Godless Theosis

The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy
by aristotle papanikolaou
notre dame, 248 pages, $27

What is “the ­destiny of the ­Orthodox Church . . . in aworld radically different from that which shaped our ­mentality, ourthought-forms, indeed our whole life as Orthodox”? Alexander Schmemann posed this question thirty-­five years ago, and for good reason. He observed that inthe twentieth century the old, organic Orthodox fusion of church and societysuffered a “tragically spectacular collapse.” Meanwhile, emigration created afar-flung Orthodox diaspora in Western Europe, Australia, and the Americas.Schmemann did not live to see a third historical development: the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, which unleashed another wave of Orthodox ­emigration.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Orthodox theologians in Americaalready had begun to ponder what sort of post-immigrant identity the OrthodoxChurch might forge, while they also laid the groundwork for a social ethic andmissiology in a democratic, religiously plural, and increasingly secular land.How might Orthodoxy avoid lapsing into an American denominational mentality ora mindless and uncritical conformity to habits and values that could undermineits apostolic witness? My teacher Will Herberg in Protestant, Catholic, Jew calledthis temptation “the American Way of Life.” The question remains very much withus.

Aristotle Papanikolaou, Archbishop Demetrios Professor inOrthodox Theology and Culture at Fordham University, offers an unsettlinganswer in The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy.He states that it is not his intention to argue for “a theoreticalcompatibility of Christianity and liberal democracy.” Rather, he seeks to give“a fuller account of the form of polity Christian civic involvement wouldfoster.” If this were all he were attempting to do, I could agree. But he wantsto do more, a great deal more. He wants to develop a political ­theology notonly in which Orthodoxy and liberal democracy are seen as compatible but alsoin which the former logically leads to the latter. “The logic of theeucharistic ec­clesiology demands the existence of a liberal democratic state,”he maintains. This raises the question of whether Papanikolaou would have usbelieve that American liberal democracy is Orthodoxy fulfilled, much as inanother day Eusebius of Caesarea argued that the Roman Empire was the kingdomof God fulfilled.

Papanikolaou builds his argument on the concept of theosis,or deification, a central Orthodox belief in the human union with God throughan ever-increasing likeness to him. This is indeed an appropriate point of departurefor reflection on an Orthodox ethos. Nevertheless, his use of theosis isprofoundly misleading, as he retranslates theosis as a “divine-humancommunion.” Translated in this way, theosis no longer need belong to itsecclesial and sacramental matrix. In Papanikolaou’s hands, itbecomes auniversally apprehensible transcendental, serviceable for a political theologythat mediates the common good within a liberal democracy.

Yet the doctrine of theosis is incomprehensible apartfrom baptism, which, strikingly, Papanikolaou mentions not once. Thiscould be because the Church cannot willy-nilly baptize every person in ademocratic polity. From the perspective of liberal inclusivism, baptism isexclusionary, and so also is theosis traditionally understood. Baptisminitiates persons into a politeuma not reducible to any one form oftemporal polity. St. Paul explains: “But our commonwealth [our politeuma]is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who willchange our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enableshim even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3: 20–21).

Communion in the body of Christ is not the achievement of ademocratic community, a world community, or any such thing. Theosis is anecclesial calling. Yet ­according to Papanikolaou, our political order may bejudged by its capacity to encourage a “free response and, hence, realization ofthe divine in creation.” In this formulation, church and sacraments drop out ofsight. Or, worse, they’re implicitly democratized and relativized for the sakeof a vague ­“realization of the divine in creation.”

This misshapen ecclesiology leads to a misrepresentation ofthe late ­nineteenth- and early twentieth-­cen­tury Russian theologies of Vladimir­Soloviev and Sergei Bulgakov. ­Papanikolaou claims that Soloviev embraced “aChristian liberalism,” when in truth his form of Russian “liberalism” is farremoved from late-modern liberal democracy and the American doctrine of theseparation of church and state. He describes Bulgakov as “endorsing liberaldemocracy” when Bulgakov simply acknowledged that, offered a choice betweenRussian autocracy and the American democratic system, he found the latter to beimmensely more favorable to the freedom and mission of the Church. Nonetheless,Bulgakov added that “we cannot close our eyes to the less desirable results ofthe separation of church and state,” not the least of which is its tendency todiminish the public reality of the Church. When it comes to democracy, or forthat matter any aspect of modern liberalism, it is false to assert, asPapanikolaou does, that “Soloviev and Bulgakov saw it as the necessaryprecondition for realizing ‘divine-­human communion.’”

In the end, The Mystical as Political is not abouttheology. The book makes much of theological concepts like theosis butdeploys them as tropes or gestures to smooth the way for the Orthodox faith tobe put in service of a distinctly American ­religious project, one launchedprincipally from within the academy.

In a telling admission, Papanikolaou writes that, when itcomes to political theology “I do not think the transcendent referent need beto the divine, but can take the form of a common good.” In other words,whatever conduces to democracy and justice is of God. The sacramental realismand eschatological maximalism of Orthodoxy evaporates and is replaced by aconsecration of the democratic “communion” of the secular liberal state.

