Hints toward a post-imperial ecclesiology?

Chapel interior, Imperial Winter Palace at Saint Petersburg

Our Orthodox Church, at the moment, is dealing with some rather bad cases of imperial hangover, which lie behind the current schismatic tensions between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Œcumenical. That’s ‘cases’, with a plural. It seems it takes a people with a long history of subjugation – under the Byzantines, under the Turks, under the French – to see clearly that Constantinople is no more free of imperial vainglory than Moscow is. The Arab Christians of the Patriarchate of Antioch understand perhaps better than anyone else the dangers of the ideology of Rōmiosunē to the fabric of a local church, and thus seem to have the best degree of perspective on it. And it is an unfortunate reality, as no less sharp a commentator than John Milbank seems to realise, that modern Greek nationalism – remember that the bulk of the Philikē Hetaireia were drawn from the Phanariots as well as Balkan Greeks and the diaspora! – is largely a façade constructed of deliberately-abstracted Romantic fantasies, and a deliberately-selective historiography of ‘interval’. What stands in now for an ideology of empire is in fact little more than a pathetically ‘thin’, narrow and exclusionary self-assertion of an imagined ‘Greekness’. I will say this for the ‘Russkiy mir’, at least it acknowledges something of the differences between nation and state.

In all seriousness, we Orthodox should be listening with special and rapt attention to the Arab Christians on this question. The Orthodox who live in the Arab world and in Africa are uniquely fitted to comment on the current entangled crisis of ‘imperial hangover’ and nationalism embroiling the faith, because of their experiences on the political side of the question, not just the ecclesiastical. They are, in a real rather than in an imagined or appropriated sense, heirs to the Non-Aligned Movement. They had to live through a long era of world superpowers fighting proxy battles on their front porches, often to the great detriment of their flocks and their communities.

With all of this in mind: a recent interview with Fr Jivko (Panev) by the Italian Catholic magazine Il Regno, posted on the excellent website Orthodox Synaxis, shows us just how deeply this question of nationalism and our wholly-inadequate response to it as a Church is really biting us in the bottom now. He highlights in particular, the close links between autocephalism (the idea that every ‘nation’ ought to have its own church) and phyletism (the ideology of race-nationalism as applied to ecclesiology). He points out in no uncertain terms that the entire project of Poroshenko’s ‘local church’ in the Ukraine is an autocephalist and phyletist project. And he points out how deeply (and how obviously) the whole of the Ukrainian problem is tied up with the no-less-painful experiences of the nineteenth-century Balkans: not just Greece, but also Bulgaria, Romania and Albania.

It is therefore highly interesting to me, that Fr Jivko closes his interview on a note drawn from Metropolitan Amfilohije (Radović) of Montenegro, who believes that the Constantinian period of the Church is at an end, and instead calls respectfully for a return to our ‘pre-imperial structure’. Long story short, I can’t help but agree with him – but what a burden that is! As Metropolitan Amfilohije himself makes clear, we cannot, and should not, proceed from here without some clear view of what we will carry forward with us, and how we will carry it.

We are, whether we like it or not, a Church of imperial legacies. We don’t get to choose that, and never really have gotten to choose it. But despite the potency of our Orthodox imperial hangovers nowadays, we are ironically a long way from the rich and honourable imperial legacy of multivalent and mediated loyalties that was such a hallmark of Byzantine statecraft. We carry forward from that imperial legacy of mediated loyalties certain intellectual and practical habits of symphonía and sobornost’. But without a practical framework for living them out even in our ecclesiastical life (to say nothing of the gæopolitical one!), those terms are just so much hot air.

Given my familial loyalties and ties to both of these places, I hope my gentle readers will forgive me this brief note of favouritism. But it seems to me that the places which seem to have best preserved (or recovered) the uniquely-Byzantine memory of this multi-dimensional fabric of loyalties – the places which never really collapsed national feeling into the ready-imported mould of the Westphalian nation-state or into absolutism – are Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Even in a materialist sense, the Yugoslav legacy of œconomic democracy seems to be an indicator of the longevity of these habits.

