Vladimir Maximenko

General Director

Strategic Culture Foundation

Ph.D. (History)

"The first man was created with a free will, with the authority over oneself. This freedom is the greatest Divine gift to the man."

St. Hieromartyr Methodius, Bishop of Patara

"A commandment was given to us... not because God did not know the future, but because He established the law of freedom."

St. Gregory the Theologian

"Christ... set us free by the holy baptism giving us the freedom to do good works if we wish..."

Venerable Abba Dorotheas

The 1 Oth World Russian People's Council took place in Moscow in April, 2006, its main result being the adoption of the Declaration

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of Human Rights and Dignity. The importance of this document presented on behalf of the "unique Russian civilization" lies in broadening the horizons of the debate on the criteria of universality of the Western concept of human rights.

Two postulates of the Declaration of Human Rights and Dignity are of fundamental significance: the assertion of the inherent plurality of civilizations within the global community and the concept of the religious origin of all cultures as "originating from God". These postulates are the major contribution of the World Russian People's Council with its Declaration to the current debate on human rights and liberties.

The human rights debate has been intensifying since the late XX century. It is paralleled by the discussions of the necessity to reform the UN which is the most universal organization of our epoch. The 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, The Final Declaration of the 1993 Regional Meeting for Asia and Latin America of the Second World Conference for Human Rights, and now the Declaration of Human Rights and Dignity of the 10th World Russian People's Council demonstrated that nowadays "the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" (mentioned in the Preamble of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights) must be confirmed in a more convincing way than it was in the XX century bipolar world.

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The starting point of the Declaration of the 10th World Russian People's Council is that, being motivated by the actual plurality of civilizations and cultures, it rejects the ideology of the "global civilization".

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The diversity of cultural and historic types in the world makes it impossible to accept the ideological thesis of "a global community" understood as a certain uniform phenomenon. As long as we give in to the enforcement of uniformity, the mission of speaking from the name of the "global community" will be monopolized by Western ideologues. As soon as we depart from the conformist worldview, the ideological uniformity of the world with only two roles for the nations - the West and the rest, the developed and the developing ones -vanishes. Instead, a diversity of peoples, cultures, civilizations, and systems of authority unfolds. Such plurality can be reduced to uniformity only in the framework of a totalitarian project.

Nowadays one must finally recognize that no civilization formed outside Western Europe and North America (the Chinese, the Indian, the Arab, the Iranian, and the Russian ones) followed the lead of the West to the extent of its own historical demise and assimilation by the Romano-Germanic European cultural type, no matter how fascinated by the West certain intellectual groups within these civilizations could have been. This by no means prohibited or prohibits intense interactions of cultures and a productive exchange of ideas.

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The millennium-long Russian religious belief in "the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten" and in His Church is the basis of the Russian civilization with its unique place among other cultural and historical types.

It is an axiom that culture stems from religion and is rooted in it. Even the culture of the secular ("post-Christian") West has a religious origin. Transferring knowledge over the horizon of the lifespan of even one generation requires being rooted in "the

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reality of the invisible" and believing in the existence of the unseen that provides a supreme sanction to human activities.

Archbishop John of San-Francisco (Prince DA Shahovskoy) wrote in the middle of the XX century that the genuine culture relates an individual to God and to the entire world and that this relationship is called religion.

The religious foundations of culture make it the nonhereditary memory of human societies and the non-biological mechanism of passing the knowledge about the rules or the Testament following which is the only way for an individual to preserve the qualities of a wise and social being. These rules in all cultures of all times essentially comprise prohibitions and directions. Being "cultured" means observing them.

In all civilizations the commandments (the testament) as a set of prohibitions and directions comprise the very core of sociality. A betrayal of "the covenant" is tantamount to dropping out of culture (for an individual) and to the termination of existence for a nation (for a community).

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Currently the Russian Church as the community of those who believe in Christ has to defend the "rights and liberties" of its members in two aspects.

First, the Church defends the freedom of religion from the aggressive and offensive ideology of the secular world. The May 18, 2006 Statement of the Moscow Patriarchate on the release of the Da Vinci Code movie (both the movie and the original book are a direct blasphemous insult to the fundamentals of the orthodox faith) states that the religious people's rights must be guaranteed

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like everybody else's and that the Church cannot ignore the need to protect the religious freedom of its multimillion flock.

Secondly, the Christian Church preserves the ideal of deification, of the transfiguration of a human being. The Church believes and teaches that God became Man to let a man with his free will become God. This is the LAW OF FREEDOM given to mankind two thousand years ago and sanctioned not legally but religiously, empowered by the man's orientation towards his Creator. Archbishop John of San-Francisco said that this is the basics of Christianity... - the civilian, social, and political freedoms are grounded in this belief in the high purpose of a human life. The derivative concepts of civilian, political, and social freedoms would have never got formed without this belief.

The laws of spiritual life are the same for different nations and epochs. According to the Declaration, "The eternal moral law has a solid foundation in the human soul, independent of one's culture, ethnic origin or life circumstances. This foundation is laid down by the Creator in human nature and manifested in human conscience". The discerning of two kinds of freedom discussed in the Declaration - the freedom as a worth unalienable from a person as the image of God from birth, and the freedom as dignity acquired by an individual when he or she lives in accord with God's will about oneself - is the basis of the Orthodox doctrine of freedom.

The two freedoms of an individual are the freedom with God and the freedom from God. The only position possible for a Christian, a position both moral and "pragmatic", is that of asserting the former freedom and limiting the latter one.

As much as the contemporary legal (secular) human rights concept not merely "affords" but even cultivates the freedom from God it becomes a threat to culture.

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* * *

Currently, the Russian society understands the further the more the relation between the Russian Orthodox culture and the two-millennium long UNIVERSAL tradition of the Apostolic Christianity. The Russian tradition with its "universalism" and openness to the world is profoundly modern. This is the position from which we argue with Europe on human rights and liberties.

From the historical point of view, the modern Western democracy with its ideology of natural rights and the legal "freedom of conscience" is a product of a revolution. Speaking precisely, it is the product of the "great" revolutions of the XVI-XIX centuries which destroyed altars and thrones and changed radically the face of the world of the Western Christianity.

The fact that there was no gap between the civilian and the state, the routine and the religious in the Russian civilization turns into a major advantage in the XXI century. The Russian tradition was formed by the "moral independence" of an individual freely open to God and by the spirit of "sobornost" - the togetherness of the society focused on the spiritual center of the national life.

The notion of the global community's not being identical to an alliance of North Atlantic countries or the European Union is also inherent in the Russian tradition. Rather, it is a planetary community of "all the members of the human family", as it is reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From this standpoint, the legal rights of a citizen, the religious and moral dignity of an individual, and the free self-determination of a nation are an indivisible entirety.

RA

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