With the recent death in prison of Alexey Navalny, the Russian politician opposed to President Putin, there has been much media attention given to what is happening; far more than that given to the late Gonzalo Lira, American citizen and critic of Zelensky, who died in similarly suspicious circumstances in a Ukrainian gaol a few weeks before. Russia is being contrasted as an autocratic regime in opposition to the enlightened democracies of the West. This promotion of the West, predicated on human rights and liberalism is still assumed to be the better system, despite protesting farmers, the yellow vests and in America a political divide too deep to be able to envision an American common weal.
These abstract human rights that the West sees as its foundation have become the only way to value human beings. In contrast religious faith did not conceive of abstract rights to be able to live a certain way or do certain things, it thought rather that man's sanctity lay in being created in the image and likeness of God. This view of human nature encompassed freedom, creativity and the sanctity of life, but remained categorically different from the abstract and individualistic idea of human rights. It gave men a telos of virtue. This perspective also honoured the Emperor, pagan as well as Christian, persecutor of the Church as well as the Christian Basileus.
In Dante's great work, Brutus as the betrayer of the emperor is in the very depths of Hell alongside Judas, the traitor to Christ. The Emperor, as the Pauline epistles make clear, is to be honoured not for his individual virtues, but by dint of his role. In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Chapter Two, verse six, Saint Paul gives a clear explanation of the role of the Emperor. And this was written centuries before the Edict of Milan:
"And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time."
The Church Fathers understood that the Emperor withholds the coming antichrist who will subvert all order and seemliness. It is impossible that Saint Paul regarded the dissolute personality of Caesar Nero as good, but his role as Emperor has a function in Christian eschatology. It is for this reason that Saint John of Shanghai understood that the regicide of the Tsar, Passion Bearer and New Martyr Nichols II meant there was no one to hold back the coming antichrist in these last days.
What are we to understand from this? We see in the West much that is promoted in the name of freedom and rights that is very much in the sprit of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see that in Western democracies today all is subverted in a post-modern celebration of degeneracy, particularly unseemly sexual degeneracy.
Meanwhile citizens from those countries deemed an alliance of evil often have not lost touch with religious faith, high literature and art, philosophical thinking and something even more significant - they, the citizens have not lost a certain decorous innocence. Whatever the accusations of corruption and oppression we in the West throw at Iran or Russia (and these are two very different countries), their people on the whole retain a dignity that people in the West have lost. They have not lost their intelligence or virtue on the whole. While we in the West see scenes of degradation of the human person celebrated as freedom, in other parts of the world they would still blush. We are somehow degraded by the celebration of the sexual passions in particular. it goes further though, there is disrespect for elders, for figures of authority, we mock that which is sacred and celebrate that which is degrading of the human body. Saint Peter in his second Epistle wrote of such a type of person:
"But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptious are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries"
Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans strongly affirms monarchical rule:
"For he is a minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."
And the Church held to this throughout the persecution by the Empire, only resisting the Emperor on matters of religious faith. Putting to one side the virtues and sins of emperors throughout history for the moment, it is clear that to be a rebel against ordained authority one is stepping into a path that also entails moral dissolution. Note that those who oppose Putin, go by names such as "Pussy Riot" and many wave the flag of Western sexual liberation - the six coloured flag of LGBT. The concept of human rights often seems a cover for living by the passions and rejecting virtue.
Being an obedient and orderly subject is part of the virtuous life. In the West, since the top-down revolution of the elites and their secret societies, overturning the order of Christendom and expressing oneself sexually is seen as liberation. It is by such a subverted and revolutionary ethos that we now live. The Jacobins run our political structure.
Elsewhere, in more autocratic countries, fallible men have taken absolute power to themselves. In a 2009 Russian film by Pavel Lungin, entitled Tsar, this very problem is confronted. The autocrat has become not dissolute but cruel and mad. His close friend and companion and Metropolitan of Moscow, later to be canonised as Saint Philip of Moscow confronts and chastises this cruel Tsar, Ivan IV, known with the epithet Grozny or Terrible. As a Christian Philip cannot stop by and watch the wanton cruelty meted out upon Tsar Ivan's innocent subjects. In the end Philip himself is martyred, strangled to death by one of Ivan's henchmen. He though witnessed against the Emperor, the vicar of God. And mad as Tsar Ivan might have been, he began to build Moscow to be the Third Rome of Orthodox Christianity.
We therefore have a paradox - the Emperor there to safeguard the Christian world can himself become another Nero, And yet Paul wrote those words as Nero, who would put him to death reigned and terrorised Rome.
There is something deep here. If democracies subvert Tradition and order with their subversive human rights, the danger of arbitrary rule so despised by Anglo Saxon liberals still seems to hold as a criticism. Do Christians turn a blind eye to abuse of power?
Perhaps one way to understand it is that the Emperor fulfils his role insofar as he does not fall into sin himself. There is also a distinction between personal sin and being a public ruler, although usually private sins enter the public realm when an empire is ruled by a person rather than a constitution.
The Church though sees the bigger picture. With Saint Philip, in the tradition of Saint John the Forerunner, the Church challenges the ungodly exercise of power, but like Saints Paul and Peter the church recognises the sacred role of the Emperor and that for all the personal faults a personal ruler is superior to a constitutional republic - the system of deists and freemasons.
It is something to do with Monarchy that keeps countries from going down the road of abstract rights and maintaining personal relationships at the core of the polity. These personal relationships define the State as a family, rather than a constitutional system of rights and processes. With a monarch at the heart of the nation, the polity is not a codified document, but a family.
Today the post Soviet republics are not hereditary monarchies. They are ruled by presidents, but to a certain extent these presidents from Putin to Lukashenko are more like autocrats and whatever their personal faults and however much these faults creep into their public roles, they are withholding forces, restraining as Saint Paul would put it, the diabolical forces that so torment the West today.
What though is it that they protect? Is it really more precious than the West's human rights? It is a different culture, one of more restraint, innocence, decorum and intelligence. Each undemocratic regime can be held to account for abuses of power, for special favours to the members of the inner circle and to downright cruelty towards political prisoners. What though keeps support for a Putin or Lukashenko is the deep fear of a return to the times of chaos and foreign exploitation. In that sense what the West sees as an opposition leader can look more like a traitor, especially when funded by the very country that had engaged in the asset stripping in the nineties.
That though is not the most precious thing that is protected. In the West our culture has been so dumbed down that we are kept placated and stupid under the power of modern-day bread and circuses, be that football or reality television. We are detached from our high culture and our history. We have lost our identity. We have been manipulated so as not to be able to discern the most precious aspects of life. Swearing, promiscuity, sexual deviancy, disrespect for sacred things, blasphemy, disregard for the elderly, rejection of our culture have been normalised. However brutal some foreign despots their people still have access to their religion, their culture and their identity. This is not something to be lightly dismissed. It is striking that a Russian or Iranian is likely to be more cultured than a Westerner.
That though is not to mistake the image for the real thing. The undemocratic and anti- Western regimes all have their roots in revolution. They are not emperors in the real sense, the traditional sense of the hierarchical religious societies of Tradition. Instead they mimic their pre-revolutionary predecessors and there is a strange overlap between this return to Tradition and roots in the Marxist revolutions of recent history.
Nonetheless, it can be seen that those in authority in Orthodox countries particularly are resisting the cultural subversion that is turning the West mad, which is even becoming confused over gender. In that sense today's autocrats are restrainers of the worst excesses of the revolutionary West that has fallen prey first to Jacobins and rationalists and now to postmodernists and LGBT. In the East meanwhile there is an example of trusting in God to bless the people with a good king.
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