The Need for an Army

A Brief Explanation of the Meaning of Christianity for a Medieval Kid Living in Today’s World

1. Why Christianity is Warfare

And truly light and holy
Is the work of majestic warfare

Thus spoke the sound Russian poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, who was destined to live in unsound times. If you want to understand anything about human societies, then you need to understand war above all. It is only now that we pretend to forget, but we remember it well. The same thing applies all the more to the Church. The Church has never engaged in anything except warfare. After all, Christ warned: I came not to send peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34). Therefore the Holy Fathers call Christian life an “unseen warfare.”

Now this “unseen warfare” is associated with the “soldiers on the invisible front.” And this is fine, since it’s true. A hippy can say of himself that he is an “ambassador of rock ’n’ roll in a spasmodic country,” as the Russian band Akvarium (“Aquarium”) sang. But Christians, if they are ambassadors, are just spies working under diplomatic cover.

Greetings, I am a saboteur,
An unorthodox punk!

Thus sang a sound girl (Arina Stroganova, the soloist of the Russian punk band Solomennye enoty “Straw Raccoons”). She explains well in this song how she should get going so that her grandchildren would be able to piece together an empire out of the existing fragments. But even when our army is broken, we need to continue the war as saboteurs and spies behind enemy lines. Of course, the point isn’t in the shattered Christian empire, which was always a means but not an end for the Church. The fact is that our goals haven’t changed, and war against those who have destroyed the Christian empire remains our sole point of business. With visible enemies the war is visible, but with the most important enemies – the unseen ones ­­– the war is invisible, the war we have within us.

The Holy Fathers explain that for Christians the entire world is the Old Testament city of Jericho, which was the first of the camps of Israel, in the Old Testament Church, to be overrun by spies, before the walls came tumbling down. So too will the walls of this world tumble down, when it’ll be conquered by the Church at the very end of time. But until then there will be no friendship with the inhabitants of Jericho, with the exception only of Raab [Rehab] the harlot and her relatives (read the whole story in the Bible: Book of Jesus [Joshua] Bar Nun, chapters 2 and 6). In this world we make friends only with those who have changed the world, and in our friendships we don’t strive to be closer with “decent people” while keeping a distance from the “indecent.”

It’s by no means terrible to be faced with superior enemy forces. In fact, this is the best thing for stimulating personal development. To be able to do something means, after all, being able to defeat those who aren’t able to do this, even if the preponderance of power is on their side. Every real, interesting, and fun war is only against superior enemy forces. In such a war, it’s no terrible thing to die, although in such a war there are usually the best chances of winning. It’s no terrible thing to die when you’re where you’re supposed to be and doing what you’re supposed to be doing. This was well understood by the Vikings, who strove by all means to die in battle, and not of old age – but, of course, Christian ascetic strugglers understood even better. But it’s for just this very reason that the most terrible thing is to find yourself among enemies before you understand what it means to be at war.

With regard to Christianity, this amounts to the irresolvable task of theodicy (and here we can only rejoice that it’s not our business to resolve such problems). After all, Christianity does not exist in any form except warfare. The Church is the camp of Israel, which is travelling through the desert, where it encounters enemies only, and doesn’t have the right either to return or just to stop in its tracks. In contrast to the Old Testament Israel, the Church does not have any purpose on earth. It will march forward like a military unit throughout all the “end times” of human history: that is, from the Incarnation of Christ until the end. The temporary condition in which the Old Testament Israel lived is also temporary for the Church; but now its time consists of all the time of earthly history. The Old Israel could live either in war or in peace, but the New Jerusalem can live only at war.

2. Why Warfare Belongs to Free People

It’s best of all to get used to war in one’s childhood and youth. St. Olaf Tryggvason, the future apostle of the northern peoples (whose image has merged in ecclesial tradition with that of St. Olaf, the Baptizer of Norway, who was also a sea-king), could handle fighting with an axe even in childhood, by which he killed his father’s killers, and it was for this very reason that he was considered ready to bring up St. Vladimir the Prince of Kiev at court. All the more appropriate is spiritual warfare for children, if they thereby learn combat skills. Warfare, which includes spiritual warfare, isn’t at all suitable for children. It isn’t suitable for civilians. Worst of all is to find yourself in the war zone when you’re a peaceful man, and even worse if you’re not even an adult. This applies to conventional warfare, and even more so to spiritual warfare.

