Ah, east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet
until earth and heaven stand before God's court
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
So begins Rudyard Kipling's frequently quoted poem in The Ballad of East and West. Less well known is the continuation:
But there is neither East nor West, nor Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
When we truly meet, face to face, there is neither east nor west, borders, races, nations nor ethnicity. In the encounter, it becomes apparent that east and west require distance and alienation and, at the deepest level, a fear of not being oneself identified and fenced in, a fear of being lost and unprotected.
For Kipling, colonialism opened up the world and created new encounters. We live in a world where this openness has become second nature, where communications and migration, globalisation and digitalisation have dissolved the distances that geography and tradition, nationality and language once posed; a world where East and West, cultures and traditions are mixed and united, nationalities are changed and language barriers are overcome by AI. A clear sign of what has taken place is the fear and the reactionary tendencies that are evoked, the attempts being made to turn back the clock, re-establish borders, conjure up the lost and keep the different at a distance.
East and West are no longer geography. Eastern Christian theology and tradition are just as much at home in the USA and Western Europe as Western Christian theology, and Western Christian theology is just as much at home in Japan, India and Ethiopia as Eastern Christian theology. East and West live together. The clear boundaries between cultures and peoples, between church traditions and religious expressions, have dissolved. Something new is emerging, whether we like it or not. The old East is as bygone as the old West, the map has been redrawn and we do not really know where we are.
But does that mean Eastern Christian studies have lost their meaning, lack a future, are no longer needed? No, quite the contrary. The need is acute. If we want to avoid fear and alienation turning into hostility and contempt, if we want to avoid arrogance and inflated self-righteousness, we need to better understand both ourselves and others. Clinging to simplified, safe forms does not help in the storm. More is required. In-depth Eastern Christian studies are an unavoidable necessity for the Eastern churches living in a Western church context, but also for the Orthodox who, in their own traditional homelands, are met by massive Western cultural influence. Yet increasingly, Eastern Christian studies will also prove necessary for those of us with a Western church background, showing us a way up from the narrow ruts we have taken for granted, but dearly stuck in.
But what then characterises the Eastern Christian studies that are needed, which have a future ahead of them?
I would like to stop at three features, three central contributions to the future of the church and our own future as Christians.
Freedom from imprisonment in the present day
Eastern Christian tradition carries a freedom from being bound to time, from seeing fellowship only in the present. It nurtures, indeed lives, the fellowship with all those who have gone before, all the way back to the time of the apostles. In this way it anchors us – we who live in a turbulent time, in a time of constant encounters with the foreign, the different, the unexpected. Here is a belonging that does not demand agreement, neither consensus nor conformity, but is a deep fellowship with strangers, with people who have lived completely different lives in completely different cultures, spoken entirely different languages and thought entirely different thoughts. To revere the saints, figures such as Ephrem the Syrian, Cyril of Alexandria, Severus of Antioch, Gebre Menfis Qiddus, but also challenging strangers such as the pillar-saint Simeon Stylites and the unknown Dionysius the Areopagite, is a good medicine against xenophobia.
The freedom from time-boundedness that the Eastern Churches carry does not mean immutability. That would imply slavery and confinement, and is furthermore impossible for anything that lives. This freedom does not mean that we polish museum artefacts and dream ourselves back to the past. It helps us to understand that we belong together despite all differences, helps us to see ourselves in the stranger and the stranger in ourselves. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has captured this well in his short and very readable book Why Study the Past? Getting to know the strangers in one's own tradition, in history, indeed one's own estrangement, is the best training for a struggle against xenophobia and contempt for the other.
2) Source streams for an era at risk of depletion
Western expansion, colonialism and mission, and not least the cultural imperialism which through television and with abundant capital has spread American culture to the smallest village in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, constitutes a threat to the diversity of creation. It has not only killed off local languages and traditions, rejected diverse human experiences and numbed ways of thinking and expression, but also created fear and a loss of self-esteem, despair and hatred. Even in theology and church life, the economic and academic dominance of the West has meant a proliferation of forms and modes of expression, indeed created a monopoly on interpretation that has pushed aside other traditions, not only in the Catholic and Protestant churches, but also in the Eastern churches. Not least have they promoted division through claims to power and demands for uniformity. In today's social media, this is further amplified.
