Does God take sides?

Sometimes one hears it said in American theopolitical discourse, that God does not take sides in politics. There is one sense in which this is a true and worthy impulse to say. And there is another sense in which this glib characterisation becomes dangerously wrong.

Firstly, I tend to believe that it is fully right and accurate to hold that the God of the Holy Scriptures, the Creator of the cosmos, has little to choose in terms of American politics. I believe it is proper to say that God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

The first reason that such a characterisation is true, is because the agendas of both parties take moral positions which would be thoroughly and irreconcilably repugnant to the early Church. The first-century Apostolic text called the Didachē, to take one example, explicitly condemns the practice of abortion. This practice is, sadly, ‘unequivocally’ countenanced as a ‘reproductive right’ by the official platform of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party is no better than the Democratic Party—indeed, in one fundamental way it is worse. The Didachē condemns idolatry as thoroughly as, and in fact more often than, it condemns abortion. And the Republican Party upholds, from the very first sentence of the preamble of its own platform, an explicit form of idolatry: the idolatry which exalts the nation-state as ‘exceptional’ and ‘unlike any other nation on earth’, and which exalts the US Constitution as a sacred ‘covenant’. What does God have to choose between one party for which destroying innocent children is a sacred right, and another party which proclaims aloud with the priests of the Sanhedrin that they have ‘no king but Cæsar’?

Although for a long time I have personally refused to support either major party with my vote, I say this not to cast aspersions on the ordinary American Christians who decide to vote with one major party or the other. Most people have independent reasons, driven by pragmatism or by personal and contextual considerations, for preferring, even strongly preferring, one party over the other. I assuredly do not believe that having such reasons makes one evil or an enemy of God. I say this merely to demonstrate that the God Who created the whole of the cosmos, Who revealed Himself by the law and the prophets to ancient Israel, and Who Himself took human flesh from a certain virgin in first-century Galilee, has nowhere to lay His head when it comes to the halls of power in Washington.

But does this mean that God does not take sides in politics, full stop?

First-order, it strikes me as rather presumptuous for American Christians to assume, that simply because the two main Coke-and-Pepsi options in their own particular powerful nation-state are both distant from God, that God must be equally distant from all possible forms of political expression. Yet many high-minded and well-intentioned evangelicals, Catholics, even Orthodox Christians, make an explicit and public point that ‘God is not political’ and that it is the job of Christians to ‘rise above politics’.

However well-intentioned this apolitical impulse may be in its attempt to engender benefit of the doubt between neighbours on opposing sides of the political divide, it nevertheless confuses a particular point. Politics is, at its basis, merely the art of learning to live together with one’s neighbour. The call to love one’s neighbour is a fundamentally political statement, and even the strictest hermits and most cloistered monks in Christian history were enjoined by their vows to uphold this particular substance in their politics. But then comes the question of the scholar of the law to Christ: ‘Who, then, is my neighbour?’

Christ answers this in the immediate sense with the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, He also more generally answers the question of this scholar of the law in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. If nothing else, the Beatitudes tell us, in their apportioning of blessing, the political position of God. In short: God does take sides. God takes the side of the poor; of those who sorrow; of the meek; of those who hunger and thirst for justice; of the merciful; of the innocent; of the peacemakers; of the persecuted.

Worth noting is that these categories are not merely symbolic or transcendental. The Beatitudes are not a parable—in fact, they are one of the few places in the Greek Scriptures where Jesus is not speaking in a way that points primarily to the symbolic. The Beatitudes are specific, direct and concrete. And they have immediate ramifications to present-day political situations.

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Iraqi people who still suffer from poverty, infant deformity and internal displacement—or would He be found on the side of their invaders and occupiers?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Yemeni people, overwhelmingly children, who still suffer from the attacks of bombs and rockets and the threat of starvation—or would He be found on the side of the Croesuses of Saudi who launch those bombs and rockets and blockade Yemen’s ports?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Syrian people who still suffer from the effects of war, invasion, religious persecution, starvation, sanctions—or would He be found on the side of the Turkish, Saudi, Qatari, Emirati, Uighur and other CIA-funded Wahhâbi religious extremists who invaded and murdered them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Palestinian people whose livelihoods are destroyed, who are evicted from their homes, and who are shot dead and detained on the streets of their own cities and villages—or would He be found on the side of the settlers and military who do the destroying, evicting, shooting and detaining?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Haitian people who are protesting in the streets against the dysfunction of their state and the theft of their country’s wealth—or on the side of those who would send in tanks and planes to oppress them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the ordinary people in Donbass who have suffered from nearly nine years of non-stop shelling and from deliberately-engineereed lack of access to schools and hospitals—or would He side with the race-nationalist paramilitaries, SBU, AFU and NATO forces who are doing the shelling?

Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Venezuelan people—or on the side of the foreign operatives and mercenaries who tried to overthrow their elected government? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Bolivian people—or on the side of the lithium mining consortiums which foisted a coup on them? Would Jesus be found on the side of Indigenous water and land defenders—or on the side of huge multinational energy conglomerates who use police forces and National Guard to harass and repress them? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Africans—or on the side of the French and British and American governments who continue to siphon off Africa’s wealth? Would Jesus be found on the side of innocent children—or on the side of those who traffic and exploit their bodies, or kill them in the womb?

In my own humble opinion, even to pose these questions in the light of the Beatitudes, is to answer them. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, the considerations and interests of worldly power—sometimes soft-pedalled into the conversation under the guise of soi-disant ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘nuance’, ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’—serve to cloud and muddy the consciences of those who would otherwise clearly answer in each of these instances. But if Jesus does promise the blessings He did in the Beatitudes, then we must say that He would take the side of the Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians, Haitians, New Russians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Indigenous nations, African nations, children—over their oppressors and persecutors. Jesus Himself took just such a political side when He chose to be crucified by the Roman authorities in conjunction with the Sanhedrin and their Herodian puppets… between two bandits. They discredited Him and crucified Him as a political agent, as a would-be ‘King of the Jews’.

Those of us who live in an empire with pretensions of universality, a latter-day Rome, where the primary political choices are between infanticidaires on one side and open idolaters on the other, have a responsibility to choose a radical third option, and to side with those throughout the world who suffer at the hands of Cæsar. And we must do so even at the risk of being called ‘communists’, ‘tankies’, ‘campists’ and worse. To do otherwise would be to betray the Gospel, and the Beatitudes in particular which place God on the side of those who suffer, rather than those who of design and intent inflict suffering.

Righteous Tsar Boris Mihail, Equal-to-the-Apostles, Enlightener of the Bulgarians

Tsar Saint Boris Mihail of Bulgaria

Christ is Risen!

Today is Holy Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Today we celebrate the holy eucatastrophe, the inversion of the logic of the fallen created order – in short, we celebrate the defeat of death. Rejoicing is a difficult thing for me right now, but still I rejoice in this: that human beings and systems will not have the last word, and that human faltering and failure are not the sum total of our existence, and that even death, which seems to be all-powerful and all-consuming in this world, is broken.

It also happens to be – and he would be a shame to ignore now, given just the fact of how fascinating the guy is – the feast day of Tsar Saint Boris Mihail, one of the pivotal figures in mediæval European history. To understand why he was so important to the shape of Europe of the 800s, it’s necessary to understand his historical and political surroundings.

First of all, there was the political crisis of the east-west division of Christendom, which had been a long time in the brewing. Although Empress Eirēnē of the Eastern Roman Empire had upheld the faith that was proclaimed in both West and East and officially ended iconoclasm by convoking the Second Council of Nicæa, in 800 Pope Leo III nevertheless anointed the Frankish king Karl the Big as ‘Roman’ ‘Emperor’ on the rather misogynistic legal pretext that the Roman Empire could not be ruled by a woman. (Ulpia Severina, Augusta of Rome after the death of her husband Aurelian in 274, may well have had a few things to say about that.) This political manœuvre, as well as justly infuriating Empress Eirēnē, further alienated the Church in the West from the Church in the East, and created a long power struggle between the Frankish kingdom and Eastern Rome that would shape many of the subsequent political conflicts in Central Europe.

Second, there was the unification of the Western Slavic tribes to Bulgaria’s northwest under Mojmír, which took place amidst the power vacuum left by the defeat of the Pannonian Avars by the Franks. This confederation was Great Moravia. And although the Moravians were technically a vassal state of the Carolingian kingdom, in practice they turned out to be far more independent than the Franks liked.

