Orthodox Christian Identity in Western Europe

Contesting Religious Authority

Sebastian Rimestad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000228106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This book analyses the discourses of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe to demonstrate the emerging discrepancies between the mother Church in the East and its newer Western congregations. Showing the genesis and development of these discourses over the twentieth century, it examines the challenges the Orthodox Church is facing in the modern world.

Organised along four different discursive fields, the book uses these fields to analyse the Orthodox Church in Western Europe during the twentieth century. It explores pastoral, ecclesiological, institutional and ecumenical discourses in order to present a holistic view of how the Church views itself and how it seeks to interact with other denominations. Taken together, these four fields reveal a discursive vitality outside of the traditionally Orthodox societies that is, however, only partly reabsorbed by the church hierarchs in core Orthodox regions, like Southeast Europe and Russia.

The Orthodox Church is a complex and multi-faceted global reality.Therefore, this book will be a vital guide to scholars studying the Orthodox Church, ecumenism and religion in Europe, as well as those working in religious studies, sociology of religion, and theology more generally.

1 Introduction

The Orthodox Church is a complex, multi-tiered, and multi-ethnic institution that claims to represent authentic and original Christianity as it was formed in the first centuries of the Common Era. Over the course of the last two millennia, it has obviously been subject to change, sometimes fundamentally, although many Orthodox theologians seem to want to hide these changes. Especially in the national churches of Eastern Europe, it is easy to portray “Western modernity” as the enemy threatening traditional, authentic Orthodoxy. For Orthodox faithful situated in areas where the Orthodox Church has not traditionally dominated the religious landscape, the discourse becomes a different one. Instead of positing the West as a threat to Orthodoxy, some faithful portray Orthodoxy as an asset for Western societies. At the same time, the Orthodox structures that have developed in the West are notoriously inadequate to the task of demonstrating Orthodox Church unity. Each of the nationally connoted church administrations from Eastern Europe insists on having its own diaspora structures among co-nationals, and constructive cooperation among the various church jurisdictions is a relatively recent phenomenon in most regions of the West.

This jurisdictional and discursive chaos is the topic of this book, which attempts to trace the discourse of the Orthodox Church from the early twentieth century until today, with a particular focus on the attempt to establish religious authority in communities outside the Orthodox heartlands. It does so in four main steps, including chapters on “diaspora”, on territoriality, on organisation, and on Christian unity. Before turning to these chapters, however, the introduction clarifies the fundamentals of my understanding of religious authority and provides a short introduction to the history of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe. At the end of the introduction, there is also a more thorough overview of the book method and structure.

The discursive construction of “religion” and “the Orthodox Church”

Ever since the “linguistic turn” in the philosophy of the early twentieth century, scholars of the humanities generally agree that what we know about the world around us is to a large degree shaped by the language we use to describe it. Instead of trying to describe and analyse reality as such, scholars have to reflect on the way they construct reality through the use of language. This is most obvious in disciplines such as post-colonial or gender studies, where language structures are seen as fundamental in creating a hierarchical order and perpetuating it. However, also in other disciplines, language shapes the way we perceive the world and how we relate to it. For Michel Foucault, not only the negotiable meaning of individual words and sentences shape reality but especially the way the words and sentences are embedded in a discourse. A discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, is the sum total of every utterance that relates to a specific topic. Foucault painstakingly deconstructed the discourses of mental illness, of delinquency, and of sexuality, for example. All these discourses show the workings of power mechanisms in modern society that attempt to eliminate dissidence at the margins of normality. Foucault’s approach to discourse analysis has been criticised from several angles, especially as it seemingly portrays discourses as having agency and is unable to account for the reasons for social change. Nevertheless, his approach has been widely influential in all areas of the social sciences and humanities, forcing scholars to rethink the relationship between the words they use and the power structures they uphold with them.

This “discursive turn” has had profound implications for the study of history. Several historians in the 1990s voiced their concern that all this talk about language, discourses, and constructed realities was “throwing the profession [of history] into a crisis of self-confidence about what it is doing and how it is doing it”.¹ This fear has, since the 2000s, given way to a new paradigm, which embraces the study of discourses in historical perspective. According to Achim Landwehr, the most prominent theorist of historical discourse analysis in Germany, this kind is on the rise, albeit still mostly tackling subjects that Michel Foucault already touched upon: science, sexuality, gender relations, punishment, etc.² Landwehr makes the case for an expansion of historical discourse analysis to further topics, as well as the theoretical reflection on the relationship of such analysis to basic historical concepts such as space, image, materiality, and time.

