| Abstract: | In this issue of Religion State &;Society Alexander Agadjanian writes about the first attempt by an Orthodox Church to outline a ‘social doctrine’, in the form of the Foundations for a Social Concept for the Russian Orthodox Church (FSC), produced by a Bishops' Council of the church in 2000. Agadjanian describes the Russian Orthodox Church as ‘facing a classical problem of religious ecology: how to respond to constant changes in the Lebenswelt, the surrounding social world, while still retaining a cognitive identity and institutional vitality’, and he finds the FSC to be a ‘torn and polyphonic document’, in which a ‘pro-world stance, affirmed in the beginning, is constantly questioned through the rest of the text’, and in which affirmation of the dignity of the individual turns out to be in the context of the church protecting the individual in his or her need to resist ‘an expanding godless civilisation’. One Russian commentator on the document soon after it appeared went so far as to say that it showed that ‘all possible forms of social existence of the church in a modern secularised society are in fact in contradiction with the sacral concept of social life which is deeply rooted in Orthodoxy’. This is the first time the Russian Orthodox Church has attempted the official formulation of a social doctrine; however, from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1920s, and thereafter in exile, successive Russian Orthodox thinkers and social activists grappled with the very question of how Orthodoxy was to respond to the changing social, economic and political environment. One fertile concept, first formulated by Aleksei Khomyakov in the 1840s, was that of ‘sobornost’', often translated as ‘individual diversity in free unity’, and based on the insight that human social relationships are a manifestation of love and analogous to the relationship amongst the three Persons of the Trinity. Agadjanian draws attention to one fact that appears particularly puzzling. In the FSC no reference is made to sobornost'; much less is there any attempt to deploy it as a conceptual tool in the shaping of a social doctrine for the Orthodox Church. Why should this be? |
