Abstract
John Anthony McGuckin, ed., The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, 2011; 2 vols, xxiii + 872 pp., maps and illus.; 9781405185394, £250.00 (hbk)
Lucian N. Leustean, ed., Eastern Christianity and the Cold War, 1945–1991, Routledge: Abingdon, 2009; xvii + 363 pp.; 9780415471978, £85.00 (hbk)
Religion was the bulwark of the traditional social order that the Soviet Communist party and its protégés were committed to demolishing after 1945. A series of Orthodox churches, deriving from apostolic times and obtaining their key features in the Byzantine era, found themselves in the path of the Soviet juggernaut. Two volumes have recently appeared which explore the experience of these churches in political captivity. The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, edited by John Anthony McGuckin, is an accessible, but scholarly and beautifully-produced reference work. It offers a balanced and often profound account of the historical, liturgical and doctrinal features of Eastern Orthodoxy. So an exploration of the devastating impact of the rise of Soviet power on the life and practice of the church is only one facet of this ambitious work. Nevertheless, it sheds light on important dimensions that are sometimes lost sight of in studies of religious oppression with a more obvious political character. The spiritual dimension of resistance and the role of the monastic tradition in countries where monasteries were not suppressed, receives painstaking attention.
Lucian Leustean is emerging as a leading authority on the political history of contemporary Orthodoxy. He has edited and contributed to Eastern Christianity and the Cold War, 1945–1991, which, as its title suggests, deals with a specific historical time period. The main focus is on the churches in South-Eastern Europe which found themselves confronting the rise of communist power. In countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia, autocephalous churches (independent churches not subject to a higher ecclesiastical authority) found their freedom of action drastically curtailed to varying degrees. In Greece the Orthodox Church was embroiled in a civil war between rightist and communist forces in the 1940s. In Cyprus the church authorities found themselves cooperating with the powerful communist AKEL movement around national objectives, while in Istanbul the Patriarchate of Constantinople has had to confront the exigencies first of ruling Turkish nationalism and of its neo-Islamic successor after 2000.
Leustean’s volume does well not to overlook churches beyond Eurasia, such as the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church, facing a militantly secularizing regime during the final decades of the Cold War, or diaspora churches that have emerged in North America and Australia, or those belonging to minority groups. He has brought together some of the most distinguished scholars of Orthodoxy to produce a reference work replete with fascinating bibliographical information that is bound to stimulate further work on the struggle of world Orthodoxy to survive in an acutely hostile political environment.
The trials of the Russian Orthodox Church occupy a central place in both volumes. Nickolas Lupinin’s chapter on Russia in Leustean’s collection points out that no less than 600 bishops, 40,000 priests and 120,000 monks and nuns were killed in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1991. But the church proved difficult to eradicate, and by the early 1940s, when facing a struggle to the death with Nazi Germany, Stalin concluded that it could be a tool, promoting patriotism or subservience at home, while being an arm of Soviet power as far away as the Middle East.
The Russian church had been subservient to state power since Peter the Great’s time, and the Balkan national states set up in the nineteenth century had made sure that no rival clerical sphere of authority would challenge often poorly-performing national elites. The degree of victimization varied. Albania was one extreme: here a cowed and broken Orthodox church was isolated from the rest of the world. Romania was another: also under a national Stalinist regime, its rulers did not see Orthodoxy as a foe but as a tool for ensuring the compliance of an overwhelmingly rural population which had often bitterly opposed collectivization. In the 1950s, the Romanian church for the first time canonized its own saints. Patriarch Justinian Marina was a visible figure in the public arena. The monasteries remained open, and these and other church buildings were restored, even with state help. In 1948 the communists allowed the Orthodox Church to absorb the Eastern Catholics or Uniates who had almost outnumbered them in Transylvania, the backbone of Romania. In Macedonia the local Orthodox church obtained autocephalous status in 1967 as part of the regime’s strategy to ensure political stability by granting autonomy to the different groups in the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state. In Georgia, church independence which had been ended under the Tsars was restored after 1917, when Georgia was briefly independent, and was not annulled afterwards.
Personalities counted. Justinian, who sheltered the first communist dictator of Romania after he had escaped from prison, is praised by McGuckin for his ‘extraordinary skill and practical wisdom’ (vol. 2, 475) in dealing with the authorities. In Georgia Patriarch Ilia II encouraged a revival of religious devotion hard on the heels of an anti-religious drive carried out by Eduard Shevardnadze earlier in the 1970s. Periodic purges were a feature particularly of Russia itself. Khrushchev in the mid-1950s launched an anti-religious offensive because he feared young people were turning towards religion. The KGB targeted Orthodox dissenters from the late 1970s until the arrival in office of Gorbachev, sweeping the best and most active leaders into labour camps. In 1985, there were three times fewer churches open than in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death.
Leustean’s volume could perhaps have devoted more space to the social impact of communism. In relatively open communist Yugoslavia, sociological studies in the 1960s and 1970s showed a collapse of religious belief among the young of Serbia. Yet, two generations later, and after many political and territorial upheavals, the country has witnessed a re-evangelization of much of the population. Only the chapter on Bulgaria probes the deleterious impact on popular religiosity of communist rule.
Leustean and many of his contributors excel in showing how Soviet communism attempted to use religion as a foreign policy instrument, starting with the 1948 Pan-Orthodox conference in Moscow, meant to corral Orthodox churches around a range of Soviet objectives. Moscow was particularly keen to gain influence in the Middle East through manipulating the Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria. It even sought to bring about the internationalization of the important monastic community on Mount Athos drawn from across the Orthodox world, and the cessation of Greek control. In both volumes the Ecumenical Patriarchate, based in Istanbul, emerges with distinction, containing Russian attempts to manipulate inter-church relations, by appealing to respect for canonical order and tradition. Eventually, with the arrival of John Paul II, a Polish Pope, in the Vatican, it would be the Soviets who were thrown onto the defensive; in November 1979, Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologist issued a decree concerned with countering the threat posed by a newly-invigorated Catholicism.
In 1987, for the first time in almost 400 years, Patriarch Pimen, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Patriarch Dimitrios of the Ecumenical Patriarchate celebrated the liturgy together. Mikhail Gorbachev had a formal meeting with Pimen in 1989, one year after the Millennium of Christianity in Russia had been celebrated without any official restrictions. A wave of re-evangelization occurred involving the re-establishment of thousands of parishes. But as the normally low-key Encyclopedia points out, ‘the ROC has also been deeply affected by the tides of widespread xenophobia, nationalism, fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and even fascism that have washed over Russian society in the traumatic post-communist times’ (504). Overall, though, the prospects for Orthodoxy appear brighter than for Christianity in Western Europe. McGuckin warns that ‘the new humanism which mocks its own ancestral religious traditions ... betoken[s] long-term social problems in terms of the transmission of societal civilized values and ethico-social cohesion in western societies’ (xx). His monumental work and Leustean’s indispensable reference book provide a wealth of knowledge about global Orthodoxy during historical cycles of growth, repression and renewal.