From 1596 to 1946 to 2016 and Back Again

At the beginning of June, I was invited to a private conference in Vienna hosted by the Pro Oriente Foundation, which has for more than a half-century been devoted to Orthodox-Catholic rapprochement. This particular conference was on the pseudo-sobor of Lviv of 1946, that bogus action by which the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church was forced "freely" to vote to "rejoin" the "mother church" of Russia, thereby leading to the official disappearance of the UGCC for nearly half a century. All this was undertaken on Stalin's orders and with the collusion and support of the Russian Church.

The hope of the conference was expressed in the title: “Arriving at a Common Narrative: The ‘Lviv Sobor’ of 1946 and Its Aftermath to the Present.” The original vision was to have Russian Orthodox scholars and official representatives there to discuss their perspective on 1946, and to enter into dialogue with UGCC scholars and hierarchs in the hopes that some common groundwork might be found leading to an eventual healing of memories of an extremely painful episode that is still cited constantly by the Russian Church even as recently as this year in the background of the Havana declaration between the pope of Rome and patriarch of Moscow.

The Russians didn't have the courage to come to Vienna, which was disappointing but entirely unsurprising. They sent a paper that said nothing but the same talking points one has heard for decades. No dialogue is possible when one party is too scared to show up; and no "common narrative" can be discovered when one side is ideologically committed to its own narrative and admits of no alternative interpretations, let alone challenging facts and evidence that put that narrative in question.

The chain of logic in that canned presentation in Vienna, and in ongoing Russian position, is this: the Union of Brest of 1596/6 was an historical injustice (committed by, inter alia, perfidious Jesuits and other proselytizing papists preying on innocent and helpless Orthodox) rectified by the Lviv "synod" of 1946, which the Russians then and since have celebrated publicly as an act of reunion. In this line of logic, 2016, the 70th anniversary of the synod was not an occasion for mourning or repentance, but of repeated, ham-fisted insistence that it was a good thing.

The fact that Brest has been subject to scholarly examination--including at earlier Pro Oriente conferences and in the two superlative books linked above--and the fact that the historical record does not bear out the usual version of helpless Orthodox being picked off by clever Catholics, does not seem to have altered Russian narratives at all. In this regard, I found the paper in Vienna a clear illustration of something Donald Spence argued, as I noted here: there is "narrative truth" and then "historical truth" and they do not always agree. It is sad that the Russians have chosen the former over the latter, and sadder still that their preference continues to cause a lot of pain to people in Ukraine.

"Uniate" History

The happiest and most rewarding summer of my adult life was that of 2001, which I spent teaching in Ukraine, a country I rapidly came to love, and where I came to meet the incomparable Fr. Bob Anderson and my great good friend, now the priest Jason Charron.

In mid-2001 Ukraine was not quite ten years out from the tyranny of Soviet communism, and I was astonished, even a decade on, to see the rot left by that evil system. As I put it to some companions not long after getting off the plane, I thought I was going to Europe: not the Third World. It was (as I have written elsewhere at length) a country of great contrasts: beautiful cities full in some cases (especially in Galicia, reflecting Hapsburg influence) of baroque architecture surrounded by primitive infrastructure and rural poverty of a kind that made me think I had been transported back to the prairies of the early nineteenth century.

It was there that I met the head of what was then called the Lviv Theological Academy, today known as the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU). It has recently been announced that the priest-scholar Boris Gudziak, rector of UCU, has been made a bishop. It is not often--in fact, it seems sadly rare--when one can give a full-throated and unhesitating "Axios!" to such an election, but this is one. Gudziak has worked tirelessly to build up UCU (Peter Galadza once said to me of Gudziak, "It's not that he's burning the candle at both ends: he's thrown the entire candle into the fire!"). UCU's students were some of the finest I have ever taught, and who, notwithstanding a lack of so much we take for granted in North America, were far and away more enlightened than their counterparts here, and far better educated in some respects. I found especially moving their loyalty to Ukraine and determination to stay there and build a country out of the ashes rather than take the easy route of fleeing elsewhere.

Gudziak was trained as an historian at Harvard, and is the author of the invaluable study Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard UP, 2001, paperback).

This book is a landmark study. It is required reading for all who desire to understand the still-convoluted and controverted religious history of Ukraine, which has so often, sadly, been on the front-lines of Orthodox-Catholic conflict, especially over the so-called Uniate problem, which has so often been subject to "confessional propaganda" (Taft) on both sides instead of real history.

About That Neo-Patristic Synthesis....

The Harvard-trained historian Boris Gudziak, author of the extremely important volume Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 1999),

wrote an interesting article in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies (vol. 41-42 [2000-01]), "Towards an Analysis of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky." It provided an excellent overview of Florovsky's life and work and the influences on and trajectories of the same. Gudziak ended by noting three problems with Florovsky's approach: the questions of inculturation, interpretation (of the fathers in a new age), and ideology. Gudziak concluded his study by arguing that "on a methodological level, many of the questions avoided by Florovsky remain unanswered by his followers. It remains for the future to show whether a 'neo-patristic synthesis' in the form advocated by Florovsky or along modified categories will provide Orthodoxy with a comprehensive and integrated vision of divine-human reality."

Florovsky's notion of a neo-patristic synthesis continues to be discussed and debated. One such discussion takes place in a book that was originally published in 2008 in hardback, and is this month just released in paperback: Alexi Nesteruk, The  Universe as Communion: Towards a Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Theology and Science (T&T Clark, 2012), 300pp. 

