Moscow Patriarch Kirill at Christ the Savior Cathedral, Moscow, February 27, 2022. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church called Moscow’s opponents in Ukraine “forces of evil.” IGOR PALKIN / AFP
Director of research at the College of Bernardines, historian Antoine Aryakovsky is both a specialist in Orthodox Christianity and a good connoisseur of Ukraine, where in 2004 he founded the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Lviv. Chairman of the Association of Christian Philosophers and he himself is Orthodox, he is the author of “What is Orthodoxy? (Folio, Galimard, 2013) and Russia-Ukraine. From war to peace? (Word and Silence, 2004). His next book, What is Ecumenism? Will be published on March 17 by the Editions du Cerf.
The Russian invasion took place in a special religious context, marked by the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019. How is the architecture of Eastern Christianity built?
Antoan Aryakovski: The Orthodox Church is a community of fifteen autocephalous churches – capable of electing their own heads – and about twenty autonomous churches. Among these autocephalous churches, Constantinople is superior because it is the second seat of the Christian churches after Rome and before Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
This group, which formed what is called the Pentarchy, constituted the structure of the Church in the first millennium, and its differences were settled on the occasion of seven great ecumenical councils. [le premier a eu lieu en 325 à Nicée, et le dernier en 787, également à Nicée]. After the first splits, the Council of Florence was to confirm the union of the churches in 1439. But the conquest of Constantinople by the Muslim Ottomans in 1453 marked a decisive departure from the Eastern Churches for Rome, which blamed the lack of support.
Thus, from the 15th century, a new communion of the Eastern churches was distinguished, whose primacy returned to Constantinople. Then they began to call themselves “Orthodox”. This polysemous term means in the broadest sense “what is true of the norm”: in this case, Orthodox Christians are determined by their fidelity to the conclusions of the seven ecumenical councils of the first millennium.
“The Orthodox Church in Kyiv was the first to be evangelized in 988: it represents the original Christian church in the Slavic land.”
They essentially led to two theological claims. The first is the unity of God as a person and his threefold revelation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the second concerns the dual identity of Jesus Christ, who for all Orthodox Christians is both divine and human. This orthodoxy of the faith acquired denominational significance in the 15th century, because after the failure of the Council of Florence, Christians began to use adjectives: Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox.
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