Met. Hilarion on Orthodoxy

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, perhaps the most prominent Russian Orthodox theologian alive today, will later this month see St. Vladimir's Seminary Press issue a translation of the second volume of his work Orthodox Christianity Volume II : Doctrine and Teaching of the Orthodox Church (SVS Press, 2012), 597pp.

About this book the publisher says:

This is the second volume of a detailed and systematic exposition of the history, canonical structure, doctrine, moral and social teaching, liturgical services, and spiritual life of the Orthodox Church. The purpose of this series is to present Orthodox Christianity as an integrated theological and liturgical system, in which all elements are interconnected. Theology finds its expression and is shaped in the liturgical experience and church art—including icons, singing, and architecture. The services, in their turn, influence the ascetic practice and the personal piety of each Christian; they shape the moral and social teaching of the Church as well as its relation to other Christian confessions, non-Christian religions, and the secular world.
The first volume provided an account of the historical arc of the Orthodox Church during the first ten centuries after Christ’s nativity, then examined the canonical structure of the Orthodox Church. This volume examines the sources of Orthodox doctrine in Scripture and Tradition; its teaching on God in Trinity and Unity, in his essence and in his energies; on the world and man; on Jesus Christ, the incarnate God; on the Church, the body of Christ; on the Theotokos, Mary; and on eschatology, the last things.
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev has authored numerous works on theology and church history, and is an internationally recognized composer of liturgical music. In the words of Patriarch Alexei II of blessed memory, “his many years of service to the mother church, his rich creative activity, and his broad perspective enable him to present the tradition of the Orthodox Church in all its diversity.”

We had his first volume reviewed and our reviewer, Lewis Patsavos of Holy Cross College in Brookline, noted that it was very good if a bit Russo-centric in focus. 

Orthodox Diversity on the Problem of Primacy

Met. Hilarion Alfeyev, of whom I was recently critical, has come out with a restatement of his views--already in circulation since the fall of 2007 at least--on the issue of Orthodox understandings of primacy, correctly observing that “there are certain divergences, and there are different positions, of the Orthodox churches on the question of the primacy." He further noted that "we do not have a very clear picture as to what should be the role of the primate in the Orthodox tradition....Without having this clear and unified vision, we cannot easily discuss the issue of how we see the role of the 'primus inter pares' in the universal Church.” In other words, until Orthodoxy deals with its internal notions of primacy, external discussions about papal primacy with Catholics will probably not go very far.

I've heard this argument before, and rejected it. As I have argued in several places, most fully and with more detail than anyone else has ever done in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, the problem of primacy within Orthodoxy only becomes an issue after East and West part company.

I am convinced (and here follow the suggestion of Met. John Zizioulas in his essay in The Petrine Ministry: Catholics and Orthodox in Dialogue) that Met. Hilarion's proposed method for resolving this disagreement needlessly extends the process to a superfluous second step. He says Orthodoxy must treat internal notions of primacy first and then papal primacy. On the contrary, I am convinced that Orthodoxy and Catholicism must have this discussion together: "solving" the problem of papal primacy will ipso facto solve the problem of internal Orthodox orderings of primacy. For that, and many other germane arguments, you really will want to read Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

Metropolitans in Print

St. Vladimir's Seminary Press has recently released two books, one from its own primate, Metropolitan Jonah, and another from the prolific Russian Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, author of books on hell, the canonical structure of the Church, Isaac the Syrian, Symeon the New Theologian, Orthodox witness today, and many musical works.

The first book, from the OCA's primate, whom I was delighted to meet in June at Orientale Lumen, is entitled Reflections on a Spiritual Journey, eds. Virginia Nieuwsma and Chad Hatfield (SVS Press, 2011), 207pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

Reflections on a Spiritual Journey —a collection of essays and addresses by Metropolitan Jonah— provides a glimpse into His Beatitude’s spiritual formation and thinking. The book, which contains not only a lengthy biography of the author but also a Foreword by The Right Rev. Benjamin, bishop of San Francisco and the West, is divided into two main sections. Part One, “The Spiritual Life,” contains the author’s reflections on forgiveness and reconciliation; becoming and purifying the true self; the connection between shame and the passions; and human personhood and the value of suffering. Part Two, “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” conveys the author’s vision regarding the identity and mission of the Orthodox Church in America as well as his perspectives on episcopacy, primacy, and the mother churches.
The volume is the first in the press’s new Orthodox Profiles series, which acquaints readers on an intimate level with Orthodox figures who have shaped the direction of the Orthodox Church in areas of mission, ascetical and liturgical theology, scholarly and pastoral endeavors, and various other professional disciplines. Archpriest Chad Hatfield, Chancellor/CEO of the seminary, is the Series Editor.

The second publication is not so much a new publication as a new version of a previously published book by Met. Hilarion: The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to the Teaching and Spirituality of the Orthodox Church.

About this book, the publisher says:

The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to the Teaching and Spirituality of the Orthodox Church, by Metropolitan Hilarion, was written when His Eminence was a priest, lecturing in dogmatic theology at the Moscow Theological Seminary in 1992. It was published in Russian in 1996, and it was first printed in English by Darton, Longman and Todd, Ltd. in the United Kingdom in 2002. It is, in the words of the author “…neither a systematic exposition of the dogmatic theology of the Orthodox Church, nor a comprehensive analysis of Orthodox spiritual tradition. It is rather a personal commentary by an Orthodox priest on the dogmas of the Orthodox Church as they relate to spiritual life.” A collection of texts, mostly patristic, which illustrate the author’s points, follows each chapter.

