Formation in Damascus and the Arab Awakening

Raphael was raised and first schooled in Damascus, entered the service of the Patriarchate of Antioch as a young student, and was tonsured a monk in 1879; because the historic Balamand seminary had been closed since 1840, his higher theological formation would have to be sought abroad. He came of age inside the great nineteenth-century struggle of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox to recover the leadership of their own ancient Patriarchate from a Greek-dominated hierarchy.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab-American diaspora)

Schooling in Damascus and Entry into the Patriarchate’s Service

After the family’s return from Beirut, Raphael was raised in Damascus and received his elementary education in the local Orthodox schools of the city (Orthodox Church in America, “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn,” Lives of the Saints, oca.org). His gifts were evident early, and the Patriarchate of Antioch — always short of educated Arabic-speaking clergy — drew him into its service while he was still young. The canonical Life records a rapid ascent through the Patriarchate’s educational apparatus: accepted as a student for the priesthood in 1874, chosen as a substitute teaching assistant by 1877, and appointed a teacher of Arabic and Turkish by 1878 (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The young man was thus, before he was twenty, both a student of the Church and a teacher within it — a trajectory that fixed him from the start in the scholarly and pedagogical vocation that would mark his whole life.

On 28 March 1879 he was tonsured a monk by Patriarch Hierotheos of Antioch, entering the monastic and clerical state formally and binding his life to the service of the Patriarchate (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The tonsure under Hierotheos — himself a Greek — places Raphael’s beginnings squarely within the mixed and contested hierarchy of the Patriarchate of Antioch in its last Greek-dominated generation, the world whose tensions would shape his convictions and, indirectly, his whole career.

The Closed Seminary of Balamand

A telling fact of Raphael’s formation is what was not available to him. The Patriarchate of Antioch’s own theological school at the Monastery of Balamand (Our Lady of Balamand, near Tripoli) — the natural place for an Arabic-speaking candidate to receive higher theological education — had been closed since 1840 and would not reopen in his youth (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org). The Arabic-speaking Orthodox of Antioch, that is, had at mid-century no functioning higher seminary of their own; a promising Arab candidate for learned service in the Church had to be sent abroad, to the Greek-run Theological School of Halki at Constantinople or to the theological academies of Imperial Russia (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; see Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev).

This is not merely an administrative detail. The absence of an Arab theological school, and the necessity of foreign education under Greek or Russian patronage, was itself one of the grievances and one of the mechanisms of the Arab-Greek struggle: it kept the higher formation of Arab clergy dependent on non-Arab institutions and hierarchies. Raphael’s own path — offered a scholarship to Halki, and later drawn to Russia — runs directly through this structural fact, and his lifelong labor for Arabic theological literature and liturgy (see The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work) is intelligible as a response to the very deficiency his own youth exposed.

The Arab Awakening within the Patriarchate of Antioch

Raphael came of age within one of the defining movements of nineteenth-century Middle Eastern Christianity: the effort of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox to recover the effective leadership of the Patriarchate of Antioch, which for generations had been dominated at its highest levels by a Greek (Phanariot-connected) hierarchy, even though the great majority of its faithful and lower clergy were Arabs.

The Patriarchate of Antioch is one of the ancient apostolic sees, its faithful in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking; yet the patriarchal throne and the chief metropolitan sees had come, over the Ottoman centuries, to be held largely by Greeks, with the liturgical and administrative prestige of Greek set above the Arabic of the people (a standard characterization in the histories of the Church of Antioch; here as summarized in the accounts of Raphael’s own involvement, OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org, and Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny). The nineteenth-century “Arab awakening” (nahda) — a broad cultural and literary revival of Arabic across the Ottoman Levant — had its ecclesiastical dimension in the growing insistence of the Antiochian Arabs that their Church be led by, and pray in the language of, its own people.

The struggle would reach its resolution only after Raphael had left for America: in 1899 the Arab party secured the election of Meletios (Doumani) as Patriarch of Antioch, the first of the modern line of Arab patriarchs and the effective end of Greek control of the see (a landmark in the history of the Patriarchate of Antioch; noted in relation to Raphael’s advocacy in the Antiochian Archdiocese Life and in the histories of the Church of Antioch). Raphael did not live in Antioch to see that victory, but he had been one of its partisans, and his advocacy of the Arab cause — including a costly stand in Russia over the disputed patriarchal election of 1891 — is the direct continuation of the world in which he was formed (see The Antiochian Arab Cause).

The Formation That Marked Him

Three things about this Damascene formation carried over into everything Raphael later became. First, he was a scholar and teacher before he was anything else, formed in the Patriarchate’s schools as both student and instructor of Arabic — the vocation that would make him a publisher and liturgical translator in America. Second, he was a child of a disadvantaged Church, an Arab in a hierarchy that undervalued Arabic, whose own higher education had to be sought abroad because his people had no seminary — an experience that made him a lifelong advocate of his people’s dignity and language. Third, he was formed in displacement and dependence, born in exile and educated on others’ scholarships, so that the pastor who would gather a scattered, dependent immigrant people in America knew that condition from within (OCA, “Repose of Saint Raphael,” oca.org; Antiochian Archdiocese, Life). The Damascus of his youth thus supplied not only his learning but the shape of his sympathies.

See Also

• Born in Exile (1860) — the family and the flight that preceded this formation
• Student and Teacher at Halki and Kiev — the higher education he had to seek abroad
• The Antiochian Arab Cause — his advocacy and the 1891 crisis that grew from this world
• The 1904 Syrian Orthodox Liturgical Work — his answer, in Arabic liturgical publishing, to the deficiency his youth exposed

References

• Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Raphael, Bishop of Brooklyn.” Lives of the Saints. oca.org. (Elementary schooling in Damascus; acceptance as a Patriarchate student in 1874; teaching assistant 1877; teacher of Arabic and Turkish 1878; tonsure as a monk on 28 March 1879 by Patriarch Hierotheos; the closure of Balamand since 1840 and the scholarship to Halki.)
• Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. The Life of Our Father among the Saints Raphael Hawaweeny. (The Arab-Greek context of the Patriarchate of Antioch; Raphael’s formation within it.)
• On the “Arab awakening” (nahda) and the nineteenth-century Arab-Greek struggle in the Patriarchate of Antioch, culminating in the 1899 election of Patriarch Meletios (Doumani): a standard theme in the history of the Church of Antioch, here as it bears on Raphael’s formation and later advocacy.