Recently I was blessed to be in the presence of the myrrh-streaming Hawaiian Iveron icon of the Mother of God at a service at the historic Orthodox cathedral in Mayfield, Pennsylvania. The Cathedral Priest Nathaniel Sorochka pointed out that deniers of God would have difficulty with the icon as a sign of God’s love to His Church. Indeed, such wonder-working icons are signs of God’s care for His Church that are beyond secular knowledge and boundaries.

Madeline L’Engle, an Anglican writer, in her classic A Wrinkle in Time described how the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but is to fold the paper so that the two dots are atop one other. In a similar way, Orthodox Christianity, with its combined apophatic and cataphatic aspects, is more akin in a secular analogy to quantum physics than to Newtonian physics. This applies to traditional Orthodox Christian approaches to ecumenism as well. There are boundaries, they are mystical, and they supersede worldly rationalism, such as the signs of the myrrh-streaming icons around the world in Orthodox churches.

Ecumenists may say there is a kind of natural law outside any historical Church, which to one degree or another they deny, that justifies a radical interfaith relation. However, as Reader Herman Engelhardt noted, natural law in Orthodoxy is the spark of God’s love in each human heart, and that is nurtured in identity most deeply in our Lord’s Church. Ecumenists seek other identities—racial, ethnic, cultural, sexual, religious, ideological—in order to justify an intermingling that must be superficial and ultimately demonic in seeking to erase His Church.

Indeed, an Orthodox approach to ecumenism exposes its paradox, that it inherently relates to what is called the modern heresy of ethnophyletism or phyletism, the exalting of one’s own kind, ethnically or otherwise in terms of fallen human categories of identities, which in a godless sense have become more central to 21st-century global ideologies.

But these two things politically so to speak appear antithetical. For example, those who might identify as “progressive” often embrace forms of secular ecumenism that cross traditional boundaries, while rejecting what they decry as phyletism, as a reactionary form of religious nationalism, racism, or patriarchal heteronormativity.

But Father Peter Heers in a 2022 article noted that today’s 21st-century version of the heresy of ecumenism, related to the spread of the global religion of the Anti-Christ (denying His historical Incarnation and His establishment of an historical Church), links up with secular identitarianism that has become so culturally prevalent this century in the “global West.” The latter includes today aggressive racialism and sexual identity theories developed in so-called wokeism and progressivism, which also find expression in extreme right-wing cultural politics of secular identity as well. By taking up the cause of essentialist identities, racial, religious, cultural, or sexual, a potential division occurs in the view of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, a fissure, recognizing divisions and even favoring some above the other, while engaging in so-called interfaith mixings, outside of the Orthodox Church, among favored other identities. All this involves modern postmodern essentialisms rather than old localist chauvinisms, seeking global hookups as it were, and tends to run outside or beyond 20th-century organizational venues for ecumenism such as the World Council of Churches.

Father Peter writes: “Ecumenism as a unification movement ironically seeks to overcome the scandal of division by denying the “scandal of the particular” – the Incarnation. Instead of crucifying their intellect on the cross of this scandal – that Christ entered and continues within history in a particular time and place, being mysteriologically- incarnationally ‘here’ and not ‘there’ – the uninitiated and rationalist followers of Jesus seek a theanthropic Body in their image: “divided in time,” in search of a fullness which they imply exists only on the heavenly plane. They see the Church as divided on the historical plane, as limited by the heavy hand of history. They see as Church identifiers not primarily the exclusive marks of oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity taken together, but rather the externals which “already unite,” such as the water of baptism (whether sprinkled, poured or immersed), the rites of the Liturgy, the belief in Christ’s divinity or the common text of Holy Scripture. It matters little that such externals, and indeed much more, were possessed by ancient heretics such as the Monophysites or Iconoclasts and were never seen as sufficient to produce any sort of “partial communion” or “already existing unity.” Neither does it seem to faze them that “the demons believe and tremble” and thus “unity in belief in Christ’s divinity” would necessarily include the demons.” He argues that this is an ecclesiological Nestorianism that divides between the Church above and the invisible fragmented Church on earth. But I would add that this ecumenism is also an ecclesiological Monophysitism, and maybe primarily so, because of its ultimate exultation of the individual self-will blasphemously to be divine, not through theosis or self-emptying in Christ, but through sinful self-assertion that objectifies and makes an idol out of the self.”

