Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (170 page)

Alongside such inspiring examples is an official Church whose relish in its renewed place of honour in Russian life is not altogether to its advantage. By 1997 a law 'On freedom of conscience and religious association' contradicted the assertion of a secular state in the 1993 constitution of the Russian Federation; it now recognized 'the special contribution of Orthodoxy to the history of Russia and to the establishment and development of Russia's spirituality and culture'. It would have been difficult for churchmen not to appreciate the sudden outpouring of money on new and restored churches throughout Russia, symbolized by the vast sums spent with the backing of the flamboyant mayor of Moscow, Iurii Luzhkov, on rebuilding Moscow's demolished landmark Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the film of whose dynamiting by Stalin remains one of the iconic images of Soviet attacks on religion. It is noticeable that another Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, explicitly reminiscent in its design of the Moscow Cathedral, has newly risen in the Russian Baltic detached territory of Kaliningrad, the city so thoroughly transformed from the Teutonic Knights' former East Prussian stronghold of Konigsberg after 1945. Kaliningrad's Orthodox Cathedral is designed to be a dominant structure in the city centre, outdoing the ancient Lutheran cathedral recently restored from wartime ruins: it is a significant statement of political architecture.
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One could adduce national parallels in another Orthodox-dominated state: in the multi-ethnic Transylvanian villages of Romania, every community in the first decade of the twenty-first century seemed to have a Romanian Orthodox church shrouded in scaffolding, as an enlargement or a lavish new build, alongside the older parish churches of the other ethnic communities.

In theology and social statements, the Moscow Patriarchate has likewise followed a conservative line. It did eventually rein in one of the most confrontational of its bishops, Nikon of Ekaterinburg, who on two occasions in 1994 and 1998 organized the burning of books by Orthodox writers of whose questioning spirit he did not approve. A range of charges from the diocese, some more lurid than these, earned Nikon deprivation and relocation to the Monastery of the Caves in Pskov.
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Among the authors thus singled out as enemies of Nikon's version of Orthodoxy had been the last priest to die mysteriously in the era of Soviet rule, as late as 1990, Aleksandr Men. This theologian, of Jewish descent and ecumenical spirit, had paralleled some of the explorations of Orthodoxy made by Orthodox theologians in exile after 1917. One of the mistakes made by the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Revolution had been to allow some of the most interesting and creative theologians of the late tsarist Church to leave Russia unchallenged.
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Out of this community of exiles had come theologians who sought to make sense of their experience of the West while remaining faithful to a dynamic version of Orthodox tradition. Two of the most prominent names, Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, who both taught in North America, were among the authors whose books were thrown on the bonfires in Ekaterinburg.

A similar spirit of conservative and anti-Western nationalism has continued in the Serbian Orthodox Church. When the state which became the kingdom of Yugoslavia was established out of the torso of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, its monarchy was that of pre-war Serbia, and the Serbs were the largest ethnic group. The Orthodox Church remained central to Serb identity, while playing host to some of the more conservative elements of the Russian Orthodox Church in exile - principally those exiles who found it more congenial to come here than to be tainted by the heretical and secularist West.
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An amalgam developed in the interwar years combining national pride, the reality of a history of Serb struggle for survival and a powerful myth adapting the Christian theme of suffering to describe that struggle. It has been christened 'Saint-Savaism' (
Svetosavlje
) after the iconic princely religious leader of the thirteenth century (see p. 479), and it was a cult much encouraged by members of the Orthodox Theology Faculty of the University of Belgrade, reinforced by exiled Russian academics.
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Given the powerful fund of goodwill towards Serbia built up in the West through the alliance in the First World War, this ideology need not necessarily have become anti-Western, but a significant influence moving it in that direction was that of the Serb theologian and hagiographer Justin Popovic, whose interwar studies in Oxford's Theology Faculty had not ended happily, when his doctorate on Dostoevskii was failed after the examiners' criticisms of its resolute hostility to Western Christianity.
