ORTHODOXY AT WAR

John P. Burgess is James Henry Snowden Professor of Systematic Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. in  first things,

St. Sophia Cathedral is quiet and almost empty when I step inside on a wintry morning. Saints in icons on the walls and pillars stare at me. A huge mosaic of the Mother of God, known as the Oranta, the Praying One, fills the apse. She stands in a sky-blue gown, her arms upraised, against a burnished gold background, which glows as the sun’s rays reach it. Her eyes look through me, and suddenly I say to myself, “Have mercy on me, a sinner.”

This visit to Kyiv took place in early 2016, one of many visits I have paid over twenty years of seeking to understand the spiritual genius of this part of the world. In 2014, a popular revolution had shifted Ukraine from the Russian to the Western sphere of influence. Vladimir Putin responded by annexing Crimea and supporting pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Now that Putin has invaded Ukraine, triggering a devastating war, I am unable to return there. But in these hard times I have often seen the Praying One in my mind’s eye, and I beg, “O Mother of God, have mercy on Ukraine, have mercy on Russia.”

Russians and Ukrainians trace their beginnings to 988 a.d., the year in which the prince of the Eastern Slavs accepted baptism into Orthodox Christianity at the hands of a Greek missionary priest. As the story goes, the prince had sent out emissaries to bring him word about the religions of the neighboring empires. Those who returned from Constantinople told of the liturgy in the great cathedral dedicated to Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia. The icons, the chanting, the clouds of incense, the candle-lit darkness—“Dear Prince,” they exclaimed, “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty elsewhere.” The magnificence of the Orthodox liturgy won the prince’s heart.

Russians call this prince Vladimir; to Ukrainians, he is Volodymyr. The place of his baptism, Khersones, lies in Crimea, to which both nations lay claim. The prince returned to his capital and ordered his warriors to be baptized in the broad river that flows through Kiev—or is it Kyiv? Within a hundred years, this capital city had a St. Sophia Cathedral of its own. Orthodox believers in both Russia and Ukraine regard it as their mother church. The Monastery of the Caves, built into the steep banks of the Dnieper (or Dnipro) River, is almost as old. It has been one of Orthodoxy’s most important pilgrimage sites. Tolstoy once walked here on foot from his estate south of Moscow.

So, a familiar story: Two peoples, now at war, with deep spiritual attachments to the same piece of earth. But why have we come to think of them as two peoples?

Mongol tribes from the East, sweeping across what is now Russia and Ukraine, sacked Kyiv in 1240 a.d. A century later, Muscovy succeeded in throwing off this so-called Tatar Yoke and began uniting other Russian principalities. Meanwhile, to the west, first Lithuania and then a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth arose. The borderlands between East and West became known as Ukraine—the very word means “on the edge” (from Moscow’s perspective). Russia increasingly dominated what is now eastern Ukraine, whereas Poland-Lithuania held the west and center.

These political developments had ecclesiastical implications. The Eastern Slavic churches were formally under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople. But as Byzantium came under Muslim control, Muscovy declared itself the defender of Eastern Orthodoxy. A Metropolitan of Moscow assumed the title of patriarch over all of the lands that Muscovy controlled, a fait accompli that the Ecumenical Patriarch recognized in 1686. In the meantime, Orthodox bishops in western areas of the (Catholic) Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had pledged their loyalty to Rome at the Union of Brest (1595–96), in exchange for the right to retain their traditional Orthodox practices and calendar, thus establishing the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

In the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire under Peter and Catherine the Great absorbed much of what is now Ukraine. Repression of the Greek Catholic Church followed. The Russian Orthodox Church claimed exclusive authority over both Russian and Ukrainian lands. When the Bolsheviks deposed the tsar in 1917, civil war broke out throughout the Russian Empire. An independent Ukrainian state briefly established itself, allowing a so-called Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church to arise. But the Bolsheviks soon consolidated their power, Ukraine became a socialist republic within the Soviet Union, and the autocephalous church went into exile. When the Soviet Union incorporated additional territory into Ukraine after invading Poland in 1939, and again at the end of the World War II (when the Red Army controlled all of Eastern Europe), state authorities forced its Greek Catholic churches to become Russian Orthodox.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed the political and ecclesiastical landscape yet again. Ukraine became an independent nation. The Greek Catholic and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox churches reestablished themselves. Pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian factions vied for control of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which was affiliated with Moscow. In 2018–19, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, in a move that remains controversial among the world Orthodox churches, granted autocephaly (self-rule) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Most of Ukraine’s Orthodox parishes and priests remained loyal to the UOC under the Moscow Patriarchate—but soon after the Russian invasion, the UOC declared its independence from the Russian Orthodox Church. This newly constituted UOC claims that it, not the OCU, is Ukraine’s true Orthodox Church. But at least 1,500 of its parishes have transferred to the OCU.