And third, there was Bulgaria itself. Upon his accession to the khaganate, Boris had inherited from his prædecessors Krum the Fearsome, Omurtag the Builder and his father Presiyan a sprawling, massive territory that stretched from Ohrid to the Dneister, and from the modern-day site of Budapest to the Black Sea. This territory, as any student of Balkan history can tell you, is difficult at the best of times to keep united and well-defended, and Boris was always going to have an uphill row to hoe when it came to protecting it all from incursions by Eastern Rome, by the Serbs, by the Croats, by the Pannonian Slavs, by the Magyars and by the newly-arrived Moravians. What’s more, under Presiyan – as prophesied by Saint Boyan-Enravota – the various tribes of Slavic peasants ruled by the Turkic Bulghar lordly class had already begun converting to Christianity. The new khaghan needed, as much for political and diplomatic reasons as for spiritual ones, to unite his people around one faith.

So. Enter Boris [Bg. Борис].

Boris, the son of the aforementioned Presiyan, had no sooner come to power in 852 than his rule was tested by numerous border wars with Greeks, Serbs, Croats and Franks… wars in which he tended to come off a bit the worse for wear each time. These wars lasted almost until the end of the 860s. He was first an ally and then a rival of the saintly King Rastislav of Great Moravia. He turned his attention between the Frankish Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire as both of them kept pressuring him along his borders.

Boris, thankfully for the Bulgarians, was no fool. He understood well enough that in order to keep the Slavs he commanded from rebelling against him or being subsumed into the kingdoms around him, he would need to convert to Christianity eventually. He understood quite astutely the nature of the rivalry between the ‘Roman Emperor’ in the West and the Roman Emperor in the East, and managed with remarkable political adroitness to ‘play both sides’… even when he was on the losing end militarily. At first, the khaghan leaned pretty heavily toward Rome rather than Constantinople. Needing to counterbalance against Rastislav’s Moravians combined with Karloman in revolt, Boris asked for an alliance with Louis the German – a provision of which would have brought Frankish missionaries into Bulgaria, and Bulgaria effectively into the Western Roman political-ecclesiastical ambit. However, in 863, the Eastern Roman Emperor Michael III launched a surprise attack into Bulgarian-controlled Thrace, and forced Boris to come to a peace agreement.

Fatefully, Boris decided to adopt the Eastern Liturgical rites of Emperor Michael III as part of this peace agreement. However, there are indications that he was already preparing to set his face eastward. For one thing, Boris’s half-sister Anna had already converted to Christianity in the Constantinopolitan style, having been held hostage in the Eastern Roman court for several years. For another thing, the Christianity of the Slavic peoples he ruled – coming as it did from the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius – already followed the Constantinopolitan rubrics and used a language, Slavonic, whose status in the West was notably in dispute. Whatever his ultimate motive (or mixture of motives!), the khaghan Boris agreed to be baptised in secret along with his family at his capital at Pliska. The Byzantine Emperor himself was his sponsor, and he took the Emperor’s name in baptism as his own: Mihail.

Boris Mihail’s baptism provoked an immediate and violent response from the Turkic Bulgarian aristocracy. They saw the Christian faith as an affront to their nomadic traditions as well as their legitimacy. In 865 the pagan boyars staged an open revolt against the newly-christened khaghan. Boris managed to crush the revolt. But despite having been recently baptised, he wasn’t all in on the whole peace, love and forgiveness aspect of Christianity yet. Nope: he went full Shang Yang on the behinds of the defeated rebels. Boris ordered the executions of fifty-two boyars, their wives and their children, exterminating their entire families. To complete the turn away from paganism, Boris Mihail abdicated the Turkic title of khaghan and adopted the Slavic title of knyaz ‘prince’, and the Greek-derived title of tsar ‘emperor’.

There was also the much more delicate matter of ecclesiology, which Boris handled with a much defter and lighter hand. The missionaries which arrived from Constantinople in Bulgaria all served the Liturgy in Greek and commemorated the Patriarch of Constantinople as the head of the Church. But Boris’s ultimate aim was to establish a Slavonic-speaking church that was beholden neither to Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, nor to Rome and the Western ‘Roman’ ‘Empire’. In this aim, he was perfectly happy to keep playing both sides against each other. Despite having had a Constantinopolitan baptism, he sent a very polite envoy to Rome with a list of 115 ecclesiological and legal questions addressed to Pope Nicholas I; he received back a famous reply of 106 answers. The Pope also sent Latin and Frankish missionaries into Bulgaria, headed by Formosus, the ambitious bishop of Porto.

This action produced no small amount of consternation in New Rome, where it was regarded as an encroachment on Constantinopolitan jurisdiction. Archbishop Photios of Constantinople took several steps in answer to the Latin missions in Bulgaria. He produced his own letter to Boris in 866, ‘On the duties of princes’. At the request of Boris’s Moravian neighbours to the northwest, he also sent among them Saints Cyril and Methodius and encouraged the adoption of a Liturgical rite in the Slavonic language. And he began attacking Latin missionaries in general – but Formosus in particular – for adding the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed. Photios’s combative approach to Rome was one decisive factor leading to the ‘Photian schism’ of 867. Boris was able to take deft political strides in the middle of this schism, and by turning his face again to Constantinople in 870 he was able to secure a promise of autocephaly for the Bulgarian Church, with its primate holding the rank of Archbishop.

In Great Moravia, the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius was meeting both with success and with jealousy. The mission was baptising critical numbers of Slavs, who could now hear the Gospel of Christ spoken in their own tongue. However, this aroused the wrath of the Frankish bishops who sought Moravia as their own jurisdiction. When Rastislav was betrayed to his blinding, confinement and death at the Franks’ hands by his traitorous nephew Svätopluk, the resulting Frankish-controlled Moravian government, at the instigation of the Frankish bishop Wiching, began ruthlessly persecuting the disciples of Methodius, subjecting them to exile, torture, slavery and likely death.

Boris Mihail, never blind to a good opportunity, welcomed the survivors of the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius into Bulgaria in 886 – in particular Saints Kliment and Naum. He instructed them to build schools and encouraged them to teach native clergy as well as teach any student who wanted the Slavonic letters. They also built up the first major corpus of Liturgical works, hagiographies and other documents in the Slavonic language.

The first Tsar of Bulgaria followed the example in old age of many mediæval princes and kings who had first embraced Christianity in their prime… and here again we see these incidental linkages (as with the eremitical saints in each) between the Church in Britain and the Bulgarian Church. Like Saints Elaeth ‘Frenin’ and Custennin of Strathclyde, Judicaël of Brittany, Ceolwulf of Northumbria, Æþelræd of Mercia and Sigeberht of East Anglia, Tsar Boris Mihail abdicated his throne in favour of his son Vladimir, and entered the monastic life.

Sadly, Vladimir’s faith was not as firm as his father’s. He began destroying the Christian churches, driving out the Christian priests, and proclaiming a revival of paganism. This met with a lukewarm reaction among the boyars (most of whom by now had already converted), and with a much colder reaction from the populace which were already strongly Christian. And it also enraged Boris, who came out of his monastic seclusion in order to raise an army with which to defeat his own son. Boris had Vladimir blinded and thrown into a dungeon, and set up his second son Simeon as Tsar before retiring again to his monastery. Two years later Boris emerged again from his monastery. This time, he helped his son raise an immense army to fend off an invasion of Bulgaria by the pagan Magyars. They defeated them decisively at the Battle of Southern Bug. He then returned to his monastery again, this time permanently, and he reposed in the Lord on the second of May, 907.

As with many of the kingly saints I treat here, Tsar Boris Mihail may not, on first glance, appear very saintly. In particular, his treatment of the pagan boyars after their rebellion and defeat seems unduly harsh. However, the importance of his conversion to the Christian faith of his subjects cannot possibly be overstated. Neither can his insistence on an independent Slavonic-speaking Church, an insistence which the ecclesiology of Constantinople found it could more readily accommodate than that of Rome. And although his conversion to Christianity may have had one or more motives which reek of political advantage, the fact that he forswore all political power after 896 and spent the last decade of his life in solitary contemplative prayer speaks to the influence that the Christian doctrine eventually had upon him. Holy Tsar Boris Mihail, apostolic guide of the Bulgarian people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Boris Mihail of Bulgaria, Tone 6:

Full of the fear of God, and enlightened by holy baptism,
Thou becamest a habitation of the Holy Spirit, O right-believing King Boris;
And having established the Orthodox Faith in the land of Bulgaria,
And set aside the scepter of kingship,
Thou madest thine abode in the wilderness,
Didst flourish in ascetic struggles,
And found grace before the Lord.
And now, standing before the throne of the Most High,
Pray thou, that He grant unto us who entreat thee salvation for our souls.

