This material was created within the framework of a joint project of the Sophia Brotherhood and the German foundation Renovabis entitled “Modern Ukrainian Orthodoxy: Deconstruction of Myths for the Sake of Reconciliation among the Orthodox in Ukraine and the Consolidation of Ukrainian Society.” The Sophia Brotherhood may not share the positions of the authors; also, individual opinions of representatives of the Brotherhood expressed within the framework of the project may not represent the consolidated position of the Sophia Brotherhood.
What is the “survivor’s guilt” and how does it affect communication within society? What effect does Metropolitan Onufrii achieve by reducing sermons about the war to the statement of soteriological truisms? What happens to a Church that does not create meanings of existence for people? Can the Church lose interest for scholars of religion? How has the neglect of the humanities affected public consciousness? Why did Russia give Ukrainians the “Heavenly Rus’” while keeping the “Third Rome” for itself?
“Religion in Ukraine” spoke with the well-known scholar of religion and poet Oksana Horkusha on a wide range of issues related to the formation of religious identity in Ukraine.
Part 2
– “The epicenter of reality,” “survivor’s guilt,” and the stratification of society
– “Metropolitan Onufrii removes a person from existing reality”
– “If religion ceases to perform a worldview function, it ceases to be a religion”
– “Scholars of religion are needed by religious figures more than religious figures are needed by scholars of religion”
– Ukrainians – the “Heavenly Rus’,” Russians – the “Third Rome”
– “Why do ‘khokhols’ need a proper church?”
– “The cleansing of the nation’s consciousness is being carried out deliberately”
“The epicenter of reality,” “survivor’s guilt,” and the stratification of society
Tetiana Derkach: You mentioned the perception of oneself in reality as part of consciousness and the phenomenon of “exclusion from reality.” What is that?
Oksana Horkusha: Let us begin with the fact that we all live in the epicenter of reality. I identified and understood the effect of the epicenter of reality back during the Maidan. There were people involved in the Maidan and people not involved. There were also priests – involved and not involved. Those who were involved were in the epicenter of reality. That is, they understood that they were inside an event that was fateful not only for their personal lives but also for the state, the nation, the people, and the world. That is, some understood that this was a global event, and they felt it differently – they evaluated the situation differently, they related to it differently. There were people who lived nearby but treated all of this abstractly. And therefore, of course, these people evaluated the meaning of what was happening differently. And now many more people are in the epicenter of reality.
Tetiana Derkach: Sometimes it happens later that those who were not involved are rewarded and the innocent are punished. Those who were in the epicenter move to the periphery of reality, and instead there appears a phenomenon such as “residents of Bucha” who never lived there, or chaplains who never went to the front. This relates to the question of how mythological our consciousness is in general. And in conditions of very high polarization of society, people who are not involved in heroism begin to invent some kind of heroic biography for themselves in order to become part of the mainstream, to be included in this heroic majority. And then people appear who say: no, you were never there, “at zero”…
Oksana Horkusha: There is also the other side of the coin. For example, our war has been going on since 2014. And some people say that the war has been going on for the third year. You understand the difference – when the war is already in its twelfth year and when the war is in its third year. And many people who had been involved in this reality since 2014 at a certain stage were completely emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually exhausted. And people who were completely uninvolved and far from these events became involved in 2022–2023, when missiles started flying over their heads. This is the stratification that now exists among us. Fragmentation of reality is taking place, and fragmentation of society is taking place very intensively.
And there is yet another variant, the reverse side of the coin – the survivor’s guilt. Or the shame of someone who remained uninvolved, who was not in battle. You understand that you and I are not on the front line. I have a friend whose two sons are at the front. And it is difficult for me to communicate with her, I feel this barrier. And this is a problem, because I know from my friend that she also has a friend whose son was killed. And when her son comes home on leave, that other friend internally says: “And mine will never return… and mine will never come home on leave…”. And this stratification of society occurs along different vectors and on different levels. We have a colleague, Vita Titarenko, who went to the front in 2022. And when I communicate with her, I feel this inner guilt before her, that I did not go together with her. I can explain why I did not go, for what reasons. But when I speak with her, I feel a certain discomfort in the situation, when a person went and gave everything, that is, sacrificed everything – and I, as it were, redeem my own life by her sacrifice…
And this inner imbalance is felt. There will be a great deal of this in our society. And, unfortunately, we stand before this abyss of misunderstandings at the interpersonal level, when people will meet who have sacrificed unevenly for the future.