Father Peter continues, “Only when one understands that the phyletists identify the Theanthropic Body of Christ with their language and their culture can he begin to grasp why they prefer to lose their very own children and let their parish die with them, rather than change one iota of these transitory aspects (Matt. 24:35). Far from being enemies or correctives of each other, ecumenism and phyletism are rather two sides of the same coin of secularism. Both deny the catholicity of the One Church and both seek to recognize in its place a “divided” Church, whether it be along ethnic or denominational lines. Both reduce the Church to the sociological and historical level, placing it at the service of the fallen world as opposed to the service of man’s salvation from, and the overcoming of, the world, according to the words of the Lord: “[B]e of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (Jn. 16:33).”

This relates to multiculturalism but also to pansexualism. For although ecumenism is accepting of different cultural approaches supposedly to God, those who take up the ecumenist heresy also tend to be welcoming and accepting of pansexual ideology that there are multiple sexualities beyond biblical tradition, and accommodate them. In both aspects, of cultural and sexual identities, these come to dominate the infected religious communities. In this paper I want to explore this phenomena through the eyes of two Orthodox Christians, one a saint-martyr, and the other a famous film-maker. They are the Russian Hieromartyr Hilarion Troitsky, and in particular his article “There is no Christianity Outside the Church,” and also the later Soviet-era film director Andrei Tarkovsky, and his classic art film Andrei Rublev.

First, let me observe that the difference between the particular and the universal is resolved in Orthodoxy through a sense of the spiritual sobornost of the Church. That term, in Slavonic meaning catholicity, means universal in the sense of solidarity rather than just spatial, and was developed by the Russian philosopher Aleksei Khomiakov in the 19th century from medieval Slavonic usage. The term is worth examining because of the distinction it makes in effect between the early Orthodox sense of the Church overlapping with the oikumene or inhabited world, as in the title of the Ecumenical Patriarch, versus modern ecumenism. Sobornost means a spiritual gathering or mystical catholicity, related to the term for cathedral or council, both called a sobor, as a fractal assembly of the universal Body of Christ. Contrasted with the meanings of sobornost are parallel secular ideas of unity in modernism. These included notably the Communist neologism of  partiinost („partyness“ seeking freedom in the Party, rather than God); the Nazi claim to false Darwinian racial unity; and the totalitarian „universal ethos“ of „survive at any cost“ described by Solzhenitsyn as pertinent also to Western capitalism. Marx’s „scientific“ definition of freedom as „conscious, rational control over economic and social forces“ differed from the ancient sensibility in sobornost of oikonomia, or operation of grace as otherworldly natural law, defining freedom as generosity through emptying one’s self in Christ.

Analogously, Indo-European roots of the term free are cognate with friend, and involve a sense of generosity rather than self-assertion. In such distinctions can be seen the distinction between sobornost in the Church and a worldly ecumenism outside the Church, related to a sense of being free in the Church and of being free in the secular world. Today’s heresy of ecumenism rejects what it considers the particularism of Jesus Christ and His Church for its sense of universalism, seeing Jesus as potentially one of a pantheon of world teachers including figures such as Mohammed and Buddha and even Tolstoy and Angela Davis and so on. However this ecumenist sense of universalism is based on a secular sense of multiple ethnic and national and worldly religious or ideological and sexual identities placed above the Incarnation of Christ and the historic Orthodox Church.

