You Never Know Whom You'll Find in Appalachia

I'm greatly looking forward to reading a book just published last week, and to interviewing its author. That book is Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia by Sarah Riccardi-Swartz  (Fordham University Press, April 2022), 288pp. It brings together so many themes of interest and in such a timely manner, too. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. This ethnography highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends.

Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin’s Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian–American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

A Greek Thomist

Several times in the past decade we have had important new studies emerge to show us that the separations fondly maintained by some Christians--and built upon faulty history while often accompanied by demonization of such figures as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas and those apparently horrid "scholastics" more generally--were not nearly as neat, sharp, or straightforward as imagined today by those with an agenda. Thus Marcus Plested's wholly welcome Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, began this important trajectory of clarification and complication. (See here for an interview with him and video of one of his lectures.) Shortly after him, in different but related ways, Christiaan Kappes (interviewed here) continued it with his study of the Immaculate Conception. Others more recently still have joined in.

Coming up next spring we shall have another study revealing just how interconnected the "Greeks" and "Latins" were. I've met the author of this forthcoming work at several conferences over the years and always enjoyed talking with him. So I shall make a point of trying to arrange an interview with him next spring when his book comes out: Matthew C. Briel, A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios (University of Notre Dame Press, April 2020), 272 pages.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Matthew Briel examines for the first time the appropriation and modification of Thomas Aquinas's understanding of providence by a fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian, Gennadios Scholarios. Briel investigates the intersection of Aquinas's theology, the legacy of Greek patristic and later theological traditions, and the use of Aristotle's philosophy by Latin and Greek Christian thinkers in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The broader aim of the book is to reconsider our current understanding of later Byzantine theology by reconfiguring the construction of what constitutes "orthodoxy" within a pro- or anti-Western paradigm. The fruit of this appropriation of Aquinas enriches extant sources for historical and contemporary assessments of Orthodox theology. Moreover, Scholarios's grafting of Thomas onto the later Greek theological tradition changes the account of grace and freedom in Thomistic moral theology. The particular kind of Thomism that Scholarios develops avoids the later vexing issues in the West of the de auxiliis controversy by replacing the Augustinian theology of grace with the highly developed Greek theological concept of synergy.

George Demacopoulos on Colonizing Crusaders

I had a very lovely breakfast with George Demacopolous in Romania in January at IOTA and so heard from him directly about his forthcoming book, which has just been published: Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity in the Era of the Fourth Crusade (Fordham UP, 2019), 272pp.

Following my usual practice, I e-mailed him some questions about the book. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

GD: Methodologically, I am trained as a pre-modern historian, but I’ve spent a good deal of time among Religious Studies and Theology faculties so I suppose you could say that my interests lie in applying historical-critical methods to aspects of Church history that continue to resonate with modern believers.  In recent years, I’ve grown more appreciative of certain theoretical resources, such as discourse analysis and postcolonial critique, because I think that they offer fresh ways of interpreting pre-modern texts.

AD: This is a book that tackles three controversial things—the Crusades, colonialism, and competing Christian identities. Tell us a bit about how you came to see the connections between them, and perhaps especially how you found the critical scholarly literature on colonialism and post-colonialism to be helpful. 

GD: It all started when Aristotle Papanikolaou and I began to explore the negative reception of Augustine among modern Orthodox communities.  The more I read the various caricatures of Augustine that prevailed in Russian and Greek writing in the 19th and 20th century, the more it became apparent that there must be a “backstory” to modern Orthodox identity narration that functioned in negative juxtaposition to the West, especially Catholicism and its bogey men—Augustine, Aquinas, etc.

As it happened—and this was about 10 years ago--I was in a faculty “theory” group at Fordham at the same time and we spent a few years reading postcolonial theory.  The more I thought about modern Orthodox identity in light of the stages of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialsim, the more I became convinced that there were aspects of the Orthodox story that aligned with phenomena in other cultures and contexts.  While I found the work of many postcolonial theorists (e.g. Said, Bhabha, Young, etc.) to be enlightening and provocative for my thinking about modern Orthodox identity formation vis-à-vis the West, it was also clear to me that there were at least two really important differences from the historical setting that I was pursuing versus the ones that postcolonial theorists typically engage in Africa, India, and the Middle East.