“Metropolitan Onufrii removes a person from existing reality”
Tetiana Derkach: Do you consider that this topic (of social auto-aggression) is tabooed now?
Oksana Horkusha: On the contrary, I believe that it should be spoken about.
Tetiana Derkach: You speak about it, and I have a professional deformation: I immediately transfer this into the religious sphere. And I have a question that cries out: why does the Ukrainian Orthodox Church not have a sense of guilt for what it was before 2014, and after 2014 – until 2022, at first almost entirely, later partially, as they say, on the side of evil? That is, there was a time when it invested not in the defense of the country but in its disarmament, in its weakening. This is what I always talk about: people, I can defend some of your rights, which I believe are being taken away with excessive zeal, but no one will remove this guilt from you. There is no statute of limitations here. Guilt as part of religious consciousness – why do they not take upon themselves this collective guilt and this individual guilt?
Oksana Horkusha: You raised the correct issue. I listened to the most recent sermons and public statements of Onufrii. You ask why they do not feel guilt. Let us conduct a contextual analysis of the sermon. Metropolitan Onufrii speaks – as a subject connected to which world? If the word “Ukraine” appears in his speech at all, it is somewhere on the margins. That is, he always says: “There is a war, people are suffering…”. We do not see the subject who launched the attack. Then he says: “But we must be with God, we must pray.” That is, he removes a person from this reality in which the person exists, lulls their consciousness at that moment, absolutely without giving any concrete parameters of this reality.
Tetiana Derkach: Destroying the cause-and-effect relationship…
Oksana Horkusha: There is none at all! And he says that “people suffer because they are sinful, therefore one must be with Christ, one must pray, and then you will have salvation.” That is it, we have arrived. He does not allow human consciousness to understand where it is located, he gives no scale for evaluating the situation – where evil is, where good is, where to go, how to move forward. He removes all these evaluations, does not name the guilty party, does not speak of the sin of the one who committed the wrong, do you see?
Tetiana Derkach: That is, this is a kind of spiritual disorientation…
Oksana Horkusha: Absolutely, spiritual disorientation. And this is precisely their role and function today in our Ukrainian society, unfortunately. I do not want to speak about the Church as a whole, I understand that very different people are present there. But we must not forget that the leaders and hierarchs of this Church lull our Ukrainian community, force it to forget about the situation and to abstract itself from reality. That is, they move a person or their parishioner to the margins of reality, do not allow them to evaluate this reality correctly, do not give them the means to orient themselves in this reality. Instead, they remove the person from this reality and say: “And now do not resist, be with Christ,” and so on. But again, “do not resist” not in relation to, say, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, but in relation to the situation of external enemies, when they do not name who the aggressor is.
Why does this happen? Precisely because Onufrii is a representative of the Moscow Patriarchate. Precisely because this institution speaks in complete accordance with the paradigm of the “Russian world.” I am not saying that they are carriers and articulators of the “Russian world.” But they speak in unison with the paradigm of the “Russian world.” It is as if you and I were Ukrainians and found ourselves with Ukrainian consciousness in an alien cultural environment. And you know how this happens: in your presence, someone begins to say something and evaluate reality not in the way you are accustomed to evaluating it. What will you do? You will remain silent, you will not insist on your own correctness, but you will make it clear to that person that “well, I am simply a person, I am outside and above this context”… But you will still remain a representative and bearer precisely of the paradigm in which you grew up and with which you became сродний.
Thus, being today in Ukrainian reality, from my point of view, representatives of this Church are representatives of another cultural environment, another worldview paradigm, who behave here as if on foreign territory. Everything here is чужe to them. They are accidental people here, they cannot become kindred to Ukrainian reality. The Ukrainian world is not truly their home. This is my conviction, so to speak, a fact.