So it is particularist in its own way, organized around a particular sense of fragmented identities in a pluralistic vision of human nature different from the biblical tradition of a shared human nature. The controversial Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin has described (in his translated study Martin Heidegger) a tendency in Western ontology to emphasize the particular as the universal but in the sense of apideas in place of persons, a virtual reality such as the notion of a global economic, sexual, or revolutionary system.

Consider the upside-down bipolar sense of mingled particularism and universalism at work in the global technocratic system today that Orthodox writer Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine.” Catholicism is centered on the secular state and place of the Vatican. Judaism on the secular but Jewish state of Israel. American has its own watered down Protestant sense of a civil religion of exceptionalism tied to its geographical entity. Islam has Mecca. All have their global networks connecting with Kingstorth’s “Machine” system.

Now for the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Orthodoxy, Israel is the Church, the Body of Christ. The Ecumenical Patriarchate may sometimes have been fixated on the Phanar, but that is not the center of Orthodoxy. Every Church is the fractal center, as the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, is brought forth through the royal doors. Yet ecumenism today as a heretical blending of faiths emanates in the spirit of Anti-Christ from every one of the other exceptionalist adaptation of centers or places mentioned. St. Hilarion sought to set the growing heresy of ecumenism straight for his early 20th-century readers, even as Bolshevism spread in Russia. “Even now, as when [the devil] tempted Christ in the wilderness,” St. Hilarion wrote, “[he] employs the aid of Scripture to prove that Christianity can indeed be separated from the Church” (Bible, Church, History, 332).

But how can you separate Christianity from the Incarnation and from the Body of Christ? It is not possible, in fact. St. Hilarion adds that in modern times, “there is a sort of indefinite Christianity, and not even Christianity, but a general, abstract religion” (333). In this, he says, there are many seekers, many who would learn, but who would not root themselves in the actual Church, and instead wander. This is what our Lord warned against in the messages to the Churches in Revelation, the synagogue of Satan that is not really of the Jews, but is a vague and occult-leaning Deism or agglomerating sense of the divine without the Church and ultimately without the Incarnation. The Evangelist John warns in an Epistle that to deny that Christ has come in the flesh is the spirit of Anti-Christ, and that extends into denial of the historical and visible Church as the Body of Christ. As St. Hilarion wrote to a Protestant world ecumenist leader in the opening phase of what became the World Council of Churches, “the Church is not a school of philosophy. She is a new mankind, a new grace-filled organism of love. She is the Body of Christ”  (487).

Some of these issues come to the fore in specific ways today in Orthodoxy around the world. For example, a recent online presentation by the Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate indicated that, to quote, “Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox leaders took a major step toward healing a 1,600‑year division when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew welcomed Pope Tawadros II of the Coptic Orthodox Church to the Phanar for a celebration of the Divine Liturgy on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women at the Patriarchal Church of Saint George. Both hierarchs called for renewed commitment to unity between their traditions.” Late last year, the Archons also expressed support for efforts announced at the ecumenical celebration in Turkey of the anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea to develop a shared date for Easter between Orthodox and Catholics and Protestants, restoring “that full communion of faith, fraternal accord and sacramental life which existed among them during the first thousand years of the life of the Church.’” Issues of relations between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental and Coptic Churches are especially fraught with controversy today, but so is what seems an accelerated drive by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Vatican to gloss over boundaries.

Yet in both cases, to do so would ignore what St. Hilarion discusses as the Body of Christ as the Orthodox Church, and the witness of Church Councils, saints, and the Creed. St. Hilarion even held such boundaries to be more important than the issue of Sergianism that in his day brought division between the persecuted remnant of the Moscow Patriarchate and the new Russian Church Abroad, as a result of Bolshevik efforts to eliminate or control faith in the Soviet Union. For St. Hilarion prior to his martyrdom it was more important to uphold the Church even when potentially in error under Communism, which he opposed. Likewise he said acts of oikonomia such as variations in practices of baptizing or chrismating or accepting heterodox or schismatic candidates into the Orthodox Church could exist so long as they were based in a clear understanding of that Church as the Church, the Body of Christ, exclusively as it were.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Rublev, which originally was made in 1966 but was edited in several versions through 1973, affords a view of the life of the iconographer saint of the title in a prologue and eight short film stories plus an epilogue, which convey a picture of medieval Russia. The prologue portrays a sense of technology as an expression of pride and downfall, such as the Tower of Babel and the modern global Machine in Kingsnorth’s term. Technology and pride along with Utopianism are modern companions of ecumenism.