In spiritual warfare one can win or lose, fight for the right or wrong cause, or even be a civilian. Warfare belongs to free people; being part of the civilian population belongs to those bound to the earth. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. When you have something to lose, you’re tied to the earth: you can’t be free. You won’t be called to fight in a war; most likely you’ll live your life in peace. But if the war to which you’ve been called comes to your land, you won’t be spared. More precisely, you won’t be taken into account, either for better or for worse.

You become free, once and for all engaged in war or peace, but then once and for all tied to the earth, by your own choice. This choice almost always takes place during early adolescence. Different societies are interested in different results of this choice, and therefore try to influence their young in different ways.

Once human society could not wage war except with people’s help. Then society sought to adapt everyone possible to the act of warfare. This made it raise the young in such a way that they would convince them to become free, in exchange for accepting the burden of warfare. This concerned, first of all, the spiritual warfare and, only in second place, earthly warfare. For earthly warfare, not all such societies have always striven to attract people from all social classes. But for spiritual warfare, no such class restrictions have ever existed. Christianity reigned everywhere; everyone knew the examples of the saints; and everyone, regardless of class, had the opportunity to learn that Christianity consists only of imitating the lives of the saints.

3. Human Material: Natural and Artificial

In modern times, human society has learned to fight almost without the participation of people. Human individuality has been replaced by a special product of processed human material: human pulp. Human individuality is a product that is expensive, difficult to obtain, and inconvenient to manage. They have learned to replace it exactly like wood is replaced by plastic and crab by mock crab. The plastic world has won (according to the famous quote from Yegor Letov, the now classic Russian punk poet and the leader of the band Grazhdanskaya Oborona “Civil Defense”).

In today’s wars, natural people do almost no fighting. It’s not yet possible wholly to abandon their use, but the demand for them has decreased. And all this despite the fact that, in today’s wars, not only does the military class fight, but so does the entire population: both those who have been mobilized and those who haven’t been. Likewise all the rest of the time, which is officially considered peaceful, but is actually a time of local military conflicts and terrorist acts.

Today’s wars – “cold,” local, and international – are conducted only with the help of human pulp. In the pulp, like in the biomass, all human individuality is an obstacle: it violates its homogeneity and, consequently, makes it difficult to control its flow. From individuality, human pulp becomes just as substandard as lumpy porridge.

Modern products from human pulp are obtained from processing human raw materials for one of two major technologies. Traditionally, one of them is called “totalitarian,” while the other is called “democratic,” although both are democratic and totalitarian in equal measure. They equally express the “will of the people” and encompass almost wholly, that is totally, the relevant society. Totalitarian ideology homogenizes the human mass through the fear of state terror, while democracy does so through fear and other primitive passions, injected through television or other means of brainwashing. The efficacy of homogenization in both cases is the same, and the specific properties of the product can be varied by the use of complex technologies with different combinations of these two main methods of processing human material.

These modern technologies were truly only developed in the twentieth century, while somewhat earlier ­– in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – it didn’t go beyond plant trials. But these technologies were not invented by secular society, but were transferred there from the church. And in the churches (of all Christian denominations) it was during these centuries that they learned how to prepare the human mass on an industrial scale. That’s how it was.

4. How to Invent Artificial Human Material

The Church is made up of Christians, for which reason it cannot be filled with the human biomass. We become Christians individually, as a result of a personal decision, while human pulp is not capable of making personal decisions.

Once, before there was a Christian empire, within the Church one could only be a true Christian or a counterfeit Christian (there was never a time when there were no counterfeits), but one had to make a conscious choice to be a Christian, or even a counterfeit. Under Christian empires – that is, after the fourth century – the opportunity arose to consider oneself a member of the Church without a conscious choice of Christianity. There were tens or hundreds of times more people who took advantage of this opportunity than there were of all others.

