The Semi-Divine Putin

“A divine light at the moment when [Putin] left his baptism transfixed his essence, restoring the destroyed depths of his being, and giving him an anthological ability to acquire celestial energy,” says someone described by Radio Free Europe as a “radical Russian Orthodox activist.” In a lecture in Moscow a couple of days ago, Dmitry Tsorionov

praised Putin’s apparent ability to survive assassination attempts and lauded his “good deeds,” such as crushing opposition protests.

. . . He asked the crowd whether Putin was sent to absolve the nation of its sins. “We kill tens of millions of our children. We betray our wives. We don’t go to Church. We smoke hashish,” Tsorionov said. “Meanwhile, Vladimir Vladimirovich, the boss, is praying seriously for us all. Of course we are not worthy.”

One journalist who heard the lecture suggested that Tsorionov was using the Byzantine theology of the emperor without having understood its nuances — “this very fine line between what’s acceptable propaganda and what’s outright blasphemous idolatry.”

Much of the crowd and people reading about the lecture on social media apparently laughed or criticized. Which is something, but Tsorionov’s extreme view of the Russian president is still at the end of a spectrum of identifying the Church and the state that the Moscow hierarchy sits on. Without Catholicism’s understanding of the two cities, the Church and the state can’t be well or effectively distinguished, and nothing restrains the inevitable tendency for religious people to commingle their religion and their nation. Catholicism has its crazies who think of the Church as a militant purifying force, but I don’t any can be found almost deifying a dictator.

My thanks to Frank Weathers for the link.