From the Blessing of Defenders to the Sacralization of War

The central question of this article can be formulated simply, although answering it requires caution: can war, in Orthodox theology, be called holy in the proper sense of the word?

The brief conclusion is this: in the normative core of Orthodox tradition, war is not recognized as a sacred thing, a sacred act, or a special path of salvation. Orthodox tradition allows for the defense of one’s neighbor, the protection of the community, military service, and the pastoral care of the army. Yet it almost always does so within the registers of tragic necessity, penitential realism, and moral restraint, not within the registers of sanctifying bloodshed itself.

For this reason, the contemporary use of the formula “holy war” in Russian church-political discourse should be understood not as a simple continuation of ancient tradition, but as a later ideological sacralization of war. It draws on certain motifs of tradition — the defense of one’s neighbors, self-sacrifice, prayers for victory, the memory of defenders, the image of Holy Rus — but it changes their overall meaning.

The issue here is not whether a Christian can ever defend others. The issue is different: can war itself be called holy? Can death in war acquire a meaning close to a sacrament, martyrdom, or automatic purification? Can a political conflict be inserted into a theological image of a battle between light and darkness in such a way that military mobilization itself becomes part of a sacred order?

The whole article rests on this distinction.

For the sake of precision, several levels must be distinguished.

The first level is dogma. At this level, Orthodoxy has no teaching that would recognize war as a sacred act, a sacrament, a normal means of salvation, or an independent spiritual value.

The second level is canon and pastoral practice. Here Orthodox tradition acknowledges that, in a fallen world, a Christian, a community, or a state may face the necessity of armed defense. But even when defense is recognized as permissible, war remains a spiritually dangerous reality that requires repentance, limitation, and pastoral care.

The third level is political theology and civil religion. It is here that figures such as the “sacred kingdom,” “Holy Rus,” “historical mission,” “defense of civilization,” and, in the most recent period, “holy war” appear. The confusion of these levels is what produces the main theological misunderstanding.

Sources also require hierarchy. The greatest weight belongs to Scripture, liturgical and canonical tradition, patristic texts, and documents of pan-ecclesial authority. Below them stand documents of local Churches and councils of bishops. Lower still are sermons, interviews, journalism, and documents of public organizations, even when such organizations are headed by church hierarchs.

This is especially important for the most recent Russian material: the sharpest formula of “holy war” appeared not in a decision of a Local Council, not in a resolution of the Holy Synod, and not in a universally binding dogmatic document, but in a text of the World Russian People’s Council — an organization with a different institutional status.

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The New Testament starting point for an Orthodox ethic of war is not holy war, but the peace of Christ, love for enemies, and the renunciation of vengeance.

The Gospel contains the commandment to love one’s enemies. In Gethsemane, Christ commands that the sword be put back into its place. In the Gospel of John, He stresses that His Kingdom is “not of this world.” The Apostle Paul calls Christians not to avenge themselves and, as far as possible, to live at peace with all people. These texts do not provide a ready-made political program for the state, nor do they dissolve all the tragic questions of public defense. But they set the fundamental direction: the Christian norm is reconciliation, not the sacralization of violence.

That is why, in the pre-Nicene period, many Christian authors regarded war and military service with great caution. Athenagoras wrote that Christians cannot even bear to watch a person being executed. Tertullian raised the question of whether military service was compatible with Christian identity. Origen argued that Christians help rulers above all through prayer and do not fight under their command, although spiritually they do battle for them as an “army of piety.”

These testimonies should not be turned into a simplified picture of absolute early Christian pacifism. The sources also show Christian soldiers, martyrs from military circles, and the absence of a full universal prohibition on military service. But it would be equally mistaken to claim that the ancient Church already possessed a positive theory of holy war.

It is more precise to say this: early Christianity lived in the tension between evangelical peacemaking, the reality of the imperial world, and the fact that Christians were present in the army. But it did not know a doctrine of “holy war.”

It is especially important that the ancient Church connected the highest form of Christian witness not with killing the enemy, but with martyrdom. A martyr is the one who endures and bears witness, not the one who receives a religious reward for taking part in battle. Already here a fundamental distinction appears between Christian holiness and military valor. Military valor may be recognized as a civic virtue, as a form of courage or self-sacrifice. But it is not identical with holiness as participation in the life of Christ.

This distinction would later be partly obscured by Byzantine and Russian military symbolism. But it never disappeared completely.

After Constantine, the situation changed radically. The Church found itself within an empire that was becoming Christian. The question was no longer only how to keep distance from a pagan state, but how to live in a world where imperial authority confessed Christ.

