Michelson, Patrick Lally and Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch (eds.) Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 554 On one level, Stone’s history of the western Slavic minorities reads like a classic nation-building history. Yet viewed through a different prism, it uncovers an intriguing archaeology of European history. From attempts to assemble a usable grand narrative from scraps of history, Wendish, Sorb and Kashubian history runs through to a recognizable late-modern experience of claims to self-determination, oppression and selfhood in a post-1989 Europe. Department of History James Koranyi Durham University Michelson, Patrick Lally and Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch (eds.) Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2014. xii + 303 pp. Notes. Index. $29.95 (paperback). This collection misses the most interesting question about ‘thinking Orthodox in modern Russia’, that is, why and how such thinking continued during the Soviet period and survived the onslaught of atheist propaganda and the many punitive measures applied to religious believers by those wielding political power. The periods examined include the eighteenth century until the early years of the twentieth century with scant mention of the post-1917 period, apart from an interesting examination of Pasternak’s view of beauty and art and some of the ideas of the Orthodox priest Pavel Florenskii who died in a Soviet labour camp. Paul Valliere in his ‘Afterword’ bemoans US academics’ lack of knowledge about Orthodoxy in the USSR until the 1970s when they ‘discovered something they had not known before or had greatly underestimated; that a significant revival of religious faith was taking place in Russia, especially in the intelligentsia’ (p. 277). This book unfortunately appears to be a continuation of this past academic failure. The revival of interest in religion in the USSR was, however, well-known to many in Europe from the early 1960s, and especially to those who founded Keston College in 1969. No mention is made in these essays of some of the intelligenty luminaries who continued to ‘think Orthodox’ despite the dangers which faced those who rejected Marxism-Leninism — for example, Anatoli Levitin, Boris Talantov, Alexander Ogorodnikov and his Christian Seminar, Fr Alexander Men, the poet Irina Ratushinskaya, the writer Andrei Sinyavskii and the remarkable medievalist, Dimitrii Likhachev, who kept his mouth shut literally during the 1930s when he worked as a proofreader and editor. And there is no mention either of Russian Orthodoxy in contemporary Russia, where, to quote Paul Valliere again, ‘the rebuilding of the Russian Church ranks as one of the most remarkable religious developments in modern times’ (p. 278). REVIEWS 555 Yet many of the themes discussed in this collection are relevant to these later historical periods. Dmitrii Bogoliubov’s work as a missionary from 1894–1913 (‘Theology on the Ground’, pp. 64–84) confronted problems which are often those of today’s missionary departments in Moscow Patriarchate dioceses: he understood that he needed to educate Orthodox believers rather than debate with dissenters, that by creating lively brotherhoods he could revive parish life. He altered his romantic view of the Russian narod when he learned about the realities of village life, came to support freedom of conscience and even learned to respect Shtundists. The conflict between grass-roots piety, the veneration for miracle-working icons and the authority of startsy or elders (possessing charismatic gifts) on the one hand, and central church authority on the other, is explored in ‘The Struggle for the Sacred: Russian Orthodox Thinking about Miracles in a Modern Age’ (pp. 131–50): this too is a theme which continues to be relevant for the contemporary church whose leader, Patriarch Kirill, puts enormous energy into creating an administratively efficient church based on centralized control. Pavel Florenskii, one of the most interesting Orthodox minds of the twentieth century, is discussed in a number of these essays. Particularly noteworthy is the examination of his commentary — only published in 1995 — on the imyaslavtsy (the Name-Glorifiers) controversy, a conflict between charismatic direct experience of God and academic theology (‘Archbishop Nikon and Pavel Florenskii on Spiritual Experience, Theology and the Name-Glorifiers Dispute’, pp. 85–107). How fascinating to discover that Sergii (Stragorodskii), later famous for his 1927 compromise between church and state, had written one of the three reports...