Pope Francis’s Russia
With all his soul, the pope wished to rescue the face of Russia's "mad holiness", that of its monks and pilgrims, its great artists and musicians, its writers capable of opening horizons of true universal union. That is why he often quoted Dostoevsky. Now, in his death, he promises us that in this inextricable inner struggle between good and evil, the face of Christ is always revealed in the human soul.
The heads of state and representatives of almost all the countries of the world are honouring Pope Francis today by stressing the universality of his role and his own personality, which enabled him throughout his life to look beyond the usual path of ecclesiastical activities, to see the most forgotten and farthest regions.
What made him a point of reference for all were not only his numerous apostolic journeys, but his words and his meetings, his ability to communicate with everyone without too many formalities, looking at people directly, whatever their social levels and backgrounds, in the age of fluid and digital worldwide connectivity.
At his funeral, Russia’s Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova will stand in for President Vladimir Putin, who will not attend, while Metropolitan Anthony (Sevryuk) will represent the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill (Gundyaev), whom he embraced fraternally in Havana in 2016.
Putin cannot risk being arrested under an international mandate, and Kirill cannot sit alongside his main rival in the Orthodox world, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew (Archontonis).
Yet Russia is a strong presence in the commemoration ceremony of the late pontiff, since it has been a place that fascinated the pontiff throughout his life, for its history and culture, even before he had to consider Church geopolitics.
As Putin's great ideologues repeatedly put it, as has Kirill himself, not only ethnic Russians and peoples historically linked to Russia are part of the "Russian world", but so are all people who admire the greatness of Eurasia, who respect Russia’s religious and cultural traditions, appreciate its language and literature and share its inspiration of sobornost, the universal union of the peoples and lands of East and West.
In this sense, Pope Francis was undoubtedly the pope of the Russian world (Русский Мир, Russkij Mir), certainly not in the warlike and apocalyptic version of wartime orthodox Putinism, but in the recognition of an important approach to the tragedy of the human existence, dispersed in boundless regions and continually led towards the excesses of good and evil, often seeking good through evil.
Russian iconography, a Byzantine legacy, presents an extreme version of the "reversed perspective", one that finds the vanishing point not in the distant horizon, but in the soul of the viewer, who is transfigured by the light of the sacred image of Christ, the Mother of God and the saints.
This is how the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio proclaimed the Gospel, from the extremities to the heart and the "end of the world" to the See of Peter, the place of gathering all the longings and expectations of man. It is the main trait of the much sought-after "Russian idea", which surprises precisely because of the complete reversal of historical movements and passages.
It is not only sacred paintings or the solemn liturgies, experienced with a pathos unknown to the Byzantine fathers themselves, but it is the entire history of Russia that forces us to find ourselves again after being irretrievably lost, like the "least of our fellow human beings" to whom the pope has always tried to turn.
Just as Kievan Rus was annihilated by the invasion and yoke of the Tatar-Mongols, so imperial Muscovy clashed with its different souls in the endless war with Poland and with the whole of Europe, up to the current war in Ukraine, in the ruinous attempt to conquer Turkey as far as Jerusalem and in the distortion of every spiritual ideal in the atheist revolution of the 20th-century "Soviet yoke".
The 30 years that followed the collapse of the communist empire have once again revealed themselves to be a reversed vortex of history, reducing the reborn Orthodox religion to an instrument of destruction and tensions at the end of the world, back to the tragedies of the past.
All this was very clear in the mind of Pope Francis, who wished with all his soul to rescue the face of Russia's "mad holiness," that of its monks and pilgrims, its great artists and musicians, its writers capable of opening horizons of true universal union.
One of the most decisive of these writers was undoubtedly Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pope Bergoglio's favourite. The pontiff often mentioned him in his speeches, citing his major works such as Crime and Punishment, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, for his ability to explore the complexity of the human soul and religious and moral issues.
Dostoevsky's main characteristic was precisely the "reversed perspective" of the soul, describing characters who in the deepest evil were inevitably led to discover a higher truth, to recognise the true face of God.
Francis used Dostoevsky to illustrate concepts such as faith, suffering, redemption and war, such as the famous legend of the “Grand Inquisitor" to reflect on the nature of faith and human freedom.
