Political Orthodoxies

When I interviewed Nicholas Denysenko recently, part of our discussion centred on the role of political theologies in shaping, and often deforming, contemporary Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. One of the perennial questions, especially in Russia, is the extent to which the Church and state should be intermingled. That question and others will be addressed in a new book by the Orthodox scholar Cyril Hovorun, whom I have interviewed in the past, and hope to do so again for this new book whose timeliness could not be better in this season of Russian war (not only militarily but also theologically) against Ukraine, and virtual war between Moscow and Constantinople over Ukraine: Political Orthodoxies: the Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced (Fortress Press, 2018), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

As an insider to church politics and a scholar of contemporary Orthodoxy, Cyril Hovorun outlines forms of political orthodoxy in Orthodox churches, past and present.

Hovorun draws a big picture of religion being politicized and even weaponized. While Political Orthodoxies assesses phenomena such as nationalism and anti-Semitism, both widely associated with Eastern Christianity, Hovorun focuses on the theological underpinnings of the culture wars waged in eastern and southern Europe. The issues in these wars include monarchy and democracy, Orientalism and Occidentalism, canonical territory, and autocephaly. Wrought with peril, Orthodox culture wars have proven to turn toward bloody conflict, such as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.

Accordingly, this book explains the aggressive behavior of Russia toward its neighbors and the West from a religious standpoint. The spiritual revival of Orthodoxy after the collapse of Communism made the Orthodox church in Russia, among other things, an influential political protagonist, which in some cases goes ahead of the Kremlin. Following his identification and analysis, Hovorun suggests ways to bring political Orthodoxy back to the apostolic and patristic track.

On "Territory," "Canonical" and Otherwise

For many years now, even before finishing my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, I lamented the lack of serious attention being paid to the often polemical and always tendentious concept of "canonical territory" being bandied about in Eastern Europe, chiefly (and incoherently) by the Russian Orthodox Church. In a globalized world, it seems to me, the geographic imaginary behind the ancient canons must be seriously re-thought. I have long thought that what we needed was not merely an examination of the canons in light of contemporary geopolitical realities, but a deeper study of the whole notion of territory, sovereignty, and how and why, if at all, we should accept that the boundaries of the modern nation-state are necessarily coterminous with those of any so-called autocephalous church.

Set for release later this month is a book that sounds as if it will pick up at least part of this challenge: Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 512pp.

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition?

           

The Birth of Territory provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

Canonical Territory

It is fascinating to read that other Orthodox hierarchs have finally come around to challenging the Russian Church over its (shall we say) sui generis understanding of the canons of the Ecumenical Councils. Though the English in this piece is somewhat tortured in places, the import of it is not:

“Due to the events which have recently taken place in the Orthodox Church,” the Council stressed the necessity that the Orthodox Churches should respect and strictly observe the geographical borders of their jurisdictions “as defined by the holy canons and Tomoses on the foundation of these Churches.” 

In addition, it is heartening to see the Ecumenical Patriarchate stating clearly that

the Constantinople Patriarchate stated in the Tomos on the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in Poland issued in 1924 that it never legally renounced its jurisdiction over the Kyivan Metropolitanate. As for the whole Moscow Patriarchate and its canonical borders, the Constantinople Council observes the Thomos of 1589 according to which the territory of the present-day Ukraine is not part of the Moscow Patriarchate.

This takes us into some very complicated history, much of which is very clearly sorted out in Borys Gudziak's superlative study, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2001), 512pp. One should also see the collection of articles edited by B. Groen, Four Hundred Years Union of Brest (1596-1996) A Critical Re-Evaluation (Peeters, 1998), 269pp. 

I follow these seemingly recondite debates with great interest and have for five years been working on an article on the notions of canonical territory, which I was able to treat only very briefly in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

Much nonsense is talked when this phrase about "canonical territory" is invoked. One of the few decent studies I have seen is Johannes Oeldemann, "The Concept of Canonical Territory in the Russian Orthodox Church," in the collection edited by Thomas Bremer, Religion and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths (Studies in Central and Eastern Europe).

"Canonical territory" is a nice theory, but nobody lives it today, as Robert Taft acidly observed both in his famous interview with John Allen in 2004 and more recently and with an abundance of historical documentation in his lecture in June at Orientale Lumen. These are problems afflicting not merely Orthodoxy, but also the Roman Catholic Church and, since at least 2003, the Anglican Communion. I'm giving a lecture on these notions in a few weeks and that prospect, together with encouraging discussions with Taft and Met. Kallistos Ware at Orientale Lumen in June, has encouraged me to return to that article I started five years ago. Several interesting developments have since taken place in the last half-decade, including the erection of Anglican ordinariates on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, and the so-called Chambésy process in the Orthodox world. Both of these developments suggest to me that the Roman and Eastern Churches might finally be getting serious about "canonical territory." We shall see.

Russian Geography: Sacred, Real, and Imaginary

Anyone who knows anything about relations among Eastern Christians in the former Soviet Union, and relations between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches since 1991, will have heard the phrase "Russian canonical territory" repeated more times than anyone would care to count. That phrase, of course, has been invoked tendentiously to assert that the Russian Orthodox Church is the sole legitimate ecclesial presence in Ukraine. Neither the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, nor the Roman Catholic Church, nor any of the other three (of four) Orthodox Churches in Ukraine are legitimately allowed to be there according to this Russian mindset: only the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is said to be legitimate. All others are illegitimate interlopers. (Some of these assertions have been examined and debunked by others, as I noted previously.)

It seems, then, that in the absence of empire, geographical boundaries and territory have become paramount concerns in buttressing post-Soviet Russian identity. Such an idea is given fresh examination in a new book by Edith W. Clowes, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell University Press, 2011), 200pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border—have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today.

Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin’s extreme views and their many responses—in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the body of this book.

In Russia on the Edge literary and cultural critics will find the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture. For intellectual historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the book is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold. The book introduces nonspecialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia’s writers and public intellectuals.