History of our British cocoon

I have watched about four times today the DVD ‘Orthodox Christianity in the British Islands’, introduced by Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, originally produced last year in Russian and now to be reedited with English subtitles (my job to check them).

I have not yet quite worked who is the real target audience for the film, nor why the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication helped pay. But leaving that aside, the DVD is tastefully done, the historical information given is accurate (bar one howler), and the subtitles sensitively written in British (as distinct from Russian) English. I had to look hard to find bits to correct.

A good half of the film is devoted to the three ‘giants’ that, to quote the blurb: ‘England gave to Orthodoxy’, the late Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh , the late Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia. And indeed the best bits are precisely little snippets of the Metropolitan’s personal experience of all three men when still a humble student, including his tactful handling of the fact that Antony and Sophrony were very far from friends….

 

Where I did feel short-sold was when the film jacket promises: “The film features bishops, parish priests and simple parishioners, native Britons who are taking the challenging path back to their spiritual roots, that is to Orthodoxy.”  

In total these take up no more than 5 minutes of a 44 minute film: two bishops, four priests and just one layman. The latter is a very well-introduced member of the London upper set, close to the British court, now a trustee of the Russian cathedral and filmed In his London club, a charming man (I know him personally) but hardly a ‘simple parishioner’.

If I was had to subtitle the film it would be either ‘England through Russian spectacles’, or less kindly, the ‘history of our British cocoon’.

History because the film looks backwards rather than forwards. Two out of the three ‘great’ figures are dead, the third just celebrated his 80^th birthday (though I of course wish him many more).  One of the big temptations of Orthodoxy outside its home countries is to live too long on its past, re-editing books and talks spiritual giants of twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, rather than encouraging a new generation of spiritual men. ‘Paris Orthodoxy’ made this fatal mistake, so, I suspect did the Russian Church outside Russia. Orthodoxy in Britain is in danger of going the same way. Certainly, of the three ‘greats’ mentioned, only one, to my knowledge (Sophrony) has produced a worthy successor, who is continuing the tradition (Archimandite Zacharias).

Cocoon, because the film gives the impression of a very closed and separate world, very much outside the mainstream of both English church life and, despite all the very ‘British’ shots (Queen, Prince Charles, Tower Bridge, horses in Hyde Park), of English life in general. Much of the comment on existing English Christianity, and in particular the Church of England, is the eternal Russian lament against gay marriage and female priests and bishops. Yes, I understand this, but somehow I feel that if someone in England is going to have again the effect that either Metropolitan Antony or Archimandrite Sophrony had, they have got to come at things from another angle. For me these are symptoms of a malaise, not their root causes. And good spirituality, by its very definition, goes for root causes.