Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox Perspectives on the Ps-Sobor of 1946

Last week, Daniel Galadza (author of this book which you must read) and I finished editing a volume we hope to see in print next year: The 'Lviv Sobor' of 1946: Arriving at a Common Narrative. It is a collection of scholarly papers given at a private conference we both attended at the University of Vienna (where Daniel teaches) and hosted by the Pro Oriente Foundation of that city in June 2016. This is just a shamelessly self-promoting and very advanced notice of the book. I will post more details as they are available.

What is this book about? As we said in our prospectus:

The volume consists of papers presented at an international conference in Vienna, Austria, in 2016, organized by Pro Oriente Stiftung and the University of Vienna, dealing with the 'Lviv Sobor' of 1946, a gathering of Greek-Catholic clergy in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv organized with the help of the Soviet government, with the aim of liquidating the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Depending on whose perspective one accepts, the event is seen either as the 'reunion' of 'Uniates' to Orthodoxy or the perpetration of a violent act against human rights and freedom of conscience. Thus, one side views it as a church council, while the other sees it as a pseudo-synod.

Why look at a little-known event now more than 70 years old? The simple answer to that finds the old line very true: the past is never truly past in Eastern Europe at least, and so 1946 is a live issue in part because, in the minds of Russian Orthodox Christians at least, it is the righting of the "injustice" of the Union of Brest of 1595/96, that event which created the modern method of "uniatism" everybody (or almost everybody) has been reprobating for a quarter-century now.

1946 has not, until our book, been given a lot of attention apart from Bohdan Bociurkiw's pioneering monograph, published in 1996: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939-1950).

For its part, though, Brest has been subject to earlier scholarly treatments. The best two books for those looking to begin to understand these events and their context would be the collection of scholarly articles edited by B. Goren et al: Four Hundred Years Union of Brest (1596-1996) A Critical Re-evaluation.

The other important work is Borys Gudziak (who was in Vienna), Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest.

For those wanting wider and longer historical contexts, then two well-known historians who were in Vienna, one of whom contributes to our volume, have authored important works: Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy.

In Praise of Oubliance

It was some 20 years ago, through a combination of reading Alasdair MacIntyre and William Cavanaugh, that I came to realize how much the structures of modernity are hidden from us, how much the liberalism of modern nation-states disguises itself as a neutral mechanism for the pursuit of competing visions of the good life--if, indeed, there even is such a thing as a good life, on which liberalism purports to take no position, though of course it does. Liberalism created, or certainly made more acute and problematic, the categories of "secular" and "sacred" and in so doing pretended to the former state while also privatizing and attempting to control the latter. Thus the ringing declaration of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason: "Once, there was no 'secular'."

In light of Milbank, Cavanaugh, and MacIntyre, it became obvious to me that the idea of "religion" is also a modern construct designed, in part, to try to domesticate and control transcendence, and also to disguise the theological claims made by "secularists." Cavanaugh's article "A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: the Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State" was pivotal here in pulling the mask off and showing that the post-Reformation "religious" conflicts that devastated parts of Europe were, in fact, much more properly considered as the bloody birth of the nation-state. He would develop this argument in much greater detail in his extremely valuable 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. 

I mention all this to sketch the context for considering a new book by Andrea Frisch, Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh, 2015), 208pp.

About this book we are told:

This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences, undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century, leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and the matter of history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation and generally associated with an increasingly modern sensibility, will nonetheless prove useful to the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism.

By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Andrea Frisch tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to 'move' readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The book shows that a shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. The emotions that neoclassical tragedy and absolutist historiography sought to elicit were intended above all to be shared, and thus a medium via which political and religious differences could be downplayed or forgotten. The book aims to illuminate some of the ways in which the experience of the wars of religion, as registered in tragedy and historiography, contributed to a restructuring of the ever-vital relationship between emotion and politics, and thereby to historicize the very concept of 'esmouvoir'.

The book begins by asking what difference the Edict of Nantes made to French historiography and history more generally--what, that is, was different after the edict called for the deliberate "forgetting" of the events that had taken place up to the start of Henri IV's reign: depuis le commencement du mois de mars mil cinq cens quatre vingtz cinq jusques à nostre avenement à la couronne. Thus the edict begins what Frisch calls a politics and a policy of oubliance, calling for a deliberate forgetting of the previous Catholic-Protestant conflict, which is to be regarded as estaincte et assoupie, comme de chose non advenue.

The author notes that the effect of a policy of oubliance was "overwhelmingly negative" on French theatre, literature, and other areas. She notes, further, that there were differences in how oubliance was understood theologically by Catholics and Calvinists.

From here much of her book becomes very narrowly focused on the effects of this policy in French theatre and literature. But to my mind there is room to consider the utility of something like a new edict of Nantes today in such seemingly intractable conflicts of Eastern Christian historical memory as the Union of Brest and the Pseudo-Sobor of Lviv of 1946, about which more another time.

A Note on the Sixth? Evangelist

There are many areas in which I am ignorant, and music is certainly one of them. So take this note for what it is: simply one of grateful expression for a book that has brought delight, almost as much for its subject as for its lovely, lyrical prose that gracefully renders a great deal of technical and historical knowledge in an accessible way without being elementary or condescending.

That book is by the historian Peter Gay (on some of whose other works I commented last month), Mozart: A Life (Penguin, 1999, 2006). It is a short and very winsome biography I read mostly on the plane to Vienna, a city that exceeds all expectations for its architecture, history, beauty, and food. The Habsburgs had indeed a capital worthy of their illustrious empire.