Long story short: we Orthodox need to get our act together, and soon. I don’t think this is a question anymore. That particular bad news has been dropping on our doorstep in overabundance for years now. The good news is, that we are not without intellectual or practical resources for addressing it. Those resources don’t do us much good, though, if we cannot find the grace to accept them where they are found – even and especially if they are found in poor and humble places. Our Church’s imperial legacies don’t have to be a ‘weight of chains’ (to badly mix the metaphors deployed by two very different Yugoslavs, Saint Justin Popovich and Boris Malagurski), if we see fit to harness them with a certain degree of generosity, creativity and eirenicism. May God grant it that we find them.

Mní wičóni

The headwaters of the Mississippi

Last week, I attended a formal protest organised by members of Honour the Earth, Youth Climate Intervenors, MN 350, the North Star Chapter of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace at the State Capitol building, to present a petition with 67,000 signatures to Governor-Elect Tim Walz and Lieutenant Governor-Elect Peggy Flanagan to stop the proposed new oil pipeline route for the Enbridge Line 3 project. I was impressed that both Mr Walz and Ms Flanagan came out to listen and talk to us in person, but given Governor-Elect Walz’s prior support for the pipeline it remains to be seen whether they will take action. This protest compasses a broad variety of concerns, from indigenous rights to clean water to climate activism. This dangerous and frankly-needless corporate boondoggle stands to threaten the natural beauty of the Mississippi headwaters, the lakes and wetlands throughout northern Minnesota, those of us who depend on water from the Mississippi and thus, the entirety of the river system downstream.

I’m going to have to beg your indulgence now, gentle readers, that this post is likely to be a retread in some degree of the admirable work of Fr Kaleeg (Hainsworth) on the subject, and of my œcological reflections last Theophany which were deeply inspired by Fr Kaleeg, as well as by Saint Gregory the Theologian and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Saint Gregory’s poetic treatment of our mediated vision of the Divine in the created order provides us with a certain insight that all water is holy water. But it is necessary, as I think the commentary from Matt Celestine on that post proves, to bring these reflections down to the realm of the concrete, the specific, the embodied.

The natural place to begin is with the event itself. Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, and the revelation to the eyes of belief through the transparent and life-giving element of water of the vision of the Holy Trinity, did render that water holy. But we must remember the circumstances in which the Theophany occurred. Saint John the Forerunner, calling his nation to repentance, drew them out into the wilderness, drew them away from the city. He called to them from a remote place, a politically-symbolic border between the West and the East. The act of washing oneself in the river, in the middle of a wilderness between Rome and a foreign land, was to the Jews of the time already symbolic of the Exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea out of Egypt, out of slavery, and into the desert. Saint John the Forerunner’s baptism was an act of political subversion, with Rome standing in for Egypt. But when Christ Our Lord undertook to be baptised Himself, it was not only a symbol of rejection of the logic of empire, but also the true appearance of the Holy Ghost to the world, a manifestation of new life.

The Mississippi River is not the Jordan – true. But it has in common with the Jordan these characteristics. Like the Jordan, the Mississippi River has long stood as a great border between the west (of the North American continent) and the east. It remains the holy source of life to many nations on either side of that divide: to the Cheyenne, to the Anishinaabe, to the Dakota and to the Meskwaki. To the Cheyenne the river is the ‘Big River of Oil’ (let’s not render that imagery literal, what say?); to the Anishinaabe it is simply Gichi-Ziibi, the ‘Great River’. Further south, the descendants of the great world civilisation which built the mounds (the Choctaw, for example) still revere the waters of the Mississippi, calling it ‘Beyond Age’. When the brutal Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto beheld the Mississippi, even he held it in a kind of reverence. We do not have to admire the man, and we probably shouldn’t, to recognise a certain degree of reflective truth in its similarities with the Jordan when he called the Mississippi ‘Rio del Espíritu Santo’: the River of the Holy Ghost.

