Andrew Sorokowski's column

Equal rites?

03.09.2016, 18:46
The old conflict between Byzantinists and Occidentalists remains alive. Although it is potentially damaging, it does offer an opportunity to examine issues that the Church must sooner or later confront.

You see them at the little shops in the vestibules of churches, at tables on the streets and squares laden with religious literature and devotional items, on the walls and work spaces of individual believers. You have seen them in houses in New York and Chicago, in Lviv, Drohobych and Ivano-Frankivsk. Some are tiny, small enough to fit in a wallet; others are large enough to frame and hang over a dining table. They usually appear on paper, canvas, or the walls of churches, butyou can find them on the Internet as well, on web sites and Facebook postings. They depict the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Most are reproductions or imitations of oil paintings in a Western Romantic or neo-Renaissance style. And most fit pretty squarely in the Latin cultural tradition.

Since at least the days of Metropolitan Sheptytsky, clerics and laity have criticized this kind of popular artifact as an example of Latin-rite cultural infiltration of the Greek-Catholic Church. It is symptomatic, of course, of a larger issue: the conflict between the Byzantinist and Occidentalist orientations, which itself had roots in the ritual controversies of the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Metropolitan Sheptytsky represented the former tendency, along with his French collaborator Cyrille Korolevsky, while Bishop Hryhorii Khomyshyn of Stanyslaviv championed the latter, assisted by lay journalist Osyp Nazaruk. Today, the issue can be seen in six chief aspects: conversions, popular cults or devotional practices, ecclesiastical culture, liturgics and theology, church and state, and modernization. 

During World War I, and especially after the Russian Revolution (and the 1917 prophecies at Fatima), the time seemed ripe for the conversion of Russia (including eastern Ukraine) to the Catholic faith. Metropolitan Sheptytsky felt that any such conversion should not entail a renunciation of the Russians’ and Ukrainians’ Greek-Byzantine-Slavonic heritage. As he explained in an article published in the 1920s on the psychology of Union, a healthy conversion should not mean a denial of one’s past. Accordingly, a Russian Uniate Church preserving the Byzantine rite was formed. This conception clashed with the notion, still current today, that becoming a Catholic necessarily means adopting Latin (and thus Western) culture. The latter conception prevailed in the Chinese Rites Controversy of the 1500s, resulting in the conversion of millions of Asians to a Latin (and thus, European) form of Catholicism, rather than one fully assimilating Asian traditions.

In today’s Ukraine, one cannot assume that individual converts are attached to any particular Eastern Orthodox tradition. Often they are people whose ancestors were Orthodox, but whose parents and grandparents succumbed to official Soviet atheism. Moreover, many of these people feel a revulsion at official Russian Orthodoxy and its hostility to the Ukrainian national revival. At the same time, they are attracted to the Latin rite because of its connections with European and, more broadly, Western culture and civilization. In such cases, it may be difficult to argue that they should become Eastern-rite rather than Western-rite Catholics. But as yet, the close identification between the Greek-Catholic Church and the Ukrainian identity has not been matched by the Latin-rite Church. Hence, Ukrainians who choose Catholicism are caught between the Greek-Catholics’ Ukrainian identity and the Latin-rite Catholics’ European (and, indeed, cosmopolitan) orientation.

Already in the pre-war period, lay and clerical intellectuals were criticizing the introduction (by Bishop Khomyshyn in particular) of such Latin-rite devotional practices as the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the May devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Even today, the Stations of the Cross are observed in parishes in both the diaspora and Ukraine. As liturgist Rev. Dr. Peter Galadza has pointed out, some of these practices have become fully incorporated into the Greek-Catholic Byzantine rite, and it would be harmful to the sensibilities of the faithful to root them out. At the same time, the co-existence of Byzantine and Latin forms can create a spiritual dissonance, while the replacement of Greek-rite rituals by Latin-rite practices (e.g., the substitution of rosaries and the attendant prayers for Greek-style beads and the Jesus prayer) erodes the integrity of the Byzantine rite.

The matter is also evident in high ecclesiastical culture. In a church building, the clash of traditional Latin forms such as statues and stained glass windows with Byzantine features such as icons and iconostases (and folk forms such as embroidered cloths) can be glaring. In Eastern church music, it is true, Western influences have been present for centuries and have been assimilated by talented composers such as Dmytro Bortniansky. Culture grows by assimilation. Hence, the notion of cultural “purity” is a contradiction in terms. Yet aesthetics demands harmony. And a tradition requires a thoughtful continuity of styles and forms. Hence, the haphazard intrusion of Latin or Western elements in Kievan Byzantine church culture can be artistically as well as spiritually disrupting.

