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The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy
Theosis, or the principle of divine-human communion, sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians and has been historically important to questions of political theology. In The Mystical as Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy , Aristotle Papanikolaou argues that a political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion must be one that unequivocally endorses a political community that is democratic in a way that structures itself around the modern liberal principles of freedom of religion, the protection of human rights, and church-state separation. Papanikolaou hopes to forge a non-radical Orthodox political theology that extends beyond a reflexive opposition to the West and a nostalgic return to a Byzantine-like unified political-religious culture. His exploration is prompted by two the fall of communism in traditionally Orthodox countries has revealed an unpreparedness on the part of Orthodox Christianity to address the question of political theology in a way that is consistent with its core axiom of theosis; and recent Christian political theology, some of it evoking the notion of “deification,” has been critical of liberal democracy, implying a mutual incompatibility between a Christian worldview and that of modern liberal democracy. The first comprehensive treatment from an Orthodox theological perspective of the issue of the compatibility between Orthodoxy and liberal democracy, Papanikolaou’s is an affirmation that Orthodox support for liberal forms of democracy is justified within the framework of Orthodox understandings of God and the human person. His overtly theological approach shows that the basic principles of liberal democracy are not tied exclusively to the language and categories of Enlightenment philosophy and, so, are not inherently secular.
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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March 14, 2024
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, almost exactly a thousand years after the Baptism of the Rus’, the Orthodox Christian world emerged free from state oppression for the first time in nearly six centuries. It is perhaps owing to this long period of subjugation, during which the preponderance of political discourse within the Orthodox Church was concerned only with strategies of survival, that the East never developed a comprehensive political theology to match that of the West. For the past thirty years, Eastern Orthodoxy has found itself in uncharted waters; neither the imperial religion of the Byzantine and Russian empires, nor captive to the antichristian imperialisms of Islam or communism. Many Orthodox live in countries that embrace, or at least tolerate, religious pluralism, and many of their governments are constituted as liberal democracies.
A debate has thus ensued in the Orthodox world over the question of whether liberal democracy is compatible with an Orthodox Christian worldview. Some commentators, particularly in Russia, argue that liberal democracy is inherently atheistic, materialistic, and relativistic, making it incompatible with Christianity; while others, including Aristotle Papanikolaou, defend certain of its presuppositions on the grounds that they are not inimical, but are in fact integral, to the Christian understanding of the relationship between God and humanity. In The Mystical as Political, Papanikolaou argues that the ascetics of theosis, or divine-human communion, “shapes a political space that is liberal democratic.” The results are intriguing, if not altogether convincing.
It is axiomatic to Orthodox theology that humanity was created for union with God. This union does not obliterate humanity, nor the creation of which humanity is a microcosm, but is instead constituted by “the presencing of the divine” within creation. Creation, which “already exists in and through the divine,” is not in opposition to God, but contains within itself a “latent divine presence” that must be realized by humanity to actualize divine-human communion. This latent transformability of creation—its sacramentality (or Sophianicity, if one follows Soloviev and Bulgakov)—is realized through a practice of asceticism through which the Christian eliminates the barriers—“False ego-constructions”—preventing him from manifesting the perfect love of God and neighbor that is itself the precise definition of theosis.
The goal of Christian asceticism, then, is to learn how to love. Far from being solely the purview of desert anchorites, ascetic practices must be applied to the socio-political sphere as well, because it is in this contumelious arena that the injunction to love one’s neighbor is both most needful and perhaps most difficult to accomplish. As Papanikolaou eloquently puts it:
“The political community is not the antithesis to the desert but one of the many deserts in which the Christian must combat the demons that attempt to block the learning of love. In no other field is the temptation to demonize the neighbor more compelling or more seemingly justifiable than in the field of politics; in no other space than in the political, then, is the Christian more challenged to fulfill the commandment to love.”