All of us who live here – Natives, white, Asian and black folks, Christians and not – depend on the Great River for so much in our lives. We don’t only drink that water and use it to wash clothes, though we certainly do that. My wife Jessie and son Albert were baptised last month in water ultimately drawn from the Mississippi. As a machinist, the roto-grinders I run depend on a constant flow of coolant (an emulsion of oil in filtered de-ionised water) to keep finished parts ground to a precise size. Even my job literally depends on clean water, ultimately sourced in the river, being readily available. The Orthodox Churches in Minnesota recognise this and demonstrate it, not just with pretty words or symbolism, but in a physical, specific and concrete liturgical way. Last year we held the Great Blessing of Waters out-of-doors in the Mississippi River itself. Part of the Liturgy involves a blessed cross being cast into the river, and someone diving in to retrieve it. In this blessing of the waters we show that we have a real stake in the cleanliness and health of the water that we live by. The conservation and protection of our fresh water is something we can and should fight for.

I believe therefore that it is meet and right for us stand in solidarity with our Native neighbours on this issue, just as Saint Herman or Saint Tikhon would have done. To us, Christ is the living water. Not only does our iconography show that was it in the midst of the Jordan’s water that the Holy Spirit descended from the heavens, but it was water along with blood that flowed from His side when He was pierced with the spear at Golgotha. Thus, we can and should say gladly and without fear along with our neighbours the Dakota: ‘Mní wičóni’ – ‘Water is life’. And we should oppose the construction of Line 3.

A war on monks – Kerch Strait, martial law, church politics

Satellite image of the Kerch Strait

The situation has been getting worse and worse for the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, particularly since the Kerch Strait affaire last week off the shores of the Russian provinces of Krasnodar and the Crimea, and the subsequent imposition of martial law by the current government. It is a particularly interesting question why, if indeed the Russian state has been waging war against them all this time, the government would choose to use the Kerch Strait incident as a pretext for imposing military rule on the east and south of the country. However, for giving the government greater licence to crack down on religious expression for those Ukrainians who are still members of the sole legitimate Orthodox Church in the country (or, indeed, on other forms of internal opposition) the prospect of martial law presents a tempting opportunity.

Since the Kerch Strait incident, the Sluzhba Bezpeki (the Ukrainian Security Service) have been harassing Orthodox monks and priests with random detentions, surveillance, warrantless searches, property seizures and house raids. A number of Orthodox monks, including Metropolitan Onufriy and Metropolitan Pavel (head of the Kiev Caves Lavra Monastery) have been placed on a list of state enemies by the Security Service-curated website Mirotvorets (alongside such people as, uh, former Pink Floyd vocalist Roger Waters). This is a clear campaign of religious suppression by the right-wing neoliberal Ukrainian government led by Poroshenko. As Fr Steven (Clark) at Ancient Traditional Fish adroitly put it in a comment on Facebook: ‘This is what persecution of the Orthodox Church looks like.’

But why? And why now? These, I believe, are indeed the operative questions here.

I think that the standard response from those hostile to the Moscow Patriarchate, that the government is acting, in good Rousseauian fashion, according to a legitimate aspiration of the Ukrainian people for ecclesiastical independence, simply doesn’t cut it from a factual perspective. (It is also very dangerous from a moral perspective, for reasons which seem rather obvious to me as an American of Jewish descent, but which don’t seem to be obvious to the defenders of Ukrainian honour and glory.) The standard response to these questions from Orthodox quarters sympathetic to the Moscow Patriarchate, at least from what I have seen, seems to be (roughly) ‘fascists gonna be fascist’. As my own gentle readers will be aware, I demur a bit from this standard line, and I think it is important to make the distinction particularly in this case. What we are witnessing is not necessarily a particularity of fascist violence per se. It is careening dangerously close to fascism, particularly with the involvement of the security services and police against monks. But I would argue instead, argue that it is a particularity of sæcular power seeking to subvert ecclesiastical prerogatives. Here is where I am going to start sounding a little bit like my old Radox-tinged pre-chrismation Episcopalian self, so bear with me a bit.

The current leadership of the Ukraine have (at, it seems, the insistence of American and Western European governments) adopted a zero-sum political stance which regards Russian interests as diametrically opposed to Ukrainian ones. The solution, in the eyes of the post-Maidan government, has been to ideologically attack any semblance of likeness or commonality between the two countries, unless that commonality could somehow be weaponised against the Russian people. The resurgence of the 19^th century nationalist myths of Hrushevsky, the racialist attacks on the Asiatic characteristics of Russians, even the heightened physical attacks on Jews and Romani, are linked back to this ideological stance.

