Mr. Bobby Maddex: On this episode of Ancient Faith Presents, Bishop Alexander of the Bulgarian Diocese of the Orthodox Church in America speaks at a joint adult education event held by the Orthodox Churches of Genesee County, Michigan.

Fr. Joseph Abud: It's nice to have all of you here at St. George.

Just so that you know, a number of years ago we had what we called informal discussions, and the priests that were here would give a short presentation. Then it would be really for the evening a question and answer.

So we wanted to plan something like that, and we had already decided it would be here at St. George, and then I think it was Fr. Paul had suggested that maybe Bishop Alexander would like to talk, and he had the topic or whatever, and we worked it out and he decided to come, so we are very, very happy to have him.

This is Bishop Alexander of the Bulgarian Diocese in the Orthodox Church in America. He's based down in Toledo, Ohio.

And if you don't know, Fr. Paul Jannakos—if you want to stand, Father?—from St. Mary Magdalene in Fenton; Fr. Matthew taking pictures—can you get me behind the podium? [Laughter] Oh, okay. Fr. Matthew Butrie from St. Nicholas. And I don't see Fr. Angelo just yet.

C1: He's here.

Fr. Joseph: He is?

C1: He's parking the car.

Fr. Joseph: Oh, parking the car. Oh, Teri—and his wife, Teri. It's great to have you here from the Assumption Orthodox Church.

So it's an honor to have His Grace with us.

At this time I would like to have Fr. Paul to come forward and to just give us a little bit of a biography of His Grace.

Fr. Paul Jannakos: His Grace, Bishop Alexander: we are so fortunate to have him here. The more the better; the more the merrier, Your Grace.

He is a native of Southern California, grew up at this very well-known parish in Tarzana: St. Innocent; graduated with a degree in English, I believe, from Berkeley in Northern California.

From there he went on to study at St. Vladimir's Seminary where he graduated with his masters of divinity, and then following his graduation from St. Vladimir's he studied for seven years at Oxford, receiving his doctor of philosophy, which is in theology, and he studied with Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, focusing in patristics, I believe. Correct? Yes.

And then, if that wasn't enough, he then went to put it all into practice. He was ordained as a priest in 1982, I believe, and spent two more years in Greece, at least one of those years being as a priest-monk at the well-known Simonas Petras Monastery on Mount Athos, of which, I believe he is still enrolled as a monk, priest-monk.

His Grace, Bishop Alexander (Golitzin): A little more complicated...

Fr. Paul: More complicated than that, yeah. [Laughter] Yes.

I would to say personally that I've been a priest now for almost 30 years, and I have had many fine, many wonderful bishops. And as just a little aside, this is the first time in my priesthood when we gather as our diocesan clergy, that we are taught.

That doesn't mean that our bishops before didn't guide us, didn't shepherd us, didn't love us, but, Your Grace, I am especially grateful for that gift that you have in a really unique and remarkable way of being able to teach, and teach in such a way which is both very practical but is also very concretely rooted in our Orthodox tradition and theology.

I haven't been to a meeting or to a retreat with His Grace where I haven't come away with something that has uniquely, I think, changed my life. And, as all of us, we're very grateful for those kinds of encounters.

So with that being said, Your Grace, we're looking forward to hearing you on this topic: Orthodoxy and Nationalism: The Good and the Bad and the Ugly."

His Grace Bishop Alexander: Who chose "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"? Are you listening to Thom Hartmann? All right.

Well, the topic is altogether a timely choice and one particularly I think that we should think about as Orthodox Christians who are living in the United States of America, because nationalism is all around us. And it is mostly bad and ugly, but I'll come to that presently.

I thought I would begin my remarks—which will take us down a few paths including a bit of history— I thought I'd begin with thinking aloud about the nature of Christianity, because it is only against that measure that we can properly judge nationalism and its potential impact and its real threat.

So what is Christianity?

We begin there with a question that the Lord Jesus himself poses to his disciples in the middle of all three synoptic gospels, and it's not a mistake that the question is in the middle, because, as it were, the gospels read from that inside moment out.

He turns to them at Caesarea Philippi when they are outside of the territories of Israel up in the north, and he asks them first, "Who do they say I am?"

The disciples say, "Some say a prophet, some say this, some say that." And of course it is Peter.

And Jesus asks, "Well, who do you say I am?" And it is Peter who answers, "You are the Christ, the Messiah."

On that confession, the Lord goes on, the Church is built, and the gates of hell will never prevail against it.

So Christianity begins with that, with the confession of Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, as Son of the living God.

And then we have the accounts of the passion, his death, and his resurrection, and there we should pause for a moment.

Christianity hangs and falls on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.

And we should bear in mind that, against its scriptural background, resurrection meant one thing: it meant the world to come, what the rabbis call, ha olam ha-ba; literally, the age to come, the coming age, the eschatological world.

That's a big long Greek word that my 18-year-olds would have to repeat to them at least a couple of dozen times in the course of a semester—I taught at university for 23 years—but I wanted them to know "eschatological": of or pertaining to the end; the last times—because the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit meant the inbreaking of the world to come.

And the community of the Messiah, what we call the Church, is nothing more nor less than our—literally—in-corporation into his risen body, which is the beginning, the first fruits, as St. Paul says, of the new creation.

So Christianity, and of its very essence, the Church, is the presence in this world of the world to come, of the kingdom of God.

When you go to church, when you walk in the doors of that building, it's not accidental that you are seeing images of the Lord Jesus, of the Mother of God, of the saints, of the angels,

and that those images are understood as conveying presences, the presence of those depicted, because you walk into that building for a service and you are walking into the presence in this world of heaven.

That's—by the way, I could go down a very interesting parenthesis now, or footnote, but I'm not going to do it. I will, however, simply observe that that's a very old idea, that the worship of the people of God is the imitation of heaven, and in a way the presence of heaven.

That's implicit in the very theology of the Temple and the tabernacle before it, in biblical Israel. And the Church continues that and makes it, as it were, yet more substantial.

As the writer of Hebrews says, "Then it was a shadow; now we have the very image."

Now I ask you then to bear this in mind, my insistence here on Christianity and the Church as the world to come, the presence of the world to come already in this world,

because only against that faith, that certainty, that truth, can we properly judge the matter of this world of which nationalism is very, very much a part.

Ah, thank you.

Okay, so much for the preface. Now let's turn to the topic.

Nationalism, I think, can be understood in least a couple of ways.

One way, it shows up as something human, something natural, and even good—not necessarily good, but good in the way that anything properly human can be good. By this I mean the natural love of place.

We might call it patriotism, except that's a word that is also bundled up with a lot of other nasty stuff. As Dr. Samuel Johnson remarked in 18th-century England, "Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels!" But I don't have that so much in mind. I'll come to it.

Right now I want to focus on this fully natural, fully human love of place.

Father mentioned that I am from Southern California, born and raised in Los Angeles.

And still when I go to California, as I try to twice a year—my brother lives out there, and I miss it—I am occasionally overcome by familiar smells, by a quality of light, by the color of the vegetation—which in summer is mostly brown; there are bright greens and a kind of dusty greens in the hills—

smells especially—the sharp, spicy smell of sage—and I love it; I love those memories, the memories that come with those smells, the memories attached to places and people who lived there.

And I think all of us know what I'm talking about, and that love is something perfectly human and, within bounds, as are all things that are perfectly human must be, perfectly good, perfectly natural, perfectly right.

We're talking about people. There's also again the very, very human phenomenon of "the group."

We human beings were not splendid predators—well, some of us are: not so splendid—by which I mean, any of us exist in perfect isolation: we're not wholly individuals.

We also belong to things: to this group of people, this family, this extended web of kinship, the people of this place.

I think one of the great educations any young person can have is to be able to live abroad for a couple of years, at least, because nothing gives you perspective on your own place like living in someone else's place, and nothing gives you perspective on your own language greater than listening to some other person's language, and trying to speak it.

So I remember when I came back from my extended stay in Europe—and by the way, that seven years included the two years in Greece. It was before I was ordained that I was at the monastery.

And though I'm not enrolled there, the abbot tonsured me some years later because he was my spiritual father, but he couldn't enroll me for canonical reasons, because by that point I was a priest in the OCA and the Ecumenical Patriarch would have frowned on it.

But when I came back to the United States after all those years abroad, I realized I was home: the way people spoke, the humor, the particular take on things.

I didn't agree with it now as completely or accepted it as completely as when I had left, but it was familiar; it was my turf, my place.

And, again, those feelings are perfectly human, and they can be perfectly good.

On the other hand, as perhaps has occurred to a number of you already, there times when groupthink is not a good thing.

Think of all the, not to single them out, but think of the Indian tribes that in their own languages refer to themselves as "the people" or "the human beings," but by implication suggesting that everyone else is not.

And the ancient Greeks were like that! No less than Aristotle, one of the founders of philosophy, thought that anyone who wasn't Greek—well, they looked like people but they couldn't talk; all they said was "bar, bar, bar, bar, bar": hence "barbarian." And they were really only good for chopping wood and drawing water—slaves.

Now, interestingly his pupil, Alexander the Great, didn't think that way, but Aristotle, a man of that intellect, did. He couldn't see beyond the group, beyond Hellas. And that was, as I noted, not an uncommon problem.

Now we come to the other kind of nationalism: nationalism as the word is normally used today.

And by the way, an aside, you'll note if you read our newspapers or listen to our broadcast media, you will often hear the word "nationalist" applied to other people.

I remember them saying that about Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer, when in fact it was not accurate.

Now, Solzhenitsyn loved Russia; he loved his country. He loved its language; he loved its customs—but there was no more ferocious critic of his government, both before and after communism, than he.

He was not a "my country, right or wrong" sort, not a nationalist, he was a patriot, yeah, but not a nationalist.

What is nationalism? It's a 19th-century Romantic phenomenon, a product of the Romantic movement. And here we've all heard of the Romantics, right? the kind of poetry that was written in the early 19th century.

Those of you who did remember your English classes from high school or college were probably stuck with reading Keats or Shelly or Byron. Those were Romantics—or Wordsworth before them.

The Romantic movement was a reaction against, or at least in response to, the great 18th-century phenomenon called the Enlightenment, associated especially with, not so much personally, but the kind of cultural results of the science of Sir Isaac Newton.

Now again, harking back to your high school or college classes, you'll recall that Newton was kind of the inventor of modern physics up until Einstein, when it changes again. Newton invented the mathematics that would deal with motion: calculus. And you all remember the story about the apple, the theory of gravity.

But the vision, as it were, produced by his science was that of the universe as an enormous machine, where, theoretically at least, if you knew the mass, velocity, and direction of every particle in the universe, you could exactly predict what would happen forever and ever, amen. The universe was a great enormous clockwork.

Well, naturally, of course, the question quickly arose: Well, what does this have to do with the Creator? And there were those who said, "Well, someone had to make the clock." But then it was assumed once he made the clock he went off and did something else.

Or there were those who said, "We have no need of that hypothesis," the answer of the French chemist Lavoisier to Napoleon when he asked the same question.

Now, educated people, looking at that great clockwork mechanism, many of them felt a kind of desolation. Here in all this mechanical perfection, stretching on for—maybe endlessly, both in time and in space: What about me!? Where am I? What am I? Just the tiniest cog?

So the Romantics said, "No! What is important is not the objective universe"—they didn't disagree, they didn't fight Newton's science—"but the self, the subject, the root of experience. That's where we find meaning." And a kind of extension of this sort of thinking included "the group."

In Russia, for example, there was the movement called Slavophiles, and they were typical of the age. The same thing happened in just about every country in Europe.

And they said, "What is there that is special or exception about us, us Russians?" "Oh well, it's—" and then there followed a long list of special things: the village commune, which would be the foundation of the future society; yada yada yada yada. There was something, if you will, magical and spiritual about being Russian.

And Orthodoxy was a part of that, and the better ones among them like the land owner, Aleksey Khomyakov, did some pretty decent theology.

But underneath that was the singling out of their place and their group as unique, special, peculiarly burdened with meaning.

And this, as I said, was part of a phenomenon that was occurring all over Europe, whether in France or England or Germany or Italy, even—Fr. Matthew—even the Czech lands and Slovakia, and, of course, the Poles, who were under Russian oppression at the time, so it kind of exacerbated or heightened the movement.

Now this is nationalism: the exaltation of the tribe, of the group, attached to place, to particular soil, to particular land, and usually a particular language—and this particular soil, this particular group, this particular language as special, exceptional, unlike any other, precious, and the source for one's own discovery of meaning and place.

Now, if you've been thinking about what I've been saying, you may have well come to the conclusion, especially given the remarks earlier on about the watchmaker God, that nationalism appears in the 19th century as a kind of surrogate god.

What had before given people meaning and validation was their faith in their transcendent God, whether Christians or Jews or Muslims, but now it changes in the 19th century.

God seems to have faded in the light of Isaac Newton's science and his universe. Wasn't a necessary hypothesis, as the Frenchman said.

So where do you find meaning? You find meaning in your race, your people, your place, your language: a surrogate god, a surrogate religion, if you will.

And this is the bad, because to go back to my opening remarks, if you're a Christian you can't be a nationalist. You just can't. First because your meaning lies in the crucified and risen Messiah, and second because your people, your nation, is the Church.

That's what St. Paul calls it. At the end of the epistle to the Galatians he speaks of the Israel of God, meaning the Church. The Church is Israel, as it were, crucified and risen, and changed, and become the first fruits of the world to come.

That is our people, that is our nation, and that is our loyalty as Christians—our first loyalty.

And early Christians knew this. One of them wrote in the epistle to the Hebrews, "Here we don't have any country." Literally he says, "We have no city which abides, but our citizenship is in heaven."

Another early Christian a few decades later wrote, "For us Christians, every land is a foreign land. We are here as sojourners."

And that's evident in some of the earliest Christian letters we have outside of the New Testament when St. Ignatius of Antioch writes to his various communities in the opening decades of the second century, he begins each one with: "to the Church which is camping at Philippi, or camping at Laodicea, or camping there. The word is paroikia, the root of our word "parish," but it means "camp," you know, like setting up a tent, say.

Christians, of course, obeyed the lawful authorities; they were told to: both by the Lord Jesus: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's," by St. Paul, by St. Peter: "Pray for the emperor. Even though the emperor is killing you, pray for him and don't disobey him except when he asks for worship."

And you all know the story of the early martyrs who refused to burn incense before Caesar. Now that sounds like a weird thing, burning incense before a statue of your ruler, but it's not so weird.

And here we go with another parenthesis. Think of the Roman Empire. It stretched from modern-day Wales almost to the Persian Gulf, from the Irish Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the mouths of the Rhine to the first cataract of the Nile.

It was huge. The entire Mediterranean, something like 35 countries today, were in whole or part included within the Roman imperial boundaries.

And we think of today in the part of the world and we think of variety, you know, everything from Irish to Hungarians to Arab speakers, to Turks, but in those days it was much more varied: many more languages.

Nowadays there are only three religions, and they are all related: Christianity, Judaism, Islam. In those days there were dozens, maybe hundreds if you count local pantheons.

Well, how do you make a united state out of that? Well, you deify the state. It wasn't, after all— Certainly people in Rome didn't think Caesar was a god, but they did think that Rome, the state, was divine, and Caesar, the emperor, as it were, was its temporary incarnation.

So he carried, at least as long as he lived, the divinity of the state, and that's what they worshiped, and that is what Christians were forbidden to do, because it was idolatry.

Now, does that sound so strange? Well, then let me make it a little bit more familiar yet.

At the end of the 19th century, the United States, at least those people who governed in the United States, were faced with a conundrum.

They had this republic—set of laws, constitution—but it really kind of depended for its good order on people who naturally accepted its axioms, and those people were, almost to a man and woman, Northern Europeans and especially from Great Britain.

But in the late 19th century the United States was industrializing. They were opening up the mines and the mills that they shut in the '80s. And they needed, well, canon-fodder for the— Where were they going to get it? They needed bodies to do the work.

That's how almost all of our ancestors got here, because they sent to eastern Europe and southern Europe agents of the industries to lure people over so they could put them to work and make handsome profits, such that by the end of the 19th century the United States, at least in this part of it and going all the way to the Atlantic coast, had a heck of a lot of people who were anything but English.

They were swarthy, they ended their names with vowels or other strange concatenations of consonants, and they weren't good Protestants. No, they were Catholics, God help us!

And Jews—millions of Jews by the turn of the century—fleeing the life in tsarist Russia. And some Orthodox, of course, who were just as foreign and just as strange to the inhabitants, the long-time inhabitants, of the United States.

Then the question arose, the same with Rome: How do you make this motley crowd a single people?

So one of the inventions— Well, one thing was the American school system, which one Church historian called the established church of the United States: the public school—to inculcate the values of the nation and its axioms.

And another was a ritual, which any of you who've gone to public school here will have done every single morning of every single school day from grade one through grade twelve. You stand up, put your right hand over your heart and say that little prayer to the flag.

Now I can't tell you how weird that is if you— I was telling this to a number of people from not un-nationalist countries, I believe it was a Serb I was talking to— and he said, "You do what?" I said, "You don't do that in Serbia?" "Heck, no!" But that was our equivalent to burning incense before Caesar, if you like, a very close equivalent.

And you might remember the court case in the mid-'40s where the Jehovah's Witnesses refused to do it because they said it was idolatry, and the court upheld them.

And, by the way, you might have heard me refer a number of times to using the term "exceptional." Haven't you heard that word a lot recently, the phrase, "American exceptionalism"?

You had President Obama declare himself an American exceptionalist on national TV, and he was simply aping the Republicans, who've been saying it a lot more. Just listen to Rush Limbaugh for five minutes, and the thing will probably come up.

But that's exactly nationalist thinking, and for the same reasons I stated earlier, it's also idolatry.

Now, to take up again the thread of history and with special reference to the Orthodox, we go back to the 19th century and the Orthodox Church.

Now, what kind of—? where was it? I'm sure you all know. Of course, it was in Russia, Ukraine, the Russian Empire. But that empire had its own Orthodox sovereign, and he was unique at the beginning of the 19th century; there weren't any others.

All the other Orthodox including the ancient lands of the eastern Mediterranean, all of them were under the rule of the Ottoman sultan, from Serbia all the way down to Turkey and Egypt and around the southern edge of the Mediterranean.

Now, the 19th century was also the time when the Ottoman Empire was, to say the least, becoming very creaky. It had done great so long as they went on conquering more lands; it was a state built on war and successful war. But when they stopped conquering, well, the rot set in pretty quick.

And at the same time, among especially all the minority peoples of the Ottoman Empire, including the Christians, when they can— and starting especially with the Greek community in Constantinople itself, which was the wealthiest, by I think 200 years after the conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mohammad, the Greeks controlled the commerce of the entire empire.

They were merchant princes, concentrating in an area of Constantinople called the Lighthouse, the Phanar.

And, being people with ordinary instincts, they wanted their kids to have the best. So they sent the boys, at least, as many of them as could, to western Europe for their education, at least their higher education. And by the early 19th century, the wealthy of places like what would be Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia were doing the same.

And their young people went and learned all the good stuff that western Europe could teach them, you know—the math, the science, the languages, the scientific method—but they also picked up other stuff, including the first stirrings of that Romantic movement: nationalism.

And nationalism blew in with them, a breeze off the Atlantic into the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century, and the result was like dropping a match in a powder keg.

In fact, we're still seeing the explosion. You think Iraq is a new story? Oh, no. I mean, we've messed it up, really badly, but wars, identity politics, well, that's old.

And, in a way, it starts with the Christians; it starts with the Greeks but the others pick it up pretty quick.

The Greeks discover Hellenism! Now they don't mean by that, at the time, what the late Fr. Georges Florovsky of blessed memory meant when he said "Hellenism"—he's a great scholar of the Church Fathers.

For him there was a sense in which every Orthodox Christian is a Hellenist, yes? We're inheritors of the wealth of antiquity, which starts with the Greeks: the philosophers, the historians, the scientists.

And the Church— the Church's language is that: the New Testament is Greek. The Fathers almost all, not all, there are Aramaeans, you know, like St. Ephraim or St. Isaac, but most of them are writing in Greek. And you have to learn it if you want to read them; it's the royal key.

Well, they didn't mean that kind of Hellenism; they meant us and the glory that was Greece: the Parthenon. Like My Big Fat Greek Wedding—remember that, when they drive up to his house with the columns? Or when the guy is baptized, and daddy-in-law says, "Now you are a Greek!"

What's his name? Does the YouTube things... Fr. Matthew?

Fr. Matthew: Mr. Panos!

His Grace Bishop Alexander: Mr. Panos, right. Talking about Easter: "Jesus Christ, he raised from the dead for the Greek people." [Laughter]

Okay, but, you know, it wasn't— They were the first, and because they ran the Ecumenical Patriarchate, it had some bad effects on the others—the Slavs, the Romanians, the Arab speakers—who were getting this rammed down their throat together with the "we're superior to you," the royal race, to vasiliko ethnos.

