In Praise of Maps and Atlases

Every semester for more than a decade I have made regular use of maps in my classes, especially those devoted to Muslim-Christian relations both ancient and modern. I am an unapologetic believer that understanding the lay of the land--noticing, e.g., where the river valleys are, or mountain ranges, etc.--is crucial to understanding much of the history. 

In that light, I am looking forward to getting my hands on Christianity: A Historical Atlas by Alec Ryrie with maps by Malcolm Swanston (Belknap/Harvard UP, October 2020), 224 pages + 121 color maps, 18 illus.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

With over two billion practicing believers today, Christianity has taken root in almost all parts of the globe. Its impact on Europe and the Americas in particular has been fundamental. Through more than one hundred beautiful color maps and illustrations, Christianity traces the history of the religion, beginning with the world of Jesus Christ. From the consolidation of the first Christian empire—Constantine’s Rome—to the early Christian states that thrived in Ireland, Ethiopia, and other regions of the Roman periphery, Christianity quickly proved dynamic and adaptable.

After centuries of dissemination, strife, dogmatic division, and warfare in its European and Near Eastern heartland, Christianity conquered new worlds. In North America, immigrants fleeing persecution and intolerance rejected the established Church, and in time revivalist religions flourished and spread. Missionaries took the Christian message to Latin America, Africa, and Asia, bringing millions of new converts into the fold.

Christianity has served as the inspiration for some of the world’s finest monuments, literature, art, and architecture, while also playing a major role in world politics and history, including conquest, colonization, conflict, and liberation. Despite challenges in the modern world from atheism and secularism, from scandals and internal divisions, Christianity continues to spread its message through new technologies while drawing on a deep well of history and tradition.

Imperial Geographies

As my students know only too well, I am forever banging on about the importance of understanding geography before you can understand things like the encounter between Eastern Christians and Muslims. Thus we spend a good deal of time looking at maps, ancient and modern, and watching borders, countries, and populations shift. The geography of Constantinople is in itself a fascinating study: the capital of one empire that resisted the advances of another empire for more than 700 years, thanks in no small part to its geographic location which conveyed supreme advantages on the defenders and made the job of invaders fiendishly difficult.

A new book will take a look at those two empires: Sahar Bazzaz et al, eds., Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013), 282pp.
 
About this book we are told:

Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space opens new and insightful vistas on the nexus between empire and geography. The volume redirects attention from the Atlantic to the space of the eastern Mediterranean shaped by two empires of remarkable duration and territorial extent, the Byzantine and the Ottoman. The essays offer a diachronic and comparative account that spans the medieval and early modern periods and reaches into the nineteenth century. Methodologically rich, the essays combine historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives. Through texts as diverse as court records and chancery manuals, imperial treatises and fictional works, travel literature and theatrical adaptations, the essays explore ways in which the production of geographical knowledge supported imperial authority or revealed its precarious mastery of geography.

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.

Counting Orthodox in North America

I have been listening to Ancient Faith Radio's coverage of the sixteenth All-America Council of the Orthodox Church of America. One of the presenters was Alexei Krindatch, editor of a volume I reviewed earlier. I thought I would re-post that review and also a new link, which he mentioned in his presentation: There is at that link a great deal of fascinating and useful statistical material on the numbers of affiliated and practicing Orthodox Christians in North America, number of monasteries, geographical distribution, and so on. All this data reveals a portrait of Orthodoxy on this continent that is far, far smaller than many imagined. (Krindatch says that average Sunday attendance in the OCA is 33,000.) For too long, when asked how many Orthodox there were in North America, one was often fobbed off with breezy figures wildly inflated. (As Robert Taft has said, "'Eastern' and 'statistics' is an oxymoron.") But the data also helpfully undermine the idea that Orthodoxy is overwhelmingly "ethnic." That is increasingly not the case, and has been so for some time. Orthodoxy on this continent is more catholic than in many other places.

The Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches packs an incredible amount of very useful data into a surprisingly affordable book. Given how affordable it is, no serious library--whether personal, parochial, or academic--should be without this book. 

After a brief introduction, including discussion of terminology and methodology, the book opens with a very helpful time-line tracing the presence of Eastern Christianity in North America from 1618-2010. A longer historical essay follows, fleshing out some of the dates and events in more detail. Then we have "Ten Interesting Facts about the History of Orthodox Christianity in the USA," which contains a few mild surprises. Then we move into what is, in my view, the highlight of the book: the maps. We have a series of maps tracing out Orthodox populations in each state, from 1906 to 2010. This data is presented in a variety of ways which is most helpful. 

After this, we move alphabetically through a series of overviews of each Orthodox Church (canonical and one or two of the uncanonical ones--e.g., Old Calendarists) present in the United States, starting with the Albanian Orthodox Diocese of America and ending with the Syriac Church of Antioch. Each of these presentations is standardized, and begins with basic data about where the church was founded, its current headquarters, contact information, chief hierarch, and basic numerical data: number of adherents, number of monasteries, average attendance rates, etc. A brief essay follows, tracing out the development of each church, and in some cases ending with a ''Further Information" section that often gives a handful of references to both books or websites. (These reference lists, not all of which are formatted properly, are the one weak part of the book because they often overlook major studies of real importance.) After the essay, we then come to the maps, showing the number of parishes and adherents in the various states, including on a county-by-county basis. These are laid out very lucidly and at a glance you can pick up major concentrations.

The authors and editors write without any apologetical agenda, and so do not shy away from presenting the unhappy parts of Orthodox history, e.g., mentioning the schism in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese that lasted until 1975, or the current challenges that have arisen more recently in that jurisdiction and others. Equally impressive is the fact that membership figures, including average attendance, seem very credible and do not appear to suffer from the kind of inflation or guesswork I have seen elsewhere among some who would have us believe that there are scores of millions of practicing Orthodox in this country. 

Chapter 3 is devoted to monastic life. After a brief essay stressing its history and importance, it goes on to discuss the "more than 80 monasteries [that] function presently in the United States" (122). These are then detailed in a chart giving location, ecclesial affiliation, sex, and whether the monastery accepts outside visitors. There then follows a directory of monasteries, giving more detailed geographic and contact information, including websites and e-mail addresses, and how many outside visitors, if any, may be accepted and for how long. For those desirous of making a retreat, this is very useful information to have.

The fourth and final chapter is one long running table breaking down the data of the "2010 US National Census of Orthodox Christian Churches." This amasses in table form what has been presented earlier in cartographic form.

A two-page appendix concludes the book with a brief list of websites and books for additional reading.

Quibbles: the entry for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church sticks the definite article in front of the country: ''the Ukraine." It also makes use of ecumenically infelicitous terminology (''Uniates") for describing Ukrainian Greco-Catholics. And, as noted earlier, many of the reference lists for further reading are non-existent in some cases or otherwise dated and incomplete. But these are minor issues in what is an excellent achievement, long overdue. The Atlas of American Orthodox Christian Churches is a very welcome book and deserves a wide audience. 

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.