The hot-air balloon in the opening of the film seeks to rise above the Church only to have the adventurer crash in the end. The first of the eight short stories involves a jester satirizing the social order, who returns in the end to remind all of the foibles of human nature and systems. There are segments about jealousy and mentoring among the iconographers that reflect this as well. In and among all the sections we see symbols of nature, of Tarkovsky’s basic sense of life in Creation, especially horses. Likewise, a pagan celebration suggests such forces of nature at work in fallen human nature. The segment on painting a mural of the Last Judgment in Church involves Andrei Rublev’s reservations about even aspects of human religious themes, and how he opts instead to portray a feast representing the Second Coming and presumably the Eucharist symbolized mystically. The raid by the forces of revenging Tartars and a Russian faction combined suggest that more than nationality is at work in sinful human nature. Rublev’s vow of silence and abandonment of iconography last until a miraculous crafting of a bell. The film ends with an epilogue showing Rublev’s iconography in color, led by his famous Trinity icon.

What do all these segments in the film have to do with ecumenism? First, they again raise doubt about technological power, hubris, and utopianism. They suggest a shared fallen human nature that involves all those tendencies, and which wrecks chiliastic aspirations that often accompany ecumenism. The forces of nature symbolized by the horses are a life force framing human life but they cannot themselves produce the art and spirituality that live in the Church, and in fallen human nature such forces of nature are destructive. Thus, the premises of ecumenism, which basically are utopian in nature, the desire to be inclusive of all views while taking seriously as particular realities also politically privileged ethnic, national, and sexual identities promoted as transcending our humanity, are ill-advised.

Yet the spotlighting of Rublev’s desire to craft an icon of a feast to depict the Second Coming, and the final highlighting in color of his most famous icon the Trinity among others, illustrate the sobornost within the Church of hidden unity, not a secular utopian ecumenism. In all this, perhaps the aftermath of the Tartar-Russian raid on the Church in Vladimir, with its iconography apparently left in ruins, disheartening Rublev, symbolizes the way the film dismisses any modern ecumenist worldview. For as Rublev in the film mourns the ruin, the vision of the dead Theophanes, his mentor, admires the beauty of a surviving icon of the Mother of God on a wall of the wrecked Church. He then notes that “there is nothing more terrible than snow in a temple, is there?” The distinctive quality and beauty of the Church and her symbolism are maintained against the forces of fallen human nature and the forces of the natural world. Sobornost is hidden unity coming forth from within the Church, as in the Holy Spirit blooming in the Church at Pentecost and continuing in her mysteries and Body, not from some external abstract supposedly natural matrix, which is a chimera and prelest or delusion.

In the film, from Rublev’s love and devotion to both faith and humanity comes the end of his period of silence and a return again to iconography, stemming from the miraculous sign of the bell being made against all odds but through the faithful determination of the bell maker in which God alone can work out a solution. Yet something beautiful is made for worship in the Church. And the love and beauty within the Church add the further elements of sobornost, they are transfiguring as Rublev recognizes, and as the iconography in the epilogue attests. Rublev’s icon of the Trinity featured there itself exemplifies sobornost mystically, by the love shown between the Persons of the Trinity symbolized there at the Hospitality of Abraham. This is typified by the self-emptying love in Christ called for by our Lord’s New Commandment, to love one another as He loved us, that is to love our neighbor more than ourselves. This is the ethos of sobornost. But it comes from within the mystery of the Trinity manifest in the Church as the Body of Christ. It does not come from without, from fallen nature and external concepts and matrices subject to demonic delusion in the world. A dimension apart and yet with us, sobornost is not to be hoarded or surrendered or wasted, but to be shared in the hidden unity of solidarity in Christ. This is seen in the beauty of both St. Hilarion’s Orthodox ecclesiology and in the cinematic iconographics of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.