Papanikolaou offers a brief survey of eastern Christian political thought as it pertains to the concept of divine-human communion. Eusebius understood the role of the Christian emperors in a manner somewhat analogous to the concept of the Mandate of Heaven in imperial China. The emperors, owing to the virtuousness of their souls, were chosen by the Logos of God, the glorified Christ Himself, to rule the Empire and vanquish the enemies of Christianity, thereby mediating the sovereignty of the Word over creation:
“After the Word had ‘paid the just penalty of [the soul’s] sins, [and] once more again restored her . . . first, then choosing unto Himself the souls of the supreme Emperors, by means of these men most dearly beloved of God He cleansed the whole world of all the wicked and baneful persons and of the cruel God-hating tyrants themselves.’”
“[Constantine is a] Victor in truth, who has gained the victory over those passions which overmaster the rest of men, whose character is formed after the divine original of the supreme sovereign and whose mind reflects as in a mirror the radiance of his virtues. Hence is our emperor perfect in discretion, in goodness, in justice, in courage, in piety, in devotion to God; he truly and only is a philosopher, since he knows himself, and is fully aware that supplies of every blessing are showered on him from a course quite eternal to himself, even from heaven itself.”
The emperors mirrored the authority of the Word over the collective, while the bishops imaged the Logos by ministering to individual souls. Church and state were thus (institutionally) distinct, but were nevertheless engaged in the same work of manifesting and defending the true faith. This arrangement was later formalized by Justinian I, who developed a doctrine of symphonia, according to which the sacred and secular authorities were distinct, but the emperor was responsible for maintaining the harmony between them and acting as the executor of canon law.
While Eusebius and Justinian believed that a specific political constitution was conducive to the realization of divine-human communion in the Word, St. John Chrysostom placed more emphasis on the role of freely-undertaken human asceticism in the consummation of theosis. Chrysostom saw the Church as “a community constituted by perfect love for God”; and since love, by its nature, cannot be compelled, the fulfillment of the Church could only be accomplished by the free devotion of every Christian. While the Church received self-motivated love, the state was necessary to educate and discipline the unvirtuous through fear and coercion in order to facilitate their spiritual growth, which would then be realized in their free communion in and as the Church.
The model of symphonia was transmitted from Byzantium to the Russian Empire, with the important distinction that the Church was more formally subjected to the state after Peter the Great abolished the Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, which operated as a branch of the state bureaucracy. This subsumption of the ecclesial authority by the secular has been blamed by some commentators for the fact that once the Czars lost their legitimacy in the early twentieth century, the alternative to their rulership could not come from the institutional Church, but only from secular political ideologies.
It was in the context of this simultaneous loss of confidence in the Czar and the clergy that Vladimir Soloviev and Sergius Bulgakov developed the concept of what Soloviev called a “Free Theocracy”. The two theologians shared the belief of Eusebius and John Chrysostom that the state must play a role in an integral Christian order; but paradoxically, a true Christian integralism would require the state to afford its citizens the freedom to reject Christianity. As Papanikolaou puts it, “the political order must be such so as to maximize the conditions for the possibility of a free response to and, hence, realization of the divine in creation. There can be no forced imposition of religion if in fact, creation is destined for communion with God . . . a cosmic vision that entails a union of materiality with the divine is realized freely only through a political form in which church and state are separated.”
This is essentially the heart of Papanikolaou’s own position:
“[If] God desires a communion as an event of love-as-freedom, then God creates the conditions for the possibility of the rejection of this communion. Paradoxically, although Christians must strive toward communion with God, Christians must also maximize the conditions for the possibility of freely rejecting God. God’s sovereignty, God’s dominion over creation, is, ironically, made more manifest in a context that reveals God’s vulnerability to creation in the form of rejection.”
