06 — Church and Nation

The most delicate section of the collection. Paisiy’s History fed a nineteenth-century movement that was, in its ecclesiastical strand, a struggle for a Bulgarian Church independent of the Greek-speaking Phanariot hierarchy — a struggle that produced the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870. But that same struggle raised, and the Council of Constantinople in 1872 named, the ecclesiological danger of ethnophyletism: the organizing of the Church on ethnic-national lines. This section treats the church question and, per METHODOLOGY §4, presents both sides of the nationalism question soberly and without anachronism.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

Files in This Section

File	Description
toward-a-bulgarian-church.md	How Paisiy’s work fed the nineteenth-century church struggle: the campaign against Phanariot ecclesiastical dominance, the demand for Bulgarian bishops and liturgy, and the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate by Ottoman firman in 1870.
the-question-of-nationalism.md	Both-sides (§4): the legitimacy and beauty of national awakening set against the ecclesiological error of ethnophyletism, which the 1872 Council of Constantinople condemned; handled soberly, without anachronizing Paisiy — who died a century before the controversy.

See Also

• 01 — Foundations — the Phanariot dominance the church struggle answered
• 04 — The National Awakening — the wider movement of which the church struggle was part
• 08 — Veneration and Memory — the saint and the national symbol