The substance of the attacks themselves gives us a hint of their sæcular nature and origins. The historiographical mythmaking of Mikhail Hrushevsky which underlies the current ideological formations in the post-Maidan era, was indeed a sæcular enterprise which took the Ukrainian nationality, as defined by blood-kinship, as primary, and the religious characteristics of the Ukrainian people as incidental. This division of the Kievan Rus’ into a racially-pure Ukrainian core and an Asiatic Russian periphery allowed him to mythologise a rupture in the history of the church, between the Kiev and the Vladimir-Rostov-Moscow periods of the church. The logic of the faith, for Hrushevsky, is subsumed in an ontology of violence that pits various racial interests against each other: in this, his thought is thoroughly of a piece with that of his Western European sæcularist contemporaries.

Gyorgi Fedotov, on the other hand, is a religious historian and thus more Orthodox in his perspective, his own liberal-socialist politics notwithstanding. Though he is a careful historian and thus loath to manufacture agreement or rupture where none exists, he nonetheless begins from the standpoint of religious psychology, and attempts to sketch for us the religious life of Kievan Rus’ from the inside. His historiography is not naïve; he is more open than the Slavophils to considering that religious forms even within Orthodoxy may have been subject to dramatic change. Indeed, this is one central point of his thesis, which he aims squarely against both Ukrainian and Great-Russian nationalist mythmaking. The inward character of Kievan spirituality was altered: in Kiev herself, by an infusion of Western rationalism and warrior-spirituality; and in Vladimir (and subsequently Moscow), by a spirit of cynicism in the face of political manipulation. Only in Old Novgorod did the traces of the old radical caritative heart of Kievan spirituality linger. Thus, when he argues against Hrushevsky and attacks the history of ecclesial rupture as a fantasy, he does so from an internal perspective that looks not only for outward signs (like a siege or the movement of a bishop), but for inward changes in the religious consciousness.

This dispute between two historians allows us to trace the roots of the current problem, but it is not identical to the problem itself. The problem really rests in the historical expectation by Maidanists that the Church-state relationship will remain, as it was under the Tsarist government and as was attempted by the Soviet, cæsaropapist in orientation, with the sæcular authority (whether Tsar or chairman or president) directly governing and managing a church which is essentially a state bureau. In reality, however, the Russian Church, both in the recent past and in the present, has bespoken a degree of independence from the government that would have been preposterous to conceive under Alexander III or Khrushchev, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has (for the present) an even greater degree. Nonetheless, this is the relationship the Maidanists imagine, and which propaganda tells them is the case, between the Danilov and the Kremlin.

Once thus imagined, this cæsaropapist phantasm becomes both something to be feared and something to be envied. Feared, both because it represents something foreign, eastern and menacing, and because it already exists within the borders, and its membership thus possibly constitutes a disloyal fifth column. (Note the similarity to, and commensurability with, the dual loyalty canard against Jews.) And envied, because the cæsaropapist model is seen as an effective way to keep the Church on a tight leash and under direct control. Hence the desire for a united anti-church, cobbled together from various existing nationalist anti-churches – with the impending blessing from la Rome deuxième, caught up as she is in her own imperial hangover.

Thus, the real problem is this: merely by existing, the Church presents an unanswerable challenge to this comprehensively sæcular account of reality, just as it would to any such comprehensive account across the political spectrum. Monastic communities, which themselves first arose as a form of social protest against sæcular life, doubly so. The Church operates according to a logic that takes the Resurrection, the Paschal overturn, as the central fact of our shared, political life. Such an orientation cannot help pointing to our essential similarities, over the foci of any more selective forms of belonging.

Thus, when their highest hierarch Metropolitan Onufriy makes a peaceful protest against state violence in the East of the country, both literally and figuratively saying that ‘Black Lives Matter’, he is behaving in a way that the same Ukrainian state, which demands loyalty to itself precede any other, cannot tolerate. And that is why the Soviet-legacy surveillance and security apparatus has mobilised against him. Not because he, or any of his monastic brothers, is a Russian agent, but on the contrary, merely because he refuses to be anyone’s agent but Christ’s. May our same Saviour and lover of mankind keep and protect His Beatitude and his monastic brethren in this time of crisis for their Church.

