The Desire to Dominate or be Dominated by Professor ADAM DeVILLE
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’ve never forgotten listening live on Ancient Faith Radio to the All-American Council in Pittsburgh in 2008, at which the OCA elected then-Bishop Jonah to be its new metropolitan. I wrote to a friend who was a priest in the OCA, telling him how impressed I was by what Bishop Jonah had said about the problematic conceptions of bishops and the tendency to confuse church hierarchy with “imperial aristocracy.” As an Eastern Rite Catholic, I was almost envious. Here, I exclaimed, was a bishop who clearly “got it” about many important but overlooked issues, not least the propensity to dress hierarchs up like emperors of old and place crowns on their heads. Bishop Jonah’s vision, at the time, was a healthful and hopeful corrective to certain practices of episcopal power as when, for instance, he said in his first address after his election that “the episcopos is not the master of the house: he is the head slave. And I am the head slave of the head slaves.” Sadly, as many of us know, that vision and that primacy did not pan out: Metropolitan Jonah was removed from his post in 2012. But parts of that vision, including Metropolitan Jonah’s talk of doing away with the “culture of intimidation,” deserve not just to be revived but implemented everywhere. The Orthodox scholar Ashley Purpura, in her excellent book, God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from
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Byzantium, has made a compelling case for looking into the problems of power in the Orthodox Church. My own recent book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, which draws heavily on Orthodox ecclesial structures, goes even farther in examining the problem of episcopal power and the loss of synodality among Catholics. The problem of Christian hierarchs imitating imperial and monarchical models is a very old one, going back arguably to at least the fourth century. Bishops almost everywhere have long been part of a social and ecclesial elite, endowed with tremendous powers, and they almost never act, dress, or are treated like “head slaves.” Rather, we treat them, and they usually expect to be treated, as “headmasters.” And in turn, the temptation in the Church to vie for mastery over one another goes back even farther. The discussion Jesus has with the hyper-ambitious mother of the sons of Zebedee indicates it was a temptation among the original apostolic band (some of whom seem not to have had the guts to talk to Jesus directly—hence they had their mom do it!) even when Jesus still walked the earth and clearly told all of us that he came “not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:20-28). Notwithstanding that clear dominical counsel, most of us rather like being served by others.
