Zeitgeist, the Orthodox Church, and Its Mission in Our Modern Times

~ A Letter by Bishop Photii of Triaditsa to a Bulgarian Orthodox priest ~

Dear Father N. 

May God’s grace be with you!

First, I would like to thank you for the kind words and best wishes in your letter of March 1st this year, and then I will try to respond to your supplication by sharing views of mine on the Church ‘s mission in our times.

Let me start by examining what was in your letter to me:

I understand that the question of the church calendar is something that seriously concerns you and a field in which you undoubtedly are competent to the possible utmost extent. Such a conversation takes a special attitude within the Church, just as well as a certain level of knowledge. We are still leading a survival fight, and when you chase the overall picture, you miss out on details. Meanwhile, we must not lose sight of the especially great need for a mission towards modern man.

The question of our survival in the Church is for us is not so much a matter of survival in a horizontal dimension, that is the physical and social survival of the Church as an institution – and that, at any cost. Such a view, such an emphatically empirical sense of the Church’s survival has intensively been formed in this country during the years of communist dictatorship. In Russia, under persecution – monstrous in its cruelty – of the faithful, the practical application of this concept for Church survival was rejected by the majority of the new martyrs and confessors of the Orthodox Faith and was called “Sergianism”. According to that kind of perception, according to that view for the survival of the Church of Christ – not only under persecution but also in [the conditions of] spiritually destructive processes within and without her – the primary, solid, tangible reality of the Church is above all the ecclesiastical institution, the visible structure of the Church as a social body [organism/constitution] in terms of its physical and social functioning. An organism with such an understanding of its own essence inevitably begins to struggle for survival primarily in the mainstream of the laws and logic of this world through adapting and compromising, which ultimately can provide its physical and social survival – but at the same time, put it in a deep contradiction with the Church’s essence as a God-man body. From this point of view, the basic reality for the Church's survival – the heavenly-earthly Church as the Body of Christ, in which we can only survive as living members in Faith, in spirit and in truth, to which the institutional structure is but an external expression – becomes an “idea”, an “ideal”, something sublime, supposedly desirable in word but abstract and ultimately conditional based upon the reality of the institution, on the empirical social organism as a massive church body, which, however, loses its authentic church spirit. And so, in our understanding of the survival battle, the overall and the detail emerge in a somewhat different light. To us overall, basic, and defining is the spiritual authenticity of the Tradition, of the doctrine, of the customs of the Church. Affiliation with this spiritual authenticity and fullness of Tradition is for us the major condition for our survival as members of the Church, the Body of Christ. In this context, the church calendar, too (or to put it more precisely, the paschal-calendar system of the Great Indiction), being an expression of the Church’s liturgical unity ever since the sixth century, is to us an integral part of Church Tradition, and not some immaterial detail liable to mechanical separation from the Tradition's fullness. And it is by virtue of this feature exactly of the calendar that it should neither be underestimated, nor grow into an unlawfully enlarged and self-sufficient criterion of “orthodoxy”. 

You share:

This: "Go you and learn...” [cf. Matt. 9:13] and its implementation is our greatest concern, as well as the lack of real workers in the field, the lack of a tested and established system of functionality that hinders the mission. It is not that there are no attempts in this direction, but we are definitely out of our [modern days] time and the contemporary needs of people. Since I am [highly] impressed with what you have done so far, I would ask you – if time allows and you are willing to – to share your insights and ideas for the Church's mission, not for my sake, but as a vision of a modern church bishop. I see that I cannot avoid the word “modern” but that’s how it is – God has placed us to live in this time and to serve Him in it.

As the topic of the Church's mission in our days is much too broad and complex [multi-layered], I will try to focus on its different aspects, moments of our proportionate to our small powers experience, in this regard included, thereby naturally I assume the risk to offer a sparse, thesis exposition, which could miss out exactly on those sides or problems of the mission, which are of particular interest to you. But I think such gaps could be filled up [to the full] later, if you deem necessary for us to continue our dialogue on this topic.

