"Real wars always begin with culture wars." Theologian Aristotle Papanikolaou discusses Eastern Orthodox perspectives on war and violence; the impact of Communism on Eastern Orthodox theology; the complicated ecclesial structures of Eastern Orthodoxy, where bishops, patriarchs, and nation-states interact in unpredictable ways; he reflects on Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia and Ukraine, the ways Christianity is enmeshed and caught up in the authoritarian, nationalist regime under Putin, and the idea of "Russkii Mir" (the Russian world), which has come to motivate and justify a great deal of violence and aggression in the name of peace and unity.
"Real wars always begin with culture wars." Theologian Aristotle Papanikolaou discusses Eastern Orthodox perspectives on war and violence; the impact of Communism on Eastern Orthodox theology; the complicated ecclesial structures of Eastern Orthodoxy, where bishops, patriarchs, and nation-states interact in unpredictable ways; he reflects on Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia and Ukraine, the ways Christianity is enmeshed and caught up in the authoritarian, nationalist regime under Putin, and the idea of "Russkii Mir" (the Russian world), which has come to motivate and justify a great deal of violence and aggression in the name of peace and unity.
About
Aristotle Papanikolaou is Professor of Theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture at Fordham University. He co-directs the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, and is author of The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy and has edited several volumes of Eastern Orthodox theological and political perspectives.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Real wars always begin with culture wars. There's a lot of causes for this war, but so-called "culture wars" is part of the narrative. And I think we just have to be aware that our rhetoric, the way we frame things, in the end can lead to this kind of absolutely unnecessary violence and aggression. What's happened in Ukraine is really, I mean, all war is tragic. It's just that there's just, you know, you had people waking up and having their coffee and then the next day being bombarded.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I'm Ryan McAnnally-Linz with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. We've covered the rise of Christian nationalism on this podcast before with several episodes-worth of how it's impacted American political and social life over the past two years, but Christian nationalism is far from an exclusively American phenomenon. The temptation to fuse Christian identity, political power, and national ambitions is as widespread as it is dangerous. Over the past month for Ukraine, it's become clear again that Christianity is playing a role, but how exactly are theological and religious factors functioning in Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Today, we're going to talk through some of the basic political and ecclesial elements of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Then we'll consider some of the implications of the current state of Eastern Orthodoxy for the war in Ukraine.
To that end, I asked Aristotle Popanikolaou to join me on the show. Aristotle is Professor of Theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture at Fordham University where he co-directs the Orthodox Christian Studies Center. He's author of The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-radical Orthodoxy, and has edited several volumes on Eastern Orthodox theological and political perspectives. We discuss Eastern Orthodox perspectives on war and violence; the impact of communism on Eastern Orthodox theology; the complicated ecclesial structures of Eastern orthodoxy, where bishops, patriarchs, and nation states interact in unpredictable ways.
With some of these basics in hand, we discuss Orthodoxy in Russia and Ukraine; the ways Christianity is enmeshed and caught up in the authoritarian nationalist regime under Putin; and the idea of "Russkiy mir," the Russian world, which has come to motivate and justify a great deal of violence and aggression in the name of peace and unity.
Thanks for listening friends,
Aristotle, thanks for taking some time to come and talk to us today.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: My pleasure.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I know, from my own experience, that the war in Ukraine, the invasion there, well, it showed me just how little I know about the Orthodox Church or Churches. And, I was a little surprised. I have theological training. I thought I might know more. It turns out I don't. And my hunch is a lot of our listeners are in the same sort of boat. And so I thought it would be helpful if you could just fill us in on a few of the terms, a little bit of the lay of the land, before we dive into the sort of theological issues at stake right now, like the theological things that are going on around the war.