In his discussion of liberal democracy, Papanikolaou takesup my own work and that of William ­Cavanaugh. By an act of academicventriloquism, Cavanaugh and I speak with one head. Thus, we both believe thatthere is a “mutual exclusivity between the church as eucharistic community” andliberal democratic polity. This misrepresents what I have said. In my book IncarnateLove: ­Essays in ­Orthodox Ethics, I stated that “so far as a liberaldemocracy claims to found its legitimacy in the consent of the governed,arrived at through the free and open discussion of the people’s concerns, thepresence of the Orthodox Church should make a difference in how honestlythat claim is made and conscientiously it is pursued.” The Church’s witness isto the eschatological kingdom of God, however, not one or another form ofpolitical regime. It’s the Church, not a hyposticized liberal democracy, thatgathers around the Lamb at the close of this aeon.

Papanikolaou asserts that “in relation to the democratic formof the common good, the church must accept its own limits and ­recognize thatthe goal is not the formation of a eucharistic community through persuasion.”This is an astounding pronouncement. The Church must renounce not only the useof the state’s coercive power, something Orthodoxy often ­depended on in pastcenturies, but also her ambition to draw the world into the eucharisticcelebration.

In the place of this ecclesial vision of transformation, weare served the claptrap of diversity and political correctness. The goal ofOrthodoxy, according to Papanikolaou, is “the construction of a community inwhich diversity and cultural difference must be affirmed and protected and inwhich the recognition of such diversity must be enforced if they are notvoluntarily accepted.” Enforced? Does this not imply that the liberal state hasa responsibility and right to coerce the Church when the Church does not affirm“diversity and ­cultural difference”? Surely, ­Papanikolaou knows that theseterms are the ­property of the progressive left that insists on same-sexmarriage, among other things Orthodoxy refuses to “recognize.”

This subordination of the Church to the authority of liberalculture once again appears in Papanikolaou’s discussion of asceticism andpolitics. “An ascetics of divine communion is meant to be a performance ofpractices that move the human toward fulfilling the command she is obliged tofulfill.” We do not deny ourselves simply for the sake of self-denial but toorient ourselves “toward the acquisition of the virtue of love.” So, “insofaras politics can be construed as an engagement with the neighbor/stranger” inthe exercise of love, “politics must be considered as one of the many practiceswithin an ascetics of divine-human communion.”

This is appealing, so far as it goes. But the explanation ofjust how this should play out in human community is much less satisfying.Papanikolaou denounces the “politics of bullying” that stems from believingthat we “possess the truth.” This is a standard postmodern trope. Humility doesnot come from a deep interior conformity to Christ, something undertaken withinthe Church through prayer and sacrament. Rather, humility comes from a tacitcultural and moral relativism (so-called “tolerance”) supported by state fiat.

The idea of a public theology framed in terms comprehensibleand challenging to our liberal ­democratic culture has been sought after forsome time. John Courtney Murray (to whom Papanikolaou likens his own efforts)and Reinhold Niebuhr were great mid-century theorists of the distinctivelyChristian contribution to political debate. They, however, composed their majorworks on American democracy at the moment when most Americans still believed inthe American Christendom based on Enlightenment principles of natural law andthe moral foundation of Evangelical Protestantism.

Though the religious revival of the 1950s seemed to indicatea resurgence of the churches’ influence over the culture, the longer-term trendwas the precipitous decline of religion’s prominence in American life. And so,in a noble but miscalculated effort, Murray and Niebuhr sought to reinvigoratethe American synthesis that was already well on its way ­toward dissolution.

American society today lacks a strong Christian core. Aderacinated liberalism and secular progressivism have displaced most of thetraditional religious ways of envisioning the meaning of America. Attempts toharmonize the basic anthropological and soteriological truths of Christianitywith contemporary social and political discourse in order to attain relevanceare more likely to result in a confusion of speech and a forgetfulness of theChurch’s primary language of salvation and conversion than in a coherentChristian vision.

We’ve sadly seen this within contemporary mainlineProtestantism and liberal Roman Catholicism. In those contexts, talk aboutjustice (or social justice) has displaced the language of holiness. This hasbeen accomplished at immense cost to the eschatological dimension in bothProtestant and Roman Catholic social ethics. In the effort to insinuate theChurch’s mind into public policy, we’ve seen the Church’s singularly biblicaland Christian speech stripped away. Papanikolaou would do the same forOrthodoxy.

If there is a lesson to be learned from The Mystical asPolitical, it is that we should approach the theological question ofliberal democratic culture historically and empirically, as Niebuhr and Murraydid. It is unhelpful to define liberal democracy as a “political space shapedby a common good that embodies the principles of equality and freedom.” Ourdemocracy is not a “political space” occupied by a set of abstract principles.It is, rather, a complex ­arrangement of institutions and laws, wrestled overthrough centuries of political contest and judicial interpretation. It is forthis reason that I always have insisted that a genuine Orthodox political­theology must be historical and prudential, not ­theoretical.

Yes, we should affirm and support the laws and institutionsthat sustain America as a free society. But let us not be naive about ourtimes. The old civil religion of which my teacher Will Herberg was wary isbeing replaced by a new ideology of “diversity and cultural difference” that soeasily flows from Papanikolaou’s pen. “Diversity and cultural difference” aretoday’s secular battering rams, god terms that set loose destructive idolatriesthat the Church must expose for the sake of the common good. Faced with thisassault, Orthodox in America need to return to theosis, not as a conceptualmagician’s trick but as a genuinely mystical and personal calling pursuedthrough deeply ­layered Christian practices that give the Church staying powerwherever it is situated. 

Vigen Guroian is professor of religious studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia.

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