Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (144 page)

For others in the Church, there was less inhibition about looking to Western liberalism or socialism. In St Petersburg, that most cosmopolitan of Russian cities, where the main streets were hospitable to an extraordinary spectrum of churches representing the variety of European Christianity, many Orthodox parish clergy spoke of social progress and questioned tsarist autocracy, in a fashion which had more in common than might be expected with the reformist mood of American Evangelical Protestantism. The ultimate fruit of this was the large part played by clergy in the reformist upheavals of 1905. It was then that Fr Georgii Gapon, a popular and charismatic (one might say headstrong) young St Petersburg parish priest, led a mass demonstration of unarmed workers in the city, demanding political and social reforms. The reaction of the government was to shoot them down, a piece of brutal stupidity which turned demonstrations into attempted revolution. The outburst of popular fury nearly destroyed the regime twelve years before its eventual fall, and left a lasting legacy of mistrust and contempt for imperial rule. It was remarkable how much support Fr Gapon had received from the Church authorities during his outspoken campaigns, but the bloody end to the events of 1905 left the Church bitterly divided as to how to proceed in an atmosphere of repression and censorship. A radical wing among its clergy, the Renovationists, would continue to seek ways of reconciling Christianity with the increasingly militant stance of angry workers in Russian cities.
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The dynamism and questioning of Russian Orthodoxy were paralleled by those experienced by Churches seeking to escape four centuries of second-class status under Ottoman rule. Serbia and Greece were the first two regions to seize their freedom, and their different trajectories away from Constantinople were to cast long shadows into modern European politics. Serbia had little external help in its successful fight between 1815 and 1817 for independence, which was only acknowledged and given international recognition in 1878. Successive native dynasties were closely associated with the creation of a Serbian Orthodox Church which was autocephalous (independent of the Oecumenical Patriarch). That new establishment followed historic precedents, and so the patriarch could regard it as a restoration of former independence; a deal was carefully negotiated with Constantinople. The Orthodox Church had been vital to the survival of a Serb consciousness over the centuries of occupation. Now it had little hesitation in identifying with an expansionist Serbian nationalism, fuelled by a view of history shot through with consciousness of heroic suffering, and inclined to look for support to Russia, which was formal guarantor of Serbian independence from 1830.

By contrast, when an independent state took shape in the Greek peninsula, the fascination of Western Europeans with the Classical past complicated Greece's assertion of Orthodox values with a strong dose of Western liberalism. Greeks had in any case long enjoyed more commercial and travel contacts with the West than most other Orthodox, and it was noticeable that it was in Greece that Orthodoxy was faced with one of its own who had turned to expounding Enlightenment ideas in his own language. Christodoulos Pamblekis had been excommunicated in 1793: perhaps a resonant year even for churchmen far from Paris.
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The Church hierarchy was initially hostile to the Greek nationalist uprising because of the rebels' Western liberal rhetoric. The hostility was ended by the savagery of Ottoman reprisals for Greek massacres of Turks in the peninsula in the 1820s, when thousands of clergy were killed, beginning with the Oecumenical Patriarch himself, hanged from his own palace gateway in the Phanar district. Ottoman violence outraged all Christian Europe, and military intervention by Britain, France and Russia eventually forced the Sultan to recognize an independent Greek state.
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The first head of what was planned as a republic, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was devoutly Orthodox, and he succeeded in winning over the new Oecumenical Patriarch, who recognized his innovative state in 1830. Chaos descended after Kapodistrias's assassination the following year. The three European great powers then adopted an expedient employed in the newly independent Belgium. In 1833 they imported a German prince to be monarch (there would be other such royal implants in newly independent Orthodox nations later in the century, with varying fortunes). Otto of Bavaria was a Catholic with Lutheran advisers, and his regime infuriated the Oecumenical Patriarch by unilaterally creating an unprecedented autocephalous state Church, with Otto as head. There was no historical precedent for this independent Church in Greece, unlike the Serbian situation. It was not until 1850 that the patriarch gave recognition to this miniature version of Peter the Great's ecclesiastical system in Russia (which, as we have seen, had itself derived from Lutheran models).

