A Church of No One

On a Church built to answer for nothing

A few weeks ago I published a piece on this page about Metropolitan Hilarion — about the myth, believed even by bishops who should have known better, that he was the Church’s presumptive next patriarch, and about the catastrophic personal solitude, decades of never building a single relationship of trust among equals, that made any real candidacy impossible from the start. It’s part of a longer pattern in what I write here: on the Russian Orthodox Church’s collaboration with state power, on the scandals of its hierarchs, on the political subservience of its leadership. Deacon Poliansky (a strange pseudonym, a man with no name — a kind of headless horseman) has now replied, and the reply deserves an answer on its own terms. His argument, in short: the institution can be corrupt, but the Church cannot. The Moscow Patriarchate’s hierarchy is not the whole Church — only a local congregation of her members. Her holiness survives untouched by whatever Kirill or Hilarion do, because the true Church is carried instead by martyrs and quiet confessors, visible and invisible, following the pattern of the twentieth century’s New Martyrs. Critics like me, on his account, risk mistaking the institution’s sins for the death of the Church itself — a failure of theological vision, not a diagnosis.

This is a serious charge. Someone who hasn’t read much of what I’ve written, from the early 1990s onward, and is judging from a post or two, might reasonably reach it. I’ll answer at length, then — most of what I’ve argued on this subject over the years is in Russian, and unavailable to an English-language reader.

Poliansky’s argument rests on Khomiakov. I’m afraid he has misread him. Khomiakov himself is not beyond challenge here — Georges Florovsky later argued that his romantic vision of sobornost drifted toward idealism, borrowed more from German philosophy than from patristic realism, too taken with an invisible communion to reckon with the Church’s stubborn historical mess. That caution is worth keeping in view. But set it aside for now, because Poliansky’s use of Khomiakov fails on Khomiakov’s own terms, before we ever get to whether Khomiakov himself needs correcting. Khomiakov never asked us to choose between the visible and the invisible Church. He asked us to have the courage to see both at once, without letting one excuse the other. What Deacon Poliansky offers instead is a Church that is visible only when convenient and invisible the moment it becomes inconvenient. Fittingly, this argument comes from a name no one can hold accountable — the same structure in miniature: an authority that answers for nothing because it made sure never to be named. The New Martyrs he invokes did not achieve sanctity by looking past Metropolitan Sergius’s 1927 Declaration of loyalty to the atheist Soviet state. They achieved it by refusing that declaration, at the cost of their lives, while the hierarchy that issued it kept its offices, struggling to preserve its titles and its seat at every table that mattered. That is not a rebuke of institutional critique. It is institutional critique, canonized. And it cuts the other way from how Poliansky uses it. If the Church’s holiness really survives no matter what her hierarchs do, then the hierarchy has lost its last excuse. Its failures can no longer hide behind a promise of the Church’s permanence that was never the hierarchy’s to borrow in the first place. Khomiakov’s doctrine does not shield Kirill from judgment. It removes the only thing that could have.

There is a word in the ascetic tradition for what this move actually is, and it isn’t found in political theory. It is prelest’: a delusion that flatters the soul, mistakes a comforting picture of reality for reality itself, and calls the mistake faith. The Fathers don’t prescribe more refined theology as its remedy. They prescribe trezvenie: sober, clear-eyed attention to what is actually in front of you. Khomiakov asked for exactly that kind of sobriety, held toward the visible and the invisible Church at once. Poliansky asks for the opposite: a calm refusal to look at the visible, dressed up in the language of the invisible. None of this excuses me from the same demand. Trezvenie turned only outward, never inward, is not trezvenie at all. It’s just prelest’ with better manners, and pointing that risk out in someone else doesn’t mean I’ve escaped it myself. I criticize a great deal, and I don’t plan to stop. But the criticism comes from care for the Church, not from any wish to discredit her.

There is also a more uncomfortable problem here: which martyrs get named, and which don’t. Kochurov, Evdokimova, Ostroumov cost Poliansky nothing to name. They passed away, canonized, long past the point where anyone owes them anything. The tradition he claims to defend is not a closed one. There are priests, monastics, and laypeople in Russia right now refusing to bless this war, sheltering the persecuted, losing their parishes, their freedom, sometimes their lives, for exactly the fidelity he attributes to the New Martyrs of a century ago. Denis Popovich and Nikita Ivankovich — two devout seminary graduates who once served as subdeacons to Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) — have spent more than a year in Moscow’s Lefortovo FSB prison on fabricated terrorism charges, their real offense being that they questioned the war. Their case is one among the more than 115 I’ve documented in my new book, Religious Communities Under Pressure. Neither Poliansky nor the vast majority of local Orthodox churches comfortably settled in free countries have shown much interest in naming them, praying for them, defending them, or standing with them while that would still cost something. It is easier to canonize the dead than to stand with the living.

