The gods that failed by James Carroll

[YankeyMCC]

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HISTORY WAS made in Moscow last week. For the first time since the funeral of Czar Alexander III in 1894, a Russian head of state was laid to rest according to the rites of the Orthodox Church.
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The New York Times report of the burial of Boris Yeltsin noted the liturgy, incense, chanting, ministrations of vested clergy -- all of it. That the ceremony was held in Christ the Savior Cathedral, which had been demolished by the Soviets in 1931, the very year Yeltsin was born, then rebuilt under Yeltsin, only emphasized the momentous reversal that has occurred since the Soviet Union ceased to exist. For 70 years, religious ritual was gone from the public life of Russia, yet now it is back in full force. Atheism was dogma, yet now a show of piety is politic.
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But the fact that tides of the Christian religion have flowed back into the drained pools of Russian life should not be taken simplistically as a triumph of the old religious order, as if the churches, too, were not shaken to the core by the upheavals of modernity. It is impossible to know what Russian Orthodox faith meant to Yeltsin at the end, but it is certain that it did not mean to him what it meant to his grandparents. Yeltsin's lifetime spanned an interruption in world history, an era that left everything changed, including religious dogmas that claim to be unchanging.

The rituals with which the Russian leader was buried last week may be ancient, but for the dogmas they represent, another god has failed. Beginning, perhaps, with Karl Marx's 1844 broadside that religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature . . . the opium of the people," secular critiques have challenged believers to see how faith, too, can be yoked to injustice. After a century of savage wars waged in the name of holy ideals, religious self-criticism has come to seem necessary. The god of enemy-damnation has also failed, and religious people know it. Religion, too, must stand the test of disillusionment.
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For secular people, that the gods have gone away is the overdue pre condition for humans taking responsibility for history. The idea that human thought creates ultimate purpose defines not apostasy, but nobility. Yet for believers, too, the experience of gods having failed can be renewing, for that failure, whether of empire, nation, or even religion, offers a recovery from the perennial temptation to idolatry. The era through which Boris Yeltsin lived teaches that there is no god but God, whose absence is a presence.
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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/30/the_gods_that_failed/

There's a nice excerpt from "Cat's Cradle" in the piece as well.

[Rydz777]

1. A quibble

If, as I believe, the retrieved bones of Nicholas II were given an Orthodox burial, then it is not true that Yeltsin was the first head of state to be so interred since Alexander III. Just a quibble - an interesting post.

[progressoid]

2. "For secular people..."

For secular people, that the gods have gone away is the overdue pre condition for humans taking responsibility for history

Responsibility is a tough one to swallow for a lot of people. It's a lot easier to say it was God's will.