ROLAND CLARK
Eastern Orthodox Christianity prides itself on following Tradition, on preserving the authentic faith of the Apostles, but that does not mean that nothing has changed in the past two thousand years. What it does mean is that change was frequently contested. Tradition does and must adapt to the times, but it is interpreted by the Church as a whole; no one person has the authority to innovate on their own initiative. During the late 19th and 20th centuries this paradox—that Tradition must adapt yet no one may adapt it—caused repeated tensions within the Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe. This volume explores 10 different renewal movements that emerged across the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Individual chapters focus on specific movements, with five chapters dedicated to the God Worshippers (Serbian: Bogomoljci) in Serbia and two to the Lord’s Army (Romanian: Oastea Domnului) in Romania and Serbia. Two chapters discuss the phenomenon as a whole. The first, by Meic Pearse, provides the historical context of modernization and nation-building in which these movements appeared, and argues that they were a result of Orthodoxy’s encounter with modernity. The second, an Introduction written by Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović and Radmila Radić, notes the remarkable paucity of research on renewal within Orthodoxy. It argues that—in addition to helping us understand religion better—elucidating these movements contextualizes “the social role of Church institutions, social welfare, experiences of modernity and patterns of social developments.” (17) Unfortunately, neither of these chapters offers much in terms of general analysis of causes, character, or consequences. Individual chapters do engage with some of these questions, but most are more descriptive than analytical, spending little time on historiographical debates. While discussing some of these movements for the first time in scholarly literature, the volume as a whole therefore throws up more questions than answers.
Many of the groups discussed here had a decisively Evangelical flavor. Milovanović and Radić tell us that they “were all characterized with intensity of personal religious experience, holiness, discipline, communion, Scriptural authority, use of vernacular languages in liturgical practice, hymn chanting, prayer.” (12) Yet in some cases, renewal movements seem to have emerged completely independently of Western influences. In late Imperial Russia, for example, Ioann Verkhovsky developed a new form of Old Belief by blending nationalism, Slavophilism, and democratic forms of church governance. Other groups in Russia—such as the Renovationists—used a passing acquaintance with Western liberalism to formulate focused critiques of the bureaucratization of the Russian Orthodox Church and its subservient relationship to the state. Not a Western import, their religious reforms nonetheless reflected certain Western Protestant discourses and values that were circulating in some educated circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Count Lev Tolstoy explicitly founded his sect in conversation with both Western Christianity and Orthodoxy, while Evangelical peasant groups such as the Stundists and the Molokans were influenced by Protestant German settlers. These groups developed within an Orthodox milieu, however, and reacted to local pressures. During the 1890s Tolstoyans attempted to influence the Evangelicals, hoping to extend Tolstoyism out of elite circles and to add the support of educated society to these predominantly peasant Christianites.
Tolstoy and his followers had a degree of success with the Doukhobors in southern Caucasia, who refused to bear arms or swear an oath to the tsar. The government responded by exiling over a thousand people to Siberia, many of whom died on the way. In Kiev province, Kondraty Malevanny led a reform movement within Stundo-Baptism characterized by ecstatic prayer, singing, and dancing, as well as a belief that Malevanny was the Son of God returned to herald the Last Judgement. All of these movements were hostile to the Russian state and the official Church, though some were more willing to work with it than others. Those that explicitly rejected state authority, like the Doukhobors, were quickly suppressed with lethal force. In Russia it was only Verkhovsky’s followers and the Renovationists who even tried to renew Orthodoxy— all the others preferred absolute separation from the rest of the Church. The Russian case studies also reflect clear differences between educated and popular religion. Whereas Verkhovsky, Tolstoy, and the Renovationists articulated their beliefs first and foremost through letters and pamphlets, the Doukhobors and the Malevantsy relied upon face-to-face gatherings and local preachers, reflecting a more Evangelical approach to spirituality and organization.
Practices usually associated with Protestant Evangelicalism arrived in the rest of Eastern Europe through a variety of avenues. The Nazarenes, for example, spread out from Switzerland during the 1830s, making converts in Hungary and the Serbian Banat region. Serbian Orthodox leaders became increasingly concerned that Nazarenes were converting Orthodox believers in the 1870s, and Boris Aleksov here argues that Orthodox reforms such as regular preaching were a response to Nazarene influence. In particular, he claims that the God Worshippers, a grassroots movement emphasizing individual piety and holiness, learned to read the Bible from the Nazarenes, making devotional Bible reading a core element of God Worshipping. Radić and Milovanović repeat this assertion, noting that the God Worshipper movement emerged out of a disparate collection of small devotional groups influenced by different Protestant sects, most notably the Nazarenes.
