Quality assessment:
On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: it is arguable that I knew enough to treat my subject adequately within the limited scope I set myself.
Revision history:
UTC=20220427T182100Z/version 1.1.0: Kmo made tiny change needed for accuracy regarding Tõravere cafeteria: queue, not trays.
UTC=20220418T135800Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded base version. He then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 96 hours, as versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ... . .
Your Eminence: You know as well as I, perhaps better than I (for I write as a layman, without significant links to any national government) that now, on the Monday which is 2022-04-18, one question above all others is taxing the best minds in Foreign Ministries and Ministries of Defence in Europe and North American, in Australia and New Zealand, and now crucially also in China. The question is: How, without precipitating a nuclear tit-for-tat and World War Three, do we respond to the small, and yet no longer negligible, possibility of a Russian tactical nuclear detonation in Ukraine? For China, in particular, with so much to lose from any widened conflict, and with so much commercial leverage over Russia, the question has surely the following accompaniment: What mixture of commercial threats and commercial blandishments can we in Beijing make, in secretly arranged concert with our Western trading partners, to dissuade Russia from detonation?
Although the prospect remains small, it looms somewhat larger from one day to the next as long as Mr V.V. Putin clings to power, evading the religious reclusion which remains his last and best personal hope. Mr Putin may be gone days or hours from now, following what is on at least some assessments the sad recent fate of Defence Minister Sergei Kuzhugetovich "cardiac patient" Shoigu. But (I repeat) Mr Putin's departure, if possible or probable, is not now a certainty.
And the prospect of a nuclear detonation might continue looming even after the conceivable departure of Mr Putin. Events have their own terrible inner logic, beyond the control of individuals.
We can breathe more easily once the anniversary date of 9 May is behind us. Until then, it is as in the Taizé Passiontide hymn (use, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmAOcHqvS0Q) "Stay here with Me, remain here with Me, watch and pray..."
You therefore need to see to it that your team, including your Patriarch, prepare a plan, especially as the politically and militarily charged anniversary date of 9 May (central in the contemporary militarized Russian culture) approaches. Perhaps the tactical nuclear strike will never happen. But if it does, say in the period of maximum current peril, around 1 May or 5 May, when the Kremlin is specially anxious to parade some kind of "success" in Ukraine, what will your team do?
You might collectively today, on the Monday which is 2022-04-18, consider that the Kremlin government would be right in using a tactical nuke, as enhancing the nobility and moral worth of that thing-which-looks-like-a-war-but-is-not-even-though-tens-of-thousands-are-already-dead, that "special military operation", that специальная военная операция. In that case, your team at the Patriarchate must have a reasoned theological case written out, ready for publication at just a few minutes' notice, to reassure a public suddenly in acute need of spiritual guidance.
You and your Patriarch might, on the other hand, follow me in considering a tactical nuclear detonation to be a criminal atrocity, akin to those clear atrocities which were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or again akin to those clear atrocities which constituted the Shoah. In that case, once again, your team must have a reasoned theological argument written out, ready for publication at just a few minutes' notice. To undertake less preparation than that - no matter what your particular stance regarding the morality of a nuclear detonation - is in my respectfully submitted assessment to leave your flock inadequately shepherded.
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It is helpful in the current situation to reflect on the historical, physical realities of the Passion and Resurrection. I would in this particular Easter season recommend the anatomist Dr Pierre Barbet (1884-1961), as an early worker in a line of investigation which has in more recent decades amassed additional scientific practitioners. You can find Dr Barbet's 1950 book, in a 1953 English translation, in PDF format, by searching on such text strings as
barbet doctor at calvary translated by earl of wicklow pdf
I would suggest that despite its great age, this is the work of a correctly disciplined scientific mind, and that subsequent investigations are likely to have altered Dr Barbet's findings in details, not in essence. Self-discipline, such as Dr Barbet musters, fortunately proves possible not only in maths and physics, but also in the fuzzier worlds of history and medicine.
It will to some minds appear unfortunate that Dr Barbet starts with the Shroud of Turin. Some, possibly including you, will join me in finding this a problematic beginning, since the Shroud has been dated by Carbon 14 measurements in our own day as mediaeval, not as a relic of classical antiquity. I for my part do note, however, admittedly without writing from any position of diligent study, that the Carbon 14 dating result has been recently called into question. We must on all accounts follow physical truth ruthlessly, being prepared to abandon our Faith itself should science give us conclusive reason for doing so, and to endure in that act of abandonment our own little crucifixion at the hands of community authorities. However, it may now be that a careful reexamination of Carbon 14 dating, far from undermining the plausibility of the Shroud, will leave the question of its dating once again open, as it was open for the so-careful Dr Barbet.
The entire book is a bit long, as I have myself found on being forced to read it in a hurry. But it suffices to read Chapter 12, which recapitulates the essentials of Chapters 1 through 11 while adding fresh insights. In the 1953 publisher's page numbering, this is the chapter that starts on page 158. The start of Chapter 12 corresponds to “page 80” in the numbering imposed by my own Microsoft computer's PDF display software, and very likely imposed by your software also.
A caveat is necessary. Dr Barbet's key Chapter 12 is marred by a perceptible and hideous, although not quite in-your-face-Nazi, antisemitism. To my own mind, hideous though the author's antisemitism is, it gives his words added force, reminding one of the barbaric era in which he is himself anchored. One literally cries out at the computer screen, noting the author’s own historical limitations as well as the unspeakable details of his ancient-Jerusalem researches.
