A question to my Russian readers...

I’ll be short. I need to get away and think and write seriously, for 'Byzantium' and others, about what it is in the western experience – other than spiritual blindness or having wickedly rejected Orthodoxy in 1054 ­– that puts in its spiritual context this modern church architecture that Russians cannot get their heads round.

 My question is:

When we talk of ‘tradition’ (predanya) in the Russian sense, would it be right to say that it includes a large element of territorial/racial identity (in the sense of narod)? There is something in the your liturgy, in your whole way of going about things religious, which makes you feel at once Orthodox and Russian, there is a sort of double continuity….

I am beginning to suspect that part of the ‘problem’ of Catholicism is to have left very little space for this territorial/racial identity element. There is little or no ‘narodni' component left. Where it existed historically, it was put down. The Gallican church in France was crushed. Attempts by the German bishops to keep a separate German Catholic identity foundered in the late 18th century on lack of support from the political powers. The roots of the Old Catholics go back beyond Vatican I to when Rome imposed its own senior bishop on Dutch Catholics against local wishes in the 18th century. Anglo-Catholicism in the UK can be interpreted as people wanting Roman spirituality, but please in a form that feels part of a continuing English tradition.


There’s the same problem when carrying across Orthodoxy into a western context. But that’s another posting.