So, maybe, first: Russia and Ukraine were both parts of the Soviet Union. And as I understand it, the relation between the Orthodox Church and the state now is quite different from what it was in the era of communism. Could you give just a few comments about how the church and the communist state related? What was the relationship between communism and orthodoxy?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Yeah, that's-- that's an interesting question. I would say that the Orthodox Churches in general have a very traumatic memory of living under communism, no matter what space you're in. I mean, they survived. They had official churches, secret polices of those churches infiltrated those churches, the memory of those communist regimes don't sit well with the Orthodox Churches. And they really remember them as regimes that tried to pretty much get rid of Orthodoxy and tried to get rid of that Orthodox history and heritage.
Historically, the memory is not a good one at all. And the memory really is one of trying to be eliminated. But I will say this, recently there've been Orthodox theologians who have tried to speak about another side of communism, right? Not that sort of Stalinist 20th-century version that we may have seen throughout the various traditional Orthodox Christian countries in Eastern Europe. And so one of the key spokespersons for that is of course David Bentley Hart. And so I encourage your readers just to Google his name and the word "communism," and you'll see about three, four, or five articles come up. To be fair, he's not really promoting communism, he doesn't really use that word as often as he would socialism. And he obviously differentiates socialism from whatever we saw under those murdererous regimes. He does that.
But one could interpret what he's saying as a form of communism, I guess, in the good sense of the word, right? That sense of thinking about communal sharing and thinking about ways of distribution and equality and justice and things like that. So, you do have some Orthodox thinkers who are moving, who aren't afraid to speak in that way, but I don't think that's necessarily trickled down to the broader Orthodox consciousness.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Got it. Yeah.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: So, it's absolutely the case that under the communist regimes that the state apparatuses very much tried to control the churches in what they did. And the churches of course, to survive, I mean, had to negotiate that. In Russia, in particular, in the Soviet Union, I should say, in particular, it was, again, absolutely the case that this went on. They tried to eradicate, really, any sign of Orthodoxy, and they couldn't in the end. But thousands of churches, monasteries, hundreds of thousands of people were just murdered in the name of their religion. If not millions. I mean, this is all very well documented.
And it is the case that, and not surprisingly, of course, that the secret police would, in various Orthodox countries, would place priests and put people in there as priests, as ways of intelligence gathering, of controlling what it is those particular churches would do in relationship to their own populations. Because they didn't want a lot of people to become Orthodox again. They didn't want a lot of people to be religious again, obviously. Right? So they tolerated the existence of the Church at some point, especially after the 1950s, but they didn't want people to really-- they didn't want a resurgence.
But it was also the case that those churches were part of international organizations. So, they saw those churches as vehicles for both projecting the Soviet Union positively, but also for making sure that those international organizations weren't controlled by the West.
So I'm not, I'm going to be very careful here-- not all bishops, not all priests under those particular, that communist period, were under the state apparatus. The significant amount of the church infrastructure, I think, was pretty much under that control. And look, quite honestly, I wouldn't say... it's not the same situation now, but in any of the traditional Orthodox countries like Russia, like Serbia in particular, maybe even Bulgaria, less so in Romania, definitely not as much in Greece--- I mean, there's a sense in which the state apparatuses don't want churches to get too much out of control. They want know churches to pretty much support what's going on in the state government.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It's a little striking to me, that traumatic history, that it wouldn't lead to more suspicion about being wrapped into a state's projects, but I mean, I guess it makes a really big difference if the state is talking you up.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Correct. That's exactly the difference. If the state supports you, then they're okay with it. And it comes at a very high cost. But one of the things you should also know as well, though, is that the Russian government is using the Church in a soft power kind of way to maintain its influence in places like Serbia and Bulgaria in particular. And one of those things that those Churches have to maybe try to realize is that by allowing themselves to do that, to some extent they're repeating this Soviet pattern, they're repeating the Soviet pattern of the Soviets trying to use, more directly, their governments controlling the communist territories in any way that they can, but also using the churches as ways of maintaining their control too.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Turning now to the war. Does the Orthodox theological tradition have a history of debates about the possible legitimacy of war, under what conditions war is acceptable, analogous to the just war tradition in the West? And then in the West, we also see a long history of a pacifist sub-current that pops up more or less at various different times. Is there anything analogous in the Orthodox world?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: No. So there never has been a debate about just war within the history of the Orthodox Church. You have comments, you have statements by fathers of the church, but there's never been a kind of outline, let's say, of just war theory. There is a excellent book, I have an essay in there, Orthodox Christian Perspectives On War, it has wonderful essays in there. And it gives a variety of perspectives, especially given what's happening in Ukraine. Obviously there's been a tradition of justified violence in the form of self-defense.
