Orthodoxy

Now, as some of you may know, I have (more than) a passing interest in the history of the Orthodox Church - I think it sprang originally from my interest in Dostoevskii, Solov'ev, Rozanov, Leont'ev and any other non-rational Russian thinker of the 19th/early 20th century you care to name.

As those of you who have studied Russian thought know, the writing about it, especially by Russian scholars is overly tendentious, taking either a strongly Soviet line, or a strong emigre anti-Soviet line.

Unfortunately, the histories of the Russian church I have delved into have had this same tendency (one shared by a great many of the conservative thinkers in Russia at the moment, step forward Mr Solzhenitsyn) - that is an overt romanticization of the pre-Soviet past, of Russian history, of the Romanov family, of the Orthodox church and of Russia's role within the world. Nothing new, you may say - romanticization of the past seems to been a genetic defect amongst not only the Russians, but amongst most nations that have experienced trauma (of whatever form), and there are clear intellectual antecedents in Russian history, and in modern Russian culture for this romantic messianism.

Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church is a magnificent introduction to the Orthodox church in general, and I wish there were an equivalent for the Russian Orthodox Church - in English, ideally - I have just picked up the 4 volume History of Russian Christianity by Shubin, but the fact that he has written, travelled and translated widely within this sphere slightly fills me with dread.