“RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN CONTESTED ECOSYSTEMS
Law, Religion and Foreign Policy in a New International Order”
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Your Grace the Vice-Chancellor,
Reverend Vicar and Fellows of this University Church,
Your Eminences and Excellencies,
Distinguished Faculty members,
Beloved students beginning a new year of studies,
Brothers and sisters in the Lord,
We greet you with the joy of the Exaltation of the Cross, which the Orthodox Church commemorates during this week, and we thank you, from the heart of our Modesty, for the honour you have shown the Ecumenical Throne of Constantinople in inviting us — through the gracious auspices of the Centre for Law and Religion of Regent’s Park College — to deliver this Lecture beneath the vaults of Saint Mary the Virgin. That so venerable and so English an institution should this day welcome the first-ranking Hierarch of the Christian East, formed in the Queen of Cities, the ancient Constantinople, is itself a small parable of the very theme we have been asked to address: that the household of faith is wider than any one culture, and that truth, when it is genuinely sought, does not recognise the frontiers we so easily draw around it.
As the Primate of the Church of Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, we follow in the footsteps of a long line of saints, martyrs, confessors, teachers of the Orthodox faith and church ministers with a universal vision who appreciated how the world of faith can prove a powerful ally in society’s efforts to address issues of freedom, justice and peace. We believe that churches and religious communities are not only pivotal in people’s personal or spiritual lives. They also reserve a critical role in mobilizing institutions and societies on manifold levels.
This is precisely why, at the Ecumenical Patriarchate, we are deeply conscious of our connections with the past and the present. As a church whose history starts with St Andrew the first called Apostle, we are rooted in a rich past, living in the complex present, yet looking to a hope-filled future. It is this living tradition of faith that permits us to speak boldly about critical contemporary issues, such as human rights, religious freedom, and the protection of the natural environment. In a world that is proving to be increasingly divided and divisive, we feel an obligation and vocation to build bridges of peace and unity, as well as of cooperation and solidarity.
We are conscious, too, of where we stand this evening. In this church, in the year 1556, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer was brought to be tried for the convictions of his conscience, and, though he first recanted under the pressure of fear, he found before the end the courage to say that his hand which had signed against his belief should be the first to burn. We do not invoke that memory to reopen old wounds, long since surpassed, please God, by mutual respect and dialogue. We invoke it because this Temple has, within its own stones, already asked the main question we have been invited to consider this evening: what does a person owe to conscience, and what does a society owe to the person who will not, or cannot, give conscience up?
Before we come to that question, allow us first to explain why we stand here today robed not only as a lecturer but also as a celebrant. It has long been the custom of the Church of Constantinople, on the first day of September, the opening of the ecclesiastical year according to our calendar, to pray for the whole of God’s creation. Our immediate predecessor, Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios of blessed memory, established in 1989 the first of September as a Day of Prayer for the Protection of the Natural Environment, so that the beginning of each ecclesiastical year might be marked not by the taking of resolutions concerning ourselves alone, but by an act of humility before what we have received and do not own. That this University should choose to mark the opening of its own academic year with a blessing of water in this church, at the meeting point of the ecclesiastical and the academic calendars, seemed to us too fitting an occasion to decline, for what is a university, at its best, if not a community that gathers each autumn to bless the beginning of new labour, and to ask that its search for truth be kept humble before the source of all truth?
It is this same word, water, that supplies us with the image around which we have built these remarks: the ecosystem. We ask you to hold two meanings of that word together in your minds this evening, as we shall try to hold them together in what we say. The first is the literal meaning the word bears in the sciences: the intricate, interdependent web of living organisms interacting with their nonliving physical environment, upon which the flourishing, or the death, of each depends upon the health of all. The second is a metaphorical meaning we borrow by analogy, and use of the world’s legal, political, and civilizational orders: the equally intricate web of laws, institutions, alliances, and inherited moral vocabularies within which a human being either finds room to believe, worship, and dissent in freedom, or finds that room steadily closed. Both ecosystems, the natural and the civic, are, in our time, contested as perhaps never before within living memory. And we have come to believe that the crisis in each ecosystem is, at root, one and the same crisis: a forgetting of the truth that neither the earth nor the neighbour is a possession to be managed, but a gift to be received in freedom and answered with responsibility.
