By chance I ran across these passages while looking for material for a paper I was working on to close out my final Spring semester of seminary. That was almost two years ago, but it seems quite timely now in light of the controversy of President Obama’s health care mandate which appears to impinge on freedom of religion/conscience. These words are from a book by Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev (1893-1966) titled The Church of the Holy Spirit only recently translated and published in English. Afanasiev was a Russian Christian, an Orthodox Priest – and by personal experience very familiar, with the communism/totalitarianism of the former Soviet Union. In light of the ‘open’ movement by the current administration toward a more socialist governance (which I admit has been in the works for at least the past century or so) in the United States, I think these passages are quite timely and relevant. Now, these remarks are by an Orthodox Priest – in other words, someone who believes that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God – that their lives are created to reflect the liberating kingship of God, not the the whims of the megalomaniacal state. So – this is from a theological point of view, and yet, highly relevant. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann has beautifully written, Man – male and female – are ‘homo adorans’ or ‘worshipping man’ – first and foremost. This worship is first and foremost, with gratitude and love, offered to God alone. He writes
It is quite interesting to find such illuminating words from a Russian Orthodox Priest that dovetail so well with the thought and intent of our nations Founders who wrote the Constitution of the United States.
A few personal thoughts – for which I am willing to be corrected if I am in error.
I’m no Constitutional scholar, but it is a short and fairly straight forward document. The most salient points being that the rights of human beings are grounded in God, not in the arbitrary favor or disfavor of any man or woman whether commoner or official. Secondly, government exists to safeguard those rights, provide for a representative government – of the people and for the people, and provide for the defense of the country. The government was never meant to be the ‘daddy’ of the people, but assumed the freedom of the citizens to pursue their own happiness in whatever occupation they desired so long as it did not impinge on the rights of another citizen. What right is preserved? It is not the ‘right’ to be taken care of by someone else, rather it is the ‘right’ to pursue my happiness. If this right is seen as being arbitrary and grounded in the opinion of a fallible human being, then it is not a ‘right’ any more, it is merely a social convention dependent on the whim of another human being. THAT is slavery, not freedom. To be at the whim of another’s desire is to be at the end of a slave masters whip. That is the totalitarian impulse – it is the desire to ‘make’ others do and conform to ones own ideological ends. It is a usurpation of the inherent dignity of human beings to be determined only by their Creator – to live in freedom – mirroring God’s own freedom – in God’s image and likeness.
Now on to Afanasiev’s thoughts. The first set of quotes involve the relation of the individual person to the state. As has been said over and over by many people for the past several years, the United States of America is a nation of laws, not of men and women. No one is at the whim of any individual’s judicial ideology. In light of the recent ‘mandate’ decreed by president Obama which leaves no room for dissent on the basis of religious conviction – freedom of conscience, I think these incisive words by Fr. Afanasiev should give us pause:
The law indicates both to the individual and to the state that which it ought not to do, meaning to protect the one from the other. But if one recognizes the primacy of the state over the individual, all the efforts of the state would be in its own defense against the individual and not in protection of the individual. In taking itself to be the superior value and sometimes even the ultimate value, the state comes to consider the individual as a means and not as an end. The individual used by the state as a means to attain its own purposes then ceases to be an individual.
and further on, the brackets are mine as well as the bolded words:
Positive norms [I take this to mean legislating what people ought to do - i.e., everyone MUST have health insurance, etc . . ., not just what they shouldn't do] are not limited to saying what one ought to do. By their very nature they tend to monopolize the conscience of individuals [i.e., seek to take the place of God as sole Lord of the heart of human beings]. And the state is forced to create among its members a sensibility which is adequate to guarantee positive norms. Meanwhile, even if the etatist ['statist'] ideology prevails, the state remains legitimate as long as it does not attempt to dominate the consciousness of its members. From the moment the first step in this direction is taken, an alarm is sounded and the state built upon law becomes transformed into a totalitarian state.
In such a state, there are no longer any limits on its own domination of the individual. In principle, it is no longer believed that the law can limit the state in favor of the individual. The state now demands the entire person [seeks to become an object of worship], seeking to dominate his inner world, as well. Law becomes almost completely positive [you have to do this or that rather than - don't do this or that]; it ceases to protect the individual from the state. The totalitarian state has no need of individuals. To it they are essentially a problem, since the features which comprise an individual are incompatible with the idea of a totalitarian state. Whether the state admits that the individual has a meaning in himself is secondary here. In either case this kind of state tends to dominate all its members. It protects their interests only insofar as these correspond to those of the state, for it is not the individual as such that the state protects, but the collectivity. A totalitarian state is also able to sacrifice totally the interests of its members for its own purposes. [Hitler; Mao; Stalin][Let the reader understand and carefully ponder this next paragraph.]