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A man of great personal charm whose intellectual consistency led him to suffer disfavour and official isolation for decades in Communist Yugoslavia, Popovic was a major force in the spiritual formation of various monks in the next generation. They then became leaders of the Serbian Church at a crucial time in the 1990s when the Yugoslav Federation began to disintegrate. At this moment, it was easy for unscrupulous demagogic politicians quitting Communism and seeking a new framework for power to draw on the more poisonous elements in the Serb past: the bitter memories of recent Serbian sufferings at the hands of Pavelic's Croatian (and Catholic) quasi-Fascists, an extremely selective reading of past Serb relations with the Ottoman Empire, and the influence of a bloodthirsty and best-selling epic poem by a nineteenth-century Orthodox Prince-Archbishop of Montenegro,
The Mountain Wreath
, which glories in a supposed seventeenth-century massacre of the Muslims of Montenegro.
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Symbolic of the alliance between the emerging post-Communist regime and the Church is yet another piece of political architecture: the massive 'Temple' in Belgrade, now one of the city's most prominent buildings, marking (probably mistakenly) the site of the burning of the bones of St Sava by the Turks in the sixteenth century. Begun in 1935 in a style intended to recall Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, here symbolically restored to Christian hands from Turkish captivity, the Temple's construction had stopped abruptly when the Communists came to power in Yugoslavia, but work began again in 1985 (see Plate 67).
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The consequences of this alliance in the wars of the former Yugoslavia are well known, and they are still unravelling. The Serbian Orthodox Church has not yet had the chance or the inclination to stand back and properly consider its part in what happened.
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The sufferings of the Orthodox and the ancient non-Chalcedonian Churches of the East through the twentieth century, combined with the mushrooming of other Christianities, have given traditional Eastern Christianity a much diminished numerical share in the contemporary spectrum of Christian activity. In 1900, the Orthodox were estimated as 21 per cent of the world's Christians; that had declined to 11 per cent at the beginning of the twenty-first century, while the Roman Catholic proportion, thanks to its growth in the south of the globe, had risen from 48 per cent to 52 per cent.
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Yet this decline in 'market share' should be viewed in the context of the huge rise in Christian numbers generally - and more importantly, it is worth remembering that the Christian obsession with statistics, triumphalist or alarmist, is even more recent than the general Western secular fascination with them. The English are among the originators and exemplifiers of this modern neurosis, and they also demonstrate how comparatively modern it is: no more than a century and a half in duration. English politicians pioneered the uses of statistics in politics and economics in the later seventeenth century, but the Church of England did not exhibit a permanent preoccupation with them until after 1851, when the then British government decided to conduct a census of religious affiliation and church attendance alongside its customary population census. The result punctured Anglican complacency about the Church's national status, even though it also provided the remarkable affirmation that on one day in that year, a quarter of the population was still attending the established Church's services. Anglicans have not ceased to worry about or celebrate numbers ever since; they are hardly alone among Western Churches.
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More important in the eyes of the Orthodox or the non-Chalcedonian Churches might be an older preoccupation: the revival in the life and morale of monasticism, that institution which is so central to their life and spirituality. From the 1970s, both Mount Athos and the Coptic monasteries of Egypt have seen a sudden and unexpected revival, bringing new recruits and new hope, albeit sometimes accompanied by an ultra-traditional attitude to the modern world. A major element in this on Mount Athos was the restoration of full community life to most monasteries after centuries when monks had tended to live individually, not generally as hermits, but pursuing their own spiritual paths.
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What remains to be seen is how this other-worldly spirituality and emphasis on an ancient liturgy can find a constructive relationship with modernity. We have seen how the Churches of the Eastern Rite and beyond found their cultures constrained in succession by two unsympathetic powers: from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire and its outliers and the Islamic monarchy of Iran, and then, in the twentieth, the short-lived but far more hostile power of Soviet Communism. Paradoxically, these oppressions were also shelters from pressing theological problems - what, in a different context, the poet Constantine Cavafy called 'a kind of solution' - for the Churches were mostly too preoccupied with survival to look beyond their walls.
