One of the strategic tasks of the state administration system is the desire of scientists to form a system of fundamental spiritual values and to orient Ukrainian society to them. After all, when spiritual values become the basis of life for every human personality, a person will look for means to realize them. Suppose the so-called universal values declared in the geopolitical space contradict the spiritual value vectors of Christianity and the Ukrainian state. In that case, they can only become tools of political manipulation to achieve the corresponding goal by certain political forces. Ukrainian society is becoming increasingly globalized, plunging into the virtual world of value relativism, which leads to the alienation of people, the church, society and the state. At the same time, in the globalized world, the destruction of religious traditions, the erasure of the boundaries of religious identity, national history, culture, and the devaluation of the spiritual values of Christianity are taking place. Globalization in modern conditions of planetary development brings both positive (economic growth, availability of finance, and information) and negative consequences (ecological problems, political, racial and national conflicts).
In turn, Christian values (faith, hope, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, mercy, generosity, gentleness, courage, perseverance, simplicity, directness, prudence, moderation, justice, stability, honesty, truthfulness, faithfulness to the word) create the basis for the formation of citizens’ trust in the church, religious organizations and state institutions, as well as contribute to the improvement of the quality of public administration and ensure social justice and spiritual development of society. Modern Ukrainian Orthodoxy is formed by the main spiritual orientations of the behavior of religious communities and, therefore, of the entire nation.
The social thought of Christianity significantly influences the processes of culture, history and state formation. In worship and social activities, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine adds social optimism, developed religious intuition to modern people and develops creative abilities in professional activities. The mission of Ukrainian Orthodoxy consists not only in the revival of church worship and the construction of monasteries, cathedrals and churches, but primarily in spiritual, educational and social service. Church-state relations have consistently shaped new methodological approaches that combine religion and modern science. In our opinion, the mission of the church and Christian communication are gradually evolving, experiencing periods of ups and downs and a certain transformation, the priority of finding new forms of theological language and preaching of the church changes depending on internal and external factors of the development of the global world. It is known that in the history of Christianity, there were various forms of Christian communication. The word communication comes from the Latin “communicatio” and means message, transfer, and conversation. Note that the conceptual concept of “Christian communication” is constantly in a state of scientific methodological development, both in theology and in public administration. Therefore, according to scientists, solutions to the problems of evangelization, preaching, mission, theology, catechization and social service are relevant for her.
Let us define Christian communication in the theological context: communication is transmitting the Christian faith (catechization), worship, preaching, interaction with society, and сhurch teaching in human life, state and society. Christian communication includes morality, theology, liturgical life and social policy of the church. Given the above, let us emphasize the practicality of the study by the state administration of the place and role of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in Ukrainian society, as well as its sacred mission.
Thus, there is an urgent need to develop theoretical and methodological principles regarding Christian communication’s theological and managerial science. The spiritual, historical, cultural, and socio-political life of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is not only the history of religion and the cultural and historical characteristics of the Ukrainian people’s existence but also the special intellectual world of modern theological science.
Considering the main aspects of the democratization of state-building processes and the issue of optimizing the state administration system of Ukraine, it is worth focusing the attention of scientists and researchers on the problems of religious, spiritual and moral, historical, humanitarian and value influence of Ukrainian Orthodoxy on the life of the Ukrainian people. Of the many social issues of the study of modern religious thought, the sphere of influence of Christian theology on doctrines, concepts, theories of state administration and world trends in their development remains the least scientifically researched. There are several good reasons, but the most significant ones should be singled out.
During Ukrainian Orthodoxy’s thousand-year history, certain components of its social teachings remain poorly studied. This is because, during the Soviet era, researchers almost did not attach any direct importance to religion in society. More precisely, scientists were guided by the methodology of “scientific Soviet atheism” and materialistic dialectic, which seems to deny religious values.
It is worth noting that Ukrainian society, at a critical stage of its development and struggle for independence and freedom, desperately needs a return to the roots of its own spiritual culture, history, and religion. In its history, the Ukrainian people have always been guided by Christian ideas of being, the eschatology of hope, and the sacred mission of asserting freedom, dignity, and one’s own vocation.
