordinate to the political and ideological interests ofstate and party. It is since about 1988, when, under Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule, the celebra-tion of the Millennium of Christianity in Russia unexpectedly created a lot of space andattention that the ROC has really been able to turn to society and start to play a significantrole in a highly ‘secular’ Russia. Under the Putin–Medvedev administrations, the ROC isincreasingly, though not officially and with varying success, occupying the place of anational religion. Having regained property and privileges, the ROC’s upper hierarchy isloyal to the state and satisfied with the largely ceremonial role that it plays (Papkova,2011a, pp. 675–77; see also Papkova, 2011b).

In the internet version, the Social Concept measures some 50 to 60 pages and is thus agood deal shorter than the 400-page Compendium. It is divided into 17 relatively briefchapters, the first devoted to ‘fundamental theological principles’, and the remaining 16 tovarious dimensions and specific issues of social life outside the Church. In several placesreference is made to Byzantine Church Fathers, especially St John Chrysostom, while(Russian) Orthodox patriarchs, theologians and important thinkers are only occasionallymentioned (there is one reference to Aleksei Khomyakov and one to St John of Kronstadt,for example).

Four Key Orthodox Principles at Work in the Social Doctrine of the ROC

In the Orthodox tradition, four key principles can be distinguished that serve to organiseand legitimise Orthodoxy’s relationship to the world.3 The first of these is the principle ofsymphonia/simfoniya, which articulates an ideal constellation of church and state. Thesecond principle, pomestnost’, balances universality and locality by dividing the ‘world

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of Orthodoxy’ into a plurality of canonical territories, each occupied by (ideally) mutuallyrecognising Orthodox Churches. The third principle, sobornost’, articulates an ideal com-munity in which individual and collective are harmoniously interacting without one beingsubordinated to the other. The fourth principle, bogochelovechestvo, states the divine–human nature of the church as body of Christ and formulates the ideal state of humanity.In the Social Concept, these four principles are applied to the four main spheres of thesecular world: politics and state, church organisation, society and ethics, and nature andeconomy. Each of them, moreover, can be seen as an attempt at a balance of opposites:symphonia as a balance of worldly and heavenly power, state and church; pomestnost’ as abalance of universality and locality; sobornost’ as balancing unity and plurality, communityand society; bogochelovechestvo, finally, as a balance of divinity and humanity, transcen-dence and immanence. Of these four principles, bogochelovechestvo is mentioned in thefirst chapter of the Social Concept as one of four fundamental theological positions(osnovnyye bogoslovskiye polozheniya), the others being community of the faithful, serviceto God and humankind, and good works (SC, I.1–4).

Symphonia

The ROC perceives the relationship between church and state primarily from the perspec-tive of the traditional Byzantine ideal of symphonia, which was formulated by EmperorJustinian (sixth century) as part of his legal code, and obtained its classical form in the lawbook Epananoge (ninth century) (SC, III.4; see also Kostyuk, 2005, p. 37). The core of thisdoctrine is formed by what Konstantin Kostyuk calls a Funktionsaufteilung, a division oflabour that makes the state deal with the imperium, the worldly things (including the churchinsofar as it is worldly), but does not let it interfere with the sacerdotium, the field ofspiritual things. As a result, the state protects the church, while the church is the ‘con-science’ of the state (Kostyuk, 2005, p. 232). Of course, historical reality has oftensignificantly deviated from the ‘above-mentioned ideal [that] could emerge in historyonly in a state that recognises the Orthodox Church as the greatest people’s shrine, inother words, only in an Orthodox state’ (SC, III.4). This ideal originated in Byzantium, buteven there it did not exist ‘in absolutely pure form’: caesaropapism – like its opposite,hierocracy – cancels the symphonic relation in favour of the unity of spiritual and worldlyauthority. Church and state came closest, according to the ROC, to the ideal of symphoniain pre-Petrine Russia, that is the period between the end of Mongol domination (around1480) and the replacement of the Patriarchate by the Holy Synod by Peter the Great in 1700(SC, III.4).

In today’s world, in which ‘the state is in principle secular and not tied to any religiousbelief’, the symphonia doctrine amounts to a principle of ‘mutual non-interference in eachother’s affairs’ (SC, III.3). The actual situation in Russia is largely in accordance withthis principle, given the fact that Russia is an ‘Orthodox country’ with an ‘Orthodoxpopulation’ – more precisely, a population that largely identifies with Orthodoxy – butnot an Orthodox state. Consequently, there is no sacralisation of the Russian state at stake.The ROC is not a state church, does not want to be a state church, and cannot be a statechurch, if the state is secular. The ROC therefore claims a space in which the church is‘absolutely free from the state’ (SC, III.5) and retains its right to speak in its own voice. TheROC does teach the faithful to accept worldly authority, but this loyalty is conditional:

The Church remains loyal to the State, but God’s commandment to fulfil the taskof salvation in any situation and under any circumstances is above this loyalty. Ifthe authority forces Orthodox believers to apostasize from Christ and His Church

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and to commit sinful and spiritually harmful actions, the Church should refuse toobey the state.

In that case, ‘appeal to international bodies and the world public opinion’ as well as‘peaceful civil disobedience’ come into view (SC, III.5). In view of its long history –subordination under the tsars since 1700 and persecution by the Bolshevik and Sovietregimes – this new position testifies to new moods within the ROC and to caution on thepart of the ROC establishment that does not want to be incorporated into state structuresagain.

Church and state are separated, but clearly seek and find each other’s support andprotection: for the first, one need only switch on state-controlled Russian television,while the second is explicitly stated in the Social Concept:

In implementing her social, charitable, educational and other socially significantprojects, the Church may rely on the support and assistance of the state. She alsohas the right to expect that the state, in building its relations with religiousbodies, will take into account the number of their followers and the place theyoccupy in forming the historical, cultural and spiritual image of the people andtheir civic stand. (SC, III.6)

The Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations (Zakon o svobode sovestii o religioznykh ob”yedineniyakh ) of 1997 gives legal form to this contemporary form ofsymphonia. It does not refute freedom of religion, which is guaranteed in the RussianConstitution (article 28). However, the qualification, in the preamble to this law, ofChristianity as one out of four traditional religions of Russia (the others being Islam,Judaism and Buddhism), and especially the emphasis on the historical and cultural impor-tance of Orthodoxy, substantiates the ROC’s eagerness to seek protection by the Russiangovernment and cooperation with it, especially when non-traditional religious organisationshave a foothold on the canonical territory of the ROC (Van den Bercken, 2002). The pricepaid for this protection is the instrumentalisation of the ROC and religion for the politicalpurposes of the state: national stability, social cohesion, political legitimacy (Knox, 2005;Papkova, 2011a).

