This material was created within the joint project of the Sophia Brotherhood and the German foundation Renovabis titled “Contemporary Ukrainian Orthodoxy: Breaking Myths for the Sake of Reconciliation Among Orthodox in Ukraine and the Consolidation of Ukrainian Society.” The Sophia Brotherhood may not share the views of the authors, and certain opinions expressed by members of the Brotherhood within the framework of the project may not represent the consolidated position of the Sophia Brotherhood.
In Ukraine, a battle has begun between the Chalcedonian constitutional-federalist model and the modern confederative-despotic model, and the prehistory of this struggle is much older than the 2019 Tomos.
Volodymyr Volkovskyi, PhD in Philosophy, Research Fellow, H. S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy
Let us talk about the main thing in church politics.
About what lies behind all the battles between the OCU and the UOC, behind all the accusations concerning autocephaly, invalid ordinations, behind all the attempts of the UOC (not the MP) to preserve its “cross without underwear” status – that is, “independent and self-governing” without autocephaly.
About the great war that rages beneath the deep surface of the Orthodox world. The great ecclesiological problem that has flared up periodically for a millennium.
We will try to describe this simply yet without oversimplifying. This will be an honest conversation, one conducted with full respect for all statuses and gifts, but honest and straightforward – without any verbal acrobatics, for, as they say, “everyone understands everything.”
Let our motto be: “Let your ‘Yes’ mean Yes, and your ‘No’ mean No; anything more than this comes from the evil one” (Matt. 5:37), who is “the father of lies” (John 8:44). And let us take care not to inadvertently blaspheme the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12:31; Luke 12:10).
The Crisis of Ecclesiology and Canon Law
We all know that Christian theology – including Orthodox theology – has different branches: dogmatics, Christology, moral theology, and so forth. One of these is canon law, which is based, among other things, on ecclesiology. Ecclesiology – as the doctrine of the Church in her earthly, historical, temporal presence and in her connection with eternal, heavenly reality – is of central importance. Depending on what the Church is, we can determine what norms of canon law should be.
It is no secret that canon law in the Orthodox world is in deep… it would not even be accurate to call it a crisis. Catastrophe, paralysis, coma – something like that. Unlike the Catholics, who have regularly systematized all canonical prescriptions and norms – updating, clarifying, explaining, codifying them into a single Code with a clear, logical, consistent structure (problematic though it may be – yet who are we to speak!) – the Orthodox world is governed by a hodgepodge of rules, including the Apostolic Canons, various decisions of Ecumenical and local councils, various and often contradictory interpretations of the Nomocanons, and the opinions of Zonaras, Balsamon, Blastares, and others. Sometimes in church circles one hears the ironic remark: “If you haven’t broken any canon, it means you don’t know all the canons.”
This erosion affects everything – from matters of marriage to fasting rules, and so on. In the sphere of church governance, the so-called economia has long degenerated into outright canonical nihilism, operating on the principle that “a canon is like a cart shaft – it turns whichever way you push it.”
The Russian Church has perhaps contributed most to this degradation: with all its politically motivated anathemas, its constant fulfilment of “state orders,” and its use of ecclesiastical bans according to the principle, “I permit if I wish, I punish if I wish.” But other churches have also actively contributed to this; with all due respect, the history of Byzantium – or the Roman Empire – is replete with every kind of canonical arbitrariness.
The successors of the apostles have so often abused the right to “bind and loose” (Matt. 18:18) – that is, to forbid and to permit, with the assurance that it will be so in heaven – that these cords have worn thin and frayed. After all the impositions and liftings of anathemas and bans – from the Donatists and John Chrysostom, through Maximus the Confessor, to Mazepa, the Old Believers, the ROCOR, and others – the very phrase “ecclesiastical ban” now provokes a cynical, ironic reaction. People may obey it out of sheer force, but to believe in its legitimacy is another matter.
