Very insightful, thank you for the explanation. Yes, this entanglement with state power is something I’ve noticed myself (although I’ve had more opportunity to observe the Church’s relationship with more recent regimes). Here, Orthodox Christianity is as much of an official state religion as you could get in a European country. The Patriarch is present at most important non-religious events; a Church representative was there at the opening of my university year (and I mean, I’m in engineering, he had no inherent business being there). Politicians use the mass appeal of the Orthodox faith to win sympathisers during elections, and people care very much about non-mainstream religious affiliations of rulers—anything non-Orthodox is bound to reflect badly on them. There’s a huge cathedral being built somewhere in my city, and I just recently found out that it was being built within the perimeter of the seat of government… talk about caesaropapism, now they made it official! In high school there was a sort of essay I had to make for the religious education class I had been forced into, and when I said I was going to write on Church activity during the Communist era, all the teachers were on me to coerce me into only highlighting how badly the Church got oppressed by the regime, and not mentioning a word on all the collaboration some priests did with it. Apparently my business there was earning them sympathy. This is about how much power they have.
Interesting how you connect historical decentralization to the onset of the Middle Ages, thus claiming that Eastern Orthodoxy is not even medieval (I never really thought of how there might have been no exact Eastern European equivalent to the medieval era, just took the whole thing chronologically), and then that to a betterment in the intellectual condition of the populace. Some people say that, from a sociological point of view, it was Orthodoxy holding us back; just like how (I think) Weber claimed that Protestantism favoured the development of capitalism in the West (mostly countries with a Germanic language, it seems to me), so it might be that some specifically Orthodox paradigms which bled into non-religious aspects of life were what stopped Eastern Europe from witnessing the same rhythm of development as Western or Central or even Southern Europe. I don’t know what those are, but it doesn’t seem implausible to me.
I think what I proposed is a factor, but it does not explain everything. While the medieval decentralisation of Germany, Italy, or even France (where Burgundy could wage war against his liege and it was not really seen as something abnormal, or how pairage / peerage meant in a sense being equal to the king), Hungary was about as Catholic as it comes and yet it was more centralized, at the very least beginning with the Anjou era in Hungary, Caroberto. In fact the Hungarian pattern seems similar to the Eastern Orthodox one, just Catholicized. E.g. at 20th Aug the birthday of the country the embalmed right hand of King Saint Stephen is carried around in a procession by bishops. A very clear unity of throne and altar.
I think the chain of causality is closer to factor X → decentralisation, weakening of state power → religion keeps some distance from the state, rather than religious statism preserving the strength of the state. But I have no idea what the factor X may be.
Very insightful, thank you for the explanation. Yes, this entanglement with state power is something I’ve noticed myself (although I’ve had more opportunity to observe the Church’s relationship with more recent regimes). Here, Orthodox Christianity is as much of an official state religion as you could get in a European country. The Patriarch is present at most important non-religious events; a Church representative was there at the opening of my university year (and I mean, I’m in engineering, he had no inherent business being there). Politicians use the mass appeal of the Orthodox faith to win sympathisers during elections, and people care very much about non-mainstream religious affiliations of rulers—anything non-Orthodox is bound to reflect badly on them. There’s a huge cathedral being built somewhere in my city, and I just recently found out that it was being built within the perimeter of the seat of government… talk about caesaropapism, now they made it official! In high school there was a sort of essay I had to make for the religious education class I had been forced into, and when I said I was going to write on Church activity during the Communist era, all the teachers were on me to coerce me into only highlighting how badly the Church got oppressed by the regime, and not mentioning a word on all the collaboration some priests did with it. Apparently my business there was earning them sympathy. This is about how much power they have.
Interesting how you connect historical decentralization to the onset of the Middle Ages, thus claiming that Eastern Orthodoxy is not even medieval (I never really thought of how there might have been no exact Eastern European equivalent to the medieval era, just took the whole thing chronologically), and then that to a betterment in the intellectual condition of the populace. Some people say that, from a sociological point of view, it was Orthodoxy holding us back; just like how (I think) Weber claimed that Protestantism favoured the development of capitalism in the West (mostly countries with a Germanic language, it seems to me), so it might be that some specifically Orthodox paradigms which bled into non-religious aspects of life were what stopped Eastern Europe from witnessing the same rhythm of development as Western or Central or even Southern Europe. I don’t know what those are, but it doesn’t seem implausible to me.
I think what I proposed is a factor, but it does not explain everything. While the medieval decentralisation of Germany, Italy, or even France (where Burgundy could wage war against his liege and it was not really seen as something abnormal, or how pairage / peerage meant in a sense being equal to the king), Hungary was about as Catholic as it comes and yet it was more centralized, at the very least beginning with the Anjou era in Hungary, Caroberto. In fact the Hungarian pattern seems similar to the Eastern Orthodox one, just Catholicized. E.g. at 20th Aug the birthday of the country the embalmed right hand of King Saint Stephen is carried around in a procession by bishops. A very clear unity of throne and altar.
I think the chain of causality is closer to factor X → decentralisation, weakening of state power → religion keeps some distance from the state, rather than religious statism preserving the strength of the state. But I have no idea what the factor X may be.