1) You point out that in our attempt to fulfill the command of the Saviour “go you and learn...” we are far from our time and the contemporary needs of people. I understand you. Actually, you pose the vital – I think – issue of the difficult, unsafe, but inevitable meeting of the truthful [authentic] spiritual Church Tradition with the intellectual-and-cultural facts of today. As a matter of fact, what content do we put into the concepts of “time”, “contemporary” [modernity], “Zeitgeist” and hence – into wordings as “modern man”, “needs of the contemporary man”, etc.?

I will try to talk briefly about the concept of “zeitgeist”. Let me start with a thought of the late Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose): “The more one knows about the spirit of the time, the easier one can remain a true Orthodox Christian in a time like today.” What do we understand by “spirit of the time”?

In the whole range of philosophical and culturological definitions the contents of this metaphor or of this term (depending on the point of view) boils down, in general, to a system of factors that to one degree or another condition, determine our knowledge, our value attitudes and behavior, while [at the same time] they themselves are influenced by current human activities. These factors are perceived as a background set of world-view and individual-scientific understandings and assumptions about the world, and also as value orientations; they all function as a matrix of perceptions, evaluations and actions.

According to Hegel the “spirit of the time” (Zeitgeist) is the objective spirit unfolding in history, which is manifested in all individual phenomena for a given epoch; the set of ideas typical for a certain period. Goethe considered zeitgeist as a predominant spiritual side of an epoch, i.e., as its intellectual-and-value dominant: “If any side stands out strongly, conquers the masses and triumphs over them in a way that the opposite side is shifted to the background and is shaded, then such preponderance is called zeitgeist, that defines the essence of a given interval of time.” And here is one modern understanding of the “spirit of the times” in a popular wording: “zeitgeist is ... a real phenomenon that anyway determines the thinking and behavior of the people living in a given time. This encompasses all the people and becomes the norm for their thinking and behavior. Of course, it is expressed in a different measure and in different ways.” And still another definition with pronounced theoretical-and-cognitive orientation, in which “the spirit of the times” is understood as “matrix schemes for theoretical constructs, invariant with respect to a certain range of theories; a set of specific world-view structures [constructs], intellectual motifs and conceptual tools for staging the problems and their solving.” But how far from the sterile-cabinet, from the classically abstract or from the “super-conceptual” understanding of “Zeitgeist” is the existential, spiritual-and-intellectual insight of Archimandrite Justin (Popovich):

In our chaotic modern times, a deity suppresses increasingly the other deities, ever more compellingly shows itself as the only god, ever more mercilessly torments its devotees. That deity is the spirit of the times. Before it, worshipping day and night, are the jaded inhabitants of Europe, offering it in sacrifice their consciences, their souls, their lives, their hearts... Their god – the spirit of the time – is too complex, it is composed of most heterogeneous elements. It contains within itself all contradictions of modern life – [both] culture and civilization, philosophy and science, Catholicism and Protestantism. It contains within itself the whole tragedy and all the comic side of life – just as it is. And living in accordance with the spirit of the times, one wanders unmerciful and unwanted through the gorges of all these irreconcilable contradictions. And the most terrible part in this is the systematically organized rebellion against the human person. Zeitgeist hampers personhood by its autocratic tyranny, it mechanizes it [the latter]: [stating] you're a screw in the noisy machine of contemporaneity – [then] live like a screw; you are a key in the distraught keyboard of nowness, rattling on whose keys is the zeitgeist – [then] live like a key. Determinism, winding into fatalism, is the main vehicle through which zeitgeist reigns as god: everything depends on the environment, on the surroundings, rather than on personal exploit [PODVIG]; whatever you do, it’s not you who does it, but the environment through you; if you do evil... you’re not the wrong [one], but the environment is, where you thrive. — But all of this – translated into the language of Slavic sincerity, comes to say: “Everything is permissible — all the vices, all the evil-doings, all the crimes, all sins are permissible, because everything that happens, takes place by the irrevocable laws of necessity.”

And in our times, on the verge between two millennia, the zeitgeist is already not mechanizing but it wells up to destroy the human personality for the sake of its freedom, and today the anti-principle “anything goes” [all is permissible] is justified not by the need, but rather by the freedom and rights of the human personality; today the zeitgeist contains not only the tragedy and the comedy of life, but represents its very contents as depleted and frantically rushes, in search of life’s element in absurdity and decay. Modern humanitarians share the perception of a crisis condition of human existence itself after the hurricane of postmodernism, reckoned to be the most vivid expression of the spirit of the times [zeitgeist] in the late twentieth century.

Very briefly postmodernism can be described as a cast of mind, as an intellectual style, as a type of philosophical thinking, as a kind of a super-reflective concept of the cultural facts in the second half of last century. And these facts are [distinctly] characterized by rapid blurring of boundaries between forms of cultural activities, by the trends of the syncretic uniting of art and science, philosophy and religion on a new worldview level, by the rejection of the classical and the non-classical traditions in philosophical thinking, by a nihilistic revolt against ideological concepts and against traditional values; these facts are also distinguished with a pervasive relativism and with a radical value pluralism [of values]. As a type of mindset and intellectual style, as an intellectual-and-creative charge, postmodernism unlocks to the highest level possible the intellectual-and-playful, reflexive, destructive inventions, seeking to push out the sense-forming, religious, moral, aesthetic, constructive beginnings from the thought-and-value motivation of the creative process. In this sense, postmodernism theorists perceived quite positively the loss of stable value orientations. The “eternal values” have been declared totalitarian and paranoid fixed-ideas, which hampered the implementation of creative design.

The postmodernists’ ideal is chaos, referred to by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) as chaosmos and understood as inherent [of the beginning] an absence of [any] order, and as a state of non-suppressed opportunities. Postmodernists see in the world two main principles – the schizoid beginning of the creative formation and development, and the paranoid beginning of the choking freezing order (from the standpoint of postmodernism any semblance of order needs immediate deconstruction, i.e., it should be relieved [freed] of meaning [sense] through disassembly of the underlying ideological concepts, that the entire culture is permeated with). Hence the image of the chaotic and very sophisticated world is a starting point in contemporary art. Postmodernism’s ontological (or rather the deontological) dimension can most briefly be designated as the crisis of metaphysical thinking, as a decay of the whole picture of the world. Postmodernism’s epistemological-and-value paradigm includes fundamental concepts such as Super-reflection, Agnosticism, Nihilism (cynicism), Total relativism, Game, Laughter (ironic sarcasm). Perhaps the following thought of Jean Bordiyar (born 1929) captures the hidden slippery nature of the pathologically complex post-modernistic ethos: “the immanent force of seduction to pick up, to deflect everything and everyone from the truth and to bring them back into the game, into the pure game visibilities (my emphasis – B.F.).” This Mephistophelean “immanent power of seduction” is actually a desire to turn the very human existence into a surreal nightmare, by bringing it down to the element of unconditional freedom to be whatever you [may] want to be; [down] to the element that gives birth to “freedom” from the truth, gives birth to “freedom” from the very humanity of man, gives birth to the “freedom” to sink into the abyss of sub-human with his unleashed desires and drives, euphemistically called “opportunities”; that same element of “absolute freedom” which calls to an unlimited consumption of ever newer and newer “goods” and the delights of the here and now... This is amidst what kind of zeitgeist manifestations – described with the brevity of a dictionary entry – we are called to be true Orthodox Christians, to be living members of the Divine-Human body of The Church of Christ.

Zeitgeist is particularly aggressive towards the Church because the Church is eternal-[in]-time, it is the only visible ontological carrier of eternity in time; through the Church eternity is present in time – and again, only the Church transforms time and enters itself into eternity. And the spirit of our times in its core activities, frantically hates eternity, it hates the truth, it derides it, sprays its seduction and everything and everyone ends up separated, departing from it [truth]. Which is exactly why the Church should not be subject to 'the times'.