Tetiana Derkach: Can we then say that representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate are asymptomatic carriers of the virus of the “Russian world”? To what extent is it possible to say that there are people who are obviously ill with it and display the full symptomatology of this phenomenon, and there are asymptomatic carriers who, for example, may not propagate the key theses of the “Russian world,” the greatness of Russia as the Catechon–Third Rome, the unity of the three brotherly nations, and so on, but who will use the methodology of the “Russian world”?
Oksana Horkusha: Yes, this is a very accurate term.
“If Religion Ceases to Perform a Worldview Function, It Ceases to Be a Religion”
Tetiana Derkach: There is also another problem here – a cognitive one. There is a general understanding that the Church of the twenty-first century is an institution that forms and formulates meanings, and not merely a ritual “printer.” If it does not do this, then intellectuals take over this function. And in order for the Church to formulate meanings, through people who study the external world – scholars of religion, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists – it must understand the environment in which it exists, what influences it will experience in five, ten, twenty years, in a hundred-year perspective. Am I understanding the situation correctly?
Oksana Horkusha: You are approaching this issue correctly, but I would add another nuance. There are functions of religion that all scholars of religion study as part of the standard typology. My favorite function of religion, which I work with, is the worldview function. What is consciousness for, what is a worldview for? Human consciousness is a subject and a locus. That is, more simply put, it is “I,” who is aware of myself (self-awareness), and “I,” who looks at the world (and this is the place where all those models exist through which I perceive reality). More simply put, this is an instrumentarium. If you have, for example, a set of color tools – yellow, green, blue – then you can distinguish colors. If you lack certain cognitive identifiers, you simply will not see a given color, you will not identify it. For example, thirty-five shades of white that we do not distinguish, but that northern peoples do. We distinguish blue and green as separate colors, while the Chinese and Japanese use one word to designate both. That is, consciousness needs a certain instrumentarium – cognitive, logical, and so on – in order to give a person the ability to orient themselves in the world.
So: religion has a specific worldview function, because religion is needed by a person in order to orient themselves in this world in relation to the sacred. It is precisely from there that these eternal meanings are drawn. Simply put, if religion ceases to perform this function, if it does not give a person the ability to rely on the sacred as such, from which eternal meanings are derived – about the meaning of life, the meaning of existence, and so on – then it loses its main characteristic, its primary functional purpose. Such a religion in fact ceases to be a religion as such. It becomes a distorted religion or a religion that has lost its main purpose – in other words, a tree that has dried up, a form that has lost its content.
And we see these distortions. I have already mentioned the interview with Sergey Chapnin (“The Silence of the Churches, or Why the Christian World Does Not Notice the Persecution of Believers in Russia?”), where he laments that no one pays attention to the fact that it is precisely in Russia that a large number of Christians are subjected to repression. That is, persecution of Christianity is taking place precisely in the Russian Federation, and he is absolutely right about this. But here there is an important nuance: it is precisely the Russian Orthodox Church that has lost its religiosity, it has ceased to be a community that produces meanings and has instead become an institution that serves the authorities. It has ceased to be a religious community and has become, in fact, a political institution, a conduit of imperial policy and an ideological and worldview instrument of Kremlin power.
There is also such a term, which I do not particularly like – “civil religion” or “secular religion.” And yet “secular religion” fits here quite well: when the sacred disappears and is replaced by secular ideology. Here religion ceases to be religion as such and falls into a broad definitional paradigm in which it is said that “religion is whatever I believe in.” With such an approach, anything at all can be called a religion. Just as anything can be called a philosophy: “I have my own philosophy of shopping or of my desires.” But this is not philosophy! We understand that philosophy as a discipline that immerses a person in meanings, in the cognitive sphere, is not the same as saying “philosophy is my lifestyle.”