Let us take each of the notions in the title of our lecture in turn, as a way of unpacking our theme, before synthesizing them in the end. The first term is law itself. We wish to make a single point about law this evening that bears on everything that follows: for the Orthodox Church, law is not a mechanism of control, still less an instrument for the accumulation of power. It exists to protect and to express communion, koinonia, among persons who remain free. The ancient canons of the undivided Church bear witness – among their many purposes – to the conciliar, synodal character of ecclesial decision, inseparably linked to the primacy of the Protos, while their interpretation and application is an exercise of oikonomia, not as an exception to the law, but as prudent pastoral stewardship, as a way of fulfilling the purpose of the law, namely the spiritual healing and salvation of each human person. A legal order untethered from this end, whether ecclesiastical or civil, however impeccable its procedures, becomes an ecosystem hostile to the very persons it exists to serve. We say this to the lawyers among you not to diminish your discipline but to remind you why, in this University above nearly all others, law has for eight centuries been taught alongside theology: because the deepest question any legal system asks is what a human being is, and what is owed to him.
That question cannot be answered from within one nation, or one culture, alone, which brings us to the second theme: the place of religious communities in a Europe, and a world, that is changing with a speed few institutions, and fewer politicians, have found time to absorb. How unevenly and how anxiously the legal architecture of this continent has adjusted to the plain fact of its own religious plurality! We see, in country after country, an old principle, that of a benign separation and cooperation in fields of common interest between the offices of the priest and the offices of the magistrate, bent now to opposite and equally troubling purposes: in some places, to justify hostility toward visible faith of any kind, treated as an embarrassment best confined to private conscience and private buildings; in others, to fuse faith so tightly to national identity that the believer who is also a foreigner, a migrant, or a minority is quietly written out of the community of belonging altogether. Both distortions, we would suggest, mistake the ecosystem for something that can be simplified rather than something that must continually be nurtured with care.
We must speak, too, of a darker distortion, one that touches our own household directly and that belongs, we believe, at the very centre of any honest reflection on religion and foreign policy in this new international order: the deliberate use of religious identity as an instrument of war. We have watched with profound sorrow as the war against Ukraine has been clothed as a “Holy War,” by some who ought to have known better, in the language of a “Russian world” (Russkiy mir) as though the Gospel of Jesus Christ could be pressed into the service of empire and ethnicity could be elevated to doctrine. Our Church has long named this temptation ethnophyletism, the heresy, condemned by the Great Synod of the Orthodox Church convened in Constantinople as long ago as 1872, of confusing the Church of Christ, which knows neither Greek nor Jew, with the interests of a single nation or state. When religion is bent to this purpose, it does not merely fail the neighbour it was sent to love; it supplies the ecosystem of contemporary conflict with some of its most durable and most dangerous fuel, for a war fought in the name of God is far harder to end than a war fought merely for territory. As we officially declared in an international conference of world spiritual leaders convened in Istanbul thirty years ago, and since then have many times repeated: “Any crime committed in the name of religion is a crime committed against religion” (commonly known as the Bosphorus Declaration). Any foreign policy that wishes to be called wise, and not merely powerful, must learn to recognise this instrumentalisation for what it is, and to resist rewarding it, wherever in the world it appears.
Before the wars in Ukraine, Iran and the Middle East, scholars working on law and religion from this University identified trends weaponising religious rights to legitimise authoritarian politics and foresaw that this weaponisation would likely redraft future geopolitical boundaries. Such trends are concerning in any faith context and there is no faith which is immune from such concerning trends today. We see that, just as policy makers recognise the need for better religious literacy, there is a need for an increased capacity for policy engagement by faith actors so that their engagement in domestic and foreign policy should not be performative, but informative, to avoid the instrumentalisation of faith for political gain.
Central to this engagement is that faith actors should not compete with human rights as if they are a hostile, theological alternative. Human rights, our third theme, is where we believe the Orthodox Christian tradition, so often assumed by Western observers to have little to contribute to a discourse born of the Enlightenment, in fact has something distinctive, and we think necessary, to offer. Eastern Orthodoxy did not produce the language of subjective rights that emerged from the wars of religion and the philosophies that followed them, and Orthodox writers have, thus, at times been too quick to dismiss that language as alien or individualistic. However, our tradition’s insistence on the law of personhood, on the human person as a unique icon of God, constituted not in isolation but in communion, in the image of the Holy Trinity that is itself relationship, offers a corrective, the human rights tradition sorely needs at the present hour: a rights-bearer who is also, inseparably, a being in relation, whose freedom is fulfilled not in the multiplication of private claims but in the capacity to love, to worship and to be responsible for the neighbour and for the stranger. As Charles Malik, an Orthodox Christian and one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, points out during the drafting debates, a human rights culture that forgets either “the one” or “the many,” that treats the person as an atom of pure autonomy owing nothing to anyone, will find, as many societies are now finding, that it has produced rights without solidarity, and freedoms that leave the individual profoundly alone.