With its preference – as a matter of principle – for the symphonic model, the ROC clearlytakes a distance from its fundamentalist right wing (as it also breaks away from its liberalleft wing): the idea of a unified theocratic, that is at once political and religious, power isrejected (see Van der Zweerde, 2007). While the possibility is not excluded that a ‘spiritualrevival of society’ might lead to ‘a religiously higher form of government’, the ROC doesnot ascribe an active role to itself in this respect: it refers to a statement by the Bishops’Council of 1994 that ‘the Church does not give preference to any social system or any ofthe existing political doctrines’ (SC, III.7). This is an important point of difference with thesocial doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, which precisely tries to substantiate such apreference, namely for democratic government, on the basis of its tradition. This ‘indiffer-ence’ with regard to the prevailing political and socio-economic system is a consequence ofthe dualism that is involved in the symphonia doctrine. It comes back, moreover, at theindividual level:

The legislator [Emperor Justinian – authors], in developing the Codex, was fullyaware of the dividing line between the order of this world, marked with the falland sinful erosion even in the Christian era, and the statutes of the grace-giving

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body of Christ, the Church, even if its members and the citizens of a Christianstate are the same people. (SC, IV.5)

Although the ideal symphonic relationship is possible only in an Orthodox Christian state,there is, from the perspective of Social Concept, no room for a social (let alone political)dimension of the ROC next to the political realm of the state and the spiritual dimensionof the ekklesia (see below) in a non-Orthodox state either. In other words, the ROC doesnot develop a positive understanding of such a ‘secular’ situation, but sees it merely as an‘absence of symphonia’, quite unlike the RCC, which has developed a positive conceptionof the secular world, even if in the end it always remains second best. This is mostobvious in relation to secular law. The ROC can exist ‘in the framework of very diverselegal systems which it treats with respect’ (SC, IV.9), but to which no positive meaningcan be attached in the light of the divine, moral law. Legal positivism and an ‘apologeticattitude towards the positive law in force’ are both rejected as a matter of principle, as isthe idea of natural law, because it fails to ‘take into account the fallen humanity’ (SC,IV.7; see also Kostyuk, 2005, pp. 307f.). This also explains the attitude towards humanrights: these are regarded as appropriate conditions for the faithful to ‘stick to theirsublime call’ to become ‘God’s likeness’, but not as inalienable rights of ‘the individual,apart from his relationships with God’. A positive appreciation of the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights as ‘a true milestone on the path of humanity’s moralprogress’, as one finds in the social doctrine of the RCC, is impossible from theperspective of the ROC and its social doctrine (C, 152; SC, IV.7).

Pomestnost’

The national character of the Orthodox Churches is one of the first things that strike theoutsider. While their creed is the same and their liturgical form largely identical, theOrthodox Churches are autocephalous and their territories largely coincide with those ofstates. In this sense, there is a discrepancy between the idea of the Church as a universaland supranational organism (SC, II.1, referring to 1 Cor. 12:12) that does not classifypeople according to national characteristics or social classes (SC, II.1, referring toRom.10:12 and Col. 3:11), and its actual existence as a multitude of national churches.The ROC explicitly combines the universal with the national principle: ‘The universalnature of the Church, however, does not mean that Christians should have no right tonational identity (samobytnost’) and national self-expression (samovyrazheniye)’ (SC, II.2).

This national and territorial dimension marks an important difference between the socialdoctrines of the RCC and the ROC. The RCC perceives and presents itself explicitly as thechurch of and for all Catholics, all Christians and all people of good will (C, 83–84, 11–12).Its position is explicitly universalistic, as symbolised by the annual Urbi et orbi. The ROCalso sees the church as, in principle, a single body (SC, II.1), and considers Orthodoxy theonly true Christianity, but it perceives and presents itself as the national church of and forall Orthodox Russians. These Orthodox Russians therefore are its main addressees: ‘Theundivided church organism participates in the life of the world around in its fullness, butclergy, monastics and laity can realize this participation in different ways and degrees’ (SC,I.3). This leads to the notion of ‘Christian patriotism’, not to be confused with nationalismor chauvinism, both rejected by the ROC: ‘The Orthodox Christian is called to love hisfatherland, which has a territorial dimension, and his brothers by blood (svoikh brat’yev pokrovi) who live everywhere in the world’ (SC, II.3). On the one hand, this makes life easyfor the ROC, because it does not have to be concerned with Christians in Africa or Americaunless they happen to be of Russian descent or otherwise fall under the jurisdiction of the

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Moscow Patriarchate.4 On the other hand, it not only means that the claim of the RCC to bethe church must be rejected by the ROC (something Protestants would do as well), but alsothat the ROC cannot admit the RCC on what it sees as its legitimate canonical territory, andcan, at best, tolerate Catholicism as the national church of, for example, a Polish minority.5

The idea of a ‘national church’ clearly appears from the following quotation: ‘When anation (natsiya), civil or ethnic, represents fully or predominantly a monoconfessionalOrthodox community (pravoslavnoye soobshchestvo), it can in a certain sense be regardedas one community of faith (yedinaya obshchina very) – an Orthodox people (narodpravoslavny)’ (SC, II.3).

The position of national church is explicable in terms of history: the Mongol–Tatar yoke(about 1240–1480) isolated Russia from the neighbouring Orthodox majority countries inthe south. The see of the metropolitan was relocated from devastated Kiev to distantVladimir and Moscow in 1325. From 1448 the Russian church was independent of thepatriarch of Constantinople and this did not change after the conquest of Constantinople bythe Ottomans. Russia even saw itself as the legitimate successor to Constantinople – thenotion of the ‘Third Rome’ – and the ROC became autocephalous in 1589 under its firstpatriarch, Iov. Since then, the ROC has always been the church of and for Russia and theRussians. Not, however, in an ethnically nationalistic, but rather in a patriotic sense: theROC is cautious to present itself as a rossiiskaya, not a russkaya church, thus not excludingnon-Russian members within the Russian Federation (or even outside), while at the sametime claiming jurisdiction over all Russians, whether they are living in Russia or in, forexample, Ukraine, which has, as one of its four Orthodox Churches, one that falls under theMoscow Patriarchate.6

Sobornost’

Sobornost’ is a theological principle that Orthodoxy has claimed as a unique feature of itsrelationship to the world and as distinctive in comparison with Catholicism andProtestantism. The main source for the term sobornost’ within the Orthodox tradition isthe Slavophile theologian Aleksei Khomyakov (1804–60), even though sobornost’ as anoun does not appear in his writings (Khomyakov, 1994; Schaeder, 1967; Bird, 1998, p. 8).The substantive use of sobornost’ probably goes back to Solov’yev.7 In the Silver Age(1890–1920), the notions of sobornoye and sobornost’ were used to express the uniquequalities of the Orthodox tradition: all-unity (vseyedinstvo), the organic unity of theuniversal and the individual (Müller, 1992, p. 17), or the sense of community (Scherrer,1992, p. 95). From an ecclesiological concept introduced by Khomyakov as a translation ofkatholikos in the Nicene Creed,8 the notion thus changed into an attempt to identify theunity of the church in a divided world. In the thought of Solov’yev and Bulgakov, itbecame an ideal of Orthodox community and social action (see Van der Zweerde, 2001,2008). With sobornost’, Solov’yev, Bulgakov and others sought to articulate a quality ofthe relationship of the church to world and people, sharply distinguished from individua-listic presuppositions in western thought, in which the individual is either suppressed by thecommunity, or stands in opposition to it, and also contrasting with Soviet-style collectivism.In sobornost’, by contrast, the personality of every individual in the collective remainspreserved.

Weber called Solov’yev’s sobornost’ an ecclesiastical term, but also indicated that theconcept was based on an idea of community (Weber, 1988, p. 467). Both aspects ofsobornost’ (as church and as community) stem from a Christian notion of charity which,according to Weber, is grounded in a posture of withdrawal from the world(Weltabgewandtheit), without any specific social orientation, and which he identified with

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early Christian thought. According to Weber, Russian Orthodoxy reflected a medievalconception of the church, contemplative and turned away from the world, and whichtherefore could not develop ascetic activity within the world (innerweltliche Askese). ForWeber, this also implied a negative judgment about Russia’s democratic and capitalistpotential, given his hypothesis, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism(Weber, 1904/5), of an intrinsic and causal relation between ascetic activity within theworld, as prescribed by puritan ethics, and the development of capitalism. In response toWeber, Bulgakov developed a conception of social activism as podvizhnichestvo (selflessheroism) that indeed is a form of inner-worldly asceticism (see below).