What emerged from this was not a dogma of holy war, but a complex Byzantine political theology of empire. The ruler was understood as a servant of the divine economy, the empire as a restraining order, and war as a sorrowful but sometimes necessary function of protecting peace and right belief. Such a logic could raise the symbolic status of war, but it still did not make war itself a sacred act.

Two patristic texts remain decisive here, though they are often read too quickly.

Athanasius of Alexandria, in his letter to Ammun, distinguishes killing as such from killing in the context of war. This text shows that the Fathers could assess the same action differently depending on the circumstances. But it does not say that war becomes holy. It speaks of a distinction in moral context, not of transforming military violence into something sacred.

Even more important is Saint Basil the Great. In his canonical letter, he says that killing in war was not regarded by the Fathers as murder in the same sense as ordinary murder. Yet he immediately advises those whose hands are “unclean” to abstain from communion for three years. This is one of the decisive texts for the whole Orthodox tradition: war is tolerated here, and may sometimes be permitted for the sake of defense, but it leaves a spiritual wound and requires penitential therapy.

If the Church regarded war as holy, Basil’s logic would be impossible. A sacred thing does not make hands unclean.

This is why modern scholarship often emphasizes that Orthodoxy did not develop a systematic Western theory of just war in the Augustinian-Thomist sense. But it does not follow from this that Byzantium was pacifist. It is more accurate to speak of an ascetic-pastoral ethic of restraint: war is an evil of the fallen world, sometimes unavoidable, sometimes justified by the defense of one’s neighbors, but still requiring repentance and spiritual caution.

Byzantine practice did indeed know strong processes of sacralizing the army and imperial authority: the cult of military saints, prayers for the emperor and for victory, the language of struggle for the “true faith,” and attempts to elevate fallen soldiers almost to the dignity of martyrs. The discussion around Nikephoros II Phokas and the idea of a special honor for fallen soldiers is especially revealing. Yet even here, a full institutional doctrine comparable to crusading indulgential theology or Islamic jihad did not take root in Byzantium.

Byzantium knew military-religious rhetoric. But it did not develop a generally recognized dogma of “holy war.”

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The Russian tradition inherited Byzantine symphonia, the veneration of military saints, and the idea of the realm as guardian of ecclesial space. But here too the levels must be distinguished.

The canonization of warrior princes or defenders of the Russian land does not mean the canonization of war as such. What is venerated is personal holiness, self-sacrifice, and the defense of the people and the faith — not bloodshed itself. In this sense, the cult of Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, or later images of military valor represents a sacralization of the defender, not an automatic theology of “holy war.”

Alongside this, another model of holiness stands in early Russian and Muscovite tradition: passion-bearing, above all in the figures of Boris and Gleb. Here the Christian ideal is disclosed not through victorious violence, but through voluntary non-resistance in order to prevent fratricide. This very coexistence in Russian memory — the warrior prince and the passion-bearer — shows that Russian Orthodoxy did not develop only along a militarized logic. It lived in the tension between defense and self-sacrifice, political necessity and evangelical radicality.

In the Synodal and imperial periods, ecclesial language became increasingly connected with the language of the state and patriotic war. This is visible in 1812, in late imperial military campaigns, and in the First World War, when the defense of the Orthodox realm began to be understood as a religiously meaningful task. Yet even then, on the level of normative church teaching, no doctrine arose that war itself is holy.

Rather, a mixture took shape: monarchical loyalty, defense of the Fatherland, religious symbolism, and imperial identity. It is more accurate to call this a confessionalized state ideology than a classical Orthodox dogma.

In the twentieth century, this line acquired a new form through the memory of the “Great Patriotic War.” In the Soviet period, church and state rhetorics coexisted in complex ways: sometimes under pressure, sometimes to mutual advantage. Postwar memory of the heroic deed of those who defended the Fatherland carried a powerful moral and sacral charge. But this was primarily a civil religion of victory, not a developed Orthodox theory of holy war.

It is from this cultural layer that post-Soviet church-state language would later draw — especially when the memory of Victory, the image of Holy Rus, and anti-Western civilizational rhetoric began to merge into one system.

The most important official document of the Russian Orthodox Church on this topic is The Basis of the Social Concept, adopted by the Bishops’ Council in 2000. In its section on war and peace, the document states directly: war is evil. It calls war a manifestation of fratricidal hatred, and killing a grave matter. At the same time, the document permits Christians to participate in military action when the issue is the defense of one’s neighbors and the restoration of trampled justice.

This combination is decisive: war is called evil, but the defense of one’s neighbors is not rejected.

