Religion_Christianism

Eastern Orthodoxy is the large body of Christians who follow the faith and practices that were defined by the first seven ecumenical councils. The word orthodox ("right believing") has traditionally been used, in the Greek-speaking Christian world, to designate communities, or individuals, who preserved the true faith (as defined by those councils), as opposed to those who were declared heretical. The official designation of the church in Eastern Orthodox liturgical or canonical texts is "the Orthodox Catholic Church." Because of the historical links of Eastern Orthodoxy with the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium (Constantinople), however, in English usage it is referred to as the "Eastern" or "Greek Orthodox" Church. These terms are sometimes misleading, especially when applied to Russian or Slavic churches and to the Orthodox communities in western Europe and America. It should also be noted that there are Monophysitic churches (holding that after Incarnation Jesus had only a divine, and not a human and divine, nature) that have adopted the term orthodox as part of their names.

The schism between the churches of the East and the West (1054) was the culmination of a gradual process of estrangement that began in the first centuries of the Christian Era and continued through the Middle Ages. Linguistic and cultural differences, as well as political events, contributed to the estrangement. From the 4th to the 11th century, Constantinople, the centre of Eastern Christianity, was also the capital of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, while Rome, after the barbarian invasions, fell under the influence of the Holy Roman Empire of the West, a political rival. In the West theology remained under the influence of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), while in the East doctrinal thought was shaped by the Greek Fathers. Theological differences could have been settled if the two areas had not simultaneously developed different concepts of church authority. The growth of Roman primacy, based on the concept of the apostolic origin of the Church of Rome, was incompatible with the Eastern idea that the importance of certain local churches--Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and later, Constantinople--could be determined only by their numerical and political significance. For the East, the highest authority in settling doctrinal disputes was the ecumenical council.

At the time of the Schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople, the membership of the Eastern Orthodox Church was spread throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and Russia, with its centre in Constantinople, which was also called "New Rome." The vicissitudes of history have greatly modified the internal structures of the Orthodox Church, but, even today, the bulk of its members live in the same geographic areas. Missionary expansion toward Asia and emigration toward the West, however, have helped to maintain the importance of Orthodoxy worldwide.

The Orthodox Church is a fellowship of "autocephalous" churches (governed by their own head bishops), with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople holding titular or honorary primacy. The number of autocephalous churches has varied in history. Today there are many: the Church of Constantinople (Istanbul), the Church of Alexandria (Egypt), the Church of Antioch (with headquarters in Damascus, Syria), and the churches of Jerusalem, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Albania, Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, and America.

The order of precedence in which the autocephalous churches are listed does not reflect their actual influence or numerical importance. The patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, for example, present only shadows of their past glory. Yet there remains a consensus that Constantinople's primacy of honour, recognized by the ancient canons because it was the capital of the ancient empire, should remain as a symbol and tool of church unity and cooperation. The modern pan-Orthodox conferences were thus convoked by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. Several of the autocephalous churches are de facto national churches, by far the largest being the Russian Church; however, it is not the criterion of nationality but rather the territorial principle that is the norm of organization in the Orthodox Church.

Since the Russian Revolution there has been much turmoil and administrative conflict within the Orthodox Church. In western Europe and in the Americas, in particular, overlapping jurisdictions have been set up and political passions have led to the formation of ecclesiastical organizations without clear canonical status. Though it has provoked controversy, the establishment (1970) of the new autocephalous Orthodox Church in America by the patriarch of Moscow has as its stated goal the resumption of normal territorial unity in the Western Hemisphere.

At the beginning of the 2nd millennium of Christian history, the church of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, was at the peak of its world influence and power. Neither Rome, which had become a provincial town and its church an instrument in the hands of political interests, nor Europe under the Carolingian and Ottonian dynasties could really compete with Byzantium as centres of Christian civilization. The Byzantine emperors of the Macedonian dynasty had extended the frontiers of the empire from Mesopotamia to Naples (in Italy) and from the Danube River (in central Europe) to Palestine. The church of Constantinople not only enjoyed a parallel expansion but also extended its missionary penetration, much beyond the political frontiers of the empire, to Russia and the Caucasus.

The ideology that had prevailed since Constantine (4th century) and Justinian I (6th century)--according to which there was to be only one universal Christian society, the oikoumene, led jointly by the empire and the church--was still the ideology of the Byzantine emperors. The authority of the patriarch of Constantinople was motivated in a formal fashion by the fact that he was the bishop of the "New Rome," where the emperor and the senate also resided (canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon, 451). He held the title of "ecumenical patriarch," which pointed to his political role in the empire. Technically, he occupied the second rank--after the bishop of Rome--in a hierarchy of five major primates, which included also the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. In practice, however, the latter three were deprived of all authority by the Arab conquest of the Middle East in the 7th century, and only the emerging Slavic churches attempted to challenge, at times, the position of Constantinople as the unique centre of Eastern Christendom.

The relations between state and church in Byzantium are often described by the term caesaropapism, which implies that the emperor was acting as the head of the church. The official texts, however, describe the emperor and the patriarch as a dyarchy (government with dual authority) and compare their functions to that of the soul and the body in a single organism. In practice, the emperor had the upper hand over much of church administration, though strong patriarchs could occasionally play a decisive role in politics: Patriarch Nicholas Mystikus (patriarch 901-907, 912-925) and Polyeuctus (patriarch 956-970) excommunicated emperors for uncanonical acts. In the area of faith and doctrine, the emperors could never impose their will when it contradicted the conscience of the church: this fact, shown in particular during the numerous attempts at union with Rome during the late medieval period, proves that the notion of caesaropapism is not unreservedly applicable to Byzantium.

The Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, built by Justinian in the 6th century, was the centre of religious life in the Eastern Orthodox world. It was by far the largest and most splendid religious edifice in all of Christendom. According to The Russian Primary Chronicle, the envoys of the Kievan prince Vladimir, who visited it in 987, reported: "We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth." Hagia Sophia, or the "great church," as it was also called, provided the pattern of the liturgical office, which was adopted throughout the Orthodox world. This adoption was generally spontaneous, and it was based upon the moral and cultural prestige of the imperial capital: the Orthodox Church uses the 9th-century Byzantine Rite.

Both in the capital and in other centres, the monastic movement continued to flourish as it was shaped during the early centuries of Christianity. The Constantinopolitan monastery of Studion was a community of over 1,000 monks, dedicated to liturgical prayer, obedience, and asceticism. They frequently opposed both government and ecclesiastical officialdom, defending fundamental Christian principles against political compromises. The Studite Rule (guidelines of monastic life) was adopted by daughter monasteries, particularly the famous Monastery of the Caves (Pecherskaya Lavra) in Kiev (in Russia). In 963 Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas offered his protection to St. Athanasius the Athonite, whose laura (large monastery) is still the centre of the monastic republic of Mt. Athos (under the protection of Greece). The writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople, are a most remarkable example of Eastern Christian mysticism, and they exercised a decisive influence on later developments of Orthodox spirituality.

