The Orthodox Church

Introduction
Strange Encounters

The Orthodox (generally) do not regard themselves as exotic. If they have come to Orthodoxy from other forms of Western Christian tradition, or from secular atheism, they often are tempted to regard themselves as exotic for a while, but it soon wears off. Apparently, however, many external observers do still retain that perspective, and it can often tempt the Orthodox to live up to it by ‘posing’ as exotic: a dangerous state of affairs which postcolonial theory has put its finger on already as ‘subalternism’, or that state where a small group with a residual minority consciousness tries to live up to expectations foisted on it by the dominant hegemonic powers of the age.1 The Christian Orthodox, as they have been encountered relatively rarely, ‘in the flesh’, in the ordinary experience of most Western Christians, are certainly a ‘strange encounter’. The root presuppositions, and the basic style of worship and attitude that are so familiar in many forms of Western Christian practice, seem different here. If the Orthodox feature in the public eye of the media at all, it is usually with a view to the ‘strange’ rituals of a church that has a very ancient liturgical style, and often uses languages that outsiders do not remotely understand.

The temptation to categorize the Eastern Orthodox as romantically exotic is a powerful one, and is often a fate wished on them by those who hold them in kind regard and who value many of the things Orthodoxy represents in Christian history, such as faithfulness to tradition, endurance under suffering, and reverence in worship. Those who are less enamoured of Orthodoxy look at it from the perspective of their own philosophies, ideologies, and orthodoxies, and sometimes censure it as reactionary, exclusive, patriarchal, rigid in its doctrines and liturgy. Rarely, however, do either its critics who dislike it, or its non-Orthodox friends who cherish it,2 have much awareness of the wider context of what an Orthodox articulation of the church and society would be on its own terms. This book tries to set out such a vision. It is offered as a sustained essay in Orthodox history, theology, and culture, and offered as much to the Orthodox reader who wishes to enter into a discussion of his or her own tradition as it is to a general reader who might simply wish to gain a deeper understanding of where the Orthodox came from, and what they claim to represent.

But running throughout all the sections of this book is the message that ‘exotic, the Orthodox Church is not’; rather, it is a full-blooded community of the faithful who have their feet planted firmly in the earth, and their eyes raised joyfully to heaven. In its own understanding it is simply the catholic heart of the Christian witness; not peripheral but at the very core of the Christian endurance throughout history. Notions of ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’ Christianity have often been far too heavily overdone in the past. Is Russia the ‘East’ any more? Is Greece, any longer, a journey too far for a ‘Western’ traveller? Those terms ‘Western Christianity’ and ‘Eastern Christianity’ have been retained in these pages as convenient shorthand for distinguishing Orthodox forms of thought from the more familiar Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds of discourse that have so massively dominated English-language Christian literature to date. But the present author is always lost for words (a rare state of affairs) whenever anyone asks him to speak as an ‘Eastern Christian’. Being an Irish, English-born, Romanian Orthodox priest teaching and ministering in America may not be a very common position; but it is surely not an unusual state of affairs any more to have an ethnic and cultural weave of many different colours in our histories, minds, and hearts in this era of the global village. This book is an attempt to present Orthodoxy in such a way that English-speaking readers may be able to gain a sense of an ancient theological tradition that does not see itself as ‘strange’ or ‘closed off’ or as ‘having nothing to say to postmodernity’, but one that has only relatively recently been released from a long nightmare of oppression, and which will, in the immediate future, be a voice that will be raised again in the counsels of world Christianity.

Because of the nature of this book as a ‘learned introduction’, sometimes I have had to cover immense ground very quickly. This leads to a species of didactic writing that is necessary if one wishes to draw up an honest guide to the terrain, but is a difficult medium to make shine. If one stops too long and discusses the depth and detail of history, it would become something wholly other than an introduction. This aspect of the book, what we could call the mode of the ‘Grand Levantine Tour’, is nonetheless important for what it reveals about our general presuppositions about things. How obsessively, it seems, all available church history has been written out of the Reformation experience. Orthodoxy did not know there had been a Reformation until the late seventeenth century. It is still true to say that it sees more or less nothing through the lens of that experience. Its view of the history of the church still tends to be dominated by older constructs: who was it that was oppressing us yesterday, and what was it about this time? I am not saying that this is a good thing, necessarily. The aftermath of extensive persecutions (and Orthodoxy has suffered considerably and relentlessly in the course of the last five centuries, most especially in the last one) often marks the survivors with deep traumas that need generations of sunlight to heal. I am saying only that it makes for a very different perspective on what really matters in telling a history of the church: endurance, community, and shared story.

Another thing that one learns very quickly about English-language books on Orthodoxy (not that the bookstores are overloaded with them, one has to say) is that they are relatively recent, and almost inevitably written by non-Orthodox scholars. There are only four written by cradle Orthodox that I can think of immediately: those of Meyendorff, Bulgakov, Zankov, and Zernov, all Russians coming out of the diaspora scattered as a result of the Soviet revolution. They try to offer a general introduction, mainly aimed at non-Orthodox who want a broadly based guide to the Orthodox world. In the geographical and social context from which they originate, that means they were written chiefly to imaginary audiences from the Anglican (Episcopalian) or Roman Catholic worlds, and were often concerned to present Orthodox ideas ‘in terms of their differences’ from post-Reformation contexts. In contrast, I have here been more concerned to speak simply as an Orthodox, and not worry too much about how other traditions have approached things, knowing that the bookstores are indeed groaning with their articulations on their own terms. His Grace Bishop Kallistos Ware's popular book on Orthodoxy set a new bar when it first appeared in 1963. Written primarily to explain Orthodoxy to the outside, it has since become a cherished vade mecum for almost all English-speaking Orthodox, who have often had great difficulty accessing balanced and cultured discussions of their faith and history.

Nevertheless, the majority of scholarly ‘Introductions to Orthodoxy’ in the English language have not been written by Orthodox at all, but by learned Roman Catholic clergy. Invariably these demonstrate two warring principles in the breast of their authors: the first a deep respect for the Eastern Church and its venerable customs and catholic spirituality; the second a progressive impatience with the Orthodox, mounting at times to a barely concealed desire to castigate them for their indifference to the advances of the early stirrings of Catholic ecumenism. Here, I am speaking especially of the first forty years of the twentieth century, before matters changed dramatically after the Second Vatican Council. Some of these books remain as valuable sources, but they are now showing their age, and their biases.

This introduction, therefore, tries to do something different; something, I hope, that is new and valuable, in so far as that is possible in what sets out to be a faithful iteration of what it is to be Orthodox. This approach to the subject is heavily invested in theological investigations. It is biblical and patristic in tonality (how could it not be if it were to be Orthodox?), but it is not solely an essay in the history of theology but always an attempt to see how the living word of the evangelists, apostles, and Fathers can speak to the present moment, in and through the experience of the Orthodox. It is a theology written from the perspective of how Christianity functions as a way of life, as a progressive seduction into beauty and simplicity.

Christian Orthodoxy, as it once more emerges into a public role in eastern Europe, and grows deeper roots in western Europe, Oceania, and America, is faced with many problems, not few of which derive from the lack of functioning theological schools for many generations past. In the context of a severe purge of leaders of intellectual acuity over the past generation, the Orthodox Church today is offered many temptations to take refuge in an authoritarianism learned from decades of hostile oppression, or to pose as the subaltern ‘other’ to the alleged norms of Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. I believe that both are ill-fitting responses: the first counteracts the Orthodox Church's potential role as...