The contemporary Russian version of this history, as propagated by President Putin and Patriarch Kirill, treats the emergence of a separate Ukrainian identity as a willful departure from God’s purposes for the Eastern Slavs. This account emphasizes the common roots of Russians and Ukrainians in Prince Vladimir’s baptism in 988. Russians and Ukrainians are said to be one people, born out of the same baptismal waters. They are brothers. When Kiev declined after 1240, Moscow preserved the one, true Orthodoxy of the Eastern Slavs. Moreover, according to the Russian narrative, the West has repeatedly tried to divide Russians and Ukrainians. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth forced its Orthodox population to become Catholic. Western powers and the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople supported the formation of an independent Ukrainian state and church after the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon invading Ukraine in 1941, the Nazis found willing allies among anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalists led by Stepan Bandera. In the aftermath of Ukrainian independence in 1991, a new conspiracy against Russian–Ukrainian unity appeared. The West pressed Ukraine into its sphere of influence, promising it membership in NATO and the European Union. Were this incorporation to take place, says Putin, Russia would be threatened militarily and economically, and Ukrainians would be forced to adopt corrupt, anti-Orthodox moral values, such as LGBTQ+ ideology.

Ukrainians tell the story differently. They are a people whose identity has been forged over the centuries in a crucible of suffering—suffering under the Mongol invasion, European imperial domination (Polish-Lithuanian, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Soviet), and now Russian military aggression. As a borderland, Ukraine has never belonged wholly to East or West. It has bridged the two worlds while forging an identity of its own. Ukrainians assert that they are a distinct people with a distinct language, contrary to the common Russian reduction of Ukrainians to “Little Russians” and the Ukrainian language to “a country dialect of Russian.” In the Ukrainian account, just as repressive Stalinist policies caused the Holodomor, the mass famine of 1932–33, Russia’s military aggression today amounts to a genocide against the Ukrainian people. In all these afflictions, the narrative continues, Ukrainians have preserved a truer, purer Orthodoxy than Russia’s, which is at best derivative of theirs. Ukrainian piety is deeper and more authentic, and their rates of church attendance are higher. At the same time, it is said, contemporary Ukraine is more tolerant of religious and cultural difference than is Russia. Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others live together in Ukraine peacefully. By this account, the truly great civilization of this part of the world is, in fact, Ukraine, not Russia.

My heart grows heavy when I hear Russians and Ukrainians use these stories against each other. A Russian colleague writes to me that Putin will soon triumph over “those fascist reptiles” who regularly launch drone attacks against her town near the Ukrainian border. In Germany, I meet Ukrainian refugees who refuse to speak Russian with me, though it is their mother tongue. They have utter contempt for Russians, calling them a backward, impoverished “village” people.

The Greek Orthodox theologian Vasilios N. Makrides argues that Orthodoxy inevitably tends toward nationalism. Orthodoxy has historically called for a harmonious, cooperative relationship between church and state, the Byzantine principle of symphonia. The emergence of modern nation-states, with their separation of church and state, led to the invention of national (and sometimes ethnic) identities. Orthodox churches redefined their relationship to the state by presenting themselves as guardians of their nations (which, in fact, they often had been). The identification of Orthodox faith with the historic nation intensified under communism, in reaction against its effort to eliminate religion and give people a new, secular identity.

Another factor contributing to religious nationalism has been the organization of Orthodox churches as local, territorial, autocephalous bodies. World Orthodoxy is not administered by any central figure or office; rather, each church body has its own spiritual and administrative head, typically a patriarch or a metropolitan. The rise of nationalist independence movements, especially in Eastern and Central Europe in the nineteenth century, impelled the formation of new autocephalous churches along strictly national lines. Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Albanian Orthodox churches emerged as their peoples threw off Ottoman rule.

Moreover, Orthodoxy has historically inculturated its teachings and practices in particular nations. Orthodox missionaries in Eastern and Central Europe did not hesitate to translate the Scriptures and liturgy into the local vernacular, thereby creating instruments (such as the Cyrillic alphabet) with which these peoples could develop their distinct ethnic, linguistic, and national identities. This Orthodox commitment to Christianizing indigenous cultural forms provided “fertile ground,” Makrides says, for “later Orthodox nationalization.” National identity became inseparable from Orthodox identity.