The Social Concept seems consistent with this interpretation: it adopts the adjectival useof sobornost’ with reference to Khomyakov (SC, I.1), but applies it primarily to ‘service toGod and people’: life in the church is a form of sobornoye sluzhaniye (SC, I.2, IV.7), aservice to which every Christian who lives in the church adds her or his share.

Bogochelovechestvo

Sobornost’ as an Orthodox ideal of church life is grounded in an underlying anthropologyconnected with another important Orthodox theological principle: bogochelovechestvo(Godmanhood, divine humanity). Bogochelovechestvo is the ideal humanity as the ROC,and more generally Orthodoxy, perceives it in this world: man’s task, individually andcollectively, is to actually become an imago Dei in an imitatio Christi, who was the firstGod-man (bogochelovek). Although church and humanity are part of this fallen world, theyalso already belong to the Kingdom of God. The ideal of church and humanity in thisworld, therefore, is to restore the lost connection with God. The nature of this connection isexpressed in the concept of sobornost’, while bogochelovechestvo represents the dualaspect of a Christian life in this world, man being an imitation of the God-man, whilethe divine order is almost completely transcendent to the human order and a deep divideseparates fallen humanity from its ideal. Godmanhood thus stresses, simultaneously, theimmanent and human aspect of creation, and its transcendent and divine nature, originand goal.

At the basis of Orthodoxy’s perception of the human being, both in the alternativeOrthodox social philosophies of the Silver Age (Bulgakov, Frank, Florensky), and in thecontemporary Social Concept, is a clear tripartite division of human history. The first stageconsists of the first man in paradise. The first turning-point is the original sin that broughtforth fallen man. The second turning-point is in Christ, the Son of God and the firstbogochelovek, who freed fallen man from original sin. The incarnation of God in theGod-man Jesus Christ is, even more than creation itself, an act of God’s love and devotion.This first redemption makes possible a second salvation: the redemption of the new Adam,who will enter the Kingdom of God. According to Solov’yev and Bulgakov, the new Adamis possible only in the form of bogochelovechestvo: one church uniting all its members insobornost’. Not the individual Christian, but all Christendom is redeemed asbogochelovechestvo.

According to Bulgakov, Orthodoxy has seen, in its historical development, not onlyecclesiological and sectarian but also mystical phenomena: first in monastic, in outside-worldly and especially contemplative forms, and later also in secular and ascetic forms. Asan example, he cites the Old Believers who split off from the ROC because of the churchreforms of Patriarch Nikon (1605–81). In contrast to Weber and Troeltsch, Bulgakovemphasised Orthodoxy’s structural possibility of developing an innerworldly asceticism(Bulgakov, 1997a (1911)). Others, for example Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad(1929–78), contributed to the same innovation with their stronger concern for society.

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This ‘sophiological’ stance is adopted by the Social Concept: in spite of the traditionallymore dominant trend to reject the world, the Social Concept calls upon the Orthodoxfaithful to participate in the world (SC, I.3).

More emphatically than the Compendium, the Social Concept departs from the positionof the church vis-à-vis state and community, and in its first chapter establishes the church asa central theological principle. The text defines the church as a divine–human organism, thelimbs of which are the believers; the individual thus seems secondary to the larger organismof the Orthodox Church and is said to serve ‘God and men’ (SC, 1.3). The expressionssobornaya Tserkov’ and sobornoye sluzheniye, however, are rather the keys to understand-ing the community form that the Social Concept favours, indicating a more personal andmore organic relationship of the individual with his Orthodox community than that impliedby the individualistic humanistic tone that pervades the Compendium. The Social Conceptis not concerned with abstract membership of an interest group, but with personal involve-ment and commitment to the general cause.

The church, as the Body of Christ, the only God-man, and his bride on earth, is a divine–human organism for the Social Concept (SC, I.2), as it was for Bulgakov and Solov’yev.The divine–human nature of the visible church, however, is ‘of this world’ and hence notperfect. The visible church is committed to its ideal, yet this ideal is, at the same time,already realised in the ‘invisible’ church. Bulgakov in particular emphasises this distinctionbetween visible and invisible church. The invisible dimension of the church becomesvisible in its divine–human nature, which is realised or becomes visible in the visiblechurch during its worldly history. It is precisely this quest for the divine–human, to whichhumanity is summoned and of which God–man was the annunciation, which distinguishesOrthodoxy from Catholicism, which, according to the Social Concept, takes too much forgranted the fallen nature of man. This has resulted, according to the Social Concept, in adoctrine of ‘two ethics’ that abolishes the equality before God of every man by settingdifferent ethical standards for lay and religious people. This Orthodox anthropologicalcritique of Catholicism and of the Catholic-Thomistic notion of natural law, but also ofpositive secular law, which is only there because of the sinful state of man, is an importantelement in the rejection of the secular formulation of human rights in the Social Concept(see below).

Applications of the Orthodox Social Doctrine

This section takes up the theological concepts discussed in the previous section, and appliesthem to some specific issues regarding society: the relation to nature, war and peace,democracy, civil society and human rights.

The Relation to (Human) Nature: Ecology and Economy, Labour and Property

Nature, in Russian (priroda) as in Latin (natura), English and many other languages, hasthe double meaning of, on the one hand, the essence or character of something, and on theother hand, nature as the non-human part of reality. Key to understanding the passages inthe Social Concept that relate to human and non-human nature is that, from a generalChristian point of view, nature is created nature, and thus is it not up to man to change it.The Orthodox vision of the relationship of human beings to nature is most succinctlyexpressed in the chapter on ecology: the Fall of man has broken the relationship betweenman and nature, which was originally a fully organic unity (SC, XIII.2). Human sindestroys non-human nature, to which man now has merely a relationship of consumption.Dealing with nature in modern times has become purely economic (SC, XIII.1). An

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important goal of the social doctrine of the ROC is to restore, where necessary and as far aspossible, the original relationship with created nature. Therefore, this is not merely, and noteven primarily, a matter of ecology or protection of nature, or care for the environment asthe original habitat of humanity, but includes the economy, work, labour circumstances andsimilar issues.

No Christian social teaching can avoid the issues of employment and property. It was,after all, precisely the opposition between the subjects of labour (the workers) and thesubjects of property (the owners or capitalists) – the ‘social question’ – that challenged boththe Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox members of the late nineteenth-century Russianintelligentsia to articulate a Christian social teaching. The papal encyclical Rerum novarum(1891) places great emphasis on the role of the church in the solution of social division andthe struggle between capitalists and workers. A striking difference between Rerum novarumand the Compendium is that while the first document propagated solidarity betweencapitalists and workers as part of a Christian relationship to the world, the Compendiumemphatically refers to love (caritas) as the central principle of the social teaching of thechurch, and sets the church the task of contributing to a ‘civilization of love’ (RN, II.1.3).At this point, the Compendium of the RCC comes close to the thinking of Orthodoxintellectuals like Solov’yev and Bulgakov, who reacted to the social question at the end ofthe nineteenth century, while the ROC, subordinated to the state, for political reasons couldnot do so, despite attempts by some clergy and hierarchs, for example John of Kronstadt(see for example Solov’yev, 1978; see also Shevzov, 2004; Schulze Wessel, 2011).

Both the Social Concept and the Compendium appreciate positively the physical aspectof labour and economic activity in the world, and understand labour as a primary andcentral value in human life: in Paradise, man was already working as the steward of theGarden of Eden. In the fallen state of man, however, working became a punishment: labourin the sweat of one’s face to serve one’s own basic needs. In addition, labour can have bothan individual (ascetic or educational) function, and a communal or social function, or evena redeeming function in the history of salvation, as in Bulgakov’s sophiology. The latter, forBulgakov, is the science of God’s love of his creation and of the task to which this lovesummons man. In a similar vein, God’s love for humanity is the foundation of the Catholicsocial teaching for the Compendium. For the Compendium and the Social Concept, thisrefers to a transformation of the individual, of social relationships and of the world. For theOrthodox teaching in particular, it is ‘the divine–human nature of the Church that makespossible the grace-giving transformation and purification of the world accomplished inhistory in the creative co-work, “synergy”, of the members and the Head of the churchbody’ (SC, I.2). The ROC equally considers it its task to fulfil its mission ‘through goodworks aimed to improve the spiritual-moral and material condition of the world around her’(SC, 1.4).

