Riot of the Dancing Little Men

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky said that there is a certain type of people who require it to be explained to them every time, why a bad smell comes from a dunghill. "It stinks!" - They are told, but they either do not really understand, or pretend not to. To argue with such people is a waste of time. For this reason, discussions about the unfortunates, who staged a dance in the church of Christ the Savior, is fruitless. What is only surprising is when we had the time to acquire such a crowd of semi- cultured and semi-educated people without any moral sense of smell. But it's not about them, they are not interested.

The fundamental question is how to respond to the incident at the church and the government’s response. Conscientious disbelief was perturbed by the scandalous event in purely ethical and cultural considerations, suggesting: "If someone strikes you on the cheek, turn and offer them the other one, forgive them." As rightly noted by Ivan Ilyin, you can offer your cheek, but not the cheek of the next person. Do not offer the face of the church or another religious person's cheek, for which the church is "the house of the living God." "The zeal of my house hath eaten me up," said Christ, and cast the money changers and merchants out of the temple.

"But try to understand, that for them, and for that matter for us, these things did not, and do not exist. For them, there is no value in that in which you see it. Yes, they are wild, but that's all relative," after these words of a civilized man it becomes almost a conspiracy, as if testing the maturity of your understanding of the laws of existence. Well, great. But it is not the church that rushes to your house and makes you reverently kiss the icons and the cross. According to written law they would be like intruders, and in moral law it would be an abuse of human freedom of choice, to believe or not to believe.

Of course, as a civilized person you have been offended, and rightly so. But let's be consistent: if some inveterate relativistic, for who no value and abstract notions of morality are relative, broke into your house and laughed offensively in front of your mother and father - what would you do? That's right - he would be thrown out, forgetting all about the theory of relativity.

So does it offend the believer a little or a lot? In the eyes of modern society, not much, because we are used to offending the feelings of anyone we choose. After all, you can only insult a person that has - faith, love, respect, and a sense of justice. Do not they, these feelings, have today become a laughing stock with a large crowd of little people dancing around us?

You can’t insult a person for something he does not have. You can’t insult disbelief, lack of love, or shamelessness. In the latter case, you can insult only freedom - forcing them to believe, love, accept a truth, as the Grand Inquisitor did. That is why the Church can’t punish, her hands are tied.

What about the state? Referring to our recent history is always instructive. Here is an excerpt from an address by Archbishop Nikolai Lyubimov at the All Russian Church Council in 1917: "On 21^st of October [old style calendar] at 4:00 pm, at the time of the small vespers, two people not quite sober, but firmly on their feet, clothed in soldiers uniforms came to the relics of St. Hermogenes, and began to tear away the covers. When they were seen, a priest cried out: "Mad men, stop!" Priests ran up and dragged the men from the relics. Then swearing and cursing was heard, and women’s cries. "

All this happened in the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin. Guards came running to the noise in the cathedral and working people, who had been in the cathedral, demanded that the sacrilegious be tied and sent to the commissariat. The commissariat sent a request to Nikolai Lyubimov, asking what he ordered was to be done with them. "I replied, 'Do what your duty and the law orders. They have committed blasphemy ... What will happen next – only God knows. From a Christian point of view, we can only say: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

The next day, commenting on the report. Nikolai Lyubimov, Bishop Nestor of Kamchatka (Anisimov), prophetically declared, "This is the beginning of the horror and sacrilege that lie ahead." In saying this, Bishop Nestor was holding a pamphlet entitled "Religious ulcer", which ended with the words: "Let's hope that soon there will come a day when the crucifix and icons will be thrown into the furnace, from the sacred vessels and spoons useful items will be forged; the churches will be converted into rooms for concerts, theater performances or meetings, and in the event that they would not be suitable for this purpose, as bakeries or stables.”

All this happened on the eve of the October revolution. The weakness of the Provisional Government was manifested, in particular, in their inability to stop a chain of incredible abominations that swept across the country in 1917. And soon the same dark force that tore down the temple domes and crosses, shot at icons and arranged latrines in the altars, began to pluck off the heads and ruthlessly destroy the Russian intelligentsia and the people who failed to protect their shrines.

Such is the tragic pattern of which Dostoevsky warned: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."<!--EndFragment-->