Historically, the most significant event was the missionary expansion of Byzantine Christianity throughout eastern Europe. In the 9th century, Bulgaria had become an Orthodox nation and under Tsar Symeon (893-927) had established its own autocephalous (administratively independent) patriarchate in Preslav (now known as Veliki Preslav). Under Tsar Samuel (976-1014) another autocephalous Bulgarian centre appeared in Ohrid. Thus, a Slavic-speaking daughter church of Byzantium dominated the Balkan Peninsula. It lost its political and ecclesiastical independence after the conquests of the Byzantine emperor Basil II (976-1025), but the seed of a Slavic Orthodoxy had been solidly planted. In 988 the Kievan prince Vladimir embraced Byzantine Orthodoxy and married a sister of Emperor Basil. After that time, Russia became an ecclesiastical province of the church of Byzantium, headed by a Greek or, less frequently, a Russian metropolitan appointed from Constantinople. This statute of dependence was not challenged by the Russians until 1448. During the entire period, Russia adopted and developed the spiritual, artistic, and social heritage of Byzantine civilization, which was received through intermediary Bulgarian translators. (See also below under The church and the world--Missions: ancient and modern).

Relations with the Latin West, meanwhile, were becoming more ambiguous. On the one hand, the Byzantines considered the entire Western world as a part of the Roman oikoumene of which the Byzantine emperor was the head and in which the Roman bishop enjoyed honorary primacy. On the other hand, the Frankish and German emperors in Europe were challenging this nominal scheme, and the internal decadence of the Roman papacy was such that the powerful patriarch of Byzantium seldom took the trouble of entertaining any relations with it. From the time of Patriarch Photius (patriarch 858-867, 877-886), the Byzantines had formally condemned the Filioque clause, which stated that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and from the Son, as an illegitimate and heretical addition to the Nicene Creed, but in 879-880 Photius and Pope John VIII had apparently settled the matter to Photius' satisfaction. In 1014, however, the Filioque was introduced in Rome, and communion was broken again.

The incident of 1054, wrongly considered as the date of the Schism (which had actually been developing over a period of time), was, in fact, an unsuccessful attempt at restoring relations, disintegrating as they were because of political competition in Italy between the Byzantines and the Germans and also because of disciplinary changes (enforced celibacy of the clergy, in particular) imposed by the reform movement that had been initiated by the monks of Cluny, France. Conciliatory efforts of Emperor Constantine Monomachus (reigned 1042-55) were powerless to overcome either the aggressive and uninformed attitudes of the Frankish clergy, who were now governing the Roman Church, or the intransigence of Byzantine patriarch Michael Cerularius (1043-58). When papal legates came to Constantinople in 1054, they found no common language with the patriarch. Both sides exchanged recriminations on points of doctrine and ritual and finally hurled anathemas of excommunication at each other, thus provoking what has been called the Schism.

After the Battle of Manzikert (1071) in eastern Asia Minor, Byzantium lost most of Anatolia to the Turks and ceased to be a world power. Partly solicited by the Byzantines, the Western Crusades proved another disaster: they brought the establishment of Latin principalities on former imperial territories and the replacement of Eastern bishops by a Latin hierarchy. The culminating point was, of course, the sack of Constantinople itself in 1204, the enthronement of a Latin emperor on the Bosporus, and the installation of a Latin patriarch in Hagia Sophia. Meanwhile, the Balkan countries of Bulgaria and Serbia secured national emancipation with Western help, the Mongols sacked Kiev (1240), and Russia became a part of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan.

Until the Crusades, and in spite of such incidents as the exchanges of anathemas between Michael Cerularius and the papal legates in 1054, Byzantine Christians did not consider the break with the West as a final schism. The prevailing opinion was that the break of communion with the West was due to a temporary take-over of the venerable Roman see by misinformed and uneducated German "barbarians," and that eventually the former unity of the Christian world under the one legitimate emperor--that of Constantinople--and the five patriarchates would be restored. This utopian scheme came to an end when the Crusaders replaced the Greek patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem with Latin prelates, after they had captured these ancient cities (1098-99). Instead of reestablishing Christian unity in the common struggle against Islam, the Crusades demonstrated how far apart Latins and Greeks really were from each other. When finally, in 1204, after a shameless sacking of the city, the Venetian Thomas Morosini was installed as patriarch of Constantinople and confirmed as such by Pope Innocent III, the Greeks realized the full seriousness of papal claims over the universal church: theological polemics and national hatreds were combined to tear the two churches further apart.

After the capture of the city, the Orthodox patriarch John Camaterus fled to Bulgaria and died there in 1206. A successor, Michael Autorianus, was elected in Nicaea (1208), where he enjoyed the support of a restored Greek empire. Although he lived in exile, this patriarch was recognized as legitimate by the entire Orthodox world. He continued to administer the immense Russian metropolitanate. From him, and not from his Latin competitor, the Bulgarian Church received again its right for ecclesiastical independence with a restored patriarchate in Trnovo (1235). It was also with the Byzantine government at Nicaea that the Orthodox Serbs negotiated the establishment of their own national church; their spiritual leader, St. Sava, was installed as autocephalous archbishop of Serbia in 1219.

The invasion of Russia by the Mongols had disastrous effects on the future of Russian civilization, but the church survived, both as the only unified social organization and as the main bearer of the Byzantine heritage. The "metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia," who was appointed from Nicaea or from Constantinople, was a major political power, respected by the Mongol Khans. Exempt from taxes paid by the local princes to the Mongols and reporting only to his superior (the ecumenical patriarch), the head of the Russian Church--though he had to abandon his cathedral see of Kiev that had been devastated by the Mongols--acquired an unprecedented moral prestige. He retained ecclesiastical control over immense territories from the Carpathian Mountains to the Volga River, over the newly created episcopal see of Sarai (near the Caspian Sea), which was the capital of the Mongols, as well as over the Western principalities of the former Kievan Empire--even after they succeeded in winning independence (e.g., Galicia) or fell under the political control of Lithuania and Poland.

In 1261 the Nicaean emperor Michael Palaeologus recaptured Constantinople from the Latins, and an Orthodox patriarch again occupied the see in Hagia Sophia. From 1261 to 1453 the Palaeologan dynasty presided over an empire that was embattled from every side, torn apart by civil wars, and gradually shrinking to the very limits of the imperial city itself. The church, meanwhile, kept much of its former prestige, exercising jurisdiction over a much greater territory, which included Russia as well as the distant Caucasus, parts of the Balkans, and the vast regions occupied by the Turks. Several patriarchs of this late period--e.g., Arsenius Autorianus (patriarch 1255-59, 1261-65), Athanasius I (patriarch 1289-93, 1303-10), John Calecas (patriarch 1334-47), and Philotheus Coccinus (patriarch 1353-54, 1364-76)--showed great independence from the imperial power, though remaining faithful to the ideal of the Byzantine oikoumene.