The same applies to religion: when I simply say that belief in anything is religion, then this is not religion (by its essential characteristics). To confirm this, let us recall the classical definition accepted in academic religious studies, formulated by Anatolii Mykolaiovych Kolodnyi: religion is the connection of a person with God, with the transcendent source of life, and the sense of one’s involvement and cooperation with this source and with this subject. That is, a relationship with the sacred. When, however, people in a church, for whom this place is a workplace, engage in its instrumentalization, when the priest treats parishioners not as subjects whom he is obliged to help establish direct communication with the sacred Subject, with God, to help them enter into this communicative relationship, but as clients whom he must serve and from whom he must obtain something material in return – this is already far from religious functionality; it is some other functionality – commercial, for example.
“Scholars of Religion Are Needed by Religious Figures More than Religious Figures Are Needed by Scholars of Religion”
And therefore I believe that religion needs this kind of instrumentarium so that it can understand where its functionality ends and where it ceases to be itself. That is, both you and I need a mirror. We constantly look into it in order to understand: am I still myself, or am I no longer myself? Scholars of religion are such a mirror for religious institutions, for churches, into which they can look and see where I am still myself and where I am already a little no longer myself. Where I have already placed on myself the crown of earthly power, or have become fascinated with material gain, and so on. To see where this distortion, this deformation takes place. Any humanitarian science is a mirror. And the Church is, at the very least, a community of people. And people need to look into a mirror, because we do not possess omniscience. Therefore, I believe that scholars of religion are needed by religious figures, probably even more than religious figures are needed by scholars of religion. At the same time, we also need an object of study and a subject with whom we communicate. Thus, we need religious figures, we need churches, we need religious people. And it pains me when I see that the Church is losing its functionality, replacing it with something uncharacteristic for it. In the end, I even worry that my own field of activity may soon come to an end if churches cease to be religious institutions and become commercial establishments…
Tetiana Derkach: Public organizations or civic associations…
Oksana Horkusha: Yes. And that is not in my interests. I used to ask one question at various conferences during meetings with theologians and scholars of theology: “And what would the Lord God say in this situation? And where is the point of view of the Lord God here?” And such a very strange situation would arise: theologians and scholars of theology are sitting there, and I, as a scholar of religion, am constantly reminding them: and what is God’s point of view? That is, I am defending this Subject, because they (confessional thinkers, theologians) give human interpretations and explanations, while I try to turn them back to the fact that there is also that Subject, and I am precisely defending His right to His authentic vision of this situation, to His authentic reading of our reality.
Tetiana Derkach: So scholars of religion can be a mirror for the Church? But the Church treats those who study it from the outside with distrust. It seems to representatives of the Church, to its spokespeople and leaders, that an external perspective is somewhat irrelevant, because it is not from within. From within, we see ourselves as completely different – white and fluffy, and most importantly – infallible. And so, in order to understand that we are moving in the right direction, external observers, such as scholars of religion, seem to be unnecessary.
In fact, this has long been my thought – to restore the role of scholars of religion for the religious organizations themselves, who would tell them: you know, here you are turning into a civic organization, here you are already becoming uninteresting to us, scholars of religion, because you are simply turning into a completely different, non-religious community. And I want the state to pay attention to the fact that we have such a mirror that studies religion – despite the neglect of this field, which we now desperately need. Because the role of religion is currently increasing in the economy, in politics, in medicine – the Church is trying to influence everything. And the Church does not always understand in what world it now finds itself. And this influence of the Church on social processes cannot always be considered constructive and ethical. It seems to me that the Church has become somewhat lost between ethical reference points. The world is changing very quickly; what we call the era of post-truth is changing ethics very rapidly, including church ethics.
Ukrainians – the “Heavenly Rus’,” Russians – the “Third Rome”
We have been talking about the difference in worldviews, mentality, and identity between Russians and Ukrainians, and a question arose for me. Recently, Kateryna Shchotkina wrote an article about the “migrants of Holy Rus’,” about the concept of the Heavenly Rus’, Holy Rus’, which for some reason is very popular precisely in Ukraine. And look at what a strange thing is happening with us. For Russians, meanwhile, the concept of the Third Rome is being popularized – this is a kind of messianic idea that somewhat reminds me of the concept of the “City upon a Hill,” very popular in America. That is, this is a state that has a messianic duty from God to oversee everything, to control everything, to interfere in all spheres of human life in order to bring people closer to God, to punish those who must be punished, to motivate those who must be motivated, and so on. That is, this is an active position.
