Russia, Ukraine, and the West’s Empire of Secularization (Excerpts)

Shelled Orthodox church near Donetsk airport Photo: Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons

Matthew Dal Santo’s ‘Russia, Ukraine, and the West’s Empire of Secularization’ appears in the winter issue of Telos journal (Winter 2022, no. 201). What follows below are excerpts from the much longer article. Dal Santo has set himself an ambitious task, that of explaining, in light of the process of secularization, the philosophical meaning and ’higher causality’ of the conflict between Russia and the West taking place today in Ukraine. The resulting analysis has produced a particularly valuable philosophical reflection on the present war.

What Dal Santo refers to as secularization overlaps — indeed, it practically coincides — with what the French philosopher Simone Weil referred to as uprooting.  To be rooted, for Weil, entailed being grounded in a settled community and its traditions, while also maintaining a connection with the eternal and the transcendent. The opposite condition, that of being uprooted, Weil considered by far the most dangerous thing that can happen to a society. For one thing, there is no obvious way out. Part of society becomes utterly passive. Another part becomes, to the contrary, hyper-active, and make it their goal in life to uproot everything in sight. Although Dal Santo does not make this point, it seems to us that America’s neoconservatives are just such people on the international stage. And as political observer Alexander Mercouris often notes, “they have no reverse gear.”

What specifically does secularization have to do with the situation in Ukraine; how does it explain its meaning? In partial response, Dal Santo poses the following question. Even if no war had taken place between Russia and the West; even if Ukraine had integrated with the European Union and the United States entirely peacefully, who can doubt that such integration would entail the replacement of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christian roots with Western (secular) imports? As is presumably even more obvious today than when Dal Santo wrote his essay, such a process is already happening, including through the active persecution by the Kiev government of Ukraine’s many-centuries-old Orthodox church. Westernization, in other words secularization, is never theologically neutral.

We are grateful to Telos magazine for permitting us to publish these excerpts, while at the same time we wish to apologize to the reader for not being able to reproduce the full text.  We strongly urge the interested reader, therefore, to obtain the complete article from Telos journal (either by purchasing the winter 2022 issue or by downloading the full text as a pdf file). Those who do so will be rewarded with many additional insights, including, notably, Dal Santo’s response to “A Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ Teaching” that was published by Public Orthodoxy (March 13, 2022) and signed by a number of Eastern Orthodox leaders.  – The Editors

The Religious Rhetoric of the Russian Civilization-State 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow have both resorted to religious reasons to explain or justify Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian territory. Repeating religious-civilizational rhetoric that Putin first employed following his return to the presidency in 2012 and then redeployed with greater intensity to account for the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, both president and patriarch have claimed or implied that Russia’s so-called “Special Operation” is needed to defend the wider russky mir, “Holy Rus”, or Orthodoxy-based Russian-language civilization that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus share from the secularized anti-civilization of the West …

… On the Western side, Russian claims that the war in Ukraine has a genuine spiritual or religious dimension have been met with disdain. Such disdain has come not only from the secular-minded proponents of liberalism from which we would expect it but also from conservative commentators and critics of secularization such, for example, as the Catholic George Weigel, an editor at First Things and author of a leading biography of (St) John Paul II. To Weigel, it is axiomatic that, when they invoke religious or cultural-spiritual justifications for the war, the Russians are lying … .

…. Whom should we believe?  In answering this question, this paper does not wish to offer an apology for Russian behaviour but to understand the deeper meaning of the conflict; above all, it wants to seize, if possible, the conflict’s religious or theological value in an era marked, in the West at least, by declining religious observance and pronounced secularization. I am less interested in the causes of the war in Ukraine than I am interested in its causality, more interested in the conflict’s meaning than in the motives of the parties to it. Even if the Russian leadership is lying about the reasons for its decision to invade Ukraine, does it necessarily follow that the prevailing Western analysis of the conflict, as devoid of religious meaning, is right?

