The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy

2. Eucharist or Democracy?

Chapter Two eucharist or Democracy? When Roman Catholics immigrated to the United States, it was not at all clear whether they could accept American democracy, together with its separation of church and state, without compromise. Among others, John Courtney Murray emerged to convince Catholics and non-Catholics alike that Western democracy is not antithetical to Catholic teachings. When Orthodox Christians started coming to the United States prior to World War I and then again after World War II, no visible tension existed between their adaptation to American democracy and their ecclesial commitments. One of the reasons why such a tension was not necessarily visible was the fact that the Orthodox Church lacked a visible transnational institutionalized authority that could function as a focal point for framing the difference between its visible ecclesial structures and the political structures of American democracy. Its lack of visibility notwithstanding, the tension was latent and became manifest in a t heological dispute between two of the more well-known American-Orthodox ethicists of the last few decades: Stanley Harakas and Vigen Guroian. Harakas attempted to justify Orthodox acceptance of American democracy through the prism of the 55 56 The Mystical as Political Byzantine legacy of symphonia. Guroian challenged this appeal to the Byzantine past, naming it a form of accommodationism. Instead, Guroian argued that a Christian political theology must begin with an account of the church—an ecclesiology. His understanding of the church is based on what has become known as eucharistic ecclesiology in contemporary Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologies. According to eucharistic ecclesiology, “the eucharist makes the church,”1 which means that the church is church in the eucharistic assembly, where those congregated are constituted as the body of Christ. As the body of Christ, the community exists as a communion with the divine . Thus, the Eucharist is not simply a practice reenacting the meritorious sacrifice of Christ, and contributing to fulfilling one of many obligations needed for salvation; it is, rather, the space of divinehuman communion. On the basis of this eucharistic understanding of the church, Guroian , together with the Roman Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh , have joined a host of other Christian thinkers who have targeted liberal democracy. If the church as Eucharist is the space of divine-human communion, and if the mission of the church is to “eucharistize ” the world in the sense of transfiguring all created reality with the presence of God, then such an understanding of the church is diametrically opposed to all for which liberal democracy stands, especially its nihilistic anthropology and its violence against religion. I will analyze the contours of this current Christian attack on liberal democracy, and while I side with an ecclesial approach to political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion , I do not agree with the conclusions put forth by Guroian and Cavanaugh. Contrary to their positions, I argue that a eucharistic understanding of the church needs to be tempered by the ascetical tradition within Christianity. I will further argue that a eucharistic ecclesiology that integrates the ascetical tradition leads to an endorsement of the principles of modern liberal democracy, and that such an endorsement is not a betrayal of the ecclesial vision of the world being created for communion with God. eucharist or Democracy? 57 The American-Orthodox Debate The legacy of the theory of symphonia in the Byzantine Empire and its influence as a frame of reference for contemporary Orthodox discussions on democracy are evident in the debate between two contemporary Orthodox ethicists, Stanley Harakas and Vigen Guroian, on Orthodox understandings of church-state relations.2 Although the first evidence of sustained reflection on modern democratic notions of church-state separation by Orthodox theologians was given by the Russian thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Harakas-Guroian debate is the first sign of substantive Orthodox reflection on democracy in the American context. Harakas’s own position is detailed in a 1976 a rticle entitled “Orthodox Church-State Theory and American Democracy.”3 Though the bicentennial that year probably played no small part in inspiring him to write the piece, the reflections themselves are the natural result of the later generations of an immigrant church forced to give some understanding to a church-state relation that has no precedent in its own history. Although the Byzantine Empire was not democratic, the past for Harakas still holds the key for understanding the present situation...