Thedeship, state and idolatry

One of the reasons that Eastern Orthodoxy is so attractive, is that its lived history invalidates all the great idolatries of the modern age. This holds true for the two great idolatries of the modern Left: Marxism (which, as numerous Christian thinkers have pointed out, is actually a chiliastic and materialist heresy) and postmodernism-constructivism (with its dæmonic urge to demolish and deconstruct what is true). But it also holds true for the several great idolatries before which the modern Right invariably bows: capitalism, fundamentalism, technocracy and nationalism.

The incompatibility of the truths of Orthodox anthropology and metaphysics with capitalist praxis has been well-documented and explored in other places: in short, human beings in Orthodox teaching are made for communion with each other and with God, and not for separation into constellations of disembodied wills and negative rights; and (Actonite fantasies aside) the œconomic ramifications of this teaching set the face of Orthodoxy, as it were, solidly against capitalism. Read in an open spirit, the Fathers of the Church were not particularly great fans of the idea of private property – accepting it as, at best, a necessary evil in a fallen world; and at worst, one of the great stumbling blocks to salvation. Still less were they fans of the idea that acquisition of material wealth was in itself virtuous or praiseworthy.

Likewise with fundamentalism and technocracy. The Orthodox Church has been dead-set from its inception against the idea of sola scriptura, instead holding that Scripture is given authority and life only within its rooted context of living and lived Tradition. This is a needed witness against those (even within the Church itself!) who would point to a dead letter, uprooted from all its context of pastoral oikonomía, as the sine qua non of Christian praxis. And the idea that human salvation can be attained in a secular way, by technical advancement and eugenics (one of the more grotesque conceits of the neoreactionary movement, and one which CS Lewis rightly recognised as dæmonic) is opposed strongly by the Orthodox teachings of sobornost’ and theosis. Human beings are saved through communion with each other, even and especially with the broken ones; and they are saved through participating together in the energies of God.

But it’s nationalism I want to focus on here.

It is important to note, over and over again, that Orthodox teaching has historically considered nation and state as separate concerns. This is owing, to a large degree, to its long association with the Eastern Roman Empire, and the distinction that needed to be drawn between the citizen as Rhōmaios (a political description, a ‘Romanity’ defined as subjection to the Emperor) and as Graikós (a linguistic description, a belonging to a thede with roots in earlier classical Antiquity). Though in its declining years the two came to be more conflated, in the Eastern Roman Empire one did not have to be ethnically or linguistically Greek to be a ‘Roman’! Syrians, Bulgars, Serbs and Dacians were all ‘Romans’, even though Greek was to them a second language. The Church had a close relationship to the State – expressed in the idea of sumphonía; and it had a close relationship to the thede through its tradition of preaching in the popular, common language. However – and this point deserves to be emphasised – the two relationships were separate and hierarchical in nature.

The disastrous, lamentable disintegration of the Eastern Roman Empire, however, and the opposition and cruelty to which the Turks subjected the Church and its subjects, created a situation whereby the Orthodox Church began to sympathise with (and allow itself to be used as a basis for) levelling, revolutionary movements of national liberation, which in secular logic conjoined the state with the idea of the nation in ways which were foreign to the classical mind of the Church. Although for contemporary purposes the Church was useful to the Byronic nationalist ‘liberator’, the identification of the state with the thede largely destroyed the monarchical principle that had held in place the layered, both-localist-and-cosmopolitan concept of ‘Romanity’, and in the process crowded out the Church from consideration. In the Empire, the Church served as the conciliar weft that could unite bickering and parochial ethnoi into a greater brotherhood, in a way the Emperor alone, with his ‘Roman’ dominion, could not do. In the secular-republican-nationalist era to follow, between the crowds screaming for Barabbas and the republican Pilates who rode to power amongst them, Jesus Christ and His Church would not find a place – except on Golgotha. Not socialists – no, not socialists; socialists, however wrongheadedly secular, at least have shades of the old brotherhood of Christian ‘Romanity’ left in them – but nationalists, for all their vaunted ‘right-ness’ as they march under their godless tricolours, will always, always be among the first to clamour for the crucifixion of a true Emperor!

And herein lies the rub. Just as nationalism and its sins will always be a temptation and stumbling-block for our separated Latin brethren on account of their doctrinal relationship to power during and after the Investiture Controversies, so it will always be a temptation and a stumbling-block for the Orthodox Christians on account of our history. And there are no greater victims of those sins, than those thedes who, like the Hebrews in the Exodus or in the Babylonian Exile, wander the deserts without a land and a state of their own. ‘Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.’ Not only Jews, but even Orthodox thedes like the Gypsies and the Rusins, are exemplars of this. It is worthy of note – and it ought to be a matter for deep shame among us Orthodox – that Rusins, for all their closeness to the broader world of the Rus’ both Russian and Ukrainian, fared far better (both culturally and materially) under the non-nationalist, quasi-Catholic Czechoslovak government of Švehla (and later under the Slovak government of Fico, which recognises them as a minority), than they ever would under the nationalist, ostensibly-Orthodox Ukrainians, who continue to regard Rusins as simply backward ‘highlanders’ to be assimilated. For shame!

Loving your thede as your family, loving your neighbours, laying down your life for your friends as suggested by the Basis of the Social Concept – these things are all good and admirable. Having a thede, having kinship ties, being rooted to a particular community, is a good thing! But nationalism – as a revolutionary ideological tendency which kills monarchs, which confines religion to the realm of the private, which stokes enmities among thedes, which oppresses the poor – this is not an ideology which Orthodox people should abide. ‘It is contrary to Orthodox ethics to divide nations into the best and the worst and to belittle any ethnic or civic nation. Even more contrary to Orthodoxy are the teachings which put the nation in the place of God or reduce faith to one of the aspects of national self-awareness.’

EDIT (2 February): Father Stephen Freeman has some profound thoughts in a similar direction on his own excellent blog, Glory to God for All Things; I might pick some nits with a couple of the historical readings (or perhaps not; I get the feeling his knowledge of history is far deeper than mine!), but I decidedly and emphatically agree with his conclusions. The modern nation-state is to be treated as a temporal convenience; it is not to be held aloft as the source of revealed truth.