But our task is not to deliver moralizing sermons; it is to show the problem of ecclesiological meaning that is connected with autocephaly and the internal structure of the Church. This is the very problem at the heart of the disputes over the validity of ordinations in the OCU, UAOC and UOC-KP, the lifting of anathemas by the Ecumenical Patriarch, and the question of whether there is a need for the OCU to be recognized by more churches.
Three Ecclesiological Paradigms in the History of Christianity
The question of granting autocephaly comes down to an ecclesiological problem: who has the right to grant autocephaly, and what is the overall structure of the Universal (Conciliar, Catholic) Church? How is authority, rights, and duties distributed within her?
If we analyze all the ecclesiological discussions over the centuries, we can briefly and provisionally distinguish three positions or approaches that have emerged in the Christian context. As an aside, I note – it is pleasant to see that ideas I voiced privately several years ago are now being spoken by respected figures:
- The Roman, or centralist, model – as represented in the official position of the Catholic Church, from Gregory VII’s Dictatus Papae to the “infallibility” of the First Vatican Council. This position rests on the doctrine of the unique role of Peter (and to some extent Paul), their martyrdom in Rome, and from this deduces that the Bishop of Rome, as Patriarch of the West and head of the Roman Church, is the successor to Peter’s authority in the apostolic Church – that is, the Pope is the “rock” (Matt. 16:18) who “feeds Christ’s sheep” (John 21:15–17). He has full, real authority in the Church; all local churches are directly subject to his authority, though some have relative autonomy (eastern rite churches, etc.). In secular legal terms, this model can be described as a centralized constitutional-federative monarchy: the monarch’s authority is relatively centralized, yet limited by constitutional rules and federal autonomies.
- The Chalcedonian, or federalist, model – evolved from the moment of the creation of the “New Rome” and Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon. It draws its legitimacy from the same source as the Roman model – Constantinople is simply the New Rome, with the rights of the Old Rome. Historically, this found expression in the concept of the Pentarchy, in which supreme authority belonged to Rome (Old and/or New), while local churches were autocephalous. This autocephaly was relative. The Patriarch of (New) Rome retained supreme judicial and arbitral authority. Clergy moved freely between churches. The local churches of the Pentarchy were “independent and self-governing,” yet Constantinople was the center of final authority, particularly judicial. This vision, in modified form, is still promoted not only by Constantinople but by all the Greek churches. In secular legal terms, it is a constitutional federal monarchy: the Ecumenical Patriarch’s authority is limited by councils, local churches are independent, but in case of dispute the Ecumenical Patriarch has supreme authority – including the right to grant autocephalies.
- The confederative model with elements of despotism – arose in the non-Greek churches, but in fact became the basic model for global Orthodoxy in the 20th–21st centuries. Canonically, this model presumes the absolute sovereignty of local churches, analogous to modern nation-states: completely self-contained and autarkic. The connection between churches is only “spiritual,” “prayerful,” “Eucharistic,” purely symbolic in the form of the diptychs. Let us call it the “Moscow” model, because it emerged primarily in Russia in the 19th century under the influence of German philosophy, which had its roots in Protestantism, and which took shape in Slavophilism. The Slavophiles synthesized Orthodox theology with German philosophy. It is from them that the word sobornost’ acquired a completely different meaning from the ancient term catholicity, becoming the untranslatable Russian “sobornost’.” All meditations on sobornost’ in one way or another pass through the Slavophiles to Schelling. To the Slavophiles we owe the mystification of this concept. In secular legal terms, this model is a confederation – since its constituent parts are completely sovereign – but within each church there is absolutism, i.e., absolute internal sovereignty. Each church has its own internal distribution of power: in some, it is despotic absolutism (as in the ROC); in others, the patriarch’s power is limited, and dioceses and parishes have relatively autonomous status.