The real institutional Church in Russia today includes the blessing of weapons. It includes the compromised patriarch and the bishops who chose survival over witness. This isn’t a scandal confined to two men. It’s the latest version of what the tradition itself now names Constantinian captivity: the Church trading her prophetic distance from Caesar for a seat near his throne, and calling the trade communion. Poliansky doesn’t quite deny this — he defers it. Kirill and Hilarion remain, on his account, members who might yet repent; nothing expels them, nothing forces the question now. True enough — but what, or who, actually calls them to repent? The prophetic voices that might have are being silenced. That’s the real move, subtler than denying their membership: every reckoning gets pushed onto some future repentance with no deadline and no required sign. It isn’t my account of the Church that’s imagined. It’s his: a Church that never has to answer for anything today, because whatever might answer for itself tomorrow is, by his own account, still safely inside.

Poliansky’s construction has a further problem, and it comes from inside his own logic. Press it and it proves too much. If holiness floats entirely free of the people who make up the Church, then it isn’t only Kirill’s weapon-blessing that stops counting as evidence of what the Church “really” is — Kochurov’s death for his flock does too, on the same logic, however much Poliansky would resist that conclusion. Both become equally external to an identity located somewhere else. That is not what Poliansky intends. It is where his own argument leads: sanctity cut loose from every actual believer, living or dead.

Nicholas Afanasyev put the point more concretely than Khomiakov ever did: the Church’s fullness isn’t distributed through some invisible communion at all, but enacted, in full, in the concrete eucharistic assembly gathered around a bishop — this altar, this gathering, now. On that account, a patriarch blessing weapons isn’t corruption happening off to the side of the true Church. It’s corruption happening at the exact point where the Church is supposed to happen. Khomiakov’s own communion of the living, the dead, and the unborn is, in Benedict Anderson’s sense, an imagined community too. That alone isn’t the problem. There’s a real objection nearby, and it deserves a straight answer, not a dodge: Christ himself forbade pulling up the tares before the harvest, precisely because human judgment about who belongs and who doesn’t can’t be trusted (Matthew 13:24–30). That parable isn’t some detail Poliansky forgot. It may be the strongest form of his argument. But the parable is about God’s patience with a mixture only He gets to sort out. It was never an excuse for the sower to stop knowing wheat from tares, or for anyone to pretend the field has no tares at all. The difference is that Khomiakov’s invisible Church still judges. It disciplines through repentance, confession, the actual falling-away of infected members that he describes without flinching. Poliansky’s version keeps the language of judgment but removes every way that judgment could ever reach the visible hierarchy. His Church knows how to absolve. It has forgotten how to see, and to call out what it sees. What’s left resembles an imagined community more than sobornost: a collective felt rather than lived, defined by no one in particular, answerable to no one in particular.

This isn’t to say nothing costs anything in Poliansky’s Church; martyrdom plainly does, and he is right to honor it. But notice who pays. The cost has been shifted entirely onto the laity and the persecuted, while the hierarchy that blesses weapons and works with the state settles its account with a cheap theology that was never going to charge it anything at all.

Khomiakov himself gives us the better ending, and Poliansky already quoted it: no one is saved alone. That’s as true of hierarchs as of martyrs, and it cuts against the very delay Poliansky is proposing. Repentance put off to some unnamed future is repentance sought alone, apart from the only communion in which Khomiakov says it can happen at all. If Kirill and Hilarion are to be saved, it will not be by a theology that lets them wait it out in comfort. It will be by entering, now, into the same communion of prayer and consequence that Denis Popovich and Nikita Ivankovich have already been living in, in Lefortovo, for more than a year. That repentance would have to show itself institutionally, not only spiritually — an actual break with the privileges the state grants a compliant hierarchy, not a private sorrow kept behind the iconostasis. And it cannot run on Poliansky’s timeline, because Popovich and Ivankovich are not living on it either.

Comforting doctrine. A cheap theology’s excuse not to repent. The same invitation extends to Poliansky, not only to the men he’s defending — but unlike his, mine comes with a date on it: today, while Popovich and Ivankovich are still in Lefortovo to hear it.