Blogs

26 March 2022

A few thoughts, not drawn from books (from my Vkontakte feed)

by Viktor Kogan-Yasny

Russia’s church tradition, enveloped in Soviet education and a post-Soviet matrix of pronounced local thinking, essentially rejects humanism, luring faith away into “mystical values” behind which – given the “mystics’” lack of real Christian experience, – in the guise of “mystical” terminology, lie abstraction and every kind of conventionality, a temporal void in place of the eternal, in place of humankind, in place of God’s world, in place of God. The abstract dogmatist “mystics” do not understand that humankind is eternal precisely in all its apparent immediacy and temporality, that God’s world is eternal in its mutability, that the eternal is the opposite of statics – nothingness, absence, a departure from eternity, self-delusion.

And again, “rigid” churchiness is completely unable to compare itself to another real, live person. As unable as national or state idolatry.

Translated by Melanie Moore