The same section speaks respectfully of soldiers who lay down their lives for their neighbors. But it also emphasizes the Church’s peacemaking mission and states directly that the Church opposes the propaganda of war and violence. The document introduces the theme of “just war,” but it does so as a discussion of the boundaries of what is permissible and in relation to the Western tradition, not as a proclamation that war is holy or good.

In other words, the official corpus of the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the twenty-first century remains within the classical Orthodox paradox: war may be a necessary but undesirable means. It therefore requires moral restraint, pastoral care, and penitential sobriety.

This makes the comparison with later statements especially important. If the main conciliar text calls war evil and condemns the propaganda of war, then later attempts to declare a specific armed conflict “holy” cannot be interpreted as a simple repetition of the same position. They are either a new development, a shift of emphasis, or a direct tension with previously adopted official teaching.

This tension becomes central for understanding the most recent Russian material.

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The role of Patriarch Kirill in this evolution is exceptional. He matters not only as primate, but also as a church intellectual, a participant in the development of pan-church social documents, and the head of institutions through which the contemporary language of the Russian Orthodox Church is formed. His statements cannot be reduced merely to private opinion, but neither can they automatically be equated with conciliar dogma. They occupy an intermediate yet highly influential position between theological interpretation, institutional leadership, and political theology.

After 2022, the language of Patriarch Kirill becomes sharply radicalized. In his sermon of 6 March 2022, he says that a struggle has begun that has not physical, but metaphysical significance. In this way, war is transferred from the sphere of tragic political necessity into the sphere of a cosmic-moral confrontation. At the same time, the conflict is linked with civilizational choice, moral decay, and the defense of a particular spiritual space.

This shift is extremely important. As soon as war is described as metaphysical, it receives the potential for sacralization, even if it has not yet been directly called holy.

An even more serious theological moment came in the statement of September 2022, where the Patriarch said of a person fulfilling his military duty: “this sacrifice washes away all sins.” Even if this formula is read in the most charitable possible way — as a hyperbole of sacrificial love — it objectively brings death in war close to a soteriological act of purification.

But in classical Orthodox theology, sins are not washed away by military death as such. They are connected with repentance, baptism, the Eucharist, the sacrificial death of Christ on the Cross, and the whole life in Christ. This is why the formula looks not like ordinary pastoral rhetoric, but like a serious theological innovation, giving death in war a quasi-sacramental meaning.

The language of Holy Rus belongs to the same complex of ideas. The officially published “Prayer for Holy Rus,” first offered by Patriarch Kirill on 25 September 2022 and placed in the section “Liturgical Texts,” contains a petition for victory. A petition for victory is not, in itself, unprecedented in Christian liturgical tradition: Byzantine and Russian prayers for rulers and armies knew such language. But in combination with metaphysical language, civilizational polarization, and the rhetoric of the “Russian World,” such a text begins to function differently. It inscribes a concrete armed conflict into a sacred map of salvific history.

From this follows an important conclusion about Kirill himself. His role is composite: theological author and church interpreter; institutional leader; political theologian who translates a geopolitical conflict into the language of civilizational mission, sacrifice, Holy Rus, and metaphysical struggle. At certain moments, this language also moves into the sphere of public ideology.

It is in this composite capacity that Kirill became the main mediator of the transition from the traditional blessing of defenders to the modern sacralization of war.

The key threshold is 2024. The official website of the World Russian People’s Council states that on 27 March 2024, under the chairmanship of Patriarch Kirill, the “Decree of the XXV World Russian People’s Council, ‘The Present and Future of the Russian World,’” was approved. This document provoked international reaction because it described the conflict in Ukraine as a “holy war.”

Here the institutional status is decisive. The World Russian People’s Council, by its own description, is an international public organization. It is headed by Patriarch Kirill, but it is neither the Holy Synod, nor a Bishops’ Council, nor, still less, a Local Council. Therefore, the WRPC document does not possess the same level of ecclesial obligatoriness as a conciliar normative document of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Yet the text should not be underestimated. Because of the Patriarch’s chairmanship and the connection of the WRPC with the church-state ideological field, it has considerable programmatic weight and shows the direction of the official-patriotic synthesis.

It is especially significant that this document entered into tension even with Kirill’s own earlier words. The World Council of Churches recalled that the Patriarch had previously connected the expression “Holy War” with the metaphysical level, not with a physical armed conflict, and had said that no war of armed violence can be holy. Consequently, in 2024 we see not merely an older church language of defense, but an escalation: metaphysical rhetoric finally joins with the direct designation of war as holy.