The question of Eastern and Western liturgics and theology is more complex. In the Byzantine tradition, theology flows from liturgy. The attitude towards the liturgy is conservative. Hence, Ukrainian Greek-Catholics have protected their liturgy from the sorts of lame, tasteless innovations one often sees in Latin-rite parishes. But in doing so, they also appear to have limited theological growth. At the same time, they have insulated themselves from a good deal of Latin Catholic theology. True, this has saved them the trouble of dealing with deviations like Modernism and Liberation Theology. On the other hand, Ukrainian theologians like the young Dr. Josyf Slipyj (in the 1930s) have seen the value of Thomism, understood as a universal philosophy not limited to the Latin rite but assimilable into the Greek-rite tradition. It would certainly be near-sighted to reject the achievements of a great theologian and philosopher like Thomas Aquinas merely because he was of the Latin rite.

More recently, Ukrainian Catholic scholars have looked to modern Russian theologians and philosophers for “Eastern” alternatives to Western, Latin-rite theological trends. Russian mystical thought is a firm response to Western rationalism and materialism – though it is precisely in the encounter with those influences that it developed.

To be sure, the Latin and Greco-Slavonic philosophical traditions are valuable and distinct. Indiscriminate mixing leads to the kind of hybridism denounced by Cyrille Korolevsky in his important essay on “Uniatism.” But traditions, like culture itself, grow by assimilation. To isolate oneself from all that belongs to another tradition is to stunt one’s growth: ritual puritanism leads to spiritual sterility.

In the 1920s and 1930s, when most of western Ukraine was under Polish rule, Metropolitan Sheptytsky and Bishop Khomyshyn disagreed on the proper Greek-Catholic attitude towards Ukrainian nationalism and the Polish state. The latter denounced radical nationalism, citing the Christian duty to obey legitimate state authority. The former, while upholding Catholic social teaching on church and state, and denouncing militant pagan nationalism, supported what has been termed “Christian patriotism.” Today, in a radically changed situation, the issue is not dead. But Sheptytsky’s principles have been vindicated, and are applicable to our times. With Russia waging a demoralizing war of attrition while carrying on inflammatory propaganda about alleged Ukrainian nationalist atrocities and collaboration in World War II, the Metropolitan’s censure of nationalist violence together with his advocacy of a healthy Christian patriotism seems to be precisely what is needed.

Bishop Khomyshyn criticized the Byzantine tradition for its Caesaro-papism. He believed that Byzantinism eventually led to Bolshevism. The fate of the Russian Church after 1917 seemed to bear him out. But Metropolitan Sheptytsky sought to forge a new understanding of that tradition, de-coupled from its Russian incarnation. He held out a Kievan Byzantinism distinct from Muscovite Byzantinism as a model for Ukrainians.

In fact, both the Eastern and the Western Church have been influenced by the state forms of their time. If the Byzantine Churches have always been somewhat imperial, the Roman church was successively influenced by the medieval, absolutist, and more recently the democratic order. These influences have been in part beneficial, in part damaging. The aristocratic and absolutist habits of high churchmen are still criticized. But a belated democratization of the Church may someday be regarded as highly mistaken too. The modern Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church has certainly been taken to task for its “nationalist” orientation. Such political influences are unavoidable because the Church is always rooted in the society of its time. But today, they provide no rationale for preferring Occidentalism to Byzantinism.

Some Ukrainians may find that Latin-rite Catholic life and culture are more apt to modernize. They may be attracted to the modern forms of lay participation that have developed in the Latin church, from the Knights of Columbus (founded in the U.S. in 1882 and now active in Ukraine) to mass movements like Focolare, Miles Jesu, or the charismatic movement. Many young people seek opportunities for interdenominational fellowship such as Taizé. These offer a social connectivity that extends beyond the parish even to the global dimension, which the rather provincial Western-Ukrainian Greek-Catholics seem to lack. The intellectually inclined may be drawn to the many ways that the Latin Catholic cultural tradition has embraced modernity (as seen, for example, in the music of Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen, or the prose of J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor). Yet if one looks to the broader Byzantine Slavonic tradition, including the Orthodox, one also finds traditional Christian content in modern form, from the poetry of Boris Pasternak to the music of Arvo Pärt and Valentin Silvestrov, or the striking contemporary iconography of the Balkans.Moreover, here and there one can find Greek-Catholic modernizing initiatives, such as the diaspora church architecture of Myroslav Nimtsiv and Radoslav Zuk, the liturgical works of Canadian Roman Hurko, or the sacral works exhibited at Lviv’s Icon Art.

Thus, the old conflict between Byzantinists and Occidentalists remains alive. Although it is potentially damaging, it does offer an opportunity to examine issues that the Church must sooner or later confront.

Andrew Sorokowski

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