Of course, these transformations are not brought about by human beings alone: earthlyprogress can never establish the Kingdom of God, since this is a gift of God’s love.However, it can contribute to a better organisation of the human community. While thisseems to be a valuable task in its own right from the Catholic perspective (C, 52–55), forthe ROC it serves to create ‘the conditions in which the Church can best fulfil her salvificwork’ (SC, I.4). While the Compendium regards economy and society, as well as humanlabour, as part of the divine plan of salvation, the Social Concept recognises only theedifying aspects and not the redeeming aspects of labour (SC, VI.4). The Social Conceptequally takes a distance, however, from a Manichean rejection of the world à la Tolstoy andthe Tolstoyans, who prescribed total abstinence from all earthly pleasures – sex, meat,struggle – and emphasised hard, regular and most of all agricultural labour as a way tosalvation. For the Social Concept, the world is intrinsically good, but affected by the Fall of

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mankind, and it therefore calls on every Christian to participate in the world to foster thedivine plan of salvation (SC, I.3).

If the views on labour and property in the Social Concept and Compendium arecomparable, the attitude to ownership in the Social Concept is ambiguous. Labour ispresented, in both documents, as a necessary element of human life, with theCompendium explicitly conceiving labour as a right (C, 287). With respect to the fruitsof labour, however, the Social Concept expresses a fear of idolatry, the temptation ofChristian man by worldly goods, leading him to turn away from God (SC, VI.3). Themoral value of work is placed by the Social Concept, on the one hand, in providing foryourself and your family (in order not to depend on others), and, on the other hand, ingiving to the needy, but not in the accumulation of wealth or in bodily asceticism. The longhistory of appropriation by the tsars and the Bolsheviks may partly explain the ROC’scaution not to be over-attached to newly regained property.

Although the ROC does not assess property rights in detail (SC, VII.1), it does warnagainst too much property. According to the Social Concept, people are not the proprietors,but the recipients of all the earthly blessings from God, who is the sole owner of all earthlygoods and has the absolute right of ownership. With reference to the parable of the vineyard(Mark 12:1–9), the Social Concept concludes that Christ always emphasised the relativenature of the right to property: ‘The Church urges Christians to see in property a God’s giftgiven to be used for their own and their neighbour’s benefit’ (SC, VII.2). Since the Biblerecognises the human right to property, the Social Concept concludes that the church mustrecognise the existence of different forms of ownership and should not give preference toany particular form. The ROC calls for a fair distribution of the fruits of individual labour(SC, VI. 6), but the renunciation of private property is not an ideal and should be voluntary,not imposed (SC, VII.3).

War and Peace

Although the ROC, like the RCC, repudiates war in general as an evil, and wants ‘to helpresolve various contradictions and bring nations, ethnic groups, governments and politicalforces to harmony’ (SC, VIII.5), it is not fundamentally pacifist and ‘does not prohibit herchildren from participating in hostilities if at stake is the security of their neighbours and therestoration of trampled justice. Then war is considered to be a necessary though undesirablemeans’ (SC, VIII.2). This is a position similar to that of Solov’yev in his ThreeConversations about War, Progress and the End of History or to Bulgakov’s position inhis Reflections on War, both authors finding their inspiration in Orthodoxy and constitutinga critique of pacifism in the form propagated by, for example, Lev Tolstoy: ‘War is … notthe only, and maybe not the worst, form of evil in the world’ (Bulgakov, 1997b, p. 671; seealso Solovyov, 1990).

With reference to St Augustine9 and to the Gospels (Matt. 26:52), the concept of just waris elaborated, with the proviso that ‘in the present system of international relations, it issometimes difficult to distinguish an aggressive war from a defensive war’, to the effect that‘the question whether the Church should support or deplore the hostilities needs to be givena special consideration every time they are initiated or threaten to begin’ (SC, VIII.3). Froma Christian perspective, moral justice in international relations should be founded on three‘basic principles: love of one’s neighbours, people and Fatherland; understanding of theneeds of other nations; and the conviction that it is impossible to serve one’s country byimmoral means’ (SC, VIII.3). Hence the ROC has an important task to play in the army:‘The agreement concluded by the Russian Orthodox Church with the Armed Forces andlaw-enforcement agencies opens up considerable opportunities for overcoming the

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artificially created dividing walls, for bringing the military back to the established Orthodoxtraditions of service to the fatherland’ (SC, III.4). From a functional point of view, thismeans that Orthodox priests have taken over the niche formerly occupied by the ideologuesof the Communist Party. However, the ROC’s guidelines are more sophisticated, combininggenuinely pastoral and overtly patriotic motifs (Hansen, 2009, pp. 409–11).

The perception of war and peace by the ROC does not differ significantly from that of theRCC; but a big difference follows from their positions as national and global churchrespectively: to the extent to which Russia is an Orthodox country, it is also an Orthodoxfatherland with an Orthodox army. In the past the ROC was compelled to support andpropagate the official foreign policy of the Soviet government; now it seems to support theRussian government’s policy voluntarily, out of a natural loyalty to the national govern-ment; at the same time it frequently warns against excessive violence, and in the SocialConcept distances itself from its militant and nationalist right wing, albeit without saying soexplicitly. Thus the ROC restricts itself to a rather cultural patriotism in contrast topoliticised Orthodox patriotism (see Mitrofanova, 2005, p. 19).

Democracy

Unlike the RCC, which has implicitly accepted democracy since the Second VaticanCouncil (1962–65), expressed explicit support in the encyclical Centesimus annus of1991 (C, 406) and emphasises the participation of citizens in the political life of society(C, 190), the ROC declares itself not to have, in principle, a preference for any existingsocial system or political doctrine (SC, III.7).10 It accepts the actual political state ofsociety:

The form and methods of government are conditioned in many ways by thespiritual and moral condition of society. Aware of this, the Church accepts thepeople’s choice or does not resist it at least. Contemporary democracies representthe form of government in secular society that presupposes the right of everyable-bodied citizen to express his will through elections. (SC, III.7)

At the same time, the ROC takes a distance from politics and mentions ‘political struggle,election agitation, campaigns in support of particular political parties and public politicalleaders’, along with ‘waging civil war or aggressive external war’ and ‘direct participationin intelligence’ as ‘areas in which the clergy and canonical church structures cannot supportthe state or cooperate with it’ (SC, III.8). One important consequence of this position is thatwhile members of the Orthodox clergy, like all citizens, have the right to vote, they cannotstand for election, unlike the Orthodox laity, whom ‘nothing can prevent from participatingin the work of legislative, executive and judiciary bodies and political organisations’ (SC,V.3), and who can operate independently, albeit without a ‘special blessing’ from thesupreme church authority (SC, V.4): ‘The clergy are not allowed to be nominated forelections to any public body or representative power at any level’ (SC, V.2). This positionhas its ground in apostolic canon 81: ‘It does not befit a bishop or a presbyter to go into theaffairs of the people’s government’; as well as in the sixth and tenth canons of the SeventhEcumenical Council of 787 (SC, III. 11). The Social Concept refers to the ‘confusions anddivisions’ that arose when members of the hierarchy and the clergy were members of theRussian Duma, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, or the new Duma of the RussianFederation, at times when ‘the clergy were permitted to run for elective offices withoutthe blessing of the Church’ (SC, V.2). In 1990, the Holy Synod ‘regretted to state’ that theROC ‘declines the moral and religious responsibility for the participation of these persons

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in the elected offices’ – meaning among others the priest–MP Gleb Yakunin (SC, V.2). Italso reserves to itself the right to take a distance from the activities or views of Orthodoxpoliticians when they differ from the position of the ROC (SC, V.4). By not taking sides foror against a democratic system, the ROC leaves its future position in Russian politicalreality open, while distancing itself both from its right wing, which openly pursues atheocratic regime and hence an Orthodox state, and from its liberal left wing, representedby, for example, the late Fr Veniamin Novik (d. 2010), for whom only the democratic formof government can be legitimised from the standpoint of Christianity (Novik, 1997, p. 197).

