A paper given at the third-annual Padeia Conference, Antiochian Village, Ascension season 7533 (2025).
In a famous scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev, the attacking Mongol-Tartars have destroyed the Church where St. Andrei Rublev had been working on iconography. He says he will never practice as an iconographer again.
His mentor the Greek Theophanes, who has reposed, appears to him in a vision, and tells him, “You are taking a great sin upon yourself.”
Theophanes tells the saint-to-be that he himself has had many of his iconostases burned, presumably as part of the Mongol invasion and occupation.
But there is more to the iconographer’s sense of sin and ruin. Rublev then confesses to killing a Russian man, apparently to prevent the abduction and presumable rape of a young woman.
“So, live between forgiveness and your own torment,” Theophanes tells him.
“As for your sin, the scripture has it, ‘Learn to do good, seek the truth, save the oppressed, protect an orphan. Then come and we shall judge between you, said the Lord. If thy sins be purple, then I shall whiten them.’”
Then, turning to look at a surviving panel from the ruined iconostasis of the Theotokos, Theophanes says, “Ah, how beautiful it is.”
After that acknowledgement of beauty, Theophanes turns and says, “it is snowing,” as he stretches out a hand to a snowflake coming down in the ruined temple whose roof is no more.
“There is nothing more terrible than snow in a temple, is there?” Theophanes asks the younger iconography. Then he vanishes.
This juxtaposition of beauty and destruction, of sin and beauty, is palpable in this scene from the film. It illustrates how Orthodoxy can be discussed in terms of Orthodox Christian existentialism, unconfused by reference to Kierkegard or Sartre.
Nihilism is described by Kevin Aho as one of the key elements in the amorphous meaning of the term existentialism. But in the case of two primary creative practitioners of an Orthodox existentialism—I include Tarkovsky here as in effect a crypto-Orthodox artist under Commnism, well as Fyodor Dostoevsky in literature–they display in effect a nihilism about nihilism, a practice of exposing the nihilism of supposed moral codes of their day.
As the late Orthodox bioethicist Herman Engelhardt noted, glossing St. Basil the Great, in Orthodoxy natural law is the spark of God’s love in each human heart. Orthodox natural law is not a legalistic matrix of either bourgeois values or communist-style ideology. Ultimately, it does not reject morality or meaning, but treats them in an experiential and apophatic way that is in practice anti-essentialist.
I will argue briefly here that Orthodoxy is able to do this because of its distinctive theology and ecclesiology, which include (i) the Essence-Energy distinction highlighting the uncreated nature of grace and emphasizing the ascetic path to theosis or oneness with God’s grace, (ii) the dynamic fullness of the apophatic essence of the Trinity as a mystery relationship of Three Persons in one Essence, and (iii) the ecclesiology of the Church as visible and historical yet offering mysteries rather than objectified ethics and merely symbolic rituals.
Put another way, Orthodox only of all the claimed 45,000 Christian denominations today offers both the historical and transcendent Jesus Christ as the Truth Who is a Person, rejecting the Arian and Monophysite tendencies alike of modern heresies and apostasy. That experience of Truth as a universal Person embedded in the apophatic mystery of the Trinity is both amazingly foreign and incredibly familiar at once. This offers a faith that can be made legible in the modern world as existentialist and rejecting religious convention.
The existentialist aspects of Orthodox practice can also be related to a specifically Orthodox type of panentheism, the sense of all being in God. I’ll argue here today that both the odd-seeming adjectives existentialist and panentheist in qualified ways can be useful for twenty-first century Orthodox apologetics in the global Anglophone world.
First, let’s consider the context for Tarkovsky’s film and what it subverts artistically.
The film was completed in 1966 but not released in the Soviet Union until 1971 due to censorship, and then only in a cut form mandated by the state. The fact that the film was made at all was due to some government nationalist myth-making in 1960. At that time, Soviet authorities had sponsored the 600th birthday of the iconographer and the opening of a museum of old Russian art under Rublev’s name. Although this involved a denatured sense of the iconographer as a proto-Soviet artistic nationalist, rather than an Orthodox Christian saint, this provided a cover of sorts for the making of the film.
Yet the atheistic persecution of the Church by the Soviets continued during the years in which the movie was first imagined and then brought to production. In 1962, a law was reiterated denying parents the right to raise their children in the faith, supported by ideological justification. In addition, between 1958 and 1966, the number of surviving registered churches in the Vladimir diocese that was the area where most of the film was made, decreased by 17 percent, with only 54 churches and monasteries left in a region that had been an historical center of Russian Orthodoxy. A similar decline in surviving Churches was seen in other areas, namely Moscow.
