According to a public opinion poll published in the second week of April, 1996, 19 percent of the Bulgarian population declare themselves to be Orthodox Christians. Regardless of the shortcomings of such polls, it must be admitted that this figure is more or less correct. A considerable portion of the Bulgarian population do accept positions in respect to the principles of their personal value systems that may justifiably be viewed as reflecting the Orthodox form of Christianity. Orthodox values thus enjoy a comparatively high relevance within the framework of modern Bulgarian culture. This is a phenomenon that cannot, and must not, be neglected.

However, the character of Orthodox values is a somewhat open and persistent question and the topic of much discussion today. Moreover, the image of Orthodoxy must be made specific to the present cultural situation. There are two fundamental positions in this regard. One adheres to Orthodoxy as it has been put forth in official doctrine and according to its essence, so to speak, while the other stresses the historically formed ideological presentation of Orthodoxy in Bulgaria. Both of these value structures insist on their Orthodox character, but there appears to be an insurmountable gap between them, something that could surprise only an outside observer.

In order to understand this situation, at least three thematic issues must be examined. First, it is necessary to abstract the specifics of Orthodoxy in accordance with its own canons, by virtue of which it exists in culture precisely as Orthodoxy. Second, the lot of Orthodoxy within the context of Bulgarian history must be considered. Third, and only in the light of the first two questions, the issue of the character of Orthodox values within the structure of modern Bulgarian culture must be raised.

Viewed in its own terms, the Orthodox Church is above all a mystical fraternity in union with God, with Christ. In this sense, the Church is a spiritual reality in which the faithful are in immediate communion with the Divine Trinity. The community that is the Church understands itself as a union of sinners who, by virtue of their religious experience, are joined with the Divinity through the love, mercy, and sanctity of Christ their head. The Orthodox Christian is thus fully entitled in respect to his religious affiliation to state "I am the Church," or rather, because of his "belonging to the Church," "We are the Church." This statement has no more than a superficial resemblance to the notion of "Christians non-aligned with the Church." In other words, Orthodoxy insists not on some type of institutional structure but rather defines itself primarily through following and worshipping God in the correct way.

Pivotal for the Christian presence in the world is the mystical spirit of Orthodox existence, at the basis of which lies the firm conviction that human intelligence is unable to grasp Divine substance positively. For the believer, God can be approached only through the acts of Divine Being that flow from His substance (ad extra). Although these are the acts of this substance, they are not the Divine substance itself. Such an attitude is obviously unable to generate any fully articulated theological doctrine. Orthodox theology is first of all a traditionally apprehended practice, a spiritual realization, and not doctrinal instruction; however, this does not at all mean that it is irrational, illogical, chaotic, or comprised of random cases. Quite the contrary, it is sufficiently strict and orderly and possesses a very clear inner connection, but it does not claim to express itself in a normative doctrinal system. Among the Christian denominations, Orthodoxy rejects most strongly all notions of pre-destination and determinism regarding human beings, and it vigorously emphasizes freedom and personal responsibility. Orthodoxy does not aim at the formation of individuals as an after thought, but rather demands persons who realize themselves through their unlimited freedom, who are personally responsible for their behavior and for the intensity of their Orthodox spirituality.

This is why a uniform Orthodox institution does not exist. Not only is every local Church a manifestation of the one and only Church, it is that very Church itself. Since each of the autonomous local Orthodox Churches is in contact with all the others (there are approximately fifteen today), it is a member of the ecclesiastical body as a whole, whose head is Christ. But this is a mystical as well as a real body. For this very reason, none of the Patriarchs, including the Patriarch of Constantinople, is able to be the sole, or even primary, administrator of the ecclesiastical body. Each of the Orthodox Patriarchs runs the affairs of his own autonomous Church and is not subject to outside pressure. According to Orthodox doctrine, the head of the Church is Christ alone, Who needs no earthly proxies and places no one to act in His stead. Therefore, there can be no question of some single organizational structure for Orthodoxy, but only of its unity in identity, which is guaranteed by the Universal Cross.

