Patriarch Kirill's public triumph in Ukraine in July was preceded with another achievement no less important for the Russian Orthodox Church. This took place in the much more intimate atmosphere of the presidential residence in Barvikha, in the Moscow Oblast. There Dmitry Medvedev met with the leaders of Russia's traditional religions, and responded to two appeals from them.

He agreed that the history and culture of the country's main religions should be included in the core school curriculum. He also agreed that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation should have military priests.

Patriarch Kirill was the first to sign both documents. The Muslim and Jewish religious communities supported the Orthodox position, despite previous objections from some muftis and rabbis.

What will this decision mean in practice for schools? Twice a week from the spring of next year, pupils in the fourth and fifth classes will study one of three new subjects. They and their parents will be able to choose between the religious culture of one religion (Orthodox, Islam, Judaism or Buddhism), the history and cultural background of the world's great religions, or the foundations of secular ethics. It will be compulsory for pupils to choose one of these three modules.

To start with, it will be introduced in 18 regions in six of the seven federal regions of Russia. The three-year experiment will be introduced in 12,000 Russian schools, 20,000 classes, 256,000 children and 44,000 teachers, according to the Ministry for Education and Science. From 2012, the new modules will be introduced to all Russian schools.

These three modules, "Foundations of religious culture", "Foundations of history and culture of world religions" and "Foundations of secular ethics",- will be taught by teachers who have taken a special training course, though most of them will probably have had  a secular education. The rector of Moscow's State University V.A. Sadovnichy has already expressed a desire to put the resources of the country's leading university behind the re-training of these specialists. But it is clear that at first the main problem will be a serious lack of qualified teaching staff.

The contents of the textbooks for these modules is also likely to prompt public debate. Consequently, the Church has already declared its readiness to work with the Ministry of Education and Science, the Russian Academy of Education, and a number of other institutes in order to inspect the new textbooks and study materials. This has already been announced by the head of the Synodal Department for Religious Education, Bishop Zaraisky Merkury.

The patriarchate has entrusted the writing of the new textbook on the foundations of Orthodox culture to the well-known Deacon Andrei Kuraev, professor of Moscow State University and the Moscow Spiritual Academy. "We must hope that these various textbooks will be written in such a way that whatever religion the children belong to, if they are going to fight during the school break, they'll use the books, rather than the words contained in them as weapons!" said the protodeacon.

"There should be no place for religious propaganda in these lessons, no appeals  to perform particular religious rites or to accept particular dogmas. The textbooks should not contain criticism of other religions, and there should not be a single line which could be used as an argument in the debate of the superiority of one religion over another. The subject should be treated secularly. It should be financed by a secular organisation, and ‘indoctrination' into any faith should be prohibited," stressed the author of the future Orthodox textbook.  

A long campaign

It took two decades to win state support for the teaching of religious culture. However, thanks to the persistence of children and their parents, and to the good will of local authorities and school heads, in many parts of Russia, classes in Orthodox or Muslim culture have in fact already become part of the curriculum - but only as optional subjects, or as part of the regional component of the curriculum.

For example, in the bishopric of Smolensk, which was headed by Bishop Kirill before he was elected Patriarch, they have already set up a three-tier system of spiritual and moral education for children and young people, embracing Orthodox kindergartens, lyceums and the appropriate faculties and departments in high schools.

In various other bishoprics it was agreed that the Church would work with local education authorities. Teachers were given training on the foundations of Orthodox culture. In one way or another, over half a million pupils are already studying the subject across the country. However, it was the abolition of the regional educational component two years ago that spurred the religious activists into action.

An open letter addressed by Patriarch Kirill to the minister for education and science A.A. Fursenko just over a month before the meeting at Barvikha testified to their disquiet. The Patriarch expressed his concern that despite the agreements previously arrived at, "the educational section on religious and moral culture was missing from the main (compulsory) section of the curriculum of the new federal state education standard for the education of the young proposed for publication on the official site of the Ministry for Education and Science of the Russian Federation. It had been proposed that this would come up with a number of subjects concerning a common system of moral values, to be chosen by pupils or their parents."

The Patriarch asked the ministry to reintroduce the subject of "spiritual and moral culture" to schools. He also asked them to include official representatives of the Church "in a working party tasked with developing federal state educational standards. Also to include them in all bodies connected with the confirmation of these standards, as also with the development of the curriculum on spiritual and moral culture".