Such people differed from authentic Christians in that they understood Christianity as something that could bring earthly benefits (such as the prosperity of state or nation) or simply as a way of life, the meaning of which it was pointless to seek. However, they still weren’t part of human pulp. That society still could not do without natural persons, and therefore even people who did not exhibit an authentic interest towards religion were educated, as much as possible, to be free.

In all these societies it was believed that there was no earthly occupation more honorable than warfare. The military was always the most honorable class from which the king was chosen. Even Russian Tsars were always professional soldiers. Therefore the Church, too, oriented all those who could not yet focus on spiritual warfare at least on earthly warfare. And very many people who started out with visible warfare gradually realized the superiority of the unseen warfare and thus became true Christians, and even saints.

The Church itself was then also governed only by the military. The military caste in the Church was its very own: it was called monasticism. Before the creation of Christian empires, there was simply no need for monasticism to exist as a separate class, inasmuch as there was no great number of nominal Christians living by worldly interests. But when there came to be many such Christians, as happened in Christian empires, then monasticism was separated into a special class, and it was perfectly natural that it was this class that became the ruling caste of the earthly life of the Church. Monks did not always hold high ecclesiastical ranks (and most often, they did not), but the authority of monasticism was always higher than that of all the other classes of Christians, not excluding bishops, and it was they who eventually determined the Church’s earthly path. Monasticism in the Church during the time of Christian empires had the same significance as the ministry of prophets in Old Testament Israel. This is very well and clearly stated in the fourteenth century in St. Gregory Palamas’ Epistle to John and Theodore.

But in subsequent centuries, due to the general cooling of faith in God, the number of earnest believers decreased, and therefore monasticism became increasingly diluted and degenerated. Not military men, but rather civilians with the mentality of bureaucrats, came to hold real power in all earthly ecclesial organizations. Such people could be very useful when they executed orders, but they became very dangerous when they themselves began to issue orders. It was they who invented human pulp, and it was within the Church that they first did this.

It became commonplace for large ecclesial organizations to be run like part of a bureaucratic machine, first like a governmental one, and in our days more like a large commercial firm. Within all the large Christian churches a special mechanism of selection was worked out: they leaned increasingly on “their own,” who aspired primarily for a quiet life, rather than a Christian one. The churches even began to turn into special reservoirs for the containing of an always-obedient mass of humans. For this, they continued to value the European rulers of the age of the Enlightenment, whose own religion was good, if not atheism.

In fact, this mass was already indifferent towards ecclesial doctrine, and therefore the Church could not hold a monopoly on the market for human pulp. The ecclesial equipment for its production, without any major changes in technological process, was successfully replaced by a secular one. The now secular equipment allowed for an increase both of the productivity of the process, as well as for the quality of processing raw materials – which is why the political regimes of the twentieth century arrived at the kind of totalitarianism and democracy to which the ecclesial organizations of the eighteenth and nineteenth century could not even have dreamed. Konstantin Leontiev, who on the eve of the twentieth century was able to consider and describe the main curse of the near future, wrote about this best of all (see, for example, his work The Average European as the Ideal and Tool of Universal Destruction, one of the first descriptions of the technology of human pulp).

We witnessed this in Russia after 1917: the nominally Orthodox human mass, quickly and with an efficiency rate of over 50%, was processed into a Communist one. The Bolshevik’s main trick was simple: they understood that the mass of Russian peasants was searching not for God, but for land; not even hiding their atheism and anti-religiosity, they promised them land. This promise – delivered without any guarantees and with the intention to deceive – turned out to be enough to win the Civil War, the outcome of which was decided by the peasantry.

Still, human pulp instead of natural people was a product discarded onto the political market by ecclesial organizations. The first to succumb to the temptation to use it were secular rulers of the older, military type, but they managed to cut down the branch upon which they were sitting. The military class was adapted poorly to managing human pulp. Here the military had to give way to bureaucrats. In recent history this has taken place through a series of revolutions.

Revolution is the war of bureaucrats against the military. It is also the war of cowards against the brave. A cowardly bureaucrat can create a revolution when he has lots of human pulp, with the flow of which he can wash away any army of natural people, with minimal risk to himself. Within human pulp can be many brave people, but concerning them it must be said that it is not they who wage war, but it is for them that war is waged, and this is done by cowards who alone know the real reasons and goals of such revolutionary wars.