First, whereas their stories typically involved Christianity as an important aspect of the hegemonic colonial force, the Orthodox Christian story is possibly the only one in history where a Christian community is the victim of colonization, rather than the aggressor.  I believe this has some important implications—not only for Orthodox identity but also for the ways in which it complicates our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and colonialism.  Second, unlike the vast majority of the colonial stories that animate postcolonial critics, the Orthodox experience of colonialism occurred in the Middle Ages (not the early modern period).  I’m convinced, in fact, that the Western European experience during the Crusading period served as an important reference point for subsequent colonial enterprises.

AD: Until his death a few years ago, the Cambridge Crusades scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith mentioned more than once his despair that no matter how this history is told, it will always be traduced and tendentiously misrepresented for present political purposes. Did you hesitate at all before wading into the histories of the Crusades? Did you despair at all after having done so?!

GD: Yes, Riley-Smith took the Crusaders at their word that they believed themselves to be doing the work of God, that their conquest of the Near East was an “act of love.”  I don’t think I ever hesitated to pursue this project along the lines Riley-Smith laments.  I suppose if there is one thing that I don’t want readers to do with my work it is to misread my goals for the project. When I draw attention to some of the terrible things that Western Crusaders did and the outlandish ways by which they justified them, I do not do so in order for us to dismiss Western Christianity or because I think that those people represent Western Christendom.

Rather, I draw attention to this history because it helps us to explain the political, cultural, and military context in which Eastern Christians first began to narrate an Orthodox identity that was decidedly framed by juxtaposition against the West.  My theological point of view (such as I have one) is that the breakdown of Christian unity in the thirteenth century has virtually nothing to do with theology—it was entirely born of political and cultural animus. Viewing the breakdown through the lens of a colonial encounter (supplemented by the insights of postcolonial critique) helps us to see this in ways that more traditional historical-critical methods can elide.

AD: You also suggest in your introduction that the Fourth Crusade is especially painful in the East for opening up “permanent fissures within the Orthodox community.” Tell us a bit more about that.

GD: More than anything else, the legacy of the Fourth Crusade is that Eastern Christians have become divided over the proper response to the West.  It was in the context of the Latin empire of Byzantium that some Eastern Christians began to say for the first time that Orthodox could not marry Latins and they could not receive the sacraments from Latins.  It is a common misconception that these things occurred with the Schism in 1054 (they did not).  It was also in the context of the Latin empire that some Eastern Christian began to say that other Eastern Christians who had various levels of association with Westerners could not be permitted to participate in Eastern Christian sacraments because they were tainted by the exposure to Latins.  To be clear, this was not the majority position—it was clearly a minority position—but it gave birth to a trajectory within Orthodoxy that would have profound and long-lasting implications.  In fact, I believe that every modern inner-Orthodox debate either explicitly or implicitly is concerned with the question of Western Christendom and what the proper response to it should be.

AD: Without naming him explicitly, Freud nonetheless seems to me to lurk in the background as you attempt to draw out the connections between sexuality, power, and colonialism. Messis and Said are some of your principal interlocutors here. Tell us a bit about what you found valuable in their works.

GD: Yes, I’ll admit that I was never really that enamored with employing psycho-analytic approaches to historical questions, but these methods are very important to many postcolonial theorists, especially someone like Homi Bhabha.  Moreover, Said and Robert Young are two postcolonial theorists to draw out the sexual dimensions of power relationships as well as issues of longing, fantasy, and repulsion.  I do believe that some of the pro-Crusader texts that I examine in the book give themselves easily to analysis from this perspective, even if I don’t explicitly pursue the psycho-analytic dimensions.

AD: You make it clear that Byzantium in the crusading period should not be regarded as uniformly “subaltern.” Would you elaborate a bit as to why this is an important clarification?