What is interesting, however, is this: is that the Russian Orthodox Church came out with something called the Social Concept Document in 2000. And it's really quite, it's quite interesting. It was fairly thorough. I don't think it was very well done, but it was fairly thorough and they talk about war. And one of the things that people have pointed out to me is that the Patriarchate's defense of this war transgresses what they actually say in that document. So they're somewhat in a performative, inner contradiction, because that document, ultimately it doesn't really provide a grounding for their current support of what's going on in Ukraine.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So what's a patriarch?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Oh. [laughs] So that's a good question. The patriarch is a bishop, but not all bishops are patriarchs though, right? So in the Orthodox Church, we have three levels of the clerical ranks, deacon, priest, bishop, and liturgically, I would say, all bishops really are the same or equal when they do the liturgy. But administratively, jurisdictionally, they have different levels of authority, of levels of responsibility. Patriarch is the highest title and only few have it.
I have to be honest, I'm not a hundred percent clear on the development of why some get the title of patriarch and some don't, that's a historical question. And my guess though, too, is that, I don't know if there's a necessarily a clear answer to that.
But the ancient Patriarchates, maybe some of these are Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the Orthodox Churches, because those were great centers, city centers, during the Roman Empire. And then which became of course the Christian Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And so that's to say that, if you were bishop of one of those cities, you were a patriarch?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Correct. Yeah. Correct. But the bishop of Rome, of course, when there was Christian unity, it was not called a patriarch. So, yeah. So a patriarch is just, the simple answer really is it's a title. It's a title of respect. It's the highest title you can get. It means that you are in charge of an independent, what we call autocephalous, church, like an independent church. You have pretty much full authority within the independent autocephalous administrative structure, which normally follows the borders of a nation state. But in the case of places like Jerusalem and Constantinople, it doesn't. Or Antioch. Or even Alexandria it doesn't.
And then there are other churches that have a kind of what's called an autocephalous or independent status, but they're not patriarchs. So, for example, the Archbishop of Athens is the head of an independent autocephalous Church of Greece, but he's not a patriarch. And I think why he's not a patriarch, why others are, very much has something to do with a certain historical, perhaps even political reasons about how these churches became independent.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Got it. So you don't have to have a patriarch to be autocephalous, independent. What does that independent status mean? What, sort of, what does it-- how does it work administratively or in terms of authority and standing?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Yeah, the Orthodox, like to say that amongst all the Churches, there is a unity of faith, a liturgical unity, even if there might be minor liturgical differences, there's a liturgical unity. And like I said, when bishops get up in front of that altar, you might have one presider, and usually the one which has that certain title of respect is the main presider, but if there's more bishops around the altar, liturgically, they're equal, there's no difference there. So liturgically they're, they're in some sense, those liturgical celebrants are all equal.
But to be the head of an independent or what we call autocephalous church means that you pretty much jurisdictionally, administratively, you pretty much run the show within your territory.
So one of the examples I like to give is, technically, the Pope can go, let's say, to the Archbishop of New York, right? The Archdiocese of New York? And pretty much make a decision about a priest, a bishop, and the Archdiocese would have to do that. Now, of course, he doesn't do that, but he could, technically. He has jurisdiction. The Pope really is in charge of global Catholicism and he has that authority.