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The Western Church in its Protestant and Catholic forms had struggled with various degrees of success to find a way of addressing children of the Enlightenment - efforts frequently scorned by the Orthodox. Out of all Eastern Churches only the Russian Orthodox Church in the last years of the tsars had much chance to do this. Now that the Orthodox cannot escape the task, the effects on Eastern Christianity will be interesting.

The stories of contemporary Russia and Serbia suggest some initial misjudgements. Some may find it depressing that after seeing the collapse of traditional European Christendom, so many Christianities are still entwined with the politics of the powerful, but it is surely inevitable that any potential source of power will fascinate fallen humanity, and that religion is as likely to bring a sword as peace. The writers of Genesis who composed the story of Cain and Abel showed wisdom in recounting the first act of worship of God as immediately followed by the first murder. While no state liberated from Soviet control decided fully to re-establish a Christian Church, the Christian Right in the United States continues to play a part in American politics which is an unmistakable bid for Christian hegemony in the nation, and there are signs of a possible new Constantinian era elsewhere. In 1991 President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia, member of a Pentecostal Church and elected freely and fairly to power on a programme of reform, became the first ruler of a post-colonial African state to declare his country 'a Christian nation', submitting 'the Government and the entire nation of Zambia to the Lordship of Jesus Christ'. Although Chiluba reluctantly stepped down from further contests for the presidency in 2001, his reputation badly sullied by his conduct in office, no subsequent government, in a country where self-declared Christians reached 85 per cent of the population in 2000, has repudiated his proclamation.
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Most remarkable of all are some voices heard within the leadership of the People's Republic of China. After decades when all varieties of Chinese Christianity faced differing degrees of suppression or persecution, the burgeoning of Christian practice has produced a possibility as astonishing as the events which followed Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge. Asked in 2002 what legacy he might give to China, the Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin is reported as saying that he would propose Christianity as China's official religion. Was this one of those world-historical jokes of which senior Chinese officials have occasionally been capable?
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Mr Jiang would remember that Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the first Chinese Republic a century before, together with his long-lived and long-revered wife, had been Methodist Christians. He might also note, with the pragmatism which has characterized Chinese policy over the last three decades, that in China and India the combined number of hidden Christians had reached an estimated 120 million, around 6 per cent of the world's total population, capable of being recognized as the world's fifth-largest religion in their own right. That was in addition to the obvious expansion of the official Churches which China had recognized over decades, albeit at first grudgingly.
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The same phenomenon of official favour is perceptible in South Korea, but there it has already proved counterproductive. In 2008, the government of Lee Myung-bak was embarrassed by accusations that it was discriminating against Buddhists in its partisanship towards Christians.
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That confrontation has been one aspect of a noticeable reaction among many Koreans at the 'Prosperity Gospel' (see pp. 960-61), the doctrine of this-worldly success which has over the last few decades leached sideways out of some influential Pentecostal congregations into Protestantism generally. The result has not been a flight from Christianity itself, but a transfer of allegiance to an alternative Christianity not associated with Protestant hegemony: the national South Korean census of 2005 revealed an actual decline in Protestant numbers by around 1.5 per cent, a modest growth in Buddhism by around 3 per cent, but an astonishing growth in Catholicism by 74 per cent.
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It is to be hoped that if new Church establishments do develop in Asia, they have the ability to see past Augustine of Hippo's celebrated misuse of the biblical phrase 'Compel them to come in' (see p. 304). A better text to hang in the office of any Minister for Religious Affairs would be the words of a brave dissident Polish priest, Fr Jerzy Popielusko, in one of the addresses which led to his death at the hands of Communist Poland's secret police in 1984: 'An idea which needs rifles to survive dies of its own accord.'
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Besides the continuing involvement of politicians in Christian life and structures, there remain contests for power between and within the Churches which reflect the cultural wars within Christianity and in wider society. Most of the traditional Churches have witnessed battles patterned after the struggles within the Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II. Southern Baptists and Australian 'Continuing' Presbyterians have both experienced determined and largely successful attempts by conservatives to take over institutional control in their Churches' decision-making bodies.