Mun Jaein’s pro-marriage, pro-peace, pro-worker Catholicism

One of the global leaders I think gets way too little respect these days is Mun Jaein, the president of South Korea. Although there is much about his politics that I could criticise from the left, his record thus far has been one of a solid reformist socdem whose heart is mostly in the right place. But I found it surprising that with a few admirable exceptions – notably Aleteia and CruxNow – few news sources seem to dwell on Mun Jaein’s active Catholicism.

Along these reformist lines, Mun has done a lot of legwork in his country for working-class people. He has increased the minimum wage and lowered the maximum work week from the utterly insane and inhuman 68 hours to a much more reasonable 52. He has moved to discipline the chaebol conglomerates. He has also notably been a cool head when approaching his neighbours to the north. Mun Jaein is also pro-marriage. Where he stands on the issue of abortion is trickier to pin down – he has been fairly silent on the issue, which may say something to his credit given the normally pro-abortion stance of his party. This gives him a rare and enviable proximity to Eastern European œconomically left but socially conservative leaders like Moldova’s Igor Dodon and Bulgaria’s Rumen Radev.

His rapid, effective response to the coronavirus crisis in particular seems to have been motivated by his Catholic piety, as he is on record as consulting the Catholic bishops on how to respond. The peculiarly Asian variant of Catholicism which Mun Jaein espouses reminds me strikingly of Thomas Han Hongchun and the Confucian social theory of Kang Xiaoguang (which Kang himself likened to Catholic social teaching).

One can observe Mun Jaein’s faith in action through his policies, but also through his speeches. It is particularly interesting to observe how Mun Jaein notes the example of the Catholic Church in Korea as having been built up by a great number of martyrs, and lays particular stress on how the Catholic Church ‘embraced the down and out’, ‘emulated the life of Jesus in the form of a social calling’, and opposed ‘colonisation, division, war and dictatorship’. Particularly intriguing are his references to the internationalist spirit and the Catholic emphasis on solidarity between nations as being a source of inspiration for his policy of realist détente with the North and hope for eventual Korean reunification. (One would think that this dimension of Catholicism would make him more of a liberal internationalist in terms of international relations theory, but it seems to have had the opposite effect!)

It is through statements like these that we can begin to see how Mun has formulated his priorities on peace with North Korea, and a much warmer relationship with mainland China – both of which policies have gotten him some major flak from right-wing critics, in particular the Buddhist leader of the People Power Party, Ju Hoyeong. Also intriguing is that Mun Jaein’s foreign policy realignment toward the continent has earned him a number of critics from both American Blob-aligned think tanks like the neoliberal Lowy Institute, and Korean neoliberals and security hawks like Lew Hanjin. (I note with shame and dismay that The American Conservative continues down its sorry degenerate slide toward a right-wing variant of hawkish idealism under Bloom’s supremely-inept and idiotic mismanagement.)

I observe all of this from an Orthodox Christian lay perspective – and one which has in the past been critical of Roman Catholic approaches in the East. I understand that his perspective may differ from mine on several points, but I cannot help but applaud Mun Jaein’s sincere Roman Catholic devotion to the Prince of Peace. That devotion carries him in a genuinely positive direction. Speaking for myself, I admire him for his peaceable, realistic and independent foreign policy stance; for his equally-sincere opposition to the redefinition of sexuality and family relations by crazed Western gender theorists; and for his attention (however reformist and incremental) to the bread-and-butter human needs and dignity of South Korea’s workers. This is one variant of the constructive, measured, hard-headed and big picture-oriented politics that I would like to see more of. Thank you, Mr Mun, and may God grant you many years.

Holy Martyr Dasios of Durostorum

Saint Dasios of Durostorum

The twentieth of November is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of the holy martyr Saint Dasios of Durostorum, a young and handsome Roman soldier of the Legio XI Claudiana, stationed on the Danube River, who was martyred in the early fourth century. He was the first of the martyrs to be slain at Durostorum during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian. The centre of his cultus is in Italy, in the city of Ancona whence his relics were moved for protection against the marauding Avars. But he is also reverenced among Orthodox Christians particularly in the Balkans.

Dasios [Gk. Δάσιος, L. Dasius, CS Дазий] was a youthful and vigorous soldier of the Roman legions, who was openly allowed to have been a Christian under prior Roman Imperial administrations. With Diocletian’s ascent to power, however, the Christians among the Roman soldiery were faced with a difficult choice: to keep their positions by denying Christ and swearing fealty to the Emperor as a living god; or else to face ritual humiliation, torture and execution. Pagan festivities were often used as pretexts for detecting and persecuting Christians, and Dasios was no exception to this. Because his features were so fine, he was chosen by lot to be the sacrificial ‘king’ of the festival of Saturnalia. He refused this honour, and told his fellow-officers that: ‘Since I am fated to die, it is better that I die for Christ as a Christian.’

He was apprehended and interrogated by his commanding officer, a man named Bassos, before whom Dasios openly denied the divinity of the Roman Emperor. For this act, as was supposed, of lèse-majesté, Dasios was hauled before the co-emperors Diocletian and Maximian themselves. Again and again he confessed Christ before them, refused to acknowledge them as gods, and moreover openly denounced the impiety and error of the whole of the festival. Many who were there at Durostorum thereafter came to believe in Christ. For this, Saint Dasios was cruelly tortured and given over to be beheaded by the sword. The execution took place on the twentieth day of November – the twenty-fourth day of the lunar cycle – at the fourth hour; his executioner was a man named Aniketos, also called Iōannēs. In this way, the holy martyr of God received the crown of his victory and was welcomed into the company of the saints.

His relics were buried in Durostorum – later Silistra in Bulgaria – by local Christians. They were popularly venerated even shortly after his death, and a Vita was written in the fourth century not long after his martyrdom. When the Turco-Mongolic Avars invaded Thrace in the 500s, however, the relics of Saint Dasios were moved to Ancona in Italy for safer keeping. They were enshrined in the Chiesa di San Ciriaco there, in an exquisite marble sarcophagus, and continued to receive the adulation of faithful Christians at that resting place. In 2002, in a gesture of goodwill toward Orthodox Christians, Pope John Paul II on a visit to Silistra in Bulgaria made a gift of Saint Dasios’s right upper arm to the Metropolia of Dorostol, in a marble sarcophagus which was a careful replica in miniature of the one in Ancona. Holy martyr Dasios, bold confessor of Christ before the pagans, pray unto Christ our God for the salvation of our souls!

Holy Martyrs Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus

Saints Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus

The eleventh of November is the feast-day of another pair of early Syrian martyrs for Christ, Saints Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus. These saints lived during the second century and were persecuted during the reign of the Emperor of the Porch, Marcus Aurelius. These saints enjoy a universal cultus which is of a singular importance in our modern time. Saint Stephanida, on account of the etymology of her name, has been invoked by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches for protection and aid against the novel coronavirus.

Saint Viktōr [Gk. Βίκτωρ, L. Victor, Ar. Fîktûr فيكتور] was born in Italy, and was a loyal Roman soldier who served in the Army and was stationed in Damascus. The governor of Damascus at that time was named Sebastianos. Though it is unclear from the evidence whether he had the Emperor’s express sanction to do so, Sebastianos began a ruthless purge of the Christians from the army ranks in his præcinct, by ordering all the soldiers under his command to offer sacrifices to the idols. Naturally, the young Italian refused to make this sacrifice, and when Sebastianos ordered him to do so, invoking his loyalty to the Emperor, Viktōr replied: ‘I am a warrior under command of the Heavenly King. Him only will I serve. I reject your foul idols!’

The military commander then ordered that Viktōr’s limbs be locked into vices and that his digits, both fingers and toes, be broken and torn from their sockets one at a time. The young soldier endured this pain and various other torments that were inflicted upon him, calling upon the name of the Lord. Then the executioners brought food to him, which had been laced with a deadly poison by a pagan sorcerer. Again Saint Viktōr prayed to the Lord, and he swallowed all of the tainted food. The poison did Viktōr no harm, and all who were there marvelled and feared to see it. The sorcerer, who saw his arts defeated by the holy martyr, abjured his powerless idols and was converted to faith in Christ. Another wonder wrought by the martyr was that soldiers with diseases of the eye were cured and their sight restored.