The great difference between a legitimate state and a totalitarian one has to do with law and the role that it plays in the state’s life. The transformation of a legitimate state into a totalitarian one is not so difficult as one would like to believe, for the nature of the state is essentially the same in either case. In a totalitarian state the nature of this reality is denuded ['made bare'], while in a legitimate one it is veiled by the law. To the extent that the action of law is weakened and its character changed, the legitimate state then tends to become a totalitarian one. (Pages 262-263)
Generally, I understand Afanasiev to be saying that when the state begins telling you how to live, i.e., you must do this or that, then it is tending towards totalitarianism. The individual is no longer protected from the State by laws, but the state now seeks to take over the life of the individual and subsume it under its self so that the individual ceases to have any value in and of him or her self, but only in so far as the state determines they have value. It seems to me that at this point the State ceases to believe in any transcendent truth that grounds the inherent dignity of the individual, and determines that it (the State) is the truth that determines what dignities the individual relative to its (the State’s) own aims and power. This state of affairs would be by nature demonic – for the state, as one of the ‘powers’ mentioned in the Scriptures as under God’s Lordship, has now displaced God as the sole Lord and King who is worthy of worship – and who in the mystery of divine freedom grounded human freedom in his own freedom. God does not compel faith. God does not ‘make’ us believe. God ‘calls’ us to relationship with himself. God ‘calls’ us to repent, to change our mindset and orientation and allow him to renew the understanding of our minds so that our humility and love and adoration of God is willing and from the heart, not unwilling and externally coerced. So, to honor the individual person IS THE SAME AS TO HONOR GOD. Think of the passage in the Gospel when Jesus says, “Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these, you do it unto me.” That is essentially the same point. To refuse the honor the individual person as one whose right to ‘freedom’ is grounded in God’s very own freedom, is an act of envy – an act which seeks to undermine the very conditions in which an individual can realize, in freedom, that God through Jesus Christ is his/her Savior and none other – neither another human being, nor State, nor political entity. Now on to the next quote.
This next quote involves church/state relations, and whether it is preferable for the church to desire a secular state that preserves the rights and life of the individual or a ‘christian’ state (theocracy) that is totalitarian and dictates what individuals should ‘do’ via law. He says clearly that we should prefer the former.
This has a more direct bearing on the recent mandate = highlighting the inevitable conflict between the ‘state’ and the ‘church’ when the state seeks to impinge upon the church by saying that it cannot be who it is and at the same time be in compliance with laws or dictates of the state:
The totalitarian state is able to recognize the Church and allow it a certain freedom of action within the limits which it determines. But it is also able to deny the Church’s existence and limit its activity to such a point that practically speaking, its existence becomes nearly or even completely illegal [it becomes criminalized]. The protection accorded to the Church by the totalitarian state almost always demands sacrifices of the Church, for the totalitarian state never sacrifices anything to its members or to the organizations within its confines. Under certain conditions, a balance between the church and the totalitarian state can be attained, but it always remains precarious because the Church can never recognize the totalitarian state, just as the state can never really recognize the Church. Conflict between them is inevitable even if this can be postponed for a shorter or longer period of time. The totalitarian state rejects the Church because it cannot allow the existence of an autonomous spiritual domain [in this it reflects the demonic]. The Church cannot recognize the totalitarian state because it demands a certain renunciation of itself or, in any case, the renunciation of its mission in the world. Independently of the ideology which it professes, the Church cannot recognize the totalitarian state, for it cannot give its approval to the enslavement of the individual even to the most sublime purposes. History has not known of an ideological state that did not seek to dominate the individual. Consequently if one proposes to the Church to choose between a “lay” or secular state that is legitimate and a “Christian” one which is totalitarian, the Church ought to prefer the former.
In The Church of the Holy Spirit, page 264
The present political developments in our country in the name of the ‘good’ should give us significant pause in my opinion. We must remember that the tree that brought about our death was not the “tree of the knowledge of evil”, it was the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Perhaps I will write another post to develop a bit more what I mean by this – but I think it points out that we are never more deceived than when we are deceived by what we determine to be ‘good’. Eve didn’t eat of the fruit because she thought it was evil – rather, she saw that it was beautiful and pleasing to the eye and she thought it was something that would make her wise. “There is a way that seems good to a man, but its end is the way to death.”
