Orthodox Canon Research Articles

Problems of adaptation / changing canons and traditions in the Orthodox Church today Ukraine

Article I.Titovskogo "Problems of adaptation / changing canons and traditions in the OrthodoxChurch today Ukraine" investigate questions need to adapt Orthodox canons and existing processesunauthorized changes, upgrade , failure norms of canon law, the canons of modern Orthodox churches inUkraine and Russia, the arbitrary power of the church, resulting in the loss of the positive influence of theChurch on society of modern Ukraine

Igor Sava, Imunitatea în raporturile dintre domnie și mănăstirile Moldovei (secolele XV-XVI). Pentru o abordare interdisciplinară a problemei / Immunity and Its Significance for the Relations between Princely Power and Moldavia’s Monasteries during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century: For an Inter-Disciplinary Approach

This article resumes the discussion of an older problem of Romanian historiography - the Moldovan monasteries’ immunities from the 15th – 16th century. The author opts for an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, a methodology appropriate for addressing this complex issue. As a result of investigating the relevant sources, I find that Moldovan monasteries possessed a clearly defined legal status in the context of the cooperation between the head of state and the church according to Justinian’s principle of “Roman-Byzantine symphony”, the regulations required by the Orthodox canons, the Byzantine law and the local law, “Jus Valachicum”. The act of foundation is an essential form of medieval ideology, powerfully inserted in the religious sphere, in the domain of state power and in the social order. The monasteries had primarily a religious function, but, at the same time, they performed a social and ideological function, designed to disseminate Orthodoxy in society as an official ideology of the secular power. In its evolution, the institution of immunity cannot be extended either to the entire period under study or to all the monasteries in Moldova.

Making as Knowing: Epistemology and Technique in Craft

The essay employs the orthodox canon of philosophical discourses in order to inquire into the relationship between episteme and techne. Platonic and Aristotelian postulates are used to trace the historical understandings of the connection between knowing and making in the development and execution of a craft. The metaphor of weaving—instrumental in Platonic discourse—is employed as the thread running through the discussion; this metaphor is also employed to guide the application of episteme and techne to textile production, in particular through a structural analysis of the pleated fabrics used by Mariano Fortuny and Issey Miyake.

From Empire to Nation State: The Consolidation of the Relationship between the Orthodox Church and Independent Lithuania and Latvia after the First Word War

In the new independent nation states that appeared on the Western edge of the Russian Empire after 1917, the local Orthodox Church had to rethink its identity completely mainly for two reasons. First, it was no longer the dominant church and second, the new states claimed to be secular, not privileging any particular religious organisation. In all these states, from Finland to Poland, the Orthodox faithful were, moreover, a minority. This paper is a comparison of the relationship between the secular state and the Orthodox Church in Latvia and Lithuania. It covers the time period from 1917 until the late 1920s, when the relationship in both states had been consolidated. The relationship between the church and the state is complicated by the incompatibility of the religious and the secular discourse. The church operates on the basis of ecclesiastical or canon law, which regulates the way it is internally organised and how it relates to other churches. Secular law, on the other hand, regulates the way citizens interact with the state. While these two types of law fulfil similar regulative, preventive and control functions, they differ in their origins. Secular law is based on state authority; it is usually codified and can in principle be applied by anyone able to read. Orthodox canon law, on the other hand, is based on divine authority, handed down to earth by God through Jesus Christ and the apostles in a long chain through the centuries to the local bishop.1 Therefore, the position and authority in the church hierarchy of the responsible bishop is more important than the letter of the law. More importantly,

Canon law as an instrument for the realisation of the Church in Orthodox ecclesiology

This article examines the description of the Church in Orthodox canon law. One of the challenges that the Church faces in the modern age is to more completely appropriate its received canonical tradition, in order to better describe or express its nature within contemporary circumstances of history. Without a serious examination of our living inheritance and its translation into our contemporary circumstances, there is a danger of distortion in our ecclesiological structures as well as damage to our canonical standards for the pastoral life of the contemporary Orthodox Church.

Orthodox Perspectives on Peace, War and Violence

Orthodox Perspectives on Peace, War and Violence

Marriage in the canons of the council in Trullo

This study presents the historical development of marriage as a legal object in Eastern Orthodox canon law. The argument of the article is that the need of the ecclesial polity to adapt to a new situation following the Islamic conquests of the seventh century led to the development an ecclesiastical common law independent of Byzantine-Roman civil law in order to survive under Muslim rule. The sources of the canon law of marriage were Scripture, patristic customary law, and Byzantine-Roman civil law. It is further argued that the differences between Roman Catholic canon law and Eastern Orthodox canon law with regards to marriage are the result of different political contexts and different theological concerns in the East and the West.

