Their rhetoric wasn't far different from calling him "a fighter against the Antichrist", but nobody of stature comparable to Patriarch Kirill has said so about Trump. Or called him "chief exorcist"--though I wonder if that's really a good translation of what Kirill called Putin.
Putin says the West is serving Satan. It seems a bit rich for Putin to be using that kind of language--if he's serious about Orthodoxy and Jesus he hides it well. But I'd be unsurprised to hear the accusation from Kirill, or from a scholar at Al-Azhar. From their standpoint the West endorses seducer/deceivers trying to pull people from the true path. (I had some impractical ideas about the "war on terror" about being proactive about that--oddly enough the Trump administration almost pulled off what I thought was the hardest part.)
That "chief exorcist" phrase is interesting. In the Orthodox church exorcism is possible for laymen at a lesser level: "the whole Church, past, present and future, has the task of an exorcist to banish sin, evil, injustice, spiritual death, the devil from the life of humanity." There are prayers to help. The language of the church involves phrases like "the demon of greed". Of course the official exorcists are a clergy-level office. They were originally supposed to prepare each catechumen to be able to renounce Satan.
So a layman is supposed to be the chief?
I'm trying to imagine Putin fasting and praying to drive out the demons from the West. You can't imagine it either?
We're always tempted to hope for spiritual victories though secular means. Given his history, I don't think Kirill is serious about his claim. I hope Putin isn't.
4 comments:
Remember why ad hominem is an informal fallacy: it may be that the speaker is a S.O.B., a hypocrite, or the wrong messenger for the message, but the message should be evaluated on its own terms anyway. Maybe 'Satanism' is too strong, but there's a point about the 'Parent 1 or 2 or 3' stuff. The new PM of Italy was making a similar point about 'Parent 1' rather than 'mother' or 'father.' Maybe she's the wrong messenger too; I don't know. Maybe Bannon is, and Trump is, and all of them are.
Yet the message deserves to be considered even if it's being raised chiefly by the wrong people.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, after all.
I believe that satanism as such is rare. However, I suspect that many rulers, perhaps most, wind up doing the will of the prince of this world. The modern West is afflicted with a particularly strange crew, who wouldn't recognize a reductio ad absurdum if it bit them in the ass. Ecclesiastes 10:13 seems to be the formula for our era.
Rod Dreher
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