Eastern Christians Under the Habsburg Monarchy

Somewhat confusingly, Amazon apparently has copies of this to sell now, even though it was advertised on their site and elsewhere as not being available until October of this new year, 2022. Still, if you are as eager as I am to read this, then you may want to snap up extant copies now of Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy. Edited by John-Paul Himka and Frank Szabo and published by the University of Alberta Press, this 248-page collection contains fascinating insights across an impressively wide range of topics. The publisher elaborates: 

The collection Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy

brings together ten studies by scholars from various countries on a wide array of topics related to the history, culture, and ritual practice of Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Empire from the eighteenth to early twentieth century. This book represents a contribution to the development of newer perspectives on the Habsburg Monarchy emerging in recent years. These newer tendencies seek to understand the dynamics of the Monarchy’s pluralism by marrying local and transnational analyses and examining shared experiences across crown lands within the context of the empire. This approach proves to be valid for the religious pluralism of the Habsburg Empire, where self-professed confessional identity could not be delimited either within a crown land or within a specific ethnic milieu. The studies in this volume explore just such shared practices and experiences encompassing a larger collection of territories within the Monarchy by focusing on those areas that contained large numbers of Christians whose faith and rituals derived from Byzantium rather than Rome, that is, Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholics (Uniates).

The volume also aims to provide a corrective in Eastern Christian studies by looking outside Russia and Greece at the often hybrid practices and cultural and religious experiences of Europe’s westernmost Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic faithful. Several chapters deal with the sacral art of the Habsburg Monarchy’s Ukrainians and Rusyns.

We are also given a helpfully detailed Table of Contents: 

Introduction by John-Paul Himka and Franz A.J. Szabo

Historical Overview:

Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1526-1918 by Paul Robert Magocsi

Historical Studies:

Politics, Religion, and Confessional Identity among the Romanians of Bistriţa: A Case Study by Sever Cristian Oancea

Aspects of Confessional Alterity in Transylvania: The Uniate – Non-Uniate Polemic in the Eighteenth Century by Ciprian Ghişa

Josephinist Reforms in the Metropolis of Karlovci and the Orthodox Hierarchy by Marija Petrović

Transnational Conversions: Migrants in America and Greek Catholic Conversion Movements to Eastern Orthodoxy in the Habsburg Empire, 1890-1914 by Joel Brady

Sacral Culture:

The Art of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo: Sacral Painting of the Eighteenth Century by Bernadett Puskás

Sacred and Heraldic Images on Ukrainian Banners of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries by Roksolana Kosiv

Facing East: References to Eastern Christianity in Lviv’s Representational Public Space ca. 1900 by Andriy Zayarnyuk

The Sacred Art of Modest Sosenko: Lost and Preserved by Olesya Semchyshyn-Huzner

Sacral Needlework in Eastern Galicia: Social and Cultural Aspects (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries) by Natalia Dmytryshyn

The End of the World in the Carpathians: Story and Pictures to Follow!

The hardcover version has been out for a few years, but helpfully a more affordable paperback version will appear this month of John-Paul Himka's unique and important study Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians (University of Toronto Press, 2018), 368pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Few subjects in Christianity have inspired artists as much as the last judgment. Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians examines images of the last judgment from the fifteenth century to the present in the Carpathian mountain region of Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania, as a way to consider history free from the traditional frameworks and narratives of nations. Over ten years, John-Paul Himka studied last-judgment images throughout the Carpathians and found a distinctive and transnational blending of Gothic, Byzantine, and Novgorodian art in the region.

Piecing together the story of how these images were produced and how they developed, Himka traces their origins on linden boards and their evolution on canvas and church walls. Tracing their origins with monks, he follows these images' increased popularity as they were commissioned by peasants and shepherds whose tastes so shocked bishops that they ordered the destruction of depictions of sexual themes and grotesque forms of torture. A richly illustrated and detailed account of history through a style of art, Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians will find a receptive audience with art historians, religious scholars, and slavists.

Ukrainian Images of the Last Judgment

When I was last at a conference with John-Paul Himka two years ago, he told me this book was in the works. It builds on his earlier work, Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians. I am delighted to see it in print at last. Nobody with an interest in Slavic iconography will want to be without The World to Come: Ukrainian Images of the Last Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2015), 410pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Icons and murals depicting the biblical scene of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. Dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, these images were extraordinarily elaborate, composed of dozens of discrete elements reflecting Byzantine, Novgorodian, Moldavian, and Catholic influences, in addition to local and regional traditions. Over time, the details of the iconography evolved in response to changing cultural resources, the conditions of material life at the time, and new trends in mentality and taste.

The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.

Secularism and Religion in Russia and Ukraine

Scott Kenworthy, author of the splendid history of Trinity-Sergius Lavra which I discussed here, just alerted me that he has a chapter in a new book edited by Catherine Wanner that is supposed to be released later this month: State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2013 [paperback]), 304pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine is a collection of essays written by a broad cross-section of scholars from around the world that explores the myriad forms religious expression and religious practice took in Soviet society in conjunction with the Soviet government's commitment to secularization. The implementation of secularizing policies invariably shaped the forms of religious expression that emerged in Soviet Russian and Soviet Ukraine. Religious practices across confessional groups over time reflect the waves of intensification and relaxation of repressive practices. During the post-world War II period, which most of the essays in this volume address, repressive tactics shifted from raw coercion and violence to propaganda and agitation as the main means to suppress religious practice and belief in the public sphere. Unlike other studies that have focused on such forms of repression, the authors in this volume consider how some communities and individual believers were able to adapt their practices and beliefs to the social, political, and ideological constraints of Soviet society so as to pursue their beliefs. The volume thus offers a new perspective on Soviet secularization that moves beyond the formation of policies and decrees to consider two additional dimensions. First, the essays engage how governing mandates to suppress religion and promote a secular society were experienced by believers. Second, this approach allows the authors to illustrate the variety of secularizing polices and how they were invariably implemented across regions, over time, and in response to perceptions of local religious practice. By considering the intersection of religious practice and Soviet secularizing policies, this collection expands our understanding of religiosity in the region and illustrates how specific denominations and the believers within them adapted to the conditions set by socialist modernity.

This book reads something like a who's-who, featuring some of the most prominent names in East-Slavic historiography today, many of whom have been featured on here before: 

Introduction - Catherine Wanner

1. Subversive Atheism: Antireligious Campaigns and Religious Revival in Ukraine in the 1920s - Gregory L. Freeze
2. GPU-NKVD Repressions of Zionists: Ukraine, the 1920s - Olga Bertelsen
3. Christianity and Radical Nationalism: Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Bandera Movement - John-Paul Himka
4. The Revival of Monastic Life in the Trinity-Sergius Lavra after World War II - Scott Kenworthy
5. ''They burned the pine, but the place remains all the same'': Pilgrimage in the changing landscape of Soviet Russia - Stella Rock
6. Confession in Modern Russia and Ukraine - Nadieszda Kizenko
7. Time and Space of Suffering: The Soviet Past in the Memoirs and Narratives of Evangelical Christian Baptists - Olena Panych
8. Preaching the Kingdom Message: Jehovah's Witnesses and Soviet Secularisation - Zoe Knox
9. The Revival before the Revival: Popular and Institutionalized Religion in Ukraine on the Eve of the Collapse of Communism - Victor Yelensky

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.