Dositheos Notaras, the Patriarch of Jerusalem (1669-1707), Confronts the Challenges of Modernity

IN SEARCH OF A CONFESSIONAL IDENTITY: DOSITHEOS NOTARAS, THE PATRIARCH OF JERUSALEM (1669-1707), CONFRONTS THE CHALLENGES OF MODERNITY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Christopher George Rene IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser Theofanis G. Stavrou SEPTEMBER 2020 © Christopher G Rene, September 2020 i Acknowledgements Without the steadfast support of my teachers, family and friends this dissertation would not have been possible, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to express my deep debt of gratitude and thank them all. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, who together guided me through to the completion of this dissertation. My adviser Professor Theofanis G. Stavrou provided a resourceful outlet by helping me navigate through administrative channels and stay on course academically. Moreover, he fostered an inviting space for parrhesia with vigorous dialogue and intellectual tenacity on the ideas of identity, modernity, and the role of Patriarch Dositheos. It was in fact Professor Stavrou who many years ago at a Slavic conference broached the idea of an Orthodox Commonwealth that inspired other academics and myself to pursue the topic. Professor Carla Phillips impressed upon me the significance of daily life among the people of Europe during the early modern period (1450-1800). As Professor Phillips’ teaching assistant for a number of years, I witnessed lectures that animated the historical narrative and inspired students to question their own unique sense of historical continuity and discontinuities. Thank you, Professor Phillips, for such a pedagogical example. Dr. Eric Weitz encouraged me to view Martin Luther’s Revolution within the broader context of German historiography, particularly its ‘modernity’ and the Sonderweg. His insightful comments and his own work on Weimar Germany and the Armenian genocide had a crucial role in shaping my appreciation for media’s influence on the public. Dr. Gary Jahn contributed his insights on the attraction of hesychasm within Russia’s spiritual and literary traditions, particularly the Philokalia. Dr. Christopher Isett contributed a great ii deal of his time and advice to help with preparations for my doctoral exam; in addition, he graciously accepted to join my committee in the latter stages of my dissertation. I would also like to thank Soterios Stavrou. He sacrificed countless afternoons guiding me through the Greek sources and patiently helping with my translations. Throughout my career at Minnesota, I was fortunate enough to receive a number of financial gifts. The Department of History supported four years of tuition assistance and living expenses by providing me with the Albert and Virginia Wimmer Fellowship and a program of paedeia through teaching assistant appointments. The Department also extended its generosity to me beyond those years when the need arose. Through the Modern Greek Studies Program I received a scholarship that allowed me to conduct research in Greece and participate in the truly ecumenical program Students for Amity Among Nations. In addition, the Institute For Balkan Studies scholarship, supported by Greece’s Ministry of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs, twice offered me the experience of an immersive Greek language educational program in Thessaloniki. The A. G. Leventis Foundation Fellowship in Hellenic Studies granted me the opportunity to participate in The American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) program for Medieval Greek hosted by the Gennadius Library in Athens, Greece. I would also especially like to thank the founders of the Basil Laourdas Fellowship for Modern Greek Studies and Greek Slavic Relations who offered financial support at critical moments during the writing of this dissertation. At the time when I was contemplating beginning my graduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota, I discovered, much to my joy, that several graduate students had already been through the special program in Easternn Orthodox history and culture at iii Minnesota.which, at the time, was under the leadership of Professor Theofanis G. Stavrou and the Center for Modern Greek Studies.. Professor Stavrou had already established the James W. Cunningham Memorial Lecture in Orthodox History and Culture. Much to my good fortune, in 1998 Jaroslav Pelikan was invited to deliver that year's Cunningham lecture entitled “Eastern Orthodox Quest for Confessional Identity: Where Does Orthodoxy Confess What It Believes and Teaches” (subsequently published in the Modern Greek Studies Yearbook). During this particular visit at Minnesota, Professor Pelikan also announced a projected multi-volume work on “Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition”, undertaken in collaboration with Valerie R. Hotchkiss. Published in 2003, this work has been a significant milestone in my research on the subject which gradually became the main theme of my dissertation. I am most grateful for the existence of this publication, as I am for the seminal work of several other scholars in this field. I can only hope that my work meets with their approval. Finally, I want to thank my mother and sister for their support over the years and abiding faith in me. Panteleymon Anastasakis for being my friend from the very beginning, thank you. Dr. James Thompson, thank you for our conversations and the encouragement. And, especially, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Karen Infield for her overabounding love, generosity, and grace. Transliterating modern Greek remains challenging because of the variety of systems attempted by scholars through the years. This is particularly true of diphthongs and the letter “η”. Similarly, many of the Greek names which appear in the dissertation vary slightly. This is especially the case with names which have been Latinized and which have a slightly different ending, such as Gennadios or Gennadius. Therefore, iv instead of attempting to adopt a uniform system, I opted for an approach which, despite obvious anomalies, may still serve as a reasonable guide to the reader. v Abstract I began my dissertation by asserting that the internet and modernity brought neither unity nor secularism, and I concluded by pointing to the Greek Revolution which resulted in the creation of a Greek nation-state and independent church. In between stood the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheos, who produced a Confession of Faith in 1672 meant to identify, unify, and shield the Orthodox East from the Christian West. Dositheos identified the Orthodox East by blaming the Roman Catholic Church for breaking the first Ecumenical or Universal Creed from the fourth century, and thereby, forming a distinctively western, national church. Dositheos sought to unify the different orthodox communities within the Orthodox Commonwealth by means of educational reforms based on the Greek language and Greek printing press. As an apologist, he shielded the Orthodox East from western modernity by defending the sufficiency of hesychasm, a specifically eastern type of prayer, and the Philokalic literary tradition, which was a collection of writings by those hesychast practitioners. As a confessor, Dositheos’ quest for an Orthodox universalism was paradoxical because he sought to unify the East by dividing it from the West. This tension between unity and particularism explains why Norman Russell stated that Dositheos’ “…anti-Westernism was the product of a profound conviction in Orthodoxy’s ecumenicity.” In other words, Dositheos rejected union with the West in favor of his desire for a unique Eastern Orthodox universalism within the tradition established by the Ecumenical or Universal Creeds. My analysis of Dositheos as a confessor offers a fresh historical account for this paradoxical phenomenon—that is, namely, unity through division. By convention, historians have limited the category of the confessor within a confessional box where the vi priest absolves the confessed sin of the parishioner. The confessor did indeed perform the priestly role of absolving sin. The personification of the confessor, however, as a celebrated living martyr of early church state persecutions, was appropriated in the fourth century and denatured into a common trope for rhetorical and performative purposes at the first Ecumenical or Universal Council. The propagated tale of the confessor served the role in a conciliar narrative (i.e., a public council for ‘truth and reconciliation’) designed for achieving a public orthodoxy—the irenic ideology of one church. To the confessor was entrusted the call for unity—the schema. Thus, amidst the Constantinian shift to one God, one empire, one emperor stood the confessor who spoke the schema accordingly, and an audience who heard the shema. As a spokesperson or public representative of orthodoxy, the confessor’s schema was a call to orthodox unity, and in the confessor’s tale that call ended formal debate. For the audience the confessor’s schema was meant to be heard as a shema—a creed to be believed and obeyed. This theatrical or conciliar platform for shaping public opinion or ortho-doxa (correct opinion) not only staged the positions and determined the roles of the speaker and audience, but also framed the articulation of that intercourse between speech and silence as orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as unity and division. In the early modern period, influenced by the impact of the print revolution

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