Dragan Ašković’s study of God Worshipper hymnbooks and singing, however, reminds us that they also drew deeply on folk traditions and lyric forms in their gatherings. The movement became more institutionalized after the First World War, responding to state pressure for an organizational structure that bureaucrats could understand and interact with. The need for devotional tracts exposed the God Worshippers to Evangelical Protestant influences during the interwar period, but many of them also entered Orthodox monasteries, thereby invigorating Serbian monasticism rather than encouraging religious irredentism. Similarly, Ksenija Končarević maintains that the Serbian Orthodox Church modernized its liturgical language as a direct response to the popularity of the devotional practices encouraged by the God Worshippers.
Theoretical debates over religious influences are mostly absent from this volume. The authors assume that contemporaneity is enough to demonstrate influence. They also downplay the impact of Roman Catholic practices and spreading literacy in order to focus on more colorful groups, such as the Nazarenes and the God Worshippers. In most cases, these chapters are convincing when they say that Orthodox leaders were deeply concerned with the implications grassroots renewal movements had for the future of their Church. Whether they imitated them, however, is a different question. Dragana Radisavljević-Ćiparizović’s much more theoretically informed chapter on 21st-century renewal movements in Serbian Orthodox communities makes one wonder how conscious and coordinated religious change was. She concludes that much more local factors are at work today than historians assume gave birth to earlier movements such as the God Worshippers. This claim should also give pause to our confidence about religious change in the early 20th century.
The two chapters on the Lord’s Army movement in Romania make another interesting contrast. Corneliu Constantineanu argues that this renewal movement emerged from “the ‘rediscovery’ of Scripture at the beginning of the twentieth century” (231). He locates this “rediscovery” in Dumitru Cornilescu’s translation of the Bible, published in stages between 1921 and 1924; in Teodor Popescu’s preaching in Bucharest; and in Iosif Trifa’s newspaper in Sibiu, first published in 1922. The Lord’s Army took root among Trifa’s readers in Transylvania, and although Trifa was aware of what Cornilescu and Popescu were preaching in Bucharest, his was a completely independent renewal project. The Romanian Orthodox Church functions as a monolithic actor in Constantineanu’s account, opposing the renewal efforts of Cornilescu, Popescu, and Trifa, and refusing even to dialogue with them.
Mircea Măran’s chapter, on the other hand, situates the emergence of the Lord’s Army within “the wish to strengthen Orthodox elite influence in the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional society of Transylvania and to attempt to suppress the neoProtestant movements which were seriously threatening to convert a large number of Romanian Orthodox believers.” (266) He focuses predominantly on the Serbian Banat region, and is able to show how the Lord’s Army functioned to strengthen ethnic and religious identities at the same time as it promoted a specific type of spirituality. Rather than emphasizing the differences between the Lord’s Army and the official Orthodox Church, Măran shows how and why the Church worked together with the Lord’s Army in specific times and places.
Although it only receives one chapter, the Zoe Brotherhood in Greece is probably the best known of the renewal movements discussed in this volume. A number of commentators have accused Zoe of being too “Protestant”— most notably the theologian Hristos Yannaras, who spent several years in the movement as a young man. Amaryllis Logotheti here argues that Zoe was “a reorganisation of the sovereign discourse of the Church as the preferential ally of the state within the borrowed version of the Protestant example.” (290) Logotheti’s nuanced approach to Zoe’s goals suggests a useful way of understanding many of the Orthodox renewal movements discussed in this volume While not Protestant, neither were they completely Orthodox in their ecclesiology and practice. The influence of Western Protestantism on these movements is undeniable, but it often arrived in oblique ways and was instrumentalized by local religious actors for their own purposes.
Galina Goncharova’s chapter on the White Cross stavropegial monastic fraternity in Bulgaria shows how renewal movements functioned when they succeeded in negotiating church politics and aligning them with ecclesiastic and national goals. There was no talk of Protestantism here, although the discourse and values of the fraternity were remarkably similar to those of other renewal movements. It is possible that Orthodox renewal only became “Protestant” when its enemies had something to gain from the label. The same global religious currents and broad social trends intersected to produce all of the movements discussed in this volume, but how their stories played out depended on local conditions and—often—petty politics.
Roland Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool.