In addition, Orthodoxy emphasizes the official and organizational primacy of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in an exclusively liturgical aspect and does not consider that hierarchy to be the Church itself. The "quality" of this hierarchy, which is determined by the personal characters of its various members, is not the quality of the Church as a whole and, from the viewpoint of the Church’s essence, has only an indirect and non-essential influence on the latter.

For the same reason, it also follows that an Orthodox political doctrine does not exist. Orthodoxy has no need of any secular or ethnic power, nor of any coordination with similar authorities. In this sense, so-called "Caesaro-Papism" is primarily an explanatory mechanism that has been utilized in West European ecclesiastical and historical thought. It is not an Orthodox norm, but merely reflects particular historical phenomena that are aberrations from the proper canonical ordinances of the Church. As such, every use of Church or ecclesiastical authority for the purpose of any political or lay aspirations whatsoever is contrary to Orthodoxy. The well-known Byzantine "symphony" of ecclesiastical and lay hierarchies in no case implies the subordination of the Church (which would be hierarchical nonsense), but rather represents a concerted service to God on behalf of the competencies of each. Therefore, at least from the point of view of the Church, the task is not to introduce any lay norm into the Church, but, quite on the contrary, to introduce spiritual norms into the world. It is precisely for this reason that Orthodoxy recognizes any power, granted its Christian piety. At the same time, Orthodoxy stands in opposition to the partiality of every lay power because the Kingdom of God is not of this world. For the sake of the above mentioned symphony, Orthodox canons allotted the Christian Emperor (but not every secular ruler) the ecclesiastical order of reader, which is a lower non-priestly clerical order. But Orthodoxy emphatically insists upon both its detachment from the realm of partial, and consequently tribal or national, powers, as well as its unchanging "relatedness" to Divine eternity.

At the same time, however, the local organization of the various Orthodox Churches implies an explicit connection between the Church proper and its territorial and historical lot. The tensions induced by this state of affairs are perhaps most clearly evident in respect to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

The official establishment of Christianity in Bulgaria began with the decision of the Eighth Ecumenical Council (870 A.D.) that the Bulgarian Church should be under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The controversy concerning this affiliation had brought about the first considerable disruption in relations between Constantinople and Rome. Only a few decades later, the Bulgarian Church declared its institutional independence.

Unfortunately, this administrative establishment of Christianity resulted in a superficial Christianization and a closer commitment of the Church to the state.

After the final conquest of the Balkan peninsula by the Ottomans in the 15th century, the local Orthodox Churches lost their autonomy and became subjugated to the supremacy of the Constantinople Patriarchate. Since ethnic divisions within the Ottoman Empire were almost wholly based on religious affiliation, the determining ethnic characteristic of Bulgarians for a number of centuries was their Orthodox Christianity. This enduring entanglement between nation and religion has left its mark on the specific features of Bulgarian everyday religious awareness, particularly as it developed as a structural operator during the 19th century in respect to efforts to consolidate the Bulgarian nation.

This entanglement became a tool of the first order in the hands of the national ideologists because the operator "territory" was non-functional. This situation was conditioned not only by the fact that Bulgarians lived within the Ottoman Empire, but also by the historical vagueness of the geographical term "Bulgaria." As a consequence, language and religion were the only available factors for defining the Bulgarian nation.

The Bulgarian movement for national independence began precisely with efforts to re-establish the Bulgarian Church. These efforts were collectively a reaction to the widespread policy of assimilation of the local Greek Orthodox Church, which had been re-established in 1829 as a result of the 1821 revolution and was sanctioned by a decree of the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1850. In addition, they were also a response to efforts on the part of the Serbian Church for autonomy after 1822. After years of struggle, the Bulgarian Exarchate was finally re-established by Sultan Abdul Azis through his ferman of 28 February 1870.

However, this decree of the Sultan was in obvious conflict with Orthodox tradition, according to which a Church can be autonomous on a territorial or state principle, but never on an ethnic principle. In addition, the re-establishment of the Bulgarian Church was not only proclaimed by a secular authority, this authority was also of a foreign creed. For these reasons, the Council of Constantinople in 1872 denounced the newly autonomous Bulgarian Church, a situation that comprised the first schism within the bounds of Orthodoxy itself insofar as the newly established Bulgarian Church was thereby isolated within Orthodoxy for more than 70 years.