In fact, in its life as the Body of Christ, as a Divine-Human organism, the Church is not subordinate to the deterministic laws of the spirit of the times – to which the Church can only try to strongly suppress it, but it cannot be stopped by it. In this sense, the Church can be harrowed, stretched apart, tortured, replaced, but it cannot be defeated and destroyed. Of crucial significance for each and every one of us, however, is our place, our share in the cross-and-resurrection exploit of the Church. And the cross-and-resurrection of the Church includes both its mission, its Gospel of Christ, of the fullness of the truth and the grace it carries in its bosom. To me this mission should not be subject to a seemingly effective, but all too vague horizontal dimension, let’s say as some common front with traditionalistically thinking people of secular and religious backgrounds with different ideological and religious orientation [in order] to counter stand postmodernism intellectually. The power of the church's mission, of the church's testimony today depends – I think – on our willingness, on our determination to be part with – spiritually-and-morally, as well as intellectually – the living Tradition of the Church; to become – proportionately to our strength – its trustworthy [authentic] carriers and to be able to bring to the minds, the hearts and the consciences of those willing to listen to it…

2) Undoubtedly, the Church's mission from its very beginning leads to an inevitable and – I would say – unsafe meeting of the spiritual tradition and the intellectual-and-cultural facts and trends of a given epoch. This – on the one hand, and on the other, by far not unconflicting are the relationships between the spiritual Tradition and the intellectual tradition (this is what I would call the theological and philosophical reflection) within the Church itself. In clarification of this last thought I would dare cite part of my address after the consecration of the library with our cathedral church (Assumption of the Most Pure Theotokos, Sofia - ed. note) (2000):

“Upon the meeting of the intellectual and the spiritual tradition of the Church there exists one very serious danger that has accompanied the Christian thought development since [early] Antiquity. This is the danger of unduly intellectualizing the spiritual tradition. This phenomenon we meet for the first time in Origen. In his effort to express the truths of Christianity in the language of the Hellenic categorial thinking Origen arrived at un–Orthodox thinking and ultimately – heresy; this is an ingenious and at the same time tragic example of a spiritual tradition intellectualization entering into the direction of pagan thinking, of pagan culture. The opposite example, one of the spiritualization of the Hellenic intellectual heritage, we find in the Cappadocian Fathers – St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Gregory of Nyssa. They managed to make a really titanic exploit by radiantly transforming the whole system of Hellenic categorical thinking with the grace, strength, and spirit of the spiritual tradition of the Church. This the Church has been doing throughout its already two-thousand- year long period of its history. This is a fight [struggle]. A fight for spiritualization of human thought, for filling it with grace. In fact, in order to commune with the intellectual tradition of the Church, one has to have the simplicity of St. Paul the Most Simple and of St. Spyridon. Why is it necessary? Because reading patristic literature is an exploit, a kind of ascesis. It is by no accident that monks have to pray, to work, and to read; therefore, reading is a kind of spiritual labor and ascesis. It is very important for us to realize that. And I must say that this is an extremely difficult kind of ascesis. Why? Because when man reads patristic texts, when one communes with the grace-filled experience of the [Holy] Fathers, with their fertile minds, when one communicates via the text with their Christ-faced personalities, one must exercise continuous austerity in denying from one’s own thoughts, judgments, opinions, perceptions of the text, all which thrives from all one’s previous life outside the Church, outside of Christ. This is crucial in order for us to commune genuinely, essentially with the thought, the spirit, and the ethos of the Holy Fathers. In fact, hence the many distortions in our personal spiritual lives, in our views and understandings – from the fact that we – from time to time – even unconsciously layer up, embed into the texts our own perceived perceptions [ideas], our habits of thought, and our habits of evaluation that are in fact foreign to the spiritual and intellectual tradition of the Church.”

3) Undoubted is the difficulty to carefully walk down the narrow royal path paved by the Holy Fathers, which avoids the pits and chasms both on the right and on the left. This involves both the life within the Church and its mission as one of its manifestations [of life]. There are countless examples both of a finite, totally passive, fanatically guarded conservatism that may well lead to degeneration of the Orthodox ecclesiastical consciousness towards sectarianism, and the diverse liberal breadth that – under the pretext of an adequate dialogue with modernity – secularizes, blurs up, and ultimately recodes all the ecclesiastical consciousness into some kind of its own contrasts. On the other hand, our Bulgarian carelessness, rough pragmatism, worn out church-and-patriotic rhetorics, dabbling in church politics, our Bulgarian-and-oriental servility to those who are the strong of the day, the daily rounds, the semi-primitive and quite often semi-pagan rituals in the Church life are a sad phenomenon that – it seems – needs a separate place in each attempt at classification of phenomena in the life of the Orthodox Church (I make this summary assessment in pain and aware that it is by far not absolute, but it, alas, reflects dominant trends in the overall church life in this country). To me, preserving spiritual chastity, striving to abide in purity and in the fullness of the Tradition in spirit and in truth, coupled with a sincere, open, benevolent, holy-evangelical attitude towards people, that should be our starting point for our spiritual-and-intellectual position in our activities as church missionaries today.