GD: To be “subaltern” is to have no access to power, to have no control whatsoever to one’s own discourse.  At the turn of the thirteenth century, Byzantium was, arguably, the most advanced and culturally sophisticated Christian society in the world.  So while I believe that it is very clear that the process of colonialism-decolonialism-postcolonialism helps us to understand Orthodox Christian history and culture from the Crusades to the present, I do not think that the situation is the identical to other regions of the globe where Western Europeans arrived and completely transformed indigenous societies.

AD: I’m especially struck by your third chapter on papal ambivalence, a phenomenon which is always so psychologically revealing. Here you discuss Pope Innocent III’s “double-bind” with the capture of Constantinople. Tell us a bit more about that bind. It seems clear that part of the bind (then as now) is that by calling Eastern Christians genuine Christians (with “valid orders” as Catholics might say today) in a real sacramental Church the pope appeared to undercut his own claim to being the fount of all validity and liceity in the Church?

The chapter argues that the unexpected capture of Constantinople in 1204 put Pope Innocent III into a rhetorical and practical double bind. On the one hand, the pontiff sternly criticized the crusaders for their brutality against fellow Christians and for compromising the larger military effort in the Holy Land.  On the other hand, Innocent saw the conquest of Constantinople as an opportunity to resolve the schism on his own terms and, at least initially, he hoped that the accrual of Byzantium to the crusaders’ Eastern network might be beneficial to his larger objectives.

But if Innocent was to capitalize on this, it meant that he would need to reformulate the very basis of crusading ideology so as to authorize the subjugation of a community that he had previously defined as Christian. Of course, one of the ways that Innocent does this is by asserting, all the more forcefully, the prerogatives of papal authority.  In the conclusion of the chapter, I assess this dimension of Innocent’s ambivalence and observe that:  “Innocent’s repeated acknowledgement that the Greeks do not accept papal rule exposes the inherent contradiction within the discourse of papal sovereignty.  Indeed, each papal recognition of Greek disobedience reveals a gap in the very premise of papal authority, whether the premise is constituted on the Petrine myth or some other foundation.  The dissonance of papal sovereignty is 'put on trial' by its every iteration."

If the bishop of Rome is truly and authentically the source of all hierarchic power and Christian teaching that its advocates claim it to be, then any acknowledgment from the bishop of Rome that there are “Christians” who do not accept such a principle undercuts all value in the claim of papal authority as a first principle.  In Bhabha’s terms, Innocent’s assertion of papal authority encodes its own inevitable undoing; its very iteration establishes an ambivalent situation that disrupts its claim to monolithic power.  As discourse, the Roman claim of papal sovereignty in the Church bears at one and the same time a striking ambivalence--both possibility and dis-possibility.

Thus, papal discourse vis-à-vis Greek Christians in this period implicitly dictates either (1) that Greeks are not Christians (because they fail to acknowledge papal authority, which is a measurement of authenticity imposed by the discourse) or (2) the recognition of papal authority is not a meaningful measurement or requirement of Christianity (because the discourse admits that no Greek acknowledges papal authority).  Either way, the assertion cannot withstand its own logical weight.

AD: As you are working towards your conclusion, you note that from this literature you review one can find clear evidence that neither Latin nor Greek views of the other were monolithic, and that the boundaries between each sacramental community were “extremely porous.” What lessons, if any, do these insights offer us today?

GD: This is an important question with broad implications.  In general terms, it teaches us is that history, even (if not especially) the history of the Church is far more complex and varied than we typically understand.  More specifically, it encourages us to see that there have always been multiple “authoritative” voices saying a variety of things about the boundaries of the Christian community and the standing of person on that borderland.  There was never a time when these questions were easy and, for me, that is a cause for hope because it means the cause of Christian unity has always been a challenge, even though the Scriptures themselves have made it a mandate.

AD: Having finished the book, what are you at work on now?

My next major project will look at the presentation of violence in late-ancient and medieval Greek hymnography.  What I’m particular interested to explore is the context in which Christians begin to ask God to destroy enemies.  It didn’t start that way.  I have a theory to explain what happened, but you’ll need to wait for the next book.

Christos Yannaras

There are certain names, by the force of their prose and the number of their books, which cannot be overlooked today, and Christos Yannaras is certainly in that category. I have used his books in classes for more than a decade now, and read some others. In the former category I have regularly assigned his Freedom of Morality.

