An outsider’s image of the Orthodox Church is often of heavily bearded men in enveloping clerical dress and striking headwear. It speaks of a church focused on personal holiness and on ritual, with little interest in social concerns. These are left to often overbearing Governments. Not a promising source of much enlightenment as we turn to the shaping of society after COVID-19.
For the Life of the World, a recent document prepared by Orthodox clerical and lay scholars and ratified by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, challenges that perception. Based strongly in the faith of the church and addressed primarily to members of the Orthodox churches, it is confident and independent in its voice and radical in many of its conclusions. For Catholic readers it might evoke a rather more rebarbative Pope Francis. For any attentive readers it will provoke reflection on what kind of society they want, and why.
Its introductory exposition of Orthodox faith emphasises that God’s love for each human being underpins human dignity. It calls for a response also based in love, to live in communion among human beings and with the created world. Because human beings and the institutions they shape are estranged from God, however, the path of Christians personally and communally to contribute to a transfigured world always takes them into a strong head wind. Its shape is given in Christ’s life and teaching, and is embodied in the celebration of the Eucharist. That shapes a polity from which cultures and societies can be judged.
From this perspective other allegiances to race and nation are relativised, and their benefits and limits are open to discussion.
'Christians may and often must participate in the political life of the societies in which they live, but must do so always in service to the justice and mercy of God’s Kingdom... The Kingdom of God alone is the Christian’s first and last loyalty, and all other allegiances are at most provisional, transient, partial, and incidental.' (par 9)
This relativising of political institutions leads to a carefully qualified endorsement of civil disobedience. It also limits the right of national states to act solely in their own interests to the neglect of the common and universal good:
'Institutional documents are often designed to offend no one
and to discourage an attentive reading by outsiders.
For the Life of the World is not one of these.
It is written with moral passion and worldly savvy.'
'The modern nation-state is not a sacred institution, even if it can at times serve the causes of justice, equity, and peace. Nor are borders anything more than accidents of history and conventions of law. They too may have at times a useful purpose to serve, but in themselves they are not moral or spiritual goods whose claim upon us can justify failing in our sacred responsibilities to those whom God has commended to our special care. In our own time, we have seen some European governments and a great many ideologues affecting to defend “Christian Europe” by seeking completely to seal borders…' (par 67)
The radical edge of the document reflects an understanding of Jesus Christ’s mission that emphasises the centrality of poverty. In Christ God emptied himself and took the form of a slave sharing our poverty. This core Christian belief was expressed in Jesus’ teaching and in his solidarity with the poor. To follow Christ, then, is necessarily to share his poverty and his solidarity with the poor. If the Church is to be faithful it must insist on this:
'...it is impossible for the Church truly to follow Christ or to make him present to the world if it fails to place this absolute concern for the poor and disadvantaged at the very centre of its moral, religious, and spiritual life. The pursuit of social justice and civil equity — provision for the poor and shelter for the homeless, protection for the weak, welcome for the displaced, and assistance for the disabled — is not merely an ethos the Church recommends for the sake of a comfortable conscience, but is a necessary means of salvation, the indispensable path to union with God in Christ; and to fail in these responsibilities is to invite condemnation before the judgment seat of God.' (par 33)
This mission necessarily sets the church in tension with the societies in which it lives and with the economic assumptions and settings taken for granted there. These reflect the estrangement of humanity. The root of poverty lies in gross inequality, which both further enriches the rich and also gives them the power to entrench the social order that protects their privilege. The document is direct and scathing in its indictment of inequality:
'Great economic inequality is, inevitably, social injustice; it is, moreover, according to the teachings of Christ, a thing abominable in the eyes of God. Whole schools of economics arose in the twentieth century at the service of such inequality, arguing that it is a necessary concomitant of any functioning economy. Without fail, however, the arguments employed by these schools are tautologous at best, and proof of how impoverished the human moral imagination can make itself in servitude to ideology.' (par 41)
The document regards the greed that underlies inequality as the root of other social ills. The commodification of human beings is seen to underlie attitudes that identify love with possession. In the rearing of children, too, the key task is to lead them through the covetousness endorsed in the wider society to generosity and attention to the common good.
'Christ called his followers to imitate the guilelessness of children, but much of late modern capitalist culture seeks to rob children of precisely this precious virtue, and to convert them instead into engines of sheer covetous longing.' (par 17)
In contrast to a common approach among Western Christians, which ties the ills of society to the Enlightenment, and so looks with suspicion on the adoption of human rights and the claims of science, the document is positive in its evaluation. It applauds the listing of human rights as giving flesh to the human dignity at the centre of Christian faith, criticising the emphasis only for being partial and for not going far enough.
'Again, the conventions of human rights theory… cannot provide a comprehensive and compelling vision of the common good that answers all the material, moral, and spiritual needs of human nature. The language of human rights is, in many ways, a minimal language. It is also, however, a usefully concise language that can help to shape and secure rules of charity, mercy, and justice that the Church regards as the very least that should be required of every society; and so it is a language that must be unfailingly affirmed and supported by all Christians in the modern world.' (par 63)
Institutional documents are often designed to offend no one and to discourage an attentive reading by outsiders. For the Life of the World is not one of these. It is written with moral passion and worldly savvy. It is radically Christian in its inspiration and argumentation and socially radical in its claims, at once comfortable in modernity and sharply critical of many of its social manifestations. It rewards reading as our minds turn to the rebuilding of society in the kingdom of coronavirus.
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