About this book, one of several recently released (as I have been noting) to treat the science-religion debate, the publisher tells us:

In this book a new and distinctive approach to the science-religion debate emerges from a synthesis of the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition with phenomenological thought. Developing ideas of Greek Patristics the author treats faith, with its sense of the Divine presence, and knowledge of the universe, as two modes of communion which constitute the human condition. The modern opposition between science and theology (which is historically paralleled with the Church’s split between East and West, and monasticism and Christianity in the world), is treated as the split between two intentionalities of the overall human subjectivity. The human person, as a centre of their reconciliation, becomes the major theme of the dialogue between science and theology.

It is argued that the reconciliation of science and theology is not simply an academic exercise; it requires an existential change, a change of mind (metanoia), which cannot be effected without ecclesial involvement. Then the person who effectuates the mediation between science and theology is raised to the level of “cosmic priesthood” while the mediation acquires the features of a “cosmic Eucharist” in which all divisions and tensions in creation and humanity are removed. It is through this existential change accompanied by phenomenological analysis that scientific theories can be subjected to a certain “vision” through which the hidden ultimate goal (telos) of scientific research (as the explication of the human condition) shows its kinship to the saving telos advocated by Christian faith. The opposition between theology and science is thus being para-eucharistically overcome.

The publisher also helpfully provides us with the table of contents:

Introduction: The Delimiters of the Dialogue Between Theology and Science
Chapter 1: A Neo-Patristic Ethos in the Dialogue between Theology and Science

Chapter 2: Neo-Patristic Synthesis and Existential Phenomenology: The Lines of Convergence
Chapter 3: Theology and Phenomenological Attitude: the Human Condition, Existential Faith and Transcendence

Chapter 4: The Dialogue between Theology and Science: Human-Centered as opposed  to Nature-Centred

Chapter 5: The Universe as Communion:  from Cosmology to Personhood and  Teleology of  Reason

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index 

Slava Ukrayina!

I have the fondest memories of the summer of 2001, which I spent in Ukraine. I have made it to five of the world's seven continents, but the trip to and time in Ukraine was, without a doubt, the most rewarding for all kinds of reasons, not least because I met the now late Archpriest Robert Anderson of most blessed memory. I would go back if for no other reason than to spend more time in such places of inneffable grandeur as the Kievan Caves Monastery and the Pochaev Lavra.

The world of Eastern Christianity is complicated enough for outsiders, but when you try to explain Eastern Christian ecclesial life in Ukraine, even the most sympathetic outsider is taxed trying to take in and differentiate among four Eastern churches: three Orthodox, and one Greek Catholic. Telling the history of how Christianity came to Ukraine, and how today the country ended up with four Eastern churches (to say nothing of a very substantial Roman Catholic population, and various Protestant groups also), takes one into further layers of often bewildering complexity.

Todd E. French therefore had his work cut out for him in his article "Orthodoxy in the [sic] Ukraine" in John McGuckin, ed., The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. I think on the whole he did a decent job, though there are some quirks, and noticeable gaps, in his coverage.

The first thing to notice, of course, is the strange presence of the definite article. Why is it there, but inconsistently? Many times he refers to "the Ukraine" but not always: the article appears twice on p. 604, but disappears on 605, reappears again on the left column on 606 but disappears in the right column on the same page--and so on throughout the article. That is sloppy copy-editing (whereas most of the rest of the two-volume text is free from any errors). The definite article used to indicate more than a lack of editorial attention: it used to indicate a lack of independence for the country when it was variously a province of the Polish-Lithuanian, Hapsburg, or most recently Soviet empires. But it has been independent for twenty years now, and proper English style does not require, indeed does not accept, the definite article: the country is, simply, Ukraine. Those who continue to insert the article are often ideologically committed to a nationalistic Russian revival of the old, thankfully dead, empire of the tsars in which Ukraine was nothing more than a province--"the Levant" of the Slavs, as it were.  Please God we have seen the end of that nonsense.

In any event, French gives the history in broad strokes, making it clear and comprehensible, with enough detail to cover the main periods and personages but without overwhelming the general reader. He does not take an overly apologetic approach--either apologizing for Russian influence, or excusing Orthodox behavior--and in fact commendably acknowledges, e.g., that "during General Dmitri Bibikov's rule (1837-52) the aim was to convert the two million remaining Catholics to Orthodoxy through willful tactics such as deportation and executions" (607).  Too many historians telling of relations in Ukraine invariably play up Catholic offenses--some real, some not, almost all wildly exaggerated--against the Orthodox, especially during and after the Union of Brest, and, more recently, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. French avoids all that.

He also avoids, however, a couple of important details, not least the rather infelicitous "elevation" of the metropolitan of Moscow to patriarchal status. For those details, see Boris Gudziak's article "The Creation of the Moscow Patriarchate: A Prelude to Patriarchal Reforms in the Kyivan Metropolitanate Preceding the Union of Brest (1595-1596)" in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 37 (1996). Even more important is Gudziak's book, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies), which is not cited in this article but should be.

Missing, also, are several good texts from the "References and Suggested Readings" list at the end of French's article. A good very general introduction to Ukraine in general, for those with no background, is Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine.

I was also surprised to see that the work of Sophia Senyk is not here, especially her A History of the Church in Ukraine (Orientalia Christiana Analecta), and astonished that Paul Robert Magocsi is nowhere to be found. He has written many highly acclaimed works of scholarship that are nonetheless accessible to general readers, including:

• History of Ukraine - 2nd, Revised Edition: The Land and Its Peoples 
• Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture 
• Ukraine: An Illustrated History 
• Galicia: A Multicultured Land (edited with Christopher Hann), and, of course, his well-known and hugely helpful cartographic works:  
• Historical Atlas of Central Europe Rev Exp edition 
• Ukraine: A Historical Atlas.

More recent scholarship that would need to be considered here would include:

• Barbara Skinner's Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
• John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarynuk, Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine

Still, on the whole, this article, and The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity generally does what one would expect such a volume to do and it remains a solid resource.