But the executioners began to rend and burn the martyr’s flesh. Upon seeing this, the young bride of one of the tormentors, a fifteen-year-old girl of Ægyptian descent named Stephanida [Gk. Στεφανίδα, L. Corona, Ar. Kûrûnâ كورونا] could bear no longer, and ran to the martyr to tend to his wounds and plead for mercy. But seeing what he had already endured, and the wonders that the holy martyr had wrought, she opened her mouth and glorified Christ before the governor. The cruel Sebastianos ordered that the young girl be seized, that two young palm trees be bent to the ground, and that the girl’s limbs be tied to each. The palm trees were then released and the young martyr for Christ was torn bodily between them – in this way she earned the glorious crown which her name foreshadowed.

During his torments, Saint Viktōr prophesied that death would take the executioners within twelve days, and that the governor would be overthrown within twenty-four days. Sebastianos ordered that the saint be beheaded, and he too went to the glories of the life æternal and received the laurels due to Christ’s athletes. And as Saint Viktōr had prophesied before his death, so the doom of the executioners and the governor all came to pass.

Local Christians took their relics and buried them with honour in Damascus. However, they soon found their way to Rome where they were celebrated and venerated by many pilgrims. In the year 997, the Saxon king Otto III had the relics brought from Rome to Aachen in Germany, where they were enshrined in the Cathedral. The cultus of these two saints has been particularly popular among woodsmen and among gamblers, but in the 1300s with the approach of the Black Death, Germans began to pray to Saint Stephanida for protection from the plague, and several villages which sought her intercession were spared from the ravages of the disease. Today many are seeking her intercessions against the novel coronavirus, on account of the Latin form of her name, Saint Corona. Holy martyrs Viktōr and Stephanida, fearless witnesses to Christ before the pagans, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saints Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus, Tone 4:

Your holy martyrs, O Lord,
Through their sufferings have received incorruptible crowns from You, our God.
For having Your strength, they laid low their adversaries,
And shattered the powerless boldness of dæmons.
Through their intercessions, save our souls!

The class politics of Eastern Catholicism, part 3: nobles, burghers, peasants and Brest-Litovsk

Carpathian Ruthenian oprishki, ca. 1500

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

Now, before I go and fire this blog-post off into the rushes, let me set some goals for myself here first. A lot of the historical analysis I’m going to lay out here, is going to share considerable overlap with my piece from 2017, ‘Mountain bandits, hedge-priests and the Unia’, for understandable reasons. The first goal I’m going to set is to not offer a warmed-over rewrite of that article, exploring the different class positions of Eastern Catholics versus Orthodox in the Ruthenian [or Rusin] territories. I’m hoping to focus a bit more here on the class alignments and shifts among both the Catholic clergy in Poland and the Orthodox clergy in Russia in order to broaden the scope of this discourse. That ties into my second goal: to attempt to contextualise these ecclesiological and religious-ideological disputes within the structure of world-systems theory. Again, this is in keeping with my attempt to introduce a grain of Fr Sergei Bulgakov’s quasi-materialist scepticism of ‘pious’ forms of hegemony and dominance, both contemporary and historical, into my historical thinking.

So the first necessary task, when examining this next phase of Uniatism, is to examine the relative positions, historical relations and class structures of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the Jagellonians, and their eastward neighbour, the Russian Tsardom, around the turn of the seventeenth century. To do this, we need to examine the relations of both to the evolving structure of the world-system of trade. That means taking into account the œconomic and political developments of their neighbours as well, and the shifting centre of the world-systemic core and peripheries.

When we left off in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, the first ‘seeds’ of proto-capitalist innovation were being sown in the northern Italian city-states, with bankers like the de’ Medici family taking a prominent rôle, in their political presence outwardly as ‘enlightened’ republicans but in practice more as oligarchs. It would be a mistake to assume, as many idealistic Whig historians do, that the ‘new sciences’ and ‘new arts’ which were assiduously promulgated in Renaissance grew out of any philosophically-driven ‘humane’ interest in the subject of man. They grew just as much out of a material need to justify the predatory practices and power-plays of these bankers, who succeeded largely by flying in the face of centuries of the Church’s moral teachings against usury. The two are, however, intimately connected. It can often be difficult to untangle, in history, where the idea precedes the material drive, and the material drive the idea, because the two reinforce each other – whether Hegel is right in a given instance, or Marx.

However, what becomes clear is that the most enthusiastic disciples of these Italian-developed ‘new sciences’ in the fields of œconomics and governance, by the middle of the sixteenth century, were the governments of England under Elizabeth I, Spain under Philip II and Charles IX and Henry III in France (themselves de’ Medicis on their mother’s side). The œconomic doctrines of mercantilism, as practised by these three powers, were the next stage in the Commercial Revolution that had begun with the Italian merchant-princes and bankers in the Big Four over four centuries previously. This new doctrine of the Commercial Revolution, the art of enriching the state, meant a scramble for new forms of œconomic exploitation and political consolidation.

But by the end of the century, England, Spain and France had to contend with the disputes of an older established thalassocratic colonial empire – that of Portugal – against a newer, leaner, meaner and more vicious one in the newly-established Dutch Republic. By the time that the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in 1596, the Republic was already in its twenty-eighth year of open revolt, during all of which time it was financing its revolt against the Habsburgs with income derived from a rapidly-expanding network of colonies and mercantile ventures, which of course included chattel slavery in kidnapped Africans (a market which had been dominated by the Portuguese for the past century). These five powers, between them, had not only begun emulating the city-states of Italy in their policy doctrines – they had also begun to not so much gently pull as yark the core of the world-system from the Eastern Mediterranean, past Italy, to the Western part. The Catholic Church, even as it began to deal with the fallout from the Reformation, had to shift its attention from the East to the West as these centres of political and œconomic power began to shift – away from fallen Constantinople (now Istanbul), and towards Paris, London and Amsterdam.

Eastern Europe began to notice this as well. The creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had a small but notable bourgeois class centred on Lublin and Krakow, deliberately modelled itself on both the Roman Republic and the Venetian one. The unique political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an experiment in aristocratic liberty and ‘noble republicanism’ – albeit one which came at a hefty price for those below the landed gentry. The Polish state, along with the parts of the Holy Roman Empire which would come to constitute Germany, represented what one might consider a semi-periphery of the new world system. Poland-Lithuania did have an œconomy based on agricultural extraction and export – predicated on brutal exploitation of the peasantry – and a market structure which was thus partially integrated into the Western core. In this – and in its reliance on a democracy of planter-aristocrats – it somewhat resembled the export-oriented agricultural and extraction-based œconomies of the rural colonies of the American South.

The differences between the semi-peripheral Polish and Russian œconomies at this stage in capitalism’s development are subtle, but for our purposes important. The Russian class structure was always such that the military ruling class – the knyaz or the tsar plus his boyary – was never truly autochthonous; as a result, the laws governing the native Slavic peasantry suffered from a good deal of vagueness, and the ability of the nobility to exploit them was thereby limited. One can see this from the often ill-defined distinctions in early Russian law between holopy, zakupy, izhoi and so on; there was always, however, a free peasantry which could fend for itself, and had limited tax obligations to the lords. At first, the Polish class system was similar to this. However, the rise of a new bourgeois legal class in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries meant rapid erosion of the rights of the Polish peasantry. Polish historian Edward Corwin points to the Piotrków Statutes as the beginning of the entrenchment of serfdom in Poland, stripping peasants of their rights to ownership of land and their right to move, and levying punishing corvée and tax requirements on them. Notably, these statutes also removed tariffs and guaranteed free trade between Poland and merchants from the Netherlands and the Hanseatic League. These things are not unrelated.

Intriguingly, despite the Game of Thrones-style violence and cruelty of tenuously-independent Moldavia at this time, the obligations on the Moldavian peasantry were remarkably lighter and less exploitative by comparison to Poland-Lithuania: a tenth of the crop, corvée of twelve days a year, and most importantly legal freedom of movement. This relatively light and unoppressive legal environment for the rural working class would continue in Moldavia for the rest of its independent period. As a result, a significant number of Ruthenian peasants under Polish-Lithuanian rule voted with their feet and ran away into Moldavia. A similar pattern held on the border between Poland-Lithuania and Russia, with many Polish peasants fleeing into Russia, not because Russian masters were necessarily any kinder, but because they had less legal ability to extract labour and produce from them. (This would change for the worse under Peter and Catherine.) Another tactic of the Ruthenian peasants was to band together and rise up extralegally against this tightening legal régime, forming bands of oprishki, or mountain bandits.