Marrying Family Law to the Nation

This paper revisits the creation of the modern Greek state in the early nineteenth century and the role that family law played in the process of generating a sense of national identity. According to the mainstream legal historical narrative Greeks managed to survive as a nation during the Ottoman years thanks to the consistent application of family law rules by the Orthodox Church. This paper reinterprets the standard narrative as the result of the institutional compromises struck between the Orthodox Church, westernizing revolutionary Greeks and local leaders at the moment of creation of the Greek state, rather than a reflection of the legal realities on the ground. It argues that competition between the Orthodox Church, Islamic judges, and local secular leaders on precisely the issues that the Church considered under its exclusive jurisdiction (marriage, divorce, inheritance) had resulted in a highly fragmented legal picture right before the creation of the Greek state. Despite this fragmentation, the first regent for judicial affairs of the nascent state, Bavarian Georg Ludwig von Maurer, argued in his seminal book Greek People that Greek Orthodox canon law had been applied consistently throughout the territories of the Greek state and that the Greeks has survived as a nation partly thanks to the efforts of the Church which saved the Greeks from barbarism. The institutional compromise he then fashioned for Church/State relations rewarded the former, by making it an important institutional player on marriage and divorce in the new state. The last part of the paper discusses the importance of revisiting the history of the state's role in generating narratives of national identity for European politics, at a moment when the distribution of resources between European citizens and non European, often Muslim, non citizens living and working in Europe is increasingly justified or tacitly accepted through appeals to notions of concrete, coherent national identities. The dynamics of relying on a named or unnamed uncivilized other against whom identity formation takes place seems to be repeating itself today with a vengeance in the case of Turkey's accession to the European Union, and the thinly veiled vs. barbarism discursive themes emerging there. Not accidentally, they are heavily concentrated in the field of family law. Without suggesting that revisiting history will solve current political problems by deductive magic it can at least help push against the more essentialist, clash of civilization versions of identity that have remade their appearance in political discussions in Europe.

Local Orthodox Church: Constitutional Issues and Forecasts

The problem of formation and recognition of the Ukrainian Local Orthodox Church (UOCOC) has not been considered by clerics of the Churches or believers only as ecclesiastics since its actualization in Ukraine at the beginning of the twentieth century. The objectivity of such an assessment of the question of propriety is borne out by the experience of becoming autocephalous of other local Orthodox Churches - none of them being able to choose their autocephaly only through the implementation of a particular church program. The reason for this state of affairs is the fact that the procedure for obtaining (or granting) administrative independence of a particular church unit is not written out in Orthodox canons.

The Branches of the Gospel of John: The Reception of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church. By KYLE KEEFER.

The three branches of the title are those represented by Heracleon, Irenaeus, and Origen. The first is arcane, tendentious, sometimes ‘playful’, the second argues this anomalous text into harmony with three of its rivals to create an orthodox canon for the episcopal church, the third domesticates allegory to give strength and amplitude to this catholic reading. In a prefatory chapter Keefer takes up the thesis of Hans Robert Jauss, that reception theory is an indispensable part of hermeneutics, finding an ally in Gerhard Ebeling's contention that, since Christ exists for us only in exposition, the truly historical reading of a gospel resides in its homiletic and pastoral application. In two concluding chapters, he observes that modern scholarship has frequently held the origins of the Gospel of John to be Gnostic and sectarian, that Ernst Käsemann's docetic interpretation of its Christology is prefigured in Heracleon, and that the Fathers are now perceived to have adopted a pluriform reading of the Scriptures, not as a charter for caprice and obfuscation, but as the only means open to them of constructing a theology that was at once comprehensive and biblical. I have endeavoured in this anecdotal summary to be true both to the content and to the character of the book, which seems to me to offer in its hundred pages a series of pregnant observations, any one of which could be profitably developed into a new hermeneutic enterprise; what it does succeed in saying, however, will not change the mind of a critic who maintains that the only business of the exegete is to recover the intention of the author. Such critics, I would suggest, need not be converted to a new hermeneutic theory before they see merit in patristic exegesis; they need only reflect that the canons of reading adopted by a native speaker of Greek in the first three centuries, when interpreting a Greek text of the first century, are unlikely to have been more anachronistic than the principles which seemed to Dodd and Streeter to define the bounds of rational discourse.