Holy Hierarch Berin of Dorchester, Apostle to the West Saxons

Saint Berin of Dorchester

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate Berin of Dorchester, a pre-Schismatic saint (either a Frank or a Lombard by birth; the sources are conflicted on this point) ordained in Genoa by the Archbishop Asterius of Milan, and sent to Britain by the controversial Pope Honorius to convert the West Saxons of England to Christianity. Saint Berin promised the Pope of Rome to, as Bede the Venerable put it, ‘sow the seeds of the holy faith in the most inland and remote regions of the English’. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the new bishop landed at Portchester in Wessex (now Hampshire) in 634, and, upon finding the folk living in the Thames watershed to be still mired in their heathen beliefs, decided to stay among them rather than going further inland. According to the legend, he healed a blind and deaf heathen woman at Portchester, who, grateful for gaining her sight and hearing, told Bishop Berin where he might find the king in those parts.

He came before Cynegils, King of the West Saxons, who lived at Cholsey in the Berkshire Downs. Cynegils, hoping to intimidate the Christian Bishop, told Saint Berin to teach the Gospel first at the barrows at Churn Knob outside Blewbury, which had been hallowed ground to the heathen for a long time. However, unfazed, Saint Berin preached the Gospel so that many West Saxons heard him and believed, and though he did not manage to convert Cynegils at Churn Knob, the king was nonetheless impressed by Saint Berin’s boldness and allowed him to preach throughout his writ. Staying then among the West Saxons, Saint Berin taught the Gospel, healed the sick, worked wonders, and brought many of the West Saxon folk into the Church.

Saint Bede, a true man of the English North, has a particular interest in the legend of Saint Berin: that Berin’s conversion of Cynegils intimately involved Saint Oswald, Martyr-King of Northumbria. At the time, Cynegils wanted to ally himself with Oswald against the Mercians under Penda, who were a threat to both Wessex and Northumbria. Oswald came southward to meet Cynegils (causing a holy spring to gush forth at Wokingham when he prayed there for water on the way), but the saintly king would not ally himself with a heathen. Thereupon, Cynegils assented to be brought into the Church by Saint Berin; and Saint Oswald was present at the baptism in 635 – the two kings thereupon became not only allies, but fast friends, ‘lovely indeed and well-pleasing to God’.

The newly-illumined Cynegils gave Saint Berin a bishop’s seat in the town of Dorchester-on-Thames from whence to do his holy works. The saint blessed the grounds for a cathedral, Dorchester Abbey, and proceeded to baptise great throngs of people in the name of the Holy Trinity – holding an especially large mass baptism of West Saxons at Bapsey Pond in Taplow (which is unfortunately now owned by a Japanese Buddhist sect). He founded several churches besides in Wessex, including the Cathedral at Winchester. Saint Berin baptised Cynegils’s son Cwichelm and his grandson Cuþræd, but Cwichelm died in the same year as his baptism and the kingdom of Wessex passed into the hands of Cynegils’s heathen younger son Cenwealh, who would not hear of Christ from Saint Berin’s lips. Cenwealh angered the Mercian king Penda by slighting the latter’s sister, whom he divorced to marry another woman – the subsequent war between Penda and Cenwealh saw the West Saxon king driven into the arms of the East Angles, whose Christian king Anna welcomed and sheltered him. It was in these straits, in East Anglia, that Cenwealh repented and received the Christian faith.

Bishop Berin reposed on the third of December, 649, and was buried at Dorchester. He was glorified as a saint almost at once. Though the move was not without controversy, his successor, Bishop Saint Hædde of Wessex, had Berin’s incorrupt relics translated to Winchester and placed in a state of honour at the cathedral there. These relics thereupon healed the illnesses and disabilities of many folk who came to visit them, and the relics of Saint Berin drew many pilgrims thence. Winchester Cathedral still has in its possession an Orthodox icon of Saint Berin written by the iconographer Sergei Fyodorov.

Holy Hierarch Berin of Dorchester, pray to God for us sinners!

Venerable Botwulf, Abbot of Icanho

Saint Botwulf the Abbot

Today, the first of December, we celebrate the translation of the relics of yet another great Benedictine monk of England and widely-beloved saint, Botwulf the Venerable, Abbot of Icanho – after whom over sixty-four churches in England were once dedicated. One of the earliest East Anglian saints and a particular patron of travellers and pilgrims, Botwulf the Venerable kept steadily and humbly to his work despite the political and religious turmoil that surrounded him, and indeed founded a significant number of monasteries further afield than his own native Suffolk.

