Cyril Hovorun , firstthings
I had begun writing about the results
of the Pan-Orthodox Council, which recently finished its work in Crete,
before it was actually convened.
The working title I chose then was
“Pentecost 2016: A Doomsday for the Orthodox.” At the time, I was
desperate about the Council and its outcome, along with many other
Orthodox, who were shocked that four of the fourteen Orthodox churches
had decided at the last minute not to go to Crete. There seemed no
reason to hope that a “Vatican-II effect” would occur at this Council.
(That is when a conciliar event, strictly pre-programmed by church
bureaucrats to prevent surprises, suddenly turns into something
unpredictable, a true manifestation of the Church.) But by the end of
the Council, it was clear that a Vatican-II effect had developed at
Crete, albeit partially.
The Council at Crete had to address a
number of challenges faced by global Orthodoxy. Moreover, the Council
itself had become a challenge for global Orthodoxy. Instead of being a
triumphant manifestation of Orthodox unity, as it was meant to be, its
inauspicious beginnings promised shameful disunity. What eventually
developed was a true conciliar event—but even then, a different picture
of conciliarity emerged than most people had expected. That picture is
not triumphalist. Not all challenges were met with success. In some
respects, the Council failed. In other respects, the miracle of
conciliarity transformed challenges into opportunities.
As I wrote above, the Council per se
had become a challenge—a challenge primarily for Orthodox identity. The
era of confessionalization affected not only the branches of Western
Christianity, but the Christian East as well, as the Orthodox were
forced to identify themselves vis-à-vis Catholics and Protestants. We
picked up “conciliarity” as a particular confessional mark. We still
counterpose it to both the Catholic papal system and Protestant
fragmentation. In Catholic-Orthodox dialogues, we always advocate
conciliarity in counterweight to primacy. In our dialogues with
Protestant confessions, we emphasize that to have valid councils, a
church must have apostolic succession and other structures that go back
to the apostolic age.
Thus, the inability of all our local
churches to come together in Crete has hurt our self-image as Orthodox.
What are we if we cannot meet together? After Crete, this question
remains difficult to answer. Nevertheless, there is hope in this
humbling fact. If conciliarity mattered to us less, more churches would
have been absent. Many—not all—showed strength in overcoming their
disagreements and hesitations, precisely to demonstrate that
conciliarity is important for Orthodox identity.
As for those disagreements and hesitations: Almost
all Orthodox churches have disputes with their neighbors. Since the
nineteenth century, the Orthodox have embraced the political idea of
territorial sovereignty. From this perspective, churches that trespass
on the “canonical territory” of other churches are treated as aggressor
states. As a result, some Orthodox churches are at war with each other,
and they viewed the Council as an opportunity to resolve their quarrels.
They used their participation to blackmail the other churches: We will
not go to the Council unless Church X stops stepping into our territory.
Conciliarity, thus, became a sort of intra-Orthodox currency, with
which the churches tried to buy solutions for local issues.
This
has been particularly the case with the Church of Antioch, which argues
with the Church of Jerusalem over an Orthodox community in Qatar. The
Patriarch of Antioch refused to attend the preconciliar meetings of the
primates and the Council itself, as long as the Patriarch of Jerusalem
was there. This was the most embarrassing and damaging episode. Other
churches, which have even more severe disagreements, resisted the
temptation to settle their local problems at the expense of the Council.
This was the case, for instance, with the Serbian Church, which has an
unsettled dispute with the Romanian Church. The Serbian Church initially
decided not to go to Crete, but later changed its mind.
Other churches, to solve their internal issues, attempted to abandon the Council for an endless conciliar process.
For instance, many Ukrainian Orthodox seek independence from the
Russian Church—and the Russian Church feared that the Council might
resolve this issue in the Ukrainian Church's favor. As long as the
conciliar process continued, the Russian Church reasoned, the
issue would remain unresolved and the status quo would be maintained.