That the conflict does, in fact, possess a theological causality and a religious meaning will be the argument of this paper.  That is, I will argue that in conformity with the transhistorical meaning of history since the beginning of the twentieth century, the higher causality of the Russia-Ukraine war is secularization – specifically, the universalizing secularization embodied in Western foreign policy and the expansion of the West generally. After all, even if the war had never taken place, would anyone seriously doubt that the effect of Ukraine’s successful integration into the Euro-Atlantic world would not be greater secularization – the importation into Ukrainian culture from outside of the cultural forms of secularized Western culture – and that if, for some reason it wasn’t, pressure would be brought to bear (as it has on Hungary and Poland) to ensure that it was? …

Augusto Del Noce and the Western Judgment for Secularization

… [Augusto] Del Noce’s most important affirmation is that contemporary history is philosophical history. By this Del Noce means that the great events of the twentieth century – from the Great War and Russian Revolution to the rise of Hitler, Second World War, Cold War, and collapse of Communism (which Del Noce lived to see the beginning of) – are connected by a trans-historical relationship of ideal causality: together, the events of the twentieth century are only really understood when seen as the translation into politics, and therefore into history, of the judgements about the nature of God, man, and human society reached in the course of the history of European philosophy in the “long” nineteenth century that preceded it, up to the beginning of the Great War. And the red thread that Del Noce identifies in those conclusions is atheism: in the nineteenth century, what remained of the Christian-Platonic ideal regarding an objective, cosmic order of truth (what Del Noce calls “the holy city”) above and beyond the human polis but to which the human polis had nonetheless rightly to conform itself as far as it was able, was finally abandoned in favour of the immanentization of God in the human mind (and even the human emotions insofar as morality was concerned) in the idealist philosophy of Kant  (for as Del Noce says, “the secular spirit in a proper sense begins when morality is called to judge religion as the highest court”) and then, supremely, in the historical process itself through the expressly atheist philosophy of Marx.

After the Russian Revolution, says Del Noce, secularity is simply assumed as the default mode or governing logic of the historical process everywhere: a social trend or development, an event, a political figure, movement or party is “rational”, “true”, “just”, “good”, and to be welcomed to the extent that it conforms to the logic of secularization. Trends or events that do not conform to this logic, that challenge, resist or seek to reverse it, however, must be irrational, untrue, unjust, bad, the product of false consciousness, fantasy, and the cynical manipulation of “myths” …

Occidentalism or the Western Empire of Secularization in Action

At this point, we ask again: Must history obey a logic, indeed, a law, of secularization that enjoys its own rights over the historical process, rights that, once claimed in the West, are not only are irreversible there but of such universal application that they may not be resisted, even potentially, elsewhere? As I hope to demonstrate, the question is pertinent also in regard to the meaning and higher causality of the current and very dangerous war in Ukraine.

Signed in Washington, D.C., a little more than three months before Russia’s “special operation” was the important US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership.  As Professor John Mearsheimer has argued, this Charter can with justification be considered the proximate cause of the Russian invasion. Consisting in four parts with a preamble, the Charter reiterates that the aim of the two countries’ “strategic partnership” (an ambiguous term used by diplomats to cover a range of meanings but which seems here to indicate a de facto an alliance) is Ukraine’s “full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.” Declaring the United States’ and Ukraine’s mutual intention to be “guided by the April 3, 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration of the NATO North Atlantic Council” (a document that declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become” members of NATO), the Charter pledges US aid to “maximize” Ukraine’s status as a “NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner”, including by promoting “interoperability”. In return, the Charter declares that Ukraine will “modernize its defense acquisition processes” (i.e., buy more American weapons) to “advance its Euro-Atlantic aspirations.”

This is the Charter’s essential political and strategic significance, and as a realist, Mearsheimer focuses on it. But in a way that would not have surprised Del Noce, the Charter also realizes a theological logic: that of secularization …

… When in Europe Ukrainian flags are flown from public buildings, the Ukrainian flag is extended a public honor usually accorded, in addition to the flags of national States and the EU, only to the Rainbow Flag of “Pride.”  Symbolic practice coincides with symbolic meaning because so, too, does the underlying logic and its source. That is, it is not Ukrainian democracy as a form of electoral procedure or nationhood as a form of moral community (ideas that only a presidency ago in the United States were deeply suspicious) that we are celebrating; it is our own secularization, and the mode of our political life is precisely that appropriate to a local province of the Occidentalist empire of secularization. Indeed, Ukrainian nationhood and even democracy are only to be celebrated to the extent and insofar as they realize themselves as the instruments for this secularization.