From a historical-theological perspective, this means the following: the formula “holy war” does not grow organically out of the canonical core of Orthodox tradition. It is assembled from several later layers: the memory of war as the heroic deed of a people, the imperial-civilizational language of Holy Rus, the post-Soviet ideology of “traditional values,” the militarized cult of Victory, and the newest political theology of the “Russian World.”

This is not simply a continuation of Basil the Great, nor simply Byzantium in a new form. It is a modern synthesis of church language with state-civilizational ideology.

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Comparison with the broader Orthodox world confirms this conclusion.

The 2016 document of the Holy and Great Council, “The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World,” emphasizes the centrality of peace and justice. It says that the Church of Christ condemns war in general, understanding it as the result of evil and sin. It separately condemns wars inspired by religious fanaticism, as well as nationalist wars that lead to ethnic cleansing and the seizure of territories. At the same time, when war becomes unavoidable, the Church continues to offer pastoral care to its children involved in conflict for the defense of life and freedom.

This is a characteristic Orthodox formula: defense is possible, but war does not become a positive sacred good.

The contemporary Greek document For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, published with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, also does not give war the status of holiness. It acknowledges that the Orthodox Church has not always historically insisted on strict pacifism and has not prohibited military or police service. But this confirms precisely the absence of the opposite extreme: if service in the army can be permissible, it still does not follow that war becomes holy.

Comparative materials from other Orthodox contexts also show a different tone: prayer for peace, pastoral care for those who suffer, calls for endurance, defense, and the cessation of violence. These examples do not always form a full social doctrine on the scale of the 2000 document of the Russian Orthodox Church, but they are important as testimony: the contemporary formula of “holy war” is not a pan-Orthodox consensus.

The mainstream pan-Orthodox line remains the same: peace is the norm, war is a sign of the fallen world; defense may be possible, pastoral accompaniment of soldiers may be possible, but not the sacralization of armed conflict as such.

If the central question is answered with full clarity, then in the properly Orthodox-theological sense war cannot be called holy.

It may be defensive, tragically necessary, justified within limits, pastorally accompanied, and even heroically endured as sacrifice for one’s neighbors. But it does not thereby become a sacred thing, a sacrament, a new form of martyrdom, or a path of automatic purification from sins.

Holiness in Orthodoxy belongs to God, His Kingdom, the Church as the Body of Christ, the sacraments, repentance, love, the peace of Christ, and genuine martyrdom as witness. It does not belong to organized bloodshed.

If, however, the word “holy” is used in a weakened, rhetorical, cultural-political sense — as a way of saying that a people considers a war supremely significant and existential — such language has indeed appeared in Orthodox societies, and especially in Russia. But in that case it is no longer strict theology; it is political theology, national mythology, and civil religion.

In that register, one can speak of the sacralization of war. But one cannot honestly claim that this is the direct and unchanged teaching of the Orthodox Church from the apostles to the present day.

For this reason, the contemporary Russian expression “holy war” is best described as an ideological construction that emerged at the intersection of Orthodox symbolism, post-Soviet state patriotism, the memory of the Great Patriotic War, the concept of Holy Rus, and the civilizational discourse of the “Russian World.”

There are elements of continuity in this construction: respect for defenders, the cult of self-sacrifice, the joining of faith and fatherland, prayers for victory. But as a whole, it is not simple continuity, but a substantial displacement: from the penitential endurance of war to its sacralization; from spiritual care for soldiers to a theological explanation of war as a special mission; from the defense of one’s neighbor to a civilizational-eschatological image of the battle between light and darkness.

This is precisely where the boundary lies between the Orthodox tradition of permissible defense and the contemporary rhetoric of holy war. The first says: sometimes one has to fight, but this is an evil and a spiritual wound. The second increasingly says: we fight because we are defending a sacred world order and a historical mission.

Between these two claims there is not merely a stylistic difference. There is a profound theological rupture.

Some questions require further work.

First, the Byzantine material on “holy war” is still debated in historiography. Some scholars emphasize the absence of a full doctrine. Others identify stronger forms of military-religious sacralization in particular periods.

Second, the corpus of the most recent Russian sources after 2022 is very large. Not all sermons, prayers, interviews, statements, and public documents have the same institutional status.

Third, the distinction between the Patriarch’s personal position, the administrative line of the Patriarchate, WRPC documents, and the properly conciliar teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church requires still more detailed mapping.

But these limitations do not change the main conclusion: the contemporary formula of “holy war” does not express the normative core of Orthodox tradition. It represents a later sacralization of war — theologically tense, historically contested, and institutionally heterogeneous.

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