Sobornost and the National Particularity [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 7-17]

NATIONAL PARTICULARITY
9
very early, but his view is contested by others. The domestication of
sobornost in the theological vocabulary of the Western churches during
the period between the two World Wars was an outgrowth of the ecumenical
movement, and especially of the deepening participation of Eastern Orthodox theologians and churchmen in its deliberations. Specifically in the
doctrine of the church, it has come to be seen as a way out of a false
dilemma between an institutionalism that was in danger of equating the
church with a particular historical structure and an individualism or idealism
that was in danger of making the church into an abstraction or an afterthought. For by its emphasis on tradition as a living reality, Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology made the catholicity of the church visible, but visible
as an article of faith, at the same time, it emphasized the national particularity of the forms that this church catholic assumed in particular cultures.
In the history of the Christian Church, that tension of sobornost
and national particularity has made its presence felt at various times and
in various ways. I shall be examining here in some detail two movements
from the church history of Central Europe: the Hussite Reformation and
the Metropolitanate of Lviv-Halyc. On the other side both of the Eastern
and of the Western boundaries of whatever we take to be "Central Europe,"
however, every specific manifestation of the tension between national
particularity and ecclesiological universality has provided a revealing index
to the special genius of that unique place and time, but also a helpful insight
into the definition of catholicity. Because they can serve as a context within
which to consider the two Central European experiments in coping with
the tension and because they also help to explain attitudes toward the
Central European incidents I shall be discussing, I propose first to look
briefly at one example of the tension in the East and one in the West:
the jurisdictional concept of "autocephaly" in the canon law of the Eastern
Orthodox Church, and the political-national movement of "Gallicanism"
in the Church of France within the Western Roman Catholic Church.
If we start with the definition of "autocephalous church" in the bestknown of the Russian Orthodox theological dictionaries, the paradigm
set forth is the relation among the major centers of the church in the first
centuries, when the patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem,
and Alexandria (as well as Antioch) each had autonomous jurisdiction,
without a central monarch. Their catholic unity and sobornost was achieved
and maintained by the "ecumenical council [sobor]," in which they together legislated on matters of faith and morals. But, to stay with standard
works of reference for the moment, it is clear from the puzzlement manifest
in the interpretation of "autocephaly" even by an extremely learned, if in
many surprising ways fundamentally unsympathetic, Western observer
like the French Assumptionist Martin Jugie (1878-1954),5 that any comparison between the canon law of the Western church and that of the Eastern
church will almost inevitably find the Eastern model of the structure of the