By: Milenko A. Perović
The Church of Serbia is trapped in an insurmountable paradox. Following the views of Nikolaj Velimirović and Justin Popović, its religious ideology was built on the militant determination to reject the whole system of spiritual and life values of the modern West. It has a special intolerance towards modern Western secularism. Silently, however, it fully accepted the basis of that secularism. It accepted the notion of God as a historical process culminating in the sanctification and deification of the world!
Like the Western religious denominations that it views though the “evil eye”, the Church of Serbia itself has turned into a cynical and “cold mechanism” that pursues exclusively secular purposes. It deified itself to the end! Instead of believing in a religious God, it professes faith in the false transcendence of the “national idea.” In the place occupied by God, it has placed the golden calf of the “nation”. But it is unable to imagine it other than as an imaginary Serbian tribe.
Its clergy show by their public actions that they do not care that in the modern age, and then in their souls, God disappears as a higher transcendent meaning. They really no longer need God as a constitutional and regulatory idea to establish the Church as an institution of the “living God”. The inertia of existence is sufficient for the church, while the clergy with cynicism live the modern Hegelian-Nietzschean thought of the “death of God.”
By this measure, the Church of Serbia is the westernmost institution of today's Serbs! It has become as godless as the modern West. They equally devalued the idea of God as a transcendence that gives life and meaning to humanity. The principle of the West was established by destroying the Christian theocentric image of the world and replacing it with the humanistic or egoistic ideal of man. In modern theomachy, God has thus receded and disappeared before human interest!
While he was only a candidate for the transcendent meaning of life of the Jewish people, the Old Testament Yahweh broke the polytheistic idols. In the Yahwistic religion, which was based on faith in a single god, there could be no place for other transcendent beings, because they offered the Jewish people different paradigms of the meaning of life.
The leading heads of the bourgeois era determined that the Christian God had aged and become unnecessary. The young bourgeoisie took “sacred egoism” (sacro egoismo) as their main guide. With this epochal decision, the Christian saint “pantheon” lost its meaning and value, as well as the Christian Holy Trinity.
God had to retreat to the margins of meaning or into nothingness before Profit as a new deity. He also lost the status of the alpha and omega of all existence. Instead of popes, metropolitans, bishops, and other priests, Profit enthroned the financial, industrial, and commercial plutocracy as his high priesthood. The archaic word of God has been replaced by the logos of capital! The stock exchanges became his main ecclesias.
The bourgeois epoch laid the foundation for the idea of liberating humanity from the interest of the otherworld and enslavement to the religious “representatives” of the otherworld. Secularization is another name for this process of liberation!
Philosophical and theological thought articulated the modern process of deification of the world. His spirit was beautifully expressed by the German mystic Master Eckart: “I would reject the vision of the Trinity to make soup for my mother.” All Western religions of the New Age — according to Hegel — are completely affected by the feeling that God is dead.
With the attitude “God is dead,” Nietzsche repeated Hegel's understanding that the modern epoch “killed” the idea of a higher transcendent meaning, without the fear that it would kill itself in the same way! The death of God means the disappearance of the power of the idea that the transcendent can still give life and meaning to all that exists. God had to be put to death to free man! In numerous theories that appear under the name of theotanatology, it is understood that, metaphorically or literally, God ceased to exist. He lost the reason for his existence, because man gained the belief that he could resist the fear of nonsense and endure the thought that he could do without God!
Which of the secularization experience and theotanatological discussions is important for judging the meaning of the existence of the Church of Serbia, especially in Montenegro?
Like religious communities in the West, the Church of Serbia has deified itself. Like them, it was tempted to base its whole religious doctrine, ideology and practice on an insurmountable hypocrisy that shifts between the religion of one God and religion without God, between Christianity and cynicism, between faith and vulgar deception! Its hypocrisy can no longer bear God as either a common or a cultural artifact!
Dostoevsky expressed the drama of the deification of the modern epoch with the sentence “If there is no God, everything is allowed.” The Church of Serbia tacitly and easily resolves the nausea of this drama in everyday life, guided by a kind of anti-Kantian “postulate”: “Act as if there is no God!”
Two moments can testify to how the Church dedicated itself to Serbia and killed God in itself! From modern secularization culture, it has taken over the loss of all sense of the sacred. By losing its sense of the sacred, it lost its sense of the divine! At the same time, it cynically rejected the idea of fear of God, as a regulatory idea of Christian action and living. By losing its fear of God, it let the world know that it does not take God seriously!
The collapse of the idea of holiness in the Church of Serbia happened in the “Saint Sava” falsification of New Testament Christianity. By emphatically emphasizing the sanctity of Sava Nemanjić, its influential theologians (Velimirović, above all) intended to establish the idea of the exceptionality of “national” Orthodoxy. However, in that way, they compromised and destroyed the Christian idea of holiness and paved the way for the mythologized de-Christianization of Serbian Orthodoxy.
They humiliated Sava Nemanjić to the status of a mythological tribal hero and a local political tribune. “Svetosavlje” (St. Sava cult) was designed according to the mold of mythological archetypes, the so-called “Cultural heroes” and glorified tribal ancestors. On the other hand, they came to proto-Nazism as the latter “truth” of any ethnophiletism. In their “Saint Sava's thought”, it was natural for them to try to make Saint Sava a proto-Nazi and a forerunner of Adolf Hitler.
Their fatal game of drowning Christian fanaticism (sacredness) in pagan and lucrative profanity takes its toll to this day. If there was a dilemma whether God really died in the Church of Serbia, it is resolved by the horror of its complete moral collapse in the political sale of saintly nimbuses to murderers and war criminals (Vukojičić, Šiljak, etc.).
By their activities in Montenegro in the last hundred years, the clergy of the Church of Serbia have shown countless times that there is no fear of God in them or the thought that they could be punished by God for their deeds! He who does not believe in God is not afraid of God's judgment! For a hundred years, these clergymen stole what belongs to others without fear of God's judgment in Montenegro! Without fear of God's punishment, they repaired the stolen so that the theft would not be known to them! They manipulated the lowest passions of power-hungryness, selfishness and ambition without discomfort! By endlessly lying about everything Montenegrin, they clearly showed that no truth is sacred to them. That is how they killed God.
The people with unusual religiosity live in the taiga of Siberia. Once a year, its members hold a religious ceremony. On it they mock the gods for making a bad world! Although in a paradoxical way, they believe in a higher meaning of life, unlike the clergy of the Church of Serbia!