|
Nothing Weird About Orthodox
Tradition
Together with the rest of
the Eastern Christian world, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrated Easter on
Sunday. In English, Orthodox Christians refer to Easter as "Pascha,"
a word related to the English adjective "paschal" and to the French
Paque or Italian Pasqua.
Going by any of these
names, Orthodox Easter this year came almost exactly a month later than the
same Western Christian holy day commemorating events immortalized most recently
and multilingually by Mel Gibson. Why did the Russian Orthodox Church celebrate
Easter a month "late" and why, in general, are Orthodox Christian
traditions so "weird"?
I submit the following
observations not as a defense of our traditions but as an offering toward a
deeper understanding of their significance to modern-day Russia. As strange as
it might seem, the current disconnect between Russian and Western worldviews
traces back -- more than 1,000 years -- to the geographical, linguistic and
theological differences between the Eastern and Western branches of
Christianity.
As a third-generation
descendant of Russian emigres, I was raised in New York in a slightly
Americanized version of the Russian Orthodox Church -- the main difference
being that the liturgical language in use is English rather than Church
Slavonic. And although I had an essentially standard American childhood, I
still managed to imbibe enough Russian cultural idiosyncrasies to enable me to
view the Kremlin's position on many issues as not only understandable but in
many instances defensible.
First, why did Easter come
so late in Russia this year? Well, as anyone familiar with Judaism should know,
Passover was celebrated this year from April 10 to April 26. With another
genuflection to Mel Gibson, the event known to Christians as the Last Supper
was a Seder service that Jesus Christ officiated. In Eastern Orthodox Europe,
Easter must come during or just after the Jewish Passover. For the first
millennium of Christian history, the undivided universal church followed this
practice until Rome instituted changes to the secular calendar for Western
Christendom -- for example, adding leap years. Although Rome got the astronomy
right, this made a mess of the Paschal cycle (meaning the procedure for
calculating the Feast of Feasts) vis-a-vis Easter's Jewish roots as well as in
the interests of ensuring a unified, universal Christian festal calendar.
As students of Russian
history know, the precursor to the modern Russian state was founded by the
Kievan Prince Vladimir, who in 988 -- give or take a year -- accepted conversion
to the Byzantine (Greek-speaking) branch of Christianity. At the time, this
appeared to be a solid move geopolitically. Byzantium -- technically, Eastern
Rome -- was a mighty empire situated relatively near to the Russian lands.
Forging a dynastic and cultural alliance with the Byzantine emperors served to
establish a strong North-South political and military axis between
Constantinople and Kiev.
Roll the clock forward
five centuries, however, and it might be argued that St. Prince Vladimir
guessed wrong. The Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks, and one-half of the
twin-star alliance that stood between the new, post-schism Roman Catholic West
and Islam further to the east and south had crumbled. This, combined with
Russia's constant struggle for political and military parity with the Germans
and Scandinavians to the west and freedom from the occupying Mongol-Tatar
hordes from the east, resulted in an indelible stamp of paranoia -- a fear of
encirclement -- in the Russian collective psyche.
These two factors --
having unexpectedly adopted a now essentially unique religion and struggling to
maintain the medieval Russian polity free from foreign invaders -- resulted in
what has been described as a messianic mentality. A formulation that received
popularity with the Russian people and especially among the nation's fighting
forces was: "The first and second Romes have fallen. Moscow is the Third
Rome, and a fourth there shall never be."
During the Soviet era, one
thing that many Russian emigres knew in their bones was that Western analysts
-- a predominantly secular if not agnostic lot -- inaccurately discounted the
significance of Russia's Orthodox Christian heritage. The Soviet Union's
propagandists rapidly and obviously replaced Christian symbolisms and rites with
parallel Communist equivalents. This alone constituted grudging acknowledgement
of the significance of Orthodox Christianity to the Russian collective psyche.
For our purposes, however,
the key distinguishing feature of the traditional Russian social construct was
its reliance on the Byzantine model of governance. In the Latin West, the Roman
patriarchs, or popes, were forced to adopt secular, administrative functions as
a result of the total collapse of the Roman Empire. In this context, such accretions
as universal papal jurisdiction and the infallible right to define church
doctrine might seem almost inevitable. But for an additional 1,000 years --
until 1453 -- the Greek-speaking Eastern Church functioned exclusively within
an intact secular empire.
To the Byzantines, the
emperor's civic reign dovetailed seamlessly with the Orthodox Church's
jurisdiction over the souls of Eastern Rome's citizens. This concept was
referred to as symphonia, but it had little if anything to do with music.
Thus, when Patriarch Alexy
II congratulated both President Vladimir Putin and President-elect Dmitry
Medvedev and their spouses during Sunday's midnight Paschal vigil in Christ the
Savior Cathedral, he was reinvigorating the Byzantine tradition of symphonia
between church and state. The Western -- primarily Protestant -- paradigm of a
"wall" between these two institutions has no bearing in this context.
This observation is not intended as a critique or defense of either construct,
but rather to highlight this contrast in traditions.
To criticize Russian
society, including the resurgence of the Orthodox Church, by using
post-Enlightenment Western European arguments is not only out of context, but
also likely to reinforce Russia's paranoia reflex. Even the harshest critic of
the new Russian tate ought to be sympathetic to the collective sentiment that
they received little if any tangible credit from the West in exchange for
quietly giving up and walking away from 50 years of Cold War confrontation.
In this context, Russians
feel free to reach back into their Russian-Byzantine heritage in search of the
building blocks for a 21st-century state. Western criticisms of this experiment
should be offered in the context of an informed dialogue that includes
familiarity with and sensitivity to Russia's distinct and -- to Russians, at
least -- honored traditions.
Vladimir Berezansky Jr., a
U.S. lawyer, has worked in Russia for 15 years
|