There are efforts in Serbia to ensure that the success and quality of education is measured based on the ammounts of religious classes and consecrated ritual bread and school buildings. It should come as no surprise, then, that Patriarch Porfirije personally consecrated the Zemun High School and used this opportunity to say that a school educates and teaches, and that the Slavic root of those Serbian words reveals something greater and more significant than the mere process of gathering information. “To be taught means to be nourished, and to be educated means to shape one’s image,” said Porfirije and added that the meaning of those words can include “the external aspect of scholastic learning and the internal aspect of building character.”
The consecration of the school was attended by the minister of education, state and church officials, and the patriarch explained to all of them that the goals of education have their predestination in the Serbian language. Mastering the Serbian language and the naive etymology of words allows Porfirije to consecrate school buildings and teach the minister and state officials, because he has already mastered the goals of education. Therefore, there is nothing strange in the minister of education standing next to the religious leader during the consecration of a school. Namely, the patriarch defines and, at the same time, fulfills educational goals, while the minister and state officials are present to confirm this.
A nation, however, is not a given, writes Dominique Schnapper in the book “Community of Citizens” (Serbian translation published in 1996), but is “the fruit of the process of integration” through the school system, which exists not only “for the sake of technical training, but, above all, for the sake of shaping a citizen,” capable of adopting the values of common life and accepting the idea of the common good. “This is how the determinism of birth becomes freedom,” concludes Schnapper; that is how, through the process of education, pupils and students overcome the determinism of the Serbian language and the Orthodox religion, and become free and responsible citizens. However, the current regime has given up on the basic goals of education – we already wrote about that here – and the patriarch has appeared to fill in that gap, however unnecessary, redundant, and even harmful his presence may be.
We saw the results of Porfirije’s education in the Church of Christ’s Resurrection in Podgorica. There, on the territory of neighboring Montenegro, the patriarch took part in a campaign to increase the number of Serbs on the population census. In the presence of ministers, the Russian ambassador and politicians, Porfirije never once mentioned Montenegro. Instead, it became “here”, a space without a name, where “our beginning and roots are deeply planted” and “the birthplace of all Orthodox Serbs.” Porfirije first rhetorically erased Montenegro, and then planted the Serbs there, as the primordial collective in that area. And that space is truly miraculous, because “here, better than anywhere else, we know who we are, what religion we are, what language we speak and what nation we belong to.” But what makes this unnamed place so much better than any other?
Because only in conflict with other identities and concepts, in this case the civic definition of Montenegro, can one know what Serbian religion, language and identity really are. Only on the basis of religious and nationalist divisions and classifications, can one define and delimit what is ours – and that is the entire nameless and unnamed space of Montenegro. For the purpose of the upcoming census, the patriarch pragmatically designated Montenegro – instead of Kosovo – as the root, beginning and birthplace of the Orthodox Serbs. The patriarch reassigned these signifiers, traditionally reserved for Kosovo, to Montenegro due to the urgency of Serbian nationalist mobilization in that area.
In church-nationalist sermons, Orthodoxy precedes everything, even when the Serbian people lived without “their own state” for centuries, they never “gave up on themselves,” said Porfirije and added: “The Serbian people never abandoned their Orthodox faith and the church, which guided them and kept them safe until today.” If we were to intervene in the structure of this message, we would come to a paradoxical result: the church guarded and preserved the Serbian people, but for what? For the secular, liberal and democratic state of “our days,” which separates the state from the church, and where the church is not the commanding structure of society, but only one voice among many, and Patriarch Porfirije is not a Serbian spiritual leader – he is merely Citizen Perić. In other words, the church protected the people, so that the people could eventually deprive it of political and social power and influence on the life of the average citizen. However, as an Orthodox nationalist and populist, Porfirije wouldn’t even think of drawing a conclusion that would deprive him of political power and influence.
That is why the Serbian spiritual leader must attack: “We live in a time of destruction of permanent traditional, but also objective, identities, and the imposition of constructed identities. Therefore, it is important to defend and preserve what we are, our identity – religious, personal, family, national identity of our ancestors, but also of our descendants.” In order to impose and establish himself as a spiritual leader, the patriarch cunningly undertakes the following maneuver: instead of identifying himself as a cleric – whom the modern state deprives of political governance and normative influence on society as a whole – he rhetorically uses the terms church and faith. That is why you will never hear him saying that the clergy preserved the people, but that the church did so.
The practical political benefit of this maneuver is in neutralizing critics and opponents by tarring them as being against freedom of religion. And only once he has hidden his true identity with a rhetorical smokescreen and confused the democratic public, the monk Porfirije emerges as someone hungry for political power, claims the title of spiritual leader and mobilizes the Serbian masses for defense against the forces that supposedly threaten our existence. What Porfirije sees as the “imposition of constructed identities” are in fact the values of the nation as a community of citizens (Schnapper). The patriarch is a Serbian nationalist, but he is against the constitution of the modern nation-state in Montenegro and Serbia, and against the integration of the citizens.
Porfirije’s transformation into a “Serbian spiritual leader” does not only serve to disregard the norms of public life within the secular state, but also the restraints imposed by the Holy Scriptures. In this sense, the words of the apostle Paul don’t seem to apply to the Serbian spiritual leader: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one (man) in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3, 28). The apostolic criteria cease to apply to the Serbian spiritual leader and, instead of “integrating” all Orthodox believers in Christ, because there are no more Serbs or Montenegrins, the leader introduces unrest, division and hostility among believers, thus tearing the Church apart as well.
According to the media, the bishops from Montenegro are following their patriarch, forgetting Christ’s warning from the Gospel of Matthew: “Ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch.”
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 30.10.2023.