Civil Society

The concept of civil society is based on the liberal perception of a secular and structurallydifferentiated society, a perception to which freedom and individual rights are central.11 Thefunctional differentiation of modern society refers to a process of disintegration of a pre-modern hierarchical social order and of increasing autonomy of various social spheres.Thanks to this functional differentiation, a ‘horizontal direct-access society’, as CharlesTaylor has called it, comes into existence, in which modern individuals relate to society byvoluntarily participating in the intermediary organisations of civil society, and by expres-sing their personal choices in a public arena (see Taylor, 1999, 2003). This individualfreedom presupposes fundamental human rights such as freedom of conscience and theright to privacy; social rights such as the freedom to associate; and political rights such asvoting or running for office. Modernity thus presupposes a radical change not only in theway in which free and autonomous individuals relate to civil society, but also in the time–space dimension in which this relationship takes place: it occurs in secular time and is nolonger tied to a transcendent referent.

In secular civil society, the role of religion changes fundamentally. Because of functionaldifferentiation, the secular spheres of politics, economy, science, are emancipated from thesphere of religious institutions and norms. From an all-comprehensive system that providesthe meaning of all subsystems, religion is reduced to one social subsystem among others.Hence modern religion must adapt to increasing differentiation by developing its owninstitutional autonomy and intrinsic functional dynamism (Casanova, 1994, pp. 19, 212).In juridical–constitutional terms, the differentiation between religious and secular spheres isunderstood as the separation of church and state (Audi, 2000, pp. 31–40). It is only undercondition of this separation that liberal democracy guarantees the right of the individual to afree choice of his or her religious or non-religious convictions and beliefs: a church thenappears primarily as an organisation within civil society based on the principle of voluntaryassociation, as is was paradigmatically conceived by John Locke, one of the foundingfathers of western liberalism:

A Church then I take to be a voluntary Society of Men, joining themselvestogether of their own accord, in order to the publick worshipping of God, in sucha manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the Salvation of theirSouls. I say it is a free and voluntary Society. (Locke, 1983, p. 28)

The topic of secular civil society is one of the most challenging and complex issues forthe social teaching of any church. Since over the last 20 years Russia has been experiencinga series of democratic transformations, both in terms of political and social structure and incultural–historical terms, this theme has become an inevitable issue for the social thought ofthe ROC too. In this context, we must remember that until recently civil society was anunknown phenomenon for Russian Orthodoxy. The emergence of civil society confronted

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the ROC with the independence of modern secular society from both state and church. TheROC faced a choice: it could either completely deny the phenomenon of the civil society byfocusing on the inner life of the church, or abandon this traditional reflex and try to relate tothe emerging civil society.

The ROC’s very attempt to formulate its social doctrine in the form of the SocialConcept, which is an absolute novelty in the ‘Orthodox world’, in and of itself demon-strates a willingness to choose the second option and to develop, in the context of aninteraction between traditional theology and modern trends, a systematic response to awhole range of contemporary issues. By publishing such a document, as well as by seekinginternet publicity (the website of the Moscow Patriarchate (mospat.ru) is well organised andhighly accessible in six languages), the ROC has taken a remarkable step towards super-seding its ‘monastic–contemplative’ orientation and positioning itself in public debate ontopical issues such as the media, globalisation, bioethics, secularisation and human rights(see Novik, 2002; Kostyuk, 2001b).

However, the conceptualisation of secular society is no easy job for the ROC, not onlybecause it has long had to act as a state-controlled church without autonomy, but alsobecause of the dualism of Orthodox theology (see also the Introduction, above). Since theOrthodox world view is characterised by contrasts between ‘spiritual’ and ‘worldly’,‘religious’ and ‘secular’, it lacks concepts with which the life of a Christian in the secularworld can be articulated as something valuable. The difficulty for the ROC to embrace theidea of civil society stems from a fundamental difference between two traditions of thought.The mind-set of civil society is dominated by individualism and liberalism, while theecclesiastical tradition of thought is legitimised through an array of traditional God-centredtheology. The anthropocentric and theocentric perceptions of the world enter intoconflict here.

The relationship of the Social Concept to the modern idea of civil society turns aroundthe discrepancy between the liberal anthropocentrism of secular civil society and thetraditional theocentrism of the Orthodox world view. Consequently, the liberal-democratictriangular relationship between state, market and civil society stands in opposition to ahierarchically structured world view with God at the top, the individual at the bottom andthe church in between as the mediator between God and individuals. While theCompendium tends towards an anthropocentric world view founded on Thomistic theology,the Social Concept remains loyal to the theocentric conception, in which the intermediatelevel of autonomous society is hard to accommodate. Society, in the Orthodox socialdoctrine, is primarily conceived of in terms of a religious community: the ekklesia.Ekklesia, as a single ‘divine–human organism’ that unites in itself two natures, divineand human (SC, I.2), cannot be identified with a modern bourgeois society that situatesitself only in a secular dimension. The concept of ekklesia determines the limits withinwhich the church develops its inner discourse and within which it attempts to solve thethree underlying dichotomies that we indicated in the Introduction to this article. From thisecclesiological understanding of social order, the Orthodox social doctrine addresses thetension between individual and collective, which returns constantly as the core dilemma ofmodern civil society: ‘the possibility (that is to say, the normative possibility) of positing aunified vision of the social order that, at the same time, recognize[s] the legal, moral, andeconomic autonomy of its component parts’ (Seligman, 2002, p. 27). The Social Conceptprefers to approach socio-ethical dilemmas primarily from the perspective of an intrinsictheological logic, but at the same time tries to participate in broad public debate and to seekalternative sources of legitimacy for a valuable existence of secular civil society, includingits own role in it; in this attempt it oscillates, as Alexander Agadjanian has pointed out,between the protective position of a minority in a largely secularised society, and the

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claimed proactive majority position of a ‘dominant moral force’ (Agadjanian, 2008, p. 18;2012, p. 292).

The ROC has thus not succeeded in developing a substantial understanding of civilsociety: it rather considers secular society as an inevitable reality, against which the churchhas to defend its transcendence-related identity. This may explain the absence of a chapteron ‘church and society’ in the Social Concept. The ROC discusses its relationship to secularmodern society in connection with its relationship to the secular state, where the concept ofsociety is absorbed by that of the state and is dominated by the traditional Byzantine modelof symphonia, not allowing a distinction between political and ecclesial communities.Cooperation with NGOs and targeted social service, to which the ROC has taken animportant step, at the same time form an only implicit recognition of civil society (SC,III.8; see Kostyuk, 2001a). Even if, generally speaking, the acceptance of secular conditionsmust have a preliminary and conditional character from the perspective of a Christian worldview, the Compendium is much more explicit in its appreciation of civil society, which itdefines as ‘the sum of relationships and resources, cultural and associative, that arerelatively independent from the political sphere and the economic sphere’ and to whichthe political order must be subservient (C, 417–420).