The Orthodox nihilism about nihilism in Tarkovsky’s work was directed in many ways toward this progressive system claiming to represent the inevitable improvement of human nature through technology and a scientific understanding of society, namely Communism. Yet in reality it led to tens of millions of death and a great culture of materialistic meaninglessness and oppression. The destroyers of churches in Tarkovsky’s time was the Soviet system, not the Mongols. The film symbolically linked both.
At the same time, lest we get too prideful in our condemnation of the Soviets, consider how today the law of Tarkovsky’s day not raise children in the faith has parallels in our own supposedly free world. In America today, public education largely retains a government-backed monopoly in which responsibility for raising children is given to professionals from radicalized secular training. Education departments are known at universities to be among the most anti-Christian on already aggressively secular campuses. Parental rights continue to be weakened to the point that children can be medically abused to supposedly change genders without parental knowledge or consent, by professionals outside the home. In addition, the cultural attitude in the West favors the idea that children should reach adulthood before seriously choosing a faith, a kind of secularist Anabaptism that I have witnessed firsthand. Also, while Tarkovsky’s film was cut by Soviet censors, when it was released in the U.S., it was further cut due to commercial reasons. Pressures of corporate influence were in effect a source of control here.
Events in the US at the time of the film’s release also did not bode well for the future. In 1966, the Church of Satan opened in San Francisco. Time Magazine headlined the question “Is God Dead?” on its cover. Divisions over the Vietnam War and civil rights for African-Americans were rising. Also, the “Small World” ride opened at Disneyland, providing an anthem of sorts for neoliberal globalization.
In a longer view, it had been exactly a century before the 1964 green light from Soviet authorities for production to go forward on the film that Fyodor Dostoevsky had published his famous work, considered by some to be an existentialist classic, Notes from the Underground.
Dostoevsky’s novella, which set the stage for his major novels toward the end of his life, took place in St. Petersburg, which it described as the most artificial of cities. Both his work and Tarkovsky’s seriously subvert the questionable human social system of their day. For Dostoevsky it is the Westernized and modernizing Saint Petersburg, for Tarkovsky it is the Soviet Union, but both highlight the nihilism inherent in modernity and in the Western objectified and self-centered ontology that infected both Victorian-era industrialization and Marxism.
The nihilism in both systems exposed by the work of the Orthodox artists Tarkovsky and Dostoevsky include the normative principles of the Soviet system that Solzhenitsyn wrote about in his section on “The Soul and Barbed Wire” in The Gulag Archipelago. These three principles have also analogies in the capitalist West. They are, first, survive at any cost. Second, only material results matter. And third, operate within a permanent lie or virtual reality of society, that is like the matrix of the film of that same name. These norms are all strangely applicable both to modern communism, capitalism, as well as fascism, the major systems of the modern era.
In Tarkovsky’s film I briefly mentioned the juxtaposition of beauty and destruction in the scene in the ruined Church. We see this edginess also in Dostoevsky’s most famous and arguably most Orthodox novel, The Brothers Karamazov, as well. There, the intellectual and agnostic brother Ivan raises the question of why God allows children to suffer in discussion with his brother Alexei, a novice monastic. In the novel we see graphically illustrated the suffering of children in dysfunctional families and a brutally uncaring society. However, Ivan’s abstract concern with the suffering of children is never answered in any logical way by Alexei. Instead, it is most directly addressed by the way in which Alexei expresses heartfelt compassion toward the children of the village when they are challenged by the illness and then death of one of their number, and their sense of their own sinful participation in events leading to the death. For as Dostoevsky’s character Elder Zosimas notes, as did his Bishop Tikhon in Demons, we are all partly responsible for each other’s sins. The modern abstraction of human experience is seen as a great sin. There is or should not be any vapid sense of separation of the proper law-abiding citizen from the sins of our fallen state and systems that amplify it. Here again we see Orthodox nihilism about nihilism, so to speak.
In Orthodoxy, natural law is not an abstraction compatible with either bourgeoise manners as in the model of Victorian England for many liberals in the West, the so-called scientific laws of Marxism under Communism, or the supposed laws of Darwinism influencing both with the myth of technological progress. Instead, as mentioned, natural law in Orthodoxy, focuses on “the spark of God’s love in each human heart.” That dynamic, experiential, and personal yet transcendent sense of natural law in Orthodox arguably distinguishes Orthodox Christianity as a kind of Christian existentialism.