Hora de la Aninoasa, by Theodor Aman. Oil on canvas, 19th c.

It is directly against this backdrop – colonial expansion among the Western European powers; growth of mercantilism; inroads of trade in the semi-periphery; the rise of a local bourgeoisie; the tightening of the screws on the peasants; the rise of social banditry – that the Union of Brest-Litovsk needs to be understood. Historian Andrei Nikolaevich Mouravieff, in his History of the Russian Church, writes of ‘the oppressions of the [Polish] nobles’ under Sigismund, who ‘violently appropriated to themselves the property’ of the Orthodox peasantry and black-robed clerics in the Carpathians – causing Metropolitan Onisifor to bring a complaint against the king himself. Considering this Metropolitan’s general timidity and… um, highly questionable sex life – this event is all the more striking, and it hints at the dire œconomic straits and general powerlessness of Orthodox parishes under the ‘tolerant’ Commonwealth government.

The growth of overtures toward Unia in Ruthenia during the latter half of the sixteenth century was largely the pet project of the Jesuit diplomat and polemicist (of northern Italian mercantile extraction) Antonio Possevino, who at first attempted to bring Ivan Groznyi and his realm into the Catholic Church on the terms of the Florentine Union (and to secure special privileges for Venetian merchants in Russia in the process), but was thwarted in both by the efforts of Tsar Ivan himself. Mouravieff, though his style is itself fairly polemical when he speaks of Possevino’s ‘zealous exhortations and wily policy’, is nonetheless convincing It is directly tied to a cohort of highly-educated, merchant-class seminarians in Lublin and Krakow: Piotr Skarga and Benedykt Herbest most notably. These missions took as their outward motivation the notable laxity of church discipline and personal morals among the Orthodox bishops: the Catholic Encyclopædia states that ‘the Ruthenian clergy were steeped in immorality and ignorance; the bishops made no scruple of setting their flocks an evil example, living in open concubinage, and practising the most brazen simony’. If this is overstating the case, then it is not by much. However, the Jesuit missions were more directly tied to the desire on the part of the nobility to more effectively expropriate and exploit the Ruthenian peasantry, as well as to secure the semi-periphery for a world-system that was shifting its centre to the commercial and financial cities of Western Europe. If the Jesuits could not secure Russia for Western Europe’s commercial interests, then they would do the next best thing and use their influence to freeze Russia (and the northern Tea Road) out of Europe.

Possevino, Skarga and Herbest did indeed contact the bishops Cyryl Terlecki and Hipacy Pociej in their effort to secure a Church union. Both of these bishops were from noble backgrounds and had firmer connexions with the Commonwealth state than the other bishops. They managed to procure the signatures for a union with Rome from the other bishops largely by suasion, though they were not above subterfuge, fraud and even force as it suited them when it came to procuring agreement: Mouravieff makes mention of Cyryl Terlecki ordering a monk to be beaten and robbed on the road in order to intercept a letter from Michal Rahoza to Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople. In any event, Terlecki and Pociej managed to convoke a local council in Brest where a union with Rome was signed. The pro-Union church and the Œcumenical Patriarchate promptly excommunicated each other. In the twenty years of the ascendancy of the Union of Brest, Pociej in particular sought to subject the churches under the Unia to the teaching authority of upper middle-class seminarians coming out of Lublin and Krakow.

Mouravieff is not the best source when it comes to class analysis. His is a ‘Great Men’ history; his narrative is largely oriented – as one can probably tell from what I have excerpted and paraphrased above – to the clash of personalities, of stratagems in high courts, generals’ tents and bishops’ chambers. But even so, hints of what this history looked like from the ‘bottom up’ peek through. He speaks of the ‘persecutions’ of Orthodox in the Commonwealth and how they were ‘deprived of their civil rights’ in general terms. He describes how the Orthodox clerics and laity in the Commonwealth ‘solemnly assembled in a private house, because they could not obtain the use of a Church’. As seen above, he occasionally speaks of expropriation and subjugation of the peasantry. He speaks of how Orthodox schoolmasters – generally of peasant, not merchant, backgrounds – had to depend on the selective and altogether inadequate patronage and protection of Orthodox nobles. More directly, though, he speaks of the expropriation and privatisation of Orthodox monastery lands at Hipacy Pociej’s orders, something one normally associates with the abuses of the Protestantising Henry VIII. He also makes passing reference to the more violent resistance of the oprishki and the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Unia. Though this is not his focus, what emerges from Mouravieff’s narrative is a clear distinction of class interest between the Unia and the Orthodox Church in the Commonwealth’s Ruthenian territories.

Asymmetrical warfare in the Carpathian Mountains

Jesuit historians like the late Robert Taft ludicrously insist, in a theatrical form of handwashing worthy of Pilate, that the impetus for ‘uniatism’ came largely from the Ruthenian bishops themselves, when the sources that he himself cites in fact claim otherwise (including Possevino’s own writings). Taft then follows this up with what should be recognised as a breathtakingly-fallacious tu quoque: apparently the uses of force against Catholics by Tsars and Soviet premiers, and the existence of the twee boutique phenomenon of ‘Western Rite Orthodoxy’, are somehow enough to balance the scales of historical wrong. So far from offering a ‘healing of memory’, it seems that Taft’s contribution to this dialogue was merely to offer another list of recriminations without any meaningful overarching analysis.

In recognition of this: no, the Russian state’s hands are not clean; nor are those of the Orthodox hierarchs. We see indictments of Orthodox wrongdoing clearly enough within Orthodox historical accounts, which Taft ridiculously accuses tout court of ‘victimhood pretense’! As mentioned above, the differences in class structure between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth state and the Tsarist Russian state were largely differences of nuance. One was a ‘noble republic’ of planters; the other a burgeoning autocracy – both had large social gaps which were enforced with sanguine brutality. But the nuances in these gaps were not meaningless to the people at the bottom of the social ladder, just as they were not meaningless to the people designing œconomic and religious policy in these states.

Any real ‘healing of memory’ must begin and end with truth, not with diplomatic approximations of truth. As such, in this case it needs to begin with a frank, unapologetic analysis of how capitalism emerged within the world-system, how it dragged the core of the world-system away from Asia and into the Atlantic, and how it made use of existing ideological supports – including the ones within the Western European Christian world – to siphon wealth away from the periphery and direct it to the core. This may seem a Hegelian tack to take, rather than Marxist. But even those on the liberation-theology end of the scale should be able to agree that we cannot view all instances of civil force in religious questions in the strictly value-neutral and blandly panglossian terms that Taft, Guzniak and other would-be gatekeepers of this memory demand. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Tsardom may have been neighbours and may even have been similar in social structure, but their internal dynamics and their relations to the rest of the world show some important differences. The actions of a semi-peripheral state like the Commonwealth, seeking to integrate itself and its territories into the emerging dynamo of capitalism, cannot be equated to the actions of a semi-peripheral state seeking to countervail against that dynamo, as the last Rurikoviches and the first Romanovs before Peter tried imperfectly to do. Even more so: the retaliatory violence of the people at the bottom, including the Ruthenian Orthodox oprishki of this era, must not be equated to the force of the state and the bourgeois class exploiting them.

The class politics of Eastern Catholicism, part 2: ‘Strange, worldly motives’ in Florence

Procession of the Magi, painting by Benozzo Gozzoli (1459)
notably depicting Lorenzo, Piero and Cosimo de’ Medici

Continued from Part 1:

The Avignon Schism and the subsequent Conciliar Controversy in the Western Church was another aggravating factor within the West that led directly up to the attempts at Uniatism. The power and prestige of the Papacy had been damaged by many decades of cæsaropapist subjection to the French Crown beginning in 1309, followed by a political schism prompted by the death of Pope Gregory XI in 1377 and the issue of his succession.