Without the military backing of a strong empire, the patriarchate of Constantinople was, of course, unable to assert its jurisdiction over the churches of Bulgaria and Serbia, which had gained independence during the days of the Latin occupation. In 1346 the Serbian Church even proclaimed itself a patriarchate; a short-lived protest by Constantinople ended with recognition in 1375. In Russia, Byzantine ecclesiastical diplomacy was involved in a violent civil strife; a fierce competition arose between the grand princes of Moscow and Lithuania, who both aspired to become leaders of a Russian state liberated from the Mongol yoke. The "metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia" was by now residing in Moscow, and often, as in the case of the metropolitan Alexis (1354-78), played a directing role in the Muscovite government. The ecclesiastical support of Moscow by the church was decisive in the final victory of the Muscovites and had a pronounced impact on later Russian history. The dissatisfied western Russian principalities (which would later constitute the Ukraine) could only obtain--with the strong support of their Polish and Lithuanian overlords--the temporary appointment of separate metropolitans in Galicia and Belorussia. Eventually, late in the 14th century, the metropolitan residing in Moscow again centralized ecclesiastical power in Russia.

One of the major reasons behind this power struggle in the northern area of the Byzantine world was the problem of relations with the Western Church. To most Byzantine churchmen, the young Muscovite principality appeared to be a safer bulwark of Orthodoxy than the Western-oriented princes who had submitted to Catholic Poland and Lithuania. Also, an important political party in Byzantium itself favoured union with the West in the hope that a new Western Crusade might be made against the menacing Turks. The problem of ecclesiastical union was, in fact, the most burning issue during the entire Palaeologan period.

Emperor Michael Palaeologus (1259-82) had to face the aggressive ambition of the Sicilian Norman king Charles of Anjou, who dreamed of restoring the Latin empire in Constantinople. To gain the valuable support of the papacy against Charles, Michael sent a Latin-inspired confession of faith to Pope Gregory X, and his delegates accepted union with Rome at the Council of Lyons (1274). This capitulation before the West, sponsored by the Emperor, won little support in the church. During his lifetime, Michael succeeded in imposing an Eastern Catholic patriarch, John Beccus, upon the Church of Constantinople, but upon Michael's death an Orthodox council condemned the union (1285).

Throughout the 14th century, numerous other attempts at negotiating union were initiated by the emperors of Byzantium. Formal meetings were held in 1333, 1339, 1347, and 1355. In 1369 Emperor John V Palaeologus was personally converted to the Roman faith in Rome. All these attempts were initiated by the government and not by the church, for an obvious political reason; i.e., the hope for Western help against the Turks. But the attempts brought no results either on the ecclesiastical or on the political levels. The majority of Byzantine Orthodox churchmen were not opposed to the idea of union but considered that it could only be brought about through a formal ecumenical council at which East and West would meet on equal footing, as they had done in the early centuries of the church. The project of a council was promoted with particular consistency by John Cantacuzenus, who, after a brief reign as emperor (1347-54), became a monk but continued to exercise great influence on all ecclesiastical and political events. The idea of an ecumenical council was initially rejected by the popes, but it was revived in the 15th century with the temporary triumph of conciliarist ideas (which advocated more power to councils and less to popes) in the West at the councils of Constance and Basel. Challenged with the possibility that the Greeks would unite with the conciliarists and not with Rome, Pope Eugenius IV called an ecumenical council of union in Ferrara, which later moved to Florence.

The Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-45) lasted for months and allowed for long theological debates. Emperor John VIII Palaeologus, Patriarch Joseph, and numerous bishops and theologians represented the Eastern Church. They finally accepted most Roman positions--the Filioque clause, purgatory (an intermediate stage for the soul's purification between death and heaven), and the Roman primacy. Political desperation and the fear of facing the Turks again, without Western support, was the decisive factor that caused them to place their signatures of approval on the Decree of Union (July 6, 1439). The metropolitan of Ephesus, Mark Eugenicus, alone refused to sign. Upon their return to Constantinople, most other delegates also renounced their acceptance of the council and no significant change occurred in the relations between the churches.

Paradoxically, the pitiful history of Byzantium under the Palaeologan emperors coincided with an astonishing intellectual, spiritual, and artistic renaissance that influenced the entire Eastern Christian world. The renaissance was not without fierce controversy and polarization. In 1337 Barlaam the Calabrian, one of the representatives of Byzantine Humanism, attacked the spiritual practices of the Hesychast (from the Greek word hesychia, meaning quiet) monks, who claimed that Christian asceticism and spirituality could lead to the vision of the "uncreated light" of God. Barlaam's position was upheld by several other theologians, including Akyndinus and Nicephorus Gregoras. After much debate, the church gave its support to the main spokesman of the monks, Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), who showed himself as one of the foremost theologians of medieval Byzantium. The councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351 adopted the theology of Palamas, and, after 1347, the patriarchal throne was consistently occupied by his disciples. John VI Cantacuzenus, who, as emperor, presided over the council of 1351, gave his full support to the Hesychasts. His close friend, Nicholas Cabasilas, in his spiritual writings on the divine liturgy and the sacraments, defined the universal Christian significance of Palamite theology. The influence of the religious zealots, who triumphed in Constantinople, outlasted the empire itself and contributed to the perpetuation of Orthodox spirituality under the Turkish rule. It also spread to the Slavic countries, especially Bulgaria and Russia. The monastic revival in northern Russia during the last half of the 14th century, which was associated with the name of St. Sergius of Radonezh, as well as the contemporaneous revival of iconography (e.g., the work of the great painter Andrey Rublyov), would have been unthinkable without constant contacts with Mt. Athos, the centre of Hesychasm, and with the spiritual and intellectual life of Byzantium.

Along with the Hesychast revival, a significant "opening to the West" was taking place among some Byzantine ecclesiastics. The brothers Prochorus and Demetrius Cydones, under the sponsorship of Cantacuzenus, for example, were systematically translating the works of Latin theologians into Greek. Thus, major writings of Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, and Thomas Aquinas were made accessible to the East for the first time. Most of the Latin-minded Greek theologians eventually supported the union policy of the emperors, but there were some--like Gennadios II Scholarios, the first patriarch under the Turkish occupation--who reconciled their love for Western thought with total faithfulness to the Orthodox Church.

According to Muslim belief, Christians, as well as Jews, were considered as "people of the Book"; i.e., their religion was seen as not entirely false, but incomplete. Accordingly, provided that Christians submitted to the dominion of the caliphate and the Muslim political administration and paid appropriate taxes, they deserved consideration and freedom of worship. Any Christian mission or proselytism among the Muslims, however, was considered a capital crime. In fact, Christians were formally reduced to a ghetto existence: they were the Rum millet, or the "Roman nation" conquered by Islam but enjoying a certain internal autonomy.

