The collapse of the EU as a surrogate Heavenly Jerusalem

All attempts to find the Heavenly Jerusalem on earth are doomed to fail. Photo: UOJ

For years, Ukrainians were told that the ultimate national goal was integration into Europe – more precisely, into the European Union. Politicians repeated it. Television channels preached it. Opinion-makers promoted it. Even representatives of certain religious organizations joined the chorus. EU membership became the principal promise used to draw people onto the streets during Euromaidan.

The message was simple and relentless: the European Union was presented as a kind of earthly paradise where all of Ukraine’s problems would miraculously disappear. Corruption would vanish. The rule of law would prevail. Salaries would soar. Pensions would become generous. Medicine would become modern and affordable. Justice would finally triumph.

Europe was painted as a radiant future, and accession to the EU as Ukraine’s only conceivable destiny.

This entire vision was perhaps best captured in a video released by former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in late 2013, promoting the signing of the Association Agreement with the EU. Ukrainians were promised salaries and pensions five times higher than those under Yanukovych, healthcare available to everyone, honest courts, and even an increase in life expectancy.

What nobody explained was how any of these miracles were supposed to happen.

People were simply expected to believe.

Or rather – to have faith.

Soviet ideology and the Maidan narrative: exploiting a religious instinct

The promises of universal happiness that would supposedly arrive after joining the EU bore a striking resemblance to the Soviet dream of communism and the “bright future” once marketed to the masses in the USSR.

Officially, neither the Soviet project nor the ideology of Maidan claimed any religious foundation. Yet the similarities are impossible to ignore. Both relied on deeply religious patterns of thought.

Most importantly, both proclaimed a final destination – a state of complete happiness and prosperity.

For Soviet ideologues, that destination was communism: a society where people were supposedly able not to work and still have everything they wanted.

For the architects of the Maidan myth, the equivalent destination was membership in the European Union. The implication was remarkably similar: Ukrainians would not need to fundamentally change themselves or transform their society. Generous benefactors somewhere in Brussels would provide the money, solve the problems, and deliver prosperity.

The resemblance to the Christian image of the Heavenly Jerusalem is obvious.

Yet that is where the similarity ends.

The Church teaches that the Kingdom of Heaven is attained through daily struggle, repentance, self-denial, and the transformation of the human heart. Soviet and post-Maidan ideologues offered something very different: obedience to political leaders who promised to guide their followers effortlessly toward earthly salvation.

Beyond their promises of future bliss, both systems also borrowed Christianity’s external forms while stripping them of their substance.

The Soviet parades of May Day and November Revolution anniversaries, complete with portraits of political leaders, were little more than secular imitations of religious processions.

The same can be said of the torchlight marches of post-Maidan Ukraine, where icons were replaced with images of political and national idols.

The famous Soviet slogan, “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live,” openly echoed the language of eternity.

For a Christian, such a statement is understandable: every human being continues to exist after physical death. Lenin lived his earthly life; now he exists, and will continue to exist, in eternity. Of course, given his responsibility for mass deaths, Ilyich is unlikely to be pleased with his posthumous state – but that is another matter.

But how were Soviet citizens supposed to understand this slogan?

That Lenin, who had already died, was somehow still alive somewhere and would remain alive forever? Where would he live? In what form? In songs, dances, memory?

For the average Soviet atheist, this was pure absurdity. A person is either alive or dead. Everything else is falsehood.

The post-Maidan slogans familiar to every Ukrainian – “Heroes never die” and “Bandera will come and restore order” – suffer from the same problem.

How should the words “heroes never die” be understood?

From a Christian perspective, nobody truly dies – neither a hero nor a criminal. Every person inherits eternal life, though in different forms.

From an atheist perspective, undying heroes are no less absurd than the eternally living Lenin.

Even worse is the slogan about Bandera, who will supposedly “come and restore order.”

Even Christians are left bewildered by this. Will Bandera come like Moses and Elijah, who appeared on Mount Tabor? Will he rise bodily from the dead, win a presidential election, capture Moscow, and fix Ukraine’s economy?

Of course, all of this is theatrical nonsense designed for an uncritical audience. And dishonest rhetoric always leads regimes toward collapse.

The collapse of Soviet ideology is now obvious to everyone after the fall of the USSR. Communism never arrived and never will.

The ideology born from Maidan has not yet reached the same point.

Many Ukrainians still view the tragic bloodshed of Euromaidan as something heroic, exalted, and even sacred. They continue to believe it was necessary for the achievement of some final goal.

What goal exactly?

They themselves would struggle to answer that fully.

But one of the most common answers remains: joining Europe.

And although the European Union itself has repeatedly denied such a prospect, that fact no longer plays any decisive role.

Faith comes to the foreground.

A passionate, theatrical, irrational faith.

And religious rhetoric has played a major role in cultivating it.

Euro-theology

Immediately after the tragic shootings during Euromaidan, its ideologues announced the creation of the so-called “Heavenly Hundred” – activists killed by unknown snipers.

The very word “heavenly” points to the religious element of the term.

The head of the UGCC, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who publicly called people to Maidan in 2013, said the dead had become the “Paschal sacrifice of the Revolution of Dignity,” called their death “life-giving,” and described the site of the shootings as a “Ukrainian Golgotha.”

Measured against Christianity, such words are, at the very least, absurd – and at most, blasphemous.