Many middle-class churchmen, particularly local bishops and parish clergy, viewing the decades-long political schism between Pope in Rome and Antipope in Avignon, came to an ecclesiastical conclusion that an Œcumenical Council was needed to finally decide the question of the Papal residence and the powers of the Pope. Several attempts by these conciliarists to bring the schism to an end and bolster – in their view – the moral legitimacy of the Church were made: in 1409 at Pisa; in 1414 at Constance; at 1423 in Pavia; at 1424 in Siena; and finally in 1431 at Basel at the end of the Hussite Wars. Tellingly, the dissidium of ‘the Bohemians’ (i.e., the largely working-class followers of Jan Hus) and the Orthodox Christian doctrine of ‘the Greeks’ were mentioned in the same breath at the Council of Basel – something which caused the envoys of the Emperor deep offence.

The Council of Florence was actually the penultimate stage in the culmination of a longer process that began with the Council of Basel in 1431. Now, I do not want to rehash any more than necessary the proceedings of the Council of Florence itself, because other authorities do that elsewhere. In terms of the doctrines discussed, including the content and theology of the Nicene Creed, the position of the Papacy and the substance of communion, I do not have anything much to add except to say that I am in full agreement with the expositions of Saint Mark Eugenikos. Though doctrine and ecclesiology are inescapable when discussing Church councils like this one, here I try to confine myself to an analysis the dynamics of class at the Councils of Basel, Ferrara and Florence.

The Council of Basel, illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicles

The impetus for Pope Eugene IV in calling for a counter-Council to Basel – first at Ferrara and then at Florence – was to shore up the political influence, prestige and moral legitimacy of the Papacy in an absolute sense, and to reinforce the very idea of Papal supremacy over the Councils. In terms of class politics, the two papal parties in Avignon and Rome represented the class interests of the feudal nobility of France and England respectively – and they behaved like it. The popes (and later antipopes) in Avignon in particular were extravagantly corrupt and lax in their personal morals. Conciliarism represented the petit bourgeois republican political dimension of disaffection with the Papacy in the cities and focussed on outward structural reform, much as they pushed for political reform within the increasingly-oligarchical city-states they lived in – though by the end the conciliarist cause had been effectively coöpted by Emperor Sigismund. The working-class laypeople in rural areas had little to do with either of these ecclesiastical parties. They did not abandon the Church, however. Instead they embraced a revitalised cultus of recent saints like Catherine of Siena. This ‘lay piety’ movement was deceptively apolitical, particularly since Catherine of Siena herself was something of a rabble-rouser and urged far more radical, pro-poor reforms of the Church than the conciliarists were prepared to countenance.

The Council of Ferrara, and then the Council of Florence which was its continuation, therefore represented a confluence of material interests between the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie on the part of the Western parties. Even at Basel there seems to have been some unseemly politicking and disputation between the cities as to where the Council would be hosted. A pro-Papal minority at Basel led by Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini opted for Florence at the vote on 7 May 1437 – and then bore off the conciliar seal and affixed it to their decision under cover of darkness. This is important to note because Eastern Orthodox sources on the Council of Florence often ascribe conspiratorial motives to the Western party at the Council, while Catholic and Anglican sources tend toward an insufferable highfalutin idealism that overlooks entirely the material interests of those who called the Council in the first place.

That the first conscious attempt at Uniatism was centred on one of the big four, therefore, should not be seen as a happy accident. Nor should it be a surprise that it aligned neatly with that city-state’s interests in financial expansion and exploitation. It seems unthinkable to discuss the so-called Council of Florence without also discussing the man who brought it there: Cosimo de’ Medici, the richest banker in Europe. It was in fact de’ Medici, through his agents Roberto Martelli at Basel in 1436 and Ambrogio Traversari at Ferrara in 1437, who introduced the idea to the Pope’s party of moving the Council to Florence.

Lithograph of Ambrogio Traversari

Although Orthodox Church historian Ivan Ostroumov explicitly mentions de’ Medici ’s rôle in arranging the robber-council’s presence at Florence, other accounts, particularly Catholic ones, fail to mention de’ Medici at all. Personally, I don’t ascribe any malice in this; it’s more likely that such elisions proceed from a profound sense of embarrassment. Even so, wounded embarrassment is a fierce thing, and I am aware as I set forth in this account that I will be accused of vulgar Marxism, of materialism, of conspiratorial thought, in exploring the ‘strange, worldly motives’ among the Latin and Greek clergy who assented to Union – so be it; the facts are what they are.

It cannot be disputed that material considerations prompted the transition of the Council from Ferrara to Florence. After all, de’ Medici offered to advance the Pope 40,000 gold ducats on living arrangements for the Imperial household and the Greek bishops in his city. It should be noted that the Greek bishops themselves were far from insensitive to the material compulsions that induced them to agree to the results of the Council. Bribery and other forms of soft coercion were used by the advocates of the Union to win over truculent Greek bishops. Bishop Syropoulos, who attended the Council, was at pains to point out that he had never accepted money for his signature – a firm indication that financial gain was indeed a ready inducement to some of the signatories. Indeed, when the Council was sitting at Ferrara, the Pope withheld the Greek bishops’ promised stipends when they failed to agree with him, and made allowances when they agreed… but at Ferrara they only got as far as discussing the right of the Western Church to make insertions to the Symbol of Faith (not the substance of the filioque clause). After the council moved to Florence, the bribes and threats became more blatant still. Here is Church historian Ivan Ostroumov on the subject, in the translation by Fr Basil Popoff:

At the same time, the Emperor with great difficulty persuaded the Pope to allow the Greeks money for their maintenance, instead of the daily rations of food they were receiving like beggars, quite contrary to the agreements made in the treaty. Generally speaking, the Greeks made constant complaints about this during the whole time of the Counicl session in Ferrara and Florence. The Pope found this the best way of making the Greeks obedient. For whenever the Greeks refused to comply with any of his wishes, he immediately stopped their pay, so that many of the Bishops were obliged to sell their clothes. But as soon as the Greeks agreed to his proposals, their wages were immediately given out as a sort of reward for their obedience. As long as the Greeks disputed about the Council seats, no money was given them. But when the disputes were ended, their monthly allowance was paid out.

As we can see, from the start, the Council of Florence was not by any means a selfless noble-minded project to reunite Christendom. The motives on the Eastern side were, unfortunately, crystal-clear, and their ‘pitiable state’ is laid out and well attested across multiple primary sources, including the writings of the Eastern Roman Emperors themselves. Military and political weakness through protracted warfare with the Ottomans, as well as substantial public debt to the Venetians (!), forced Emperors Manouēl II and Iōannēs VIII Palaiologos to seek aid from the better-armed states of the West – though the Western Empire, which was at that time concluding its crusade against the Hussites, could not oblige the Eastern Empire.

The motives on the Western side have always been cast in a bit muddier terms. It’s clear, however, that the placement of the Council in the northern mercantile states of Italy, rather than in Constantinople, was no accident but instead a central and ideologically-motivated demand of the Western Church under Eugene. So the fact that de’ Medici figured so prominently in the last stage of the proceedings is worth exploring. Cosimo de’ Medici always had an eye on how an East-West reconciliation could be exploited for gain, which is why he had the entire council moved from Ferrara to Florence at his own expense. The financial prospects which would accrue to his coffers from trade concessions from Constantinople for Florence were high on the list of motivating factors. As GF Young, the largely-sympathetic historian of the de’ Medici family, points out:

The Emperor John Paleologus, following the example of his father and grandfather, proposed making a personal visit to the West to solicit help against the Turks to save Constantinople, which must otherwise fall. The Pope invited him, together with the Patriarch and bishops of the Eastern Church, to a conference, holding out hopes of such aid if the breach between the Churches of the East and West could be healed…

The Emperor John Paleologus and his retinue, together with the Patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph, and a numerous body of bishops and theologians, sailed from Constantinople, and in due time arrived at Venice. The Emperor was received with great pomp by Doge Francesco Foscari, and entertained at Venice for a month; after which he proceeded to Ferrara, where Pope Eugenius having also arrived, the Council began its sittings (5^th January 1438).