Botwulf, an East Angle born around 615, was the elder of two brothers, the younger being Æðelwulf. While they were both yet young, the East Angles fell away from Christianity and began again worshipping heathen idols – however, thanks to the vigorous missionary efforts of the Irish mystic Saint Fursey, who founded a monastery at Burgh, the relapse into heathenry was blessedly only temporary. The brothers Botwulf and Æðelwulf took their education at Saint Fursey’s monastic school at Burgh, and were tonsured as monks there. When the heathen Penda King of Mercia attacked the East Angles, the two brothers fled southward into Sussex, where they joined a monastery in Bosham led by Saint Deicola.

As one may witness from his patronage, Botwulf did not keep the Benedictine rule of stability particularly well: he travelled to Francia to learn the spiritual disciplines from the monks there; and upon his return he became, like Saint Fursey, a determined missionary in various parts of his native England. He founded a monastery at Icanho, and dedicated it to the memory of the lately-reposed Anna King of the East Angles, who had fallen in battle against another Mercian invasion. It is said that Saint Botwulf struggled mightily against, and drove away, the dæmons that lived in the brackish fens that surrounded the site of the monastery – the land afterward became blessedly fertile and good for the monks and the surrounding freeholders to reclaim and farm. It is on this account that Botwulf became especially beloved of workers of the earth, and is often shown in holy art depicting him with a scythe or a plough.

The abbot Botwulf became widely known as a starets, a beloved elder and spiritual father to many (both monks and layfolk, both high and low in earthly stead), and his monastery grew in renown throughout England. As it says in his English hagiography:

All loved Botwulf: he was always humble, modest, friendly and mild in communication, proved the truth of his sermons by the example of his life… He taught his monks the rules of Christian perfection and the decrees of the Church Fathers. He thanked God both in good and sorrowful times alike, knowing that He makes everything for the good of those who love Him.

Very much like his northern contemporary and fellow-monastic Saint Hilda, Abbot Botwulf took the commonality and the poverty of the monastic life very seriously. One time in particular, he gave away the whole of the monastery’s stock of foodstuffs to the poor, and was scolded by his brother-monks for his profligacy. However, the brothers were soon stunned into awed silence when they beheld boats sailing upriver to Icanho bearing gifts from wealthy donors. Botwulf, a keen river-man from his youth, boated all through the newly-rechristened East Anglia preaching the Gospel and making the East Angles steadfast in their twice-found faith; it is for this reason that many of the churches dedicated to Saint Botwulf – from Lincs in the north and Shropshire in the west down to Kent and Sussex in the southeast – stand on riverbanks. Whether from Icanho or in his travels afield within England, the holy abbot wrought wonders and gave good rede to his monastic sons. Icanho became renowned as a great centre of holiness, drawing thither for spiritual and practical help all kinds of folk from princes and abbots down to farmers.

Again like Saint Hilda, Saint Botwulf was stricken in his later years with a lingering illness, from which he gave forth no complaint but instead gave thanks to God and turned his attention inward. Indeed, he reposed in the same year, 680, as his sister-abbot in the north. As it turned out, his relics travelled as far abroad and themselves worked wonders as he had during his life; many of them found their way to Ely, Bury St Edmunds, Thorney and London, where a number of churches were righted in his honour. Saint Botwulf’s memory has been cherished faithfully by many generations of English Catholics (and also Orthodox Christians), as well as Christians in the Teutonic countries like Sweden, Denmark, Frisia, Saxony and Kievan Rus’.

Venerable Elder Botwulf, our father among the Saints, pray to Christ our God for us sinners!

Holy Hierarch Ælfríc of Abingdon and Canterbury

Abingdon Abbey

The feast of Saint Ælfríc of Abingdon, the late tenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury and successor to Saint Dúnstán in that office, is celebrated tomorrow on the Orthodox Old Calendar. Ælfríc belonged to a family of well-born Kentish Jutes, and he spent much of his early career as a simple Benedictine monk at Abingdon Abbey in Berkshire. Being high-born, he was not well-fit for bookish pursuits, but as a man of his time he found his calling in shielding his flock from Danish sea-raids with his body during the ill-fated reign of Æþelræd II ‘Unræd’ in England.