You may now reflect, Your Eminence, as a (1995) doctorally qualified theologian from the same leading British school which gave me a 1979 philosophy doctorate: this thing, this Roman execution, happened, even as the assassination of "Ivlivs Caivs Caesar" happened, and its medical details are likely to correspond, in a reasonable approximation, to Dr Barbet's anatomically informed reconstructions: in the face of this thing, I, Hilarion the Titular Metropolitan of Volokolamsk, have as a shepherd of souls a duty to make up my mind now regarding the morality or immorality of a possible tactical nuclear detonation in Ukraine.
Here "now" means "now, in the week of 2022-04-18", not next week, and not in procrastination as late as the week of 9 May. You, being as a Western-educated Titular Metropolitan no stranger to the realities of public life, can picture still more clearly than I the eventual national panic under the minute-to-minute pressure of events in the geopolitical crisis which a detonation would precipitate. The detonation, if it comes, will see television programmes not in Russia alone, but in every industrialized nation, interrupted for special bulletin upon special bulletin. The horror, if it comes, may well see parts of the media, including parts accessible to ordinary Russians, indicating to their terrified audiences that Kremlin decision-makers have been spotted exiting Moscow. You cannot wait for images of exit helicopters to fill your personal screen. To do less than prepare now, this week, would be to abdicate your personal pastoral responsibility at the foot of the Cross.
****
Easter is a time of rebirth. What might rebirth mean in the present circumstances, with a morally resolute Ukraine standing up to a brutalized and depressed Red Army, and with a pampered and decadent West now seeking for itself a moral courage at least dimly mirroring Ukraine's?
I will not examine possibilities for the West here, beyond saying that if some expanding 2022 nuclear war does not destroy us all, then over coming decades Western people can unite in peaceful and legal ways against those twin Western evils which are (a) the supranational corporations (the past beneficiaries, in many instances, of post-1991 Russian commerce) and (b) the corporate facilitators, our corrupt (our hired, our purchased) Western parliamentary factions. These are not factions on the "Populist Right" alone, but factions ranging across much of the current Western parliamentary spectrum, in most or all Western democracies, here in Estonia and far afield.
One such peaceful and legal way will be the rejection of a consumerist lifestyle, and concomitantly with that rejection a return to personal minimalism - through a simple, straightforward, "Refusal to Buy", through a straightforward "Insistence on Simple Living", in any case needed as we Western citizens strive alongside our often-clumsy governments to support Ukraine.
As regards Russia, I suggest that scant hope can be now placed in government. How can a government structure be endorsed which recruits even infants to its cult of war, as reflected in those familiar Internet photos? You are unlikely to need such photos yourself. And yet to ensure that my point becomes fully clear I do supply you with two of them. They will serve to remind you and my wider readership of the extent to which public authorities now betray the Gospel, or at any rate connive in its betrayal:
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| Photo: Moscow Times, 2019-05-10, reporting 9 May festivities in Pyatigorsk. |
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| Photo: https://therussianreader.com/2021/12/28/yigal-levin-do-russians-want-war/. |
Some hope remains, on the other hand, for the efforts of your Russian natural scientists, your Russian historians, and your other Russian intellectuals, as local witnesses to Truth.
And there is hope, if we care to see it, in your own Russian Orthodox Church. You know better than I the decay which has for centuries beset Russian Orthodoxy. The Vatican has the unfortunate distinction of having in recent years operated (owned? leased?) a helicopter, capable of shuttling at least between Vatican City and the suburban Castel Gandolfo. You, on the other hand, have perhaps yourself boarded, as I have not, the yacht "placed at the disposal of the Patriarch" should his pastoral duties happen to take him to the isolated monastery of Valaam. Pope Francis lives in a kind of hostel-for-prelates, foregoing the private traditional papal apartments, and is said to take his meals in a cafeteria alongside ecclesial colleagues, much as we do at the observatory campus here in Tõravere, with our humble cafeteria queue. In the Patriarchy, simplicity is less prized.
Further, you have likely set foot, as I have not, in the new Moscow Oblast "Military Cathedral". You, Your Eminence, know this gargantuan celebration of militarism better than I, and my other readers can quickly research it through (for example)
It remains the case that your Church has the graces to lead a national spiritual revival, in concert with constructive, anti-consumerist, social forces in the West, notably with forces allied to the Holy See. It has the graces to lead that revival in the teeth, if necessary, of whatever enigmatic factions may this year be emerging in some enigmatic post-Putin Kremlin.
I do not call you to martyrdom in the manner of Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Saint Franz Jägerstätter or Saint Edith Stein. In calling you to articulate your stand in the face of a possible tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine, I call you only to what seems possible from a human standpoint.
I additionally herewith join, as an obscure Catholic layman, with western ecclesial authorities, including a former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, in calling for a Ukraine ceasefire to mark the Russian Orthodox Easter, and I join with Pope Francis in the recent prayers consecrating Russia and Ukraine to Our Lady.
Finally, I herewith enjoin you from the theologically unassailable position of a lay pastoral supplicant, obedient to my Bishop, to my local Nuncio, and to the Vatican - and I do so in the name of Christ, thereby presuming even to bind you - to acknowledge receipt of this present (e-mail, papermail, and blogspot) communication. My previous efforts at obtaining receipts of communication from you have failed, in large part through my own ineptitude. As time passes, however, I become better in my various methods, and I remain in this Easter season hopeful of success.
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