Therefore, the Russian Church insisted that the Council was premature
and advised that the preparatory process should continue. This was an
easy idea to sell to other churches. The process of preparation for the
Council had lasted for over fifty years—so long that it almost seemed to
take the place of the Council as such. So the Russian Church argued:
What’s the hurry? We should take some more years and make the Council
perfect.
This proposal would have granted the Council a very
limited mission: to sign what had already been agreed upon in the
process of preparing for the Council. This attitude recalls the famous
saying of former speaker of the Russian Parliament Boris Gryzlov:
“Parliament is not a place for discussions.” All of the Council’s
decisions would have to be prearranged. But the Council managed to avoid
this trap. It became “a place for discussions,” some of them rather
heated. The scope of the discussions may have been narrow, confined to
the thematology that had survived the long process of preparation.
Still, the Council became an unpredictable event, with the results of
the discussions depending not on prearrangements but on the
argumentation of the sides involved. This made it truly an ecclesial
council, rather than a “congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union.”
The drafts of the documents prepared for discussion were
imperfect—as was pointed out by several churches that claimed the
documents as their reason for not attending the Council. As a matter of
fact, no one much liked the quality of these documents, though the
churches that attended the Council were able to improve them through
discussion. In any case, the churches should blame themselves if the
documents were unsatisfactory. All the documents had been drafted over
the course of decades by bureaucrats appointed by the churches. These
bureaucrats did their drafting job and then reported to their synods.
The synods were supposed to scrutinize the documents and accept or
reject the drafts. In reality, however, few read the texts. After formal
approval, they were sent to collect dust in the archives. When the
synods dusted off the texts and read them for the first time, they were
surprised how unsatisfactory they were. The Council was put at risk,
then, because the synods had not done their homework until the last
minute.
The Council was only partially successful in addressing
the issue of solidarity. In its final statements, the Council expressed
sympathy for refugees and for those who suffer in the Middle East.
However, it kept silent on an ongoing conflict that is much closer to
the Orthodox: the one in Ukraine. Only once in the encyclical letter did
a reference appear to “the troubled country of Ukraine.” More words
were uttered by the Council in support of two bishops kidnapped in Syria
than for thousands of Orthodox killed in Ukraine. The two wars in
Europe in the twenty-first century have been between Orthodox countries:
Russia and Georgia in 2008, and Russia and Ukraine from 2014. One would
expect the Orthodox churches, at their unique venue, to address both
wars. Unfortunately, the Council only condemned war in general, without
acknowledging any Orthodox responsibility for two particular conflicts.
Despite
this and other failures, it is worth emphasizing that the participants
of the Pan-Orthodox Council have lived through an experience that no
member of the Orthodox Church has for centuries. The Council at Crete
turned out to be different from what both optimists and pessimists had
expected. It did not resemble any icon of the Ecumenical Councils that
we usually imagine. It was a council with a lot of pain and anxiety,
before and during the event. But were the Ecumenical Councils not the
same to their participants, who did not yet know that they would be of
any historical importance for the Church?
The Council at Crete was
a true conciliar event. Now that it is over, pain and anxiety have
given way to hope that Orthodoxy can overcome its partisanship and
paralysis. The Council revealed not so much the doxa of
Orthodoxy, as its real condition. Modern Orthodoxy is complicated. It is
challenged and challenging. The Council allows us to realize more
adequately what we are as Orthodox. We understand our limitations, but
we also see the way to overcome them. The Council will make us humbler
in our relations with our non-Orthodox Christian brothers, but it has
not humiliated us before them.
Cyril Hovorun is a senior
lecturer at Sankt Ignatios Academy/Stockholm School of Theology in
Sweden and a visiting scholar at Columbia University. He served as
chairman of the department for external relations of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church and first deputy chairman of the educational committee
of the Moscow Patriarchate. He is a scholar in patristics and
ecclesiology. His recent book is Meta-Ecclesiology: Chronicles on Church Awareness.Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.