This is not a merely academic quarrel among theologians and jurists. Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, of blessed memory, whose thought on the “law of personhood” has deeply influenced our own, taught that to be a person, rather than a mere individual, is to exist in relation, as the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — exist eternally in relation, each wholly given to the others without loss of identity. A human rights culture built only on the first half of this insight, the dignity of the individual, and forgetful of the second, the person’s constitution in and through the neighbour, will always be vulnerable to the complaint, heard now across our continent and beyond it, that human rights language has become a solvent of every bond, familial, civic, and religious, that once held communities together. This does not mean that because of its theology the Orthodox Church must be against the international human rights system. We neither argue that a theological anthropology can simply be transferred into the positive law of the contemporary pluralistic societies. Rather, we consider that the Orthodox understanding of personhood and communion can enter into dialogue with the tradition of the human rights as legal tools under international law and help recover a dimension already inherent in its best expressions: that dignity and freedom belong to persons who are equal and unique, yet who simultaneously live with and for others. We do not believe the answer is to retreat from the language of human rights. We believe the answer is to deepen that language, by engaging with our own theological tradition.
Central to our lecture and our concern for international human rights and international order remains the fourth theme, the question about religious liberty itself, in a new and, if we are honest, disordered international order. We have watched with sorrow as the language of religious freedom, one of the oldest and most hard-won achievements of the human conscience, has increasingly become an instrument of statecraft rather than an end pursued for its own sake. Great powers now invoke the plight of persecuted believers in their rivals’ territories with genuine passion, while remaining strangely silent about identical sufferings among their own minorities or their allies’.
We speak of this not as a distant observer. The Theological School of Halki, on the island where we ourself studied, the only Orthodox Seminary within Türkiye, has stood closed by order of the Turkish authorities since 1971. We wish, however, to speak this evening not only of that long closure but of a hope. Recently, we met with the President of the Republic of Türkiye, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate has entered into renewed and encouraging conversations with the Turkish Ministry of Education and the Council of Higher Education toward Halki’s reopening. We receive this development with sincere gratitude, and we wish, before this University, to encourage every hand now engaged in bringing it to completion. We mention Halki this evening, then, not to shame anyone, but because more than half a century of closure has taught us, with a clarity our own life has forced upon us, a lesson we would commend to this new international order as a whole: that religious liberty is safest, and most truly itself, when it need not wait upon the diplomatic weather of a given season to be honoured — so that what one hand has, in hope, begun to give back may never again, in some future season, be so easily taken away.
We pursue our own associational religious freedom in court and through dialogue nationally and supranationally, primarily in the contexts of the European Union and the Council of Europe. In our efforts we share the view, navigated by current scholars in the University of Oxford, that faith communities must reject the superficial attractions of claiming such freedoms for themselves alone, and must unhesitatingly support the freedom of religion or belief for all. That is precisely the discipline a new international order has yet to learn. Anything less is not the defence of religious liberty; it is its weaponisation.
When we think of human rights and religious freedom, we cannot stop thinking of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East, in Syria and in Lebanon, jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Antioch, and in the Holy Land itself, the See of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, as well as of all other Middle Eastern Christians and religious minorities under attack. Tragically, their numbers have fallen in a single lifetime from a settled and confident presence to a remnant many now fear for. Their fate rarely determines the outcome of an election or the passage of a trade agreement, and so it rarely receives the sustained attention that more strategically convenient cases of persecution attract. A new international order that is more than a rearrangement of the old order’s alliances would place the protection of such endangered communities, and of vulnerable minorities of every faith and none, at the centre of its foreign policy rather than at its margins, not because they are useful to any bloc, but because the disappearance of the Middle Eastern Christianity would impoverish the whole human family, ourselves included.
We would add one further word here, because it touches the vocation of this University directly. Religious liberty is defended not only by treaties and by foreign ministries, though we do not undervalue their labours, but, through education, through learning from one another, by the slower, less visible work of dialogue between legal and religious normative cultures, and, more broadly, between different traditions that choose to know one another before they are forced to negotiate with one another. Our own decades of encounter, primarily with the See of Rome, but also with the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran World Federation, or with the Jewish and Muslim communities, have taught us that honest inter-Christian and interfaith dialogue — patient, unhurried, and unconcerned with immediate advantage — can open doors that the diplomacy of the chancery cannot. We would ask the scholars present, particularly the younger among you beginning your studies this autumn, not to treat the comparative study of religion and law as a merely academic specialisation, but as formation for a kind of peacemaking the world will need in greater supply with each decade that passes.