This is what happened both during the French Revolution, after which there was still some time for the possibility of revenge, and in the Russian Revolution, which we still cannot win after nearly ninety years, although we hope to succeed.

5. A Particle of Human Pulp Under the Microscope

Being a Christian was difficult even in societies of natural people. Natural people were exposed to all manner of temptation, and if they had any faith in God, it was choked by so many weeds, which needed to be weeded and weeded. But within human pulp we aren’t even talking about temptations in the normal sense of this word. In human pulp, even a nominally Orthodox one, no religious faith ­– neither sound nor unsound – is possible.

For a particle of human pulp, making a personal choice of faith is as impossible as it is for a patient with an extreme degree of dementia or for a newborn baby. A particle of human pulp is a biorobot, which has developed all the functions inherent in man as a special kind of animal, but has blocked within it the development of everything that is determined by the activity of an immortal soul. The external behavior of such a particle can equally appear to correspond with or to contradict Christian virtues but, in either case, it will only be an imitation of the relevant virtues or vices.

This doesn’t mean that the particle of human pulp doesn’t have an immortal soul. If even the soul of a victim of abortion has such a soul, then how much more will a fully-formed person have one, regardless of whether or not he became part of human pulp. The difference lies elsewhere.

We don’t know how the Lord will judge the newborn, or even unborn babies, or people with dementia. But we do know that these people did not make any personal choice in the usual sense of the word. God knows the position of their immortal souls, by which He can judge them, but this position can’t be expressed through the movement in position of this “soul,” which is formed with age and available for study outside normal human means, and which is the subject of psychology and psychiatry. In contrast to them, the person who is a particle of human pulp becomes such by his own personal choice. This choice is a conscious rejection of personal consciousness. It is made before one can pose the question of choice by this personal consciousness with regard to religious faith or unbelief.

Rather than the choice inherent to the natural person between virtues and vices, the particle of human pulp creates an imitation of virtues and vices, inasmuch as his real motives for action are outside him. From the Christian point of view, this however means that one becomes a particle of human pulp as the result of a single base sin: the voluntary abandonment of responsibility for one’s own life and actions.

The natural person practices such a refusal only in certain areas of his life. When among such areas, as happens in most cases, he finds religion, then the natural person becomes, with regard to the Church, a “civilian” who is not a “military” man. However, if one preserves enough of the sphere in which he acts consciously and responsibly, then he will never become part of human pulp, and to become a normal Christian it will be sufficient for him to abstain from certain concrete sins, that is, do enough weeding to allow faith to grow.

In a particle of human pulp, the refusal of responsibility for one’s life and actions becomes total: that is, it encompasses all spheres of its existence. There is equally no ground for either germs of faith or even weeds. From the outside it may seem that human pulp is dominated by certain concrete vices and that certain concrete virtues are cultivated. But both are accepted only by the flow of pulp. In fact, from a Christian point of view, there can be no virtues at all, and there is only one sin as such, but an all-consuming one: the radical rejection of one’s immortal soul.

6. Why Rebellion is Unsound, But Why One Should Enter the Army

In modern society, you don’t even have the time to make a personal religious choice before you are so completely totalized and democratized that you no longer have any choice to make.

Attempts somehow to deal with one’s own faith are always logically preceded by a desperate struggle not to turn into a hard, empty ball within human suspension. Chronologically speaking, both take place at the same time.

It seems that the whole world is against you:
Believe in your brother, have faith in man,
Help each other, honey, if you can
Because it looks like everybody in this whole round world
Is down on me.

The most unpleasant thing is that this is real. “If I’m paranoid, it still doesn’t’ mean that no one is following me.”

On such a path, it’s most difficult not to end one’s life with a heroin overdose. Either literally, as with the author just cited, or in some other way, such as by going to sleep.

