The fate and miracle of Patriarch Alexy II: the lawyer turned to the biography of His Holiness

If a person obeys this word, then his life will develop not as a material biography, but as fate. Biography lies on the surface of random cause-and-effect relationships, contrary to the deep spiritual purpose of a person. Remember, if a happy accident occurred in your destiny, then you will not find an exact material reason, and the most common explanation will appear: you were lucky or it was His Majesty Chance. And only a spiritually sighted person will say: this is God’s providence (for Catholics it is providence). But because you acted not for your own self-interest, but for another (or others). Now this is what our soldiers do in the Northern Military District zone, and this is how they explain it in their answers to journalists.

Christian thinkers have been telling us this for many years: “An ordinary person of any culture notices in the physiognomy of the entire formation, both his own and the formation of the living world around him, only the immediately accessible foreground. The totality of his experiences, both internal and external, fills the course of the day as a simple sequence of facts. Only a significant person feels… the deep logic of formation, which appears as the idea of ​​fate and exposes just these superficial, meaningless everyday formations as something random” (O. Spengler, “The Decline of the Western World”). What has been said is quite familiar to many, and the fate of A.M. Ridiger confirms this, since of all the paths to insight he chose the most faithful one – “sincere creations of religion.”

It is not difficult to read the biography of His Holiness – for example, in the Encyclopedic Dictionary for 2005 there are only ten lines, from birth to grave. What’s inside this period? Is it just a “simple sequence of facts”?

We are often alarmed and frightened by the fact that fate as a symbol is incomprehensible and unpredictable to us both at first and second glance. Something in fate is clearly not only and not so much in our hands.

Let’s look at the biography and fate of Holy Patriarch Alexy II, where the facts are symbolic. He was born in 1929 and chose the feat of monasticism. God had mercy on him to survive the waves of militant atheism of the Soviet regime. The resignation in 1964 of Khrushchev, who promised to show the Russian people “the last priest,” also helped. So, in the same year A.M. Ridiger headed the Tallinn and Estonian dioceses (archbishop, metropolitan), and since 1988 he has already been the metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod. After the death of Holy Patriarch Pimen in 1990, he participated as one of the contenders for election as head of the church. For the first time in the years of the USSR, elections were quite free – at least without pressure from the CPSU, the Council for Religious Affairs and the KGB. He passed both the first and second rounds and was elected.

This is the very case that God’s providence elevates to a phenomenon of fate. After all, the elections were attended by candidates who were much more senior in consecration (i.e., who had previously become bishops and metropolitans): Juvenaly, Pitirim (Nechaev), etc. Lost elections are not just some kind of failure, it is a sign of unworthiness and mistrust. Let’s give Alexy II his due – after becoming patriarch, he did not make massive displacements and reshuffles in the patriarchy, maintaining some stability in management.

The time of his election – 1990 – coincided with sad, if not tragic events for Russia. It is obvious that preparations were being made for the destruction of a single state—the USSR. And then August 1991 came…

On the 19th there was the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the first liturgy since 1918 in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin, where Russian emigrants of the first wave were invited. On this day I assumed the position of head of the legal department of the Moscow City Council. The Holy Patriarch, among several others, invited me. Only I came – as befits an officer, in uniform. After the liturgy, I was called to the altar to the patriarch, who said that today he did not say a prayer for the authorities and the army, because… doesn’t know what the government is now, but he asked me to come to St. Daniel’s Monastery – we need to talk.

Members of the Holy Synod gathered at the St. Daniel Monastery. The text of the Holy Patriarch’s address to the flock was discussed. The appeal was issued in a peacemaking spirit, and A.V. Rutskoy, who arrived, was dissatisfied with it – it seemed rather weak and apolitical. The Holy Patriarch did everything right, without putting the Russian Orthodox Church on one side or the other, especially since there was no official information about the program of the State Emergency Committee and Yeltsin.

Subsequently, the relationship between the Holy Patriarch and the President was complicated and sometimes difficult. Yeltsin came to all-night services at Yelokhovsky Cathedral twice a year: at Christmas and Easter. He conscientiously defended almost the entire service, communicated at the altar with the Holy Patriarch and left. This was the case until 1993, until Yeltsin’s mother, who sent him to the temple, died in September, and the visits ended. In 1997, the State Duma adopted in three readings (initiated by Communist Party member Zorkaltsev) a constitutional law recognizing Orthodoxy as the state religion – but Yeltsin, after hysterical calls from the leaders of Germany and the United States, vetoed it without asking the Holy Patriarch, which His Holiness was sharply dissatisfied with. He remained silent, but practically stopped communicating with the president.