In January 1454 the Sultan allowed the election of a new patriarch, who was to become millet-bachi, the head of the entire Christian millet, or in Greek the "ethnarch," with the right to administer, to tax, and to exercise justice over all the Christians of the Turkish empire. Thus, under the new system, the patriarch of Constantinople saw his formal rights and jurisdiction extended both geographically and substantially: on the one hand, through the privileges granted to him by the sultan, he could practically ignore his colleagues, the other Orthodox patriarchs, and, on the other hand, his power ceased to be purely canonical and spiritual but became political as well. To the enslaved Greeks, he appeared not only as the successor of the Byzantine patriarchs but also as the heir of the emperors. For the Ottomans, he was the official and strictly controlled administrator of the Rum millet. In order to symbolize these new powers, the patriarch adopted an external attire reminiscent of that of the emperors: mitre in form of a crown, long hair, eagles as insignia of authority, and other imperial accoutrements.

The new system had many significant consequences. Most important, it permitted the church to survive as an institution; indeed, the prestige of the church was actually increased because, for Christians, the church was now the only source of education and it alone offered possibilities of social promotion. Moreover, through the legal restrictions placed on mission, the new arrangement created the practical identification of church membership with ethnic origin. And finally, since the entire Christian millet was ruled by the patriarch of Constantinople and his Greek staff, it guaranteed to the Phanariots, the Greek aristocracy of the Phanar (now called Fener, the area of Istanbul where the patriarchate was, and still is, located), a monopoly in episcopal elections. Thus, Greek bishops progressively came to occupy all the hierarchical positions. The ancient patriarchates of the Middle East were practically governed by the Phanar. The Serbian and Bulgarian churches came to the same fate: the last remnants of their autonomy were formally suppressed in 1766 and 1767, respectively, by the Phanariot patriarch Samuel Hantcherli. This Greek control, exercised through the support of the hated Turks, was resented more and more by the Balkan Slavs and Romanians as the Turkish regime became more despotic, taxes grew heavier, and modern nationalisms began to develop.

It is necessary, however, to credit the Phanariots with a quite genuine devotion to the cause of learning and education, which they alone were able to provide inside the oppressed Christian ghetto. The advantages they obtained from the Porte (the Turkish government) for building schools and for developing Greek letters in the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Walachia that were entrusted to their rule came to play a substantial role in the rebirth of Greece.

The Union of Florence became fully inoperative as soon as the Turks occupied Constantinople (1453). In 1484 a council of bishops condemned it officially. Neither the sultan nor the majority of the Orthodox Greeks were favourable to the continuation of political ties with Western Christendom. The Byzantine cultural revival of the Palaeologan period was the first to experience adverse effects from the occupation. Intellectual dialogue with the West became impossible. Through liturgical worship and the traditional spirituality of the monasteries, the Orthodox faith was preserved in the former Byzantine world. Some self-educated men developed a remarkable ability to develop the Orthodox tradition through writings and publications, but they were isolated exceptions. Probably the most remarkable among them was St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, the Hagiorite (1748-1809), who edited the famous Philocalia, an anthology of spiritual writings, and also translated and adapted Western spiritual writings (e.g., those of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius of Loyola) into modern Greek.

The West, in spite of much ignorance and prejudice, had a constant interest in the Eastern Church. At times there was a genuine and respectful curiosity; in other instances, political and proselytistic (conversion) concerns prevailed. Thus, in 1573-81, a lengthy correspondence was initiated by the Lutheran scholars from Tübingen (in Germany). However interesting as a historical event, this correspondence, which includes the Answers of Patriarch Jeremias II (patriarch 1572-95), shows how little mutual understanding was possible at that time between the Reformers and traditional Eastern Christianity.

Relations with the West, especially after the 17th century, were often vitiated in the East by the incredible corruption of the Turkish government, which constantly fostered diplomatic intrigues. An outstanding example of such manipulation was the kharaj, an important tax required by the Porte at each patriarchal election. Western diplomats were often ready to provide the amount needed in order to secure the election of candidates favourable to their causes. The French and Austrian ambassadors, for example, supported candidates who would favour the establishment of Roman Catholic influence in the Christian ghetto, while the British and Dutch envoys supported patriarchs who were open to Protestant ideas. Thus, a gifted and Western-educated patriarch, Cyril Lucaris, was elected and deposed five times between 1620 and 1638. His stormy reign was marked by the publication in Geneva of a Confession of Faith (1629), which was, to the great amazement of all contemporaries, purely Calvinistic (i.e., it contained Reformed Protestant views). The episode ended in tragedy. Cyril was strangled by Turkish soldiers at the instigation of the pro-French and pro-Austrian party. Six successive Orthodox councils condemned the Confession: Constantinople, 1638; Kiev, 1640; Jassy, 1642; Constantinople, 1672; Jerusalem, 1672; and Constantinople, 1691.In order to refute its positions, the metropolitan of Kiev, Peter Mogila, published his own Orthodox Confession of Faith (1640), which was followed, in 1672, by the Confession of the patriarch of Jerusalem, Dosítheos Notaras. Both, especially Peter Mogila, were under strong Latin influence.

At the Council of Florence, the Greek "metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia," Isidore, was one of the major architects of the Union. Having signed the decree, he returned to Moscow in 1441 as a Roman cardinal but was rejected by both church and state, arrested, and then allowed to escape to Lithuania. In 1448, after much hesitation, the Russians received a new primate, Jonas, elected by their own bishops. Their church became autocephalous, administratively independent under a "metropolitan of all Russia," residing in Moscow. In territories controlled by Poland, Rome (in 1458) appointed another "metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia." The tendencies toward separation from Moscow that had existed in the Ukraine since the Mongol invasion and that were supported by the kings of Poland thus received official sanction. In 1470, however, this metropolitan broke the union with the Latins and re-entered--nominally--the jurisdiction of Constantinople, by then under Turkish control.

After this, the fate of the two churches "of all Russia" became quite distinct. The metropolitanate of Kiev developed under the control of Roman Catholic Poland. Hard pressed by the Polish kings, the majority of its bishops, against the will of the majority of their flock, eventually accepted union with Rome at Brest-Litovsk (1596). In 1620, however, an Orthodox hierarchy was reestablished, and a Romanian nobleman, Peter Mogila, was elected metropolitan of Kiev (1632). He created the first Orthodox theological school of the modern period, the famous Academy of Kiev. Modelled after the Latin seminaries of Poland, with instruction given in Latin, this school served as the theological training centre for almost the entire Russian high clergy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1686 the Ukraine was finally reunited with Muscovy, and the metropolitanate of Kiev was attached to the patriarchate of Moscow, with approval given by Constantinople.

