Nationalisms and the Orthodox Worlds

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM bs_bs_banner J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY A N D N AT I O N A L I S M AS EN Nations and Nationalism •• (••), 2019, 1–9. DOI: 10.1111/nana.12539 Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds† SINIŠA MALEŠEVIĆ University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland ABSTRACT. This review article explores the role nationalism has played in the world dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The focus is on the recent contributions of Paschalis Kitromilides who has written extensively on this topic. The article assesses the four books dealing with the relationship between religion, politics, Enlightenment and nationalism in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The analysis emphasises the complex and contradictory relationship between nationalisms and the Orthodox Churches pointing to the profound transformation that has taken the place in this relationship over the last 250 years. KEYWORDS: Enlightenment, ethnic nationalism, modernity, Orthodox Church Paschalis Kitromilides, Religion and Politics in the Orthodox World: The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Challenges of Modernity. London: Routledge 2019, 130 pp. £115. Paschalis Kitromilides (ed), Enlightenment and Religion in the Orthodox World. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016. 329 pp. £70. Paschalis Kitromilides and Sophia Matthaiou (eds). Greek–Serbian Relations in the Age of Nation‐ Building. Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation. 2016, 257 pp. £35. Paschalis Kitromilides Pravoslavni Komenvelt: simbolička nasleđa i kulturna susretanja u Jugoistočnoj Evropi. Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike. 2016. 317 pp. £ 25. In his numerous public pronouncements, patriarch Irenaeus (Irinej), the current leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church, regularly glorifies the Serbian nation and the Serbian state. Hence, in one of his rather typical statements in 2017, he warned Serbs that ‘they must not forget their history and the crimes committed against them and that they have responsibility to pass this knowledge to the future generations’. Moreover, the patriarch emphasised that ‘the Serbian nation has lost many bodies but it must not lose its soul’ and that is why Serbs should not quarrel among themselves but work together because ‘we love our fatherland and wherever Serbs live that is Serbia … Serbs here and in the world have to unite and think about the great and glorious history of our people’.1 Very similar statements can be found in the speeches of other contemporary Orthodox Church dignitaries from Armenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia to Russia and Greece. Hence, it is no surprise that most †Occasionally the journal publishes articles which express an author’s particular viewpoint on a topic or theoretical issues under the heading “Viewpoint”. This is one such article. © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 2 Siniša Malešević Eastern Orthodox Churches are generally perceived as the beacons of ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, the Orthodox Churches maintain the policy of autocephaly where each church is headed by its own fully independent religious authority. This policy has in modern history been tied to the state formation, and attaining state independence has regularly resulted in the establishment of an autocephalous national church. Hence, the independence of Greece in 1832 was followed by the creation of the Greek Orthodox Church separate from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Constantinople. Similarly, in 1872, the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church proclaimed their autocephalous status which was tied to the political autonomy and eventual independence of the Bulgarian state. This strong link between the independence of the state and the church has contributed substantially to the widely shared view that the Eastern Orthodox Churches have always been nationalist organisations. Nevertheless, as the four books under review here amply demonstrate, the link between nationalism and the Orthodox Church has never been simple and straightforward. On the contrary, both the Church and the nationalist ideologies have experienced substantive transformations over the past 250 years. Although the Eastern Europe including the Balkans have traditionally been associated with the ethnic nationalist projects which utilised religious markers to reinforce the differences between the ethnic collectivities and nation‐states, this has not always been the case. Despite the popular assumptions that the Ottoman legacy and the deep religious divides have automatically generated entrenched ethnic nationalisms in the Balkans, the historical analysis shows otherwise. In fact, as Paschalis Kitromilides, the world leading authority on this topic, clearly shows here, the Orthodox world was profoundly influenced by the Enlightenment ideas that initially have shaped the character of nationalisms in the region. More specifically, Kitromilides documents well how the late eighteenth century influential Orthodox clerics were open to many strands of the Enlightenment project. For example, influential monks such as Cosmas of Aetolia and especially Orthodox scholars such Eugenios Voulgaris and Theoklitos Farmakidis were influenced substantially by the ideas of Enlightenment. Voulgaris was very well versed in the work of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Locke and Wolff and attempted to combine his Orthodox faith with the teachings of natural philosophy. In this context, he directed the Athonite Academy at the Mount Athos from 1753 to 1759 where he successfully blended the teaching of the religious classics with the modern European philosophers. In the mid and late eighteenth century, many