The Russian Orthodox exile philosopher SL Frank has also been described in non-Orthodox circles as a Christian existentialist, and his work helps explore that aspect of Orthodoxy as legible to the outside world. Frank’s early book The Falling of the Idols marked his response to the emergence of the Bolshevik totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union, which led to his own forced exile on the philosophers’ ships. Because of his background as a Jewish convert to Russian Orthodox Christianity before the Revolution, he subsequently was also a refugee in effect again from Nazi Germany and then in Nazi-occupied France.
He wrote that, “All the idols which we had served enthusiastically and the service of which gave meaning to our lives—all these idols have lost their enchantment and cannot attract our souls, no matter how many people around us continue to worship them. All we have left is the thirst for life—for full, living, and profound life… ultimate and profound demands and desires of our spirit, which we do not know how to satisfy or even how to express.” In the book, he had outlined the fallen idols sacred to liberal intellectuals as the idol of the revolution, the idol of politics, the idol of culture, and the idol of moral idealism. All had fallen for him as he stood an exile in the West, which in many ways still adhered to those idols.
“All the same,” he concludes, “[a resulting] living religious morality is profoundly different in its inner structure from the dead morality of duty and the ‘moral ideal.” “We understand… our share of the blame in [our homeland’s] collapse, in the spread of blindness and satanical malice; we are full of love and pity for the concrete, living soul of our nation, fallen now, just as we ourselves are… it is an arduous, purgatorial path for humanity; and perhaps it is not excessively conceited to believe that we, Russians, who have been in the deepest depths of hell and who have tasted, like no one else all the bitter fruits of the worship of the abomination of Babylon – that we, Russians, will be the first to pass through this purgatory, and that we will help others to find their way to spiritual resurrection.”
We can only hope that, if not true of course in any narrow ethnic or national sense, it may be that the diaspora of Russian Orthodox Christianity in the past century may contribute, with God’s mercy, to that end of which SL Frank speaks, from his own “existential” situation in exile.
The writings of Solzhenitsyn certainly add to this Christian existential sensibility of Orthodox experience in the past century, as do the experiences of Greek and Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians, and even of those Orthodox who as a minority in the West fact an underlying hostile culture. In it, as Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of blessed memory noted, “fun” has become the central virtue perversely, and Disneyland and Disney World the Meccas of our technocracy.
Apophaticism and ascetic struggle contribute to what I have described as an Orthodox Christian existential sensibility. They relate also to the other four elements of existentialism outlined by Aho, besides nihilism. Those other elements are personal engagement with struggles rather than abstract detachment, the idea that existence precedes essence, the way in which human experience is distinguished by freedom and an authenticity beyond social conformity, together with a rejection of moral legalism for what could be called a morality of the heart.
All those elements, filtered through the lens of Orthodoxy, arguably relate to the fundamental aspects of the Tradition already mentioned. That Tradition involves Orthodox Ecclesiology in which, as St. Cyprian of Carthage put it, to have God as Father you must first have the Church as Mother, and that is the Church of Pentecost of Apostolic origins, the historical and liturgical continuing Orthodox Church, not the invisible so-called church of the heresy of modern ecumenism, which fades into pantheism. Again, while the tag of existentialism should not be exaggerated and made exclusive in describing Orthodox Tradition, it can in a qualified sense be helpful to making its legible to those in modernity today.
Finally, I’ll argue here for another dubious term that nonetheless can be related to that of existentialist, of potential use in Orthodox apologetics today. That is panentheism.
John Culp has outlined how panentheism is a constructed 19th-century philosophical and religious term from Greek roots pan, all, en, meaning in, and theism. Thus, he writes, “Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world. While panentheism offers an increasingly popular alternative to classical theism, both panentheism and classical theistic systems affirm divine transcendence and immanence. But, classical theistic systems by prioritizing the difference between God and the world reject any influence by the world upon God while panentheism affirms the world’s influence upon God. On the other hand, while pantheism emphasizes God’s identity with the world, panentheism maintains the identity and significance of the non-divine.”
Firstly, such a definition of panentheism indicates its distinction from the modern pantheism that is so common to our technocratic secular world today and its loose and often demonic spirituality, which as Hieromonk Seraphim Rose noted 50 years ago in his book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future draws us closer to the global religion of the Anti-Christ.
Yet at the same time, as Father Seraphim and his editor Abbot Damascene Christiansen have noted, panentheism has also been a problematic term used in New Age movements in recent times, with a genealogy from Romantic Deism. Culp’s definition mentioned earlier indicates this problem when he states that panentheism unlike theism “affirms the world’s influence upon God” while maintaining “the identity and significance of the non-divine.” It is that alleged world’s influence on God that is a problem with the term for Orthodox Christians. That is reflected in how modern non-Orthodox panentheists contend that God can be considered within time through their definition of panentheism.
