Identity Papers
Orthodoxy’s Self-Definition & Its Constructions of the West
by Gary W. Jenkins
Co-sponsored by Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Program and its Center for Medieval Studies, a conference titled “Orthodox Constructions of the West,” held on June 28–30, 2010, sought to understand how “Orthodox authors . . . had created artificial categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and then used (them) as a basis for self-definition.” These Orthodox authors, the conference assumed, had (falsely) apophatically self-identified themselves as “what the ‘West’ is not.” To use the nomenclature the conference itself employed, these authors had cast the West as “the Other.”
At first blush, this would seem an uncharitable effort of caricaturing the West’s Orthodox critics by making “Other” of such thinkers. Yet this was hardly so, for it fell largely to the Orthodox to themselves identify the malefactor self-identifiers, as Orthodox Christians presented eleven of the fifteen papers.
With the theme of the polemical “Other,” the twentieth century was the conference’s historical locus, though it also treated medieval and early-modern topics, each with an eye to informing present understandings. The twentieth century saw a number of robust Orthodox denunciations of Western thought, theology, and categories; and several such fulminators were often cited during the conference, or their shades haunted the margins of the papers, e.g., Vladimir Lossky, John Romanides, Christos Yannaras, and Georges Florovsky. The conference sought both to clarify the categories of the last century’s polemics and to put them into their historical and geopolitical contexts for ecumenical dialogue.
Conceits of Otherness
Ecumenism loomed as an important leitmotif: If the Orthodox theologians the conference treated were correct about the West, then a substantial chasm exists between the Orthodox world and the Latin (both Catholic and Protestant) world. This gulf would relegate ecumenism to so much whistling past the graveyard: a fatuous waste of time, effort, and even hope, by the chasing of a chimera proclaiming unity, while the Orthodox continue to think that, whatever these “Others” are united with, it is not us. Consequently, the investigation of the nature of Orthodoxy’s views of what the West was and is—and since cast as a dialectical endeavor, what Orthodoxy was and is—focused on the particular historical and theological milieus which birthed these Orthodox constructions of the West.
The ambitions of the organizers and presenters, nonetheless, were not limited merely to the historical and theological. The penultimate panel developed the conference theme along political, cultural, sociological, and socio-economic lines. This panel’s first paper, “Shaking the Comfortable Conceits of ‘Otherness’,” delivered by Elizabeth Prodromou of Boston University, cut directly to the categorical and terminological quick of what the conference’s stated purpose entailed: Are Orthodox East and Latin West a real antimony, a thesis and antithesis? Is the category of “otherness” an applicable heuristic? And had not the conference made “Other” of the Eastern Orthodox?
Once pulled upon, this categorical tapestry seemingly unravels. Professor Prodromou’s paper raised questions that should have been addressed as a prolegomenon of the conference. Given time constraints, she could not address them, though she promised that her finished paper would. Nonetheless, she showed the inadequate parameters of the conference’s presuppositions, valorizing her assertions about “comfortable conceits.”
The Mind of the Émigrés
Two other papers, both by Orthodox Christians, especially stood out (though in truth all the papers were outstanding). One of them, “Russian Religious Thinkers in the Twentieth Century and the Rediscovery of the West,” by Antoine Arjakovsky (Ukrainian Catholic University), could be divided into unequal halves (I am not you; I am you) and wonderfully played out the dissonances of sympathy and otherness.
Gary Jenkins Ph.D., is the Van Gordon Professor in History (retired) at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, and the current director of the St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture (also at EU).
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