Ælfríc took well, it seems, to the monastic life, and he was chosen as abbot for the Cathedral and Abbey Church of Saint Alban in Herts; after this, he was given the Bishopric of Ramsbury in the year 990 and the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 995. He was (and this was a particularly crucial issue in this era of the English Church) a bold and vocal champion of the rights of monasteries vis-à-vis sæcular lords and kings, who regularly attempted to wrest control of lands from the Church as well as the right to make appointments of high clergy. (This issue came to a head, not coincidentally, in the wake of the Great Schism, and has never really gone away. It is indeed a problem in some Orthodox jurisdictions.) Ælfríc managed to secure for his home abbey of Abingdon in particular the right to elect their own abbots internally, as well as getting rulers to return lands that had been taken from the abbey since the death of a former abbot of Abingdon, Æþelwold.

Æþelræd ‘Unræd’ was particularly egregious in this regard, in the early part of his reign. He had appointed a political yes-man to head Abingdon, and had proceeded to take Church lands and distribute them to his vassals. Ælfríc was instrumental, as bishop, in getting Æþelræd to repent of his anti-clerical actions. As Abingdon’s biography of Ælfríc states:

Æþelwold had adopted a French practice of including in his charters statements that anyone breaking their terms to the detriment of the monks would be under a curse. Nonetheless, after 984 when both Æþelwold and Osgar died, King Æþelræd gave the abbacy to an unsuitable candidate in exchange for a large sum of money and began to take over and disperse the Abbey’s endowments. In the early 990s, with the resumption of intense and destructive Viking incursions, Æþelræd became convinced that the curse was taking effect. There was a negotiation in which Ælfríc must have taken a major part, and at Pentecost (Whitsun) 993, at a large gathering in Winchester, the king admitted his faults and issued a charter of reconciliation. The monks had shown their forgiveness by asking God to forgive him. They had celebrated 1500 masses and completed a thousand ‘singings’ of psalms for the king’s soul, and he now guaranteed the abbey’s liberties and began a lengthy process of returning its properties. Ælfríc was one of the first of a long list of witnesses to the charter. He was also given one of the disputed estates, which he duly left to the abbey in his will.

Though this is the only example that the sæcular Abingdon biography gives, we see in Ælfríc’s letters that this was neither a lone nor a self-serving stance; indeed, he is consistent in his epistolary exhortations to the laity to be just and fair in their dealings, merciful to the poor, generous to orphans and widows, meek and peaceable in their interactions with each other; and there is good evidence to suggest that as abbot he made himself an example in all of these things. Ælfríc was apparently far better at being an abbatial administrator than he was a scholar or ascetic; even so, he commissioned hagiographic works commemorating his predecessors, Æþelwold and Dúnstán. As Archbishop of Canterbury he also championed and deepened Æþelwold’s policy of reforms against simony and finical abuses of church property, for which he was accounted a ‘beacon among the bishops’.

However, in addition to all of this, when the Danes began raiding the Kentish shoreline Ælfríc seems to have taken up arms in defence of his home (as indeed, in time of distress, some of the monks of Radonezh did when the Tatars attacked Russia at the Battle of Kulikovo). His will, additionally, leaves to the English king a number of ships and a store of military equipment, and a request that with the receipt of this gift by the king, the military levies on the common folk be reduced. Even though the deeds which he himself is supposed to have done against the Danes have been lost to time, his epitaph at Abingdon describes him as a ‘Defender of the Kingdom’ and ‘Guardian of the Homeland of the English’, which seem to indicate a certain degree of military exploit during his time as bishop.

The hagiographic and sæcular treatments of the life of Ælfríc show us the portrait of a Teutonic atheling – not particularly learnèd, not particularly ascetic in the conventional sense, still possessed of a certain degree of warlike thumos and ambition, but a man nevertheless who had learned in some degree to moderate these worldly faults and bend them to serve the Church. In other words, Ælfríc was a gentleman in the mediæval sense: a fighter who held himself in check, a lordling who noted his inborn pride and yoked it to the defence of the Church’s rights against his own kin by way of blood and by way of the world. We may also see in his example, someone who understood his own strengths and lay down his body to shield the weak, to guard his beloved Kent against heathen Danes gone a-viking when the strength of his king failed. In both of these things, we can see a different, but no less honourable, form of askēsis.