Muscovite Russia, meanwhile, had acquired the consciousness of being the last bulwark of true Orthodoxy. In 1472 Grand Prince Ivan III (reigned 1462-1505) married Sofia (Zoë), the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. The Muscovite sovereign began to use more and more of the Byzantine imperial ceremonial, and he assumed the double-headed eagle as his state emblem. In 1510 the monk Philotheus of Pskov addressed Vasily III as "tsar" (or emperor), saying: "Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be." The meaning of the sentence was that the first Rome was heretical, the second--Byzantium--was under Turkish control, and the third was Moscow. Ivan IV, the Terrible, was crowned emperor, according to the Byzantine ceremonial, by the metropolitan of Moscow, Makary, on January 16, 1547. In 1551 he solemnly presided in Moscow over a great council of Russian bishops, the Stoglav ("Council of 100 Chapters"), in which various issues of discipline and liturgy were settled and numerous Russian saints were canonized. These obvious efforts to live up to the title of the "third Rome" lacked one final sanction: the head of the Russian Church was lacking the title of "patriarch." The "tsars" of Bulgaria and Serbia did not hesitate in the past to bestow the title on their own primates, but the Russians wanted an unquestionable authentication and waited for proper opportunity. It occurred in 1589 when the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II, was on a fund-raising tour of Russia. He could not resist the pressure of his hosts and established the metropolitan Job as "patriarch of Moscow and all Russia." Confirmed later by the other Eastern patriarchs, the new patriarchate obtained the fifth place in the honorific order of the Oriental sees, after the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

After the 16th century, the Russian tsars always considered themselves as successors of the Byzantine emperors and the political protectors and financial supporters of Orthodoxy throughout the Balkans and the Middle East. The patriarch of Moscow, however, never pretended to occupy formally the first place among the patriarchs. Within the Muscovite Empire, many traditions of medieval Byzantium were faithfully kept. A flourishing monastic movement spread the practice of Christian asceticism in the northern forests, which were both colonized and Christianized by the monks. St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314-92) was the spiritual father of this monastic revival. His contemporary, St. Stephen of Perm, missionary to the Zyryan tribes, continued the tradition of SS. Cyril and Methodius, the "apostles to the Slavs" in the 9th century, in translating the Scripture and the liturgy into the vernacular. He was followed by numerous other missionaries who promoted Orthodox Christianity throughout Asia and even established themselves on Kodiak Island off the coast of Alaska (1794). The development of church architecture, iconography, and literature also added to the prestige of the "third Rome."

The Muscovite Empire, however, was quite different from Byzantium both in its political system and in its cultural self-understanding. The Byzantine "symphony" (harmonious relationship) between the emperor and the patriarch was never really applied in Russia. The secular goals of the Muscovite state and the will of the monarch always superseded canonical or religious considerations, which were still binding on the medieval emperors of Byzantium. Muscovite political ideology was always influenced more by the beginnings of western European secularism and by Asiatic despotism than by Roman or Byzantine law. Though strong patriarchs of Constantinople were generally able to oppose open violations of dogma and canon law by the emperors, their Russian successors were quite powerless; a single metropolitan of Moscow, St. Philip (metropolitan 1566-68), who dared to condemn the excesses of Ivan IV, was deposed and murdered.

A crisis of the "third Rome" ideology occurred in the middle of the 17th century. Nikon (reigned 1652-58), a strong patriarch, decided to restore the power and prestige of the church by declaring that the patriarchal office was superior to that of the tsar. He forced the tsar Alexis Romanov to repent for the crime of his predecessor against St. Philip and to swear obedience to the church. Simultaneously, Nikon attempted to settle a perennial issue of Russian church life: the problem of the liturgical books. Originally translated from the Greek, the books suffered many corruptions through the centuries and contained numerous mistakes. In addition, the different historical developments in Russia and in the Middle East had led to differences between the liturgical practices of the Russians and the Greeks. Nikon's solution was to order the exact compliance of all the Russian practices with the contemporary Greek equivalents. His liturgical reform led to a major schism in the church. The Russian masses had taken seriously the idea that Moscow was the last refuge of Orthodoxy. They wondered why Russia had to accept the practices of the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy in Florence and had been justly punished by God, in their view, by becoming captives of the infidel Turks. The reformist decrees of the patriarch were rejected by millions of lower clergy and laity who constituted the Raskol, or schism of the "Old Believers." Nikon was ultimately deposed for his opposition to the tsar, but his liturgical reforms were confirmed by a great council of the church that met in the presence of two Eastern patriarchs (1666-67).

The son of Tsar Alexis, Peter the Great, changed the historical fate of Russia by radically turning away from the Byzantine heritage and reforming the state according to the model of Protestant Europe. Humiliated by his father's temporary submission to Patriarch Nikon, Peter prevented new patriarchal elections after the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700. After a long vacancy of the see, he abolished the patriarchate altogether (1721) and transformed the central administration of the church into a department of the state, which adopted the title of "Holy Governing Synod." An imperial high commissioner (Oberprokuror) was to be present at all meetings and, in fact, to act as the administrator of church affairs. Peter also issued a lengthy Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovny Reglament) that served as bylaws for all religious activities in Russia. Weakened by the schism of the "Old Believers," the church found no spokesman to defend its rights and passively accepted the reforms.

With the actions of Peter, the Church of Russia entered a new period of its history that lasted until 1917. The immediate consequences were not all negative. Peter's ecclesiastical advisers were Ukrainian prelates, graduates of the Kievan academy, who introduced in Russia a Western system of theological education; the most famous among them was Peter's friend, Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Pskov. Throughout the 18th century, the Russian Church also continued its missionary work in Asia and produced several spiritual writers and saints: St. Mitrofan of Voronezh (died 1703), St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (died 1783)--an admirer of the German Lutheran Johann Arndt and of German Pietism--as well as other eminent prelates and scholars such as Platon Levshin, metropolitan of Moscow (died 1803). All attempts at challenging the power of the tsar over the church, however, always met with failure. The metropolitan of Rostov, Arseny Matsiyevich, who opposed the secularization of church property by the empress Catherine the Great, was deposed and died in prison (1772). The atmosphere of secularistic officialdom that prevailed in Russia was not favourable for a revival of monasticism, but such a revival did take place through the efforts of a young Kievan scholar, Paissy Velichkovsky (1722-94), who became the abbot of the monastery of Neamts in Romania. His Slavonic edition of the Philocalia contributed to the revival of Hesychast traditions in Russia in the 19th century.

The ideas of the French Revolution, the nationalistic movements, and the everliving memory of past Christian empires led to the gradual disintegration of Turkish domination in the Balkans. According to a pattern existing since the late Middle Ages, the birth of national states was followed by the establishment of independent, autocephalous Orthodox churches. Thus the collapse of the Ottoman rule was accompanied by the rapid shrinking of the actual power exercised by the patriarch of Constantinople. Paradoxically, the Greeks, for whom--more than anyone--the patriarchate represented a hope for the future, were the first to organize an independent church in their new state.

