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

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JAROSLAV PELIKAN
et ad aeternam salutem pertinentium," which had been entrusted to the
successors of Peter, and authority over "rerum civilium et temporalium,"
which the New Testament had reserved for temporal rulers; the Articles
quoted the familiar words of the Epistle to the Romans about "the powers
that be," which had after all been spoken about the emperor Nero.
Both the principle of autocephaly within Eastern Orthodoxy, "New
Rome," and the theory of Gallicanism within Western Catholicism, "Old
Rome," were efforts to come to terms with the two elements of the tension
stated in our title: "sobornost and national particularity." But because
of its situation midway between Old Rome and New Rome, Central Europe
has manifested that tension in special forms and with special poignancy.
Two of the territories listed by Masaryk in his attempt to draw the boundaries are "Bohemia [Cechy]" and "Galicia [Halic]." As it happens, the
Hussite Reformation among the Czechs and the Catholic Metropolitanate
of Lviv-Halyc among the Ukrainians-so radically different from each other
in origin, development, and outcome-are two especially intriguing case
studies in how national particularity and the quest for universality have
interacted there. An examination of this question-or cluster of questionsmay therefore illumine not only the history of the definition of una sancta
catholica et apostolica, but the special nature both of the religious and of
the national experience of Mitteleuropa.
As much of the scholarly and theological literature about Jan Hus
and the Hussite movement demonstrates, it is almost irresistibly tempting,
but also disastrously simplistic, to see the fundamental impulse of that
movement as the espousal of national particularity against the authority
of Roman Catholic sobornost. The critique of "Masarykova ceska filosofie"
in the Cesky Casopis Historicky of 1912 by Josef Pekai emphasized just
how Roman Catholic the theology of Jan Hus still was, and several recent
studies, notably those of the Belgian Roman Catholic scholar Paul de
Vooght, L'heresie de Jean Hus (1960) and Jacobellus de Stf[bro (1972),
have been devoted to this theme. Even without accepting Vooght's entire
thesis, we must recognize how Hussite ecclesiology struggled to do justice
not only to Czech nationhood but to both elements of the tension. It is
possible to specify at least three ways it did so.
The first, and in many respects the most fundamental, was the very
definition of reform. From an external or institutional definition of the
essence of the church, the Hussite reform, and any reform so conceived
and so dedicated, must be seen as schismatic: there could be no conceivable
reason, under any circumstances, for severing ties with the Holy See. Not
only does such a view overlook the existential crisis in which the very
identity of the "Holy See" was caught as a consequence of the Babylonian
Captivity in Avignon and then the Great Schism, but it fails to grasp what
was at stake in the reform of the church according to Hussite (and not
only Hussite) doctrine. Of the four "notes of the church" enumerated