Ukrainians, consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or unintentionally, have been imposed with this concept of the Heavenly Rus’, the myth that our Homeland, in fact, is not here. Our Homeland is hidden somewhere beyond the clouds, and we belong to it. It is such a holy place that is far removed from the dirt that exists on earth. At least I see something in common here with the apocryphon about the city of Kitezh. This is also a typically Russian apocryphon about a city that, according to legend, sank underwater or simply disappeared from this earth during the invasion of Khan Batu. But it exists somewhere in an alternative reality, and some kind of life continues there as well. This was very popular among Russian peasants of the eighteenth century. Tell me, why were these otherworldly apocrypha and utopian ideas imposed on Ukrainians? Why are these utopian ideas popular in Ukraine? They used to be popular in Russia, but now I see the promotion of the Third Rome as a much more active civic position, while we are left with such utopian concepts, and they resonate very strongly with Ukrainians. And we see a detachment from our earthly homeland, probably precisely because for Ukrainians, as we said at the very beginning, the state was not some kind of sacred meaning. Can you explain whether this was done deliberately, or whether it somehow happened intuitively?
There is a joke that if I eat cabbage and you eat meat, then together we are eating cabbage rolls. And so we have such a “Russian world” in which Russians got the aggressive concept of the Third Rome, while we got the spineless utopia of the city of Kitezh, and therefore they go to their deaths for all the avatars of their empire, whereas we do not attach ourselves to our own homeland, because it is something “dirty” and “too earthly.” And from that already follows our civic duty and similar things.
Oksana Horkusha: We cannot reproach the Russians for not having dealt with the worldview and the consciousness of their citizens. They have dealt with this constantly. The formation of consciousness and worldview has been brought to a fairly high scientific level. You know how much attention they pay to what children are “packed with” in schools and kindergartens, what the mass media do, and so on. All of this is placed on a “scientific” foundation, and they fully plan how to pack this consciousness in order to form the kind of person who will perform the necessary tasks. This is the same social engineering.
I communicated with a well-known and powerful Ukrainian scholar in the humanities, Rena Marutyan. She has a concept of a metanarrative, according to which it is very important for a state to form a certain metanarrative – these are the legends and myths on which the public consciousness of a people lives. And in Russia this social engineering packs metanarratives into the consciousness of the population. They deliberately form them, calibrate them, and combine them into such a logically closed system where everything is “justified.” That is, they give the consciousness of their citizens this perfected instrumentarium, and answers to any possible questions a person might have are found within this metanarrative – anything can always be justified by referring to the metanarrative.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, neglect of the worldview sphere took place. And I believe that this was not merely carelessness (and if it was carelessness – it was criminal). It seems to me that it was a strategic plan to mankurtize a nation that had already been half-mankurtized by the previous seventy years of enslavement in the Soviet Union, where the “Soviet person” was being raised – a Soviet person with a specific identity, with natural identities being broken first.
“Why Do ‘Khokhols’ Need a Proper Church?”
The same thing happened in the Church as well. With all my lack of respect for the bloodstained Patriarch Kirill, this Kremlin criminal, I am nevertheless forced to say that there is sufficient intellectual power there. Any of his sermons or speeches are formulated in such a way that I can draw certain meanings from them. That is, it is not simply interesting for me to listen to him, but I understand that there is a logically structured thought there, that there is justification, that he builds on these mythologies – a very powerful intellectual machine is at work there. Meanwhile, when we listen to the sermons of Metropolitan Onufrii – you understand what audience this is designed for.
Tetiana Derkach: Where there is simplicity, there are angels by the hundred…
Oksana Horkusha: Obviously, in terms of meaning, such a sermon is designed for an audience that is very undemanding with regard to deep meanings. I think that this is connected with a specific кадрова політика toward Ukrainians. And what did the “khokhols” want for themselves? That they should also have a proper church? “Why should khokhols think? Why should khokhols reflect? Why should khokhols have meanings? It is enough for khokhols to cross themselves and crawl on their knees.”