It is a compelling vision, if a bit counterintuitive. But for me it raises more questions than it answers. Is the “Free Theocracy” envisioned by Soloviev really interchangeable with liberal democracy? Papanikolaou seems to imagine that liberalism produces a socio-political system that is free from coercion; a notion that many people, myself included, would emphatically reject. Another problem is with the concept of freedom itself. Is it really possible to “freely” reject God? Perfect freedom requires perfect knowledge, and the latter is unavailable to us in this life. Is freedom the ability to choose between options or, in the vein of John 8, the liberation of the spirit from those intermediate forces that interfere with our communion with the transcendently true? Is human freedom on this side of Eden constituted by choice, or by charity and sacrifice? Is Papanikolaou putting the cart before the horse, taking as the starting point of his political theology a freedom that is actually the end, not the beginning, of the spiritual life? This offering leaves much to contemplate.
A debate has thus ensued in the Orthodox world over the question of whether liberal democracy is compatible with an Orthodox Christian worldview. Some commentators, particularly in Russia, argue that liberal democracy is inherently atheistic, materialistic, and relativistic, making it incompatible with Christianity; while others, including Aristotle Papanikolaou, defend certain of its presuppositions on the grounds that they are not inimical, but are in fact integral, to the Christian understanding of the relationship between God and humanity. In The Mystical as Political, Papanikolaou argues that the ascetics of theosis, or divine-human communion, “shapes a political space that is liberal democratic.” The results are intriguing, if not altogether convincing.
It is axiomatic to Orthodox theology that humanity was created for union with God. This union does not obliterate humanity, nor the creation of which humanity is a microcosm, but is instead constituted by “the presencing of the divine” within creation. Creation, which “already exists in and through the divine,” is not in opposition to God, but contains within itself a “latent divine presence” that must be realized by humanity to actualize divine-human communion. This latent transformability of creation—its sacramentality (or Sophianicity, if one follows Soloviev and Bulgakov)—is realized through a practice of asceticism through which the Christian eliminates the barriers—“False ego-constructions”—preventing him from manifesting the perfect love of God and neighbor that is itself the precise definition of theosis.
The goal of Christian asceticism, then, is to learn how to love. Far from being solely the purview of desert anchorites, ascetic practices must be applied to the socio-political sphere as well, because it is in this contumelious arena that the injunction to love one’s neighbor is both most needful and perhaps most difficult to accomplish. As Papanikolaou eloquently puts it:
“The political community is not the antithesis to the desert but one of the many deserts in which the Christian must combat the demons that attempt to block the learning of love. In no other field is the temptation to demonize the neighbor more compelling or more seemingly justifiable than in the field of politics; in no other space than in the political, then, is the Christian more challenged to fulfill the commandment to love.”
Papanikolaou offers a brief survey of eastern Christian political thought as it pertains to the concept of divine-human communion. Eusebius understood the role of the Christian emperors in a manner somewhat analogous to the concept of the Mandate of Heaven in imperial China. The emperors, owing to the virtuousness of their souls, were chosen by the Logos of God, the glorified Christ Himself, to rule the Empire and vanquish the enemies of Christianity, thereby mediating the sovereignty of the Word over creation:
“After the Word had ‘paid the just penalty of [the soul’s] sins, [and] once more again restored her . . . first, then choosing unto Himself the souls of the supreme Emperors, by means of these men most dearly beloved of God He cleansed the whole world of all the wicked and baneful persons and of the cruel God-hating tyrants themselves.’”
“[Constantine is a] Victor in truth, who has gained the victory over those passions which overmaster the rest of men, whose character is formed after the divine original of the supreme sovereign and whose mind reflects as in a mirror the radiance of his virtues. Hence is our emperor perfect in discretion, in goodness, in justice, in courage, in piety, in devotion to God; he truly and only is a philosopher, since he knows himself, and is fully aware that supplies of every blessing are showered on him from a course quite eternal to himself, even from heaven itself.”
The emperors mirrored the authority of the Word over the collective, while the bishops imaged the Logos by ministering to individual souls. Church and state were thus (institutionally) distinct, but were nevertheless engaged in the same work of manifesting and defending the true faith. This arrangement was later formalized by Justinian I, who developed a doctrine of symphonia, according to which the sacred and secular authorities were distinct, but the emperor was responsible for maintaining the harmony between them and acting as the executor of canon law.
