Orthodox Christian Material Culture

Of People and Things in the Making of Heaven

Timothy Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367590550
• eBook ISBN: 9781351027045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Although much has been written on the making of art objects as a means of engaging in creative productions of the self (most famously Alfred Gell's work), there has been very little written on Orthodox Christianity and its use of material within religious self-formation. Eastern Orthodox Christianity is renowned for its artistry and the aesthetics of its worship being an integral part of devout practice. Yet this is an area with little ethnographic exploration available and even scarcer ethnographic attention given to the material culture of Eastern Christianity outside the traditional 'homelands' of the greater Levant and Eastern Europe.

Drawing from and building upon Gell's work, Carroll explores the uses and purposes of material culture in Eastern Orthodox Christian worship. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a small Antiochian Orthodox parish in London, Carroll focusses on a study of ecclesiastical fabric but places this within the wider context of Orthodox material ecology in Britain. This ethnographic exploration leads to discussion of the role of materials in the construction of religious identity, material understandings of religion, and pathways of pilgrimatic engagement and religious movement across Europe.

In a religious tradition characterised by repetition and continuity, but also as sensuously tactile, this book argues that material objects are necessary for the continual production of Orthodox Christians as art-like subjects. It is an important contribution to the corpus of literature on the anthropology of material culture and art and the anthropology of religion.

Part I

People and place

1British Orthodoxy¹

Orthodox Christians in England understand themselves to be the inheritors of an ancient tradition in the British Isles going back as far as St Aristobulus,² who was numbered among the seventy disciples of Jesus,³ and was raised to the episcopacy and sent to Britain by St Paul.⁴ This Orthodox heritage stretched down until St Edward the Confessor and his son the Martyr King Harold (cf Moss 2011). With the Conquest of William of Normandy, however, Orthodox Christians see a break in the constitution of England as an Orthodox nation. William, acting under the blessing of the recently excommunicated See of Rome, ended the Orthodox heritage of England.

The ecclesiastical rift between Orthodox Christians and other Christians in Britain was then made worse by the destruction of the Orthodox material culture. The Dissolution of the Monasteries undertaken by Henry VIII destroyed much of the material remains of Orthodox Christianity. By this point in time, only the ecumenically minded Orthodox Christian would consider the monastics in Britain to be spiritual kin, but there is a great loss felt by Orthodox Britons, nonetheless, because the destruction included many ancient relics, ikons, and monasteries that were extant from the period before the Schism and Conquest. This event in British history marks a worsening by degrees of an already dire situation. While the Roman Catholics were bad, one informant said, the Protestants proved much more hostile and destructive.

While the past is central to this section, it is not concerned with history; rather, it is about continuity. Husserl draws a useful distinction between an historical event remembered and a past event still experienced (Husserl 1991). In the context of Orthodox Britain, for example, while the Battle of Hastings is an historical event, the Conquest and consequential severance of the Church in Britain from the Orthodox Church is a moment of the past still experienced for Orthodox Christians in Britain today. For Husserl, history is something that takes the mind’s attention and focuses it on something separate and past (ibid.; see also Gell 1992a, 1998; Gosden 1994). As what he calls a ‘reproduction’, historical considerations restrict the mind’s perception from the present context. In contrast, he outlines a system wherein the past is remembered as a continuity of the present. A musical note held for five seconds is, in this way, seen to be a ‘time object’, wherein the first second of the note is held in the mind, as a ‘retention’, when hearing the final second. The first is still being experienced even though it has passed. Husserlian retentions, and their forward-looking sisters, ‘protentions’, expand the ‘time horizons’ of the present (Gell 1992a; Husserl 1991). It is the argument here sustained that Orthodox British presence is an ‘expanded present’, which includes people such as St Aristobulus and events like the Dissolution of the Monasteries within the local time horizons of Orthodox presence. As such, this section is not so much an ‘historical background’ as an ‘expanded present context’.

My argument, however, moves beyond Husserl’s focus on the perception of phenomena to consider the sensuous, affective aspects of those things held within perception. This artefactual approach, looking at the qualities of materials moving forward in time, is largely done following Alfred Gell’s application of Husserl to the analysis of art (Gell 1998, 2013). In his understanding of the extended mind, Gell sees art-like production to be a process of objectification of the artist’s mind (1998:265). Earlier pieces, which exhibit themes developed in later pieces, are seen as retention within the whole œuvre of an artist’s life work (1998, 2013). For Gell, there is a strong bond between the perception (and reception) of an art-like object and the artist’s mind, linked through the medium of the art-like object (1992a, 1998). The manipulation of materials is able to produce pieces that trap the viewer, drawing the viewer into a relationship with the mind of the artist and the prototype after which the piece is modelled (Gell 1992b, 1996, 1998).