Hayden White, the American historian in the tradition of literary criticism, also challenged the discipline of history with his critical view of historiography:

no matter what the pragmatic intent, since the facts about past events are partial and the historian is obliged to make a coherent story (narrative) of them anyway, it is evident that the author must fill in the gaps and thus portray those events in a fashion that is, at least to some degree, fictional.³

This view – that historical data and narratives may be arranged in almost every imaginable way which never truly represents “raw facts” – is a different take on Foucault’s discourse theory. Whereas Foucault focused on how discourse hegemony generates power relations and structures social hierarchies, White’s concern was how it is possible to rearrange historical data to arrive at a widely divergent narrative. White emphasised agency, where Foucault saw only structure, so to speak. Hayden White’s influence on the profession of history has ushered in a new focus on historiography – the act of writing history. Instead of the famous dictum by nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke that the historian’s task is to describe the past objectively, “as it really happened”, historiography questions the possibility of objective history, instead focusing on deconstructing the literary and narrative strings of historians’ works.

Both the Foucauldian focus on underlying power structures and the historical narrativity of White are important factors to consider also when discussing religion. For one, as Jonathan Z. Smith was among the first to remark: “ ‘Religion’ is not a native category. It is not a first person term of self-characterization. It is a category imposed from the outside on some aspect of native culture.”⁴ This view, that the very term “religion” does not mean much except as an analytical category, is shared by many scholars of religion, although the consequences they draw from it are diverse.⁵ Nevertheless, the fact that the meaning of the concept “religion” cannot be taken for granted remains an important key stone for current religious studies. The word “religion” cannot be eliminated, though, since it has become a marker for something many people hold very dear. This approach to the study of religion is the subject of the next section.

Another way the “discursive turn” has impacted the study of religion is related to Edward Said’s book Orientalism from 1978, which can be seen as the founding work of post-colonial studies.⁶ This work analyses the depiction of the Oriental “Other” in Western literature and art, claiming that this depiction often says more about the author’s or artist’s own culture than about the Orient. According to Said, most depictions of the Other contain a negative foil of the self, bolstering the positive connotations of Western “enlightened” culture. This is exactly what Foucault also was referring to when he posited that certain discourses uphold structures of power and meaning, disabling dissident voices from being heard. “Orientalism” is not something that is limited to culture, but encompasses religion too, often even to a larger degree. When criticising another religion, one’s own religion often becomes the good one, contrasting radically with the criticised one. There is a more thorough treatment of Orientalism in relation to the topic of this book – Orthodox Christianity – in the section after the following one.

A third impact on the study of religion includes some recent attempts to deconstruct religious historiography: the way scholars of religion have narrated a history of the religion in terms of modern history but based on religious historiography.⁷ By using the narratives of the religious actors themselves in constructing a history of the religious group, historians of religion often fail to reflect on the “processes, functions and forms of religious practices and beliefs shared beyond the boundaries of ‘religions’ ”.⁸ The scholar must analyse the narratives in the stories the religious actors themselves produce and establish the relationship between them and other historical narratives.

The socio-rhetorical approach

The main impact of the focus on discursivity in the study of religion mentioned earlier is the insight that the very term “religion” does not have a meaning in and of itself. This approach is linked to the North American context, where scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith, Russell T. McCutcheon, and others have pointed to the constructed nature of the term since the 1990s. For McCutcheon, “religion” as a scholarly term is “manufactured” as a “socio-political management technique”:⁹

It is the act of scholarship itself that … “invents” such categories as religion, myth, ritual, sacrifice, pilgrimage, etc., uses them to construct theoretical “models” of how minds or institutions work, and then “maps” these models onto what might otherwise simply be termed observable human behaviours.¹⁰

This view of the term “religion” criticises the way it is used as a tool to evoke a certain attitude towards behaviours deemed “religious”. Moreover, this instrumental use of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on terminology
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Orthodox faithful as “diaspora”?: the pastoral discourse
• 3 The territoriality of Orthodox Church structures: the ecclesiological discourse
• 4 Orthodox jurisdictions as organisations: the institutional discourse
• 5 The Christian Church as one: the ecumenical discourse
• 6 Conclusion
• Index