Jan,

Putin is not a Stalinist. He worked in the KGB, resigned during the coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991 and later was appointed head of the FSB by Yeltsin. He’s too young to be a Stalinist. Stalin’s reign was widely discredited within the Soviet Union under Krushchev. He was a member of the Communist party; however, he joined only when he made the decision to enter the KGB. He liked how KGB agents were portrayed in Soviet films.

You criticize the Orthodox for being too otherworldly and mystical to defend themselves and then attack the ROC for being cozy with a strong (though perhaps morally questionable) leader. Hierarchs blessing nuclear weapons does not sound too pacifistic to me. Read about St. Alexander Nevsky to get an idea of how willing some Orthodox are to defend themselves and their faith.

Just out of curiousity, Jan, are you a liberal Catholic? That would explain the bulk of your comment. Quasi-socialist rants about how all real Christians consider politics all-important, glorifying the (Catholic) West and villifying the Orthodox East – – yep, that checks all the liberal Catholic boxes.

Which is why slavery ended in France by 1000 A.D. but continued in Russia until 1863. Precisly because no monk or priest in Russia cared that slaves were being starved and whipped to death.

I suggest you read some history: France colonized Haiti, for instance, until the slaves revolted, and that was well after 1000 A.D. Read a little of the Russian Mission in Alaska (and after the Czar left-the Amerindians contined to convert), and compare to the deal the Amerinidians got in the Spanish missions of the Southwest.

Right now in 2010, at every “Orthodox” parish I’ve been too, folk actually think there is something wrong with politics. “You mustn’t talk about politics in the church–or even the Church kitchen.” But, of course, politics is the only way we have of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

Spoken like a true socialist. No, its not: St. Martin clothed the naked without a cent of tax money, and I don’t think St. John Chrysostom feed the hungry with it either. Social programs are the easy way to relieve ourselves of the obligation of charity.

They were PR flacks for Stalin during World War II. And now they are PR flacks for Putin (who is a Stalinist member of the KGB).

Read up on the Franciscans and the Ustashe (Croatian Nazis), amongst other like topics, and we’ll compare notes.

Jan,

your criticisms regarding our historical analyses are well-taken. All I can say is that thre are a couple of really good books on the Crusades recently out. I’ll name them at a future time (they’re at home & I’m not).

As for your other point, I believe you’re painting with too broad a brush. Orthodox Greeks and Slavs fought the Islamic onslaught almost from the outset. My broader point is why did the Near Eastern Christians (mostly Semites, but not all) just throw open the gates of their cities to the Muslim armies? The prevailing view is two-fold: Roman taxataion and Byzantine arrogance –one could almost say racialism towards Semitic Christians.

I’m hypothesizing here: but I can’t rule out the possibility that when it came to the Semitic Christians and the Palestinian Jews, the feelings of kinship to the Arab Muslims must have played some part. One can’t dismiss race and ethnicity in these things. One of the reasons that the Virginians bolted from the Union was their unwillingness to turn on their Scots-Irish brethren in the Deep South at the behest of a purely Anglo-Saxon, Yankee aristocracy. We see this same type of thing taking place right now in the Near East: the Saudis have granted overflight rights to the Israeli Air Force, so they can take out the Iranian nuclear reactors. The Iranians are Indo-European, whereas the Arabs are Semites, like the Israelis.

Jan:

Some even criticize the Crusades because the Western Christians tried to take back Palestine and Jerusalem from the Sultan–cynically trying but failing to justify the apathy and laziness of the local “Christians.”

APOCALYPSE OR REPENTANCE:
THE SEVEN DAYS OF WESTERN HISTORY

It was the beginning of a new ‘Judeo-Christian’ West, called ‘Catholic’. It was an arrogant, Scholastic, imperialistic West, which reached its apogee under Pope Innocent III (1198-1216). This new Aristotelian West set out to conquer the world through ‘Crusades’ and the persecutions and massacres of Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Cathars and any other ‘dissidents’.

The Crusades restored Christian control of the Holy Land but the savagery of the Roman Catholic clergy and laity at that time was later described as “animal barbarity”. The Orthodox were not safe near them.

Do you know why the Orthodox were the ones allowed to serve the Divine Resurrection Liturgy at the Holy Sepulchre? Because when the Catholics served after their battles, the Holy Light did not descend! Quite frightening! The RC then decided to call the Orthodox to serve. With fear of being massacred by their “christian brothers”, the Orthodox did serve and the Holy Light descended even though the service was held later than it was supposed to be. This is why the Orthodox serve to this day at the Holy Sepulchre.

Eliot,

Ironically…the celebration of the saint’s nameday is July 02!!!

Best Regards,
Dean

Jan:

Why did Western Christians fight for Christ and Eastern Christians not fight for Christ? There is something in the Orthodox way of thinking that does not take the real world seriously. Something politely called “mysticism.”

Wow … never expected to hear this!

Stephen III of Moldavia or Stephen III (c. 1432 – July 2, 1504), also known as Stephen the Great

During his reign, he strengthened Moldavia and maintained its independence against the ambitions of Hungary, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire, which all sought to subdue the land. Stephen achieved fame in Europe for his long resistance against the Ottomans. He was victorious in 46 of his 48 battles, and was one of the first to gain a decisive victory over the Ottomans at the Battle of Vaslui, after which Pope Sixtus IV deemed him verus christianae fidei athleta (true Champion of Christian Faith). He was a man of religion and displayed his piety when he paid the debt of Mount Athos to the Porte, ensuring the continuity of Athos as an autonomous monastical community.

As one of the presumed “guys”…the main problem i have with your analysis is this:

RE: What is immediately striking is how the Christians in the middle east just gave up, rolled over in bed, and did not fight. Compare this to the West, where many everyday folk did fight to keep the Muslim conquest out. Take the battle of Poitiers that ended the Muslim invasion of France in 732. There is no question that–whether or not Charles Martel was there– there were a lot of local folk fighting to stop the invasion.

That’s fine, except it ignores the fact that Islam was contained in the East, at Constantinople, just as it was in the West by Charles Martel. Otherwise, it would have burst into Europe 400 years earlier, and wouldn’t have stopped until it reached the Atlantic coast. This, by people with the same Orthodox tendencies.

That aside, I think your comments ignore the point I was attempting to raise. People generally don’t just “give up”…particularly their freedom. The question I was raising was “Why did they give up? What made the area so ripe for transition? The thing that strikes me is that the entire Middle East basically surrendered to the Persians in the 100 years BEFORE the Muslims.

Why?

I have a hard time believing it’s an Orthodox tendency….it’s certainly not what happened in C’nople in the 600 years following the rise of Islam. And it’s certainly not what occurred in Greece and the rest of the Balkans, for the 400 years of Ottoman occupation.

And I think it’s also at least worth mentioning that, at the time of the Persian invasions in the 7th century AD…this entire area – from Egypt to Syria – had been constantly “occupied” by foreigners…since the time of the original Persian Empire…some 1400 years earlier. The entire notion of “nationhood” was foreign in the region…perhaps it was just an exhaustion factor…i don’t know. After all, how much opposition did Alexander the Great face when he rode into Egypt? Not much. You can’t blame that on the Orthodox.

I think there was something much more insidious at work here…and was only raising the question (without footnotes) because I don’t know what it was.

Best Regards,
Dean

I refer to the way everyone is interjecting his own opinions and theories re the 7th century, an extraordinarily obscure era, from which little evidence and thus fewer facts have survived.

One guy asserts with absolute conviction that Middle Easterners were taxed very highly by the Greek imperial government. But, of course,he gives no footnotes, since he has no evidence to footnote. (As an aside, by documents, an historian means something like a tax roll or receipt for taxes paid written in Seventh century Greek. Comments by some monk or other that “taxes are high” are of no value, zero value. It does not matter if the monk lived during the 7th century. To say his comments have value is exactly the same as saying that everything Glen Beck says about Obama is absolutely true because they are living at the same time.)

What is immediately striking is how the Christians in the middle east just gave up, rolled over in bed, and did not fight. Compare this to the West, where many everyday folk did fight to keep the Muslim conquest out. Take the battle of Poitiers that ended the Muslim invasion of France in 732. There is no question that–whether or not Charles Martel was there– there were a lot of local folk fighting to stop the invasion.

And beginning in the 790s, the Spaniards that had managed to hold out in the Pyrenees began their 600 year battle to throw the Muslims out.

Why did Western Christians fight for Christ and Eastern Christians not fight for Christ? There is something in the Orthodox way of thinking that does not take the real world seriously. Something politely called “mysticism.” Take the Russian Orthodox clergy. They were PR flacks for the stars. They were PR flacks for Stalin during World War II. And now they are PR flacks for Putin (who is a Stalinist member of the KGB). Which is why slavery ended in France by 1000 A.D. but continued in Russia until 1863. Precisly because no monk or priest in Russia cared that slaves were being starved and whipped to death.

Right now in 2010, at every “Orthodox” parish I’ve been too, folk actually think there is something wrong with politics. “You mustn’t talk about politics in the church–or even the Church kitchen.” But, of course, politics is the only way we have of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. One-to-one Charity is OK and not practiced enough by the Orthodox. But it can never be sufficient. For example, an individual can only feed the hungry that he knows about, and he can’t know about all of them. Which is why only the government can do an adequate job of feeding the hungry.

Which is why Christians love politics. If one does not love politics and consider it the most important subject there is (or rather the only truly important subject), one is not a Christian in any sense. See the “Beatitudes”; See Matthew 25, 10, read as a gospel during Lent.

Something is very wrong with Eastern practice and has been since the 5th century. Because something went wrong with Eastern theology somewhere that leads to this total lack of concern for whether one’s neighbor is starving or being tortured. And this total refusal to sacrifice anything to defend Christianity.

Some even criticize the Crusades because the Western Christians tried to take back Palestine and Jerusalem from the Sultan–cynically trying but failing to justify the apathy and laziness of the local “Christians.”