The absence from the Social Concept of adequate theological concepts and methods forthe development of a modern understanding of society is explicable in terms of the specificrelationship between church and state in Russia. On the one hand, the institution of theROC has been subordinated to the powerful Russian, and later Soviet, state and has hencebeen forced to produce a politico-theological validation of the idea of sovereignty(Kostyuk, 2005, pp. 273–80). On the other hand, the ROC increasingly developed adistance from secular problems through this forced form of secularisation. It retreatedinto its own shell and identified more with itself than with the world around it. This canof course be interpreted as an implicit protest against the existing political power. The ROCfocused entirely on its immanent theological discourse and thereby acquired an inner libertyfrom political power. Because the state accounted for the modernisation of social politicalstructures, the ROC did not have to go along with this modernisation and could preserve itsideological–cultural autonomy. In this respect its position did not change under the condi-tions of the Soviet regime, once immediate persecution was a thing of the past. It was onlyunder the rapidly changing political and social conditions from 1990 that the ROC sawitself confronted with liberalisation, democratisation and secularisation, and with the needto relate to this modernisation.

The Social Concept does not ascribe independent value to secular society, but regards itas a temporary constellation of human relationships to be transformed, ultimately, into theheavenly kingdom. The ROC refuses to adapt to the world as a matter of principle, but callsfor transformation of the world through the deification (theosis) of man and nature,summarised in the concept of bogochelovechestvo (see above). Therefore the ROC doesnot turn to the whole world by addressing all people of good will, as does the RCC in theCompendium (C, 12), but limits its message to those who participate in the life of thisdivine–human organism (ekklesia), a life to which ‘everyone is called’ (SC, I.3). Thus itprimarily addresses those who believe in the possibility of transfiguring this world by theirGod-inspired actions.

Human Rights

There prevails, in the Social Concept, a contradiction between a positive attitude withrespect to a Christian foundation of human dignity and a vigorous anti-liberal critique of themodern concept of human rights. The only place where human rights are called inalienable

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solemnly begins with the following statement: ‘The idea of the inalienable rights of theindividual has become one of the dominant principles in the contemporary sense of justice’(SC, IV.6).12 In both the Social Concept and the Compendium, the value of human rightsrelies on the Biblical vision of man as imago Dei. In the Social Concept, the idea ofinalienable rights is based ‘on the biblical teaching on man as the image and likeness ofGod, as an ontologically free creature’ (SC, IV.6). Analogously, for the Compendium ‘theultimate source of human rights is not found in the mere will of human beings, the reality ofthe State, in public powers, but in man himself and in God his Creator’ (C, 153).

In contrast to this agreement concerning the foundation of the inalienability of humanrights, however, the Social Concept and the Compendium hold different views about theright to freedom of conscience and about the process of codification of human rights insecular law. The Compendium defines the right to freedom of conscience as ‘the right todevelop one’s intelligence and freedom in seeking and knowing the truth’ (C, 155 (italics inthe original)), while the Social Concept acknowledges, first of all, that ‘a certain autono-mous sphere should be reserved for man, in which his conscience might remain the“autocratic” master, for it is the free will that determines ultimately the salvation ordeath, the way to Christ or the way away from Christ’ (SC, IV.6). This passage seems tosubscribe to a certain autonomy of human conscience, but actually concerns only the rightto believe, not freedom of conscience. In this manner, conscience’s choice is placed in anormative framework and treated as a choice between belief and disbelief. The SocialConcept has difficulty with a moral recognition of the principle of freedom of conscience,even though this principle was included in the Constitution of the Russian Federation asearly as 1990 (see above). In fact, we encounter here two different notions of freedom:freedom from sin, or eleutheria, which is an important notion from a Christian, including anOrthodox Christian, point of view, and freedom of choice, or autexousion, including thefreedom to live in sin, which is unacceptable (SC, II.1; Agadjanian, 2008, p. 8). To put itdifferently, what is rejected is the (liberal) idea that any preference of a free individual hasprima facie acceptability.

The rejection by the ROC of freedom of conscience, in the sense of freedom of choice, asa fundamental principle relates to its attitude to the process of codification of human rightsin secular law. At this point, there is a clear difference between the ROC and the RCC. TheCompendium states that ‘the movement towards the identification and proclamation ofhuman rights is one of the most significant attempts to respond effectively to the inescap-able demands of human dignity’ (C, 152). In the secular codification of human rights it seesan ‘extraordinary opportunity that our modern times offer, through the affirmation of theserights, for more effectively recognizing human dignity and universally promoting it as acharacteristic inscribed by God the Creator in his creature’ (C, 152). The Compendiumrelies on the Thomistic conception of human nature, which, despite its fallen status, is opento the revelation of truth. This explains the positive valuation of the Universal Declarationof Human Rights (UDHR), described by Pope John Paul II as a ‘true milestone on the pathof humanity’s moral progress’ (C, 152). The Social Concept, by contrast, refers to theUDHR in the context of its critique of the modern legal concept of freedom of conscience(SC, III.6).

Unlike the RCC, the ROC does not ascribe positive value to the legal affirmation ofhuman rights, because ‘as secularism developed, the lofty principles of inalienable humanrights turned into a notion of the rights of the individual outside his relations with God’,while ‘outside God … there is only the fallen man’ (SC, IV.7). Because ‘the contemporarysystematic understanding of civil human rights’ ignores the fallen state of man, the ROCdisapproves of the modern concept of human rights. While the Compendium accepts the(fallen) state of human nature as a normative basis for the affirmation of human rights, the

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Social Concept deplores this dangerous trend, where the human being is no longer seen asthe image of God, ‘but as a self-sufficient and self-sufficing subject’, and where ‘thefreedom of the personality (svoboda lichnosti) [is] transformed into the protection of self-will (svoyevoliya)’ (SC, IV.7).

The fact that the principle of freedom of conscience is included in the constitutions ofmost democratic states is seen, by the authors of the Social Concept, as a sign of the moralmalaise of modern society, rather than as a triumph of a Christian core principle. At thesame time, however, the ROC recognises the advantage of this principle for itself:

The adoption of freedom of conscience as a legal principle points to the fact thatsociety has lost religious goals and values and become massively apostate andactually indifferent to the task of the Church and to the overcoming of sin.However, this principle has proved to be one of the means of the Church’sexistence in the non-religious world, enabling her to enjoy a legal status in asecular state and independent from those in society who believe differently or donot believe at all. (SC, III.6)

The Social Concept thus accommodates the constitutional principle of freedom of con-science in a opportunistic manner in favour of the existence of the ROC in the secular state.

In 2008, the ROC supplemented its social teaching with the document The RussianOrthodox Church’s Basic Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights (Osnovyucheniya Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi o dostoinstve, svobode i pravakh cheloveka) (hen-ceforth the Human Rights Teaching or HRT) (HRT, 2008), in which the ROC again refusesto value positively the secular institution of human rights, because ‘human rights protectionis often used as a plea to realize ideas which in essence radically disagree with Christianteaching’ (HRT, Introduction). The aim of the document is to conceptualise the dignity ofman as a ‘religious–moral category’. The ROC thus links a moral to a legal element: itapproves of the legal principle of human dignity only if it refers to the state of humanmorality. This is not surprising: in the Orthodox tradition, the concept of ‘dignity’ has in thefirst place a moral sense, and ideas about what is and what is not worthy are closelyconnected to the moral or immoral behaviour of man and to his inner spiritual state (HRT,I.2). Moreover, the Orthodox tradition attributes little intrinsic value to secular law. Theinalienable ontological dignity of every individual human being is derived from the likenessof God, and therefore

dignified life is related to the notion of God’s likeness achieved through God’sgrace by efforts to overcome sin and to seek moral purity and virtue. Therefore,the human being as bearing the image of God should not exult in this loftydignity, for it is not his own achievement but a gift of God. (HRT, I.2)

In contrast with the Social Concept of 2000, where human worth was given, but dignity hadto be acquired, in the Human Rights Teaching of 2008 human dignity is presented as given,while ‘dignified life’ is what man has yet to realise, living up to the image of God(HRT, I.1).