In the New Testament Church, the expression “Paschal sacrifice” refers to the voluntary sacrifice of Christ. The same applies all the more to the phrase “life-giving death.”

St. Theodore the Studite wrote: “Christ by His life-giving Death abolished death, and all in Hades were freed from their bonds; Christ opened Paradise and made it accessible to all.”

There is no evidence that the slain activists intended to offer themselves as a sacrifice for anyone. They were simply cynically killed.

How one can compare the deaths of these unfortunate people with the Sacrifice of the Savior is known only to the conscience of the head of the Uniates.

Representatives of both the UGCC and the UOC-KP presented the “Heavenly Hundred” as new saints. Their images were painted on church walls, akathists were composed to them, and churches were even consecrated in their honor.

And although prayers to these new “saints” did not ask them to lead Ukrainians into Europe, that goal was clearly implied.

“Metropolitan” Mykhailo Zinkevych of Lutsk, then of the UOC-KP and now of the OCU, declared during Euromaidan: “We have one path – to God. And to Europe.”

Later, in 2016, Zinkevych said that “the Ukrainian people want to go to Europe, and the task of the authorities is to create the conditions and do everything necessary so that people can interact with the community in which they feel comfortable.”

According to another controversial representative of the UOC-KP, “priest” Oleksandr Dediukhin, now also in the OCU, Maidan was an action of the Holy Spirit:

“The Holy Spirit gives every apostle the strength to go out onto the Maidan in Jerusalem and preach. Yes, they did not particularly need Molotov cocktails, because there was already fire above each of them, and that proved enough. So yes, in Paradise, Maidan is unnecessary. After all, Maidan is the action of the Holy Spirit in an imperfect world.”

Euromaidan-era poster

The twilight of Europe?

Six years have passed since Euromaidan, but nothing has changed.

The Association Agreement with the EU was signed, but European salaries did not appear. European pensions did not appear. Modern healthcare did not appear. Even fair courts did not appear.

Ukraine’s prospects of joining the European Union remain just as vague, and Europe remains just as unreachable an ideal as before.

Everything is exactly as it should be in a religion.

With one caveat – this “ideal” is collapsing before our eyes.

The coronavirus epidemic exposed enormous problems in European society, which only yesterday had seemed ideal and flawless.

Mutual aid, solidarity, compassion, and joint problem-solving – neither we nor the rest of the world saw any of this in that supposedly beautiful Europe.

Each country in the union suddenly realized that the union itself was a myth, and that all the beautiful words about unity were no more than an illusion.

Catholic Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi of Trieste, Italy, argued that the coronavirus had demonstrated the inglorious end of the European Union:

“The experience of these days has once again shown that the European Union is divided and phantom-like. Selfish disputes emerged among member states instead of cooperation. Italy was left isolated and alone.”

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said in one of his speeches:

“There is no great international solidarity. European solidarity does not exist. It turned out to be a fairy tale.”

The ideal earthly society as a surrogate Heavenly Jerusalem?

Each of us wants to be surrounded by decent people – honest, kind, cultured.

When apartments or houses are advertised for sale, sellers often mention “respectable, decent neighbors.” Housing in areas inhabited by “respectable” citizens is always more expensive than housing in “slums” with high crime rates.

It is no accident, then, that throughout history people have tried to build an ideal society of “worthy” people here on earth.

The French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nazi experiment in Germany – all declared the creation of a new ideal society as their goal.

And almost all of these attempts borrowed heavily from religion.

Modern Russian communist politician Gennady Zyuganov says this openly: “We largely copied the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism from the Bible. And whoever tries to say otherwise should simply place those documents side by side.”

But the question arises: why create a surrogate when the original already exists?

All revolutionaries, even the most sincere ones, offered people only external changes: replace “bad” rulers with “good” ones, one system with another.

But none of the ideologues of these new ideal societies set themselves the task of transforming the individual person, as Christ calls us to do.

To cleanse oneself of spiritual filth, to burn away one’s passions and sins through repentance – only in this way can a person be transformed.

We know no other path to a truly ideal society – the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Looking around and listening to the rhetoric of certain religious leaders, we must clearly understand that every attempt to speculate on a fusion of politics and religion is doomed to failure.

History bears witness to this convincingly.

The “Heavenly Hundred,” who died, among other things, for the sake of entering the EU, were not saints at all. They were unfortunate people killed so that certain forces could come to power.

Their death was not “life-giving.”

Europe is not an ideal society into which we must break at any cost for the sake of a happy life. It is a community of people just like us – only, at present, better fed.

Our goal lies farther away, beyond the horizon.

And to reach it, we must work long and hard.

Work on ourselves.

To construct strong and tall buildings, people use brick – fragments of clay or sand fired at high temperature.

Can one build with raw materials?

One can.

But at some point, such a structure will inevitably collapse.

Clay and sand can be used to make children’s mud cakes, not real buildings.

And even if one writes the word “brick” on a lump of clay, it will not become hard.

Building an “ideal society” in the modern world is an impossible task, because from the standpoint of Christian values, such a society is possible only under the condition of immense spiritual effort by each of its members.

In this sense, a person living in such a society must strive not toward Europe or anywhere else, but exclusively toward the Kingdom of Heaven.

The final goal of our life is not European integration, but heavenly integration.

At the heart of this “integration” must be not the ideals of material prosperity, but the ideals of moral and spiritual perfection.

And only when those ideals are fulfilled will the Lord grant everything else as well.

As He said: “Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Read also