In 1821 the Greek revolution against the Turks was officially proclaimed by the metropolitan of Old Patras, Germanos. The patriarchate, being the official Turkish-sponsored organ for the administration of the Christians, issued statements condemning and even anathematizing the revolutionaries. These statements, however, failed to convince anyone, least of all the Turkish government, which on Easter Day in 1821 had the ecumenical (Constantinopolitan) patriarch Gregory V hanged from the main gate of the patriarchal residence as a public example. Numerous other Greek clergy were executed in the provinces. After this tragedy, the official loyalty of the patriarchate was, of course, doubly secured. Unable either to communicate with the patriarchate or to recognize its excommunications, the bishops of liberated Greece gathered in Návplion and established themselves as the synod of an autocephalous church (1833). The ecclesiastical regime adopted in Greece was modelled after that of Russia: a collective state body, the Holy Synod, was to govern the church under strict government control. In 1850 the patriarchate was forced to recognize what was by then a fait accompli, and granted a charter of autocephaly (tómos) to the new Church of Greece.

The independence of Serbia led, in 1832, to the recognition of Serbian ecclesiastical autonomy. In 1879 the Serbian Church was recognized by Constantinople as autocephalous under the primacy of the metropolitan of Belgrade. This church, however, covered only the territory of what was called "old Serbia." The small state of Montenegro, always independent from the Turks, had its own metropolitan in Cetinje. This prelate, who was also the civil and military leader of the nation, was consecrated either in Austria, or, as in the case of the famous bishop-poet Pyotr II Negosh, in St. Petersburg (1833).

In the Austro-Hungarian empire, two autocephalous churches, with jurisdiction over Serbs, Romanians, and other Slavs, were in existence during the second half of the century. These were the patriarchate of Sremski-Karlovci (Karlowitz), established in 1848, which governed all the Orthodox in the Kingdom of Hungary; and the metropolitanate of Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy) in Bukovina, which, after 1873, also exercised jurisdiction over two Serbian dioceses (Zara and Kotor) in Dalmatia. The Serbian dioceses of Bosnia and Herzegovina, acquired by Austria in 1878, remained autonomous but were never completely independent from Constantinople.

The creation of an independent Romania, after centuries of foreign control by Bulgarians, Turks, Greek-Phanariots, and, more recently, Russians, led in 1865 to the self-proclamation of the Romanian Church as autocephalous, even against the violent protests of the Phanar. As in Greece, the new church was under the strict control of the pro-Western government of Prince Alexandru Cuza. Finally, as in the Greek case, Constantinople recognized the Romanian autocephaly under the metropolitan of Bucharest (1885). The Romanians of Transylvania, still in Austria-Hungary, remained under the autocephalous metropolitan of Sibiu and others under the church of Czernowitz.

The reestablishment of the Church of Bulgaria eventually was secured, but not without tragedy and even a schism; this happened mainly because the issue of reestablishing the autocephalous church arose at a time when both Greek and Bulgarian populations lived side by side in Macedonia, Thrace, and Constantinople itself, though still within the framework of the Ottoman imperial system. After the Turkish conquest, and especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bulgarians were governed by Greek bishops and were often prevented from worshipping in Slavonic. This enforced policy of Hellenization was rejected in the 19th century when Bulgarians began to claim not only a native clergy but also equal representation on the higher echelons of the Christian millet--i.e., the offices of the patriarchate. These claims were met with firm resistance by the Greeks. The alternative was a national Bulgarian Church, which was created by a sultan's firman (decree) in 1870. The new church was to be governed by its own Bulgarian exarch, who resided in Constantinople itself and governed all the Bulgarians who recognized him. The new situation was uncanonical, because it sanctioned the existence of two separate ecclesiastical structures on the same territory. Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimus VI convened a synod in Constantinople, which also included the Greek patriarchs of Alexandria and Jerusalem (1872). The council condemned "phyletism"--the national or ethnic principle in church organization--and excommunicated the Bulgarians, who were certainly not alone guilty of "phyletism." This schism lasted until 1945, when a reconciliation took place with full recognition of Bulgarian autocephaly within the limits of the Bulgarian state.

After their liberation from the Turkish yoke, the Balkan churches freely developed both their national identities and their religious life. Theological faculties, generally following German models, were created in Athens, Belgrade (in Yugoslavia), Sofia (in Bulgaria), and Bucharest (in Romania). The Romanian Church introduced the full cycle of the liturgical offices in vernacular Romanian. But these positive developments were often marred by nationalistic rivalries. In condemning "phyletism," the synod of Constantinople (1872) had, in fact, defined a basic problem of modern Orthodoxy.

The Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great remained in force until the very end of the Russian Empire (1917). Many Russian churchmen consistently complained against the submission of the church to the state, but there was little they could do except to lay plans for future reforms. This they did not fail to do, and in the 20th century the necessary changes were rapidly enacted. Though Peter himself and his first successors tended to deal personally and directly with church affairs, the tsars of the 19th century delegated much authority to the Oberprokurors, who received a cabinet rank in the government and were the real heads of the entire administration of the church. One of the most debilitating aspects of the regime was the legal division of Russian society by a rigid caste system. The clergy was one of the castes with its own school system, and there was little possibility for its children to choose another career.

In spite of these obvious defects, the church kept its self-awareness, and among the episcopate such eminent figures as Philaret of Moscow (1782-1867) promoted education, theological research, biblical translations, and missionary work. In each of its 67 dioceses, the Russian Church created a seminary for the training of priests and teachers. In addition, four theological academies, or graduate schools, were established in major cities (Moscow, 1769; St. Petersburg, 1809; Kiev, 1819; Kazan, 1842). They provided a generally excellent theological training for both Russians and foreigners. The rigid caste system and the strictly professional character of these schools, however, were obstacles to their seriously influencing society at large. It was, rather, through the monasteries and their spirituality that the church began to reach the intellectual class. More influential than the rigid discipline of the large monastic communities, the prophetic ministry of the "elders" (startsy), who acted as living examples of the standards of the spiritual life or as advisers and confessors, attracted large masses of the common people, and also intellectuals. St. Seraphim of Sarov (1759-1833), for example, lived according to the standards of the ancient Hesychast tradition that had been revived in the Russian forests. The startsy of Optino--Leonid (1768-1841), Makarius (1788-1860), and Ambrose (1812-91)--were visited not only by thousands of ordinary Christians but also by the writers Nikolay Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The latter was inspired by the startsy when he described in his novels monastic figures such as Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. From the ranks of an emerging group of Orthodox lay intellectuals, the production of a living theology--if less scholarly than in the academies--was taking shape. The great influence of a lay theologian like Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-60), who belonged to the Slavophile (pro-Slavic) circle before it acquired a political flavour, eventually helped in the conversion to Orthodoxy at the end of the century of such leading Marxists as Sergey Bulgakov (1871-1944) and Nikolay Berdyayev (1874-1948). Missionary expansion also continued, particularly in western Asia, Japan, and Alaska (see below, Missions: Ancient and modern).