Historical and Political Background: Empires and Nations
It is obvious that these three models have both theological and historical-political foundations. Strictly speaking, the oldest are the Roman and Chalcedonian models. Politically, they were based on the political unity of the Roman Empire – on the so-called Roman (and later Byzantine) world. This became especially clear after the Arab invasions and the collapse of the empire, when the Eastern Roman Empire contracted to the ethnically Roman (Greek) regions – Asia Minor and the Balkans – and the Orthodox Church in the Middle East took on the character of a Greek diaspora. Therefore, it is quite logical to speak of the “long arm of the Roman world” or the “Roman worlds” (Old and New Rome). The question of reconciliation with the non-Roman (non-Byzantine) Eastern churches remains open to this day, though somewhat blurred both by Rome’s unionist policy and by the genocidal practices of the 20th century.
The so-called “Moscow” model spread in the 19th–20th centuries, when the idea of the modern nation-state triumphed in Europe – based on the concept of the absolute sovereignty of “the people” and the absolute autarky of the state. The “nationalization” of churches was grafted onto the early modern policy of confessionalism (under the slogan cujus regio, ejus religio – “whose realm, his religion”), where the ruler (princeps) determined the religion of his subjects (we all know the Augsburg Confession).
In the early modern context, this principle did not necessarily lead to the autocephalization of the church within the state – although, in fact, by the 18th century, the Catholic Church was under significant pressure from national monarchies. Gallicanism – the idea that the king’s authority in matters of church governance (though not in dogma or morals) was superior to that of the Pope – completely dominated over “ultramontanism,” the conviction that the Pope should have authority above all earthly rulers, at least in church matters.
The advent of Modernity – in the form of the French and American revolutions – greatly changed the situation. On the one hand, the idea of cujus regio, ejus religio was carried to its logical conclusion in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of “civil religion” and in the practices of the revolutions: a church whose administrative center lay outside the Republic, and which was exclusivist (that is, which held to the principle Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus – “Outside the Church there is no salvation”), had to be prohibited and abolished. Rousseau’s Social Contract (Book IV, ch. 8) and the policy of the French Revolution found an echo in the United States, where throughout the 19th century the theme of nativism prevailed: all Catholics were, by definition, considered enemies of the Republic – in full accordance with Rousseau’s ideas (and this in a country that had adopted the First Amendment!).
In fact, the parade of autocephalies in the 19th–20th centuries was the triumph of Gallican ideas in the Orthodox world, supplemented by the nationalist dogma of the sovereignty and autarky of the nation-state. This parade was rooted in the political reality of the time – the collapse of old empires, modernization, unification, mobilization, and the clearing of cultural and social spaces to fit the new national states. Thus arose the situation that might be called “the Yalta–Potsdam system of world Orthodoxy, or the World Orthodox Confederation.”
Allow me to quote an apt passage from the same article by Tetiana Derkach:
“It seems that the World Orthodox Confederation is following the path of all the Yalta–Potsdam international legal institutions, which sought to counter the force of revanchist dictatorship with the force of bureaucracy – and proved incapable of stopping the aggressor. In fact, the entire Confederation is part of the same Yalta–Potsdam deal that arose after the Second World War as a global system of compromises to prevent a new war. But the shelf life of this ‘rules-based order’ has already expired. This means that as the old international system collapses, there will also be a reassembling of world Orthodoxy. The other question is: what principles and values will be laid at the foundation of the new system? And that depends on which centers of power the leaders of the local churches choose to orient themselves toward.”
One may argue whether the fact that “the world is rapidly sliding into post-liberal social Darwinism,” and that in the Christian world wealthy magnates disguised as “crusaders” dominate, really changes anything in the situation of the Universal Church (or “World Orthodox Confederation”). After all, this system fully satisfies all the main stakeholders.
But it is hard to deny that it is precisely Ukraine that is bringing about the collapse of this system. Just as Ukraine, as a secular nation-state, refuses to die for the sake of a “civilized world” dreaming of business as usual with the “great Russian culture” – with “ballet, vodka, the bear, and the balalaika,” backed by the nuclear bomb, bloody terror, and cheap oil and gas – so too does the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, tested by a millennium of struggle, refuse to surrender to the great “despots,” that is, the rulers of Orthodoxy. And just as the secular Ukrainian state is not led by perfect people, so too can many uncomfortable questions be asked of the leaders of the OCU regarding their mistakes. But, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).