Against this God-given dignity, the document places the unworthiness of sinful man:

A special importance in restoring a person to his appropriate dignity belongs torepentance based on the awareness of his sin and desire to change his life. Arepentant person admits that his thoughts, words or actions are not consonantwith the God-given dignity and acknowledges his indignity before God and the

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Church … . For this very reason the patristic and ascetic thought and the wholeliturgical tradition of the Church refer more to human indignity caused by sinthan to human dignity. (HRT, I.5)

As has been noted by many commentators, while human dignity is given from a RomanCatholic (as well as Protestant) point of view, from an Orthodox perspective, it is the worth(tsennost’) of every human being that is given, but dignity (dostoinstvo), later corrected todignified life (dostoinaya zhizn’), is something one has yet to acquire by living up to theimago Dei (see for example Hurskainen, 2012; Zwahlen, 2012; Stoeckl, 2012, p. 222). Thenotion of theosis (deification) is crucial here: the moral obligation to try to restore ‘theprimordial image that existed before the original sin’ (Agadjanian, 2008, p. 8) excludes theascription of dignity on the mere ground of being human.

Just like ‘dignity’, the ROC considers the notion of ‘freedom’ from the perspective offallen human nature. The Human Rights Teaching distinguishes, first of all, free choice(compatible with a political–philosophical understanding of political freedoms), to which itdoes not attribute ‘absolute and ultimate value’. ‘God has put it at the service of humanwell-being. But due to the power of sin inherent in the fallen human nature, no human effortis sufficient to achieve genuine goodness’ (HRT, II.1). Only in the context of divine–humanreunification in the ekklesia does man obtain a different kind of freedom (eleutheria),pointing to a redemption from sin. The ROC recognises that ‘only those are truly freewho take the path of righteous life and seek communion with God, the source of absolutetruth’ (HRT, II.2).

Finally, the Orthodox social teaching contains a much more positive appreciation ofcollective than of individual human rights: it is not accidental that Patriarch Kirill in 2005‘discovered’ article 29 of the UDHR, in which the individual’s duties to the community areemphasised, and subsequently made it part of the human rights discourse of the ROC(Stoeckl, 2012, p. 217; HRT, IV.9). Within the Orthodox conception of justice, the idea ofhuman rights is closely linked to the idea of service, to the community and to God.According to the Social Concept, ‘a Christian is … in need of his rights particularly inorder to fulfil, in their use, above all his lofty vocation to become the “likeness of God” andalso his duty towards God and the Church, to his neighbour, family, state, nation and otherhuman communities’ (SC, IV.7). The same idea of restricting individual human rights bycollective rights is strongly present in the Human Rights Teaching, where the ROC statesthat ‘the acknowledgment of individual rights should be balanced with the assertion ofpeople’s responsibility before one another. The extremes of individualism and collectivismcannot promote a harmonious order in a society’s life’ (HRT, III.4).

The emphasis on collective rights and responsibilities in contrast to individual rightsmakes sense in the light of a vision of society to which conciliar (sobornoye) functioningwithin the ekklesia is key (see the section Sobornost’, above): ‘The spiritual experience ofthe Church however has shown that the tension between private and public interests can beovercome only if human rights and freedoms are harmonized with moral values and, mostimportantly, only if the life of the individual and society is invigorated by love’ (HRT,III.4). This statement also shows that the discourse of the ROC on human rights is situatedwithin the broader context of concepts like bogochelovechestvo and sobornost’.

The Orthodox teaching on human rights and dignity determines a quite conservativeattitude towards questions of bioethics. The ROC sees life as a precious gift from God thatsees the inalienable freedom and dignity of the human being as founded in God’s likeness.From this inalienable right to life, a number of medical practices on the border of life arerejected. Abortion is considered murder and condemned as sin. From the moment ofconception, any violation of life is sinful. Therefore, abortive means of anti-conception

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are prohibited; only preventive ones are to be used. Procreation is highly valued by theROC, but is not to be achieved by any means: artificial insemination must be ruled outbecause of supernumerary embryos, surrogate motherhood is unnatural, adoption is notrecommended, and it is unnatural if homosexuals want a child (SC, III.2).

In general, the ROC is not enthusiastic about the opportunities that rapid advances inbiomedical technology have created. This development is attributed to man’s attempt to puthimself in the place of God (chelovekobozhiye, the opposite of bogochelovechestvo), tochange His creation and to ‘improve’ it according to his own will (SC, XII.1). The SocialConcept warns against the abuse of genetic information (SC, XIII.3). Cloning is seen by theROC as a way of claiming the role of the Creator. Human cloning is not permitted, but thegeneration of organic material is, as long as this practice does not affect human dignity.

This argument returns in the debate about transplantation and donation. Transplantationon a commercial basis should never be allowed. The donor sacrifices his organ and therecipient receives it as a gift. Dying should never be extended or shortened in order toobtain donor organs. Nor should a transplant be performed that threatens the recipient’sidentity. Foetal therapy is of course absolutely forbidden. The absolute prohibition onplaying with the boundary between life and death implies that neither organs nor donormay be kept alive for transplant purposes. Euthanasia is equally covered by this absoluteprohibition and is not permitted as a means to reduce pain.

A second absolute ban is the prohibition on changing a person’s identity. This substanti-ates the rejection of cloning, of some forms of transplantation, and especially of gender-change operations. Transsexuality is a rebellion against the Creator. Some types of humanbehaviour are sinful perversions of God-created human nature: homosexuality is a primeexample here.

The right to life, so important in the ROC’s stance on issues of bioethics, is clearly underpressure in the issue of capital punishment (SC, IX). Irrespective of the inalienable right tolife, the Social Concept concedes that the death penalty was already recognised in the OldTestament, and that neither the New Testament, nor the tradition of the Orthodox Church,call for the abolition of capital punishment. The ROC is positive about pardon, butrecognises society’s right to decide about the application of the death penalty. The ROCdoes call for humane treatment of criminals, with a special eye on the criminal mind: it seespastoral care and the sacrament of forgiveness as the best fight against crime.

Conclusion

Although the Social Concept, we believe, does not offer a theological–metaphysicalfoundation for modern society, the text does treat urgent problems of modern society thatwere never before addressed in the Orthodox theological discussion, and it does contain anumber of important statements that show the de facto recognition, by the ROC, of thedemocratic system and civil society. The strong dualistic tensions in Orthodox traditionbetween immanence and transcendence, anthropocentrism and theocentrism, collectivityand individuality, state and church, territoriality and universality are balanced with thespecifically Orthodox Christian principles of symphonia, pomestnost’, sobornost’ andbogochelovechestvo. For the ROC, as reflected in the Social Concept, this dualistic stancehas a double advantage. First, renders it possible for the ROC to claim its own domain,primarily understood as ekklesia, which certainly is an advantage in the case of a state that,like the Russian state, does not understand itself as Orthodox. Second, the ROC does nothave to mingle with a world that is not its own. This second advantage can easily turn into adisadvantage if society expects a public and socially engaged role for the ROC, while thegrudging acceptance of secular civil society by the ROC cannot be substantiated

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theologically. The fact that the ROC deals actively with urgent problems of modern societydemonstrates its willingness to participate in public debate. At the same time, however, itmust refrain from taking an exclusive normative perspective on social differentiation. Thisis difficult, and in a sense paradoxical: if a church wants its voice to be heard, in alegitimate way, in the public arena, it must accept the concept of a plural liberal society,even if its message is a protest against precisely that type of society. According to JoséCasanova, religion can take on a public form only if the inviolable right to privacy and theabsolute character of the principle of freedom of conscience are recognised (Casanova,1994, p. 57).