And so we return, as we promised, to the water, which we are going to bless in a few minutes, and to the fifth and final theme: the environment, that ecosystem in the plain and scientific sense with which we began, and how it connects with everything else we have said so far. We have been called the “Green Patriarch,” partly on account of the many symposia we have convened during our humble 35-year Patriarchal ministry on rivers and seas across the world, from the Aegean to the Amazon, the Arctic to the Danube, bringing scientists, theologians, and civil leaders together in the conviction that the ecological crisis cannot be solved by technology or by treaty alone, essential as both are, without a change of heart. We have said before, and we say again this evening under this ancient dome, that to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. It is a sin to contribute to species extinction, to degrade the integrity of the earth through climate change, to strip the earth of its natural forests, to destroy its wetlands, to contaminate its waters, its land, its air, its life, with poisonous substances. These are all sins, because the earth, like our neighbour, is not our possession to exhaust, but a gift entrusted to our stewardship, and because the poor and the powerless, always, suffer first and worst from its degradation. International environmental law, painstakingly built through Rio, through Paris, through the long procession of conferences whose acronyms now outnumber the glaciers they were convened to save, is indispensable, and we deeply honour those who labour within it. But law alone, severed from repentance, from what the Eastern Orthodox tradition calls “metanoia,” a change of the mind and heart, will keep producing fine agreements with poor compliance, because it will keep asking humanity to limit its appetite by calculation, when only love, and the humility love requires, has ever been strong enough to do so.
We have chosen, deliberately, to speak of this as a movement from crisis to kairos, borrowing a word our tradition reserves not for chronological time but for the appointed, opportune moment in which grace and human freedom meet. A crisis, left to itself, produces only anxiety, or its equally unhelpful opposite, denial. A kairos is a crisis received as an invitation to examine ascetically not merely our carbon accounts, but our manner of life, our appetite, our relation to what is enough. This is why, on our ecological symposia, we have insisted on bringing scientists and theologians into the same room, and often onto the same vessel, rather than allowing them to speak past one another from separate conferences. The scientists have taught us the precise, sobering arithmetic of what is being lost. We have tried, in turn, to offer what theology alone can supply: a reason, beyond enlightened self-interest, why a stranger’s grandchild’s access to clean water should matter to us today, and an ascetic discipline, tested over centuries primarily in our monastic communities, by which desire itself can be retrained rather than merely regulated.
Esteemed audience,
Please remember that what we do for the earth is intimately related to what we do for people, whether in the context of human rights, international politics, or world peace. In other words, the way we respond to climate change is intimately connected to the way we respond to human challenges. Whether speaking of conflict and injustice, of economy or ecology, of discrimination, persecution or forced migration, we are called to remember that none of us can any longer pretend to live as if the rest of the world does not exist. We are created for encounter; and we are judged based on our response to each encounter. We live in a global community. And, as such, we share common values, which transcend national, political, religious, racial or cultural boundaries. This ethical awareness does not merely depend on our religious convictions, but on the universal dignity of all people.
We have asked you this evening to hold together the health of rivers and the liberty of conscience, Church Law and the international legal order, the plight of the refugee believer and the plight of the flooding coastline, because we have become convinced, across the 35 years of our Patriarchal diakonia, that they are not separate concerns competing for the world’s limited attention, but facets of a single, integral vision that both our theological and our legal traditions, at their best, have always defended: that the human person and the created world he inhabits are not raw material for the ambitions of the powerful, whether those ambitions wear the mask of ideology, of profit, or even of a well-intentioned but graceless internationalism, but are, each of them, a gift, addressed to freedom, and requiring, of every generation anew, an answer of love.
The waters we are now going to bless, in this University’s calendar as in our own, are a sign of exactly that answer: matter taken up and made a vehicle of grace, in the same movement by which, at the wedding in Cana, water was not abolished but transfigured. We do not ask this University, in a new academic year that opens amid wars, displacements, and a warming planet, to solve every contested ecosystem it will study. We ask only, and it is no small thing, that it study them as Cana’s water was treated: not as a problem to be managed at the least cost, but as a gift capable, still, of transfiguration, if only the will can be found.
We thank you for your patient attention. We thank this venerable University Church, her Vicar and Churchwardens, the Vice-Chancellor and Fellows of the University of Oxford, as well as the prestigious Centre for Law and Religion, primarily Sir Malcolm Evans and Professor Peter Petkoff, the Centre’s Director, for the honour and their gracious hospitality, and we invoke upon this new academic year, upon this ancient and beloved University, and upon all who labour here in the pursuit of truth in freedom and love, the grace, peace, and abundant mercy of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the intercessions of the All-Holy Theotokos, the blessed Virgin Mary, whose name this church bears.
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