Orthodoxy?

Ritorno alle Sorgenti: Il mio Pellegrinaggio a Oriente nel Cuore dell’Ortodossia (A Return to the Sources: My Pilgrimage to the East in the Heart of Orthodoxy)

By Alessandro Gnocchi 

Edizioni Monasterium, Cellio, 2023

The current state of the Church is presenting faithful Catholics with terrible and tragic choices. What can they do to preserve their liturgy, their morality and their Faith and pass them on to their children? One possibility that is increasingly relevant is the Eastern Orthodox Church.  To what extent is Orthodoxy a viable alternative to the Roman Catholic Church?

Alessandro Gnocchi is an Italian writer and journalist. For years he worked together with Mario Palmaro tirelesssly defending Catholic tradition in all its aspects. With Palmaro, Gnocchi was one of the earliest and most perceptive critics of Pope Francis. Together, they predicted all too clearly what was about to befall the Catholic Church. Mario Palmaro died in 2014. Since then, I’ve heard little of his colleague in arms. But I now understand that in 2019 Alessandro Gnocchi joined the Russian Orthodox Church (he is now “Aleksandr,” at least when receiving communion). This year, he has published a short book telling of his experiences of Eastern Christianity.

Now in judging this book, we should not be swayed by contemporary political pressures. And the last thing I would want is to rekindle obsolete polemics between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. So, we should not be quick to denounce the author but try to understand what motivated his decision. After all, other Catholic apologists over the years have taken this step,  most notably Rod Dreher. 

I have some personal insight into the matter since, through much of the 1980s. I was a parishioner at Saint Michael’s Russian Catholic Chapel in New York. Subsequently,  I got to know members of the Russian Orthodox community in the United States – especially one good friend who died in 2020. 

What does Gnocchi find attractive in Orthodoxy?

We should start with the liturgy. For the Orthodox churches have preserved the ancient liturgies of the Church.  They have (generally) resisted the temptation to compromise with the spirit of this age. For example, (though Gnocchi himself seems ambivalent about this point)  we should remember that both the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches have insisted on retaining liturgical languages that are not easy to understand for speakers of modern Greek or Russian. 

Orthodoxy has retained the central role of monasticism and therefore of asceticism and mysticism. These are not just as the preserve of esoteric specialists but are incorporated into the life of the entire church. So, for the Orthodox the center of gravity of their religion is not the patriarchate of Constantinople or of Moscow but the monasteries of Mount Athos. And as Gnocchi points out, those monks who have received  the grace for the task undertake the role of counselors or spiritual directors for the laity that have recourse to them. Thus, monasticism is integrated into the world of the Orthodox faithful.

Continuing in this line of thought, the Orthodox Church still treasures the theological and spiritual classics of patristic and medieval times. It celebrates the role of the great saints of the past.  In contrast to the West, which generally restricts the sources of its theology to Vatican II and subsequent papal pronouncements, the Orthodox world draws on the Eastern fathers of the church, the Desert Fathers, the mystics of late antiquity and the Middle Ages as well as more modern contributions. These sources are all still living presences in the Orthodox faith.

Gnocchi also speaks of icons and the traditional art of the Eastern Church. In Eastern theology their role is far beyond that of a mere depiction or reminder of a sacred person or event. The icon creates a real presence of that person, of the sacred in the world of today. Therefore, the artist of icons, such as the famous Andrei Rublev, is ideally a holy man, a monk,

Gnocchi has some extravagant praise for the Orthodox monks and elders he has encountered on his “pilgrimage.” But even discounting these exaggerations, what he is really pointing out is that, for all his faults, the Eastern priest, the Eastern monk is still a man of God – he acts as a spiritual leader through the liturgy,  through the other sacraments, through his spiritual counsel. The contrast with the Roman Catholic clergy, secularized,  bureaucratic, self-regarding and self-promoting, could not be greater. And of course, there is no Pope in Orthodoxy.  Gnocchi does not need to write much about patriarchs and bishops. These are not the center of the Orthodox faith.

So far it would seem that Orthodoxy is a most attractive alternative to what passes for Christianity in the Western Church. Yet, this is not the end of the story.   As we shall see, I don’t think that Gnocchi makes a very compelling case for the Orthodox Church.