While Eusebius and Justinian believed that a specific political constitution was conducive to the realization of divine-human communion in the Word, St. John Chrysostom placed more emphasis on the role of freely-undertaken human asceticism in the consummation of theosis. Chrysostom saw the Church as “a community constituted by perfect love for God”; and since love, by its nature, cannot be compelled, the fulfillment of the Church could only be accomplished by the free devotion of every Christian. While the Church received self-motivated love, the state was necessary to educate and discipline the unvirtuous through fear and coercion in order to facilitate their spiritual growth, which would then be realized in their free communion in and as the Church.
The model of symphonia was transmitted from Byzantium to the Russian Empire, with the important distinction that the Church was more formally subjected to the state after Peter the Great abolished the Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, which operated as a branch of the state bureaucracy. This subsumption of the ecclesial authority by the secular has been blamed by some commentators for the fact that once the Czars lost their legitimacy in the early twentieth century, the alternative to their rulership could not come from the institutional Church, but only from secular political ideologies.
It was in the context of this simultaneous loss of confidence in the Czar and the clergy that Vladimir Soloviev and Sergius Bulgakov developed the concept of what Soloviev called a “Free Theocracy”. The two theologians shared the belief of Eusebius and John Chrysostom that the state must play a role in an integral Christian order; but paradoxically, a true Christian integralism would require the state to afford its citizens the freedom to reject Christianity. As Papanikolaou puts it, “the political order must be such so as to maximize the conditions for the possibility of a free response to and, hence, realization of the divine in creation. There can be no forced imposition of religion if in fact, creation is destined for communion with God . . . a cosmic vision that entails a union of materiality with the divine is realized freely only through a political form in which church and state are separated.”
This is essentially the heart of Papanikolaou’s own position:
“[If] God desires a communion as an event of love-as-freedom, then God creates the conditions for the possibility of the rejection of this communion. Paradoxically, although Christians must strive toward communion with God, Christians must also maximize the conditions for the possibility of freely rejecting God. God’s sovereignty, God’s dominion over creation, is, ironically, made more manifest in a context that reveals God’s vulnerability to creation in the form of rejection.”
It is a compelling vision, if a bit counterintuitive. But for me it raises more questions than it answers. Is the “Free Theocracy” envisioned by Soloviev really interchangeable with liberal democracy? Papanikolaou seems to imagine that liberalism produces a socio-political system that is free from coercion; a notion that many people, myself included, would emphatically reject. Another problem is with the concept of freedom itself. Is it really possible to “freely” reject God? Perfect freedom requires perfect knowledge, and the latter is unavailable to us in this life. Is freedom the ability to choose between options or, in the vein of John 8, the liberation of the spirit from those intermediate forces that interfere with our communion with the transcendently true? Is human freedom on this side of Eden constituted by choice, or by charity and sacrifice? Is Papanikolaou putting the cart before the horse, taking as the starting point of his political theology a freedom that is actually the end, not the beginning, of the spiritual life? This offering leaves much to contemplate.
January 18, 2022
Ця книга - спроба окреслення сумісності православного християнства і сучасної ліберальної політичної ідеї. Поміж стрижневої теми в книзі подано огляд ідей свободи слова, діалогу, сповіді, прощення в руслі православ’я.
March 6, 2023
Книга современного православного богослова Аристотеля Папаниколау представляет собой новейший опыт формулирования политической теологии, которая опирается на восточно-православную традицию и в то же время находится в диалоге с теологами из других христианских конфессиональных контекстов.
