NATIONALISM AND ECUMENICISM: WHY POLITICS MATTERS

 

Dr. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool. He has translated Dumitru Stăniloae, The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There was Love (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012) and is the author of Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) and Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania: The Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building (Bloomsbury, 2022).

When the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church announced the canonization of sixteen new saints this summer—several of whom had been involved in fascist politics during the 1930s—they precipitated a bitter debate in Romanian civil society. As Ionuț Biliuță recently suggested in Public Orthodoxy, one of the key foci of this debate has been the person of Father Dumitru Stăniloae (1903-1993). Fr. Stăniloae is universally and rightly celebrated as the most brilliant and insightful Romanian theologian of the twentieth century. He contributed in no small measure to the neo-Patristic synthesis in modern Orthodox theology, explained the centrality of mysticism and asceticism to Christians’ experience of God, and played a key role in the Christian ecumenical movement for several decades. His prominence is such, Biliuță notes, that his name “helps to legitimize the other names on the list.” In the wake of harsh condemnation of the canonization of clergy with fascist sympathies, a number of theologians have jumped to defend Stăniloae’s record. In one extensively researched article, Răzan Perşa went to great pains to show that Stăniloae was never a member of a fascist movement and never affiliated himself with one, dismissing his famous article celebrating two fascist martyrs and his frequent associations with fascist publicists such as Nichifor Crainic as irrelevant. Similarly, one prominent specialist on Stăniloae’s ecumenical theology, Radu Bordeianu, argued in Public Orthodoxy that Stăniloae was “a complex figure” whose politics during the 1930s should be kept separate from his mature theology.

The problem with Bordeianu’s well-intentioned argument is that it is simply not possible to separate Stăniloae’s politics from this theology. In fact, complications arise precisely in the realm that Bordeianu cites as Stăniloae’s most un-fascist theological contribution: in his ecumenicism.

Allow me to explain. When Stăniloae wrote about Protestantism and Catholicism he repeatedly dismissed them as inferior forms of Christianity. Of their many faults, the one that Stăniloae returned to repeatedly in his condemnations of Western Christians during the 1930s and again in the 1990s was that they separated God and nation. As far as Stăniloae was concerned, God saves us in and through our relationships with other people, and one of the most important of those relationships is with our nations. Nations are so important, Stăniloae believed, that it is impossible to separate Orthodoxy from Romanianness, and only Orthodox Christians could claim to be truly Romanian. Protestants believe that we are saved as individuals, Stăniloae said, and Catholics that the Church mediates our salvation independently of any national community. Only the Orthodox, he insisted, truly recognized the importance of nations in the work of salvation.

Stăniloae wrote little about nations and nationalism after the Second World War, and he was incarcerated as a political prisoner by the Communist regime between 1958 and 1963 on the dubious accusation of being associated with fascist elements. His earlier obsession with nationalism remained muted until the 1990s, but expressed itself in other ways. When he imagined human personhood in his mature theology, Stăniloae thought of it as a reflection of the Holy Trinity itself: I exist as a person because I love other people, and my personhood is dependent on my relationships with those closest to me. When he engaged with other Christian traditions in ecumenical dialogue, Stăniloae insisted that churches are human communities grounded in specific historical, geographic and political experiences, and that they encounter each other in much the same way that other communities (such as nations) meet to discuss diplomatic or business relationships. Whereas other Orthodox theologians argued that the Church is one, and that it is grounded in the Eucharist or in an eschatological movement of deification, Stăniloae thought that each church had an ontological unity just as he thought that individuals and nations enjoyed their own type of personhood. Ecumenicism then, is about communities that are ontologically different meeting together to find common understanding, not about transcending the things that separate us to find God beyond our disagreements.

Stăniloae made the arguments for his Trinitarian understanding of the Church in purely logical terms, drawing on first principles, the Bible, and the Church Fathers. Except when he was attacking Greek Catholicism, he rarely tried to justify his ecclesiology during the Cold War by talking about nations and nationalism. But when one strips away the theological language it becomes clear that Stăniloae’s thinking about the Church as an ontological community, and about ecumenicism as the meeting of corporate persons who are fundamentally different from one another, was the same throughout his life. His fundamental understanding of what the Church is developed during a period when his thought was heavily shaped by nationalism and when many of his colleagues and collaborators were affiliated with fascist movements, and it persisted long after he had temporarily abandoned the language of nationalism for that of Trinitarianism. When dealing with a complex figure such as Stăniloae, it is important to remember that he was also a whole person, and that like all of us, it is impossible to separate one sphere of his life from the others.

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