Catholicity and Sobornost

Katholikos is the Creed’s word and a patristic one: the Church is catholic because she possesses the whole, not because she covers the globe. Sobornost’ is something else — a nineteenth-century Russian construction built out of the Slavonic Creed’s rendering of that word, carrying commitments drawn from Romantic philosophy and from a polemic against Rome and the Reformation. This file distinguishes the two carefully, reports what sobornost’ genuinely contributes and what it imports, and gives Florovsky’s critique, which is the standard one and has never been answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Older Term

The Church’s word for herself in the Creed is katholikē, and its sense has been set out in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic: kath’ holou, according to the whole; qualitative wholeness; the fullness of faith and grace present in the local assembly and not merely aggregated across the world. St Ignatius uses it of a single church with its bishop (Smyrn. 8.2); St Cyril of Jerusalem gives four senses, of which three are qualitative (Cat. 18.23).

Two consequences of the older term deserve to be stated before the newer one is introduced, because the newer one has sometimes obscured them.

Catholicity is not an achievement of size or of consensus. It is the character of a body that possesses the whole. A church of thirty in a village is as catholic as a patriarchate, and a patriarchate that has lost the apostolic faith is catholic in nothing. This is the point Florovsky insisted on: catholicity is “not a quantitative but a qualitative concept,” and it “does not depend on the extension of the Church” (Florovsky, “The Catholicity of the Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Collected Works I).

Catholicity is not a sociological property. It describes a mode of being — the many existing as one without ceasing to be many — which the tradition grounds in the Trinity and in the Eucharist rather than in any account of how groups cohere. Florovsky’s formula was that catholicity is “the transfiguration of personal consciousness” into the mind of the Church, effected by the Spirit, not the submission of the individual to the collective.

The Slavonic Word and What Was Built on It

The Slavonic Creed translates katholikēn as sobornuyu, from sobor — an assembly, a council, and by extension a cathedral. The choice is old and defensible: the Church confessed in the Creed is in fact the gathered and conciliar Church, and the translator was rendering sense rather than sound.

In the nineteenth century Alexei Stepanovich Khomiakov (1804–1860), a layman, poet, and the central theological voice of the Slavophile circle, built a full ecclesiology on that adjective. His principal ecclesiological texts are the short treatise Tserkov’ odna (“The Church Is One”), written in the 1840s and published posthumously in 1864, and the three French polemical essays Quelques mots par un chrétien orthodoxe sur les communions occidentales (1853–1858), addressed to Western readers.

Khomiakov’s claims, at their strongest:

The Church is an organism of grace, not an institution. “The Church is not a multitude of persons in their separate individuality, but a unity of the grace of God, living in a multitude of rational creatures, submitting themselves willingly to grace” (The Church Is One, §1).

Unity and freedom are not in competition. This is the heart of the programme. Khomiakov held that Rome had secured unity at the cost of freedom, by locating authority in a person outside and above the body; that the Reformation had secured freedom at the cost of unity, by locating it in the individual; and that the Church holds both together because her principle is neither external authority nor private judgment but mutual love in the Spirit. “The Church is not an authority, just as God is not an authority and Christ is not an authority, since authority is something external to us… The power is found in mutual love, the weapons in the communion of prayer” (On the Western Confessions of Faith, 1853; trans. in Schmemann, ed., Ultimate Questions, 1965).

Truth is guarded by the whole body. No organ of the Church — not a primate, not a council considered in isolation — possesses the truth over against the body. A council’s decrees are received as true by the whole Church, and this reception is the sign of their truth. Khomiakov could point to the 1848 Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, published in his lifetime, which states that “the guardian of religion is the very body of the Church, that is, the people themselves” (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848, §17) — a sentence which became, and remains, the standard proof-text for the doctrine of reception.

The concept is pneumatological. What holds the body together in freedom is the Holy Spirit, who is not the possession of the hierarchy but the life of the whole plērōma.

A Note on the Word Itself

A correction of usage that is regularly needed. Khomiakov himself works overwhelmingly with the adjective — sobornyi, sobornaya tserkov’ — as the Slavonic Creed supplies it. The abstract substantive sobornost’, and its currency as the name of a theological programme, belong chiefly to his followers, editors, and later interpreters, and the term became a fixture of Russian religious philosophy in the generation of Solovyov, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev rather than in Khomiakov’s own pages. It is therefore accurate to say that the concept is Khomiakov’s and that the word as a technical noun is largely his successors’; it is not accurate to call sobornost’ a term of the Fathers, and this collection does not.

Two things follow. First, no argument in this collection rests on sobornost’, and none needs to. Second, when the word appears in Orthodox writing it should be read as a nineteenth-century interpretative proposal about catholicity, with a definite intellectual genealogy, and not as a datum of the tradition.

What the Concept Contributes

It would be a mistake to treat sobornost’ as merely a Slavophile enthusiasm. Three of its contributions have proved durable and are used throughout this collection.

The doctrine of reception. That a council’s authority is manifested in the Church’s reception of it, and that councils have been rejected despite impeccable convocation (Ephesus II in 449, Hieria in 754, Ferrara–Florence in 1438–39), is not a Slavophile invention — it is the Church’s practice — but Khomiakov’s generation gave it a theological articulation it had lacked. See The Council and the Question of Reception.