Now I will add one controversial final addendum here. I mentioned the problems spiritually with the Vatican, Hellenism in the Phanar, Zionism in Israel, American and Islamic exceptionalisms centered on Washington and Mecca, and how their selective particularisms (attachment to a particular place in alignment with a spiritual worldview) in our era can feed the myths and delusions of the modern heresy of ecumenism in the so-called Global West, which becomes a version of the Tower of Babel.

How does Russia as the largest Orthodox Christian nation fit in with such exceptionalism’s, or not, in the Orthosphere online and in the realities of life including the many horrific tragedies of the War in Ukraine? First, there is the obvious externally visible fact that Russia is literally at war currently with the global West in Ukraine, related to its promotion with China and India and other countries of a multipolarism at odds with the Western globalism that has been the political accompaniment of ecumenism.

In part of this, Russia as a consciously identifying Orthodox Christian culture has set its opposition to the global West on the standard of Orthodoxy including opposition to the racial, ethnic, and sexual particularisms reflected in the diversity and woke-isms of globalistic culture. This too is at a remove from the origins of ecumenism. I will return to the paradoxes of this position, in relation to Russian nationalism, in a moment.

But first I will digress briefly on a tangent in history related to origins of the global West in the 20th century, and the link between the particular and the global in the case of the “Anglo-Saxons,” i.e. the British Empire and America. We can see how, in the secular realm, heresy, ambiguity of pansexualism, ecumenism, and a type of phyletism mixed in one case study of the transition of leadership of the so-called global West as it emerged in the 20th century, from British to American empires. Some of this was managed culturally, though not necessarily directly conspiratorially, by what one historian has called the Milner Group. The Milner Group of elite English influencers was heir to the efforts and partially the fortune of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes, who in turn had been influenced both by John Ruskin and an active will to power starting in the South African diamond mines. The Milner Group helped start the Round Table groups and their mother ship known as Chatham House, including their American offshoot the Council on Foreign Relations. In the 1920s a history of the group describes it as heavily influenced by the Anglo-American cult of Christian Science, a Unitarian gnostic and occultish group akin to Freemasonry. From the particular attachment to the Anglo race, which for many Christian Scientists was regarded as descended from the lost tribes of Israel and bearing a transcendent role in world history, came advocacy for the Commonwealth of Nations, the special relationship between the UK and America, and the globalist culture undergirding the emergence of international and trans-Atlantic groups such as first the League of Nations, then the UN, the World Bank, NATO, and IMF etc. after World War II, up to the era of the World Economic Forum. There was also an ambiguous indirect pansexualism among key leaders in this network of Anglo elites, going back to Ruskin but including Rhodes and also Lord Lothian, a leader in the Round Table network who became British Ambassador to the US. It all involved an openness to cross-cultural and cross-faith influences with non-Christian religions of the Middle East and East, while ironically advancing a privileged Anglo-American elite network, while transgressing boundaries of any Anglican or other Western Christian ecclesiastical tradition.