I picked up Gay's biography of Mozart last month because I was going to Vienna this month to a private conference organized by Pro Oriente on the Lviv "sobor" of 1946. So it seemed only fitting that I read about the man who spent the latter part of his life in the imperial capital and was buried there after having written some of the most glorious pieces of music any man has ever created. Gay makes his life come alive and skillfully interweaves it with commentary on his music that is never technically overwhelming (this latter problem having caused me to abandon, several years ago, another biography of Mozart--written by Maynard Solomon--because it was written at a technical level that only those with degrees in musicology could have fully accessed and appreciated it).

In fact, on the train, I passed the cemetery where Mozart was buried. And then I had the great good fortune to go with friends to the magnificent Karlskirche for a performance of excerpts from Mozart's Requiem which was, in that context, not only transporting but also revealing. As my friend, the priest-theologian (and my Doktorvater) Andriy Chirovsky put it, we could finally understand something of the nature of the Baroque--and the Karlskirche has to be a prototypical example of the Baroque--by listening to that music in that church. Suddenly what seemed perhaps excessive now made more sense, as though both the music and that architecture were each commensurate with the other.

And in Gay Mozart has found a biographer of commensurate skill also. Whether Mozart is the sixth evangelist (the status of "fifth" having, some time ago, been assigned by others to Bach) is for others to say, but I do rather like the line attributed to Barth which I first encountered in reading his Swiss contemporary and fellow Mozart lover, Hans Urs von Balthasar: when in the presence of God, of course the angels play Bach; but when they are simply en famille, they play Mozart! (See here for Philip McCosker's interesting theological study of Mozart, Barth, and von Balthasar.)

LOGOS: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies Fall 2015

I am delighted to be putting the finishing touches on the upcoming fall issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the oldest academic revue of its kind in North America whose editor I am. We have two interesting articles, several shorter essays, and a nice array of book reviews and notices.

Articles:

The lead article is especially fascinating: it treats relations between Orthodox and Greek Catholic clergy in Soviet Ukraine, showing the messiness and complexity of those relations after the forced pseudo-sobor of 1946. Some UGCC clergy wanted to regard others who went over to Russian Orthodoxy as "Judases" while others had a much more sympathetic view and co-operated with them unofficially at the parish level. Entitled "After 'Reunion': Soviet Power and the 'Reunited' and 'Non-Reunited' Greek Catholic Clergy in Eastern Galicia (1950s-1960s)," the article is written by Kateryna Budz, a doctoral candidate in history at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine) and, until the end of this month, holder of a scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. She draws on original archival research in a variety of repositories in Ukraine to see what official records among Soviet state agencies reveal as well as ecclesial bodies and their own archives. Some figures in this story are well known--e.g., Josyf Slipyj--but others have not received much scholarly attention until now. 

The second article by Timothy Wilkinson treats the phenomenon of Christians appropriating Jewish traditions as seen in the popularity of celebrating a "seder" supper in many Protestant traditions over the last two decades.Entitled "The Contemporary Protestant Seder: An Orthodox Critique," the article reviews the rise of seder suppers and what they say about a late-modern Christian understanding of church and Jewish history, Jewish-Christian relations ancient and modern, and contemporary Western liturgical theology, which is critiqued gently in light of such Orthodox figures at Alexander Schmemann.

Notes/Essays/Lectures:

In the Notes/Essays/Lectures section, we feature three pieces. The first is an up-to-the-moment report from Andriy Chirovsky on the recent patriarchal sobor and synod of bishops, both held in and for the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church in Ivano-Frankivsk this August. 

The second is a short excerpt from my lecture at OTSA at Fordham this past June in which I treat the questions of memory and "forgetting" in Orthodox-Catholic relations, focusing on the upcoming 70th anniversary in 2016 of the pseudo-sobor of Lviv which saw the Stalin-approved destruction of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church with the collusion of the Russian Orthodox Church.This is a

Finally, Augustine Casiday, author of the invaluable landmark work Reconstructing the Theology of Evagrius Ponticus: Beyond Heresy (whom I interviewed about this very book here) has a fascinating and learned essay treating the uses and abuses of Evagrius' famous definition of theology and a theologian from his treatise On Prayer. This maxim, which I have myself quoted regularly, and which seems to be a staple of contemporary Eastern spiritual and apologetical literature, is often used as little more than a thinly disguised sneer at intellectual work--as a cloak for anti-intellectual obscurantism in other words. Casiday's treatment of what Evagrius really meant is important and not to be missed. 

Book Reviews: 

Finally, in this section we have reviews by the Orthodox scholar Will Cohen of Maximos Vgenopoulos' important study (which I read in draft form before publication), Primacy in the Church from Vatican I to Vatican II: An Orthodox Perspective.

Daniel Galadza of the University of Vienna reviews the hefty scholarly collection Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Georgian, one of the latest installment in this invaluable series of books from Ashgate to which I have drawn attention on here before.

Michael Plekon reviews a new French-language publication of autobiographical "notes" from Sergius Bulgakov. 

And finally we have two review essays: the first by the Orthodox priest-historian D. Oliver Herbel (whom I interviewed here about his recent outstanding book) looks at two books both published recently and both treating the question of Orthodox identity: Orthodox Identities in Western Europe: Migration, Settlement and Innovation and Eastern Orthodox Encounters of Identity and Otherness: Values, Self-Reflection, Dialogue.

The second review essay is mine, reviewing two recent treatments of papal primacy and Orthodox-Catholic searches for unity: the first is from the Orthodox philosopher and Greek priest, John P. Mannoussakis, whom I interviewed here about the book, For the Unity of All: Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between East and West.

The second is by the Roman Catholic theologian Paul McPartlan,A Service of Love: Papal Primacy, the Eucharist, and Church Unity. Both are short but valuable contributions from scholars noted for their clarity of argument and their charity in engaging those they disagree with. 

All told then, given this cornucopia of riches, what keeps you from subscribing today?