That's not the case in the Orthodox Church. We have a Patriarch, the Ecumenical Patriarch. He, he has that title of respect, of honor, as being first among equals. There's some debate about whether that carries some level of authority or not. But one thing is for sure: he cannot go into, let's say, the autocephalous Church of Romania and just remove a priest from a parish, or tell the Patriarch of Romania what to do. He simply cannot do that. And so there's a sense in which, jurisdictionally, those churches really are autonomous centers of power. And that, I mean, related to maybe some of the things we're going to talk about today, that actually has a bit of an impact. I'm thinking through the situation in Russia, in Ukraine, and others, what's going on in the rest of the Orthodox world.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So maybe last bit of background: where does the Orthodox Church in Ukraine historically sit? In terms of these structures.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Yeah. That's also a bit of a, as with everything in the Orthodox world, it's a bit of a complicated and tricky question. But basically, the area where we're looking at, around where Kyiv is today and a little bit northeast, where Belarus, parts of Russia, is-- that constituted that empire. The historical story is that Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus', he converted, and, to some extent, that was the beginning of what we now know as Orthodoxy, Orthodox Christianity, within that area, really within the Slavic world.
And then over time through various historical developments, the center of religious power resided in Moscow. Moscow's jurisdictional territory, it did expand to include what we now know today to be Russia, but also what we now know today to be Ukraine. So the Moscow Patriarchate became part of the Russian Empire. And, again, their jurisdictional territory didn't necessarily follow Imperial borders, and they, for historical reasons, that really covered that particular region.
And then around the early part of the 20th century, when there was a push for Ukrainian nationhood, for national borders, a nation state, and it happened around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. There was also a push for the creation of an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. And truthfully, I mean, that's how many of the autocephalous churches got formed over the past few centuries. Because the Serbian nation fored, the Bulgarian nation formed, the Romanian nation formed. And many of those autocephalous churches really just followed those national borders. Even in Greece as well. I mean, that's really, the nation state to some extent, determined autocephalous borders.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Okay. That's interesting. We shouldn't be picturing autocephalous churches that, the waves of empires, kind of, washed over them, and they remained, but, the creation of the churches is bound up with the modern nation state process over the last couple of centuries.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Right. So, I mean, there's a sense in which the history of this autocephaly has something to do wit, has something to do both with imperial structures, but then eventually it solidified with the creation of nation states. And I think the Ukrainian nationhood movement towards a certain kind of Ukrainian nation, to Ukrainian national identity, national borders, in the early part of the century had something to do with the creation of an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which gained steam again after communism fell. And after communism fell, of course, the nation of Ukraine was in fact formed. And there was a bit of a push for an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
There seemed actually to be a little bit of possible acceptance on the part of Moscow, but then that was all quickly stopped. And then there became several Ukrainian Orthodox Churches within now, the newly formed nation of Ukraine. And there was a bit of a history there. And now we've ended up with that there is a Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, which has about 12,000 parishes. And there's an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church that the Ecumenical Patriarchate established, they gave what's called a tomos. And they have about 7,000 parishes. And before the war, that's pretty much where we were at. There's of course a Greek Catholic population, which is about 20% of the population. And then there's an extremely small kind of renegade Orthodox Church in Ukraine that really is very small and somewhat insignificant in this whole affair now, but that's pretty much where we stood before the war.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: All right. So the current patriarch of Moscow is Patriarch Kirill, and he has been, broadly speaking, supportive of the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine. Could you fill us in a little bit on, on the texture of that support and then maybe what sort of reasons have been offered for it?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Okay. So on the surface, I mean, the reasons he's giving, it's pretty much in line with the kind of narrative that Putin is giving, right? "There are Russians under attack, there Nazification". And even the layer-- like, Kirill gave this famous sermon a few weeks ago on what we call the Sunday of Forgiveness.
[audio excerpt plays of Patriarch Kirill's sermon]
It's the Sunday right before Lent begins. And he's saying that ultimately, I mean, implying and I'm paraphrasing here, but basically that the West was leading Ukraine astray. And making a reference to the fact that they were allowing gay parades or something like that.
So the idea somehow is that, "In Russia, we promote traditional values. Ukraine is being seduced and led astray by the West. That's immoral, ideologically immoral, etc." So Kirill was pretty much supporting it for those particular kinds of reasons, and ultimately Putin even incorporates a lot of that rhetoric as well.