Gell applies this model of relations of retentions and protentions both within a single artist’s corpus (2013) and within artefactual elements of a larger society (1998, 2013). Examining a Maori meetinghouse, Gell identifies the assemblage of woodcarvings that form the architectural structure of the building as a series of retentions of previous generations and protentions toward future generations (1998:251ff). These, which Husserl classes together as ‘intentions’, produce an expanded present in which the multiple generations of a Maori clan may be together present at the same time via the artefactual quality of the house-as-intention.

Following this material reading of Husserl, I argue that episodes such as the Conquest and people such as the 7th-century St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne form elements of St Æthelwald’s past, not as history, but as a set of retentions.

It should be noted that my informants did not use this Husserlian model to understand their own material practice of the saints. A few with whom these ideas were shared did see the promising nature of the enquiry; however, within their own teaching and discussions of the past, the language that is used is that of collective consciousness (having ‘the mind of the Church’) and familial history. There is an understanding of inherited memory that ties individuals into the intergenerational community of both the living and those who have died. In a sense, everything that is remembered is held in common lived memory. The analogy that is used by the St Æthelwald’s parish priest to describe this to neophytes is that of family history. A newly wed in-law will never truly become part of the family, the argument goes, unless he takes on the stories of his bride’s heritage as his own. He may be welcomed at the table, included in family events, but until he takes on the memory of his new wife’s family, he will always be, in Fr Theophan’s words, ‘just that guy our Svetlana married’. This ‘family history’ of the Orthodox Church includes a wide range of events often recalled in no particular order, such as the Diocletian persecution, the Ikonoclastic Era, Julian the Apostate, the Ottoman and Turkish Yoke, the Communist Yoke, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. These are all events that the family has endured, and each shapes this community in their relationship to the Britain in which they now find themselves. It is a Britain that is often hostile, but is also rich with retentions of the Church’s own material culture. Each of these events has shaped the Church, and in many cases their evidence can be seen in the Feasts of the Church, the biographies of the saints, or the ethnic make-up of the local congregations.

Pilgrimages to places such as Barking Abbey and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham work to celebrate what the priest at St Æthelwald’s sister parish in Essex calls ‘the holiness of our own region’ (News Letter 176 [2011], cited at length in Chapter 3). Orthodox Christians find themselves in Britain surrounded by places that have an ancient sacred character, and this character is considered to still colour the nature of the place today. As such, the ancient saints, as well as the devastation of the Conquest and Dissolution, are active parts of how Orthodox Britons constitute their environment. These local events are part of a wider historic narrative that is held, to greater or lesser degree, by all those in the parish.

Modern re-emergence

This is Orthodoxy’s ancient presence in Britain. It stretches back to include members of Christ’s own following, and boasts a thousand years of vibrant religious fervency and cultural production, notably at sites quite close to St Æthelwald’s physical location, such as the monastery of Barking Abbey. Orthodoxy’s recent presence dates back to the slow introduction of merchants, students, and labourers, mostly from Greece, starting in the 17th century (Catsiyannis 1993; Harris 2009). The first modern Orthodox parish in Britain was founded in London in 1677, in Soho, dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God. Though started under the patronage of the then Duke of York, King James VII, it was short lived, and was closed after the Anglican Bishop of London complained about its ‘Romish’ practice of ikon usage (Theocharous 2000). Greek Street, in Soho, still bears its name – the only evidence of the former parish. In 1698, Tsar Peter the Great visited England, spending four months in the capital. During his stay, a small parish was established in conjunction with the Russian embassy. Welcoming both Greek and Slavonic worshippers together, it quickly outgrew its housing within the embassy; but this parish is thought to be the first permanent Orthodox Christian parish in modern Britain, and though it has moved several times, the community claims continuity with the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad cathedral parish of the Dormition of the Mother of God and the Royal Martyrs (ROCA 2005), now in Gunnersbury.

By the 1920s, the Orthodox population, mostly Greek and Russian, was large enough to warrant episcopal oversight. First by the Œcumenical Throne of Constantinople, in 1922, and then by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (later ROCOR), in 1929, Orthodox bishops were named for London. The Orthodox Christian presence in Britain grew again, in three marked waves. The first was that of the Cypriot immigration following the Turkish invasion in 1974. The second was of various Eastern European communities following the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent inauguration of ‘free movement’ within the European Union. The third is a ‘native’ movement (used in inverted commas, oftentimes, by those in the movement themselves). Largely led by a group of former Anglican ministers who, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the liberalisation and modernisation of the Church of England, this third group sought entrance into the Orthodox Church (Harper 1999). A priest intimately connected within the dialogues concerning this group, though himself outside the group, described to me a process which included the formation of a synod of Greek, Russian, and Antiochian clerical authorities in order to determine whether indeed the group should be received into the Orthodox Church, and if so, on what grounds. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, however, circumnavigated this process when the Patriarch decided to receive the group as a whole. The group was received into the Antiochian Greek Orthodox Church in 1995 by Patriarch Ignatios IV (Hazim). A deanery was created for those parishes in the United Kingdom and Ireland and placed under the episcopal oversight of Metropolitan Gabriel (Saliby) of Paris (Hallam n.d.). At the time of my research, the parish of St Æthelwald’s was one among roughly fifteen Antiochian parishes. In 2013, the deanery was elevated in status and is now the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland.