The tone of barely restrained irritation in this document is understandable. For the Ministry of Education and Science had blatantly broken all previous agreements, including those reached at high-level meetings in the presence of the head of the presidential administration S.E. Naryshkin and his first deputy V.Yu. Surkov.

Besides, the Russian Orthodox Church (chiefly through the metropolitan, and subsequently through Patriarch Kirill), has been trying for years to persuade its opponents that teaching the foundations of religious culture is only intended to be a voluntary subject. There will be alternatives, which will take into account the regional predominance of different religions. 

The Patriarch was at pains to stress that his overriding concern was that the historical and cultural aspect of the new subject should be well established. For without a good grasp of the foundations of the religion that defines the state, it is impossible to understand the country's historical roots, or to appreciate the riches of its national culture.

There was much discussion of the fact that although Russia's constitution stipulates the separation of Church and state, in Russian history the Church is none the less closely linked with the lives of the people, as well as being a significant and influential aspect of civil society.

Finally, the Church issued a polite but firm reminder that freedom of conscience, seen solely as an unlimited opportunity to inculcate atheist thought, is a hangover from the worst days of the state's war against religion

Responding to critics who accuse the Church of trying to clericalise secular society, the Patriarch said: "We are worried about the moral climate in schools which forms the personality of the person, and his or her understanding of good and evil. This is what concerns us, not lobbying for a particular subject of the curriculum, as people often try to make out".

However, the lack of balance in the national education system does raise issues. For example, in Moscow today there are plenty of ethnic schools which receive municipal funding, and sometimes also from the state. There are several dozen Azerbaijani, Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Korean, Lithuanian, Moldovan, Ukrainian, Tatar and many other schools, upper secondary schools and education centres. But strange though it may seem, there is not one which specialises in Russian culture (unless you count private schools like the Radonezh gymnasium). In fact, they have not been allowed to teach a course on Orthodox culture in mainstream Moscow schools. It would seem obvious that  such anomalies in our approach to educating young people could lead to serious inter-ethnic problems for those living in a multi-ethnic capital such as ours.

The Kremlin heard the voice of the Patriarch. So too did critics of the Moscow Patriarchate, who mocked the "Barvikha symphony" of the Church and State, the "Orthodoxisation of the country" and the "missionary revenge of the church". For they realise the threat which Patriarch Kirill's new policy, which is gaining increasing popular support, poses to their ideas.

This policy lies in turning nominal Christians, people who are Orthodox only in name, into active members of the Church. The Patriarch has set himself the task of bringing the growing generation of Russians into the church and taking care of them, a generation whose spiritual, moral and physical health is now being sorely tested by the false ideals that are forced on it - vulgar consumerism, social egoism, and attainment of personal success at any price. For as the old Russian saying goes, "he who does not know the law does not know sin either".

I hear that at a parish Sunday school where the well-known Moscow priest Maxim Kozlov teaches pupils sing this merry ditty after lessons: "Father Maxim is going to teach us ‘goats' (ed play on name Kozlov) everything!"

I like the pun, the self-deprecating humour. It makes me feel good about the future.

Lars von Trier is a tantalising film-director who provokes his audiences sometimes to the point of humiliation. He is also a master of visual theology. His Antichrist is the antithesis of Mel Gibson's tawdry and emotive The Passion of the Christ, offering as it does an exploration of the violent underbelly of the Christian story of sin and redemption. If Antichrist offers us any glimpse into the tortured psyche of its director, then it is a psyche sculpted around a visceral Catholicism of a much darker and more existentially credible kind than Gibson's lurid fantasies of crucifixion. A number of critics at the Cannes film festival derided von Trier for his dedication of Antichrist to Andrei Tarkovsky, and in doing so missed their affinity: for like the great Russian director, von Trier has a capacity to use the moving image as a celluloid icon through which to offer us glimpses into the depths of the Christian unconscious with its metaphysical terrors and yearnings.

In von Trier's Breaking the Waves, the female character Bess (Emily Watson) is a Christ-like figure, a disturbing representation of mysticism and madness who sacrifices her life to redeem the man she loves. It is a harrowing and controversial film, not least for the questions it raises about the extent to which Bess's prostitution and murder reinforce violent sexual stereotypes about female sexuality and martyrdom. Antichrist pushes these questions even further by asking us to contemplate what it would mean to portray woman not as a Christ figure but as Eve, who in the Christian theological tradition has been represented as the personification of evil and bringer of death to the world.