I will start with his style. In extravagant and exalted language, he sings the praises of Orthodoxy and attempts to convey abstruse points of theology. In other passages, particularly in the second half of the book, he turns strident and confrontational on topics like filioque and papal infallibility. Throughout there’s a constant use of Russian terminology. Gnocchi appears to be less a humble sinner or a seeker after truth but that most tiresome of individuals: the religious fanatic.

Now I have heard of this happening to Catholics who become Orthodox. As in Gnocchi’s book, they want to transform themselves into a Russian or Greek and break utterly with the West and their own past. Is this really a consequence of their own Roman Catholic heritage: the obsession with doctrinal terms, the agitated tone, a certain fixation on the clergy?  I don’t think it’s just the fault of the converts, however. For the Eastern churches themselves, as I understand it,  demand of the new convert complete repudiation of his past and of all his ancestors.  I have heard that sometimes a convert has sent such a declaration to the members of his former community or parish – was not this very book written at the instigation of Gnocchi’s elder or “staretz”? (More of this later.)

Here we come to a critical point: the “Eastern” ideology that is forcefully advocated by Gnocchi. This holds that there exists a fundamental difference between Western and Eastern Christianity dating back at least to the 4th century and that the two Churches had evolved into different mutually exclusive worlds many years before the supposedly decisive break of 1054. Indeed, for Gnocchi the decisions of the hierarchies on mutual recognition  – or not – play little or no role given this fundamental chasm between West and East. This self-understanding of Eastern Christianity as an unchanging, pure, isolated block descended from Apostolic times is the Orthodox equivalent of Western ultramontanism which tried to find the 19th century papacy in the 4th century and earlier.

This is, of course, historically preposterous. From the 4^th century onward the popes of Rome, Western doctors and saints had influenced and interacted with the East just as the doctors, saints and councils of the  Eastern Churches did the West. Indeed, Pope Gregory the Great is (probably erroneously ) considered as the author of the Orthodox service of the presanctified gifts.  Greek and Eastern popes governed the Church for much of the 7th and 8th centuries. Between 730 and 840 (with one interruption) it was the Eastern Church, not the West, that was dominated by iconoclastic heretics.   Neilos, a Greek monk (born in Italy!), recognized as a saint in both East and West. established around 1000 a monastery,  Grottaferrata, not too far removed from Rome itself. And, even afterwards, contacts between the two churches were not at all entirely broken off  – consider the career of El Greco in the 16th century in Spain, of all places.

Another alienating feature of Gnocchi’s spirituality is his relationship with his elder or staretz. This role of the staretz is personally unfamiliar to me. I had always understood it to involve the voluntary recourse by a layman, let’s say,  to the staretz – a monk who makes available to him the spiritual insights gained in the contemplative life. But Gnocchi’s staretz seems to have assumed the controlling role that used to be ascribed to the Jesuits. By the way,  it is totally untrue, as is asserted here, that this type of counseling is unknown in in the West.  We might mention the anchoresses of medieval England, just as one example.

I hope the reader does not think that the tone of this book, now confrontational, now enthusiastic, at times ranting or overblown, is typical of the faithful of the Orthodox Church. Far from it.   The born-and-bred Orthodox have a very relaxed attitude to their faith, as it is as natural to them as their own nationality. After all, the Orthodox Church still places the greatest weight on the role of the nation: Serbian, Greek, or Russian. The nation is the contemporary descendant of the governing function once performed by the Byzantine or Russian emperors.  In certain branches of Orthodoxy like the OCA (the Orthodox Church of America) or the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in America, the relationship with contemporary society becomes perhaps too cozy, resulting in problems like those afflicting the Roman Catholic Church.

And, in contrast to what Gnocchi presents, the attitude of the Orthodox, both laity and clergy, to the Western world is not at all unrelentingly hostile. Consider this passage from Gnocchi’s own book:

 In the Orthodox Church the divine liturgy is the most perfect expression of the true faith. When Pope Benedict XVI “liberalized” the celebration of the ancient mass, Patriarch Alexei II commented, “it is a step in the right direction. For if we had touched the divine liturgy, we would never have been able to survive 70 years of state atheism.”

Given its spiritual treasures, I think the case for Orthodoxy can be made. Gnocchi in this book has regrettably not succeeded in doing that. I would think this divisive work would have exactly the opposite effect. That’s a shame. Because amid this darkening world,  it is essential that all adherents of Christian Tradition rally in the defense of Christianity and the Truth.