NICHOLAS DENISENKO, comment fb
DID THE MAIDAN LIGHT A FIRE UNDER THE MOVEMENT FOR AUTOCEPHALY?
The Maidan added firewood to the already-existing fire of autocephaly in Ukraine. I’ll be developing a paper on this in the new year.
The imminence of autocephaly seems to have taken many Orthodox in America by surprise. Why?
Because the media claims that autocephaly originated when the USSR collapsed and Ukraine attained independence.
This claim is not only false, but also too convenient, because it fits nicely with the cliché that autocephaly is a state project that national independence was the flame that lit the fire of autocephaly.
The American Orthodox perspective is simply unable to consider factors outside of claims to canonical territory and the limits of primacy. Our status as a tiny minority in a multi-religious society conceals a broader view of the intrachurch situation abroad. We know almost nothing about Ukraine. If one person tells us that the Maidan was a revolution of dignity, another tells us that it was an illegitimate gathering of troublemakers who turned against their legally-elected president. So, when the media gives us a neat sequence of events – Maidan, Crimea, Donbas - autocephaly looks like another attempt by a tiny group of nationalist dissidents to smear the canonical Orthodox Church.
Our social media conversations debate ‘what is to be done’ about Ukraine. Maybe “East Ukraine” should be absorbed by Russia (since all Russian speakers are pro-Russian), and Ukraine should split into two? Maybe the dissidents should claim their inevitable destiny and become uniates? We can’t see that our perspective is colonial (unless we openly pine for the restoration of a monarchy in Russia, with Little Russia restored to its proper place). The objective is for the dominants – both outside and in Ukraine – to get the people back on course, to being who they were originally – people of one undivided Rus’, as it was from the beginning. We agree that the Soviet experiment was a terrible error, so we return to the period immediately anterior to the Bolshevik Revolution, when there was one nation ruled by one monarch sharing one faith. This paradigm does not permit separatism, and that’s what autocephaly is – separatism.
If we had the patience and discipline to pay attention to the entire story, though, would we be able to see the picture with more clarity?
I wonder if the American Orthodox would be surprised to learn that the autocephalists were Orthodox traditionalists for most of their history. They took a decisive step away from the innovations of 1921 and reverted to canonical order. The first autocephalist movement was liquidated by the Soviet regime. The second migrated West, in 1944. The autocephalist church was illegal in post-war Soviet Ukraine. As soon as Gorbachev permitted toleration, the autocephalist church returned and grew immediately – before the USSR fell, before Ukrainian independence, and before the Maidan.
The autocephalous movement has proven to be remarkably resilient: it has survived overt persecution, multiple war, and migration. It will not go away. The decision of one party to finally violate the laws of ecclesial ritual purity by meeting with autocephalists seems to have blown everything open, and we’re in shock – even though this situation has been brewing and simmering for decades.
I disagree with those who say that Moscow and Constantinople need to sit down and work this problem out. Those who make this appeal are trying to remain neutral, but they’re letting themselves off the proverbial hook, for trying to look away from a crisis that needs to be confronted.
It’s not enough to try to arrive at a quick canonical opinion.
It’s not responsible to recycle the same old blame game.
It’s morally dubious and just plain unhelpful to redistribute inflammatory material that places all the blame on one bad guy and his millions of minion followers. We should be smarter.
It’s time to meet with the people whom we fear to see what they’re really all about. And more than anything, it’s time for some serious self-reflection, to find out why we rely on blaming others to excuse our inability to heal schisms, and to turn to our own tradition to see how we can learn to rebuild communities that have been taught to disregard one another for multiple generations. The Ukrainian divisions aren’t the only ones that tear apart the body of Christ – they’re just the ones in today’s headlines. This is an opportunity for us, as a body of Christ, to relearn how to heal our wounds. This is possible only if we truly want healing, because if our Christian body is sick, we can always find someone else to blame for giving us the disease. And it’s just so much easier to tell the sick person to stay out of the Church, with the private hope that they might eventually die from their sickness