It is, I must note, very sad that a man of Hilarion's caliber, who can produce many theological books of considerable erudition, nonetheless recently popped up in the media to repeat the same tedious nonsense about Ukrainian Greco-Catholics and the so-called conditions for the pope of Rome to meet the patriarch of Moscow. This is the same tendentious rubbish that the Russians slanderously spout every few months when it suits their mendacious purposes. No serious historian believes them (Robert Taft, inter alia, has long debunked all this, first in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2001, and again at Orientale Lumen in June of this year) and it is a mystery that such an intelligent and Oxford-educated man as Hilarion can put this forward with a straight face. After reading Taft's article "The Problem of 'Uniatism' and the 'Healing of Memories'," and listening to his OL lecture, Hilarion should next go out immediately and buy a copy of a new book by his fellow Russian Orthodox theologian, Antoine Arjakovsky: En attendant le Concile de l'Eglise Orthodoxe. 

I have read this book with great interest, and am reviewing it for a journal in Ukraine this fall. In chapter 24 of this very meaty and wholly welcome book, "Memories of the Pseudo-Synod of Lviv," Arjakovsky writes movingly and powerfully about that attempted suppression by Stalin of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) with clear and demonstrably verifiable collusion from the Russian Church. Arjakovsky, as a well-trained historian (with a doctorate from the Sorbonne), simply lays out all the evidence without polemics or hysterics, allowing the absurdity of Russian claims, still mindlessly mouthed by Met. Hilarion, to be made manifest. He goes on to note that the other notion, that Ukraine somehow today remains part of Russia's "canonical territory" is equally risible to anyone who, in Taft's memorable words, actually studies and understands history instead of just making it up:

la difficulté ici n’est pas seulement que la justification historique présentée est loin de pouvoir convaincre. Le principal problème est que le patriarcat de Moscou ná eu à aucun moment de son histoire de juridiction en Galicie ! L’Église de Kiev-Halitch a toujours relevé du patriarcat de Constantinople (499). 

This chapter is especially useful in updating the discussion with all the documentation issued in 2006 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the pseudo-synod. Thus we read the letter from Pope Benedict XVI on the anniversary, the letter from then-president Victor Yuschenko, and a handful of rather reluctant acknowledgements from some Orthodox, including Nicolas Lossky. In the end, though, as Arjakovsky notes, memories of 1946 remain an enormous wound (“une blessure profonde”) that, in truth and justice, must be acknowledged and then healed. How long will it take for the Russian hierarchy to admit this? 

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev

The Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev is a prolific scholar and musician, having previously authored such works as a recent book on eschatology and soteriology (Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent into Hades from an Orthodox Perspective), two introductions to Orthodoxy in general (The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to the Teaching and Spirituality of th(e Orthodox Church, and Orthodox Witness Today), and two others: St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, and The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian.

St. Vladimir's Seminary Press just sent me a copy of the metropolitan's newest work, the first volume of a projected multi-volume series in translation from the original Russian: Orthodox Christianity Volume I: The History and Canonical Structure of the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2011), 340pp.

If this book holds true to its title, it will most likely be a major study of an area still not well examined in Orthodox ecclesiology. At risk of being immodest, I would say that the only other recent, updated, largely comprehensive study of the canonical structures of the Orthodox Churches would be my own Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, wherein I undertook, inter alia, to provide a previously unprecedented survey of the canonical structure of more than a dozen churches: the five ancient patriarchates, the modern European patriarchates (of Sofia, Bucharest, and Moscow) and then many of the so-called non-Chalcedonian churches, including the Copts; the Syrians, and the Indian churches derived from them; and then the Armenian Apostolic Church, to which I gave special attention because of its utterly singular structure. When I was working on that book, I quickly discovered that no such comprehensive, up-to-date survey had been attempted. I was breaking new ground.

Lest anyone think this discussion of canonical structures is academic-ecclesial arcana that nobody could possibly find relevant, I would remind the reader that disputes over ecclesial structures are at the heart of the on-going search for not merely Catholic-Orthodox unity, but unity among the Orthodox themselves, as, e.g., Met. Hilarion made clear following the Ravenna meeting. (I discuss Alfeyev's concerns in an article available here.) Witness, too, e.g., the debate in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America about the status of their bishops. While there are certainly grounds for deploring that decision, one cannot simply say that the reduction of previously installed diocesan bishops to the rank of "auxiliary" (itself a deplorable concept inspired by modern Roman Catholic practice, which should be scrapped and replaced with much smaller jurisdictions: the problem is not too many bishops, but too few presiding over, as Joseph O'Callaghan showed, dioceses needlessly and unjustifiably larger than some of the world's largest corporations, making it almost impossible for a bishop to be, in any serious sense, a spiritual father) is somehow "unOrthodox" as though there were one model that all Orthodox follow, or ought to follow.  One of the important lessons my research revealed was that there is no such thing as "the" structure of the Orthodox Church true across all Orthodox churches--or even true across the same church in different periods.

Thus one sees, once more, that the shibboleths one so often hears from lazy, ignorant, or simply tendentious apologists for Orthodoxy--in this case that the Orthodox Church is always and everywhere "synodical" or "conciliar" while the Latin Church is always and everywhere "monarchical" and "papist"--is just so much rubbish. There is, as I show in my book, a long history of synodical governance in the Latin Church, and, as I show, a significant history of some patriarchs in some Orthodox Churches at some periods having powers (Τον Δεσπότην indeed!) that the pope of Rome could only dream of and drool over. For these and other juicy details, you really must buy Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity