Clark, Roland. "Introduction." Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920S Romania: the Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building

Clark, Roland. "Introduction." Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania: The Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 1–15. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350100985.ch-00I>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 05:46 UTC. Copyright © Roland Clark 2021. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Introduction Ruth Rouse, a former Anglican missionary, spent eight days in Bucharest as part of a fact-finding journey through Europe for the World Christian Student Federation at the end of January 1911. She found Romanian attitudes to religion completely foreign and inexplicable according to the criteria of British Protestantism. Rouse noted down some of her observations in a report to the Federation. Irreligion prevails amongst the educated. I will not say Agnosticism or Atheism: their irreligion is far too unreasoned and a matter of atmosphere to be classified under one form of unbelief or another. They have simply no interest in religion, no idea that it could possibly have significance for any educated person. Religion is for them dead and gone. Never in any country have I suffered so from the impression that spiritual ideas, however simply expressed, were simply not understood. The church of the country is Orthodox, but can do nothing for educated people. They openly mock at their priests, who are for the most part low-class men, uneducated, sometimes unable to read, often with no form of training for their work except ability to read the services, unpaid, venal, because dependent for their livelihood on fees for religious services, and too often of bad life. Yet, with all their contempt for their church, the Roumanians have a Chauvinistic dread of foreign influence, and do all they can to make missionary work among them impossible. They are exceedingly suspicious of Roman Catholicism, which has made some progress. They are suspicious also of Protestant effort, though in a less degree. Protestant missions are represented by the Seventh-Day Adventists and Plymouth Brethren. Both have made some progress, though their missionaries are put over the border as soon as they are found at work. Reform movements within the church scarcely exist. There are, however, some signs of hope. The Roumanian Church possesses one great advantage over all other Orthodox Churches. The services and the Scriptures are read in 2 Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania the language of the people, not in an incomprehensible Archaic tongue. Some priests are striving after better things … Some earnest laymen are issuing a little magazine giving very simply religious instruction of a decidedly evangelical kind. It is rather closely modelled on the magazine issued by the Plymouth Brethren, and even reproduces its articles, but it is an Orthodox effort.1 Rouse’s reports about her visits to Balkan countries were consistently derogatory and her language more than a little racist. She wrote about Serbians, for example, that they had a fanatical attachment to [the Orthodox Church] as a national institution, combined with open avowed sceptism [sic] and utter contempt for the priests as uneducated and corrupt. But whether from a kind of superstition or a primitive sort of hypocrisy, (the Servians are very primitive in lots of ways) many of them still seem to go through a certain amount of church attendance.2 The idea that Serbians went to church when Romanians did not gives us an insight into the reliability of Rouse and other commentators who bemoaned the lack of Romanian religiosity. Serbians were famous in the Balkans for failing to attend church services, and Romania had roughly one parish priest for every 900 people, compared to Serbia’s one per 3,000 people.3 Commentaries about how ‘religious’ a society is are always in the eye of the observer. Knowing what is going on in someone else’s heart and mind when they close their eyes in prayer is impossible when you are standing next to them, let alone when we are talking about entire countries of people who lived a hundred years ago. Regardless of how accurate Rouse’s negative views about Romanian religiosity were, such opinions were consistently reiterated by Romanian writers for the next twenty years. During the late nineteenth century British and American ideas about what constituted ‘good’ religion came to dominate Romanian public opinion. According to Western criteria, churches were judged based on how many people attended weekly worship services, how much they respected their clergy, how well lay people were able to articulate their beliefs, how fervently people embraced these beliefs (as expressed through their emotional states) 1 Ruth Rouse, Report to the World Student Christian Federation, ‘Roumania, 25 January to 2 February 1911’, Lambeth Palace Archives, R. T. Davidson Papers, Student Christian Movement, 1905–25, vol. 491, ff. 50–1. 