Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev (1946- ) of Moscow and all the Russias with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (1952- ) on the occasion of His Holiness’ birthday on 20 November 2011.
_____________________________
In the above image, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin gave birthday greetings to His Holiness on last Sunday. In our Orthodox doctrine of symphonia, the Church and the State, the Patriarch and the Ruler, work together. It’s not like the Proddies, where the Church is subservient to the the State, nor is it like the Papists, where the ultramontanists maintain that the State is subservient to the Church, where the Pope trumps all civil rulers. In Orthodoxy, the Church and State have their own spheres; they maintain an attitude of mutual respect and reciprocity… the Church has always been subject to the State in its temporal doings (for the state apparat didn’t collapse at the Centre in New Rome, only in the peripheral Western barbarian provinces), just as the State’s been subject to the Church in its spiritual affairs. That is, believers have recourse to the civil courts if the Church commits a civil wrong against them (as happened in the Koumentakos case), and they have recourse to ecclesiastical courts if the offence is canonical, not statutory. The Church has always held to this positive dynamic of dualistic tension between the “Powers”… just as we believe that Our Lord Christ is both human and divine, we believe that Power is embodied both in the Church and the State, and each has its proper sphere. That’s symphonia in “25 words or less”, kids…
BMD
