The Church and the Holy Spirit in 20th Century Russia

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2000 by Boris Bobrinskoy

First I should like to speak about some of the signs or gifts of the Spirit without which the church would not be the church and which are sometime lacking in our treatises and volumes on ecclesiology.

Joy

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace ..., gentleness," St Paul writes to the Galatians (5:22-23). The theme of joy, which is rare in our classical theological textbooks, appears implicitly as one of the most authentic signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit of God," ... and no-one will take your joy from you" (John 16:22). This joy is the sign of the breath of the Spirit resting on the poor of the Beatitudes and on those who, following them in the church, are baptized into his death and resurrection (1 Pet. 4:13). Father Alexander Schmemann said on this:

   What is required is a return on our part to that source of energy, in the
   deepest sense of the word, that the church had when it was conquering the
   world. What the church brought into the world was not certain ideas
   applicable simply to human needs, but first of all the truth, the
   righteousness, the joy of the kingdom of God. The joy of the kingdom: it
   always worries me that, in the multi-volume systems of dogmatic theology
   that we have inherited, almost every term is explained and discussed except
   the one word with which the Christian gospel opens and closes.(3)

"When the Holy Spirit fills a man's whole being with the sweetness of his love," writes starets (elder) Silouane, "then in unutterable joy the soul contemplates God."(4) "The Holy Spirit is sweeter than anything that is on earth. It is celestial food, the joy of the soul."(5) The theme of joy is one which recurs most often in the writings of the holy starets as a sure and certain sign of the presence of the Spirit. "My joy, Christ is risen" -- these were the words with which St Seraphim of Sarov welcomed his visitors.

Beauty

Father Sergius Bulgakov contrasted "rationality" as characteristic of the grace of the Logos with the revelation of the Holy Spirit as beauty:

   Thus, the revelations of the Spirit cannot be perceived by pure reason, but
   by other faculties of the human spirit, where they resound as ineffable
   words which human beings are not permitted to express. The hypostasis of
   the Spirit is the hypostasis of Beauty and we understand that his action in
   nature fills it with beauty, which is already a foreshadowing of the
   kingdom of God through the Holy Spirit.(6)

Sergius Averintsev recently recalled Fr Paul Florensky's comment: "Of all the philosophical proofs of the existence of God, the most convincing is one which is not even mentioned in scholarly volumes and which can be expressed more or less as follows: `Rublev's Trinity exists, therefore God exists'." And Averintsev concludes on this "logical idea of dazzling simplicity: beauty is not only beautiful, beauty is a criterion of truth and, what is more, of the most profound and fundamental truth".(7)

I am glad to find that, in the thesis on Russian ecclesiology by Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev mentioned above, there is an important chapter on "the beauty of the celestial world as reflected in the architecture of our ancient churches, in the character of the icon, its symbolism, the rhythms of its colours and forms, in the beauty of liturgical worship". He sees this as testifying to the power and depth of theological thinking, drawing on the very sources of the wisdom of the Fathers and fructifying the church's whole life.(8)