highly educated Orthodox clerics were keen to incorporate the Enlightenment ideas into the religious canon aiming to offer a spiritual extension or an alternative to what they regarded to be an overly materialist conception of progress. Nevertheless, the secularist foundations and the further radicalisation of the Enlightenment project, including the violent legacy of the French revolution, alarmed the traditional Orthodox hierarchies which eventually became hostile towards the Enlightenment. As this hostility grew, the Church authorities also resisted nationalist ideas that underpinned the Enlightenment project. Hence, © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 3 in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Orthodox church establishment was firmly opposed to the nationalist ideas and practices. For example, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V issued an encyclical on education in 1819 that condemned the popular practice of naming children after ancient Greek mythical heroes, describing this as a pagan trait. The Church was also opposed to the key aspects of nationalist project such as the attempt to standardise the Greek vernacular. As Kitromilides (2007) shows in the updated and revised Serbian edition of his modern classic ‘An Orthodox Commonwealth’, there were two principal reasons why the key representatives of the Orthodox Church became antagonistic towards nationalism. Firstly, they gradually realised that the nationalism, as articulated in the aftermath of the French and American revolutions, was conceived as a profoundly secular, liberal and modernising project which had little understanding for the traditional religious thought and practices. In this context, liberal nationalism was perceived as an ideological enemy of Orthodox Christianity and as such represented a threat to the Church but also to the Orthodox Christian way of life. Secondly, despite the recognised concept of the autocephaly, the Orthodox world largely represented a unified cultural space that was underpinned by the shared universalist creed of Orthodox Christianity. Both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires preserved this shared cultural space which existed not only in the domain of the high culture of the Constantinople but even more so in the everyday life of Orthodox Christian population. The ‘Orthodox commonwealth’, as Kitromilides calls it, was constituted not only by the same faith but also by the shared social experience of individuals in their everyday activities. In other words, Orthodoxy was not just a religious doctrine; it was also a distinct way of life that united ordinary people across the Balkans and Eastern Europe. This everyday experience was built around religious calendar and was accompanied by specific rituals. This was a world with a very different concept of time and space to the one we inhabit today. In this premodern universe, local attachments and the shared religious world‐view easily trumped ethnic identifications. As Kitromilides shows in this period, Orthodox monks such as Dapontes, whose writings are preserved, could easily travel throughout this Orthodox commonwealth without differentiating between different geographical locations and different regional traditions. His writings indicate strong local attachments (he expresses deep longing for his native island) and a deep immersion into a religious world‐view, but there is no indication of any recognisable ethnic or national identification. Hence, the arrival of ideas and movements advocating national sovereignty, state independence and particularistic, that is, nationalist, attachments were bound to undermine the universality of the Orthodox Christian tradition. Hence, the Church authorities resented nationalism and favoured revival of the neo‐Byzantine imperial order. Nevertheless, once the nationalist ideas gained traction among the political and cultural elites and the Ottoman imperial structure started to crumble, the Church hierarchies reluctantly changed their position and eventually accepted © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 4 Siniša Malešević the establishment of sovereign nation‐states. Moreover, as new states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and others came into being, the political leaders were determined to create national churches that would be completely independent from the Constantinople. In this environment, the old Byzantine idea of autocephaly, which originally had nothing to do with nationhood, was radically transformed and utilised by the political rulers for the nationalist purposes to divide the Orthodoxy into several different national churches. Hence, as Kitromilides shows, this process was not led by the Churches but by the state leaders who aimed to control the religious establishment through the creation of national churches. Thus, the national independence brought about a paradoxical situation where the ‘liberated’ Orthodox patriarchs and other top clergy often ended up having less real power over their flock than their predecessors had under the millet system of the Ottoman rule. Although the formation of national states has contributed to political and social modernisation, the establishment of autocephalous churches severely constrained their influence. Furthermore, the religious universalism of Orthodox tradition has suddenly been replaced with the ethnophyletism – the conflation of one’s religious denomination with one’s nationhood. In this new context, the traditional religious idea of martyrdom (hiermartyr) has been transformed into a concept of ethno‐national martyrdom (ethnomartyr). Consequently, in the nationalist re‐interpretation of the past, the death of Patriarch Gregory V was framed along these lines. Even though he was completely opposed to nationalism and tried to stop the Greek uprising in 1821, he has become the leading ethnomartyr in the Greek national narratives. Gregory V