Book Review: The Price of Prophecy
by Archbishop Chrysostomos
ALEXANDER F.C. WEBSTER, The Price of Prophecy: Orthodox Churches on Peace, Freedom, and
Security. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1993. Pp. 333 + Notes and Index.
Paperbound.
A convert to the Orthodox
Faith, Father Alexander Webster teaches at St. Sophia Ukrainian
Orthodox Seminary, in South Bound Brook, NJ, and at George Mason
University in Fairfax, VA, and is a Priest in the Romanian
Episcopate of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). This book
shows his wide knowledge of social and political issues, as well
as a keen understanding of contemporary theological trends, and
is written in a style which conveys complex thoughts in very
simple and direct language. It is an ambitious book, as the title
suggests, and I must admit that it took me no small amount of
time to read it, not only because the material is fascinating,
but because it contains under the cover of a single book
insightful comments on Orthodox moral theory, Church history, and
Church-state relations. It concentrates on the emerging Orthodox
Church in post-communist Eastern Europe, touches on the
contemporary Orthodox witness in America, and offers a glimpse
into Orthodox thought in terms and categories that Western
Christians can easily understand.
Though I know good thought,
good writing, and intelligent commentary when I see them—and
they adorn this book—, I am not competent to offer a
technical critique of Father Alexander’s approach to the
issue of the moral obligations and witness of the Orthodox Church
in modern society. I have little familiarity with the study of
these matters. I can only say that the strength of his book, from
the standpoint of making Orthodox moral precepts understandable
to a Western audience is also, from the vantage-point of a
student of the Fathers, its deficit. For example, his views on
political symphonia and the Orthodox Church’s
understanding of personal and public conscience are drawn, not
from the Patristic consensus, but from what I call the
"secondary systematics" of Orthodox theology in the
West—from artificial constructs based on the Patristic corpus but separated from the complex and, if may be
forgiven an unpopular characterization, "mystical"
interplay between human history and the "spiritual
irony" which Unamuno so insightfully attributed to the
notion of reality in the Greek Fathers.
Most Orthodox today are
struggling for relevance in a world in which their Faith was not
formed, in which its very political, social, and moral precepts
are antiquated and foreign. Those who contribute to this
struggle—and Father Alexander’s book is a significant
contribution, indeed—see Orthodoxy as a Faith which is
universal and catholic and thus understandable in any age. There
are some traditionalist Orthodox today, myself among them, who
believe, on the other hand, that Orthodoxy is catholic in a
noumenal sense, relating to the world only to the extent that,
usurping its higher moral values, it permeates and converts a
society. This spiritual permeation of the world, beginning with
the Resurrection and reaching its culmination in traditional
Orthodox societies, expresses the catholic nature of
Christianity: a force of universal transformation. Those who
attribute to us traditionalists a certain intellectual deficit
would argue that we render history meaningless and Orthodoxy
impotent, relegating the Orthodox world to a "backward
notion of progress," as a Protestant writer recently
observed. In response, I would argue that just as spiritual life
in the Orthodox Church centers on personal transformation in the
light of man’s restoration in Christ, so Orthodox history is
elevated by its reference to the past and invigorated by its
constant irrelevancy vis—vis
the "modern
condition" of man. This is not to say that Orthodoxy should
not witness to contemporary society in the style of Father
Alexander’s socio-political apologetic, but it is to say that the focus of our attention, in
presenting Orthodoxy to the West, should never deviate from a
clear Patristic substructure and from the "witness of the
past," even when we have the ear of those who speak in a
different language. If we risk parochialism in so doing, let us
keep in mind that one of the more arrogant traits of our times is
a tendency to forget that today’s universal
"givens" are often the parochialisms of tomorrow.
Sadly, I found in this
otherwise excellent book a few lapses in scholarly objectivity
which deserve attention. In his effort to portray
Orthodoxy’s response to contemporary moral issues in a
systematic manner understandable to the West, Father Alexander
does abuse to a tradition which is not at all as systematic and
immediately comprehensible as many assume that it is. In
particular, in his attempt to summarize the complex world of
American Orthodoxy, he describes the OCA as the inheritor of the
early eighteenth-century Russian missions in Alaska. As he
admits, in fact, the OCA was, no more than a generation ago,
largely Greek Catholic. Its roots lie in the administrative
vagaries of the diaspora, of course, but the actual history of the Russian Church in the diaspora, especially after the Russian
Revolution, centers not on the precursor of the OCA, the Russian
Orthodox Greek Catholic Metropolia, but the Higher Church
Authority and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA). In
making Orthodoxy relevant, we can too easily make it what it is
not. And the OCA is not what Father Alexander claims it to be. It
is thus particularly disturbing that, in distinguishing those
Orthodox in America who belong to the self-styled
"canonical" jurisdictions under the Standing Conference
of Orthodox Bishops in America (SCOBA), and what he calls
"quasi-canonical groups," Father Alexander borrows from
non-Orthodox terminology first coined by Archimandrite Seraphim
(Surrency), the late "Vicar" of the Patriarchal Russian
Churches in America. There is no such thing, of course, as a
"canonical" Orthodox jurisdiction, despite the fact
that this kind of terminology has crept into our ecclesiological
vocabulary from the West. Nor are there "official"
Orthodox Churches, a category produced by the contemporary
ecumenical movement. Were this so, and were such terms amenable
to the nuanced ecclesiological notions of the Greek Fathers, we
would have to concede that the Cappadocian Fathers, the Studite
monks, and the Palamite Hesychasts were, in some way,
"quasi-canonical" and "un-official." This, if
nothing else, warns us against apologetic presentations which
unwisely pass over the intricacies of Church history.