One reason that the Greek bishops eventually found this arrangement acceptable was that, although the monarchy might seem an alien graft, it backed the aspiration of the initially small-scale territorial state to expand and encompass Greeks scattered through the southern Balkans and Anatolia. The Greek State Church's new-found freedom and privilege were exhilarating after four centuries of humiliation, and not surprisingly it became vigorously nationalist. That brought its own tensions with other Orthodox national groupings, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians, who had long resented the Greek domination of the patriarchate in Constantinople. Although the Ottoman Empire's decay did lead to enlargement of the kingdom of Greece in later wars, the ambition of Greeks for even greater gains was a catastrophe in the making for all Eastern Christians.

A different situation shaped first independent Church and then monarchy in Bulgaria. The delays in political independence, which the Bulgars did not formally achieve in full until 1909, threw all the greater attention on the status of their Church. That was tangled up with long-standing hostility between Greeks and Bulgarian-speakers, who resented the continuing favour shown to Greeks by the Oecumenical Patriarch. Matters came to a head in 1860 when one leading bishop announced the creation of an independent Bulgarian Church. The Ottoman authorities were only too happy to encourage Christian divisions: ten years later they formally recognized a Bulgarian exarch (a bishop whose authority over other bishops was similar to that of the six ancient patriarchates). It took until 1961 for the Oecumenical Patriarch to recognize the exarch's successors. The struggle between the exarchate and the Phanar was unusually bitter, and it produced a notable assertion of principle from the Oecumenical Patriarch. Faced with a situation where congregations and whole dioceses were declaring for the exarch on the basis of their common Bulgarian language and culture, in 1872 the Patriarch led a synod in Constantinople that condemned this as 'ethnophyletism', declaring it a heresy. The argument ran that there was no justification for an independent Church in Bulgaria, since it was still a territory under Ottoman suzerainty and with no other sovereign, unlike the Churches in the independent states of Serbia and Greece.

The denunciation of 'ethnophyletism' was a commitment to a vision of Orthodoxy which affirmed that it must never simply be an expression of nationalism or even of a single national culture. Despite the fact that from its first expansion into the Balkans, Orthodoxy has often become precisely such particular expressions, the affirmation of 1872 is likely to prove of great importance to Orthodoxy in the future. In practical and immediate terms, it did not prevent either the continuing de facto independence of the Bulgarian exarchate or the eventual development of a kingdom of Bulgaria which reflected the exarchate's boundaries. This was an unusually intimate melding of nationalism with the Church, which was treated by the monarchy rather in the fashion of Tsar Peter the Great and his successors in Russia (indeed, from 1908 until 1944, the monarchs of Bulgaria also styled themselves tsars). Ultimately this led to a routine politicization of Bulgarian Church leadership which antagonized many laypeople, and that has been seen as one of the reasons for the eventual weakening of Bulgarian Orthodox practice in the twentieth century. Despite the Church's crucial role in creating modern Bulgaria, the post-Communist republic now has one of the lowest rates of participation in Church life of any Orthodox country in Eastern Europe.
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As the Ottoman authorities suffered humiliating losses of territory to new Christian polities which justified independence precisely by their Christian identity, it was not surprising that sultans were increasingly inclined to see their remaining Christian subjects as a threat to their survival, and emphasize their authority with reference to their Muslim identity. Since their sixteenth-century conquest of Egypt with its Abbasid caliphate, Ottoman sultans had asserted their claim to be caliph, but it was only in the reign of Abdul Hamid II at the end of the nineteenth century that a sultan (in turns reformist and arbitrarily violent) chose to emphasize his role as protector of all Muslims. This was a desperate grab for enhanced spiritual authority by a monarchy losing control, rather like the pope's claim of infallibility at the moment of the loss of the Papal States.
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By the end of the nineteenth century, the sultan presided over an empire still multinational and multi-confessional, but in which the traditional mesh of understandings between faith groups was being much eroded, and much more was being said about the Islamic character of Ottoman rule.