That book seems emblematic of Yannaras in some ways--blustery and sprawling, desperately in need of an editor, prone to wild exaggerations and polemical tangents (especially about tiresome Orthodox bugbears such as "scholasticism" and "pietism"), and not a little bit idealistic. Still it contains some crucial insights well worth thinking about in depth.

It is a facile temptation, devoutly to be avoided, to write Yannaras off as one more anti-Western Orthodox crank, of whom there seem to be not a few today. But Yannaras can indulge in those kinds of polemics (perhaps nowhere at greater length than in Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age) and still be worth your time because--unlike almost all other anti-Western Orthodox--he regularly turns the criticism back on Orthodoxy itself in welcome ways, as he does in this book in particular. This capacity for self-criticism, as I noted here, became obvious and welcome in 2011 when he gave a commencement address at Holy Cross in Brookline denouncing Orthodox zealots with their individualism, their idolization, their fundamentalism, and their fanaticism masquerading as Orthodox but in fact deeply modern and deeply Western.

Among his other books which I have read, and in some cases reviewed elsewhere, I'd draw attention to The Enigma of Evil. I'm not entirely convinced by its arguments, but again it raises some good questions (in between the usual shots at the West).

And I am just about to begin reading his Against Religion: the Alienation of the Ecclesial Event. It promises to be of interest in my own current work on Freud and theology, some of it discussed here where Yannaras's ideas on psychoanalysis (especially its Lacanian variant) were also noted and welcomed. In his essay on Lacan, Yannaras is a model of open learning, of "despoiling the Egyptians" that the Fathers so often practiced and recommended--but which few on-line apologists today seem to do.

There are many other books that could be mentioned, but the point of this entry is to draw your attention to a new book, and a forthcoming one later this year.

The new book is Metaphysics as a Personal Adventure, trans. Norman Russell (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2017), 212pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Christos Yannaras is a philosopher, theologian, and political thinker widely regarded as one of the most important Orthodox thinkers of the twentieth century. He sees theology along with philosophy not as an academic enterprise, but as a serious approach to reality in all the dimensions vital to life today. A controversial figure, he castigates much of what passes for Christianity in the East as well as in the West, calling it a religionization of faith. In this book he responds to searching questions concerning his work, setting his thinking as a whole in an integrated vision of knowledge, truth, relationship, and salvation.

And then, set for release in August of this year is a forthcoming study: Christos Yannaras: Philosophy, Theology, Culture By Andreas Andreopoulos (Routledge, 2018), 243pp.

About this forthcoming work Routledge tells us the following:

Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics. With contributions from established and new scholars this collection considers the four main strands of Yannaras’ work - philosophy, theology, ethics and culture - and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields. Christos Yannaras provides a foreword.

Orthodox Constructions of the West: III

When we were last met together, we discussed several articles in this excellent and very important collection, Orthodox Constructions of the West. Let us continue to explore its riches, beginning with an article on Georges Florovsky written by Paul Gavrilyuk, author of a forthcoming book on Florovsky as I noted earlier. It seems obvious that many contributors to this outstanding volume wrote articles based on books that would soon be forthcoming. That was the case with Plested's chapter, as I noted briefly in Part II of this series.

Gavrilyuk notes many rich ironies in the life of Florovsky, whom I studied in some detail in a doctoral course devoted to his thought more than ten years ago now. Gavrilyuk begins by noting a rather unmistakable strain of anti-Western and anti-Catholic sentiment in Florovsky at least in the 1920s when he was playing with fantasies of "Eurasian" civilization, far removed from those wretched German idealists and romantics. And yet, as Gavrilyuk puts it in an unimprovable sentence rightly skewering Florovsky: "It is ironic that a Russian theologian, born in the southern Ukraine and residing in France, would come to Greece to deliver his first communication in German and his second communication in English in order to protest the 'Western captivity' of Orthodox theology"! Most of the rest of the chapter is spent showing how, pace his protestations to the contrary, Florovsky was in fact influenced by Western categories and theologians, especially those in France at the same time as he was who were involved in the Catholic ressourcement movement. Much is demonstrated proving that Florovsky was in fact himself something of an idealist and a romantic, and that for all his going on about the supposed universality of Christian "Hellenism," his arguments in its favor are sweeping, unbalanced, partial, and highly tendentious.

