Party Politics

Archbishop Averky saw that, once the savor of Orthodoxy is lost and the Church comes to be regarded first of all as an earthly organization, membership in the Mystical Body of Christ becomes confused with membership in one or another administrative church party. People’s lives may then be ruined under the pretext of “cleaning up the Church” if these people do not seem advantageous to the organization. Clergy, lay people and monastics are pitted against and made to distrust each other in order to protect the worldly interests of their respective parties. One church group may split off from another and seek to legitimize its position with any number of legal and canonical formulas.

Various church parties may join to form “super-parties” in order to make themselves feel more legitimate; they may speak of their outward unity as if this represents the true spiritual unity of the Church, but they betray how merely political this unity actually is when they dismiss or use polemics against those Orthodox groups which have not joined their organizations. Those with a “party mentality” may lose the very idea of sanctity, glorifying church figures primarily because they are “recognized” by their particular party or are its most prominent spokesmen. “Canonicity,” a major weapon in party polemics, comes to be manipulated quite arbitrarily and becomes wrongly confused with one party’s “recognition” by other parties. Accordingly, one appears to become “canonical” when one uses the most effective propaganda.

Archbishop Averky was repulsed by this realm of what he called “party politics,” seeing that it had nothing to do with basic Christianity.

Although party politics have indeed reached an extreme in these last times when the love of many grows cold (Mt 24:12), the “party mentality” is not, of course, new to the modern age: it is a common tendency of the fallen, carnal side of humanity. Even St. Paul had to deal with it when writing to the church at Corinth: Every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were ye baptized in the name of Paul? While one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos, are ye not carnal? (1 Cor 1:12-13, 3:4).

To make the Church a tool of political intrigues, Archbishop Averky said, is “to subject the eternal to the temporal, the heavenly to the earthly, the holy to the sinful.” In his article Holy Zeal, he stated further:

“And there is likewise a false, lying zeal, behind the mask of which is concealed the foaming of ordinary human passions—most frequently pride, love of power and honor, and the interests of party politics like that which plays the leading role in political struggles, and for which there can be no place in spiritual life, in public church life, but which unfortunately is often to be encountered in our time and is a chief instigator of every imaginable quarrel and disturbance in the Church, the managers and instigators of which often hide themselves behind some kind of supposed idealism but in reality pursue only their own personal aims, striving to please not God but their own self-concern, and being zealous not for God’s glory but for their own glory and the glory of the colleagues and partisans of their party. All of this, it goes without saying, is profoundly foreign to true holy zeal, hostile to it, is sinful and criminal, for it only compromises our Holy Faith and Church!”

“The Church,” emphasized Archbishop Averky in another place, “was given to us for the salvation of our souls and for nothing else! We cannot make it a tool or an arena for the play of our passions and for the settling of our personal accounts.”

As far as Archbishop Averky was concerned, party politics were boring no matter what party was involved. They were hardly worth giving one’s life for—giving up the chance for a wife and family as he had done when becoming a monk. Ironically, it was precisely his lack of unanimity with those of a “party mentality” that made him the victim of their politics. He was dismissed as a permanent member of his council of bishops because he refused to be guided by a “party-line” rather than by his own conscience. Seeing that party politics had infiltrated not only other groups, but his own as well, he once told one of his former seminarians, “does it not follow from this that the grace of the Holy Spirit is leaving our synod?”

Still, it may be wondered why Archbishop Averky spoke so openly about the “uninspiring” phenomenon of party politics. Would it not have been better just to pretend that all the other Orthodox groups did not exist and to confine one’s attention to one’s own circle? No, for Archbishop Averky, this would have been a shirking of his responsibility as an Apostle of Christ. Party politics were poisoning the mission of Orthodoxy in the Free World, turning converts away and making believers listen to the whispers of the devil rather than to the words of Life. To keep silent would have been a crime, since if this issue was not addressed openly, how else would spiritual seekers find the true essence of Orthodoxy, which is inherently above party politics? How would they experience the living reality of the true Church, which, as Archbishop Averky said, is “the close-knit spiritual union of all who truly believe in Christ?”

“Only holy zeal for God, for Christ,” wrote the archbishop, “without any admixture of any kind of slyness or ambiguous cunning politics, must guide us in all deeds and actions.”

Role-Playing

Archbishop Averky detected another sign that Orthodox churches, even when they adhered to all the outward forms, were losing Orthodoxy’s savour. This was the fact that Orthodox leaders and spokesmen were having to play “roles.”

Role-playing occurs when small men, out of worldly ambition, want to take on positions which have been instituted in the Church for men of higher spiritual calibre. In most cases, those playing roles, having no real spiritual authority themselves, have to acquire this authority outwardly by resorting to what Archbishop Averky called “man-pleasing.” This was spoken of by St. Paul, who in the first years of Christianity had to point out the distinction between the true representatives of Christ and the “man-pleasers:” If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Gal 1:10). But as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the Gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God, Who trieth our hearts. For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloak of covetousness; God is witness. Nor of men sought we glory… (1 Thess 2:4-6).