And so they got the same disease only applied to them, and from the same western European sources. Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians: their elites all discovered the miracle and wonder and absolutely unrepeatable splendiferousness of being—fill-in-the-blank: Serb, Bulgarian, Romanian, Antiochian— or not— Albanian, what have you.

And they all wanted their nation-states and their national churches! And they got them. This is all a 19th-century thing.

The Ottoman Empire comes literally to pieces like wet paper—wet toilet paper, actually. Just goes kinda: fftt. And the First World War, of course, finishes it off, and the western European powers, especially the English and the French, create the modern Middle East, from which we are still suffering right now.

Winston Churchill drew the borders for Iraq and Jordan and Syria on a napkin in a four-star hotel—five-star, probably, for him—in Cairo, I think, in 1924. And they were borders designed to suit the interests of the English and, of necessity, the French—nothing to do with the people who lived there. Even the kings were imported from the south.

All right, but back to the Church. Orthodoxy, you could say, was deeply infected by the nationalist virus, and it's a virus which is still very much with us.

Now, in 1870, I think, the Church of Constantinople held a council, because the Bulgarians had just started their own Church and gotten a writ from the sultan to do it. But the Bulgarians thought that wherever you were, if you were Bulgarian you were part of the Bulgarian Church—even Constantinople itself! So they set up a parish in Constantinople with its own mission.

And the patriarch of Constantinople held a council and rightly condemned this. The technical word they used in Greek was phyletism, but I think it is easy to translate that Greek word with our English "nationalism."

They condemned it as an ecclesiological—that is a Church—a heresy as pertaining to the Church, for exactly the reasons I set out at the beginning of my remarks.

The Church is not of this world and not of this blood and soil. The Church is the presence among us of the world to come, and boundaries of a human sort do not apply to it, and hence the bishop in a particular place is proper to be the bishop for everyone.

As St. Paul says, "Neither Jew nor Greek; neither slave nor free; neither male nor female in Christ." All these divisions, these distinctions, are erased in the world to come.

And that erasing, that sort of coming together of humanity, as God intends humanity to be, is supposed occur in the Church, and when the Church becomes a vehicle of something else—something lesser and something, frankly idolatrous, like any country's nationalism, including our own US nationalism, exceptionalism—then the Church is falling victim to idolatry and heresy.

Now, I think you can figure that this has pretty much direct application to our situation here in the New World, and not just the New World, but Australia, the West European nations where a similar sort of immigration has taken place over the last few generations and particularly in the wake of recent wars and tribulations.

Now you have hundreds of thousands of Romanians, Serbs, Ukrainians all over Western Europe, and clergy and churches and bishops to match, but—Serbian bishops for the Serbs, Greek bishops for the Greeks, Russian bishops for the Russians, Romanian bishops for the Romanians.

And there is at least the official consciousness in the highest circles of the Orthodox Church that this isn't quite right.

And, as you will have doubtless have heard—as you've doubtless heard—the heads of the local churches commissioned each of the— all of the bishops living in the countries outside of the traditional Orthodox territories to create an assembly of bishops and to work to resolve, to use their language, "canonical anomalies."

But by "canonical anomalies" they mean the contradiction between the very confession of a faith, its nature, and the fact of, well, as we have now, me and Bishop Anthony in Toledo, two of us where there ought to be one.

I think New York has six or seven, and Chicago six or seven—and we're all in communion with each other, but who's bishop of Chicago for everyone? Well, no one. And that is, to say the least, an anomaly. Now, can we—

And the challenge confronting us—all of us, not just the bishops, although the responsibility falls especially on them—and not all of them, it has to be confessed, really want to meet it— on all of us—is to present the Church, visibly, in a world soaked through with nationalisms and exceptionalisms and, as a result, not accidentally, soaked in blood, because nothing has created wars like nationalism. Nothing.

No wars in the past begin to match, except maybe the Mongol conquest or Tamerlane, begin to match the slaughter of the 20th century. And the propelling force in that slaughter... Well, think of the Nazis. Well, Nazism was nationalism, as it were, taken to its reductio ad absurdum. That's fascism. And then the "red fascism", if you will, of Stalin: and tens of millions died.

So it is up to us who confess the Orthodox faith, who confess Christianity, in form fundamentally unaltered from its very beginnings, to show it and become, visibly, the one Israel of God.