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Published by
Transitions Online,
March 25, 2005
The Orthodox Are Coming
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by
Nicolai N. Petro
The Orthodox are
increasingly important players in the EU--which
makes it all the more important to stop regarding
Orthodoxy as intrinsically anti-modern and
anti-Western. From
New Europe
Review.
"The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are
Coming!" was a 1966 Hollywood spoof of Cold War
attitudes. It portrays a Soviet submarine crew
stranded on the coast of Maine. The Soviet sailors
end up winning over the local townspeople, who
even help the sub to escape before U.S. Air Force
planes arrive to sink it. The movie made light of
the differences between Russians and Americans by
suggesting that they had much more in common than
they realized.
As improbable as that story seemed back in 1966,
an even more momentous encounter is currently
taking place in Europe. Thanks to the expansion of
the European Union, millions of Orthodox
Christians now have a seat at the table of
European decision-making bodies. The admission of
Romania and Bulgaria will quadruple the number of
Orthodox Christians in the EU, from 10 million to
more than 40 million, but this is just the tip of
a very large iceberg. Should the EU continue to
expand eastward, it could someday encompass as
many as 200 million Orthodox believers,
transforming Orthodox Christianity from a quaint
minority into the largest denomination in Europe,
with the Russian Orthodox Church as its
pre-eminent political voice. This will be true
regardless of whether Russia itself joins the EU,
since more than half of its parishes are located
outside Russia. For the first time since before
the fall of Constantinople, Orthodox polities are
part of the decision-making structures of Europe,
yet little thought has been given to the impact
this is likely to have on the political complexion
of Europe.
There are some potentially worrisome aspects to
this encounter. For one thing, the political
weight of the Church within those countries is not
declining, as it is in Western Europe, but
growing. Orthodox faithful expect to have their
voice heard within the European political
institutions of which they are now a part, and
this poses a direct challenge to the secular
framework of the EU. Moreover, with the fall of
communism, the various branches of Christianity
are once again in direct competition for members.
Religious proselytism has already emerged as a
source of tensions in several Orthodox countries.
Finally, while most take it for granted that
people in Eastern Europe will follow the Western
path of modernization, it is certainly worth
pondering what impact the values of Orthodox
Eastern Europe will have on the West, and the
potential danger of an intra-European clash of
cultures, if a common ground is not found.
There are many who believe that there is, in
fact, no common ground to be found. Following in
the footsteps of historians Oswald Spengler and
Arnold Toynbee, Samuel Huntington has warned of
the coming clash between "Slavic-Orthodox"
civilization and the Catholic-Protestant West. He
claims that basic Western cultural values
("individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism,
human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law,
democracy, free markets, the separation of church
and state") have little currency within Orthodox
cultures. In his view there is a slim chance that
Orthodox countries can join the West, but only if
they recast their self-identity in clearly secular
terms. Huntington portrays the Eastern and Western
halves of Europe as profoundly alien, and "the
eastern boundary of Western Christianity [as] . .
. the most significant dividing line in Europe."
Recently, however, a much more hopeful assessment
has begun to gain ground in both Western and
Eastern Europe. It advocates a broader view of the
process of European integration, by suggesting
that the Western and Eastern branches of
Christianity focus less on what has divided them,
and more on re-acquiring the common cultural
heritage that once united them. Most people
realize that the common cultural legacy begins
with Roman law and Greek philosophy, and that both
contributed to the stability of the Byzantine
Empire. Few, however, stop to consider its
contribution to the theology of the Christian
Church and its doctrines on Church-State relations
in particular. Of special importance is the
evolving Orthodox view of democracy and civil
society, which can be most clearly traced in the
Russian Orthodox Church because of its size and
its impact on the whole Orthodox world.
According to senior
spokesman for the Patriarch Alexey II, Fr.
Vsevolod (Chaplin), there is a renewed
appreciation of democracy within the Russian
Orthodox Church. Democratic institutions allow the
Church to carry out its social mission more
effectively, and to voice concern about the decay
of moral standards in post-Soviet Russia. Still,
he says, Orthodoxy's endorsement of democracy can
only be a qualified one. Democracy, particularly
secular democracy, can never be considered a
proper ideal, because the Church can never accept
as ideal any form of government that consciously
separates itself from the divine. However, there
are two notable elements in Church life that
directly contribute to the democratization of
society: 1) the locus of its authority; and 2) its
stewardship of the community.
Unlike
Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy is highly
decentralized and dispersed. There is no supreme
papal authority overseeing the 15 autocephalous
Local Orthodox Churches. Ultimate authority rests
with Church Councils that bring together the
entire religious community-both laity and clergy.