Against this, Eastern Christian studies offer a wealth of perspectives and expressions, a wealth of poetry and literature, of the language of prayer and imagery, of architecture and various ways of shaping trust in the Triune God, various ways of being the Church. Today, Eastern Christian studies are of crucial importance for maintaining the wealth of theology and church life that otherwise risks being lost. It is not a matter of the expressions and ways of thinking of the Eastern Christian tradition being better or exemplary for everyone; indeed, they are not even always compatible with one another. It is a matter of living in and from diversity, because it is only there that true love can flourish. As is well known, love requires difference, being an overcoming of separation. A good expression of this is when Saint John Moschos begins his anthology of contemporary monastic life by viewing his anecdotes as flowers in a meadow, all of which are different so that each person can pick the one they have fallen in love with.
Eastern Christian theology sees a beauty in and rejoices over the diversity that gives each of us a space to live in and plenty of room for those who are not like me, who think and live completely differently, a bread to share whose grains have been gathered from the four corners of the earth, to speak with the Didache, one of the church's oldest texts.
3) Resistance to the concentration of power
With fast communications, an accumulation of capital and ownership among a few actors, and increasingly advanced technology, we have today arrived at a dangerous concentration of power where the powerful can ignore agreements, collaborations, and the less powerful. Power wants to rule, wants centralisation and standardisation. This applies not least to religious traditions and thereby also the church. In India, the BJP party is trying to create an Indian Hindu state church, in Russia the state controls the church, in Ethiopia the church leadership is trying to centralise, and in Sweden strong political groupings are trying to reduce diversity within the Church of Sweden. Power wants control, a control that provides the opportunity to determine what may be thought and said, what is truth and a lie.
Here Eastern Christian theology offers a counterweight. Unlike the Catholic and primarily Protestant tradition, it has throughout the ages guarded itself against definitions and an increasingly explanatory and accommodating theology. Against the regulations and standardisations of Western monasticism, against the attempts of nominalist theology to make language a docile tool for control, and against the centralisation of power ongoing in various churches, the Eastern Christian tradition offers a counterweight: an emphasis on the freedom of the individual monastery, the individual bishop, the individual parish, yes, even the individual Christian. The individualism that is spoken of so much today—that which primarily consists in turning inwards upon oneself in search of attention—is no individual freedom, but rather an expression of powerlessness and the fear of non-existence. Here the monastic tradition of the Eastern Church, the wisdom of the desert, with its emphasis on self-knowledge, humility, and alienation, offers a counterweight. Here the mystical theology of the Eastern Church, with its emphasis on the endless quest, the unfathomability of God, and the limitation of language, offers a counterweight. Here offers a tradition where poetry is the primary language of theology, the language that between the lines and the words gives space to say that which cannot be said. Just think of memrê and qenê, of kontakia and zema. In the heritage of early Christendom, indeed of the ancient Greek school, there are ways of learning and practising that provide material for creativity rather than information to cling to.
Finally:
Fear is a dangerous poison that kills the freedom we are created for, the freedom which, according to one of the foremost teachers of Swedish orthodoxy, Torsten Kälvemark, characterises Eastern Christian theology, a theology that does not restrict through confession texts or decrees. In a time of polarisation, increasingly sharp contradictions, ever more irreconcilable conflicts, ever deeper divides between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, Eastern Christian theology offers a counter-force, an emphasis on friendship rather than control, on diversity rather than unity, on beauty rather than clarity, on hope in a time of despondency.
Samuel Rubenson is professor emeritus of church history at Lund University and professor of Eastern Christian studies at Sankt Ignatios College. Rubenson is – a bit like Sankt Ignatios himself – something unique in the Nordic region: an expert on the history of the Coptic, Ethiopian and Syrian churches – and on the relations between the churches and early Islam.
Throughout his academic career, Rubenson has been Sweden's leading authority on early Christianity. He has focused in particular on the emerging monastic movement in the Eastern Mediterranean. His thesis, The Letters of St. Antony, first published in 1990, has remained an international classic within the field of research. Through his major research projects focusing on education, Rubenson has helped to shape international developments in knowledge; through his acclaimed books in Swedish, he has communicated monastic knowledge to a broader Scandinavian audience.
Rubenson has never been a person who is satisfied with purely theoretical knowledge – through his upbringing in Ethiopia and studies in Egypt, he has lived alongside Eastern Christianity and cultivated close relationships with churches – and not least monasteries – in those very regions. There are many of us who have travelled with him to all corners of the Middle East. Over time, Rubenson has also been an invaluable catalyst for this institution of ours for Eastern Christian studies, Sankt Ignatios College.