was unsuccessful at stopping the uprising and was eventually hanged by the Ottoman authorities. Therefore, this nationalisation of the Orthodox churches is a fairly modern phenomenon spearheaded by the political elites keen not only to fully control the Church but also to use the Orthodox cultural tradition to justify the establishment of independent national states. Once the state apparatuses gained control over the autocephalous churches, these previously universalist religious organisations became fiercely nationalist, and the Orthodox Churches are now generally regarded as the epitomes of ethno‐nationalist institutions. Kitromilides’s latest book Religion and Politics in the Orthodox World (2019) demonstrates convincingly that this nationalist trajectory was not inevitable. By zooming in on the experience of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, he shows that the contemporary reality where each nation‐ state with the Orthodox religious majority must have an independent national church is a myth grounded in a recent political experience. The very existence of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople indicates that the Orthodox Christianity was not predetermined to become nationalised as it has become in the last two centuries. Through the historical analysis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Kitromilides shows convincingly that Orthodoxy and nationalism are in fact ideologically incompatible projects as former articulates a universalist and ecumenical vision of the ‘universal empire’ whereas the latter is a particularistic project centred on political power over specific territory and © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 5 population. Furthermore, Kitromilides is critical of the conventional historiographic accounts that analyse Orthodox churches through the secular prism of power politics. Instead, he attempts to understand the dynamics of the Orthodox religious institutions by exploring the wider historical context in which they operate and by studying how the key representatives of these institutions perceived their role in the world. The book challenges the dominant nation‐centric interpretations of the past pointing out that the nationalisation of religion in Eastern Europe and the Balkans was product of a very recent history. Although the Ecumenical Patriarchate is now perceived as an organisational aberration, a non‐national Orthodox Church, Kitromilides argues that this organisational form is much more in line with the original Orthodox tradition while the other, national, churches represent the organisational and ideological anomaly. The book offers a chronological analysis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate showing how it successfully maintained its non‐national structure for thousands of years. The very existence of this non‐national church continuously challenges the hegemonic idea of Orthodoxy defined by nationhood. This book together with the ‘An Orthodox Commonwealth’ makes a strong case that the early nineteenth century nationalisation of Orthodoxy was a modernist, Enlightenment inspired, state project often implemented through the direct and conscious policies of imitating the West‐European experience. The leaders of the new Balkan states successfully instrumentalised the traditional canon law to nationalise the idea of autocephaly in order to break the links with the Great Church in Constantinople but also to put the local Church organisations under the control of the new states. Thus, using the Enlightenment blueprint for the relationship between the Church and the State, Adamantios Korais formulated a completely different model of state and church organisation which was later largely implemented in the legal system of the Kingdom of Greece. The other Balkan states developed a similar legal codes and practices to subordinate the Church to the state. Kitromilides (2019: 34–5) argues that in many respects, these practices involved imitation of ‘the Protestant model of European Modernity’ where ‘the Church became a component of the public sector, [and] its structure was integrated into the state administration and the clergy became public functionaries’. Hence, the nationalisation of Orthodoxy had very little to do with the traditional practices and much more with the modernising projects of state and nation‐building. The four books reviewed here cover a wide range of issues. While the two authored books explore the general patterns of these historical shifts from the distinctly non‐national to the nationalising worlds of the Orthodox Christians, the two edited books zoom in on the cultural, political and social differences within the Orthodox world. In The Enlightenment and Religion in the Orthodox World, Kitromilides and other contributors challenge the conventional views of Enlightenment as an aggressively and exclusively secular project which allegedly made no room for religion. They also question the dominant perceptions of Enlightenment as being an essentially a West‐ European phenomenon. Most chapters in this book show not only that © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 6 Siniša Malešević Enlightenment has shaped and was profoundly influenced by religious doctrines but also that the intellectuals and clerics, in the Eastern Europe and the Balkans, were initially very open to these ideas. For example, the Orthodox clergy embraced some Enlightenment ideas to counter the widespread superstition and rampant pagan practices among ordinary people and to combat the chronic illiteracy which has proved a major obstacle to reading and understanding the religious texts. The chapters in the book compare varied historical experiences in the two main intellectual and organisational centres of the Orthodox world – the South East Europe culturally dominated by the Greek language and the Russian Empire. The book also zeros in on the impact Enlightenment ideas had