In a message to Russia, the pope used a passage from The Possessed to emphasise how war is an outrage against God. After all, it is precisely in this novel that the apex of the opposition between man and God is expressed, as in the statement of one of the revolutionary protagonists of the story, Kirillov, who asserts, “If there is no God, I am God", and, to escape His will “I am bound to show self-will.”
Citing an incident that really took place in Russia in the mid-19th century, the young man explains that “I am bound to shoot myself because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself”. By killing himself, he intends to kill God. This is precisely the “reversed” form of monastic ascent, which in the traditions of Russian hesychasm provides for the "annihilation of the self" to leave room for God.
A few months after his election, in December 2013, Pope Francis quoted Dostoevsky when speaking of the suffering of children, one of the key themes in The Brothers Karamazov.
He said that the Russian writer is like "a teacher of life", explaining that "the only prayer that comes to me is the prayer of why", like Ivan Karamazov's cry of rebellion against God and destiny, to which he seeks answers in the diabolical temptations re-proposed by the Grand Inquisitor (a Catholic cardinal) to Christ returned to earth, who must be killed again so that he does not return to give man freedom.
In June 2021, speaking to seminarians in Italy’s Marche region, the pontiff advised them to "also read those writers who have been able to look inside the human soul; I am thinking, for example, of Dostoevsky, who in the miserable events of earthly pain was able to reveal the beauty of the love that saves.”
For Francis, some may say: “what does Dostoevsky have to do with this? This is for the literati! No, no: it is about growing in humanity.” The pope insisted that people should “Read the great humanists. A priest can be very disciplined, he may be able to explain theology, philosophy and many things well. But if he is not human, he is of no use. Let him go out and be a professor. But if he is not human, he cannot be a priest: he lacks something. Does he lack language? No, he can speak. He lacks the heart; [be] experts in humanity!”
Also in April 2022, against the backdrop of the controversy in Ukraine over the presence of two women, one Ukrainian and the other Russian, at the Via Crucis on Good Friday, Pope Francis quoted Dostoevsky at the general audience, to emphasise that “Jesus’ peace does not overpower others; it is not an armed peace, never! The weapons of the Gospel are prayer, tenderness, forgiveness and freely given love for one’s neighbour, love for every neighbour.”
In May 2023, receiving in audience the participants in the conference promoted by the magazine La Civiltà Cattolica with Georgetown University on the theme "The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination," the pontiff spoke of the orthodox Dostoevsky when he said that “how often we are restless deep within our hearts.”
He then quoted a passage from The Brothers Karamazov that relates the story of “how a little child, the son of a maidservant, throws a rock and hits the foot of one of the dogs of the master of the estate. The master then sets a pack of dogs on the child, who runs and tries to save himself from their fury, but ends up by being torn to pieces under the satisfied gaze of the master and the frantic eyes of the mother.”
For the pope, “That image has tremendous artistic and political force; it speaks to us of reality, past and present: of wars, conflicts within society, the selfishness within each of us,” and “the contradictions of our human existence.”
Dostoevsky also spoke at public debates, asserting the need to conquer Turkey, the Holy Land, and the whole world, uniting the Slavs and therefore other peoples to achieve the Russian salvation of souls, anticipating the most extreme theories of the "Russian world".
However, the writer did not only report those destructive tensions in his novels, but also all the contrary and different ones, and it was never possible to understand which of the characters he wanted to identify with.
Perhaps the most symbolic hero of all his literary works is The Idiot, played by Prince Myshkin. Suffering from epilepsy, he comes from Europe to Russia to announce a new vision of the Gospel, criticising the Catholics who "have led us to atheism",
Finally, he states: “let them find the Russian world, let them search and discover all the gold and treasure that lies hid in the bosom of their own land! Show them the restitution of lost humanity, in the future, by Russian thought alone, and by means of the God and of the Christ of our Russian faith, and you will see how mighty and just and wise and good a giant will rise up before the eyes of the astonished and frightened world; astonished because they expect nothing but the sword from us, because they think they will get nothing out of us but barbarism. This has been the case up to now, and the longer matters go on as they are now proceeding, the more clear will be the truth of what I say; and I—”
The Russia of Pope Francis is that of Dostoevsky and many other men and women of art and culture, the Russia that seeks a new resurrection, even if this means “setting the world on fire."
In his death, the great Russophile pope promises that in this inextricable inner struggle between good and evil in the human soul, the face of Christ, the saviour of every human and every people, is always revealed, always beginning with the least of our brothers and sisters.
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