The Bulgarian Church eventually adopted the view that its chance for survival lay in closer relations with the Bulgarian state that had emerged after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, and the politicians and ideologists of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom, almost without exception, fostered its consolidation. The new state did not conceal its ambitions for territorial union with all those Bulgarians who were left outside the territory of the Bulgarian Principality by the Congress of Berlin. The existence of an autonomous Church was very useful in this respect since the Church, along with language, continued to be the most powerful identifying feature of the Bulgarian nation.

Church crises closely tallied with state crises in modern Bulgarian history, a situation that was aggravated after the imposition of the Communist regime in 1944. The Bulgarian Communists did not repeat the repression of the Church that had been carried out by their Russian comrades, but rather adopted a more flexible and, in the final analysis, more effective position. For example, the Communist government successfully interceded for the re-establishment of the Bulgarian Patriarchate in 1953. This took place, of course, not so much out of concern for the lot of Orthodoxy in Bulgaria as for the possible exclusive commitment of the Bulgarian Exarchate to the Moscow Patriarchate, which was dependent on the Kremlin.

But this "preservation" of the Bulgarian Church was achieved at too high a price. This was expressed not only by the obvious collaboration of Church officials with the government, but also by the sharp decline in ideological culture among the clergy. The price paid could also be seen in the prostrate attitude of the clergy towards the persecution of virtually every civic position that was based on Christian values. The final aim of such oppression during this period was the reduction of Christianity to a mere phenomenon of Bulgarian cultural history.

To summarize the discussion to this point, it could be said that the history of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, especially during the last two centuries, has been the history of an on-going "deviation" from its real vocation, which, needless to say, has led to its respective deformation. In the cultural sphere, Orthodoxy has been presented not in its essence, but rather as an element of the national and ethnic character. This applies especially to the period from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. During this period, Orthodoxy was forcibly marginalized and came to represent only the historical merit it had acquired in consolidating national identity; it thereby also served to safeguard valuable traditions of everyday life that had begun to fall into decay. In this fashion, the explicit cultural presence of the Church was reduced to a minimum, being virtually eliminated from the official ideologized culture.

After 1989, an obvious change occurred concerning the status of Orthodox values within the structure of Bulgarian culture. This change, however, cannot and must not be given a univocal evaluation insofar as the institution of the Church has squandered an historical opportunity to atone for its accumulated errors and reclaim its natural status of spiritual guide by means of a gesture of penance. Instead of doing so, the Church gave itself over to a pandemonious lack of unity in respect to political developments. (I insist on the term "lack of unity" instead of "schism" since the latter involves liturgical and dogmatic differences, which do not apply in this case.)

Furthermore, an obvious decline of the priesthood, an acute lack of spirituality, and an adherence to the letter at the expense of the spirit can be seen in every aspect of this situation. Regardless of what the course of development or eventual outcome of this state of confusion might be, it is reasonable to expect that neither now nor in the years to come will the institution of the Orthodox Church be capable of becoming a constructive factor in Bulgarian culture. The fact that the public debate concerning the role and meaning of Orthodoxy is now conducted exclusively by laymen provides the basis for a virtually irrefutable argument in support of this view.

The tensions within this debate are brought into focus by the fact that, in the period immediately preceding the collapse of Communism, a considerable number of Bulgarians, particularly among the intelligentsia, considered their affiliation to Christianity as a rebuff to Communist ideology. Stated otherwise, Christian values were viewed from a politically colored vantage point. While this may have had a certain positive effect, it unambiguously reinforced the instrumental embodiment of Orthodox values in the common dimensions of culture, if not elsewhere as well. The current attempt at the cultural assimilation of Orthodox values upon the platform of nationalism is widespread and aggressive, and not only by virtue of the tradition in this regard that has been discussed above. Within the Bulgarian cultural context, nationalism did not occupy a certain vacuum that arose after Communist ideology had been discredited insofar as the latter had already lost all cultural worth, even in the eyes of its own agents. Bulgarian nationalism is rooted rather in a mass complex of cultural inferiority that is intensified precisely in the circumstances of the open society, or rather semi-open society, that Bulgaria has now become. The average Bulgarian simply does not see any compelling reason to compare himself positively with his foreign contemporaries, nor would he in fact enjoy favorable odds in such an effort. Nationalism today has undertaken the task of compensating for this complex, but of course it cannot base itself on a cultural interpretation of the word "nation." Its only possible basis is the Blut und Boden ideology, where nation is equated with state, and both nation and state with ethnos.