Many of the state-management concepts and areas of study of the history of Christianity in Ukraine, first of all, need a fundamental clarification, explanation, and new interpretation, and some of them require a general rethinking in the light of Christian theology and the history of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. In our opinion, the real historical experience of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, the life and work of church hierarchs, the social teachings of world Christianity, and political theology significantly enrich the concepts of political philosophy and state administration. The need to study the social thought and history of the church is strengthened by the fact that it forms the value field of modern geopolitics, history, culture and political activity.
At all stages of Ukrainian history, the public and political activity of the passionate intelligentsia, it was the representatives of Ukrainian Orthodoxy (church hierarchs, theologians, ordinary clergy) who attached great importance to the development of the national culture of the Ukrainian people, its identity and historical uniqueness.
So, the historical path of Ukrainian Orthodoxy is a certain paradigm in the search for Ukrainian cultural identity, church, national, and state building. We can confidently note that the history of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine has become a source of creative inspiration for Ukrainian intelligence.
With the fall of the communist regime in the USSR and the revival of the autocephalous church movement in the independent Ukrainian state, Ukrainian Orthodoxy integrated wide circles of the ecclesiastical and political public in Western Europe, America, Canada, and Australia into its religious institutions.
Church-state relations during the existence of the Soviet Union, like all scientific fields of that time, were used by the political helmsmen of the Soviet atheist power primarily to serve the interests of the totalitarian system. After all, culture, history, and literature were perceived as tools that had a significant impact on the consciousness of citizens, and to ensure the stability of the regime, constant control over the formation of the consciousness of the enslaved people was necessary. Starting with the mutiny and coup d’état of 1917, the Bolsheviks constantly used the church issue in their revolutionary struggle.
The intelligentsia and the clergy had to carry out various orders of the Soviet government, for example, during the civil war, to motivate the peasants who fought for autocephaly to fight against the White Guard formations, to maintain a negative image of the former tsarist government. This had inevitable consequences for the system of church administration, as well as for the life of Ukrainian Orthodoxy itself.
The spiritual struggle for one’s own church identity began during the life and activity of the outstanding educationalist, reformer, and talented preacher, Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivsky, in the 20s of the XX century. Church history shows that after 1917, the national liberation movement of the Ukrainian people covered all of Ukraine, raising important issues of church life. Public leaders who were indifferent to the current problems of state building and active leaders of national liberation struggles (1917–1921), priests Vasyl Lypkivsky, Nestor Sharaievsky and Peter Tarnavsky, founded a unique church movement for the renewal and revival of the Ukrainian Church, which led to the emergence of the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council ( AUOCC). The Minister of Confessions of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Professor Ivan Ohienko, the future Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada, as well as numerous groups of priests who advocated autocephaly, were deeply convinced that only through the creation, strengthening, and development of the national church can a national state emerge and strengthen. Already in the spring of 1920, the active political and church public, having proclaimed the autocephaly of the Ukrainian church, made a conscious break with the Russian church authorities.
Realizing that the existence of the church in the paradigm of the canons and history of Orthodoxy is impossible without the episcopate, the activists of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) began to make attempts to acquire their own hierarchy. Social democrat, former prime minister and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR), professor Volodymyr Moiseyovych Chekhovsky (1876–1937), who was a leading and active figure of the Orthodox Church, showed activity in this matter. The author of theological and church-historical works began to persistently promote the idea of canon law (broad involvement of believers in influencing church life and management). According to this idea, the ordination of an ordinary priest to the episcopal rank (ordination) can only be performed by the church people without bishops (hierarchy). The council of the community – the council of priests, deacons, and laymen – has the right to independently resolve urgent issues related to the church’s existence and make any important decisions. It is worth noting that the Ukrainian autocephalists tried to liberate the Christian faith from the power of medieval scholasticism and ossified dogmatism and harmonize the Orthodox faith of the church with the realities of political and social life. They perceived the canonical law developed in Byzantium as a moving element of the best arrangement of the multifaceted church life. They allowed the second marriage of the clergy, a married bishop and other church innovations. It is difficult for Christian academic theology to deny the need for a timely renewal of Christian faith (canon law), religious practice (worship) and church organization (congregation) by changes in the socio-political and cultural context.