Tina Beattie is professor of Catholic studies at Roehampton University, England. Among her books are God's Mother, Eve's Advocate (Allen & Unwin, 2002), New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (Routledge 2005), and The New Atheists: The War on Religion and the Twilight of Reason (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007). Her website is here In the 2nd century, Tertullian wrote of women: "You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert - that is, death - even the Son of God had to die." Von Trier takes his audience into the malevolent brew of these masculine beliefs and the havoc they wreak in women's lives.

The elusive source

Antichrist is an allegory of the Genesis myth which exposes the psychological terrors of Christian beliefs about the origins of sin. It draws its imagery not only from modern horror films but also from the teeming fears of medieval imaginations with their pervasive sense of evil and the power of Satan. The Antichrist of the film's title is everywhere and nowhere - a viscous and elusive presence that seeps through nature, including human nature, and infects it with futility, death and decay. The Antichrist is perhaps also the God-man himself, alluded to in the figure of the husband, whose misogynistic cult has sacrificed generations of women through persecution, burning and torture, while implanting in women themselves a deeply rooted sense of guilt and self-loathing.

The film opens with a prologue of exquisite pathos, filmed in black and white and played in slow motion to ethereal music (the Lascio Chi'o Pianga aria from Handel's Rinaldo - "Let me weep over my cruel fate, and that I long for freedom"). As the nameless protagonists (superbly played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Dafoe) make love, their toddler climbs out of his cot and down the stairs, briefly witnessing his parents' entwined bodies before falling to his death in the snow outside. Thus von Trier begins his exploration of the shadow side - the feminine side - of the Christian story of salvation, focusing on the Mary/Eve figure whose child must die to bring redemption to man; but at what cost to her? Also by Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

"Pope Benedict XVI and Islam: beyond words" (17 September 2006)

"Veiling the issues: a distractive debate" (24 October 2006)

"Religion in Britain in the Blair era" (10 January 2007)

"Religion's cutting edge: lessons from Africa" (14 February 2007)

"The end of postmodernism: the ‘new atheists' and democracy" (20 December 2007)

"Rowan Williams and sharia law" (12 February 2007)

"The dark (k)night of a postmodern world" (21 August 2008)

"Along the precipice: visions of atheism in London" (6 November 2008)

"Banksy in Bristol" (24 June

Von Trier's woman is Madonna and whore, a tender and grieving pietà and a voracious and deadly seductress. In flashbacks we see how, the summer before her child's death, she had taken him to a cabin in a remote forest known as "Eden" to work on her doctoral thesis. Her topic was gynocide - a term coined by feminists to refer to the persecution and killing of women, particularly in the Christian tradition. As she studied she became convinced that the knowledge she sought was a lie, and that women really are guilty of the evil of which they have been accused. And so this young mother becomes von Trier's Eve, seeker of forbidden knowledge, bringer of death, bearer of the guilt of the human race, cause of the death of the Son of Man.

The husband is a therapist who decides to take control of his wife's rehabilitation, offering himself as her confessor and saviour as she plunges into the depths of inconsolable grief and madness over the death of her child. When she admits to him that she is terrified of the forest, he insists they go back there so that she can confront and rationalise her fears. Thus this human pair - Adam and Eve, everyman and everywoman - cross over a bridge which symbolises the boundary between culture and nature, reason and chaos, sanity and madness: the bridge into hell. The narrative of the film disintegrates as von Trier takes his archetypal western man of reason through the nightmares of his most repressed and irrational fears - the swamp of violent female sexuality and the savagery of nature.

There are several scenes where the husband tries to analyse his wife's fear of the forest. She tells him that her greatest fear is not the forest but something else. He draws a triangle and writes "Eden (garden)"  near the top, leaving a question-mark in the top position as he tries to find a word for the real source of her fear. At one point, she tells him that nature is "Satan's Church', and he puts Satan in the top position. Then, as he discovers the depths of her sense of personal evil and blame, he puts the word "me" - her ultimate fear is herself - only to cross it out again. I was reminded of Paul Ricoeur's study of Genesis, in which he ponders on the pre-existence of evil in the Garden of Eden, suggesting that we find ourselves in a world in which evil precedes us as an unnameable mystery. The symbols of the fall pervade this film, but the serpent never appears. Whatever the source of evil, it has already done its work before we enter this poisoned Eden.

