The Wandering Heart of Orthodoxy
In the history of Bulgarian film industry there is a certain movie which reveals a whole bunch of national archetypal images and collective memories. “A One-Day Gentleman” is a movie about Bulgarian peasants’ mores during the period between the two World Wars.
The main character, Asparouch (Purko) in the actor Todor Kolev’s marvelous performance steals a handful of coins from the village’s church collection box. On his way out the prolific father and unfortunate robber stops in front of a Jesus’ icon. With a mouth full of sinful pieces of silver, bending his head before the Divinity, Purko spits out with a pious gesture the coins one by one and in his embarrassment explains: “It’s only because I need it so much – when I get better I’ll bring it back to You.”
Bulgarian literature does not bustle with icon-related scenes. Racking my memory I could only recall two of these, the mother and her children who kneel in prayer for their father who fights in W.W.I, in front of the “thoughtful icon” from a well-known poem by Ivan Vazov. The other poetic association features the lyric hero of Dimcho Debelyanov, ever-returning to his “father’s home”, completely carried away by the poetics of this home-coming, maybe looking somewhere deep inside of himself for the roots of a faith long-forgotten.
Both of these scenes I would dare to define as nostalgically naive which by no means diminishes their poetic value. This naiveness when it comes to matters of faith is especially strong in Vazov and we could find it in his series of children religious poems. One of them starts like this: “Grandpa God, forgive me, /I pray Thee from my heart”. A friend of mine, himself a Protestant, made a sarcastic remark about this verse: “Why “Grandpa”? Why not “Uncle” or “Brother-in-Law”?”. This symptomatic little poem encouraged me to have a closer look at the dethroning of God from His biblical statute of Father diminishing Him to some tribal Grandfather. I am not aware of any other Orthodox or non-Orthodox Christian culture which has carried this process of theoprofanation so far. And because Vazov himself (Grandpa Vazov, as he is often referred to as) has gone long ago to the country “from whose realm no traveler returns” we are but to try to figure out for ourselves the winding roads of the defilement of the sacred.
The famous Bulgarian sociologist Ivan Hadjiyski has analyzed this phenomenon: in Bulgarian national consciousness the Divine does manifest itself in the spiritual endeavors of the nation but submerges into the pagan-dominated impulses of domesticism.
Unlike the icon scenes the image of the village priest has gained a quite visible place in the pantheon of sarcastic and humorous achievements of our literary men in order to be essentially concentrated in scenes like these: “The priest in his underwear was feeding the pig in the courtyard.” (Leveling by Chudomir) or in the piquant short stories of Elin Pelin featuring the sexual fantasies of Bulgarian priests and monks (Under the Monastery Vineyard by Elin Pelin). And do I even need to mention the numerous “folk” songs bearing titles like “White Monasteries are Out for Sale”, “A Black Monk’s Leading the Dance”, “A Monk is Winking at Me”, etc., where priests and monks are being mocked and which defy the idea of religious morals altogether.
Of course, for justice’s sake we should not ignore the positive images, the most important of which are Father Dorothey (Under the Yoke, Ivan Vazov) and of course, Paisiy, who represent the positive end of the Orthodox scale. (I do not distinguish between the real historical and the literary personages deliberately as I am interested in the archetypal images and relationships which are quasi-literary and quasi-historical). But these positive images, more or less, are overshadowed by the overall funny image that surrounds instead of a nimbus the head of the Bulgarian priest.
With a great regret we have to admit one single fact, namely that Orthodox Christianity did never inspire any of the few geniuses we have had. The most indisputable of them, Botev, even “denounced” the God of the believers, replacing Him with the god of Reason and of the Paris barricades. (“The Orthodox cattle”, though, who constitute most of our small nation, had turned out to be quite a reverent material for liberating if Botev did not hesitate to die for them.) This fact which was highly praised in the past as a proof for the firm atheistic base of the Bulgarian nation and actively emphasized by many scholars, in the present conditions could bring nothing but grief. The nation which passed Christianity to the Slavic world, in its new history turned out to be impotent of Orthodox thinkers and artists. The comparison with Russia’s rich religious heritage is inescapable: “The League of the Militant Atheists” and the open persecutions there could not cause more harm than the one we observe in our country today.