Upon reception into human pulp, human materials are treated like an apparatus consisting of the grinding mill and the centrifuge. If they fail to make neat particles for homogenous suspension out of you, then the centrifuge that separates particles suitable from everyone else will throw you in the waste. You either need to go along with everyone else, or you’ll be thrown into the faction of drug addicts, alcoholics, bums, and the like. Then they’ll still find some ecological niche for you, albeit an uncomfortable one (since it’s in the trash).

For those who can read this with even minimum reasonable interest, the problem of missing the suspension has either been resolved, or at least they know how to solve it; although it could be that they don’t resolve it in any way that’s really decisive. Then for them the problem of the heroin addiction of this world must become acute.

The mechanisms of totalitarian democracy leave little opportunity for believing people to become military men and to leave behind being civilians. Civilians can only by accident not fall under the mill and into the centrifuge. Perhaps it’s possible, but one can no longer count on it.

Therefore the only viable religious choice today is that of warfare – as, however, was the case from the very beginning, in the first three centuries of Christianity. The historical respite that was allowed by Christian empires came to a final end after the nineteenth century (although it in fact ended in 1453, with the fall of the thousand-year reign of the only great Christian empire, Byzantium; all subsequent Christian empires were its pale and inaccurate copies).

Thus, there remains only one real and effective way to become a believer in our times: to choose warfare.

Very many people understand this. Therefore our time is one not only of totalitarian democracy, but also one of rebellion against it. Alas, it’s not so much of a war as it is a kind of rebellion… The rebels are sometimes brave, often more stupid than brave, but they are always doomed to defeat.

It was about them that it was said that an axe can’t stand up to a gun. Because we know that if they can come at you with an axe, you have to shoot. You can’t give way to emotional impulses, but must come up with a weapon more technologically advanced than an axe. Such weapons are issued only by the army, which you’ll need to find and join. But while you’re busy searching and learning, you don’t need to show your dissatisfaction with those who can come after you with an axe.

We are sympathetic to all rebels. But let us take another step in our understanding. It’s fine if we hold certain rebels to be more sympathetic than any others. And let it be them who have gone and enrolled in an active army.

An army differs from rebels not only in terms of discipline, but above all in terms of professionalism. A rebellion takes place only during a period of rebellion. A professional army is an occupation for all one’s life. In certain military professions it is impossible to retire. This applies to the greatest extent to the main military profession: Christianity.

7. Why a Free Man Should Shun “Happiness”

One thing gets in the way of making the choice in favor of a professional army, and specifically the sort that engages, and will always engage, in warfare: the desire for “simple human happiness.”

When this is a conscious desire, then civilian life is chosen; and, in practice, in the conditions of a totalitarian democracy, this is the path to the human biomass.

When this desire is not conscious, then one chooses heroin or “heroin” – some kind of complicated (but, in fact, just as simple) human happiness. In practice, in the conditions of totalitarian democracy, this is the path to the dump and/or to premature physical death.

In this battle with “simple human happiness” it is generally very difficult to survive. The refusal to pursue the mass understanding of “happiness” guarantees nothing. One needs to find the means to give up not just that which the masses desire, but that which is “human.”

This has happened with many people, but involuntarily: it happens with a mental illness, with depression. When one is depressed – and in one way or another nearly all the rebels of the twentieth century suffered from depression – then the whole world becomes entirely uninteresting. But man himself breaks out of this. Profound depression is unbearable. This is why it is so often protected against by suicide and heroin. (Kurt Cobain deliberately became addicted to heroin, realizing that it could help him struggle against depression. Heroin, LSD, or even alcohol can in fact help, but only in the very short term. Then the depression breaks out at the wrong time, and suicidal desires can no longer be controlled.)

Depression is not renunciation of the world, but the banal syndrome of the frustration of worldly inclinations. Any false renunciation of the world, of course, is also fraught with depression.

If you want to enroll in the Christian army, then you’ll need sincerely to forget about “simply human happiness.” You’ll need to grow out of it, just as children grow out of children’s games when they are starting out on their life of independence. The interests of a mature and free person displace the interests of a weak and dependent child. An independent life requires freedom, but one who is bound to the dream of “happiness” will always be a slave.

8. Why Faith in God is Neither For Awards or the Fear of Punishment

Christianity is based on faith in God.