The laity are not an audience. The insistence that the whole body, and not the episcopate alone, is the bearer of the tradition has had concrete effects, most visibly in the Russian Church’s own Council of 1917–18, which seated clergy and laity alongside bishops while reserving dogmatic decisions to the episcopate (see The Council of 1917–18).

A real alternative to two real errors. Khomiakov’s diagnosis of papal centralism and of Protestant individualism as opposite failures of the same relation between unity and freedom is a genuine contribution and is why the concept was taken up so widely in twentieth-century ecumenical discussion.

The Critique

The critique is substantial, it comes from within, and it has not been dissolved.

It is Romantic in provenance. Khomiakov’s contrast between organic, living, inward unity and external, mechanical, juridical authority is the characteristic vocabulary of German Romantic and idealist thought, and the parallels with Johann Adam Möhler’s Die Einheit in der Kirche (1825) — a Roman Catholic work of the Tübingen school built on the same organic categories — have been noted repeatedly in the scholarship. The concern is not that Khomiakov borrowed, but that the borrowed categories do work that patristic categories were not asked to do. [Disputed: the extent and directness of Khomiakov’s dependence on Möhler and on German idealism is contested — some scholarship treats the resemblance as evidence of substantive dependence, other scholarship treats it as a shared nineteenth-century idiom independently applied; both readings are represented in the literature on the Slavophiles and neither has become standard.]

It is polemically shaped. The account of the Church is generated largely out of a contrast with Rome and the Reformation, and the resulting portraits of both are, by modern standards of accuracy toward an interlocutor, caricatures. Roman Catholic ecclesiology is not exhausted by “authority,” and Protestant ecclesiology is not exhausted by “individualism.” An ecclesiology whose content is a negation of two misdescriptions is structurally unstable, however attractive its positive intuition.

It underdetermines structure. This is the most serious objection. If the Church “is not an authority,” what is a synodal decision, a canonical deposition, or an excommunication? Khomiakov does not deny that the Church has bishops and councils; but his framework gives them little to do, and it is easily read — and has been read — as making hierarchy extrinsic to the Church’s nature. The tradition does not permit this: the Church whose principle is love also excommunicates, and does so in the same breath (1 Corinthians 5:3–5).

Florovsky’s version. Georges Florovsky, who took catholicity seriously enough to write on it repeatedly, appropriated the substance while explicitly detaching it from the Slavophile frame. He argued that catholicity must be grounded patristically and christologically rather than in a philosophy of organic community; that it is not a sociological or psychological quality of togetherness; and that the Slavophile reading risked reducing the Church to a moral communion of the like-minded. His Ways of Russian Theology treats the Slavophiles as a stage in a Russian theology that had lost its patristic bearings under Western influence — the general thesis of the book — and his essays “The Catholicity of the Church” and “Sobornost: The Catholicity of the Church” restate the doctrine on patristic grounds (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, Collected Works I; Ways of Russian Theology, Collected Works V–VI; “Sobornost: The Catholicity of the Church,” in E. L. Mascall, ed., The Church of God, London: SPCK, 1934).

Bulgakov’s version. Sergius Bulgakov developed sobornost’ in a sophiological direction, identifying the Church’s conciliar life with the life of Sophia (Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb). Since Bulgakov’s sophiology was itself formally censured by the Moscow Patriarchate and by the ROCOR Synod of Bishops in 1935, this development is not available as a settled account, and the collection Sergius Bulgakov sets out the controversy.

Where This Leaves the Term

A summary that can be used as it stands.

Catholicity is the Creed’s mark: patristic, qualitative, load-bearing, and the basis of the local church’s fullness. Everything in section 03 depends on it.
Sobornost’ is a nineteenth-century Russian interpretation of that mark, with real insight into reception and into the place of the whole body, and with real defects of provenance, polemic, and structural underdetermination.
The two are not interchangeable. A claim that can be made only in the vocabulary of sobornost’ has not thereby been made in the vocabulary of the tradition, and should be tested against the older term before it is relied on.
Neither term settles a jurisdictional dispute. Both parties in the disputes treated in sections 07 and 09 appeal to conciliarity, and the appeal decides nothing by itself. This is worth saying because the appeal is made constantly.

References

Khomiakov, A. S. Tserkov’ odna (“The Church Is One”), written 1840s, published posthumously 1864.
Khomiakov, A. S. Quelques mots par un chrétien orthodoxe sur les communions occidentales (three essays, 1853–1858); the first trans. in Alexander Schmemann, ed., Ultimate Questions: An Anthology of Modern Russian Religious Thought. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965.
Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8.2; trans. Ehrman, LCL 24.
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 18.23; trans. NPNF II/7.
Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, Constantinople, May 1848, §17.
Florovsky, Georges. “The Catholicity of the Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works I. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972; “Sobornost: The Catholicity of the Church,” in E. L. Mascall, ed., The Church of God: An Anglo-Russian Symposium. London: SPCK, 1934; Ways of Russian Theology, Collected Works V–VI, on the Slavophiles.
Möhler, Johann Adam. Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Prinzip des Katholizismus. Tübingen, 1825. (Cited for the comparison, per METHODOLOGY §4.1: heterodox scholarship and sources are used where they are relevant without importing their ecclesiology.)
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Bride of the Lamb. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002.
Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion, ch. 4. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985.
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 5:3–5.