While the parish was started with a majority of ex-Anglicans of British, if not English, ancestry, the parish has become increasingly varied in its demography. The priest describes the parish as a ‘truly metropolitan parish for a truly metropolitan city’, and he is correct in assessing the parish as having a variety of ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds. As a general principle, everyone is drawn to this parish, as opposed to the countless others across London, because St Æthelwald’s is unique in offering the weekly Liturgy in English. This lingua franca unites native English speakers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Jamaica, New Zealand, and Australia. Others have chosen the parish either because the Liturgy is not offered in their native tongue (Italian, Spanish, German, Polish) or because they would prefer to worship in the national language as opposed to the ‘Orthodox’ language they speak (Greek, Romanian, Russian, Serbian). Because of the nature of St Æthelwald’s as an urban parish, the number of parishioners and visitors on any given Sunday varies quite widely. On most Sundays, between thirty and forty persons can be expected to be present. Pascha – which in any parish always boasts the greatest numbers of attendees – in 2012 was attended by eighty persons.

St Æthelwald’s

This book is based on three years’ participant observation from September 2009 to August 2012. The parish is called St Æthelwald’s Antiochian Orthodox Parish, and it rents space each week from the synonymously named Church of England parish. The parish underwent a significant demographic shift during the three years of ethnographic engagement, but in general the temple of St Æthelwald’s had about forty people on a Sunday morning. A much larger number of people, closer to 200, were either occasional attendees – but primarily based at other parishes, either in London or abroad – or members of the parish but house-bound and consequently present only rarely, if ever. Due to the infrequent contact between fellow parishioners, a core group of parishioners, and key informants, stayed together, past the Liturgy and past the weekly parish lunch, attending ‘coffee club’ well into the evening. Along with this routinised participation in the parish each Sunday between, roughly, 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., I also joined parishioners on ‘family days’, hosted at various homes; parish outings to sister parishes across London to celebrate mid-week feasts; and local pilgrimages within England. Each of these is discussed in more detail in the subsequent chapter. Alongside these group settings, I also joined individual parishioners in attending other parishes (outlined in the next chapter) – this provided insight into how parishioners supplement the limited services offered at St Æthelwald’s. It also afforded comparison in terms of how St Æthelwald’s ritual practice fits within wider circles of Orthodox Christianity. Furthermore, informal interviews were conducted with roughly thirty parishioners as well as roughly a dozen individuals from sister parishes across the diocese. When possible, interviews were conducted in the parishioner’s home, many of these lasting several hours, and most individuals were interviewed several times over the three years. Key informants were engaged in interviews at regular intervals in order to gain a sense of how the yearly cycles of feasting and fasting, including colour shifts and the change in fabrics used in the liturgical cycle, affected the individual. As September is considered the Church New Year, the three years of participant observation coincided with three full performances of the liturgical calendar. Along with interviews, several outings – such as personal retreats to St John’s Monastery in Essex, or the gathering of oak galls from Epping Forest in order to render traditional ink for ikonographic work – extended out of the parish community, following individuals as they performed their religious devotion.

Another important aspect of my research engagement with the parish relates to the fact that Orthodox Christians, at least in my experience, have a regular practice of recommending, along with pilgrimages and the use of ritual paraphernalia, books and other text-based resources. Informants routinely directed my questions to both published and online resources. In the Introduction, it is argued that engaging theology is an analytical necessity arising from an arts-approach to the materiality of transformation, particularly following Campbell’s development of Gellian thought. Here, it is seen that engaging theology is a methodological necessity arising from the saliency of theology (both codified and otherwise) within the fieldsite. During the course of research, I became better at asking questions which would elicit individuals’ thoughts, but I also made a practice of reading the monastic, academic, Patristic, and spiritual texts recommended to me. As this book is not a theological study or an anthropological study of theology, these texts are quoted in this book only rarely; however, they proved methodologically beneficial in two ways. Principally, they gave me a broad sense of the debates internal to Orthodox Christian practice (theological, political, ethical, social). This supplied the context in which to understand many of the statements my informants made. Furthermore, they provided me with a less ‘foreign’ language with which I could phrase more meaningful and less hostile questions that elicited more informative answers. This might appear tangential to the primary interest of this book: the how and why of fabric in Orthodox worship. However, reading theological text provided a greater insight into Eastern Orthodox tropes and modes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface (by way of apology)
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on language usage
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I People and place
• Part II Materials
• Part III Making heaven
• Diagram of St Æthelwald’s Parish Church
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index