Again, part of the rhetoric, too, is, "We have a shared history, we're one people, we're Holy Rus. I mean, there's this thing called the Russian world" the Russkiy mir, that we're a part of, and we don't want Ukraine to be led astray by these Nazis, by these sort of people who are being seduced by the liberal West." Right?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Okay. So, so on the face of it, a large part of that seems, I mean, it's just flatly false and a good chunk of it sounds, I mean, it sounds very reminiscent of U.S. culture wars stuff. Are there theological appeals being made, like properly theological? Or is it giving theological weight to non-theologically articulated social morality claims? How is theology functioning in this sort of rhetoric?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Yeah, I mean--- so, the idea of Russkiy mir is a little bit more of a historical, political kind of idea. I mean, I don't really know if theology plays a role in that particular way of seeing things. I mean, say, the idea, in other words, is that we're really one people and we have a common history, a coming heritage, we should be one, we should not be seduced by the West, so on and so forth.
I think it's interesting for your listeners to know, too, that during the Empire, to be Russian meant to be Orthodox. I mean, the communists sort of de-link that: to be Russian meant not to be religious, not to be Orthodox. And it really was not clear whether after communism fell, whether that link would be reestablished. And it was. It took a long time, but it wasn't necessarily a given. And Putin around 2012, started to buy into this re-linking as well. So that somehow to be Russian meant to be Orthodox, right? But that to be Russion, to be Orthodox, also had this broader kind of Russkiy mir, Russian world idea to it.
Now, again, that idea is a little bit more historical geographical. Where the theology, I think, comes in is, when they start to identify this Russkiy mir and this Russian national identity that to be Russian is to be Orthodox, et cetera, to really identify with this sense of traditional values, and promoting traditional values, and having a democracy that is not seduced by liberal notions of freedom and autonomy and individuality. Because, I mean, Russia, to this day, I know it's hard to believe, they'll claim they're a democracy, which of course they're not. But there's a sense that they are a kind of democracy that promotes traditional values. That's really where the theology comes in.
And recently just to end here, on this point, there was a declaration against Russkiy mir. And it was signed by many theologians, I think it's got over a thousand signatures by Orthodox and even non-Orthodox theologians and scholars. And the word heresy was used once. And I think the reason why it was used was because, again, it's a really more historical and geographical. The theology comes with this traditional values. But I think the reason why the word heresy was used is because it's somehow being appropriated. It's somehow being appropriated as a way of justifying the violence in this war. It's playing a role there. And I think the word heresy became a very strong way of really condemning the manufacturing or imagination of this kind of world as some kind of theological grounding for a God-given mission to save Ukraine from itself.
But insofar as this kind of political ideology developed, and the church is associated with it, it has, it would be called an ecclesiological dimension. A way of understanding the church and its relationship to politics and to nation, because all that is involved. And to some extent, there are that does involve theology, it involves a certain way of understanding the church. This, the declaration, did in one instance, really, refer to it as a heresy: as something which is not a proper way of understanding the church's relationship to nation, culture, politics, et cetera.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So I think you may have used the term, like, a mission, like, a historical mission? A God-given mission, and that's jumped out at me. That seems to be a place where theology and nationalism-- that's where you really get going, right? When you have a theology of history and of the theological place of particular national communities or entities within whatever that theology of history is. And I'm curious, how does that strike you?
I mean, you've talked about heresy in this particular case: is it, does that strike you as problematic at a formal level? At the level that the kind of identification of nations as bearers of historical, God-given missions is a problem? Or is it more at the material level? In this case, identifying Russia as having this mission and that mission, including something, like, the violent conquest over Ukraine, is the problem.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: It's a little bit of both. I mean, at the theological, at the formal level, let's say, Christian faith is really a transnational faith. And that's one of the advantages of papal primacy, which I know there's a lot of controversy over, but one of the advantages of papal primacy, especially a little bit more recently, is that it's a transnational center point, right? It's a place where people can at least point to as trying to go beyond national identifications.
