I received both of your letters and was overjoyed. However, I won’t conceal this, that together with the joy of your letters, it created sorrow in my heart and in the hearts of all those who love you. You praise me for my zeal and extol me, forgetting about my sinfulness up to Ilya Kolesnitchik (the Chariot Elijah. O, how ashamed I am over this comparison because I am unworthy of it! But here, your words declaring that you want to go on a random pilgrimage, without a twinge of conscience, so as to pray in any temple without distinction – these two words settled on our hearts as a heavy weight and crushed all of your praises about our zeal.
After all, there is no grace outside of the Orthodox Church and consequently no salvation: there is not and cannot be a true temple of God, but there is simply a building, according to the word of St. Basil the Great. In my opinion, the temple without the grace of God becomes a place of idolatry, and the most holy icons, stripped from the life-giving grace of God, become dead boards - idols. And suddenly you write that you would like to pray wherever the name of God is praised.
But if you continue your speech further, then you will find yourself not only among all types of heretics, but in the midst of Mohammedans, Buddhists and others as they too "glorify" God. But you yourself can see that such thoughts, full of indifference, destroy not only the meaning and significance of the Orthodox Church, but even Christianity itself. And what is the point of our confession of the truth of the Orthodox Church? Why do we endure deprivations, suffering and perhaps we will have to endure death itself ?! This is from your first letter; but here from your second one – you mention about the schism and other matters - and reading between the lines - you ascribe them to us. This, once again, erases all of your praises to us for our true words, which according to your opinion, we should have said to the deceived.
No, sacred head, we are not renegades from God’s Church and are not schismatics who have broken away from Her: may this never happen with us. We do not reject Metropolitan Peter or the Holy Patriarchs: I don’t even speak of our reverent preservation of the creed and Church structure, committed to us by the Fathers and in general, we are not insane and do not blaspheme God’s Church.
Thus, in 1923 we confessed the truth of the Church in exactly the same manner and achieved, through our suffering the expulsion of the unrighteous from God’s Church, forcing them to organize their own “renovationist” cabal apart from us. Therefore, in your opinion were we schismatics then in our confession? I don’t imagine you would think that way as you yourself blessed us and soothed our sores. Those who spoke about us as schismatics are those who were seduced by the devil, traitors to the Church, who wished by this to defend their renunciation and fall.
And these same people are now accusing us of this schism. We are not creating a schism in the Church but are only demanding that the betrayers of God’s Church vacate their positions and transer the administration into other hands, or tearfully repent and express contrition for the evil they have done.
Or do you think that Sergius is better than Antonin? His delusions about the Church and about the salvation of man in it were clear to me back in 1912, when I wrote about him in an Old Believer magazine that the time would come when he would shake the Church. And so it happened. We must apply all measures so as to preserve and shield the flock of the Orthodox Church from this new cajolement. And it is not we alone who strive for this, but with us is the Council of the Solovetsky bishops, and a great many of God's servants. Within Christ’s enclosure, these wolves by the evil they put forth, although they are not masters but impostors, produce such a horror that fear before them is suppressed. Metropolitan Peter had not blessed either the “synod”, or “appeal”, or those activities which Metropolitan Sergius is producing, having exceeded his authority, from being a simple overseer of the Church he is making himself out to be her master. And so, voices have been raised from all the corners of the Russian Orthodox Church, accusing the betrayers: and akin to what transpired in 1923, efforts have appeared to remove them from authoritative positions. But the destroyers of the Church are hoping that Metropolitan Peter will not return to “life” – just like the past Church apostates, the living churchmen, hoped that His Holiness the Patriarch "would not rise again." On our part, we have a different hope: that the memory of them will perish with noise - for they are despoilers of Christian souls.
We believe with childish simplicity that the strength of the Church is not in organization, but in the Grace of God, which cannot exist where there is wickedness, where there is betrayal, where there is renunciation of the Orthodox Church, even if only under the guise of achieving the external good of the Church. After all, this is not a simple sin of Metropolitan Sergius and his advisers. Oh, if only it were so! No! Here is the systematic destruction of the Orthodox Church according to a certain pre-planned deliberation, the desire to confuse everything, desecrate and spiritually corrupt everything. Here is a pledge for the destruction of the entire Russian Orthodox Church. After all, there is an obvious perversion of the essence of the Church, namely the conscious adaptation of her - the Heavenly Bride of Christ, to serve the world, that is, evil, for the world lies in evil.
"Do not worship under someone else's yoke with the unbelievers" and so on - commands the Holy Apostle. But these individuals are preaching the opposite. And all this they are attempting to spread throughout the whole Russian Orthodox Church, because everyone has to endorse this new unrighteousness, or otherwise – they strive to force them, as they declare: “We are your superiors”. Oh what blindness of the mind! Oh, the horror of the experience!
With the experiences of 1923 and later, it became quite clear that the pillars of the Orthodox Church were the confessors of the Truth – the Bishops, who were bound with an inseverable, grace-filled bond and love with their flocks. And what are the new enemies of Orthodoxy doing? They are removing such Bishops from their Cathedras and replacing them with their henchmen: and this is done not in isolated instances but systematically throughout the whole Russian Church. Can you imagine what groans, weeping and horror covered the Orthodox Church when this dissection of the indivisible began!
The clergy and laity of Leningrad "Petrograd" asked Metropolitan Sergius, to explain this atrocity? And he naively replied that the Church is not suffering but the Bishops and their flocks. - But isn’t this a small Church? a cell of the Universal Church? According to the words of Metropolitan Sergius, this is necessary in order to show loyalty to the civil authorities. What kind of madness is this?! - They ruin the Church to reveal their loyalty.
Furthermore, the second pillars of Orthodoxy turned out to be the parish councils. And again, what are the new enemies of Orthodoxy doing? They issue a decree that nullifies the purpose of the parish councils so that their Bishop henchmen could replace clerical positions according to their own wishes. What a desecration of souls will now begin from such wicked priests, whom the bishops will scatter everywhere, and what a frightening despoliation of the Faith and decline in religious life will be inflicted by both the Bishops and their clergy – that have not been acknowledged by the faithful… Truly, such evil thoughts against the Church are not from a human but from he, who has been a murderer from the beginning and who hungers for our eternal damnation i.e. the devil - whose servants the new traitors have become. These have substituted the very essence of Christ’s Orthodox Church, they turn Her from being Heavenly to being of this earth, from being a grace-filled union, into a political organization.
In concluding this letter, I beg of you as a friend whom I esteem for your piety, flee from poisonous enticing speeches (letters) that are akin to snakes which want to distance you from the life-giving Cross of Truth. Let us remain firm and unyielding in our confession for the Truth of God, undertaken by us since 1922, so that the Lord does not direct the voice of the prophet to us: “Her priests have violated My law, and have profaned My holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and the profane” (Ezekiel 22:26), but to them everything was the same. Remember what we had both read about our great confessor Theodore the Studite, when he terminated his communion with the Patriarch just because didn’t defrock a priest who consciously conducted an unlawful wedding ceremony. As well, recall another Confessor Maximus, who said: “Even if the whole universe communes with the heretical Patriarch, then I alone will not commune with him unto the ages”. With God’s Grace, let us emulate these Confessors.
Peace unto you,
Bishop Victor.
(The above text has been kindly translated by Seraphim Larin.)