ETHNO-CULTURAL IDEOLOGEMES OF ARCHPRIEST JOHN ROMANIDES AND THEIR DETRIMENTAL NATURE FOR THE 21-CENTURY ORTHODOXY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31392/cult.alm.2024.2.4Keywords:
politics, soteriology, Franks, Romans, ideologization of theology.Abstract
The article contains an analysis of the main theological and ethno-cultural views of archpriest John Romanides, one of the three most prominent representatives of the Greek Neo-Orthodoxy of the 1960s. Against the background of the gradual disclosure of thoroughly politicized Romanides’ thoughts in the late period of his work, the author accentuates the danger of ideologizing Christianity and the inadmissibility of its narrowing to the status of an ethnocentric religion. By devoting his early articles and doctoral thesis to rehabilitating patristic soteriology, the Greek scholar has laid a solid foundation for the subsequent long-standing intellectual contest with the scholastic models of Western Christian thought that had been infiltrating and significantly modifying Greek theology for several centuries. Romanides’ open rejection of Western intellectual culture was not only theoretical. Since 1977, he has taken practical steps to realize his ambitions in the Greek political realm as a representative of the right-wing radically conservative forces. A characteristic feature of Romanides’ theology is its imperial essence, while he brands any other forms of government as inconsistent with God’s design. In fact, the researcher’s conspiracy theory consisted of the idea that European historians of the modern age implicitly advocated the positions of Frankish Christianity, overemphasizing the differences between Greek and Latin Christianity of the patristic era. Instead of constructing a political theology with unbreakable biblical foundations, Romanides proposed a program for ideologizing and politicizing Orthodox theology, where ethnocultural ideologemes were the main reference point for further research. The article’s conclusions contain a comparative analysis of Romanides’ countermodern anti-Westernism and the neo-imperial project of the modern Russian Orthodox Church as two examples of civilizational nationalism.
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