Louis Althusser (1918-1990), a French Marxist philosopher whose main body of work antedates 1980, continues to exert significant influence on postmodern thought some 40 years later. Of relevance to this article is his notion of “ideological state apparatuses” (ISA), articulated almost 50 years ago in his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” which has drawn the attention of Slavoj Žižek, among others.
While ISA have no formal relationship to state power, they typically function in more or less subtle ways to inculcate the dominant statist ideology in the citizenry. ISA cover a range of social and political configurations, such as educational institutions, the media, the family—and churches.
In an Orthodox context, Althusser’s ISA provide a useful critical lens through which to analyze church-state relations in Byzantium, the successive stages of Ukrainian and Russian history from the adoption of Orthodox Christianity in 988 to the present, and especially what many Orthodox Christians in the West regard with growing discomfort as a worrisome blurring of boundaries between the Ukrainian state and the newly reconstituted Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
Given the nation’s ostensible westward tilt socially, culturally, and politically since the EuroMaidan Revolution, those of us Orthodox who generally support its political and ecclesiastical independence from Moscow—as well as the role of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in conferring legitimacy on the latter—have rather hoped to see Ukraine embrace a model of church-state relations different from that of their Russian neighbors.
“Byzantine symphonia,” as noted in my recent essay for the Kyiv Post, represents the political theory—some would say “political theology”—according to which church and empire were presumed to speak with a single voice throughout the Byzantine era. I say “presumed” because, in reality, Byzantium’s imperial administration attempted repeatedly to dilute Orthodox dogma as a way to quell the political unrest that arose from doctrinal disputes. In one example among many, St. Maximus the Confessor’s defense of christological orthodoxy in the mid-7th century landed him squarely on the wrong side of Emperor Constans II’s designs for imperial unity. At the age of 82 Maximus was maimed and sent into exile in modern-day Georgia, where he soon died from his wounds. In ways sometimes more immediately obvious and sometimes discerned only through the historian’s retrospection, the Church nearly always finds herself on the losing side of Byzantine symphonia.
This makes all the more chilling Patriarch Kirill’s and Vladimir Putin’s open embrace of Byzantine symphonia, some half dozen years ago, as a paradigm for church-state complicity in 21st-century Russia’s domestic and foreign policy agenda. No possible good can come from the Church’s abandonment of her prophetic voice in a modern, majoritarian Orthodox society. Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970), one of the foremost lay theologians produced by the Russian émigré community in Paris after the Russian Revolution, wrote in a 1967 article:
:…no social arrangement can be “dogmatized” or “canonized.” Always relative, no particular political, economic or social system incarnates the ideal of divine justice or the good. The Church…transcends all political regimes and economic orders…. Despite the many errors of the historical past, no dependency of the Church upon a political system is justified, except in the case of violent constraint. It is this freedom which gives the Church the power of standing as the moral conscience of humanity and shapes her ministry in society. Such a charismatic ministry seeks approaches to the absolute through the changing and relative forms of history.
“The New Testament,” Evdokimov continued, “canonizes no particular social system. Christ announces the coming of the Kingdom, but he never presents himself either as a reformer or the lawgiver of a specific social order…. [H]e neither concerns himself with nor criticizes any of the political, social, or economic institutions of his time.”
This brings us to the subject of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government’s direct involvement in negotiating the autocephaly of the OCU with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and in assigning a church for the latter’s use as its stavropegion in Kyiv, the christening of Petro Poroshenko as “the new St. Volodymyr” by the Phanar’s exarchs, Poroshenko’s highly visible role at the OCU’s Unification Council and following, the Verkhovna Rada’s legislation of what the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine must legally call itself, and the appeal of the OCU’s newly elected Metropolitan Epifaniy for the retaking of Crimea: these all comprise troubling signs to Orthodox observers in the West—otherwise sympathetic to Ukrainian aspirations for full independence from Moscow—that Ukraine may have learned nothing from Russia’s mistakes and simply made the Putin-Gundyaev playbook its own.
To be fair, given Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and the Moscow Patriarchate’s expressly stated ideology of speaking in a single, unified voice with the Kremlin, the Ukrainian government’s national security concerns for a local Church liberated from Russian control seem entirely justified. We Orthodox in the West have not had to confront a situation like this. We cannot say how we would deal with a similar set of circumstances.
Ukraine has no imperial past except that of foreign occupation and oppression. Left to their own devices, Ukrainians shine most brightly from the pages of their democratic Cossack history. In crafting its own future—where the Church preaches the Gospel and the state pursues national interests with justice and integrity on the world stage—Ukraine has no need to follow the bad example of its neighbor and former overlord.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian of Ukrainian and Lemko descent on his mother’s side, a PhD student in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and the founding editor of Orthodoxy in Dialogue. He holds a BA in Sexuality Studies from York University and an MA in Theology from Regis College, both in Toronto, and is an alumnus of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Earlier in life he completed the course work for the MDiv at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary near New York City. Orthodoxy in Dialogue has an extensive Ukraine section in its Archives by Author.