Cosimo, in that task which had been mentioned of gradually bringing foreign nations to recognise in him the motive power of the Florentine state, and also gradually convincing his countrymen that their interests were best served by leaving foreign affairs to him, had had to exercise much patience. He had a matter to effect which necessarily moved but slowly, and during the first few years he had been forced to be content with a very partial control, and often been obliged to acquiesce in action which he was as yet without the power to direct as he would wish. But by the end of the year 1438 he was beginning to have this power, foreign affairs being more and more left to him to manage in his own way. And now he took the first independent step, one which had very important results to Florence. He proceeded to Ferrara, where the Council between the Eastern and Western Churches had been sitting for nearly a year, and so used his influence with Pope Eugenius IV that he got the Council transferred to Florence; whereby he obtained for his city increased political influence, and brought to it much added trade. [emphasis mine]

Cosimo de’ Medici

This passage has the benefit of highlighting some of the political contours, at least among the Western cohort, within which the Council of Florence took place. Once this is established, then the proceedings of the Council begin to make much more sense. On the face of it, as the power struggle between the conciliarists at Basel and the Papal party at Ferrara and Florence makes clear, a lot of the internal struggle of the Catholic clergy had to do with attacking or protecting the sovereign authority of the Pope. But finical considerations overshadowed even these ideological-ecclesiological ones. Thus, the class dynamics become bitterly ironic. Despite their sympathy with bourgeois republicanism, the conciliarists’ biggest supporter at Basel was in fact the Western Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg. And despite his insistence on royal grandeur and previous support from the Kings of England, Pope Eugene found the most material support in Ferrara and Florence from de’ Medici, who represented one of the ‘Big Four’ Italian merchant republics. Both Sigismund and de’ Medici had political agendas of their own.

As far as the Greeks were concerned, even those who signed the treaty that concluded the Council at Florence, Ostroumov laconically puts it: ‘The conclusion of peace was a joyful event for one party only—the victors.’ The various material carrots and sticks that had been used on them by the Papal party had evidently left a bad taste in many Greek mouths, including many of them whose signatures were ultimately found on the concluding document. That of Saint Mark Eugenikos was not among them. Ostroumov goes on: ‘The Latins acceded to nothing; the Greeks were more or less obliged to accede to them in everything. The victorious party did not even try to soothe the sad feelings of their new brethren. The pride of the self-willed conqueror evinced itself in all his intercourse with the newly reconciled party.’

On the Greek side: the most notable personalities among the Greek deputies to Florence were Mark Eugenikos, the saintly Bishop of Ephesus; Basil Bēssariōn of Trebizond, the Metropolitan of Nicæa; and Joseph II, the Patriarch of Constantinople. Mark became famous within Orthodoxy for being the only member of the Greek delegation to reject the conclusions of the Council of Florence, and he is as such regarded as a ‘Pillar of Orthodoxy’ in our Church. Both Mark and Basil were highly-educated and belonged to senatorial families. Both of them were monks based in Constantinople. Both of them studied under the great Platonic philosopher George Gemistos, who was also at the Council of Florence. Both of them deeply valued certain strands in Western Scholastic thought. Although their upbringings were similar, though, Mark and Basil still represented two very different styles of thought, two very different intellectual tendencies, and ultimately two very different class interests within the Eastern Empire.

Even though Basil was tonsured as a monk, he spent only one year as a monk and later an abbot in Constantinople prior to his elevation to the metropolis of Nicæa. It becomes clear from his subsequent career in both Greece and Italy that he is far more comfortable hobnobbing with the esteemed, the wealthy and the great among the lords spiritual and temporal, than he is with keeping the monastic disciplines. He was a key figure in ‘Renaissance humanism’, which is to say, that he carefully cultivated the patronage of people like de’ Medici and Louis XI of France. Thus, although he was originally sceptical of the Council of Florence, as he began to understand the opportunities for fame and career advancement that the Council provided him, he turned into the biggest supporter of Union between the Churches on the Latins’ terms. As Ostroumov put it: ‘No! it was no love of truth, but other objects in view, that prevailed upon [Bēssariōn] to side with the Latins; and most likely a wish to afford [the Emperor] John pleasure, and a hope of honours from the Roman court.’

Saint Mark (Eugenikos) of Ephesos

Mark, on the other hand, was practically raised in the Church and was a monk through-and-through, long before he became a bishop. His concerns are almost entirely monastic. The personality that comes through in the accounts of his activity at Florence show a man who is deeply invested in the exploration of theological questions to the point that he doesn’t care if he trod on the toes of Popes or Cardinals, or Dominican friars like Giovanni di Montenero, or even his own fellow Greek bishops! He was actually originally in favour of the Union, but running up against the egos of Montenero and others in the sittings at Florence, he came to the realisation that a common truth was not to be found there. When he returned home, also, his polemical works could be considered almost ‘populist’ in flavour, as pointed out by his contemporary Andrew of Rhodes. He had no objections, on the whole, to speaking with and directing his writings to the ‘common man’ in Constantinople or Ephesos. As Ostroumov puts it: ‘Mark’s words and influence had a great effect both on the plain, and on the learned, inclining them to the defence of Orthodoxy.’

In the end, I have to wonder what might have been, if the effort to unite the Churches had been based, not on the diplomatic proceedings of the proud and the mighty, but instead building on the lay piety of the Catholic devotees of the Dominican Saint Catherine of Siena on one side, and the parallel quasi-monastic religious expressions of the common folk of Byzantium on the other. If anything, the enthusiasm of Saint Mark Eugenikos for certain Western saints going into the Council – particularly the Benedictines – shows that there could well have been some grounds for discourse on a higher common denominator between the Orthodox monastics and the lay piety movement in Spain and elsewhere. As Berdyaev would say, perhaps there is still common ground. But if the Council of Florence is any indication, the technique of forcing a top-down Unia quickly displays a haute bourgeois class character which is inimical to the religious expressions and aspirations of the masses, in both East and West.

Continued in Part 3.

The class politics of Eastern Catholicism, part 1: Crusades, Black Death and the Big Four

Map of 13^th-century Venice

I promised that I would write a post on Western Christian gæopolitics in early modernity, from an Orthodox perspective that takes account of world-systems theory. This blog post quickly sprawled out in three different directions, and I soon realised that to retain coherence and not to try the patience of my readers, I had better split it up into three or four separate blog posts. I also decided that given the ecclesiological nature of the discourse, it would be best posted here rather than on Silk and Chai (even though it overlaps strongly with S&C’s wonted subject matter). This, then, is the first part of that series, where I explore the Crusades and the œconomic opportunities and class rifts that they exposed, particularly among the mercantilist northern Italian city-states: particularly Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence. The Maronites play a significant rôle here, because they demonstrated, especially to the Venetians, the value of having a local comprador élite class which could serve as agents of extraction for that city-state’s high financial and commercial interests. For a long time, the Western Church did not act on this insight – not, at least, until the financial depression brought about by the bubonic plague and the ecclesial instability brought about by the Western Schism.

To start with: one of the conceits that several of the sui iuris non-Latin rites of the Catholic Church – in particular, the Maronites and the Byzantine Greek Catholics – have about themselves is that they are ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’. This self-descriptor actually conceals more than it illuminates, which is of course precisely the point. If they were Orthodox Christian, they would be in communion with at least several of the established and visible body of Patriarchal Churches (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, Moscow, Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Tbilisi, Justiniana, Athens, Tiranä, Warsaw and Prague) that is generally recognised by that name. The descriptor of ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’ is meant to conceal as much as possible the actual gæopolitical and œconomic agenda these churches were created to serve, and which they have served throughout their history.

The first attempts at ‘Unia’ were largely political and œconomic instruments of the merchant city-states of Northern Italy as they attempted to break into the mediæval world-system along the Silk Road and the Maritime Route. Subsequent attempts at ‘Unia’ were deployed by the mercantilist powers, and their ultimate aim was to keep the global semi-periphery from escaping the control of the global core. With a few notable exceptions, today they largely continue in that rôle, particularly in gæopolitical flash-points like the Ukraine and Lebanon. Their aim is to constrain the semi-periphery, and prevent any organised alternative to capitalism from forming – particularly in Russia or in China.