Maybe a closer look at a recent wave of interest that has swept over the nation could give an idea of how Orthodoxy is generally misunderstood in this country. Vanga, the Macedonian clairvoyant who has consulted heads of state and ordinary people for nearly fifty years, attracted the media attention several months ago with the building of an Orthodox temple which the Holy Synod had refused to consecrate. The dispute that followed involved the public appearance of figures as Svetlin Russev who had painted the iconostatsis and some political leaders who were also supportive of the initiative. “The canon” which required the icons to be painted in a certain way, according to the centuries-old tradition of the Church, was presented as something limiting to the artist’s imagination. This attitude is symptomatic for the whole society. The overall concept of sanctity and holiness is apparently shattered and is currently associated with any psychic abilities. The result (unthinkable in any other Orthodox country as Greece, for example) was that the Holy Synod submitted to the media pressure and gave its blessing for something that by all Orthodox religious standards could be defined only as sacrilege.
In each nation’s history there are moments, personalities and events which later become determining for the nation and which reveal it to a degree never to be later surpassed. In such moments the nation is most respective to itself; before and after them we can say it does not act, it only exists. Putting on the mask and going out on the stage of the world is not necessarily a spectacular event. In most cases it passes quite unnoticed and only after many years (sometimes even centuries) the national memory defines it as its own ultimate emanation, thus turning it into a basic archetype. It is often regarded as the “contribution of the nation in the world culture or history” and it is exactly this contribution feature that differentiates it from many other important events for the nation which are, so to say, of local importance, the April uprising being a good example for us Bulgarians.
I believe that with the conveying of Eastern (later Orthodox) Christianity to the Slavs the Bulgarian nation has experienced its apogee. The image of the relay-race, although with a touch of modernity is probably a good illustration of the historical position our nation has acquired towards Orthodoxy. The act of passing the baton includes an element of imparting, even fertilizing but also of losing, emptying oneself out of something ontologically essential. Of all the Slavic nations only Russia bore a remarkably rich spiritual fruit and in this act she manifested her spirit in an inimitably outstanding way. The words of St. Paul about the different vessels and their unequal value seem to be applicable not only to human beings but to the nations as well.
Inspite of its quality of a universal message carrying the Good News, throughout the centuries Orthodoxy like a living creature has been entering into the lives of many nations, rearranging the values of different cultures. At the same time it has always had a distinct center, well definable in time and space, which has concentrated the glamour and the tension, the tragedy and the transcendence of Eastern Christianity. A primordial image of this concentration we see in the individual person of Abraham and later, in the collective personage of Israel, which the Bible calls a “God-chosen nation”. Later on, Rome and Constantinople had been the two great centers of Christianity and all Christian cultures had been identified as such through their relation to the two. Bulgaria had been formed as a nation and a culture through the influence of the Byzantine Empire although most of their history the two countries had spent in constant wars with each other. This rich heritage is not only forgotten today but the little that has remained is destroyed because of ignorance and misunderstood feelings of national dignity. In the search of an European identity the national culture found itself in a shocking state of incompatibility, not in economic but in purely cultural terms. The myth of the Europeanness of Bulgaria is shattered more and more as people get the chance to travel and actually see what Europe is like. The haunting sense of not-belonging will grow if the banner of our European identity is kept on waving in the name of primitive political causes, based on the idea that Western wealth could be achieved by joining a couple of international structures.
In this respect the common Byzantine past of the Peninsula is the only unifying cause for the nations in this part of the world. The separate Balkan identity is based on Orthodox Christianity and it would be only for the benefit of the nation if the patterns of Eastern Christian spirituality and the related practices are well understood by the media, the ruling class and everyone who claims to believe in God in the Eastern sense of the word.
Ironically, at about the same time a marvelous book appeared on the book market, dealing with the issues of religious art, as understood in the East and in the West. The outstanding Russian philosopher Florensky explained the liberating character of the iconographic canon; not limiting but inspiring for the true artist.Rom. 9:21
As K. Leontiev writes, “…Bulgarians had been educated by the Greeks as the Czechs had been educated by the Germans”. (In “Byzantinism and Slavism”)