What, then, are we to make of Florovsky today and his method of a "neo-patristic synthesis"? Gavrilyuk notes that we have two ways of proceeding, and many, alas, seem to have taken the first way which consists of hatred of the West, intellectual obscurantism, bogus mysticism, a "misguided apocalypticism" and what he memorably and aptly calls "patristic fundamentalism." In place of this Gavrilyuk counsels that we see Florovsky's method as being simply one of intellectual engagement of a given culture in order ultimately to lead that culture to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

 

Orthodox Constructions of the West: II

When we last met, we heard from one of the contributors to the collection Orthodox Constructions of the West on the question of primacy in Orthodox ecclesiology. Let us now proceed back to the beginning of the book and the introduction and opening historical essays, all of which are, alone, worth the price of the book. As I noted in my first comments, this is an invaluable book that deserves the widest possible audience.

The editors provide the introduction, noting that it is not designed to be a comprehensive re-telling of the history of relations between East and West. Nevertheless, they do set forth an expansive and carefully considered narrative which goes some considerable distance toward "clearing the swamp" (Stanley Hauerwas) of received notions. (Many of the shibboleths people repeat in the dolorous narrative of East-West division are manifestly of recent vintage, and many issues we today commonly insist are paramount were of little concern to our forebears.) But more than that, the editors set forth the vision of this volume, and of the conference that preceded it, noting that "the categories of East and West are always fluid, always multiform, and almost always projections of an imagined difference" (2; my emphasis). This emphasis on an imagined difference is a leitmotif in many of the essays that follow.

Robert Taft's essay is vintage Taft. Much of it will, of course, be very familiar to those who read Taft. Parts of this paper, in fact, were used in another paper of his at the Orientale Lumen conference in 2011 when I was on a panel with him and others, including Sr. Vassa Larin of ROCOR; and Met. Kallistos Ware, the retired Greek Orthodox theologian from Oxford. Taft's opening is worth quoting in extenso because it sums up perfectly my own views of, approach towards, and love for the Orthodox Christian East:

I consider the Orthodox Churches the historic apostolic Christianity of the East and sister churches of the Catholic Church;...I recognize and rejoice in the fact that Orthodox peoples remain Orthodox; the Catholic Church should support and collaborate with the Orthodox Churches in every way, foster the most cordial relations with them, earnestly work to restore communion with them, recognize their legitimate interests especially on their home ground, avoid all proselytism among their flocks there or elsewhere, not seek in any way to undercut them, nor rejoice in or exploit their weaknesses, nor fish in their pond, nor seek to convert their faithful to the Catholic Church.

After this, Taft notes that it's important to begin with self-criticism, and so he goes into some detail about how his own Jesuit predecessors badly mangled relations with the Christian East in places such as India, Ethiopia, and Eastern Europe, especially, of course, what is today known as Ukraine. This latter brings to mind the controverted history of "Uniatism," about which Taft is as blunt and detailed here as in the rest of the essay.

Having criticized the Catholic Church in unsparing terms, Taft then lists a number of areas where we are still waiting for more honest self-criticism and -assessment from the Orthodox. By laying out the facts, Taft shows how, e.g., the idea that no Orthodox country ever used the power of the state to compel non-Orthodox to believe is revealed to be without foundation--both in the early Byzantine period (cf. the fate of the Copts or Armenians) and later as under, e.g., the Russian tsars. The idea that the residents of Constantinople in 1204 were as pure and innocent as the driven snow, and thus complete victims of the Fourth Crusade, conveniently overlooks the fact of a pogrom against the Latins in the city organized and murderously carried out by the Greeks in 1182. Orthodox treatment of Greek Catholics in Romania and Ukraine in the immediate post-war period of the 1940s is another area where frank admission is still wanting. The point of this list (and other many examples Taft provides) is not to engage in a tit-for-tat--what Taft memorably in 2011 called the "my hands are cleaner than yours" approach to history; but simply to show that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of our romanticized pasts.