Disproportionately larger and richer than its sister churches of the Balkans and the Middle East, the Church of Russia included, in 1914, more than 50,000 priests, 21,000 monks, and 73,000 nuns. It supported thousands of schools and missions. It cooperated with the Russian government in exercising great influence in Mid-Eastern affairs. Thus, with Russian help, an Arab (Meletios Doumani) rather than a Greek was elected for the first time as patriarch of Antioch (1899). With the successive partitions of Poland and the reunions with Russia of Belorussian and Ukrainian territories, many Eastern Catholic descendants of those who had joined the Roman communion in Brest-Litovsk (1596) returned to Orthodoxy.

The Church of Russia was less unprepared than generally believed to face the revolutionary turmoil. Projects of necessary reforms had been prepared since 1905, and most clergy did not feel particularly attached to the fallen regime that had deprived the church of its freedom for several centuries. During the rule of the provisional government, in August 1917 a council representing the entire church met in Moscow, including 265 members of the clergy and 299 laymen. The democratic composition and program of the council had been planned by the Pre-Conciliar Commission. It adopted a new constitution of the church that provided for the reestablishment of the patriarchate, the election of bishops by the dioceses, and the representation of laymen on all levels of church administration. It was only in the midst of the new revolutionary turmoil, however, that Tikhon, metropolitan of Moscow, was elected patriarch (October 31, 1917--six days after the Bolshevik takeover). The bloody events into which the country was plunged did not allow all the reforms to be carried out, but the people elected new bishops in several dioceses.

The Bolshevik government, because of its Marxist ideology, considered all religion as the "opium of the people." On January 20, 1918, it published a decree depriving the church of all legal rights, including that of owning property. The stipulations of the decree were difficult to enforce immediately, and the church remained a powerful social force for several years. The patriarch replied to the decree by excommunicating the "open or disguised enemies of Christ," without naming the government specifically. He also made pronouncements on political issues that he considered of moral importance: in March 1918 he condemned the peace of Brest-Litovsk that brought an unsatisfactory armistice between Russia and the Central Powers, and in October he addressed an "admonition" to Lenin, calling on him to proclaim an amnesty. Tikhon was careful, however, not to appear as a counterrevolutionary and in September 1919 called the faithful to refrain from supporting the Whites (anti-Communists) and to obey those decrees of the Soviet government that were not contrary to their Christian conscience.

The independence of the church suffered greatly after 1922. In February of that year, the government decreed the confiscation of all valuable objects preserved in the churches. The patriarch would have agreed to that measure if he had had the means to check on the government contention that all confiscated church property would be used to help the starving population on the Volga. The government refused all guarantees but supported a group of clergy who were ready to cooperate with it and to overthrow the patriarch. While Tikhon was under house arrest, this group took over his office and soon claimed the allegiance of a sizable proportion of bishops and clergy. This became known as the schism of the "Renovated" or "Living" Church, and it broke the internal unity and resistance of the church. Numerous bishops and clergy faithful to the patriarch were tried and executed, including the young and progressive metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd. The "Renovated" Church soon broke the universal discipline of Orthodoxy by admitting married priests to the episcopate and by permitting widowed priests to remarry.

Upon his release, Tikhon condemned the schismatics, and many clergy returned to his obedience. But he also published a declaration affirming that he "was not the enemy of the Soviet government" and dropped any opposition to the authorities. Tikhon's attitude of conformism did not bring immediate results. His designated successors (after he died in 1925) were all arrested. In 1927 the "substitute locum tenens" (holder of the position) of the patriarchate, Metropolitan Sergius, pledged loyalty to the Soviet government. Nevertheless, under the rule of Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s and '30s, the church suffered a bloody persecution that claimed thousands of victims. By 1939 only three or four Orthodox bishops and 100 churches could officially function: the church was practically suppressed.

A spectacular reversal of Stalin's policies occurred, however, during World War II. Sergius was elected patriarch in 1943 and the "Renovated" schism was ended. Under Sergius' successor, Patriarch Alexis (1945-70), the church was able to open 25,000 churches and the number of priests reached 33,000. But a new antireligious move was initiated by Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev in 1959-64, reducing the number of open churches to less than 10,000. Patriarch Pimen was elected in 1971 following Alexis' death, and, although the church still commanded the loyalty of millions, its future remained uncertain.

In bringing about the fall of the Turkish, Austrian, and Russian empires, World War I provoked significant changes in the structures of the Orthodox Church. On the western borders of what was then the Soviet Union, in the newly born republics of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the Orthodox minorities established themselves as autonomous churches. The first three joined the jurisdiction of Constantinople, and the Lithuanian diocese remained nominally under Moscow. In Poland, which then included several million Belorussians and Ukrainians, the ecumenical patriarch established an autocephalous church (1924) over the protests of Patriarch Tikhon. After World War II the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian autonomies were again suppressed, and in Poland the Orthodox Church was first reintegrated to the jurisdiction of Moscow and later was declared autocephalous again (1948).

In the Balkans, changes were even more significant. The five groups of Serbian dioceses (Montenegro, patriarchate of Karlovci, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Old Serbia) were united (1920-22) under one Serbian patriarch, residing in Belgrade, the capital of the new Yugoslavia. Similarly, the Romanian dioceses of Moldavia-Walachia, Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia formed the new patriarchate of Romania (1925), the largest autocephalous church in the Balkans. Finally, in 1937, after some tension and a temporary schism, the patriarchate of Constantinople recognized the autocephaly of the Church of Albania.

After World War II, Communist regimes were established in the Balkan states. There were no attempts, however, at liquidating the churches entirely, similar to the persecutions that took place in Russia in the 1920s and '30s. In both Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, church and state were legally separated. In Romania, paradoxically, the Orthodox Church remained legally linked to the Communist state. With its solid record of resistance to the Germans, the Serbian Church was able to preserve more independence from the government than its sister churches of Bulgaria and Romania. Generally speaking, however, all the Balkan churches adopted an attitude of loyalty to the new regime, according to the pattern given by the patriarchate of Moscow. At that price, they could keep some theological schools, some publications, and the possibility to worship. This is also the case of the Orthodox minority in Czechoslovakia, which was united and organized into an autocephalous church by the patriarchate of Moscow in 1951. Only in Albania did a Communist government announce the total liquidation of organized religion, following the Cultural Revolution of 1966-68.

As a result of the Greco-Turkish War, the entire Greek population of Asia Minor was transferred to Greece (1922); the Orthodox under the immediate jurisdiction of the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople were thus reduced to the Greek population of Istanbul and its vicinity. This population, rapidly shrinking in recent years, is now reduced to a few thousand. Still recognized as holding an honorary primacy among the Orthodox churches, the ecumenical patriarchate also exercises jurisdiction over several dioceses of the "diaspora" and, by consent of the Greek government, over the Greek islands. The impressive personality of Patriarch Athenagoras I (1948-72), who was succeeded by Dimitrios, contributed to its prestige on the pan-Orthodox and ecumenical levels. The patriarchate convened pan-Orthodox conferences in Rhodes, Belgrade, Geneva, and other cities and began preparations for a "Great Council" of the Orthodox Church.