The obvious differences between the social doctrines of the ROC and the RCC can beexplained, first of all, by the specifically Orthodox principles that underlie Orthodox socialteaching: symphonia, sobornost’, pomestnost’ and bogochelovechestvo. A second explana-tory factor is the fundamentally different perspective on history in general, and on moder-nisation in particular: the Orthodox limitation to the first Seven Councils and the ChurchFathers makes a commitment to later thinkers, in a process of aggiornamento, almostimpossible. It is difficult, for theological reasons, to match the use of St Augustine or StThomas Aquinas, in the Compendium, with a similar use of Gregory Palamas (1296–1359),Maksim Grek (1475–1556), Solov’yev or Bulgakov in the Social Concept: the Orthodoxtradition by and large lacks the notion of doctrinal renewal that has become part of the Latintradition; consequently, the opinion of Bulgakov is never more than ‘an opinion’. The thirdfactor, finally, is the national and territorial nature of the Orthodox Churches and, conse-quently, their greater dependence on the political history of their country – in the case ofRussia a series of regimes which subjugated the ROC or kept it in a golden cage.

Despite these historically explicable differences and hindrances, however, the SocialConcept marks an important step in the history of the ROC and of Orthodox Christianityin general. Whether this is a first step in a process of renewal and positive appreciation ofthe world and society, or the concluding step in a relatively short period of full autonomy,will once again depend on the interactions between the inner dynamism of the OrthodoxChristian religious and theological tradition on the one hand, and the actual relation of theROC to surrounding social and political realities on the other.

Notes

1 Thus, for example, the Patriarchate of Constantinople and most other Orthodox Churches do notrecognise the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of America: this was granted by the ROC,whereas Constantinople believes that it alone can grant autocephaly (see Roberson, 1999, p. 45);the ROC itself proclaimed its autocephaly in 1448 by choosing its own metropolitan, bypassingConstantinople (which had been sending Greek metropolitans to Moscow until then), but thismetropolitan was recognised by the other churches as patriarch only in 1589.

2 It should be noted that the fourth branch of Christianity, the Oriental Churches or Churches ofthe East, is even more overlooked.

3 In his comment to the German translation of the SC, Rudolf Uertz mentions sobornost’ andsymphonia as two ‘social guiding principles’ (‘soziale Leitbilder’) that organise the ROC’ssocial doctrine (Uertz, 2001, p. 146). Various, often diverging, English translations are offeredfor these principles, which is why we prefer to retain them in their original wording: symphoniacan be translated, obviously, as symphony; pomestnost’ can, if we bear in mind the meaning ‘pomeste’, ‘according to place’, be covered by territoriality, locality or ‘localness’; sobornost’ isrendered, in different contexts, by communality, conciliarity, catholicity (Uertz translates it as‘Katholizitätsprinzip’), etc., while bogochelovechestvo is translatable as ‘Godmanhood’ or as‘divine humanity’.

4 In practice, local Eastern Orthodox Churches can decide for themselves under which patriarch’sjurisdiction they place themselves, usually the Moscow Patriarchate or the Ecumenical

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Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Finnish Orthodox Church, for example, is established as oneof the national churches in Finland and has autonomous status within the Patriarchate ofConstantinople. The Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church left the jurisdiction of the MoscowPatriarchate – under which it was ranked in Soviet times – in 1996, and now equally hasautonomous status within the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This is not, however, recognisedby the Moscow Patriarchate, though meanwhile a compromise has been found and parishes canthemselves decide under which Patriarchate they fall: ethnically Estonian parishes as a rulechoose Constantinople, ethnically Russian ones Moscow.

5 This can be seen as a general principle of the Orthodox Churches, coming to the fore in the banon proselytism in Greece (article 13 of the Greek Constitution).

6 The difference between russky and rossiisky is crucial and politically sensitive: russky refers tosomeone or something who or which is ethnically Russian, whereas rossiisky refers to someoneor something who or which belongs to the highly multinational country of Russia.

7 For a historical analysis of the use of sobornost’, see Esaulov (1995, 1997).8 The Russian translation of ‘Credo in … unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam’ is

‘Veruyu v … Tserkov’ yedinuyu svyatuyu sobornuyu i apostol’skuyu’ (see Khomyakov, 1994;Bulgakov, 2003, p. 117).

9 See also Kostyuk (2005, p. 316, footnote 144). According to Kostyuk, this use of Augustine isindicative of the absence of an Orthodox ‘just war’ doctrine.

10 The authors are aware of the complex relation of the RCC with democratic forms of govern-ment: de facto endorsement does not imply principled allegiance. The notion of popularsovereignty, with its tendential rejection of divine omnipotence and with a plurality of ‘equallylegitimate’ world views, goes against the entire Catholic tradition. We limit ourselves here to theexplicit statements in the Compendium, knowing that a full investigation of the topic wouldrequire much more research, time and space.

11 For a general assessment of the relation between Orthodox Christianity and civil society, seeVan der Zweerde (1999) and Hoppe-Kondrikova (2012).

12 Instead of ‘inalienable rights of the individual’, the Russian original has ‘inalienable rights ofthe person’ (neot”yemlemyye prava lichnosti). As in quite a few other places, the Englishtranslation is, to say the least, sloppy. In this case, it glosses over the fundamental differencebetween ‘individual’ and ‘person’, thus cutting short substantial discussions in both Russian andwestern thought (see, for example, Haardt and Plotnikov, 2008).

Notes on Contributors

Olga Hoppe-Kondrikova is the director of EthixAdvice, a consultancy providing strategicadvice on business ethics and intercultural communication (ethixadvice.com). In 2012 shedefended her PhD thesis Struggling for Civility: the Idea and the Reality of Civil Society:an Interdisciplinary Study with a Focus on Russia at Radboud University Nijmegen. Herresearch interests include civil society, the theory and practice of democracy, the functionaldifferentiation of society, social corporate responsibility, Orthodox religious philosophy,Russian political history and applied ethics. Email: olgakondrikova@gmail.com

Josephien van Kessel is a junior lecturer in the Department of Social and PoliticalPhilosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at RadboudUniversity Nijmegen and executive manager of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studiesin Nijmegen. She is currently finalising her PhD thesis Bulgakov’s Sophiology asConceptualization and Ontology of an Alternative Modernity. Her research interestsinclude social theory and philosophy, secularity and religion as social phenomena, socialethics and human rights, Orthodox religious philosophy, Russian Westernisers andSlavophiles, and atheist and anarchist social philosophy of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. Email: j.vankessel@ivoc.ru.nl

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Evert van der Zweerde is professor of political philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy,Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, director of the Centre forEthics and academic adviser of the Soeterbeeck Programme at Radboud University. HisPhD thesis (1994) on the history of philosophy as an academic discipline in the formerUSSR was published as Soviet Historiography of Philosophy in 1997. He is the author ofnumerous articles and chapters on Soviet and Russian philosophy, Orthodox Christianity,civil society and democracy. Three recent publications: ‘Where is the common ground?Interaction and transfer between European and Russian philosophical culture’, Studies inEast European Thought, 62 (2010); ‘Mix the balance! Democracy as a paradoxicalprocess’, in J. Gijsenbergh, S. Hollander, T. Houwen and W. de Jong (eds.), CreativeCrises of Democracy (Brussels, Peter Lang, 2012) and Orthodox Christianity and HumanRights (Leuven, Peeters, 2012), co-edited with A. Brüning. Email: e.vanderzweerde@ftr.ru.nl

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