Orthodoxy’s ancient claim to be an elect people with a divine commission to preserve and transmit the one true faith converged with eighteenth-century Western Romantic notions of the unique character of each people and culture. Orthodoxy had shaped the collective consciousness of many peoples, and in the modern era they now regarded themselves as “chosen” nations. As Makrides notes, polemicists contrasted messianic ideas of a purer “Orthodox East,” characterized by harmonious, organic “community,” with the “decadent, individualistic, rationalistic (and ungodly) West.” Makrides cites the famous passage in Dostoevsky’s Demons in which Shatov declares that he has faith in the Russian people but is less sure that he believes in God. In this view, which in Orthodox regions may be as strong among unbelieving elites as among pious churchgoers, the deeper, more pristine faith of the East underwrites an exclusivist, nationalistic vision. Rather than placing the Eastern Slavs beneath a transcendent, judging God, Orthodoxy divinizes them and makes them the judges of righteousness.

The messianic view of collective destiny has shaped Orthodox understandings of political power. Traditionally, the patriarch would anoint a new tsar with oil, thereby setting him apart—indeed, sanctifying him—to serve the people’s earthly well-being. The church asserted that the tsar had absolute power on earth. No parliament or constitution should constrain him. He was accountable only to God. To be sure, the tsar was a mere man, and the church reminded him of that fact. At a coronation, the patriarch handed him a sack of dirt. Nevertheless, the tsar was nothing less than an icon of Christ, a shining reflection of the Lord who is the ultimate ruler of life and death. In his coronation, the tsar was endowed by God, through the church, with holiness. His sacred responsibility was to sanctify the nation.

The end of the Romanov dynasty, followed by seventy years of communist persecution, did not put an end to Russian and Ukrainian appeals to sanctifying power. Writing soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian political philosopher Arsenii Gulyga worried about foreign domination. He inveighed against the “false Russians” who now exploit the nation’s natural and industrial wealth to enrich themselves, and he mourned the nation’s moral impoverishment under and after communism. Gulyga argued that “Russia” was more than the Russian Federation that had emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union, and more than an ethnic identity. “Russia” was a spiritual reality, a unique culture with a special destiny. In the past, Russia had enriched the West and even saved Europe from Napoleon and Hitler. Russians must now recover that culture, reassert its greatness, and save the world from the West’s decadence.

The “true” Russia includes diverse nationalities both within and beyond the present borders of the Russian Federation—especially Ukraine and Belarus. According to Gulyga, “All of the territorial decisions of the communists and post-communists have dismantled Russia and are, therefore, illegal and invalid.” The creators of the “Russian idea,” its great religious thinkers at the turn of the century—Solov’ev, Dostoevsky, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Lossky, Frank, and Il’in—believed that only a strong, centralized government and a shared Orthodox identity could protect the cultural integrity and territorial unity of the Eastern Slavic peoples.

Along these lines, Gulyga argues that a nation’s form of government—monarchy, constitutional republic, or democracy—is a secondary fact. What is decisive is that the state be “sovereign” and “self-sufficient.” Gulyga insists, “The greatest vice of a state is weakness. Russia was always strong, thanks to the state. We were constantly attacked. But the state always beat back [our enemies] and guarded our independence and freedom.” Today, Russians must regain confidence in their unique historical mission and create a powerful state that will protect and promote their national interests.

Gulyga argues that Orthodoxy has historically united “Russians” culturally. Orthodoxy gave Russians the principle of sobornost’—which we might translate as conciliarity, communion, or even solidarity. Sobornost’ respects individuality but insists that the people are one and indissoluble. Orthodoxy sustains national identity because it has created and guarded the great churches and monasteries, the renowned icons and relics, and the famous pilgrimage sites and spiritual heroes that give Russians (in Gulyga’s broader sense of that term) pride in their nation, whether they are believers or not.

Wherever Gulyga says “Russia,” one could say “Ukraine.” For Ukrainian Orthodox political thinking likewise sacralizes the state and the nation. Although coronations are a thing of the past, every newly inaugurated president, in both post-communist Russia and Ukraine, goes to an Orthodox cathedral, lights a candle, and receives the blessing of the patriarch (Russia) or metropolitan (Ukraine). Hierarchs gather with the president on official state occasions, and state leaders declare their personal loyalty to the church.