That's something that's a little bit hard for Americans to understand. The way in which religion, nation, culture, somehow fuse together in many places around the world, in ways that maybe we don't understand. We're obviously getting a little taste of that now with our own resurgence of what's called Christian nationalism in the United States. But that is coming as a surprise to us, right? I mean, that's coming as a bit of a surprise. But you know, Americans are learning what that's about and seeing its impact.
So at the formal level, I would say that it can be very problematic in the sense that Christian identity is a transnational identity. And that, too, it often is the case that when religion, or in this case, orthodoxy, is identified with a particular national identity. So in Greece, for example, even today, even though people don't go, 90% of Greeks identify as Orthodox Christian, it's a very high percentage. But during the Balkan wars, let's say, of the 1920s, they fought the Bulgarians and it was clear that their Orthodox identity didn't really play a role in basically saying to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe we shouldn't be fighting other Orthodox."
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: "Hey we're orthodox, you're Orthodox."
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Right. And I think here in Russia, too, I mean, we have to just say it's a one way kind of thing going on here in the Russian-Ukraine War. Russia is invading. Russia has invaded, they are invading. They're the ones who started the war. They're the aggressors. Now, they're making claims they're doing it because of Nazis and this and that which we all know here in the West are false. But it's not occurring to them that they are really killing innocent Orthodox Christians.
So there's a sense in which even at the material level, I mean, it sounds nice. It sounds nice. It's like, your nation is also imbued with these religious values and this are the just way of life. And that can be very nice. Like in Greece, things pretty much come to a halt during Holy Week. And it's very nice. Everybody's celebrating together, and they eat the same food, and they celebrate the same ways, and that's beautiful and that's very nice. That's one of the, maybe, the material advantages of it.
But there are also dangers that come with it as well, in the sense that it can make you forget that Christianity is a transnational faith. That ultimately it's something that refers to God and something beyond national borders and national identity. I mean, I have so many examples and stories to tell you that are really interesting. In Greece, one time, in 1991, I was visiting with my friend and we went to his uncle's house. And his uncle-- so, his uncle knows that he's a Greek-American, right? American from Greece, whose family comes from that same part of Greece. And his uncle asked us point blank, "So in your country, are you Orthodox?" Because in his brain, because we came from another country, he's not really clear what kind of Christianity we are, right? And so, just to give you some idea of that fusion, in a way, how it can impact the way people see the world.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: As you look at the particularly violent form that fusion is taking right now, what hopes do you have for Orthodox Christians in Russia, for Orthodox Christians more broadly, in terms of how they think about the public implications of their faith?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Yeah. So let's be clear about the fusion. The fusion is happening in Russia in such a way that the church now, the official church-- not all Orthodox Christians in Russia, because there are many who are against what's happening, so let's be clear about; there are many priests, some people who have really risked their lives and their wellbeing speaking out, et cetera-- but the official church, I mean, Patriarch Kirill and many surrounding him: that fusion has basically led them, has backed them into a corner now, where they simply have to support and reiterate the government's line, its narrative, its way of thinking. That's one of the costs of having re-linked Russian identity with Orthodox identity and having the government of the regime now use that in this particular way.
So that's also leading to the support of this Russkiy mir idea. Which to some extent is an idea that is saying, "Well, who we are as Russian people has nothing to do with national borders. It even goes beyond present day national borders." So it sounds a bit transnational. However, it is basically being used to tell other people that what you're saying about your identity is just false. So it's basically that the Russkiy mir idea is being used by the Russian government. It's that national fusion of religion.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: The idea is that Ukrainians are self-deceived in thinking of themselves as Ukrainians rather than Russians, right?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: To some extent, yeah. I mean, there's a sense in which they are claiming, "You are self-deceived in thinking that we're not all one people," and that "You really should be a part of us". And again, there's this implication that "We're really saving all of you from being seduced by the West, which will just corrupt your heritage, your history, who you are."