Within that context, bishops are expected to
administer their diocese in harmony with the will
of both these groups. Historically, such
administration has taken a wide variety of forms
in Russia - from thoroughly hierarchical control
to extensive popular control, including consensual
investiture of bishops. The form deemed most
suitable depends on the needs of the particular
Church, and the community's prevalent political
culture. In the present context of expanding
democracy, the Russian Orthodox Church has
responded by expanding dialogue on ways in which
Church life should democratize.
A new generation of Western scholars on religion
(Zoe Knox, Christopher Marsh, Elizabeth Prodromou,
Nikolas Gvosdev) have even applied Western
literature on civil society to contemporary
Orthodoxy. By looking at the Church's highly
delegative, almost "confederative" system of
administration, and focusing on its
community-centered initiatives, they argue that
the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is playing an
important role as the country's largest civic
organization. In this capacity the ROC has also
had to come to terms with de facto religious
pluralism of modern Russia. Following the collapse
of the atheistic communist regime, Orthodox laity
was exposed to a wide variety of new political and
economic doctrines, including some from Orthodox
communities outside Russia. In the absence of a
clear consensus, the leadership of the ROC decided
to give up the role of the institutional Church as
a political competitor, and to establish it as a
neutral arbiter. As a result, the Church itself
has become a place of dialogue, a space existing
outside the state, the government, or the family,
devoted to the preservation of an autonomous
sphere for the individual, and a protector of "the
inherent foundations of human freedom from the
arbitrary rule of outside forces." Nikolas Gvosdev
quite correctly sees this as a theological
endorsement of civil society.
Indeed, Orthodox communities seem much more
comfortable with the ideals of civil society than
they do with those of liberal democracy. One
reason is that they see the latter as rooted in
competition and confrontation, while the Church
strives for community and harmony, a tradition
that Fr. Vsevolod calls "gathering the scattered"
(literally, in Church Slavonic, sobrati
rastochennaya)-bringing people of differing
ethnic, political and social persuasion together
for the common welfare. Avoiding confrontation
with state authority is deeply ingrained in the
theology of Orthodoxy, stemming from the Byzantine
view that, pace St. Augustine, the gap between the
"City of God" and the "City of Man" can and should
be overcome. Societies on earth should strive to
be a "reflection" of the heavenly realm, and to
accomplish this Church and State must work
together for the good of the whole community.
The Orthodox Church does not shun the world, or
abstain from politics. Its politics, however, are
non-partisan, a call to "calming of political
passions, and concern for peace and harmony" and
to civic dialogue. A typical example is the
Russian Orthodox Church's efforts to mediate the
political crisis between Boris Yeltsin and the
State Duma in 1993. Orthodox church leaders have
played similar role in the political crises in
Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and, most recently,
Ukraine.
The issue of the Orthodox Church's stewardship of
the community also poses the question of whether
Orthodoxy is compatible with capitalist economic
development and a global market economy, which
many consider as vital to democratic development.
While Max Weber stressed the otherworldly aspects
of Orthodox cultures (as he did with Islam,
Hinduism and Catholicism), economic developments
in Russia suggest that the notion of Orthodox
Christian stewardship affords ample room for
business and economic development. In fact, the
rebirth of Russian Orthodoxy (from 7,000 parishes
in the early 1990s to more than 26,000 today) has
coincided with a no less impressive economic
upsurge, particularly since 1999. Record-breaking
productivity growth, rapid increases in domestic
investment, and a tripling of wages nationwide
since 2000 have been matched by a seven-fold
increase in corporate philanthropy, which
Patriarch Alexey II has highlighted as vital to
the nation. Clearly, Orthodoxy has been good for
business.
We, in the Catholic-Protestant West, should
prepare for the coming of the "Orthodox Century"
by appreciating all that unites us. If the
dividing line between East and West continues to
exist in our hearts and minds, removing it from
the political map of Europe will accomplish very
little. In the long run Europeans must become much
better educated about their common Byzantine and
Eastern Christian heritage. Even in the short run,
however, the essential elements of this common
inheritance can be used to shore up pan-European
democratic institutions. Recent scholarship by
Silvia Ronchey, Helene Ahrweiler, and Antonio
Carile, provide a conceptual link between
Byzantine political thought and the modern age,
and highlight how much current European
aspirations to pluri-culturalism and subsidiarity
(the idea that matters should be handled by the
lowest competent authority), have in common with
the Byzantine political model.
The worst
possible solution would be to cling to a "clash of
cultures" view that regards Orthodoxy as
anti-modern and anti-Western. This can only result
in Orthodox believers feeling like strangers in
the "common European home" they have just joined.
If that occurs, we will have succeeded only in
pushing the dividing line through the heart of
Europe a little further east of where it was
before.
Nicolai N. Petro
is professor of political science at the
University of Rhode Island (USA). His most recent
book is Crafting Democracy (Cornell University
Press, 2004), available in both English and
Russian. This article originally appeared in
New
Europe Review.
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© 2005 Transitions Online. All rights reserved.
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