No one dealt with metanarratives here. Pay attention: even if we set aside the religious sphere and look at the civic and political sphere, there is always a search for a national idea. Everyone is engaged in seeking the national idea. But why search for it? It has long been formulated and rooted in the heart of every Ukrainian, even if it has not yet been fully articulated. And yet everyone laments and searches for it as if it does not exist. But here it is: from our ancient thinkers to modern ones, everyone speaks within the same paradigm. This paradigm – the human heart as the source of love, meaning, and action, as the vessel of freedom, will, and responsibility – you simply take it and articulate it today. It already exists; there is no need to search for something or invent something.
Instead, they cast us this fishing line: let us search for the national idea, instead of developing a strategic metanarrative and implementing it through history, through culture, through the school system. I am not saying that we should do what they do in Russia, because there they simply rewrite consciousness and worldview. But we must uncover the natural potential of our worldview, of our consciousness, and manifest that worldview. Instead, what do we see? The neglect of the humanities – all of this did not even allow a metanarrative to be formed. And Rena Marutyan lamented this very much.
I like to compare this reality and that reality. We take, for example, a sermon by Kirill and a sermon by Onufrii, place them side by side – and we see how different the approach is toward those who listen to it.
You said absolutely correctly: there, a messianic position is formed – that “we must influence the world, we have this mission, we are the bearers of the sacred bonds,” all divine attributes are directly ascribed to their earthly rulers – omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. And “the mission lies on us to bring all of this to the world. We break that world, it is bad. We build our world, because our ‘Russian world’ is precisely what God wants. This is the Oikoumene that we must build.”
And what does Onufrii preach instead? “We pray, this world is not for us, we must be above this world… People suffer because people are sinful…”
Tetiana Derkach: That is, the city of Kitezh, the drowned world that went under water…
Oksana Horkusha: “Let us abandon this reality, we will throw it away, let whoever wants conquer it, this reality does not interest us, and we will live with Christ,” and so on. Because they fight, for example, against the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, against other alternative sacred proposals, they defend their right to be abstracted from reality. And when settlers are abstracted from reality, this is in fact a call to the occupiers: come and take whatever you want.
“The Cleansing of the Nation’s Consciousness Is Being Carried Out Deliberately”
Tetiana Derkach: That is, this is the destruction of the natural immunity of the nation, conditionally speaking, right?
Oksana Horkusha: Yes, this is a cleansing of consciousness from the instrumentarium that would allow the nation first and foremost to become aware of itself, and then to become aware of its world, to build it, and to be resistant to external influences.
I believe this is being done deliberately. And we can observe similar things in many spheres, in education, for example. There is an extremely depressing situation with religious studies education: why was everything wiped out? In Ukraine, religious studies as a science is at a high level even in comparison with the global level: a large body of works, an established methodological school, relevant knowledge developed on the basis of living empirical material. But suddenly religious studies became unnecessary for the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian people. Why? Could it be because we are a mirror for religious organizations on the one hand, and on the other hand, we are analysts and diagnosticians who can diagnose the social organism, even when a person imagines that they are absolutely healthy and wonderful? We can conduct adequate diagnostics of religious organizations, of processes in state–church and religious–civic relations. And this is exactly what we do. But for some reason this is not needed. Why would a diagnostic instrument be needed where the goal is for the patient to cease to exist more quickly? That is why I believe this is being done deliberately.
But we will not operate with conspiracy theories; instead, let us note the clan-oligarchic approaches. Let us retrospectively return to the time of the formation of our elites – in all spheres, not only religious or state-building. Those elites that remained to us after the Soviet Union had a path to become genuine Ukrainian elites and to strategically develop metanarratives that would allow this nation to become a powerful subject of the global dimension in the modern world. And we had such prospects… But very often, our elites were not the best people, but those who were convenient, those who were needed by someone, those who were loyal to something. That is, selection was based on a negative criterion – not the best, not the one capable of formulating a strategy and articulating meanings, but the one who satisfied someone’s demand. This distortion, unfortunately, exists among us.
To be continued.
Source: religion.in.ua