That was the advice of the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.
Many of my acquaintances tell me: “I believe in Christian values, but I don’t trust our clergymen. They live in luxury and excess and do not at all correspond to the image of Christian virtues.” It is undeniable that among our clergy—as well as among Russian Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, and other religious leaders—such people do exist.
But to those who say this, I suggest answering the following question (I am not the author of this “test”): If you know, have met, or after searching find a priest who lives modestly, frugally, in the manner of an average Armenian—or even worse off (in my view, the majority of our priests are precisely like that)—will you go to the church where he serves every Sunday? If the answer is yes, then your faith, as well as your discontent with the clergy, is genuine.
But if those asked begin to hedge and evade, then their complaints about the “worldly sins” of priests are nothing but a pretext to disguise spiritual laziness.
Read also
The Church is pure only to the extent that we ourselves are decent, virtuous, and true believers. My view may sound naïve, but I am convinced that if members of a given community lead restrained, God-fearing lives, then the priest serving them will not dare, so to speak, to flaunt the latest model of a Mercedes before their eyes and spend his days from morning to night in restaurants. People, including clergymen, need not so much admonitions as role models.
This example can also be applied to secular authorities, though not in the way it is usually done—“let us elect a good government.” I have serious reservations about the “healing powers” of elections. The “will of the people” (if it exists at all) can be distorted—by ballot stuffing, by falsified numbers.
Voters can be bribed in one way or another. Or they can simply be deceived with political technologies. Who said that the last method is any better than the others? And in countries like ours, much depends on whether Western institutions are inclined to “recognize” election results or to reject them. That, too, has nothing to do with the “will of the people.”
Let our esteemed oppositionists forgive me, but I also do not believe in another “traditional” prescription for reform: “Soon the people will rise up and take to the streets.” Such “uprisings” can also be staged—again, figuratively speaking, by handing every teenager a vuvuzela and producing unbearable noise. But after the noise subsides, neither baseness disappears, nor does villainy. The events of 2018 and the seven years that followed are vivid proof of that.
I gave the example of spiritual life to show the path that I myself see—and that is the path of our individual responsibility, our solidarity, our dignity. In a country where citizens think about their human and national dignity, a figure like Nikol Pashinyan cannot be a leader.
…In Soviet times people complained about injustices, about shop managers, warehouse bosses, district committee secretaries, and other “privileged ones”—but at the same time they were stealing electricity worth two kopecks. That is why the Soviet Union collapsed.
Aram Abrahamyan