Now they prefer not to remember the events of October 1993. Many active participants are no longer alive. Then the question was raised about Russia as a state: either it is presidential or parliamentary. Yeltsin, with his Decree No. 1400, by dissolving the Supreme Council, clearly exceeded his powers, but the Supreme Council, by depriving Yeltsin of his powers and proclaiming Rutsky president, also went far. In general, a forceful option for resolving the conflict began to emerge clearly.

Here the last peaceful option to reach some kind of compromise appeared – negotiations in the St. Daniel Monastery, which were headed by the Holy Patriarch, and from the Kremlin – Luzhkov, Filatov, Soskovets. Each time there was a new composition from the Supreme Council, which was 1.5–2 hours late, as the deputies traveled to Moscow enterprises, campaigning for Soviet power. I was at all the meetings, and by the beginning of October it became obvious that the parliament wanted a rebellion without clear prospects. Then the Holy Patriarch made, I would say, a fateful decision: to take the icon of the Vladimir Mother of God from the Tretyakov Gallery for one day and at a special prayer service in the Elokhov Cathedral to ask her to moderate her passions – after all, she saved Moscow in 1395 from the Crimean Khan Tamerlane, and will save Now.

I was assigned to pick up the icon. I wrote a certain joint resolution of the governments of Moscow and Russia (signed by Luzhkov and Soskovets), the Holy Patriarch also signed. But the issue was not decided by this decree, but by a real miracle. The management of the Tretyakov Gallery met this resolution with hostility, as did the curators of the hall of icons initially. There is no need for skeptical smiles, but Vladimirskaya herself wanted to leave the museum for church and put into my mind a text that I did not have, namely: “Orthodox people, give, for Christ’s sake, an icon for one day, we will return it.” The issue was resolved in 10 seconds, and Vladimirskaya began to pack for the journey. Magnificent Christian mathematician of the 17th century. Blaise Pascal argued that “a miracle is an effect endowed with a force many times greater than the force of the natural causes that gave rise to it”…

Vladimirskaya continued to show miracles. The prayer service brought together thousands of believers in the Yelokhovsky Cathedral and around it. At the end of the service, His Holiness called me to the altar and said that the believers had decided not to return the icon to the museum. There are thousands of them, but I have only 20 people from the riot police… Here the icon showed a miracle to Yu.M. Luzhkov, who promised people that after the end of the unrest he would resolve the issue of returning Vladimirskaya to the Russian Orthodox Church. And I decided: on October 4, we prepared a decree “On the restoration of the historical appearance of Red Square,” which, among other things (recreation of the Church of the Kazan Mother of God, the Iverskaya Chapel), included the return of two icons to the Russian Orthodox Church: Vladimir and the Trinity.

And, of course, the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior from St. Patriarch Alexy II was fateful. The idea came in 1994 from the then unbaptized Yu.M. Luzhkov, but without the blessed decision of the Holy Patriarch this would have been impossible – and we received the blessing. There were many opponents, open and hidden, and Yeltsin was among them. In my presence, he repeatedly called Luzhkov asking him not to rush into building the temple.

For a number of years, St. Patriarch Alexy II headed the Public Supervisory Council for the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (Luzhkov is the deputy). Among the members of the council were celebrities: Ulyanov, Soloukhin, Glazunov, Zakharov, Obraztsova… Now only a few are alive: St. Patriarch Kirill, Resin, Tsereteli and me, a sinner.

It was under Alexy II and with his active participation that on May 13–16, 2000, the Council of Bishops adopted the Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, where the spiritual foundations of the idea of ​​Russian nationalism were laid and justified (taking into account the works of Ilyin, Solovyov, Berdyaev, Tyutchev, Danilevsky, etc. .); relationship between church and state; Orthodox morality in society and family; approach to the relationship between formal law and the moral content of law, etc. Much of this document is being implemented in politics now, and not all of it is fully implemented, although it is still relevant today.

The format of the article does not allow us to provide even more evidence in favor of the statement of the famous Russian philosopher A.F. Losev: “It was in vain that scientists and philosophers abandoned the concept of fate and replaced it with the concept of causality. This is helplessly tucking your nose under your own wings and being afraid to look life directly in the eyes. Fate is an absolutely real, absolutely vital category… And only fate controls us, not anyone else” (“Dialectics of Myth”, St.-Fri., 2018).

The fate of St. Patriarch Alexy II is only a confirmation of the phenomenon of fate. He would have turned 95 next year.