The brief historical survey provided above should make it sufficiently evident why Orthodox values have not only become the "stock in trade" of nationalism but have also been promoted to frontline positions.

On the one hand, and as during the 18th and 19th centuries, today there are no factors more powerful for confirming Bulgarian ethnicity than religion and language. This is why Christianity is taken as the definitive Bulgarian religion and Orthodoxy as the root of national and political independence. Of great importance is the fact that Orthodox Christianity has proven to be the factor which distinguishes Bulgarians from both the European West as well as Byzantine culture by virtue of its local institution. Unfortunately, Orthodox Universalism has been completely sacrificed for the sake of this separative function.

On the other hand, it is precisely the combination of Orthodoxy and language that apparently has made it possible to overcome the illogical transition from ethnic encapsulation to Slavophile and Pan-Slav ideology. This has resulted primarily in a decline in Russian political and cultural influence.

Clerical circles have put up no resistance whatsoever to the ideological cliché whereby Orthodoxy has been bound to the "national" and the "political". In contrast, intellectual circles which took up positions in accordance with the canonical structure of Orthodoxy, not its historical context, began to take shape as early as the 1980s. These circles try to uphold Orthodox values not from the viewpoint of some ethnic or state affiliation, but upon the basis of the spiritual substance of Orthodoxy. It must be emphasized that this is the first time such intellectual programs have become valid as formative factors within the Bulgarian cultural context.

But it is nonetheless important to keep in mind that these circles, regardless of their high intellectual potential, by no means form the face of Bulgarian culture in a decisive way. Quite the contrary, Bulgarian intellectuals with grandiose ideas prefer to speak about the irrationalism of Orthodoxy, about what might be referred to as its basic cultural deficiency. Such figures thereby place Orthodoxy utterly at the disposal of the national, Blut und Boden ideologists. In so doing, they rely on their own ignorance of theology — which is in no way inferior to the ignorance demonstrated by these ideologists. Such ignorance is generally representative of the average and mass level of Bulgarian culture, which in its modern version tolerates only the everyday, not the elevated, forms of Orthodoxy.

In sum, certain conclusions and prognoses can be outlined upon the basis of the above discussion. First of all, it must be noted that Orthodox values are neither a decisive nor the decisive factor in modern Bulgarian culture. They have been preserved mainly at the level of political and everyday life, where they are realized not in their dogmatic constitution, but rather in an historically distorted, and distorting, context. That is why their power to shape Bulgarian culture, insofar as it can be said to exist at all, has merely an episodic and unsystematic character. However, it must be emphasized that intellectual programs which clearly state their Orthodox foundations, that is, that they have been formed explicitly upon Orthodox theological ideas, have for the first time become a fact of modern Bulgarian culture. It may be of some importance that those who comprise these circles come mostly from the young and middle-aged generations.

With regard to prognosis, it must be indicated that Christian values will not become the substantial content of Bulgarian culture for many years to come; perhaps they will never adopt such a role. This should be obvious not only from the structure of the modern cultural situation but also from the specifics of those values themselves. As has been noted, the latter demand a particular disposition of the personality and a particular spiritual power, which is why the intellectuals who now stand proxy for this value-system do not pursue its expansion and popularization. Nevertheless, these intellectual circles may eventually contribute to a change in the general formation of the Bulgarian cultural context, thereby exerting a certain influence upon its specifics provided cultural processes in Bulgaria are not forcibly interrupted but rather are left to pursue their own course of development.

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