In the same vein, I am
surprised that a scholar of Father Alexander’s stature would
refer, as he does, to an ukaz issued in 1939 by the Russian Orthodox Church
Abroad under Metropolitan Anastassy, successor to Metropolitan
Anthony of Kiev as First Hierarch of that body, to Adolf Hitler,
thanking the dictator for his help to the Russian community in
diaspora and praising his patriotism. The Orthodox Church in
America, in supporting its spurious claims to primacy in the
Russian diaspora, has often taken slaps at the ROCA on account of
this incident, pointing out that if the Russian Bishops in exile
were justified in their opposition to the Moscow Patriarchate for
kowtowing to the communists, they could be equally condemned for
praising a mass murderer. First, little was known in 1939 of the
inner workings of the Third Reich, and especially to the Russian
immigration, which was fiercely struggling for survival itself.
Nor was Metropolitan Anastassy’s praise of Hitler’s
nationalism and patriotism in any way comparable to collaboration,
by the Soviet Bishops, with a secular authority that was not only
guilty of genocide similar to that visited upon the Jews and
other Europeans by Hitler, but which, unlike the Nazi régime,
openly advocated the eradication of religion. This shameful bit
of jurisdictional polemics might have been better left out of
Father Alexander’s book.
Equally unedifying is Father
Alexander’s unwarranted speculation that an alleged
"internal schism" in the ROCA, in 1986, might well have
substantially reduced its previously-reported membership in the
U.S. (55,000), since thereafter such data were no longer
reported. First, the departure of a single monastery—which
had, in fact, retreated into the ROCA from the Greek
Archdiocese—with a handful of Faithful, numbering far less
than a thousand individuals, hardly constitutes an "internal
schism." Second, while membership statistics and references
to the ROCA do not, indeed, appear in recent almanacs in this
country, relevant information is provided to these reference
sources by the National Council of Churches (NCC), a well-known
ecumenical body. The NCC has of late shown little desire to
publish statistics about anti-ecumenical Orthodox jurisdictions
not affiliated with its Orthodox members. That this is the result
of pressure from the Orthodox ecumenists in its ranks is
unquestionable, as evidenced by the fact that only after intense
pressure, and over the objections of certain Orthodox spokesmen,
did the NCC agree to list the small American Exarchate of our
Church, only one of a number of Old Calendarist bodies
represented in the Americas, in its annual registry of religious
bodies. Given the exaggerated membership numbers reported for
those jurisdictions belonging to the SCOBA (the OCA a glaring and
extreme example thereof), statistics on Orthodox populations are,
at any rate, a subject which we should probably avoid, and
especially when they support accusations of a gratuitous and
inaccurate kind.
The Orthodox world, again,
is tremendously complex. Outside the fantasy of an Orthodoxy that
fits into "official" and "canonical"
categories, there are millions of Orthodox who are struggling
with questions of personal, social, and ecclesiological identity
that Orthodox in America not only cannot understand, but would
frequently like to ignore. The ecumenical movement, steeped in a
hypocrisy known primarily to us Orthodox minorities, taints any
discussion of the moral witness of the Orthodox Church, since its
darker side is hidden and its agents secretive. In the face of
these things, and bringing to mind what I said earlier about the
nature of history and spiritual vision in the Patristic witness,
I would advise anyone reading Father Alexander’s book to
exercise caution. It is a useful and excellent apologetic work.
It touches, as I have noted, on a wide range of subjects and
presents the Orthodox Church to the West in terms that are
positive, constructive, and absolutely necessary. But it lacks a
certain balance, as evidenced by its unfortunate and, I trust,
unintentional forays into jurisdictional polemics, resulting in
images which, though didactic and compelling, are thus not wholly
realistic. Read with circumspection, this book is a pivotal
contribution, for us Orthodox, to the task of making our Faith
known to the West. For the Westerner, it is a primer of
Orthodoxy, offering invaluable insight into our moral life and
ethos, albeit with the shortcomings that I must, in good
conscience, carefully point out. Needless to say, disenfranchised
as we traditionalist Orthodox—Kafkaesque stokers before the
contrivances of the New World—are by the artificial
"officialdom" of Orthodoxy in the West, my observations
will no doubt strike our modernist friends as those of a
"crackpot." Be that as it may, for any who truly desire
to present Orthodoxy to the West, as I suspect Father Alexander
does, my objections should serve as a warning against
tightly-wrapped packages that sometimes fail to contain the whole
product. Handsomely printed and distributed by the Ethics and
Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., I heartily recommend
this book to our readers.
From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XIV, No. 2&3, pp.
69-72.
|