Volodymyr Moiseyovych Chekhovsky justified this experience of church life with real examples from the history of episcopal ordinations of the ancient Alexandrian Church with arguments at the level of academic theology and Christian history. The active support of political forces (at first the Directorate of the Ukrainian National People’s Republic, and then representatives of the Soviet government) of the public movement for autocephaly became a powerful impetus for the convening of the First All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council of the UAOC. The epoch-making First All-Ukrainian Council of the UAOC occurred in Kyiv, in the Church of St. Sophia of Kyiv, on October 14-30, 1921. The leaders of the new church movement became the famous priests Vasyl Lypkivsky and Nestor Sharayevsky, as well as representatives of the intelligentsia professors V. M. Chekhovsky, A. E. Krymsky and V. E. Danylevych. At this cathedral, the three pillars of the UAOC were proclaimed: autocephaly, canon law, and Ukrainianization.
The Bolshevik atheist government in Ukraine, the Soviet authorities and the administration wanting to weaken the Russian Orthodox Church, which was headed by Patriarch Tikhon (Belavin), willingly came into contact with the religious communities of the UAOC. By the mid-20s of the 20th century, the network of religious communities of the UAC, which took care of the issues of state formation, mass use and development of the Ukrainian language, literature, and history, was actively spreading (there were already about 1,300 of them). Still, gradually, the operation conditions and state structures’ attitude toward the autocephalous church changed. Under the pressure of the Bolshevik government of Ukraine, headed at that time by L. Kaganovych, the leadership of the UAOC in January 1930 convened an extraordinary church council in Kyiv, at which a decision was made to dissolve the church. During the period of Stalin’s Red Terror, which began in the 1930s, the state policy regarding religious and church life was transformed into an authoritarian policy of persecution and total extermination of the clergy and Ukrainian intelligence, which consciously supported the autocephalous movement of the Ukrainian church.
The national project of study, understanding and modernization of Ukrainian state formation is an important scientific and practical task in public administration science. Approaches to it lie precisely in the field of research into the mass consciousness of religious institutions (the life of Ukrainian Orthodox communities), the study of the social teachings of the Orthodox Church as a complex socio-cultural phenomenon, which largely reflects the most important aspects of human value motivation in the definition and study of paradigms of Christian theology and the history of Christianity.
Thus, Christian theology and religious ethics regulate, subject to general conditions, the general rules of behavior of many people. First of all, the spiritual values of Christianity affect a person’s spiritual world, motivation, spiritual and social mission, thinking, aspirations, and interests. When we talk about the spiritual life of the Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Christian, we mean the existence of certain spiritual (theological) ideas under the influence of which people build their social, cultural, historical, and political space.
Modern science emphasizes that the physical (material) world is the real world of biology, economics, and politics, which a person experiences as the complex nature of things surrounding him. The spiritual world (ideas, concepts, mythology, psychology, religion) is the world of creativity, poetry, literature, art, spiritual ideas of humanity, theological and religious ideas. Here, it is important to realize that the processes of state formation are the world of realization of spiritual ideas, ideas about the existence and development of the state, and the spiritual world of religion and Christian theology significantly affects the philosophy of state administration and the real processes of politics.
In the middle of the 20th century, the core of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in the world were Ukrainian emigrants from America and Canada – mostly highly educated, patriotic church hierarchs, creative intelligentsia, who showed considerable interest in the preservation and revival of Ukrainian culture, history and ideas of the establishment of Ukrainian statehood.
Scientists study the rich Ukrainian world of the American and Canadian diaspora to understand how Ukrainians created themselves on another continent, preserved their history, language, culture, faith, passion for creation and the proclamation of Christian preaching to the modern world. Let us emphasize that even today, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA provides humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian state. Ukrainians greatly appreciate this great help that the people and the government of the United States provide to Ukraine in the fight against the Russian aggressor. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine is confident that Ukraine will be able to protect its freedom and independence through joint efforts with nations of good will. Let us emphasize that the well-known hierarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the USA, Archbishop Daniel (Zelinsky), constantly takes care of topical issues of charity, social service of modern Orthodoxy, and helping one’s neighbor. Through his efforts, the clergy of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine joins the modern world’s theoretical and practical professional social work.