English Rustic in Black Skin: Post-Colonial Education, Cultural Hybridity and Racial Identity in the New Century

This article is written against the backdrop of deepening xenophobia and ethnic absolutism (forms of ‘racial cruelty’) that have come to dominate human relations between individuals and groups worldwide in the new millennium. Cameron McCarthy argues that these tendencies towards ethnic absolutism and ethnic essentialism have their counterparts in schooling, where debates over identity and the curriculum in the educational field have been clouded by ethnic particularism and dogmatism with enormous consequences for contemporary school youth and their teachers. As an alternative frame of reference, McCarthy attempts to theorize his autobiographical journey from his inauguration in postcolonial education in the British Caribbean and his ultimate displacement to the academy in the United States. McCarthy writes about race relationships in education from the viewpoint of radical instabilities that inform our understanding of identity and subjectivity. He uses the term ‘radical instability’ to underline the expiration of old forms of knowledge about race centered on unreflexive, quantitative, behavioral and fixed strands in social science and education. In doing so, he seeks to offer new understandings of race relationships, which are always contextualized and immersed in forms of experience that exceed the more orthodox academic canon and mainstream curriculum organization, experience and interpretation.

The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety: Their Didactic Role and Impact on Children's Lives

The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety:Their Didactic Role and Impact on Children's Lives Weimin Mo (bio) and Wenju Shen (bio) The texts that make up the orthodox canon of Confucianism, The Classic of Filial Piety and its supplement The Twenty-Four Examples of Filial Piety, could be considered the oldest example of children's literature that still has a strong impact on children's daily life.1 The Classic of Filial Piety has been dated by modern scholars to the period between 200 B.C. and A.D. 350 (Barnhart 73). Consisting of a series of conversations between Confucius and one of his disciples, Tseng-tzu, it provides a systematic instruction in filial piety and represents the epitome of the literary classics on the topic (Traylor 63-64). Written in archaic Chinese, which is drastically different both syntactically and semantically and far more compact than the modern language, it employs fewer than four hundred Chinese characters and is divided into eighteen short chapters that children can easily read, memorize, and recite.2 Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese children from well-to-do families started their education at home at private schools for their clan. For around two thousand years, until the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, The Classic of Filial Piety was the first textbook for schoolchildren in China, the work from which they learned both ethics and how to read. Even though in ancient times literate people made up only a small percentage of society, the scholar class in China successfully instilled those teachings into every aspect of life. Moreover, The Twenty-Four Examples of Filial Piety, which embodied the teachings of the earlier book, powerfully reinforced its predecessor's didactic role. Thus The Twenty-Four Examples of Filial Piety has been traditionally accepted as an official supplement to The Classic of Filial Piety, the stories in this supplement were so popular that even nonliterate people became thoroughly versed in Confucian teachings. According to Confucius, filial piety encompasses all aspects of human social life and is implied by all the virtues associated with human behavior. It is the keystone that organically links politics, ethics, and religion in a way not found in other cultures. The eighteen chapters of The Classic of Filial Piety provide fundamental principles regarding the role of filial piety, and a glance at some of the chapter titles gives some idea about its importance in life of the Chinese. They delineate the duties of filial piety in relation to social institutions and for people in all walks of life: "Filial Piety in Relation to the Five Punishments," "Filial Piety in Relation to the Three Powers," "Filial Piety in Government," "Filial Piety in Mourning for Parents," "Filial Piety in the Son of Heaven," "Filial Piety in High Ministers and Great Officers," "Filial Piety in Lesser Officials," "Filial Piety in the Common People," and so on. In his introduction, Confucius explains that filial piety provides the foundation for an all-embracing rule of conduct: Our bodies—to every hair and bit of skin—are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them:—this is the beginning of filial piety. When we have established our character by the practice of the filial course, so as to make our name famous in future ages, and thereby glorify our parents:—this is the end of filial piety. It commences with the service of parents; it proceeds to the service of the ruler; it is completed by the establishment of the character. (Doeblin 142) Chapter Ten, "An Orderly Description of the Acts of Filial Piety," describes how filial piety is linked to ethics and politics: He who thus serves his parents, in a high situation, will be free from pride; in a low situation, will be free from insubordination; and, among his equals, will not be quarrelsome. In a high situation pride leads to ruin; in a low situation insubordination leads to punishment; among equals quarrelsomeness leads to the wielding of weapons. If those three things be not put away, even though a son every day contribute beef, mutton, and pork to nourish his parents, he...

