The Great Schism, Patrick Tobin

The Great Schism Patrick Tobin looks East again

Fifty years ago, when I was an impetuous teacher of History at St Benedict’s Ealing, I drove six brave Sixth Formers on a 7,000 mile journey to Turkey and Greece. The idea was to follow the route taken by the First Crusade and it took us through what was then Yugoslavia. In Belgrade I asked a young man where we might find Mass. ‘We are Yugoslavs,’ he replied, ‘Wine, women – NO religion!’ We eventually found our Mass - not Roman Catholic but our first experience of the Orthodox ritual – in the fortified monastery of Manasija. A few old women provided the choir but the singing was beautiful. After an hour or so I asked the boys whether they wished to leave. They vigorously shook their heads.

Perhaps that was why I then embarked on the writing of a book, examining the impact of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily on the Byzantine Empire, with reference both to the Schism of 1054 between Greek and Latin Christianity and to the Crusades which so woefully deepened that rift, but it was not long before I left St Benedict’s and the teaching of medieval history.

Retirement from teaching led to an unexpected broadening of horizons in 2003 when I became Administrator of HMC Projects in Central and Eastern Europe. It was the most wonderful privilege. Until then, my only professional involvement with Eastern Europe had been the offer of a term in my Edinburgh schools to six Bosnian students. Now I ran a scheme which brought hundreds of students to Britain and, together with my wife Margery, I interviewed candidates in capitals across Central and Eastern Europe – in Sarajevo, Sofia, Zagreb, Prague, Tallinn, Chisenau, Podgorica, Warsaw, Bratislava, Bucharest, Kiev, Lviv and Kirovograd. We immediately came to appreciate the difference between working with and enjoying the company of devoted national agents and the superficiality of tourism and, looking back, we think fondly of those years and of the friendships which mean so much to us.

Almost without exception our scholars were splendid ambassadors for their countries – intelligent, hard-working, ambitious and adaptable. They willingly engaged with their companions in their new schools, contributed hugely and, more often than not, were offered second years in their courses. And many of them, despite the decades of state-directed atheism thrust onto their countries, were evidently Christian.

To the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Twentieth Century brought harsh persecution of the Christian faith. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin and Stalin imposed on Russia an atheist dictatorship of ‘scientific materialism’. The puppet regimes established across Eastern Europe following the Soviet victory in 1945 also made it their business to repress Christianity.

Yet the Church has survived the Soviet epoch in Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria, as it had done in Greece, Serbia and Macedonia during the centuries of Ottoman occupation. Everywhere today there is the lovely haunting chant, the beautiful imagery in fresco and mosaic, the timeless ritual. Nowhere has the revival of Orthodoxy been more striking than in Russia itself. In Moscow the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished on Stalin’s orders to make way for a temple to communism, but the German invasion intervened. After the war, Khruschev turned the empty space into a gigantic swimming pool, and yet, in 2005, the Russian government committed to the wholesale restoration of the great basilica, a project completed in 2013 at a cost of £120 billion.

Another example may be seen in Yaroslavl, founded in 1010 on the mighty Volga at its confluence with the Kotorosl. The

town’s antiquity did not save the Church of the Assumption, which was blown up in 1937 on Stalin’s orders. But, to celebrate the millennium of Yaroslavl, a Moscow businessman rebuilt the church, which re-opened in 2010, much enlarged, its golden domes trumpeting the victory of Orthodoxy over atheism.

In the early years of the Twenty-First Century, the churches of Orthodoxy are full and flourishing. 23,000 churches have been built in Romania since the fall of Ceausescu. But in Western Europe, the churches are empty. Former Archbishop Carey recently observed that the Anglican Church was one generation from extinction.

Russian Orthodoxy has always been a buttress against the West, and many Orthodox Christians still perceive the 1054 Schism as a gulf with Rome that cannot be bridged. Nevertheless, in 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras met in Istanbul, the city that as Constantinople witnessed the mutual excommunications, to agree that these should now finally be lifted. In 2001 Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for the Fourth Crusade and Pope Benedict XVI’s first visitor following his election was Patriarch Kirill. His recent meeting with Pope Francis is another step along the road to rapprochement.

In 2017 the relics of St Nicholas, stolen from Myra by Normans in 1087 and kept ever since in the cathedral in Bari, were sent to Moscow on loan. For three months they were venerated, by President Putin and two and a half million Russians. When the Patriarch of Moscow brought them back to Bari he was made an honorary citizen. Thus does our age seek to make amends for Norman assault on Byzantine sensibility nearly one thousand years ago.

Might one therefore hope that the Christian churches are discovering common cause? Political reality has sadly punctured such ecumenism, and is now threatening schism within the Orthodox communion itself. Moscow has told the Patriarch of Constantinople that it will no longer accept his primacy if he endorses the independence of the Ukrainian Church from Moscow. It can be argued that the identification of the Moscow Patriarchate with its modern tsar, Vladimir Putin, is but the latest instance of the vein of ‘caesaropapism’ endemic

Different views in the Eastern Church since Constantine.

One of Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics is the Russian film director, Andrey Zvyagintsev. In 2014 his film ‘Leviathan’ depicted contemporary Russia as a ‘stagnant, corrupt, cruel and hopeless place’. Zvyagintsev blames the complacency of a church which passively accepts, for instance, the rehabilitation of Stalin in Russian popular esteem. The ‘timeless ritual’ of Orthodoxy immunises Russia against true Christianity.

But, Zvyagintsev observes that the dehumanisation of society is a universal problem. His 2017 film ‘Loveless’, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is on the face of it a private drama, but his real intention is to show the ‘continuity of the moral depravity between the public and private realms. They cannot be separated. The moral issues we are facing – the lack of empathy, the egotism, the fundamental issues of human relationships, the corrupted emotional and moral fabric of society and the family - they are all influencing the social and political fabric of society.’

Russia is by no means the only country where narrowly nationalist agendas have received the support of widespread populist chauvinism. Throughout Europe, the present decade has seen the rise of political parties gaining support by focusing on supposed threats to the national identity and evoking a return to better times in the past. This has clearly been part of the appeal of Donald Trump and may be one of the many motives that led people to support Brexit.

Nevertheless, students from fourteen Central and Eastern European countries still benefit from HMC Projects, as a number of schools in membership of HMC and GSA continue to offer scholarships which, given that the schools cover the complete costs of tuition, food and accommodation, are worth roughly £30,000 a year. To quote from the HMC Project website, ‘together the alumni of HMC Projects constitute a modern elite, international and supranational body, who are an inspiration to the young and remind society at large of the virtues of the best in British education and of the benefits which arise from Europe-wide contact and collaboration.’ Patrick Tobin was Chairman of HMC in 1998