We cannot ignore the Orthodox Christians of Canada. Metropolitan Hilarion (Rudnyk), First Hierarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada (Ecumenical Patriarchate), directs his apostolic ministry to strengthen the authority of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in the bosom of world Orthodoxy, affirming Christian ideals of spirituality and mercy in the realities of the modern global world. For the most part, talking and thinking about church hierarchs is responsible and dangerous, joyful and exciting, accessible and challenging: they wake up priests and believers, lead the people of God, awaken Christian communities from spiritual hibernation, sleep of the mind, from lukewarmness, so foreign to true ascetics of the Orthodox faith and Christian spirit. First of all, they always want to talk about church organization, order, discipline, rules, laws and prohibitions. But there are free-thinking, free-thinking archpastors who grow out of their political time and national environment to become spiritual leaders of the world, moral authorities beyond time because they synthesize theology, canon law, history, dogmatics, apologetics, sociology, moral theology, ethics and philosophy. It is precisely such church hierarchs who have the phenomenal ability of the universal unification of the Christian past, present and future through their service and preaching, as well as reducing the geographical and political distance between countries and peoples.
And it is Metropolitan Hilarion (Rudnyk) who impresses with the range of his theological knowledge of the subtleties of Eastern Christian asceticism, the spiritual and moral orientation of his wise reflections on the life of the church, the modern Christian, the archpastor’s symphony of warm, sincere emotions towards the priesthood, spiritual sons and daughters, and his tireless care for education integrity in the spiritual life of Canadian church parishes. As a spiritual-intellectual archpastor of God’s people, a wise teacher, and a Byzantine wise man, he strives to educate and re-educate religious communities based on the Orthodox faith, theological science, liturgical culture of Universal Orthodoxy, taking care of the blessed processes of spiritual victory over despair, despair, apathy, and unbelief, pits, atheism and immorality. Even in the conditions of the challenges of the modern world and a certain bureaucracy of church life, his love for Orthodoxy is manifested in his constant concern for worship, the comprehensive development of parishes and the spiritual state of the spirit of God’s people in Canada.
Moving from the annals of the church life of Canada and the USA to the history of the revival of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in Ukraine, let us emphasize that it began in the Western regions. It was mainly motivated by deep folk traditions, historical memory carefully preserved by the patriots of Ukraine, and global processes of the revival of Ukrainian culture (literature, poetry, art) among the creative intelligence.
Due to the efforts of Soviet dissidents, human rights defenders, public figures and students, in February 1989, the Initiative Committee for the Revival of the UAOC was established. The All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council was convened on June 5-6, 1990. Metropolitan Mstyslav (Skrypnyk) (1990–1993) was elected the first Patriarch of Kyiv and All Ukraine at this cathedral in absentia. On June 25-26, 1992, he headed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate after the unification of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) and a part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which was represented by Metropolitan Filaret (Denysenko) and Bishop Yakiv (Panchuk). After the death in the USA of the Patriarch of Kyiv and All Ukraine Mstyslav (Skrypnyk), the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council was convened in Kyiv on October 21-24, 1993, at which the Patriarch of Kyiv and All Ukraine Volodymyr (Romaniuk) was elected. After the death of Patriarch Volodymyr and his funeral, which were accompanied by tragic events and known in the history of Ukraine as “Black Tuesday” (July 18, 1995), the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council on October 20-22, 1995, elected Filaret (Denysenko) as the Patriarch of Kyiv and All Rus-Ukraine ).
Even much earlier, some parishes of the UAOC did not accept the unification with representatives of the Kyiv Patriarchate. So, on September 5, 1993, the 78-year-old archpriest Volodymyr Yarema, the former abbot of the Peter and Paul Church and the initiator of the revival of the UAOC in Ukraine, was ordained as a bishop. Before that, father Volodymyr and his wife Yulia took monastic vows named Dymytriy and Yuliania.
On September 7, 1993, the Second Local Synod of the UAOC elected Bishop Dymytriy as the Patriarch of Kyiv and All Ukraine. The enthronement took place on October 14, 1993. Patriarch Dimitry (Yarema) moved to Kyiv and began to organize the administrative center of the UAOC there. After the death of Patriarch Dymytiry (Yarema) by the will of the Local Cathedral of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on February 14, 2000, the church was headed by Metropolitan Mefodiy (Kudryakov). For Metropolitan Mefodiy, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was a church of authentic tradition. This church is the true heir of all martyrs and confessors of faith who fought for autocephaly and Ukrainian statehood in the 20th century.
After Metropolitan Mefodiy’s death, from June 4, 2015, to December 2018, Metropolitan Makariy (Maletych) headed the UAOC. Bishop Makariy, as his flock notes, is a hierarch from the people, the soul of the Ukrainian nation. As a talented preacher, he has a simple but apt word and conveys honest, joyful, warm, truthful words about the creed of the Orthodox Church and the life of the people to the heart of a person.