Ukraine: The Main Battleground
Let us take a step further.
On the territory of Ukraine, a battle has begun between the Chalcedonian constitutional-federalist model and the modern confederative-despotic model. Everyone knows that the prehistory of this battle is much older than the 2019 Tomos. The clashes between the ROC and Constantinople began long ago. The cases of the Polish, American, and Czechoslovak churches, Stalin’s attempt to make the Moscow Patriarch the Ecumenical Patriarch, the fights over Estonia and Finland – all these are merely modern phenomena, to say nothing of the fact that over the course of two centuries (1685–1885) Constantinople lost 90% of its “territories,” about half of which were annexed by Russia, and in the 20th century Moscow in fact took away another good half. Chronic hate speech against Bartholomew was already sounding in ROC media back in the 2000s.
Moscow effectively destroyed Bartholomew’s life’s work – the 2016 Pan-Orthodox Council – by sabotaging it precisely on the grounds that there was no agreement on autocephaly. How much this influenced his resolve is, of course, an open question, but the fact remains that the quite elderly Patriarch made a decision that has firmly inscribed his name in history. He struck at the very legitimist foundation of the ROC, and by the very act of the Tomos he broke the cycle of perversely narcissistic violence that the ROC had been inflicting on Ukrainian Orthodox. Yes, precisely perverse narcissism – all the elements are there: on the one hand, compliments and exaltation; on the other, punishment for the slightest disobedience and the denial of any value without connection to the Moscow narcissist, accompanied by the sky-high self-esteem of the “despot and kyrios,” that is, “lord and master.”
However, the difficulty lay precisely in the Ukrainian soil. How ready were the Ukrainian churches (the UOC-KP and the UAOC) for the Chalcedonian model? Unfortunately, for decades they had been cultivating within themselves a purely “Moscow” (or, if you prefer, non-Greek) confederationist-despotic orientation. They dreamed of a state church, the embodiment of the spirit of the nation, sovereign and autarkic. Churches raised in the tradition of Moscow despotism (from the very word vladyka, “lord”) were not prepared for the constitutional-federalist model that prevailed in Ukraine until 1686. For the situation before 1686 was characterized by two things:
a) openness to external influences and recognition of the supreme arbitral authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch – the cadres of Kyiv Orthodoxy moved freely from Athos and Cyprus to Kyiv and Vilnius;
b) considerable freedom of parishes and brotherhoods, and relatively high autonomy of parish priests.
This significantly weakened the Ecumenical Patriarch’s room for maneuver and helped the ROC to consolidate its stronghold in Ukraine. For the choice is between a despot and freedom, not between a rich and a poor despot.
Nevertheless, the confrontation continues.
For the Orthodox world does not exist in a vacuum. Secularization and the degradation of Christianity have not been canceled. New challenges have not gone away – artificial intelligence, the cyborgization of humanity, transhumanism, the blurring of the boundaries of the human, the crisis of the very concept of “human,” ecological and other cataclysms – not to mention the new great war between freedom and dictatorship, which is taking place both on the battlefields of Ukraine and in the minds of all humankind. Christianity has already suffered both a technical default and a technical knockout – for under the banner of Christ, new Red Guard–style “crusaders” are already committing mass violence and/or condoning the mass murder of women and small children, cloaking the lawless rule of brute force in demagoguery about “traditional values” (although, why “cloaking” – such were the “traditions” indeed: to slaughter, to hang, to kill, to burn). The shame that hung over Christianity for its inaction during the Holocaust may be repeated in the blood of Ukrainians.
The world of nation-states is changing. The role of transnational corporations and networks has returned – analogs of the old Lombard and Hanseatic leagues, guild corporations, church orders, and mass movements. A “New Middle Ages” has been foretold for more than a century.