Dean, there’s no doubt, the taxation that the Romans (Byzantines) imposed on the citizenry was onerous to the extreme. By contrast, the Arab conquest resulted in a massive tax cut. When all was said and done, all of the taxes that the Caliphate imposed on the Jews and Christians –even with the dreaded jizya tax–was less than what they paid under the Romans. You could say that the Arabs were the first “supply-siders” in history.

Fr John, you are absolutely correct. I wonder if Helen Thomas will have the courage of her convictions and tell the Turks to “go back to wherever the hell they came from.” I somehow doubt it.

George,

I think you are right…but one of the things that this most recent book that I’m reading (Heraclius – Emperor of Byzantium by Kaegi) makes is a good one…it’s difficult to discern whether those “fissures” were really a factor in the loss of the Middle East, or whether they were simply blamed in hindsight for a failed imperial policy (let’s face it…the survivors wrote the history). It’s an interesting perspective.

What I’m wondering is “why” there was such a degree of unrest throughout the Middle East, in the non-Greek areas – was it massive taxation? was it imperial colonial policies? was it the result of the religious tension and intolerance by the imperial church? Was it the blues/greens political fallout (this seems to have been a bigger issue than i realized).

For some reason, the entire Middle East, the Levant, was ripe for the taking..and when the Persians came in – pre Islam – they ripped the entire Levant away from the Empire…fairly easily. And there was no local resistance..no uprising against the “foreigners”…the area made peace with the invaders as best they could. The process was repeated 50 years later, this time for good…with the Muslims.

It makes me recall a comment from a Syrian of the age..can’t remember the source – the person said something to the effect of “whoever these people are (Arab Muslims) they can’t possibly hate us as much as the Romans did.”

There was clearly something that had been going on for a long time that had angered the local citizenry…to the point of insurrection and despair.

None of the historians talk about it much…but i know there was a dramatic climate change that occurred..right around the same period if i’m not mistaken. Prior to that time, Egypt had been the granary of the Mediterranean…and the source of much of the wealth in the East…going back to Ptolemaic times. With the climate change…we got the Egypt that we have today. I’m pretty sure this happened around the 500’s…just prior to the period we are talking. You have to wonder if it was something that basic..no food suddenly.

Anyway..it’s a fascinating period…it really is “the beginning of the end” for Christianity in the Levant. And it happened very very suddenly….you get a sense of the whirlwind and bedazzling effects on the people of the time from the histories. There were actually coins issued during this period inscribed with “May God help the Romans”.

The participants seemingly understood the far reaching effects of the changes they were witnessing…but were nevertheless powerless to stop, mitigate or harness them.

A real lesson.

Best Regards,
Dean

Dean, you are more right than you know. However, I believe ethnic fissures were becoming apparent before the Islamic conquest. The Greek and Latin-speaking elites of Byzantium seemed to be indifferent to the Coptic Monophysites and the Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christians. Imperial policy reflected this disdain and that is why the Arab invaders from the desert were welcomed as liberators from the hated “Greeks.” This also played a significant part in the conquest of Palestine. The Byzantines continued the policy implemented by the Emperor Hadrian, who forcibly routed all the Jews from the city of Jerusalem proper (but not Palestine). The desire to re-occupy the city of Jerusalem caused the Palestinian Jews to make common cause with the Muslims. Although upon retaking the city the Caliph Omar agreed to the Roman terms of excluding the Jews officially, within no time at all, Jews were back in force.

Re: Bat Ye’or wrote:

Dhimmitude derives from the surrender of the Christian clergy and political leaders to the Muslim jihad armies, and their submission to Islamic domination of both their lands and peoples.

I’ve always been fascinated by the period just prior to the Muslim conquest…I think it’s a particularly misunderstood period of history. There was unrest in the empire, the emperor Phocas had just viciously usurped the throne (first time something like that had happened since Constantine), there were climate changes occurring (this was the time that Egypt ceased being the supplier to the entire Mediterranean), as well as tremendous religious antagonisms (Monophysite vs Orthodox throughout the Middle East).

As you read the history of that period, you are struck by the fact that this is the last time all four Eastern patriarchates will be in Christian hands…forever. Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem….all still important Christian metropolises…until the Persian and then Muslim conquest.

While it is not stated explicitly – you get the sense, reading the history of that time, that it was really the first time that “ethnic” rivalries began to surface…”ethnic” at that time being defined as “imperial” vs local…nothing more than that. But this was an enormous change from the previous monolithic “Roman” state…nothing like this had occurred in the East since the Hellenistic period….600 years earlier.

As the Persians advanced, attacking and conquering Antioch, the empire was cleaved in two…with the southern provinces, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt…all left to their own. Can you imagine the impact on the US if Canada suddenly invaded and took Chicago? That’s the kind of “shock” to the system we are talking about.

It may sound irrelevant – but this was the thing, the single event, that lead to the increased “Greekness” of the Church. After this event, and the subsequent loss of the Middle East to Islam, the empire would never again be truly ethnically “diverse”…it would become a “Greek focused” church – in language at first, and in ethnicity later during the Turks.

To think that the remnant of this system, the ecumenical patriarchate, is ever going to be able to relate to “ecumenical” concerns again….that is really pushing the limits of the possible.

Just a thought…

Best Regards,
Dean