Taft's essay is followed by two others, equally historically impressive in different ways though less widely focused. The historian Tia Kolbaba, author of such important studies (which I had expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies) as Inventing Latin Heretics: Byzantines and the Filioque in the Ninth Century and The Byzantine Lists: ERRORS OF THE LATINS, draws on her historical expertise to treat relations between Byzantines, Armenians, and Latins on the question of whether to use yeast in the eucharistic bread, a controversy she traces to the tenth century. This is a fascinating essay in which she reveals that the common problem of the time was an inability to conceive of difference that was not seen as "heretical," a term which, she notes, still needs further historical elaboration and differentiation  in the Byzantine period.

Kolbaba's essay is followed by "Light from the West: Byzantine Readings of Aquinas" by Marcus Plested, who has, of course, recently published an entire book on Orthodoxy and Aquinas, which I discussed here while interviewing the author here. In the next installment, we'll look at what Plested unearths here, and a few of the other essays that follow. To be continued. 

Orthodox Constructions of the West: I

If I were a rich man, I would immediately order at least a thousand copies of Orthodox Constructions of the West and send them to every serious Christian academic library. Then I would order another thousand copies or so and send them to various ecumenical institutions and leaders around the world. After that I'd start sending copies to anyone and everyone who has ever commented on or thought about Orthodox-Catholic relations, Christian history, the historiographical process, Byzantium, liturgical history, and much else.

Edited by Fordham's two Orthodox theologians, George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, this book is the collected proceedings of a 2010 conference held there under the same title. It is a goldmine of insights and wonderfully refreshing blunt talk, making it an excellent book for the scholar and general reader alike. I thought I would dip into articles individually to give you a taste of what to expect, but only a taste because you need to buy and read this book. 

Naturally enough, even before reading the introduction, I turned immediately to the chapter by the philosopher (and Greek Orthodox priest) John Panteleimon Manoussakis, "Primacy and Ecclesiology: the State of the Question." It is a short article, and was given at a conference nearly a year before my own Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity was published so it is not (unlike my book) a comprehensive coverage of the question, but it is very valuable nonetheless. I greatly enjoyed the author's take-no-prisoners approach. He comes out swinging: "the phenomenon of antipapism, understood as the denial of a primus for the Universal Church and the elevation of such a denial to a trait that allegedly identifies the whole Orthodox Church, is, properly speaking, heretical" (229). He notes that for too many would-be defenders of Orthodoxy--Manoussakis focuses almost entirely on contemporary figures in the Greek Church--"heresy is all they see" when looking Westward.

What I found especially depressing was how recent some of the attitudes are. E.g., a 2010 statement of a conference in Greece at which several metropolitans of the Church were present makes the demonstrably foolish claim that there is no theological justification at all for any kind of primacy in the Church. Obviously, as I wrote sarcastically in the margins of the book, Metropolitan John Zizioulas did not get this memo--nor the dozens of other Orthodox theologians I surveyed. Zizioulas, precisely one of the finest theological minds of contemporary Greek Orthodoxy, has been arguing cogently for decades in a variety of books and articles that primacy and synodality stand or fall together, and no Church properly so called can function except with both primacy and synodality exercised together. For hierarchs trying to argue otherwise reveals an ignorance of their own tradition, which is truly intolerable. You can say whatever you want about Catholicism; but when you try telling me what Orthodoxy is or stands for when it can easily be proven otherwise, you've just revealed yourself as a completely unserious person.

The author gives other examples of what he calls the "rogue fanaticism of para-ecclesial groups" (239) before showing how they do not even understand the very Orthodoxy they purport to defend. He himself has no patience for them, and instead sets forth in a calm and lucid fashion some of the principles needed for the proper understanding of primacy. The whole essay, while short (he tells me via e-mail that he has a longer work coming out in 2014, For the Unity of All: Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, for which I will be eagerly watching in the new year) is a wonderfully bracing blast of the cool air of reason.

In Part II: comments on the introduction and Robert Taft's essay. Stay tuned. In the meantime, buy this book, which deserves the widest possible audience.