AN ENGLISH edition of addresses and articles by Patriarch Kirill, head of the Moscow Patriarchate, should have been an exciting event, but, alas, those published in Freedom and Responsibility all date from before his election as Patriarch in January 2009, and thus do not set out his current vision for his Church.

He presents two world-views that to him are irreconcilable: a Western liberal model that he sees as the product of the Renaissance, Reforma­tion, and Enlightenment, in opposition to what he calls a traditional religious model, which promotes spiritual rather than materialistic values and can happily co-exist, he believes, with other “traditional religions” such as Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism.

This West-East division has been the bugbear of much in the history of ideas in Russia, while some of Patriarch Kirill’s language is remin­is­cent of Huntington’s views on the clash of civilisations. How refresh­ing it is, in contrast, to listen to the voices of such sophisticated Russian men of letters as Alexander Pushkin and Pyotr Vyazemsky, who, in the first half of the 19th century, made no such division, but valued the learning produced by the West’s Renaissance and Enlightenment, while at the same time loving their own Russian culture and religion.

Patriarch Kirill strongly supports the need for absolute values and religious faith within a polity, but his arguments lose their potency by being frequently repeated. Much of the blame for this, however, should be directed at the editor who com­piled this collection. It has not been adapted for an English readership, and is simply a translation of the orig­inal Russian text published in 2008.

Patriarch Kirill claims to speak for the whole of Russia — “we the citizens of Russia” — although only a small percentage of citizens in the Russian Federation regularly attend the Orthodox Church (even for the Easter liturgy), and in Lipetsk, for example, there are as many Protest­ants as Orthodox, while in the Far East of Russia the Orthodox have to keep a low profile as Charismatic groups gain in size and influence.

Be that as it may, he nevertheless raises a number of important subjects for Christians in relation to the contemporary world: for ex­ample, the nature of Christian free­dom and responsibility in the light of current human-rights legislation; individual dignity as understood in the Orthodox tradition; the need for religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue; the place of religion in the socio-political sphere, and its marginalisa­tion; and the need for a multi-polar world and a common morality. He speaks as a world religious leader, and much of what he says needs to be taken seriously.

Xenia Dennen is a Russian specialist, and chairman of the Keston Institute, Oxford.