But, again, Orthodox Christian apologetics has the resources in our tradition to offer its own re-definition of the term panentheism, or all in God, to baptize it in effect. Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev has noted in his exegetical writing how Creation can be regarded as in Christ. He uses the scriptural texts of Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 to illustrate this. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” In this he said we are led spiritual to understand the Logos, God, as the Arche or beginning. This is not to confuse or diminish in any way the sense of Creation from nothing that is basic to Orthodoxy. However, it does indicate the mystery of how the logoi of the Logos, or the words of the Word, shape and direct, while also potentially redeem, Creation. As St. Maximus the Confessor wrote, the logoi and the Logos are one. Those logoi of the Logos are the articulations in effect of the uncreated divine energies distinctive to Orthodox theology. As such, they also again reflect the dynamic nature of Orthodox natural law, describable not as an analogy of being, but an energy of being, in effect. The Essence-Energy distinction enables us to regard Creation and anthropology as immersed in and potentially engaging with God’s uncreated grace directly, while uncreated grace expresses the full Trinity as a whole, unhobbled by the dualistic filioque, which had encouraged a false individualistic abstract rationalism in the West. The uncreated energies of God also conjoin in the mysteries of the Church as visible, the Orthodox Church as the Body of Christ, and also the Bride of Christ, mystically.
Apart from Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev’s exegesis of Genesis 1 in relation to John 1, perhaps the best example of a proof text, so to speak, for an Orthodox Christian sense of panentheism is found in Acts when the Apostle Paul says, at the Areopagus, of God that “in Him we live and move and have our being.”
So, an Orthodox Christian panentheism can be understood, once again not exclusively, and in a qualified use of the term, in a way that may lend legibility to the difference of Orthodoxy for moderns. This relates to existentialism in that panentheism involves not the world influencing God, but God’s willings or uncreated energies as grace in the world, involving the mysteries of His visible Church. Some holy Orthodox elders have made the suggestion, humbly in recognition of the mystery, that perhaps God extends the symbolic 1,000-year reign of Christ through His Church by the prayers of the righteous to help mercifully over the possibility of salvation to more in repentance across time. If so, however, this is not the world influencing God, but an expression of God’s mercy and economia, understood in Orthodoxy also as synergy of human effort and divine grace in salvation. Still, the presence and embrace and potential connectivity of the uncreated energies of God with human experience recall the encounter with beauty as well as destruction in the ruined Church in Tarkovsky’s film.
What could be called aspects of Orthodox Christian existentialism and panentheism relate to the upcoming Feast of Pentecost and the way in which Orthodoxy views the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and Pentecost, in effect on a continuum of redemption and salvation. Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky of blessed memory added to this the compassion and self-emptying of His human nature shown by Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, a moment again of heightened modern legibility for existentialist and panentheist understandings.
St. Gregory Palamas in a homily on Pentecost wrote, “Why did He [the Holy Spirit[ appear in the form of tongues? It was to demonstrate that He shared the same nature as the Word of God, for there is no relationship closer than that between word and tongue. It was also because of teaching, since teaching Christ’s gospel needs a tongue full of grace. But why fiery tongues? Not just because the Spirit is consubstantial with the Father and the Son—and our God is fire, a fire consuming wickedness—but also because of the twofold energy of the apostles’ preaching, which can bring both benefit and punishment. … The text says tongues like fire… Why did the tongues appeared to be divided among them?… Each one obtained different gifts, lest anyone should suppose the grace given to the saints by the Holy Spirit was theirs by nature.”
Of the Apostles, “He revealed them as heavenly lights set above the whole world, who had the word of eternal life, and through them He illuminaed all the earth. If fron one burning lamp someone lights another than another from that one, and so on in succession, he has light continuously.”
The Orthodox Church is in a sense always Pentecostal in her mysteries, always on the edge so to speak, as indicated in the common American Orthodox saying by those who have been baptized into the apostolic succession of the Church’s conciliar hierarchy: “I have been saved, I am being saved, I hope to be saved.” Saint Philaret of Moscow put it this way: “All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamonds; above them is the abyss of the divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness.” Vladimir Lossky adds, “The nothingness of creatures is as mysterious and unimaginable as the divine Nothingness of apophatic theology.” Yet in Orthodoxy, it is within that mystery that we find that even in the tragedies of the fallen world in God we “live and move and have our being.”