Автор поставил перед собой амбициозную задачу: показать, как восточно-христианская идея «обожения», интерпретированная в более широком смысле «бого-человеческого общения», может стать продуктивной для определения позиций и действий православных христиан в современном либерально-демократическом политическом контексте. С теологической точки зрения автор рассматривает темы демократии, прав человека, общего блага, свободы слова, политического прощения и «говорения правды», соотнося их с традицией, восходящей к политической теологии древней церкви. Основная идея книги состоит в том, что либеральная демократия является не врагом церкви, а, напротив, тем политическим пространством, в котором христианин призван осуществлять аскетические практики, чтобы научиться богозаповеданной любви. Отстаивая свою позицию, автор полемизирует с ведущими современными христианскими мыслителями, занимающими антилиберальную позицию (прежде всего со С. Хауэрвасом и Дж. Милбанком), тем самым включаясь в дискуссии, ведущиеся сегодня в области политической теологии.
Аристотель Папаниколау (Aristotle Papanikolaou) — профессор теологии, заведующий кафедрой православной теологии и культуры и содиректор Центра православно-христианских исследований (Orthodox Christian Studies Center) в Фордемском университете (Fordham University), Нью-Йорк, США.
Автор поставил перед собой амбициозную задачу: показать, как восточно-христианская идея «обожения», интерпретированная в более широком смысле «бого-человеческого общения», может стать продуктивной для определения позиций и действий православных христиан в современном либерально-демократическом политическом контексте. С теологической точки зрения автор рассматривает темы демократии, прав человека, общего блага, свободы слова, политического прощения и «говорения правды», соотнося их с традицией, восходящей к политической теологии древней церкви. Основная идея книги состоит в том, что либеральная демократия является не врагом церкви, а, напротив, тем политическим пространством, в котором христианин призван осуществлять аскетические практики, чтобы научиться богозаповеданной любви. Отстаивая свою позицию, автор полемизирует с ведущими современными христианскими мыслителями, занимающими антилиберальную позицию (прежде всего со С. Хауэрвасом и Дж. Милбанком), тем самым включаясь в дискуссии, ведущиеся сегодня в области политической теологии.
Аристотель Папаниколау (Aristotle Papanikolaou) — профессор теологии, заведующий кафедрой православной теологии и культуры и содиректор Центра православно-христианских исследований (Orthodox Christian Studies Center) в Фордемском университете (Fordham University), Нью-Йорк, США.
March 3, 2020
Една от стравнително малкото книги за корелацията между християнство и политика написнаи от православна гледна точка.
Интересно четиво, на моменти доста проникновено, а на моменти и ебектиритично.
Авторът определено има поглед върху по-широката литература излизаща извън контекста на собствената му традиция, което му помага да влезе в интересн диалог с различни автори.
Лично за мне Фордам школата се очертава като една от най0интересните в съвременното православно богослвие.
Интересно четиво, на моменти доста проникновено, а на моменти и ебектиритично.
Авторът определено има поглед върху по-широката литература излизаща извън контекста на собствената му традиция, което му помага да влезе в интересн диалог с различни автори.
Лично за мне Фордам школата се очертава като една от най0интересните в съвременното православно богослвие.
June 14, 2022
One of the more important books in Christian political theology I've read in a long time. Fascinating insights into democracy, theosis/deification, divine-human communion, and even diagnostics for politics of demonization. Bracingly relevant. A book I'll return to.
December 19, 2016
Papanikolaou bases his argument on the Orthodox notion of theosis. ‘Theosis asserts that the human was created for … communion with God’, he argues. Creation ‘exists with the eternal capacity for transformation, which is nothing other than the presencing of the divine in its very materiality’. In other words, creation is there to be transformed, and the Church’s job is to work together with God to bring about this transformation. This has profound implications for how Christians relate to secular politics: ‘insofar as politics can be construed as an engagement with the neighbor/stranger, then politics must be considered as one of the many practices within an ascetics of divine-human communion. The political community is not the antithesis to the desert but one of the many deserts in which the Christian must combat the demons that attempt to block the learning of love. In no other field is the temptation to demonize the neighbor more compelling or more seemingly justifiable than in the field of politics; in no other space than in the political, then, is the Christian more challenged to fulfill the commandment to love’.
See my full review here: https://wordsbecamebooks.com/2016/12/...
See my full review here: https://wordsbecamebooks.com/2016/12/...
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