4) Let me honestly state that for me – generally speaking a contemporary “reformatting” of Orthodoxy into the neo-renovationist point of view, for the mission of the Orthodox Church today, is unacceptable – a point of view defended by such otherwise talented personalities as Arch-priest Alexander Men, priest Georgy Chistyakov, priest George Kotchetkov, Archimandrite Sergius (Ribkò) in Russia and by other bishops, clergy and theologians in the Orthodox world. However, time since 1965 has proved the sterility of the famous Roman-Catholic “aggiornamento” – the principle adopted by the Second Vatican Council on updating church life and church mission. For the past more than 40 years, Rome has statistically lost and continues to lose a significant number of its followers despite its attempt at adapting a number of forms of church life and the Church mission to the spirit and tastes of contemporaneity. I had an occasion to personally see such for myself, during my visit to the capital of Bavaria – Munich, just in the season of Western Christmas in 1994. Festivities were on the street, and not in temples. It is another issue that from the decrepit shack of church life in our much-suffered [Bulgarian] Fatherland, the number of church-and-public, missionary, charitable, and pastoral aspects of Roman-Catholic Church life, is perceived as a prestigious model for [our Bulgarian] modern church rebuilding.

5) What is the expression of the missionary work (if we could ever so label our humble efforts in this field) of our little Church? I need hardly explain that these activities are determined by our very small capacities. We do not have the spiritual-and-intellectual and material resource for larger-scale missionary activities, we do not even have training courses for our priests, but as far as we can, we do work in the following field:

• Work with the congregation: Regular, good-faith performance of worship services [liturgies], reading (instead of the so-called “spiritual concert” after the post-communion prayers [zaprichastniya]) and a sermon at the end of the holy liturgy. We try to pay particular attention to the living bond of the priest with the parishioners. The aim is for the parish to be raised up as a spiritual family, as far as this is possible in our conditions. The priests (with very few exceptions) do maintain a proactive communication with me, they take advice, share problems, almost all of them confess with me, the same as I have one of them as my cleric [confessor]. Our fellowship is fraternal, open, constructive, for which I am grateful to the Lord.

• Catechetical activities: with us the Mysteries of Baptism and Matrimony are performed after preliminary catechism (if the one baptized is an infant, the catechetic talk is held with the parents or the godfather [adopter in faith]), which takes quite some effort and time of the priests. With the cathedral church in Sofia, as you know well, we have classes for children (Group I) and for juniors (Group II).

• With the help of the “Shroud of the Holy Theotokos” convent, Knyazhevo, nuns, we implement publishing activities, which however, over the last couple of years have encountered difficulties of various nature and have begun to flag. We publish the “Orthodox Word” magazine [Православно Слово], the works of the late Fr. Archimandrite Seraphim [Alexiev], as well as other books of spiritual-and-moral contents. One of the monks residing at the bishopric [house], does all the maintenance work for our official web page http://bulgarian-orthodox-church.org, which promises to become the major forum for our missionary activities.

• Another direction in our attempts at missionary activities is the compiling [drafting] of liturgical texts (services, akathists); translation of biblical and liturgical texts into the Bulgarian literary language (an exceptionally responsible activity whose systematic performance calls for a team of collaborators; for the time being two of us are currently working on the translation of the Psalter (after the text of the 70 interpreters) (from the Church Slavonic language - ed. note), of the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, etc.); the liturgical glorification of saints: the holy Chinese new-martyrs (their liturgical veneration was renewed by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 1997 after a service compiled by us), St. Vissarion of Smolyan (1999), St. Seraphim, Archbishop of Boguchar, [and] Sofia the wonder-worker (2002), and the holy martyrs of Batak (2006).

With this I would finish my exposition. If you have any clarification or any other questions on the subject, please share them, I will try and answer as best I can.

May the Lord strengthen you!

Your humble supplicator in Christ

† Bishop Photii