Metropolitan Kirill delivered a lecture at Moscow State University

METROPOLITAN KIRILL DELIVERED A LECTURE AT MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY

On April 4, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, delivered a lecture on “The Uniting Europe as a Civilizational Challenge” at Moscow State University. The lecture became part of the international interdisciplinary academic course on Regional Integration and Greater Europe organized by the university’s Center for the Problems of Integration and System Analysis.

In the beginning of his lecture, His Eminence the Metropolitan spoke about some Western circles ignoring Orthodox religious tradition on which the public attitude of many nations is based. According to the DECR chairman, “A particular part of Europe, even that which used to be under ideological pressure, cannot have an apriori wrong attitude. Given all the historical mistakes and even crimes, a particular part of the world cannot look down at another from the height of a professor’s chair”.

But then this reality has been partly caused by the fact that the Russian world, the Russian “oikoumene”, has not participated in the development of the philosophy of European unification which has been shaped under the influence of liberal ideas rooted in Protestantisn and neo-heathen anthropocentrism. However, “at the beginning of the intergration process which included Eastern European countries where 200 million people associated with Orthodox tradition live, the question arose: Where are we in this Europe?” Metropolitan Kirill is convinced that it is impossible either to adopt liberal ideas uncritically or to adopt an attitude of their total rejection.

It is impossible to speak about the solidity of united Europe if in the process of building it alien values will be imposed on nations. This, in particular, can aggravate the age-long opposition between those who give priority to the individual and those who give priority to tradition and human community in Russia. Moreover, Western reaction to the new Russian law “On the Freedom of Conscience and on Religious Associations” has pointed to the danger of a civilizational conflict around these priorities. Aware of this, Russian Orthodox Church is conducting an ideological dialogue with European institutions.

Metropolitan Kirill considers it possible and important to reconcile the liberal and the traditionalist outlooks. By finding an answer to the question of how it can be done, “we will help not only ourselves but also Europe and the world. For there cannot be a monopolar world; a particular civilizational standard cannot be put in the basis of integration and globalization”. The DECR chairman envisions the following way for harmonizing liberalism and traditionalism: “It is quite evident that such values as free market, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and many others have not only the right to exist but also help to achieve the fullness of human life. However, it happens only if we are capable of putting a barrier on the way of the philosophical idea of liberalism entering the inner – spiritual and cultural – life of the human personality”. The rejection of the idea of sin, the cult of the maximal self-fulfillment of the fallen man with his low instincts, cannot improve by itself the personality and society; therefore it is ruinous.

“It is my profound conviction that we do not have to rush aside from the integration, moreover it is impossible”, Metropolitan Kirill said in conclusion of his lecture, adding, “But we should enter the integration process spiritually strong and clearly aware of what our own contribution to the intergration should be”.

After the lecture, Metropolitan Kirill answered questions asked by professors, students and post-graduate students of MSU and other educational institutions.