God unveils ineffable completeness through Christ in the Spirit, embracing temporal incompleteness with the glory of timeless completeness. If Holy Trinity is ineffable completeness, from whence came the fall? Was the original sin God’s fall from completeness into incompleteness, evil, suffering and death, as Ivan Ilyin taught? Or was the original fall from glory the fall of angels and men, as Orthodox tradition had always taught? For Holy Orthodoxy, the fall’s hold on the world, does not create incompleteness, which is the creation of time, but is the consequence of pride that separates creation from God, or vainglory that confuses it with God. Ilyin’s gnostic dualism inverts this, presuming to redeem the divine by eliminating incompleteness instead of perfecting it, reducing the completeness of the realm of glory to a satanic, totalitarian parody. This counter-inversion of God’s redemptive inversion of the fall counters God by replacing God, confusing sound communion with communism or divisively glorifying white Russia’s war on communism. Confusing diversity with division perverts Holy Orthodoxy into kleptocratic kenodoxy. When eschatological hope degenerates into hopeless traditionalism, Russian innocence weds military power, fixating on criminality, arming itself to the teeth with nuclear warheads. Kleptocratic criminality despises the rule of law in the name of holy Russian innocence, demonising democracy in the name of totalitarian dictatorship. Traditionalist paranoia sees time as the destroyer of innocence, therefore time as persecutory evil, whereas genuine tradition ineffably embraces time, completing incompleteness in the uncreated light of timeless completeness.
Wisdom inspires Orthodox regeneration, curing gnostic heresy and totalitarian tyranny, healing dualistic nihilism by turning into the ineffable oneness of God, seeing God in God, Holy Trinity awakening the uncreated wisdom of the eye of the heart. Neither right-wing nor left-wing totalitarianism can work the cure, because both inverted dualisms invert the other’s dualistic inversion. Upstream from mirroring dualistic extremes lies the paradox of co-inherent communion, the wisdom of Holy Orthodoxy manifest in uncreated glory. Instead of the elimination of time, time is transfigured. Instead of the desolation of warring dualisms, difference is included. Gnosticism fixates on the failures of God and the disasters of crucifixion, imposing totalitarian exclusion of difference. Gnostic totality consumes difference, annihilating enemies, which is Satan’s parody of God’s love of enemies. Ivan Ilyin’s fascist interpretation of Orthodoxy was the perverted inspiration of white Russian totalitarianism, reducing prophecy to ideology and prayer to violence, despising the rule of law from below. To Ilyin, white Russian totalitarianism was anterior to Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism, waiting ten decades in obscurity for the collapse of Soviet communism.
For Ilyin, democracy was demonic, and Russian innocence was immaculately conceived, being the third Rome, making Moscow heir to Constantine’s imperial inheritance, and holy Russia heir to imperial Christian Rome. Just as Greece had long ago been subsumed into holy Rome, Ukraine had long ago been subsumed into holy Russia. When all parties are destroyed, democracy disintegrates and history is replaced by mythology, leaving dictatorial totalitarianism reigning supreme. Ilyin’s, slavophile mythology of holy Russianness was resuscitated to function as the ideology of Putin’s dictatorial kleptocracy. Ilyinists contemplate the totalitarian completeness of Holy Russia in place of the holy reign of God, confusing God’s reign of glory with Russian glory. Holy Orthodoxy restores glory to God by displacing Russian glory with Orthodox right-glorification of God, opening through God to integral multi-perspectival wisdom. The cure of kleptocratic kenodoxy lies in the restoration and renewal of God’s own right-glorification of God in God, which is Holy Trinity in action as wisdom revealing glory, generously completing incompleteness by unveiling completeness, manifesting the theophany of wisdom’s glory of ineffable completeness.