Later, as is known, part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC KP) under the spiritual leadership of Patriarch Filaret (Denysenko) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) under the chairmanship of Metropolitan Makariy (Maletych), having gone through a long and challenging path of overcoming the church separation on the initiative of the Ukrainian state and the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I (Archondonis) on December 15, 2018 created a new independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). On January 6, 2019, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine received a Tomos (certificate) on autocephaly from the Ecumenical See. On February 3, 2019, the Primate of the OCU, His Beatitude Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine Epiphany (Dumenko) was enthroned in St. Sophia of Kyiv.
Ukrainian Orthodoxy was the spiritual and moral leader in the formation of the national idea and patriotism and the initiator of the revival of the Ukrainian state in Ukraine’s history. Historians, theologians, and prominent church hierarchs emphasize that the Ukrainian church is the spiritual mother of Ukrainian statehood. The Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are two wings of the Ukrainian people, a symbolic spiritual bird of Ukrainian history.
The history of Ukrainian Orthodoxy is a theoretical and practical embodiment of the national idea of the Ukrainian people, an actualization of the spiritual, political, and social system that harmonized the interests of all citizens of Ukraine based on the principles of the religious, historical, cultural, and political heritage of the titular Ukrainian nation. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine supports and strengthens its national state based on spiritual ideals of social teaching. Such social service of Ukrainian Orthodoxy is not something artificially invented and formulated by scientists. It is a historical, cultural, and socio-political reality of Ukrainian life.
The most prominent church hierarchs, theologians and representatives of Ukrainian Orthodoxy are constantly concerned with the most challenging problems of Ukrainian national statehood. As a talented, active church and public figures, they resort to the professional subject of scientific and theological analysis of the world and national practice of state formation. They also analyze the historical paths of Ukraine as an independent, independent and sovereign state.
Modern politics is a rather dirty business, connected mainly with power, lies, corrupt positions, big money, and manipulation, as mostly preached by priests in the church. State formation is a necessary and decisive tool of Christian communication, a platform for the spiritual unification of people, what makes one’s own state a spiritually related community of freedom, dignity, patriotism, and social justice.
The powerful rise of the spiritual forces of the Ukrainian people in the war with russia created the prerequisites for the state leadership to rethink the Orthodox Church’s role in Ukraine’s general social progress.
In our time, the history of the church has become a subject of interest both at the everyday and scientific level. Therefore, the question of developing the theoretical part of the study of the church’s role in the processes of Ukrainian state formation with a clear methodology of state management is acute. In our opinion, the protection of the national interests of the Ukrainian state is impossible without creating and affirming spiritual ideals of social development with certain Christian values, norms, and guidelines. The lack of real scientific and objective research on the history of the formation and development of the social teachings of Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the hypertrophied processes of political propaganda lead to the loss of the main spiritual landmarks in society, which inhibit the processes of strengthening the real state formation of Ukraine.
In the conditions of the processes of globalization, the historical process of strengthening economic, cultural and political contacts between different parts of the world, which leads to the growing monotony of the lives of many peoples of the planet and the erasure of religious and cultural boundaries of civilizational development, the question of actualizing the spiritual values of Christianity in the processes of state formation arises more than ever. What will be the religious map of the world tomorrow, where and what will the Ukrainian church and state be, in what way will the church communicate with the outside world and embody the ethical values of Christianity in the fields of culture, science, education and politics – these are not just the rhetorical questions of scientists, not only a political questions and state management prognostication, this is the most important theoretical and practical issue of Christian theology as a science.
Having analyzed the history and heritage of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, we can confidently say that it plays a significant role in the processes of state formation and culture and is, at the same time, a spiritual phenomenon on a global scale. Therefore, Ukrainian Orthodoxy attracts attention from domestic and foreign historians, state managers, philosophers, and theologians.
It is proved that the spiritual and value system of the Ukrainian people, history, and culture were formed during the historical development of the Orthodox Church. The moral and value norms of the Ukrainian people’s life are strengthened in the paradigm of love for God, the church, the state, humanity, and sacrifice, which characterize a special identity that has distinguished Ukrainian spirituality throughout the existence of our nation.
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