Those for whom nothing remains in Christianity after ejecting everything worldly (the desire for personal happiness, ethnography, politics…) are unbelievers, and therefore they cling to their nominal Christianity in all these foreign objects.

What, then, is Christianity for? See above: exclusively for the sake of God.

Nothing earthly and accessible outside the Church can ever be the meaning of Christianity, because this would mean that these earthly things were God. But God is not made up of the earthly or of anything accessible to human understanding. God is accessible not to man’s understanding, but to man. But this takes place only when God Himself brings man beyond his human understanding. “God became man, so that man could become God,” as the Church Fathers put it.

It’s impossible to learn how to swim if you don’t dive into the water and stop clinging to everything earthly that supports and buoys you up. This is where Christianity begins: with learning how to swim.

All earthly props, not excluding the promises of blessedness in the afterlife or threats of hell, are props and nothing more. The Apostle Paul might surprise you when he prayed that he be “anathema (separated for all times) from Christ” for the sake of the salvation of others (Epistle to the Romans 9:3). Likewise in the Old Testament, Moses, in an analogical situation, asked God that he be blotted out from His book (Exodus 32:32). These requests seem absurd, but only to those who think that the righteous struggle for the sake of rewards, even for the heavenly afterlife, or from fear of punishment, even if it be eternal. Both fear and rewards are important things, but they belong to the category of salutary means for those who don’t yet know how to swim. Some swim well and others poorly, but the main thing is finally to stop holding on, and to swim.

Perhaps someone has noticed that I’ve fibbed a bit. After all, I said that Christianity is like the ability to swim, when in fact it is the ability to walk on water. But these things are related. The difference is that the ability to swim is taught by man, but walking on water by God.

9. Why Our Times Are the Best

It might seem like a great pity to us that the Middle Ages have ended. But if so, then in vain. Medieval windmills have now matured into the true enemies of the human race: giants. Now there’s absolutely no reason to drag oneself through the Spanish heat to find something to fight. Now everything is everywhere, both near and accessible. Has any time been more convenient than our own?

One great Russian poet, Aleksandr Blok, who suffered from dysgraphia (often writing one letter instead of another), should’ve written about this in his inspired poem: “O war (voyna) without end and without border…” (rather than “O spring (vesna) without end and without border…”)

The Orthodox Church is an army. The normal state of an army is waging war. When any army doesn’t wage war for a long time, it decomposes. That which called itself the Church in the beginning of the twentieth century was in fact a small Church inside a dead and bloated body. Now the Church has been freed from that. In the 1920s and 1930s a division occurred between the True Orthodox Church and the dead, official ecclesial organizations that make up so-called “world Orthodoxy.” The corpse continued to swell and disintegrate, but no longer crushed the Church. Many problems have remained in the True Church, but it lives and fights. And this is all only thanks to our times: it has simply forced a division between those who fight and those who are decomposing. How can we not say that our own times are the best?

It is important to belong to the True Church both externally and internally.

An interior membership only takes place without the exterior when this is physically impossible: for example, when one lives in a very remote region or in prison. But if one simply ignores the external, he will not have the internal.

Internal membership in the Church is possible only for one who needs God alone, and doesn’t need any peace with the demons or temptations of a quiet life.

Christ said: My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you (John 14:27). This is the peace that we need, and we should have no expectations for any other kind. Christ promises it only to those who are with Him, but “not as the world giveth,” but rather His own peace – that is, not external peace, but only inward peace. Both the Holy Martyrs and Christian warriors had this peace of Christ… But to all others Christ says that which we cited at the very beginning: I came not to send peace, but a sword (Gospel according to Matthew 10:34).

December 2006.

Bishop Gregory (Lourié) of Petrograd and Gdov.

Source : http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=news&id=114163

The following article, written by Igumen Gregory (now Bishop of Petrograd and Gdov) in December 2006, was originally intended for an audience of young Russians familiar with both the classics of their literature and with the products of the underground counterculture, both Russian and American. While some of the references cited may be foreign to non-Russian readers, we believe that the underlying arguments are relevant to readers from all cultural backgrounds.