Russia's historical fate: mapping space, time, and salvation in Patriarch Kirill's sermons

Abstract

The relationship between the Russian State and Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) during Putin’s regime has been characterized as mutually beneficial. The most influential figure in the contemporary ROC is Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, who has worked with Putin to give Russia’s current nation-building project, Russkiĭ Mir ‘Russian World,’ a religious foundation. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine exists within this project, which Kirill has sought to sacralize in his sermons. In this thesis, Barton utilizes discourse analysis to examine how Kirill’s sermons justify Russian imperialism while also projecting a vision of the ROC within the national project. Specifically, Barton identifies how Kirill employs grammatical and prosodic resources to invoke an Orthodox cosmological space-time, or “chronotope,” i.e. a linguistically encoded rendering of space and time that endows figures with moral characteristics. In his sermons Kirill invokes what Barton terms the Salvation chronotope, a space-time modeled after St. John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Through close analysis of one sermon, she demonstrates how Kirill constructs the Salvation chronotope in the image of the Ladder and depicts the movement of congregants, the nation, and Russian military within its metaphysical landscape. She argues that in doing so Kirill frames Russia's full-scale invasion as the nation's “historical fate," necessary to keep it oriented on the path to salvation. Alongside this Barton analyzes a speech register she dubs “God-speak,” a performance style marked by liturgical tonality and paeonic meter. She demonstrates that Kirill employs God-speak to connect historical Russian conflicts with the Russo-Ukrainian War and prophesize the divine intervention of an Orthodox figure on Russia’s behalf. She concludes that the Salvation chronotope is one method by which Kirill aligns himself with Putin while stepping beyond State rhetoric, asserting the importance of Orthodoxy in ensuring Russia’s existential fate after the Russo-Ukrainian War.