The Bulgarian Orthodox Church: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Evolving Relationship between Church, Nation and State in Bulgaria (review)

Bulgaria appears so infrequently in published English-language historical studies that the publication of any such work elicits interest by serious scholars in that field. One that examines the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria is of special interest because of the culturally important role that the institution played in Bulgaria since medieval times. The creation of the Cyrillic Slavic literary language in the ninth century and the establishment of the first autocephalous Slavic Orthodox church organization in the tenth are considered Bulgaria’s seminal contribution to world cultural history by most specialists. Bulgarian cultural identity and Orthodoxy have been partnered intimately through centuries of Ottoman Islamic domination, Western-style secularization/modernization, and communist dictatorship. The exact nature of this partnership over time seldom has been examined in detail. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church by James Hopkins purports to achieve this feat. Unfortunately, it succeeds in doing so only to a limited extent.

Hopkins informs the reader that the primary emphasis of his study is on analyzing the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s political and social position during the communist and postcommunist periods and that a “new,” more “objective” interpretation of the Church’s history is necessary for full comprehension of that analysis. Truly, the two chapters covering those more contemporary periods are the most informative and insightful of the nine in the book and should have received expanded treatment. Unfortunately, the preceding five precommunist historical and one concluding philosophical chapters should have been summarized in the introduction alone. Hopkins’s “new” historical interpretive perspective rarely moves beyond bursting a string of “straw man” arguments that reflect past and present Bulgarian ultranationalist myths (i.e., Cyril and Methodius being “Slavs”; the Ottoman “Yoke”) that are rejected or long discredited by most serious contemporary scholars. In one of the “newest” interpretations, which depicts the early-medieval Bulgarian church as “foreign” to the Bulgarian “nation,” except for the tenthand eleventh-century Bogomil heretical movement, the author bases his argument on a traditional idea that the Bogomils enjoyed a mass following and fostered social discontent when no primary evidence actually supports such contentions. Another “new” interpretation is the claim that mass “nations” existed in medieval times. An unsuccessful attempt to validate this assertion in the book’s final chapter ultimately demonstrates that the author’s definition of the term is too generalized to take seriously.

The historical presentation is colored by a stated preconception that, historically, the Bulgarian church was more often a tool of foreign influences than a native Bulgarian manifestation. Only “highlights” in the church’s history purporting to support the author’s view are presented, rendering coverage selective, sometimes questionable, and spotty, with gaps filled by generalities and conflicting circumstances omitted. Thus, the nineteenth-century Bulgarian National Revival is portrayed as a purely secular affair with the church culturally inactive, ignoring the important linguistic/literary role of clerics such as Neofit Rilski. Furthermore, the historical narrative is marred by factual flaws of omission and commission (such as no mention that Cyril’s Slavic alphabet was Glagolitic, or that Cyrillic was created later in Bulgaria by others; Januarius MacGahan and not James; Eugene Schyler did not write for the Daily News; and it was the Russians and British, not Americans, who met at the 1876 Constantinople conference).

Last, the scholarly mechanics of the book are amateurish and rigidly pedantic—each chapter introduces a topic and conclusion and then proceeds to achieve the aforementioned conclusion in its narrative, at the end of which the conclusion is restated as proved. Worse, Hopkins apparently cannot discriminate between primary and secondary sources in the bibliography, labeling all Bulgarian- and Russian-language works “primary” while listing works that most serious historians would consider primary under the “secondary” heading.

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