How Russia was Christianized Essay

Religion, as one of the fundamental forms through which human beings make sense of their existence and experience, belongs to the intellectual and spiritual sphere of world-view, passion, or philosophy. Conversion to Christianity and gradual adaptation of the daily Christian rituals were a steps in continues process. Russian Christianization is a long-term, open-ended process; in other words, it was obliged to reinforce the Russian commitment to the faith through deeper understanding and performing daily rituals. Orthodox Christianity is the majority religion of Russia, estimates the number of adherents range from 55 to 80 percent. Russian Orthodoxy is an integral part of the Eastern Orthodox world and worldview (Ardichvili, 2006). The geographic reach of Eastern Orthodoxy today includes mostly Russia and the European part of the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and the eastern Mediterranean. For Russians, Orthodoxy is much more than simply a church; it is an entire way of life and culture (Clendenin, 2003). Russian approach to Christianity differed from Catholicism and Protestantism. It involved much singing and ritual and not much knowledge of the Bible. It also had a thick pagan substratum: peasants believed in wood spirits, sea demons and monsters of the lake. Orthodox teachings have stood the test of time; they are not teachings that serve popular culture. Russia’s state history as a history of its â€Å"core† people – the Russian people – is well known, and is a history of a Christian people. This paper provides a monograph on how Russia was Christianized. It shows how Russians are being molded by their belief as a whole. Further, it provides a deeper understanding of how Russians grows as a society through the Russia Orthodox Christianity. Russian Orthodox Christianity Orthodoxy came to Russia from Byzantium in A. D 988, when the ruler of Kievan Russ (precursor of modern Russia and Ukraine) Grand Prince Vladimir, converted to Christianity, married a sister of the Byzantine emperor, and started a rapid process of instituting Orthodoxy as the state religion. Having searched the world for a faith to unite his people, his emissaries to Constantinople returned awestruck. Orthodox worship possessed such beauty, they reported, and that they did not know if they were on earth or in heaven. Russians soon came to love and adore their new faith, taking Orthodoxy to heart and building numerous churches and monasteries. The church in Russia was governed by a hierarch appointed from Constantinople until the Turks sacked that city in 1453, leaving the Russians as the strongest defenders of Orthodoxy in the world. In 1472, Ivan III, the grand duke of Moscow, married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor (who had died in 1453). Ivan then took the title of czar-an adoption of Caesar-and Moscow began to consider itself â€Å"the third Rome. † Missionary activity spread Russian Orthodoxy throughout Siberia and beyond Russia’s borders to Alaska, Finland, Japan, and China. In effort to serve Russian emigrants around the world, the Russian Orthodox Church established dioceses in North America, Europe, and Japan. The Russian Church and state continued to play this central role in the Orthodox world for the next 450 years (Clendenin, 2003; Ware, 1997; World Fact Book, 2005). However, in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution resulted not only in abolition of Orthodoxy’s role as the state religion but also in destruction of thousands of churches and monasteries, and the deaths of millions of members of the clergy, monks, nuns, and lay believers. Communists, bent on creating a workers paradise in this world, fiercely attacked the church. Before the revolution, Russia boasted more than 50,000 churches and 160,000 priests. By late 1930s there were no more than 300 functioning churches. The clergy had been murdered or had died in the gulags, and only a skeleton crew of priests was allowed to serve such as the faithful. Outside communist Russia, the faithful suffered as they witnessed the tragic fate of the countless persecution of their church. Bishops in exile rallied around Metropolitan Antoni, forming a temporary church authority that took refuge first in Constantinople and, then, at the invitation of the Serbian patriarch, in Karlovei, Yugoslavia. The historical events of that year, 1917, caused the dispersion of millions of Russians worldwide, outside the borders of their native country. Back in Moscow, Patriarch Tikhon issued a decree supporting this action, though later, presumably under communist influence, he retracted it. The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia chose to ignore the second decree, since Patriarch Tikhon issued it while under house arrest. He later died under circumstances so mysterious that he is now considered a martyr. One of his successors, Metropolitan Sergii, maintained correspondence with bishops abroad. This landed him in prison in 1926, where he stayed until he issued his now infamous â€Å"Declaration† in July 1927. In it, he demanded that all clergy abroad make a written promise of their loyalty to the Soviet government and declared that all Orthodox in the Soviet Union must be â€Å"faithful citizens and loyal to the Soviet government. † Perceived as a betrayal of the church by the Synod and many faithful within Russia and abroad, Sergii’s declaration silenced any doubts that the church in Russia was subject to communist control. The problem was compounded when he formed a church organization that was not sanctioned by the bishops in Russia and abroad. In the USSR, an underground â€Å"free† church sprung up in defiance, Russian Orthodox abroad dug in and held tight to their traditions, sensing that they alone preserved the faith undefiled and incorrupt. Archbishop Laurus, who arrived in America in 1946 with a group of monks fleeing the war in Europe, states that the primary purpose of Hollywood Monastery is to â€Å"preserve Orthodoxy as it was passed on from our predecessors and to give it to the next generation and also to Russia. † With the fall of communism, Russians were allowed to return to their churches without obstacles. It soon became clear that Orthodoxy had procreated the Russian soul so deeply that even seventy years of repression couldn’t stamp it out. Even so, the Russian Church outside of Russia and the Russian church in Russia have not reunite There are a number of unresolved issues blocking union, including the canonical ones cited above, moral questions, and others, such as the caution of all the new martyrs of Russia. The Synod, unwilling to taint the purity it has so ardently maintained, remains steadfast in its position. Moreover, Warem (1997) estimated that there were more than 54,000 churches in prerevolutionary Russia and more than 17,000 functioning churches in 1996. Although officially the whole country was supposed to be atheist during the Soviet rule, millions of people followed their religion in private, and many more joined the church after 1991. As suggested by Clendenin (2003), more than 70 million people in Russia today identify themselves as Orthodox. WORKS CITED Ardichvili, A. â€Å"Russian Orthodoxy worldview and adult learning in the workplace. Advances in Developing Human Resources. † 8(3). 373-381, 2006. Clendenin, D. â€Å"Eastern Orthodox Christianity. † Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Aademic, 2003. Warem T. â€Å"The Orthodox church. † London: Penguin, 1997. World fact book, December 20, 2005.