on the transformation of the non‐Greek‐speaking Balkan societies including Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Although Russia was a latecomer to the Enlightenment ideas, the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the most westernised institutions of the empire. With the clerical education thought in Latin until 1808, the Church was among the first institutions to be exposed to the new ideas coming from the West. In this context, the Russian word for enlightenment (prosveshchenie) which has multiple meanings (the restoration of sight, illumination, education and spiritual perfection) was deployed to navigate the secular and religious connotations of the new ideas from the West. This conceptual ambiguity proved crucial in reconceptualising of the Enlightenment in Russia as an endeavour of moral self‐improvement which combined the secular and religious notions of righteousness. The chapters in the book also chart the creative interactions between clerical intellectuals such as Voulgaris and Russian Archbishop Platon Levshin both of whom draw on the Enlightenment principles and natural law to advocate a degree of religious toleration. This volume shows clearly that the intellectual currents in the Orthodox world were very much in tune with the developments taking place in the West. The second volume edited by Kitromilides and Matthaiou deals with a more specific issue – the Greek–Serbian relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book explores the historical context of the Serb–Greek alliances from 1861 to 1918, the shared experience of resistance to the Ottoman rule, the character of parliamentary governance throughout nineteenth century, the role of Orthodox Christianity in the political and cultural alliances between Greek and Serbian national movements and the wider social and cultural relations between the two countries after the independence. One of the more interesting findings in this book is that despite a generally cordial relationships between Serbia and Greece and the numerous agreements and political alliances established in this period, there was very little systematic and the long‐term political or cultural cooperation between the two states. Although the Serbian and Greek politicians signed numerous political and military agreements between 1861 and 1918, there was little will to implement them. For example, the Serbian government decided to remain neutral in the Greco‐Turkish war of 1897, while the Greek government refused to back Serbia’s clandestine request for the military support from Bulgarian attack in © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 7 1915. Although two countries cooperated well during the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 and the local population of Corfu was very hospitable to the surviving Serbian soldiers residing in the French occupied Corfu from 1916 to 1918, the Greek–Serbian political and military alliance remained much more nominal than real. This was even more pronounced in the cultural sphere: while before the age of nationalism, ‘the Orthodox commonwealth’ was a shared cultural space where clerics, monks, government officials, traders, merchants and others were integrated in the wider interactional networks across the region, the emergence of independent nation‐states largely mitigated against such wider cultural links. Once the principle of nationhood trumped that of religion and lineage, there was little room for the genuine cultural interaction across the state borders. Unlike their imperial counterparts which unintentionally created space for the transcultural activities, the new nationalising states driven by different geopolitical logics and by different ideological ambitions mostly closed off these avenues for greater cultural interaction. Although a number of chapters in this book are at pains to present the rich repertoire of Greek– Serbian cooperation in the age of nation‐building, what is more striking is the fact that despite vocal support for such activities from the both sides, this co‐operation was in fact quite modest considering the enormous potential and the geographical and cultural closeness of the two countries. There is no doubt that Paschalis Kitromilides is one of the most knowledgeable and perceptive scholars of nationalism in the Balkans. He is also the leading authority on the relationship between the church and state in the Orthodox world. He has already published numerous highly influential studies on these topics, and these four recent contributions will only enhance his reputation further as the foremost cultural historian of modernity in the South East Europe. These four books successfully combine the intellectual and cultural history of the Balkans and the Eastern Orthodox churches with the wider theoretical discussions on the relationship between the Enlightenment, modernity and nationalism. Kitromilides and several contributors to the two edited volumes (particularly Iannis Carras, Andrei Pippidi, Elena Smilianskaia and Vojislav Pavlović) offer insightful and well‐researched historical analyses that question the established doxa about the relationship between nationalism, enlightenment and the Orthodox religious institutions and their most influential representatives. The two single authored books by Kitrimilides are also very good – the updated and revised edition of ‘An Orthodox Commonwealth’ offers a wealth of information, analysis and subtle scholarship on the organisational and ideological structure of the premodern Balkans and Eastern Europe. Kitromilides is particularly good at drawing refined comparisons between the traditional world where the Orthodoxy was not just a religious doctrine but a largely unquestioned everyday social experience of individuals living in this part of the world and the modernising Balkan societies where the nationalising and inevitably secularising state radically transforms the social dynamics