The Question of Nationalism

The hardest question Paisiy’s legacy raises, treated per METHODOLOGY §4 from both sides. The national awakening he began is, in one light, a genuine good — the recovery of a subjected people’s memory, dignity, language, and faith. In another light, the movement it fed issued in ethnophyletism: the organizing of the Church on ethnic-national lines, a principle the Council of Constantinople condemned in 1872. This file holds both, soberly, and refuses to anachronize Paisiy, who died a century before the controversy.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

Stating the Question Fairly

The question is not whether Paisiy was a good man or a saint — the Church has answered that — but whether the national awakening he set in motion is, from an Orthodox point of view, simply a good, or whether it carries within it a real spiritual danger. The honest answer is that it is both, and that the two cannot be neatly separated. To celebrate the awakening without naming the danger would be to endorse whatever was done in its name; to condemn it for the danger would be to slander a genuine recovery of a Christian people. METHODOLOGY §4 requires that each side be given in its strongest form, that proponents be named, and that the collection not adjudicate. It also requires that Paisiy himself not be anachronistically charged with a controversy that arose a century after his death.

The First Anachronism to Avoid

Before the two sides are set out, one distortion must be cleared away. Paisiy died around 1773. The ethnophyletism controversy — the condemnation of nationalism as an ecclesiological principle — arose in 1872, nearly a hundred years later, in circumstances (the Exarchate schism) that Paisiy could not have imagined and did not advocate (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1 and 6; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “phyletism”). Paisiy’s own concern was cultural and ecclesial recovery within the Orthodox and Ottoman order he knew — that Bulgarians should honor their language, remember their saints, and not be ashamed of their nation — not the creation of a nationally-defined church jurisdiction overlapping another (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and appeal; see Content and the Famous Appeal). To read the 1872 error back into the 1762 book, or to make Paisiy the author of phyletism, is a category mistake. What can rightly be said is that his awakening was one of the streams that fed a movement which later confronted this question — not that he answered it, or posed it, himself.

The Case for the Awakening as a Good

The strongest case for the national awakening rests on what it recovered and on the Orthodox tradition’s own honoring of peoples.

Orthodoxy has never been indifferent to nation and language. The whole Cyrillo-Methodian mission — the giving of the Scriptures and the liturgy to the Slavs in their own tongue — is a founding act of Slavic Orthodoxy and a standing rebuke to the idea that the faith must be received in an imperial or prestige language (see Ss. Cyril and Methodius) (Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly 19, 1989). Against the Phanariot pressure to Hellenize, Paisiy’s insistence that Bulgarians worship and learn in their own language stands squarely within that tradition; it defends the dignity of a people and their tongue before God (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, appeal; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The awakening recovered a Christian people from cultural extinction, restored their memory and self-respect, spread literacy and schools, and gave them back a church-life in their own language. On this view — held by the national tradition and by many Orthodox — the love of one’s own people, kept in due order under the love of God, is not the sin of nationalism but a natural and blessable affection, and Paisiy’s awakening is its honorable expression (Kitromilides, 1989, on the distinction; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6).

The Case for the Danger: Ethnophyletism

The strongest case on the other side is stated most authoritatively by the Church itself, in the act of 1872.

When the Bulgarian Exarchate was established in 1870 on an explicitly national basis, overlapping in the same territory with the existing Patriarchal hierarchy, the Patriarchate of Constantinople convened a Council at Constantinople in 1872 which condemned the principle it called phyletism (from Greek phyletismos, “tribalism” or “racialism”) — the doctrine that the Church may be organized according to ethnic or national identity, so that nationality rather than territory and the one Eucharistic communion becomes the basis of ecclesiastical order (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “phyletism”; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3). The Council declared such phyletism a heresy or ecclesiological error incompatible with the nature of the Church, and on its basis declared the Bulgarian Exarchate schismatic — a schism that endured until 1945 (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “Bulgarian Exarchate” and “phyletism”). The condemnation has remained a reference point in Orthodox ecclesiology, invoked ever since against the subordination of the Church to nationalism (Kitromilides, 1989).

The danger the Council named is real and perennial: that the Gospel, which knows “neither Greek nor Jew” (cf. Colossians 3:11; Galatians 3:28), can be captured by the nation and made its instrument; that the Church, which is one Body, can be fractured into national churches at war with one another; that love of one’s people can harden into an idolatry that ranks blood and language above the communion of the Body of Christ (see Orthodoxy: Holy Tradition). On this view — the view of the 1872 Council and of Orthodox critics of nationalism — the very awakening that recovered the Bulgarian people also opened the door through which nationalism entered the Church, and the schism of 1872 is the monument of that entry (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; Kitromilides, 1989).

Holding Both Without Adjudicating

The collection does not decide between these. Both are true to something. The awakening was a genuine recovery of a Christian people and their language, standing in the line of Cyril and Methodius; and the movement it fed did, at a particular moment and in a particular institutional form, fall into the ecclesiological error the Church condemned. The distinction that lets both stand — and it is the distinction the tradition itself draws — is between the legitimate love of one’s people, ordered under the love of God and kept within the unity of the Church, and the phyletism that makes nationality the principle of the Church and thereby breaks her unity (Kitromilides, 1989; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). Where exactly the one passes into the other is precisely the question on which Orthodox have differed and still differ, and this collection does not presume to fix the line.

What can be said justly of Paisiy is this: he called his people to know and love their own nation and language, within their Orthodox faith, at a time when they were losing both; that call belongs to the honorable side of the distinction. What was later done with the awakening — including the schism of 1872 — belongs to a history he did not live to see and cannot be made to answer for. The saint is honored for what he did; the danger is named for what it is; and the two are kept, soberly, apart (METHODOLOGY §4).

References

Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Entries “phyletism” and “Bulgarian Exarchate”: the 1872 Council of Constantinople; the condemnation of phyletism; the declaration of schism to 1945.)
Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The national basis of the Exarchate; the 1872 condemnation and schism.)
Kitromilides, Paschalis M. “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans.” European History Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1989): 149–192. (The Orthodox commonwealth and the entry of nationalism; the distinction between the honoring of peoples and phyletism.)
Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The caution against anachronizing Paisiy; the awakening as recovery; the later appropriations.)
Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The appeal to nation and language within the Orthodox faith — the honorable side of the distinction.)
Scripture: Colossians 3:11; Galatians 3:28 (the Church that knows neither Greek nor Jew).