Memory & history—mémoire & histoire

This paper investigates the phenomenon of collective memory in the final years of the Soviet Union. A discussion of the historiographical uses of memory introduces an appraisal of the interrelationship between collective memory and the Soviet regime before Gorbachev. An exploration of the themes and social role of the allegorical film, ‘Repentance’, provides a key to the subsequent analysis of transformations during glasnost’. First, this elucidates the forces that stimulated and the forms that structured the emergence of unofficial discourses of collective remembrance. Secondly, it describes how these increasingly radical and diversifying social memories progressively challenged the orthodox canons of commemoration and contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet system.

The Practice of Tradition in the Writing of Custom, or Chinese Marriage from Li to Su

��� Rites, Writing, and the Study of Popular Culture As scholars of Chinese culture and society, we tend to take for granted the importance of rites in the flow of Chinese life. In Chinese thought, the concept of Ii has been an object of ongoing interpretation and debate, especially in Confucian intellectual circles. Likewise, there appears to be no lack of descriptive or prescriptive information about the nature of rites in the religious and political realm as well. While the orthodox canons and traditions in Buddhism and Taoism speak for themselves, Chinese textual accounts of the nature and history of political institutions are rarely complete without a preface protocol. For the anthropologist or folklorist on the ground, the other hand, working primarily with local traditions, the physical reality of activity is a tangible one that has been objectively observed, described and understood in its own terms. Thus between these various poles of scholarly authority the subject of Chinese rites, there already appears to exist an inexhaustible wealth of knowledge about the practice of rites at both the literate and popular level. Given such specialized resources for the study ofritual, scholars have paid little attention to popular guides to practice, or what can be generically referred to as etiquette (li-i pien-shu).1 As their title suggests, they are quite literally books of convenience for the practice of etiquette, usually for domestic rites like weddings and funerals. These etiquette handbooks are sometimes entitled chia-li (family ritual ) or This paper is the result of preliminary work local etiquette handbooks done with the support of the Chinese Popular Culture Project, University of California, Berkeley, and a National Science Council (Taiwan) project. The author regrets not having access to two recent works by Patricia Ebrey, namely her annotated translation of Chu Hsi's Chia-li and a companion volume, Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing About Rites, until after the writing of the manuscript. 1TlIeSe handbooks correspond closely to what Hayes 1985:81 calls handbooks of family and social practice.

Accounting for rituals

The paper considers the proposition that accounts describe the relationships which exist between certain collaborators in the firm, rather than the activity of the firm itself. These relationships are essentially ritualistic, insofar as they are the outward forms of rather complex realities. Moreover, the ritual, and the “theology” which underlies it, are anthropocentric rationalisations, which may not completely capture the essence of the reality they are intended to portray. Such problems are especially likely at this time, in view of the discrepancy between accounting theory and the more holistic approach of the modern world-view. Conflicts tend to be circumvented rather than resolved, by devices which are strictly irrational. The function of accounting and financial professionals is both to devise new rituals to meet new circumstances and accommodate them within the orthodox canon; parallels are drawn between this activity and that of the witchdoctor in more primitive societies.

Should We Learn More About Ourselves?

FOR years historians have grappled with the problem of attaining objectivity. Some of us have concluded that beyond individual practice of the orthodox canons of careful scholarship, there is little more that can or should be done, that bias is inevitable and the variety of views that arise out of individual and free scholarly enterprise will somehow result in truth. Some contend that bias is desirable, essential even, for history as art. Such resignation or optimism seems premature. We do not know precise facts about the biases of the individuals who comprise our profession. Most writing on historical method has discussed history as a science or an art (Should it deal with the general or unique? Is its proper form analysis or narrative?) or has dwelt on the ways of dealing with documents, the difficulties of determining what we call fact, and, in short, the methods historians use in their study, rather than the nature of historians. Too little is known in empirical terms about those who profess history, how they function, and what influences condition their views. It may be undesirable to analyze historians and the nature of their views. The results could be used for unwise ends. But a study done with proper regard for the confidential nature of individual viewpoints might be highly enlightening and useful. Some initial studies have been made. Since I958 the American Historical Association's Committee on Graduate Education in History has engaged in an extensive survey of the contemporary training of historians.1 A large-scale study of the origins, motivations, problems, and