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The Birth of National Churches
In acknowledging the accomplishments of the Byzantine Empire, we would be
missing a large part of the picture if we did not look at its massive cultural
impact in all those surrounding areas where Orthodox Churches would be
permanently established.
One of the single most important legacies of the Eastern Empire, and a key
theme of this book, was its creation of national churches in Eastern Europe and
the Middle East—churches that to this day remain culturally and emotionally
linked to specific language/ethnic groups. The consequences of this historic
nationalization of churches haunts us even today in the bloody history following
the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which pitted Eastern Orthodox Serbs
against Roman Catholic Croats.
Apart from contesting names and theologies, the “Greeks” of the East spent
centuries in a much more elemental struggle with Rome over territorial
influence, especially in the Balkans and parts of the Middle East. In one of the
fateful cultural decisions of history, the Eastern Orthodox Church dispatched
missionaries in all directions to convert the pagan world and establish new local
linguistically based churches—Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian, Macedonian,
Coptic, Albanian, Armenian, Romanian, and so on, across and beyond Byzantine
lands. These ethnic, or “national,” Eastern Churches, with their use of local
languages in liturgy, stood in sharp distinction to the supranational and
“universal” Catholic tradition based on scripture and rituals conducted
everywhere strictly in Latin. And nearly every one of these “national” Orthodox
Churches would come to have some future close relationship with Islam in a
checkered coexistence. The Western Church, on the other hand, would rarely
experience close proximity to Islam, except in Spain.
The Orthodox Church did not actually have any specific intention of
enshrining ethnicity as the foundation of the church; rather, the process evolved
naturally. The linking of religion and ethnicity came about as Byzantine
missionaries fanned out to pagan peoples, particularly in the Slavic world, to
reach them by preaching and translating the Bible into their native languages.
The conversion of the Slavs began in the ninth century with the mission of Cyril
and Methodius into the Balkans, where they created the first alphabet for Slavic
languages.
This missionary work held far greater significance than mere religion: it was
a vital strategy in the Eastern Church’s rivalry with Rome to convert pagans to
Eastern Christianity rather than let them fall to Western Catholicism. Translation

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of the Bible into the vernacular languages of the peoples on the borders of the
empire became a key instrument in their conversion; it brought the Bible to them
in their living language and secured their cultural loyalty, especially since the
translated Bible was often the first document ever to be written in their
languages—such as what is now called Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical
language of the Slavic Orthodox world. In response, German Catholic clerics in
the region fought unsuccessfully to dissuade the Slavs from adopting the liturgy
in a Slavic language. (Astonishingly, at this same period in the West, the Bible
still had not been officially translated in full into vernacular languages, nor
would it be until the Protestant Reformation five hundred years later. Indeed, the
Catholic Church insisted on maintaining Latin as the sole liturgical language
until the twentieth century—even though the New Testament had originally been
written in Greek.)
A second attractive feature of Eastern Christianity was the relatively greater
autonomy that Eastern Churches were offered as opposed to the requirement of
rigorous submission to Rome, even on church administrative matters, under
Catholicism. The pope, furthermore, insisted on arrogating to himself immense
secular powers in ways that the Byzantine patriarch did not. The history of the
European Middle Ages is replete with just such massive power struggles
between the pope and worldly princes. This reminds us that there is, in fact, a
much deeper tradition of religious interference into Western secular politics by
the Roman Catholic Church than has ever been the case in Islam and its
consistently secular (nonclerical) rulers (until modern Iran).
As the East-West rivalry continued in Eastern Europe, the Serbs, Bulgarians,
Romanians, Russians, and the southern half of the Albanian population were
ultimately converted to Orthodoxy. But Rome won out in the conversion of the
Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenians, and Hungarians, who chose
Catholicism. This simple choice of religion fatefully cast the die for the entire
future political and cultural orientation of these countries that lasts until today. A
sharp Latin-Orthodox fault line still runs from the Baltic Sea down through the
old Yugoslavia to the Aegean.
Thus, without explicitly intending to do so, Constantinople had fused religion
with ethnicity within the Orthodox tradition—a particularly potent combination.
Indeed, the richness of the Orthodox Churches lay in their cultural diversity even
as they remained part of a broader, powerful Orthodox community united in
common spiritual values, belief, and ritual. In sharp contrast, Islam strongly
resisted the creation of any “ethnic” Islamic movements or use of local
languages to replace Arabic for worship; but Islam also never adopted the highly
centralized model of control that Rome did. Rome had a pope, Islam had a

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caliph, but the latter never remotely maintained the centralized position of
religious power that the pope did.

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