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: In terms of witness moving forward, what do you hope Orthodox theologians other Orthodox churches learn from this?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Well, the repercussions will be for a long time, because, like I said, there was a... there was this debate within the Ukrainian space about the various Orthodox Churches. There was the Ecumenical Patriarch that established this independent church. They did so, and then there was an-- actually, when the Ecumenical Patriarch did that, most of the Orthodox Church sided with the Moscow Patriarchate. So in fact, he gained a lot of social capital within the Orthodox world. He gained a lot.
Now, I mean, with what's happening, I mean, I can't imagine a single Ukrainian, quite honestly, that would-- I really can't imagine a single Ukrainian that would want to be under the leadership and the pastoral guidance of the Moscow Patriarchate. That's would be one thing to look out for. Like, what will happen within Ukraine, if Putin, in some way, in some way succeeds in putting in his own government, this independent autocephalous Orthodox Church will probably be cut out. And that will maybe create an underground church, who knows what will happen there.
If Putin doesn't put in a puppet government, and they come to some other solution, then I think the Moscow Patriarchate's influence within the Ukrainian space will have diminished significantly. And not only that, but the social capital it built with all the other Orthodox Churches I think has also diminished. Many of them have uneven statements, but I think most of them are to some extent, pretty horrified about what's happening and the way that religion is being used to justify this war.
What I hope-- so, the dynamics within the Orthodox church will change. And what I hope is what I hope all Christians should hope: that somewhere down the line, there'll be some form of reconciliation. But given what's happening, that will take decades in my opinion. But yeah, but down the line, I hope there'll be some accountability, some repentance, and somewhat of a reconciliation because, in the end, I mean, that's really what we're called to do. But again, I think that will take a lot of time.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Do you have particular things that you would want or hope American Christians to pray for in this time? And do you have particular things that you hope we would learn and take with us in terms of relating to relating the Orthodox Churches and relating our own faith to our national identities of various sorts?
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Yeah, definitely pray for the cessation of the war. Pray for, I think, accountability, repentance, some form of reconciliation, forgiveness. But I would say what we're seeing now is a certain kind of internationalizing of cultural wars. There's a wonderful project called The Postsecular Conflicts Project run by Kristina Stoeckl, who has actually been sounding the warning bell on this for a long time. And she made a comment that real wars always begin with culture wars. And we're absolutely in the midst of a culture war here in the United States. I mean, people thought it was over, but it's come back full force. And I just pray that it doesn't escalate to violence. I'm not predicting a civil war in the United States. I'm not. But I just hope it doesn't lead to violence.
And to see that, that-- I guess, for Americans and American Christians, especially, just to be aware that it's not just simply a clash of ideas. But when it becomes a clash of ideas in such a way that there's an impasse, no compromise, no conversation, winner take all, zero-sum game: it leads to violence. And we're seeing that play out. There's a lot of causes for this war, but so-called culture wars is part of the narrative. And I think we just have to be aware that our rhetoric, the way we frame things, in the end, can can lead to this kind of absolutely unnecessary violence and aggression. And what's happened to Ukraine is really, I mean, all war is tragic. It's just that, there's just-- you know, you had people waking up, having their coffee and then the next day being bombarded. And I'm wondering why.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Well, thanks for helping us wrap our heads around, at least a little bit of this, it's been really good to talk to you. I've learned a lot.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Well, I appreciate it. Anytime. And I invite all of you to visit our Center. Our Orthodox Christian Studies Center at fordham.edu/orthodoxy, and also publicorthodoxy.org, and our YouTube channel as well, Orthodox Christian Studies Center at YouTube: webinars, tons of essays over the past two weeks, they could really learn a lot by what's been written over the past couple of weeks there.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Well, thanks for all your work on that. It's been really valuable to me, and I know that others are learning a lot and coming to understand things that, again, we didn't know we didn't understand a few weeks ago.
Aristotle Papanikolaou: Thank you.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologians Aristotle Papanikolaou and Ryan McAnally-Linz. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday, sometimes midweek.
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