To return to the case of Russia, and how I think it is different in nuance at least from an historical example of phyletism related to ecumenism as in the Anglo-Saxon case: In Russia’s war in Ukraine can easily be seen a destructive particularism, and potentially an ethnic identification with spirituality, accusable of phyletism. Even so, elements of Slavophilism point toward a more universal commitment to Orthodox Christianity Pentecostal in spirit, whether by identification and past alliance with the Christians of the Middle East especially in Syria, early support for missionary work in North America, or manning the battlements against the sexual incursions of LGBTQ ideology, or versus the disguised Eurocentrism at the heart of globalization and ecumenism. And the humiliation of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Bolshevik yoke, and its exile character, have been explored in the Christian existentialist philosophy of the Orthodox writer S.L. Frank, particularly in his work “The Fall of the Idols.” Frank wrote of a “strange love” of having a homeland that no longer exists.

Still, we are left with the horrors of the Ukraine War and the question of Russian nationalism or phyletism in that whole tragedy. The Orthodox Christian philosopher Ivan Ilyin in his book Resisting Evil by Force argued during the aftermath of the Russian Civil War and the start of the Red Terror of the anti-Christian Bolsheviks that violence was justified at times, and could be right even if not righteous, if done on behalf of the vulnerable and if repented of. This is seeing war through the lens of the Orthodox concept of the “Necessary War” developed in Byzantium, not the “Just War” idea of the crusading West. Can a war that is seen as necessary in defending an Orthodox Christian culture against an incursion into its heartland by the global West be indeed right if not righteous? There can be much disagreement about this. And how do Western manipulations and engagements with Ukraine before the war, and its geopolitical aspect as a “heartland” of historic Russia, enter into this or compare to American doctrines such as the Monroe (more recently dubbed “Don-roe”) Doctrine?

But at the same time all this suggests the nuance in the situation of Russia. If the “Third Rome,” as Russia was called in the Middle Ages for preserving Orthodox Christianity, can be subject to the same combination of globalism and ecumenism as America or the Vatican or the Phanar or Zionism or Islam, yet from an Orthodox Christian perspective the bottom line commitment there should be to the Church as the Body of Christ that has no particular worldly center. The presence of a Third Rome typing the New Jerusalem mystically can stand for something other than secular ecumenism, as in a focus for preserving the tradition of the monasticism of Optina and her legacy around the world today, and the exiled and humbled phronema of much Russian Orthodox spirituality worldwide. To the extent that is the case, then there is not necessarily a modern phyletism that is a precursor to ecumenism, or a nationalist ideology, but something else under the protecting veil ultimately of the Theotokos, as coming from the Church. The symphonia of Church and State symbolized in the Byzantine tradition of the double-headed eagle is not the Caesaro-Papism that emerged in the West, in the Vatican and in the Protestant state churches, despite the influence of the latter on Petrine Russia. Yet that distinction must be discerned and, again, if so, any violence and wrongs must still be deeply repented.

But all this still remains far from the postmodern crusading wars for democracy of the West, stimulated and extended and encouraged in Ukraine and in the Middle-east and elsewhere, economically and environmentally and technologically and covert also, for which the bloody hands of globalism and ecumenism go largely unrecognized and unrepented. Often such “Crusades” today carry on remotely and systemically, with high technology and global economic influence.

In all this, we should remember how the whole framework of modern definitions of “ethnophyletism” arguably involve a link between ethnocentrism and modern ecumenism. In the later 19th century the terminology of this modern heresy was arguably formed, according to some historians, by the Patriarchate of Constantinople asserting its ecumenical but also ethnic authority over the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. In that light, this Ur-charge of ethno-phyletism could be seen as an assertion of Hellenism, itself ethnocentric.

So this reminds us also that in discerning the connection between phyletism and ecumenism raised by Fr Peter as quoted at the beginning of this talk, we need to seek discernment, including self-reflection, for our own bias and sins. When accusing others of bias, our bias may also ironically feed ecumenism, based in objectified identities or idols that would fragment the true Church while claiming to integrate it into new global networks of spirituality.

In this again the clarity of the ecclesiology of Hieromartyr Hilarion and the beauty of the insightful art of Andrei Tarkovsky can both be helpful in our discernment of such delusions.

May the Lord give us wisdom and the strength of His love in this Pentecost Week. Amen!