2 Rouse, ‘Serbia, 3–7 February 1911’, in ibid., ff. 53–4. On Ruth Rouse, see Ruth Franzén, Ruth Rouse Among Students: Global, Missiological and Ecumenical Perspectives (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2008). 3 Bojan Aleksov, Religious Dissent between the Modern and the National: Nazarenes in Hungary and Serbia 1850–1914 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 42 n. 50. Introduction 3 and how strongly religion shaped believers’ everyday lives. Grigorie Comşa, a dedicated anti-Protestant evangelist, complained in 1921 that ‘in church life we see indifference about indifference. We acknowledge painfully that even some priests are addicted to commerce. No one goes to church anymore; the laws and commandments of the church are ignored. Adultery is becoming widespread; the name of God is mocked, the holy mysteries are trodden underfoot, and sectarianism ravages the land.’ 4 The editors of the church magazine Crucea (The Cross) introduced their first issue in 1923 by stating that ‘almost everyone now believes that the Romanian Orthodox Church is incapable of doing its j o b’. 5 Nicolae Iorga, a well-known atheist, committed nationalist and erudite historian, concluded the second edition of his two-volume History of the Romanian Churches (1928) by observing that, at the beginning of the First World War, ‘following the destruction of its spirit and purpose by the constant intrusions of the state as [political] parties vied for its control, the Church of the Romanian Kingdom no longer represents that moral force which once constituted its glory’.6 Rouse and other commentators point to a general dissatisfaction with the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) as a social and spiritual institution, coupled with a deep hostility toward foreigners – and towards foreign missionaries in particular. At the same time, they noted that there were efforts by both priests and laypeople to spread ‘evangelical’ ideas through magazines and newspapers. Rouse writes that young women in Bucharest welcomed her and were eager to spend time with her. A chance to speak English and to learn about the West was worth the time spent answering the questions of this interesting English woman. Orthodox writers frequently compared themselves to the British when discussing the merits of their own church.7 An anonymous priest commented in 1909 that ‘the [religious] questions that are now being discussed in Romania, the civilized peoples of the West have been discussing for a long time. We have opened our eyes quite late. But at the end of the day it is a good thing that we have opened them at all.’ 8 Prominent Orthodox leaders in Bucharest welcomed the increasing dialogue between the Anglican and Romanian Orthodox 4 Gheorghe Comşa, Istoria predicei la români (Bucharest: Tipografia Cărtilor Bisericeşti, 1921), 3. 5 ‘Starea de plâns a Bisericei Ortodocse’, Crucea, 1 March 1923, 6. 6 Nicolae Iorga, Istoria Bisericii Româneşti şi a vieţii religioase a românilor, vol. 2, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Saeculum, 2011), 319. 7 ‘Congresul preoţilor’, Biserica Ortodoxă Română, December 1923, 1125. 8 Un preot de mir, Chestiuni de discutat (Piteşti: Tipografia Transilvania, 1909), 1. 4 Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania Churches that began in the early 1920s.9 Rouse’s interest in ‘reform movements’, her position at the intersections between Orthodox and Western Christianity, her discussions of lay spirituality and her observations about the Orthodox use of Protestant literature all lie at the heart of this book. Rouse was not imagining the productive relationship between these religious currents. She visited Archimandrite Iuliu Scriban while she was in Bucharest, who was the director of the Central Theological Seminary in Bucharest. ‘He is a remarkable man’, Rouse wrote, ‘full of both spiritual and intellectual power’. He is, perhaps, the only priest in Roumania who has entered the priesthood from a sense of vocation. He is a man of good family and independent means. He studied theology for five years in Germany (1904 to 1907), at Strasbourg and Heidelberg, has a library full of theological books and magazines in five languages, and has travelled in France and Switzerland. He corresponds with friends of his abroad, both Protestant and Catholic. He was a member of the German Student Christian Union all the time he was in Germany, and is now an ‘Altfreund der DCSV’. He reads Die Furche [The Furrow], Le Semeur [The Sower], Fide e Vita [Faith and Life] regularly (all Student Movement magazines), cheerfully greeted me by saying he knew all about me, and was just contemplating an article on the Constantinople Conference in a Roumanian newspaper! One felt at once in the completest sympathy with him. He is a man of deep spiritual life and evangelical fervour, and it is glorious that he has the training of young priests in his hands. He longs to see the Federation at work in Roumania.

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