of everyday life. This theme also underpins Kitromilides’s latest book which challenges ahistorical and anachronistic interpretations of the © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 8 Siniša Malešević church and state relationships and rightly insists on understanding historical contexts on their own terms. These four books make an important contribution to the several strands of scholarship including the nationalism studies, the sociology and history of religious institutions and the history of the church and state relationships in the Orthodox world. However, some assessments and analyses are also likely to invite criticisms. For example, Kitromilides is rightly critical of the state’s use of religion for political ends. Nevertheless, there is not much criticism of the responsibility of religious establishments for their own politicisation of religion within and outside the Church. At times, it seems that Kitromilides paints a bit too rosy view of the Orthodox clergy. He recognises ‘the fiery rhetoric in the Church of Greece’ and that some Orthodox clerics were ‘invoking their Orthodox identity in ethnic and civil conflicts in Yugoslavia’ (2019: 110), but there is no comprehensive analysis or critique of the Church’s role in the ethno‐nationalist mobilisation in the Balkans. Although in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the governments were at the helm of these ethno‐nationalist drives by the end of the twentieth century, and today, the nationalist priests have often taken the lead in these campaigns and have occasionally been responsible for inciting violence against the non‐Orthodox populations. There is no doubt that the many clerics in the Serbian Orthodox church were directly involved in the warmongering activities in 1990s and are still supportive of the radical ethno‐nationalist projects. The Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox authorities are still deeply hostile to the ecumenical initiatives and perceive themselves as the beacons and defenders of their respective nations. Hence, unlike their late eighteenth and early nineteenth century predecessors, they tend to oppose Enlightenment project, modernisation and liberalisation which are now associated firmly with westernisation. The Russian Orthodox establishment has also been fully aligned with the authoritarian government in Russia and has shown disdain for the heritage of Enlightenment including the freedom of speech and dissent. It seems that it is only the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Constantinople which has successfully resisted this nation‐centric instrumentalisation of religion. Some could also question the overly culturalist analysis of the Orthodox institutions and their representatives as the Church is not and has never been free from politics. Although Kitromilides is a cultural historian who focuses on the history of ideas and as such has less to say about the political history of the churches, I believe that having more analysis of the politics of the Orthodox churches would in fact enhance the cultural analysis of this institution. Kitromilides is right that the activities of Orthodox churches should be analysed on their own terms without our own secular biases. However, the Church authorities themselves had historically to navigate the religious and the secular world which inevitably made them into the political agents whether some of them liked it or not. Furthermore, some of the contributions in the two edited volumes are rather uneven. For example, several chapters in the Greek–Serbian Relations © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds 9 in the Age of Nation‐Building stand out in terms of reproducing the nationalist stereotypes and tropes that underpin the conventional, state supported, historiographical accounts. Hence, in their contributions, Dušan Tabaković, Ljubodrag Ristić and Sanja Lazarević Radak largely replicate the conventional nation‐centric narratives of Serbian historiography. Hence, one can read unreflective stereotypical assessments such as the age old ‘plans of Serbian national unity’ (p. 65), how in 1875 Serbia ‘was boiling with national fervour’ (p. 47) or how in the Habsburg empire ‘the Serbs considered that only by the free use of their mother tongue they could preserve their national identity’ (p. 199). These chapters embrace hard groupism (Brubaker 2004) and tend to reify and essentialise very diverse experiences of individuals and groups in the Balkans (Malešević 2019, 2013) while also providing little or no evidence on the perceptions of ordinary people. These chapters tend to project contemporary categories into the early nineteenth century and as such go very much against the main arguments developed by Kitromilides and other modernist scholars of nationalism in the Balkans. Nevertheless, leaving to one side these criticisms, there is no doubt that all four books advance our scholarship on nationalism in the Orthodox world. Paschalis Kitromilides has done more for the development of this scholarship than anybody else. His painstaking research and comprehensive analyses have dispelled many established myths and untruths about the relationship between nationalism and ‘the Orthodox Commonwealth’. I highly recommend Kitromilides’s work to the new generation of scholars of nationalisms in the Orthodox worlds. Note 1 The statement is a direct translation from the Serbian as published on 25/10/2017 at https:// freshpress.info/politika/patrijarh‐irinej‐gdje‐god‐zive‐srbi‐je‐srbija‐cuvajte‐dodika/. References Brubaker, R. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kitromilides, P. 2007. An Orthodox Commonwealth: Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in South‐Eastern Europe. London: Routledge. Malešević, S. 2013. Nation‐States and Nationalisms: Organisation, Ideology and Solidarity. Cambridge: Polity. Malešević, S. 2019. Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019