It’s first necessary to understand something about Europe’s historical and current place in the world-system. Historically, Europe was a benighted backwater. Most of the world’s trade was happening around and across Asia, over the southern land route and the Indian Ocean maritime route. One broad swathe of trade routes existed between Damascus and Luoyang, and another trade between Zanzibar and Guangzhou. This trade between Byzantium, India, China and later the Arab world created and transferred the majority of the world’s material wealth, and it was carefully and meticulously regulated on both ends. Standing on the sidelines, beyond Byzantium and Damascus, were the doges of the Italian thalassocratic merchant republics and city-states: particularly the ‘big four’ of Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence. In general, Venice had been content early to sit back and rake in the secondary benefits of trade with Constantinople, but one major motivating factor of the First Crusade had been the desire of Genoa and Pisa to ‘break into’ the trade network with its terminus in the Eastern Mediterranean. As Janet Abu-Lughod puts it:

Appetites whetted and abilities tested by prior sea battles and seeking to expand their horizon from the western basin of the Mediterranean to the eastern, the Genoese enthusiastically answered the call of the Pope for the first foray of that bloody and eventually unsuccessful venture—the conquest of Palestine… It was thus Genoese and Pisan ships that came to the rescue of the French, Flemish and other European knights who had eagerly answered Pope Urban the Second’s call in 1095 for a ‘reconquest’ of the Holy Land from the Muslims…

Venice held back until the operation looked as though it might succeed. Not until ‘1099, after the Frank armies had battered their way into Jerusalem, slaughtering every Muslim in the city and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue… did a Venetian fleet of 200 [leave] the Lido port’. It finally arrived in the summer of 1100 just in time to assist in the recapture of Jaffa and other towns. As a reward the Venetians were also allotted one-third of the towns’ land and environs and given special trading concessions in the new Crusader kingdom. Later, Venice received her usual third when the ports of Tyre and Ascalon were taken with her help. Venetians were allowed to form their own quarters and enjoy a position privileged to exploit the commercial opportunities of expanding trade.

This direct entrée to the riches of the East changed the role of the Italian merchant mariner cities from passive to active… The Genoese and to a lesser extent the Venetians had begun the long process of tipping the fulcrum of the world system. By the thirteenth century ‘the centre of gravity [of Europe at least] had definitely moved to the “big four” of northern and central Italy (Venice, Milan, Genoa and Florence) whose powerful merchants had a firm grip on the routes towards the fertile and industrious European hinterland and endeavoured to reach far beyond the declining Islamic façade into the depths of Asia and Africa’.

It would not be entirely accurate to characterise the Crusades between 1100 and 1400 as being a purely predatory enterprise by the volunteer foot soldiers of these merchant republics. As Abu-Lughod makes clear, some Crusaders were authentically and genuinely driven by a pious desire to defend the Christian holy places from Islâmic oppressors. In this, they were motivated by an often stunning degree of idealistic naïveté. However, it is necessary to look at the œconomic motivations of the people who had answered Pope Urban II’s call to Crusade, because many of the high-ranking Crusaders saw it as an opportunity to carve pieces for themselves out of what had once been the Eastern Roman Empire – and certainly the naval city-state powers mentioned above had material stakes in diverting trade towards themselves.

Particularly interesting in the above account is the Venetian and Genoese interest in the coast of Lebanon, and here is where we can begin to see the origins of the Unia – not as a disinterested and pacific desire for Christian unity, but instead as a political stratagem to cultivate and firmly entrench a coterie of native informants and compradors. The Maronites – a religious community tracing its origins to the monastic communities that arose around Saints Mârûn in Syria and ’Ibrâhîm in Lebanon – had firmly and decisively detached themselves for political reasons from Eastern Rome several centuries before. Blessed Theodoret of Kyrrhos notes disapprovingly that the first self-described disciples of Mârûn waged a civil war with other Orthodox Christians over their beloved saint’s body after his repose!

From William of Tyre’s Histoire de Outremer

But what was originally, and might have remained, an intriguing footnote in Byzantine religious history, gained an interesting œconomic and political significance during the Crusades. Although their motives for separating themselves from the Byzantine Orthodox Christians around them had more to do with the politics of holy places than with any sort of doctrinal difference, doctrinal differences between the Maronites and the Orthodox nevertheless accumulated. Despite the warnings of several of their leading churchmen against it, by the 1100s – according to contemporary sources William of Tyre and Jacques de Vitry – the Maronite community had embraced the early-mediæval hæresy of monothelitism: probably on account of the military aid they had received from the al-Jarâjima cavalry from the Taurus mountains who inclined to that belief. Still, when the Frankish, Flemish and Italian Crusaders arrived – exhausted and low on supplies – on the Lebanese coast, they were surprised to discover that they were welcomed warmly by the local urban élites who belonged to this sect. The local Maronite leaders fed the Crusaders, resupplied them, furnished them with guides and interpreters, and even sent a supporting unit of archers with them.

The Maronite Patriarch made the first gesture of unity with Rome in 1182, when he sent a missive to the Pope recognising his supremacy over the Church, recognising the entire body of Roman Catholic doctrine, and establishing formal communion. It appears from the record that the impetus for this first instance of Uniatism – again, undertaken for political reasons with the Maronites being opposed to both Constantinople and the Arab Caliphate – came largely if not entirely from the Maronites themselves. Even so, the political and financial potentials of such alliances were not lost on the Italian doges who observed them. They had seen the value in keeping handy a clique of allied locals, particularly ones in a position of relative military and œconomic dominance.

From the perspective of Venice in particular, indirect imperialism became of great strategic importance over the coming centuries. The Fourth Crusade in particular highlighted both the œconomic benefits of dominating important trade hubs like Constantinople, and the political limits of direct conquest and expansion. Venice was not really concerned with exercising direct political authority, so much as controlling points of distribution of trade goods into Europe. Again, from Abu-Lughod, concerning the Fourth Crusade:

Between July 1203 and April 1204 the ‘Latins’ who had set out to fight the infidels instead besieged their fellow Christians and, when the city was finally entered, set it on fire, plundered its riches, and then piously celebrated Palm Sunday and Easter Day ‘with hearts full of joy for the benefits our Lord and Saviour had bestowed on them’.

The Count of Flanders and Hainaut, Baldwin IX, still in his twenties, was elected Emperor of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, his coronation taking place a few weeks later in the great Church of Saint Sophia. The Venetians wanted no high office, they wanted only to expand their merchant empire. They ‘appropriated the best part of the imperial territory’, claiming three-eighths of the city and empire, including all of Crete, from which Venice would direct her spice trade into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries… This, when added to her continuing Egyptian connexion, made Venice the dominant force controlling European access to the spices and silks of Asia.

The siege of Constantinople, 1203

Abu-Lughod then goes on to point out that in the wake of this conquest of Constantinople, Venice entered into a period of marked expansion. Its culture flourished. Private business flourished. Its political system became more efficient. Industrial, naval and transport technologies not so much progressed as leaped explosively forward. Even though Venice was jealous of this new prosperity and wanted to prevent Genoa in particular from benefitting, the other three of the big four Italian mercantile city-states also found themselves on this upward trajectory.

However, with very few exceptions, despite their interest in trade with the Orthodox world (and beyond), and despite the growing body of knowledge that the Crusaders were bringing back from their Muslim contacts in the Levant, the Italian city-states did not pursue a religious-ideological attempt at unifying West and East for the next couple of centuries. This was because such attempts at bringing about political unity between the two halves of Christendom were, from the Italian mercantile perspective, not œconomically necessary. They were doing remarkably well at diversifying, intensifying and expanding their trade networks, and using their presence in various ports around the Eastern Mediterranean to extract wealth and resources, without such a strategy.

A number of events changed that calculus, however. The first and most important of these was the Black Death. The Black Death reached Venice and Genoa through their trade networks, having been imported from Caffa, which had been besieged by Mongols who were carrying the plague. These outbreaks of bubonic plague were utterly disastrous for the merchant republics. As Abu-Lughod notes:

The results were catastrophic.

Something like three-fifths of the inhabitants of Venice died within the next 18 months … Three plague-ridden centuries followed 1348 … In 1500 the population [of Venice] was about the same size as it had been two hundred years earlier.

Genoa suffered a similar fate. By 1350 her population was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1341 and never did recover fully.

The Black Death hits Venice

Venice and Genoa both went through a ‘Great Depression’ that lasted until the late 1300s. Abu-Lughod tells us that this had an indelible impact on the political culture of the city-states of northern Italy; power became further concentrated among a handful of family patrimonies across all of the Big Four and their mercantile-republican systems became more openly oligarchic in substance if not in structure. In addition, the ‘bandwidth’ of each city-state’s trade network narrowed. Volume of trade decreased, but not as precipitously as the diversity and interconnexion of the trade networks.

The decrease in population across the entire Mediterranean basin meant that the Big Four were increasingly dependent for logistical purposes on local mercantile compradors who served Venetian or Genoese interests from within their native ports. Though it’s unlikely that these big mercantile empires thought of employing a union between the Western and Eastern churches as a stratagem for easier control of local comprador élites, this consideration did sweeten the deal for them when the proposal was made. This, however, will be covered in a subsequent blog post.

Continued in Part 2 and Part 3.