State officials in Ukraine, as in Russia, have ways to ensure the churches’ loyalty. The Ukrainian state retains ownership of major religious properties that were confiscated by the communists. St. Sophia’s is a national museum, only occasionally open for worship. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) has been able to use the Monastery of the Caves and other major monastery complexes only through a lease agreement. The pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14) privileged the Moscow-oriented Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but presidents Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10) and Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) promoted the establishment of an autocephalous church, even meeting personally with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. Poroshenko was present at the enthronement of OCU Metropolitan Epiphanius in St. Sophia’s in 2019.

Volodymyr Zelensky, who identifies as Jewish, initially made a deliberate effort to stay out of church politics. He eschewed the pomp and ceremony—and religious trappings—of earlier inaugurations and did not enter the dispute between the two Orthodox churches currently vying to be the “true” Ukrainian church. Nevertheless, as the war has gone on, he has come under increasing pressure to grant favored status to the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). In 2023, Zelensky terminated the lease of the Monastery of the Caves complex to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), despite its assurance that it no longer answered to Moscow, and he allowed the OCU to celebrate Pascha (Easter) in one of the monastery churches. His security forces have raided UOC churches and monasteries in search of Russian “propaganda” and collaborators. Zelensky has signed into law a measure that moves the state’s observance of Christmas from January 7 (as is traditional in Russia and Ukraine) to December 25, which the OCU now recognizes. He supported recent legislation that effectively bans the UOC. If the law is fully implemented, Ukraine will move in Russia’s direction, treating one Orthodox body (in Ukraine’s case, the OCU) as a privileged national church.

Moreover, Zelensky has increasingly cloaked himself in Ukraine’s traditional Orthodox sacrality. He has invited leaders of the different churches to St. Sophia’s to pray with him for peace and celebrate Ukrainian independence. In 2022 he recorded an Easter greeting to the nation—from inside the cathedral, in front of its gilded iconostasis:

We are enduring dark times. And on this bright day, most of us are not in bright clothes. But we are fighting for a bright idea. On the bright side. And the truth, people, the Lord and the holy heavenly light are on our side. The power of the patron saint of the human race—the Oranta. She is above me. She is above us all. . . . Above the image of Oranta are the words from the Psalms: “God dwells in that city; it cannot be destroyed. From the very break of day, God will protect it.” On this Great Day, we all believe that our dawn is coming soon. . . . Light will overcome darkness, good will overcome evil, life will overcome death, and therefore Ukraine will surely win!

Zelensky concluded his address with the traditional Easter proclamation, “Christ is risen! Truly, he is risen!”

Meanwhile, Russia’s Patriarch Kirill has ordered his priests to pray at every liturgy, “Behold, those who want to fight have taken up arms against Holy Rus’, hoping to divide and destroy its united people. Arise, O God, to help your people, and grant us victory through your power.” The few clerics who have instead prayed for peace have faced harsh church discipline and threats of civil punishment.

Today, both Ukraine and Russia claim to represent Holy Rus’, the chosen people in whom God has brought heaven to earth. In their way of thinking, God’s holiness has entered into the Eastern Slavic world, into the people’s way of life and cultural achievements—and, indeed, into the very landscape. Alexander Solzhenitsyn captured a sense of this spirituality: “Wherever you are in the fields or wandering in the meadows [in the Russian or Ukrainian countryside], far from any habitation, you are never alone . . . The cupola of a bell tower always beckons . . . [The tolling bells] remind [us] to set aside trivial earthly matters and to offer up the moment to eternity.”

Patriarch Kirill has asserted that even during the Soviet period, Russian and Ukrainian culture preserved and transmitted Orthodox values and ways of life: “The Gospel was proclaimed primarily not by priests, missionaries, or Church literature. . . . Literally everything that had been created during centuries of cultural development—literature, poetry, architecture, art, and music—made a witness to Christ. . . . A Christian worldview, the Church’s wisdom, and biblical aphorisms lived on in the people’s consciousness.” A Soviet tour guide implicitly preached Christianity whenever she explained the meaning of a historic icon or the theological principles that guided the architectural design of a historic Orthodox cathedral.

This vision of divine glory infusing everyday life is powerful. It has touched me when I have visited Ukraine and Russia. I have heard the church bells as I wandered along the banks of the broad Volga, far from any town or city. I have fallen into prayer before the Oranta in Kyiv and before Andrei Rublev’s Trinity icon, recently returned, by presidential decree, to the ancient Holy Trinity Monastery north of Moscow.

American Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko once remarked: “As the grandson of Carpatho-Russian immigrants to the United States, I cannot imagine my life in any other society, and I feel extremely grateful for my personal destiny. But as an Orthodox Christian . . . I cannot imagine a way of life more insidious to Christian Orthodoxy and more potentially dangerous to human being and life.” Many contemporary Western Catholic and Protestant theologians sharply criticize the close link between politics and religion that characterizes Orthodoxy. They hope that liberal democracy will save the world from national, cultural, and ethnic idolatries. But Orthodox churches as a whole—and especially those in Russia and Ukraine—are not so sure. They worry that Western-style democracy inevitably implies a liberalism that promotes secularism and undermines the traditional Christian confidence that God can make all things sacred, orienting us to him in prayer and contemplation.

The early-twentieth-century German theologian Ernst Troeltsch contrasted the “church” with the “sect.” The Orthodoxy I see in Ukraine and Russia is largely of the “church type.” The church accommodates itself to the world, institutionalizes itself, and adopts a conservative social ethic. Believers live and act with a distinctive set of motivations (charity) but do so within inherited social structures. They do not seek to remake the world into the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the “sect” emphasizes the radical demands of the gospel and the kingdom. It constitutes itself as an alternative community of love and justice over and against a sinful world. In Orthodoxy, this type of Christianity has been less evident. As Hopko once said to me in conversation, “Perhaps only in a remote part of Russia are there a few monks who have not reduced Orthodoxy to the Russian nation.”

Troeltsch was nevertheless convinced by his review of church history that the radical impulses of the gospel never disappear entirely from the “church.” The Sermon on the Mount remains latent within it and, at unexpected moments, renews its challenges to our complacent worldliness. Troeltsch was especially interested in the ways in which sectarian Christian minorities often renew both the “church” and the wider society. To some degree, evangelical Protestants in Ukraine play this role. Though constituting perhaps only 2 to 4 percent of the population, they have taken the lead in humanitarian outreach and educational initiatives. Ukraine’s religious pluralism may also leaven Orthodoxy with sentiments that are antithetical to sacralized nationalism. In addition to sharing their country with Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and Greek Catholics (8 percent of the population), Orthodox believers are fragmented, unlike their Russian counterparts, into rival church bodies.

I have reasons to hope. Orthodoxy contains spiritual resources for tempering its tendency toward extreme forms of nationalism. Its highly developed liturgical life draws the believer upward. Its magnificent architecture, icons, hymnody, and rhythms and seasons of prayer prepare souls for another world. I have immersed myself in the Orthodox ethos. I have experienced for myself the ways in which it communicates the liberating impulses of the gospel, not the least of which is freedom from enslavement to worldly passions and sacralized political projects. “We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth.” The Orthodox liturgy invites us to glimpse that “other” world, where there is genuine communion among the persons of the Trinity, between God and humans, and among humans themselves, who have been created in God’s image.

As the war has intensified, I have asked myself: How is it possible that Russians and Ukrainians participate in the same liturgy on Sunday mornings, receive the same revelation of a heavenly reality in which God and humans are at peace and in perfect sobornost, and yet are unable to transcend national and ecclesiastical self-interest? Even the liturgy is now a matter of contention. Should Ukrainians celebrate it in the vernacular or in the traditional Church Slavonic? Which hierarchs should be included in, or removed from, commemoration? Will Ukrainians honor “Russian” saints, or Russians honor “Ukrainian” ones—even those men and women who were martyred for their faith (and not because of their nationality) by the Bolsheviks?

Still, I do not lose hope. Whatever their political battles, Russia’s and Ukraine’s Orthodox churches never radically change the liturgy. What they have inherited from St. Basil the Great and St. John Chrysostom continues to point them heavenward, to reveal for a brief moment a different, more profound reality, and to remind them of the kingdom of God, which they share with all of God’s elect.

Prince Vladimir (or Volodymyr) is thought to have laid the cornerstone for St. Sophia in Kyiv not long after his conversion. His son Yaroslav commissioned the luminous mosaic of the Oranta. Over the centuries, the Oranta has seen war and ruin, restoration and renewal. The atheistic Bolshevik regime nearly razed her and her cathedral to the ground. Today, the cathedral itself is borderlands—a state museum, a national shrine, a historic place that belongs to none of the rival churches and, yet, to all of them. As she has for centuries, the Oranta lifts her arms and hands toward heaven, in the ancient Christian gesture of prayer. She prays for her Russian and Ukrainian children.