Together with the ecumenical patriarchate, the ancient sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem are remnants of the Byzantine imperial past, but under the present conditions they still possess many opportunities of development: Alexandria, as the centre of emerging African communities (see below The Orthodox diaspora and missions); Antioch, as the largest Arab Christian group, with dioceses in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq; and Jerusalem, as the main custodian of the Christian holy places in that city.

The two ancient churches of Cyprus and Georgia, with their quite peculiar history, continue to play important roles among the Orthodox sister churches. Autocephalous since 431, the Church of Cyprus survived the successive occupations, and often oppressions, by the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Turks, and the English. Following the pattern of all areas where Islam was predominant, the archbishop is traditionally seen as the ethnarch of the Greek Christian Cypriots. Archbishop Makarios also became the first president of the independent Republic of Cyprus in 1960. The Church of Georgia, isolated in the Caucasus in a country that became part of the Russian Empire in 1801, is the witness of one of the most ancient Christian traditions. It received autocephaly from its mother Church of Antioch as early as the 6th century and developed a literary and artistic civilization in its own language. Its head bears the traditional title of "Catholicos-Patriarch." When the Russians annexed the country in 1801, they suppressed Georgia's autocephaly and the church was governed by a Russian "exarch" until 1917 when the Georgians reestablished their ecclesiastical independence. Fiercely persecuted during the 1920s, the Georgian Church survives to the present day as an autocephalous patriarchate.

The first Orthodox communities in what is today the continental United States were established in Alaska and on the West Coast, as the extreme end of the Russian missionary expansion through Siberia (see above The church in imperial Russia). Russian monks settled on Kodiak Island in 1794. Among them was St. Herman (died 1837, canonized 1970), an ascetic and a defender of the natives' rights against their exploitation by ruthless Russian traders. After the sale of Alaska to the United States, a separate diocese "of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska" was created by the Holy Synod (1870). After the transfer of the diocesan centre to San Francisco and its renaming as the diocese "of the Aleutian Islands and North America" (1900), the original church establishment exercised its jurisdiction on the entire North American continent. In the 1880s, it accepted back into Orthodoxy hundreds of "Uniate" parishes of immigrants from Galicia and Carpatho-Russia, particularly numerous in the northern industrial states and in Canada. It also served the needs of immigrants from Serbia, Greece, Syria, Albania, and other countries. Some Greek and Romanian communities, however, invited priests directly from the mother country without official contact with the American bishop. In 1905 the American archbishop Tikhon (future patriarch of Moscow) presented to the Russian synod the project of an autonomous, or autocephalous, church of America, whose structure would reflect the ethnic pluralism of its membership. He also foresaw the inevitable Americanization of his flock and encouraged the translation of the liturgy into English.

These projects, however, were hampered by the tragedies that befell the Russian Church following the Russian Revolution. The administrative system of the Russian Church collapsed. The non-Russian groups of immigrants sought and obtained their affiliation with mother churches abroad. In 1921 a "Greek Archdiocese of North and South America" was established by the ecumenical patriarch Meletios IV Metaxakis. Further divisions within each national group occurred repeatedly, and several independent jurisdictions added to the confusion.

A reaction against this chaotic pluralism manifested itself in the 1950s. More cooperation between the jurisdictions and a more systematic theological education contributed to an increased desire for unity. A Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas was established in 1960. In 1970 the patriarch of Moscow, reviving Tikhon's project of 1905, formally proclaimed its diocese in America (which had been in conflict with Moscow since 1931 on the issue of "loyalty" to the Soviet Union) as the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, totally independent from administrative connections abroad. The ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople, however, protested this move, turned down a request for autonomy presented by the Greek archdiocese (the largest single Orthodox body in the United States), and reiterated its opposition to the use of English in the liturgy (1970). This latest crisis of American Orthodoxy involves the very understanding of the Orthodox presence in the Western world, centring on the question of the utility of preserving the ethnic ties of the past.

Since World War I, millions of east Europeans were dispersed in various areas where Orthodox communities had never existed before. The Russian Revolution provoked a massive political emigration, predominantly to western Europe and particularly France. It included eminent churchmen, theologians, and Christian intellectuals, such as Bulgakov, Berdyayev, and V.V. Zenkovsky, who were able not only to establish in Paris a theological school of great repute but also to contribute significantly to the ecumenical movement. In 1922 Patriarch Tikhon appointed Metropolitan Evlogy to head the émigré churches, with residence in Paris. The authority of the metropolitan was challenged, however, by a group of bishops who had left their sees in Russia, retreating with the White armies, and who had found refuge in Sremski-Karlovci as guests of the Serbian Church. Despite several attempts at reconciliation, the "Synod" of Karlovci, proclaiming its firm attachment to the principle of tsarist monarchy, refused to recognize any measure taken by the reestablished patriarchate of Moscow. This group transferred its headquarters to New York and is also known as the "Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia." It has no canonical relation with the official Orthodox patriarchates and churches. A "Ukrainian Orthodox Church in exile" finds itself in a similarly irregular canonical situation. Other émigré groups found refuge under the canonical auspices of the ecumenical patriarchate.

After World War II, a very numerous Greek emigration took place to western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. In East Africa, without much initial effort on their part, these Greek-speaking emigrants have attracted a sizable number of black Christians, who have discovered in the Orthodox liturgy and sacramental worship a form of Christianity more acceptable to them than the more dogmatic institutions of Western Christianity. Also, in their eyes, Orthodoxy has the advantage of having no connection with the colonial regimes of the past. Orthodox communities, with an ever increasing number of native clergy, are spreading in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Less professionally planned than the former Russian missions in Alaska and Japan, these young churches constitute an interesting development in African Christianity.

Between the two world wars, many Orthodox churchmen of the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople, of Greece, of the Balkan churches, and of the Russian emigration took part in the ecumenical movement. After World War II, however, the churches of the Communist-dominated countries failed to join the newly created World Council of Churches (1948): only Constantinople and Greece did so. The situation changed drastically in 1961, when the patriarchate of Moscow applied for membership and was soon followed by other autocephalous churches. Before and after 1961, the Orthodox consistently declared that their membership did not imply any relativistic understanding of the Christian truth, but that they were ready to discuss with all Christians the best way of restoring the lost unity of Christendom, as well as problems of common Christian action and witness in the modern world.

During the reign of Pope John XXIII, when Roman Catholicism became actively involved in ecumenism, the Orthodox--after some hesitation--contributed to the new atmosphere. The spectacular meetings in the 1960s between Patriarch Athenagoras and the Pope in Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Rome, the symbolic lifting of ancient anathemas, and other gestures were signs of rapprochement, although they are sometimes mistakenly interpreted as if they were ending the Schism itself. In the Orthodox view, full unity can be restored only in the fullness of truth witnessed by the entire church and sanctioned in sacramental communion.