Earlier in the century, the Ottoman rulers' pursuit of
Tanzimat
('reorganization') brought modernizing reforms in edicts of 1839 and 1856 which dismantled the
millet
system of separate religious communities. This provoked a good deal of resentment from Muslims, who now saw former second-class status groups claim equality with themselves - and more than that, gain favour and economic preference from a variety of Christian European powers who were interesting themselves in the affairs of the Middle East. These were developments fraught with danger for Christian minorities. There was little inter-communal trouble in the Arab portions of the empire, where after one bad outburst of violence in 1860 in Lebanon and Syria, Muslims, Christians and Jews tended to develop a sense of common Arab identity under Ottoman auspices. The problem was further north, where Russian imperial religious intolerance sent hundreds of thousands of Muslims fleeing for refuge over the Russo-Ottoman border into Ottoman territories, decade on decade. There seemed good reason to distrust and envy Christians.
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In 1843 came a grim precedent: a series of massacres of Dyophysite Christian mountain communities by Kurds in what is now Iranian Azerbaijan, provoked by anger at Western missionary activity and Russian military advances. Equally ghastly were a series of massacres of Armenians in the Caucasus and further south during the 1890s, which included the burning alive in 1895 of several thousand Armenians in their cathedral in Urfa - once that venerable Christian centre, Edessa.
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All this heralded even worse times to come, whose lasting effects threaten Christianity's ability to survive in the lands of its origin.

MASTERS OF SUSPICION: GEOLOGY, BIBLICAL CRITICISM AND ATHEISM

While in Ottoman lands Christianity found itself under one form of attack, developments that had started with the Enlightenment led to another, asking whether the Christian picture of God was believable. During the eighteenth century, the Newtonian system of mechanics and the deism associated with it seemed to safeguard the place of God as creator, and little in scientific discoveries seemed to suggest a denial of the biblical idea of a benevolent maker of the universe. Indeed, the mood of intelligent Christians was symbolized by the immense popularity in England of an apologetic book by the Cambridge mathematician and theologian William Paley, his
View of the Evidences of Christianity
(1794). This was the work which made much of 'God the watchmaker', an image whose antecedents could already be found in pre-Christian philosophy: its argument for God's existence was based on the evidences for design in creation. The intricate structure of a watch could never have come about by chance, and neither could the intricacy or even adaptation and change in nature.
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Against this background, there developed an enthusiasm for a systematic physical exploration of the landscape, described by a new word-coinage, 'geology'. This made it clear that traditional estimates of the date of biblical creation such as Ussher's 4004 BCE bore no relation to the reality of the huge epochs of the earth's existence. From the late eighteenth century, investigations in France laid down the way to proceed. The pioneer zoologist Georges Cuvier patiently mapped out the strata of the Paris river-basin even as the French Revolution raged about him; he showed that there could be a history of rocks and extinct creatures, just as there was a history of human empires.
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When English scholars added their contributions to this work, many of them were devout and orthodox Anglican clergy, led by the cheerfully learned and multifariously curious William Buckland, who kept a hyena at home as much for the enjoyment of its company as for research, and announced his intention of eating his way through the whole range of created animals. Geological work offered no problem to faith for such scholars; for them, creation stories in Genesis merely spoke figuratively of the time-spans involved in God's plan. When Buckland recognized extinct fossil species, apparently changing in regular fashion over time, this was an additional proof of God's providence: all earthly things have a tendency to decay, given the fallenness of creation, but God had provided for their replacement by creating new species. 'Erratic' rocks traceable to some rockbed large distances away after age-old glacial movements in ice ages seemed satisfying proof of the Flood's universal reach.

This picture was abruptly made less comforting by the work of Charles Darwin, once a prospective clergyman, who in 1835 turned from an early and not especially fruitful interest in geology to observing natural phenomena on the remote Pacific islands of the Galapagos, during a voyage which was actually launched with the main purpose of expanding Christian missionary work. He noted the remarkable differences in animal and plant species here from anywhere else, and indeed from island to island, and at first he marvelled at the insight which this gave into what God's creation had originally been like. But in 1837, reflecting on what he had seen, a wholly new idea came to him: perhaps these new species were not relics of Eden, but instead the end product of an immensely long chain of development in isolation from the rest of the world. Over the next two years, he worked from this perception to produce a theory of evolution which totally contradicted the world view of Paley (previously among his most treasured authorities). The only way in which Darwin's data made sense was to suppose that species battled for survival, and that evolution came when one slight adaptation of a species proved more successful than another in the battle: a process which he named 'natural selection'. There was nothing benevolent about the providence which watched over the process. Reason was served her notice as the handmaid of Christian revelation.