The gynocidal story

Lars von Trier made Antichrist during a time of deep depression, and his antipathy to therapists is well known. Yet his target here is not just the therapy industry, but the controlling power of the rational masculine mind which refuses to acknowledge the mystery of good and evil, the primal chaos of nature, and those aspects of human experience which are beyond language and the control of reason. If it is a condemnation of modern psychotherapy, the film is also an oblique homage to Sigmund Freud who dared to venture into the forest of our darkest and most haunted dreams.

A recurring motif is the three beggars who symbolise grief, pain and despair and who provide the chapter titles for the film which, like Breaking the Waves, has its narrative interrupted by title pages: Grief, Pain (Chaos Reigns), Despair (Gynocide) and The Three Beggars. It might be pushing the symbolism too far to suggest that these allude to the beggars in Russian folklore who, like Christ, offer wisdom and compassion through suffering - it is hard to find any redemptive message in von Trier's portrayal of suffering here. The epilogue has a repeat of the Handel aria but it offers a kitsch fantasy of redemption. The man - saviour turned murderer - is wounded but alive in an Eden apparently restored to its original goodness, while the women whose dismembered bodies have recently littered the forest floor rise up in a general resurrection. But it is an ironic and mocking ending.

Whatever the meaning of redemption, the mystery of evil remains, and von Trier seems to imply that no resurrection or return to Eden can erase the gynocidal story which precipitates the biblical drama. As the closing credits rolled, I for one was left wondering whether those women were supposed to represent the redeemed at the heavenly banquet, or a hoard of vengeful harpies about to set upon the solitary man.

The mother of sorrows

So what to make of this? Antichrist has been condemned for being misogynistic and anti-Christian, but I think this is simplistic. Perhaps von Trier is even pointing a finger at those critics who seek to deny the chtonian depths of the human psyche by their moral posturing. The woman in this film is a vengeful and violent force of nature, but the film invites another reading too. She is also the mater dolorosa, the mother of sorrows whose grief is too vast to be contained in a world dominated by the forces of objective and rationalising masculinity. The more the man seeks to control her, the more uncontrollable she becomes, mutating into the woman of Genesis who is condemned to bear her children in pain and longs for the husband who will lord it over her (Genesis 3:16), but whose child will also be the source of their redemption.

There is a scene when the woman describes hearing her son's voice crying in the forest. She goes in search of him but he seems to be nowhere and everywhere. Suddenly, the camera pans up so that we have a God's eye view, and the child's cry becomes the cry of a cosmic Christ, suffering for the sins of the world. This imagery is reinforced by the mother's subsequent discovery of her child, playing in the cabin with a piece of wood in a pose reminiscent of paintings of the young Christ in his father's carpentry workshop, foreshadowing the wood of the cross. Later, the woman will use that same piece of wood in a castrating attack on her husband, in one of the film's most disturbing and explicit scenes of sexual mutilation and abuse.

This Eve is not the passive victim of male control. She seeks vengeance, allowing her terror of abandonment and forsakenness to drive her to extremes of sadistic and masochistic violence as she seeks to entrap the man, so that audiences have been appalled by the brutality of the film. But that may be part of its oblique message. Audiences of horror films have an apparently insatiable appetite for the penetration, mutilation and murder of female bodies. Just like those medieval images of burning and tortured women, the cinema reveals us to be a gynocidal culture, accepting as normal the mutilation and abuse of women by men, but horrified when it is women who become the abusers.

The missing half

Nevertheless, one is left with the uneasy question as to whether von Trier simply adds to the catalogue of gynocidal horrors which he exposes. Ultimately, it is not the woman but the man who survives, as the crucified one becoming the crucifier, and the woman inflicts upon herself the most savage sexual punishment for the evil of which she stands accused in her own eyes.

These ambiguities are part of the film's disturbing potency. Von Trier peels away the veneer of a domesticated, civilised religion and shows us the human condition as it appears in the darker, more pessimistic aspects of the Christian tradition, suggesting a fall into evil which plunges man, woman and nature into a state of savage alienation and violence.

One can of course argue that this is a deeply distorted reading of Christianity, for the woman at the heart of that tradition is Mary, the New Eve, whose divine motherhood symbolises God's peace with creation and the goodness and grace of woman redeemed. Yet as many feminists point out, Mary has occupied a position of unique purity and holiness in the texts and traditions of Catholic Christianity, while all other women have been identified with Eve as a primordial force of nature, chaos and death which must be resisted and controlled by the rational masculine mind. Von Trier might only tell half the story, but it is the half which has too often been allowed to define the whole in the history of western religion and culture.