Holy Hierarch Ælfríc of Canterbury, pray to God for us sinners!

Éanflæd the Venerable, Abbess of Whitby

Ruins of Whitby Abbey

On the twenty-fourth of November we commemorate another Orthodox Yorkshirewoman of great holiness and virtue, Éanflæd daughter of Éadwine King of Northumbria, wife of Oswiu of Berenice, Benedictine nun, contemporary and kinswoman of Saint Hild, friend to Saint Cuðberht and Saint Theodore, mentor to Saint Wilfrið, mother of four including Ælfflæd of Whitby and with her, co-abbess of the monastery at Whitby.

Her father Éadwine was still a Teutonic heathen when Éanflæd was born, but her mother Æþelburg was a Christian who had been accompanied by Bishop Paulinus northward to York at her wedding. Saint Bede tells the tale that Cwichelm of Wessex afterward sent an assassin to murder Éadwine, but a servant of his, Lilla, sacrificed herself to save her king’s life. The shock of the attack caused Æþelburg to go into labour, and she gave birth to Éanflæd that same night. Bishop Paulinus prevailed upon Éadwine to have young Éanflæd baptised and to be baptised himself if Éadwine would recover from his wounds and be granted a victory over Cwichelm. He and Éanflæd were baptised together on the twelfth day after Pentecost; a Welsh tradition has it also that the one who baptised Éanflæd was Rhun ap Urien of Rheged.

Éadwine was received into the Church by baptism the following year, and many in Yorkshire were baptised with him. He led the Northumbrian armies into battle against Penda of Mercia, but was slain in the fighting – as a result, Orthodox and Catholic Christians commemorate Éadwine as a martyr for Christ. Éanflæd was raised by her saintly mother and by Bishop Paulinus at Lyminge in Kent, in exile from Northumbria as the Mercian king laid waste the Christian works that her father Éadwine had begun. Éanflæd went back to Northumbria to marry Oswiu of Berenice, who was still then a heathen. When Oswiu had his Christian cousin Oswine murdered to gain control of Deira, Éanflæd convinced her husband to lay the cornerstone of a new monastery in Oswine’s name, at the very spot where Oswine fell, at Gilling. Trumhere, Oswine’s kinsman, became the first abbot of the new monastery.

This was around the same time as the controversy in England over whether to follow the ‘Celtic’ or the ‘Roman’ calculation of Eastertide, which led to the Synod of Whitby. Most Northumbrian Christians at the time followed the ‘Celtic’ calculations, and Oswiu himself was a partizan of the Celtic date, though Éanflæd (who had been raised in Kent) favoured the Roman date. The king of Northumbria summoned the Synod, at which Saint Colmán of Lindisfarne, Saint Hild of Whitby, Saint Cedd of Lastingham, Saint Agilbert of Paris and Saint Wilfrið were all present. Though Saint Bede himself is far from a neutral historical observer of the event, we may take his word for it that Saint Wilfrið was the man of the hour at the Synod, since he managed to convince Oswiu and most of the Celtic party (except for Saint Colmán, sadly) to adopt the Roman date calculation for Easter.

Oswiu died six years after the Synod at Whitby, as he was on pilgrimage to Rome. The widowed Éanflæd was tonsured a nun at Whitby in obedience to Saint Hild while she was still Abbess there. Éanflæd and her daughter Ælfflæd became joint Abbesses after Hild’s repose, and she had her husband and saintly father translated to Whitby and buried there and began promoting their glorification. She devoted the rest of her life, as Bede recounts, to the ascetic life, to charitable works, and to prayers for the souls of her departed husband and father. Her daughter, in turn, was made of similar stuff as her saintly forebears Æþelburg and Éanflæd were; she too was an energetic and devoted Abbess of Whitby, and a saint in her own time, after her mother met her repose on the twenty-fourth of November.

Holy Mother Éanflæd of Whitby, pray to Christ our God for us sinners!