In “man-pleasing,” one must flatter the right people and, conversely, destroy potential opponents at the right junctures; one must “take into consideration” influential people, regardless of whether this accords with one’s conscience. Finally, one must give out awards and ranks and publicize this, thereby binding oneself to alies by mutual “recognition” rather than by heartfelt love. “How many,” wrote Archbishop Averky, “give their hearts to the distraction of exalted callings, ranks, orders and awards, being ready to acquire them by any means at all, even by trampling down their consciences.”

Archbishop Averky indicated that role-playing may also bring about hostility and divisions in the Church:

“To start the cruel hostility and dissension which cut off at the root the peaceful course of parish life and break up and destroy the parish it is sufficient for just one such person to appear in a parish—a person who imagines that he is the ‘hub of the universe,’ that everyone should take account only of him and obey him in everything, that all his judgements and evaluations are infallible and without error… For people of this sort it is as if the voice of conscience does not exist and they do not recognize the Law of God: they are capable of every sort of tendentious distortion of the truth, of any sort of lie and malicious slander against those people who do not agree with their conceited inclinations, who do not approve of their attitude of self-satisfaction and their unrestrained desire the play the leading role everywhere, even if those people by lawfully appointed and truly good pastors and men of prayer, of whom there are fewer and fewer nowadays, and who ought to be valued, not persecuted with lies and slander for purely personal, conceited reasons, which is a foul and repulsive sin in the eyes of God.

“It is just such people, possessed by the mad passion of self-love, who are being used by the powers of darkness, the servants of the coming Antichrist, to disrupt and destroy the Church, starting with its individual parishes… They are genuinely living without a conscience!”

In role-playing, a person acts in the way the world expects one in a “respected” position to act. This is the opposite of that which characterizes the authentic modern “links” with Orthodox traditions: a complete naturalness, lack of pretense, and freedom of spirit, with no attempt to fit into some prescribed category.

Of one role-playing church leader, Archbishop Averky said that he wore a “mask.” “There are such hypocrites,” he wrote, “who like to appear saintly and pious, when, in fact, they are not at all that way, but they will have to answer to God for they attempt to deceive the trusting, and they do so for personal gain.”

Role-playing may take many forms. One may take on the role of an authority on spiritual life or even of a “Holy Elder,” misapplying lofty standards to the low spiritual calibre of modern times. Using St. Paul’s phrase, Archbishop Averky identified this as “zeal without understanding—zeal which loses its value because of the absence in it of a most important Christian virtue: discernment, and therefore, in place of profit can bring harm.”

Another kind of role-playing is to be found in false spokesmen of Orthodoxy. We have already discussed the “theologians” of a “restored,” innovative Orthodoxy. Such false teachers are to be found, however, not only in the more “liberal” circles, but also among the “patristic experts” and “scholars” of the “conservatives” and “traditionalists.” False Orthodox spokesmen may make one feel that one has finally “figured out” Orthodoxy, but most often they leave one’s soul unmoved and unchanged. Of them, Archbishop Averky remarked:

“Alas! How few people there are in our times, even among the ‘educated’, and at times even among contemporary ‘theologians’ and those in the ranks of clergy, who understand correctly what Orthodox is and wherein its essence lies. They approach this question in an utterly external, formal manner and resolve it too primitively, even naively, overlooking its depths completely and not at all seeing the fullness of its spiritual contents.”

Once, when some clergymen were attacking the memory of a 14th century saint because he did not fit in with their concept of “traditionalism,” Archbishop Averky called them “puppy theologians.” They were followers (to borrow a term coined by Fr. Seraphim Rose) of “external wisdom.” The so-called “liberal” and false “traditionalist” Orthodox teachers were, in Archbishop Averky’s view, but two sides of the same coin. They both had a touch of modern criticism, a love of glitter and an attitude of “knowing better,” having received Orthodoxy by doing research and forming “reasonable” conclusions rather than by learning from its living vessels. Outward contact with a genuine bearer of tradition is not enough; there must be a loving kinship and “oneness of soul” with that bearer.

The presence or lack of this kinship, it is true, may be hard to discern from the outside, especially when one is not aware of the world of piety in which a true carrier of tradition has been born. For example, one might at first think that Archbishop Averky, from the bold, unequivocal tone of his writings, had the attitude of “knowing better.” However, when one comes to understand the spirit of his first and second generation spiritual fathers, Theophan of Poltava and Theophan the Recluse, then one will see that he was entirely in their tradition, that he received everything from them.

Like all true Fathers of the Church, Archbishop Averky taught others not because he had an inflated view of his own knowledge or significance, but because he felt personally responsible for the priceless treasure that had been passed on to him from holy teachers.