Poland, and Europe, are losing our best. A year ago it was Bronislaw Geremek, now it is Leszek Kolakowski. This great philosopher and public intellectual spent years after 1956 in brave and critical opposition to the communist orthodoxy that ruled Poland, before moving to the west in 1968. He chose to believe what he saw with his own eyes and could judge with his own mind, not what the party preached. When the gap became intolerable, he dared publicly to speak in defence of his core values: reason, truth and decency.   Adam Szostkiewicz is a writer and journalist with the weekly magazine Polityka in Warsaw

Also by Adam Szostkiewicz in openDemocracy:

"The Polish lifeboat" (22 September 2005)

"The Polish autumn" (26 October 2005)

"Poland's past and future pope" (13 April 2006)

"Poland marches: the people sound the alarm" (12 October 2006)

"Bronislaw Geremek: Polish and European liberal" (15 July 2008)

As a young man Kolakowski was himself a communist activist in post-1945 Poland, but soon turned into a socialist critic of the abuses of "really existing socialism"; this earned him the enmity of the establishment, which in 1968 forced him from his post as a philosophy professor at Warsaw University. His journey continued as he became a renowned champion of human rights and democracy, supporting peaceful struggles for change in Poland in a way that made him a hugely influential figure during the Solidarity era.

A ban on his ability to work or publish could not stop him inspiring Poland's independent-minded scholars and students, a deep influence that continued during his long years in the west. His prolific output included many articles, essays and books; most substantially, a three-volume intellectual history of the rise and fall of Marxism, which won him renown in Europe and the United States. In official Poland, he continued to be persona non grata until the transformations of 1989 and after.  

But Kolakowski's work filtered through via unofficial channels: copies of his Main Currents of Marxism trilogy were smuggled into Poland, and widely (if secretly) read by students and intellectuals - as well as high-ranking party and government functionaries. He acutely identified the loss of belief in official doctrines: "This ideology was supposed to mould the thinking of people. But it became so weak and ridiculous that nobody believed in it, neither the ruled nor the rulers."

The world and Poland too

When the democratic opposition movement became stronger in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the gestation of the Solidarity movement, underground printers took the risk of jail by reprinting Leszek Kolakowski's writings. 

Among the most popular of these were Kolakowski's "manifesto of hope against hopelessness" and his short presentation on "how to be a liberal-conservative-socialist". When I read those clandestine (an added thrill!) musings I was overwhelmed: that's the way, I thought, that's the path I want to pursue. In reacting this way I was only one of the many who found in Kolakowski an inspiration to think and act for myself in my then captive country. The Solidarity generation to which I belonged found Leszek Kolakowski to be one of its incarnations of courage, intellectual and political. 

What fascinated us was Kolakowski's evolution from a radical leftwing and anti-clerical dogmatism to an open-minded, self-critical, sometimes even self-mocking, liberalism. It was a liberalism that allowed a serious and unbiased analysis of religion. He considered the Christian gospels a foundation of European culture, but he also took a great interest in Buddhism. (I remember vigorously discussing the Buddha with Kolakowski in the home of his Polish friends in London). 

We were at the time - the early 1980s, the years of martial law after the crackdown on Solidarity - a pluralist crowd: a mix of socialists, anarchists, nationalists, Catholics. We argued about his ideas, but seldom denied his importance. What mattered was that he had changed his mind about the system, and continued to think for himself. 

He saw through the deceits of the socialism that had been built in Poland, and  identified the contradiction between its proclaimed social and democratic ideals and the harsh realities of the project to create a "new socialist man" -  to be implemented under the dictatorship of the party.        

In one of Kolakowsk's late and recently published interviews with Anna Bikont, he described his private library in Oxford, where he lived and worked as a fellow at All Souls College for many years until his death on 17 July 2009. There were all sorts of books, on almost every subject: he was one of the curious kind. This was a philosopher who loved poetry, which he read in Polish, German, French (Baudelaire was a favourite), and Russian. There were the great European novels, books on art, the Jewish and other religions, on the Bible, on witches and the devil - everything under the sun.

The cultural Leszek Kolakowski was as important as the political one. He was an incarnation of what seems to me the very best in the 20th-century Polish and European intelligentsia. Never a guru, always a master.