Self Defence & The Pussy Riot

The Russian Orthodox Church claims that the Pussy Riot performance in St. Basil's Cathedral was an assault on Christian sensibilities. So?

Jesus offered no defence against his accusers and suffered every injury and indignity before and, most probably after, his Crucifixion.

Christ's absolute sufferance led his earliest followers to espouse an uncompromising passivism. It was a rule of the Early Church, that a Christian was not allowed to defend himself. Even St. Cyril Constantine (d. 869), who advocated "just defence" of neighbours, accepted the passivist premise against self-defence.

What did this mean? It meant very simply, that if struck you were to turn the other cheek; if thrown to the lions you were to offer neck to fang. A Christian was committed to suffer whatever evil God sent his way.

Now there are those who would like to engineer a more convenient result by resort to casuistry, which "resolves moral problems by extracting theoretical rules from particular instances and applying these rules to new situations." (Wiki)

Typically, this case-based rationalism seeks to manoeuvre between a thicket of supposed goods and not-goods by asking "how do we?" and "what is the purpose of?". The injunction to put aside the sword, these rationalists say, is a command to avoid violence. Self-defence without violence is permitted and indeed even "Christian."

Thus it is that AIKIDO is popular among those who wish to have their defence and be pacific too. The martial art of Aikido is based on receiving the force of violence but deflecting it mirror-like against its source so that the attacker end up attacking himself.

Clever but not Christian. There is nothing wrong with aikido as a martial art and as a martial art it is perhaps the most ingenious. But pacifism and Christianity are not co-terminous. Put another way, pacifism and submission are not the same thing. Jesus did indeed enjoin living by the sword but the crucified Christ went beyond that. The Christian who thinks he is emulating Christ by practicing non-violent Aikido deludes himself. The only way to emulate Christ is to suffer whatever crucifixion God bestows as one of his dubious graces.

Which leads us to the Pussy Riot. The Russian Orthodox Church is scandalized by what it calls the salacious and satanic performance of the female punk rock group within the sacred precincts. We did not have the benefit of seeing the performance ourselves and may accept that it was so grotesque and blasphemous as to be deeply offensive to orthodox religiosity. But so what?

There is a degree of palaver in the Russian and Western press about the unduly close ties between Church and Kremlin, about the unduely repressive response to an "inappropriate" exercise of nonetheless free speech, about the public relations disaster of the whole affair, on the one hand, and the substantial popularity of the prosecution on the other. We have also read that the Pussy Performers were put up to it by nefarious agencies seeking to stir up trouble in Russia. But none of this is here or there.

The Church should emulate its Founder and bear the injury with patience and gratitude. Had patriarch Kirill truly followed his Saviour he would have suffered through the performance and then invited the Pussy Girls to tea.

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