For the Orthodox world, the fatal question of the independence of the Ecumenical Patriarch (a topic for another discussion) has long stood in plain view.
In these conditions, the one who survives is the one who can best fit into networks of influence and communication, who can adapt, who can become not the ruler of an empire, but a facilitator of communication. After all, “the ministry of Peter,” like the ministry of any bishop, is precisely unitas in varietate – the ministry of unity, the ministry of κοινωνία (communionis) – which means “Communion,” “community,” “fellowship” – ἡ διακονία τῆς κοινωνίας.
You cannot put “old wine into new wineskins.”
One can fool a few people for a long time, or everyone for a short time – but one cannot fool everyone for a long time.
A lie may get you through the world, but it will not bring you back again.
These banal sayings from folklore, mingled with the Gospel, are frighteningly apt in our own time.
Here’s the precise English translation of your final section, keeping the nuance, theological register, and rhetorical style intact:
Instead of Practical Conclusions: Autocephaly, Dialogue, and Reconciliation
And so – again and again, et semper idem – the reconciliation of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine is above all in the interest of Ukrainians themselves (for by the time non-Ukrainians grasp the need, it will be too late). And thus, when there is talk of the “self-sufficiency and independence” of the UOC (not-MP), one must always state: there is only one path to genuine self-sufficiency and independence of a Local Church in Orthodoxy – namely, the proclamation of autocephaly. But Metropolitan Onufriy’s UOC is in a fortunate position. They have two:
- Proclamation of autocephaly – with all the well-known subsequent stages, which tend to frighten representatives of the UOC (not-MP);
- A second unification council with the OCU, which is already a recognized Local autocephalous Orthodox Church.
Of course, I assume my reader knows that the ROC remained in a state of unrecognized autocephaly for 141 years, the Bulgarian Church for 73 years, the Romanian Church for 20 years, and the Church of Greece for 17 years. And also knows that to this day certain churches – most notably the Orthodox Church in America – are recognized by only five Orthodox Churches (the Romanian Church lists it as a sister church but does not specify its status). Against this background, the Kyiv Patriarchate’s 27 years of “non-canonicity” and the four Churches that currently recognize the OCU look quite “normal” (provided, of course, that one considers this state of nihilism “normal” at all).
This second council could be held in the presence of other Churches and could even include the renewal of ordinations for certain bishops to dispel any doubts. Such a council could well include mutual repentance and forgiveness. The only things that make such a council impossible are pride and hatred. You cannot prove you are not the MP if you continue to hate and consider your Orthodox brothers unbaptized satanists; if you propagate Moscow’s lies and hate speech; if you simulate dialogue while ignoring the most basic principles of dialogue and reconciliation.
This council is urgently needed by the OCU itself. The schism mutually weakens both sides – unity works cumulatively, multiplying the strength of both many times over. At present, the situation in Ukraine’s ecclesiastical (virtual) universe recalls the Ruin of the 17th century: hetmans, battles, clashes, hostile intrigues. Moscow has not succeeded in imposing on Ukraine the 17th-century scenario in which it once prevailed. But in ecclesiastical Ukraine, that scenario is, for the moment, still working.
Finally, it is also a duty toward our protector, His All-Holiness. He undertook radically asymmetric actions and entered history. The same heroism, the same asymmetry and readiness to take risks, is now required of Metropolitan Epiphanius. The questions facing the OCU are far from those posed by Glavkom or criticized by Ukraina Pravoslavna. But the situation calls for asymmetric action – just as in the 19th century the great Ukrainian Mykhailo Drahomanov insisted that “a clean cause requires clean means.” Both the trace left in history and the role played in it will depend on this.
It is precisely Ukraine that now faces the task – no more and no less – of working out a new modus vivendi for Orthodox Christianity. For it is here that its problematics are felt most acutely. New canonical law, new theological innovations, vigilance and sobriety of spirit – but those are already other topics.