An Impartial Overview of the Greek Old Calendar Movement by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia [+2022]

A SHORT SUMMARY AND REVIEW

By Archbishop Chrysostomos [of Etna]

 

 

 

Text under review:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mIWBJXTNkbbBGING2B2dzsQAZ5mGFh30/view?usp=sharing

 

It was through the good offices and kind invitation of His Eminence, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia (a Hierarch of the Exarchate of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Great Britain), and with a travel grant and fellowship from the Marsden Foundation, that in 1985 I was able to spend the Michaelmas term at Pembroke College, Oxford University, as a visiting scholar. In spite of some unpleasant experiences and instances of outright prejudice that I have experienced as an Old Calendarist in other academic institutions, at Oxford I was shown nothing but the utmost respect and kindness and was given by Metropolitan Kallistos (who, now retired, was then Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies at Pembroke), every opportunity to participate in the scholarly life of the Orthodox community there.

It was thus with great pleasure that I recently encountered an essay by His Eminence, entitled “Old Calendarists,” in the collection Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society (London: Hurst & Company, 2002), by Professor Richard Clogg, the well-known historian and Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Though I am somewhat surprised that this excellent article has not been more widely distributed and cited since its publication, its evenhanded and dispassionate quality and tone were not at all unexpected, given my aforementioned considerate and cordial reception at Oxford. This does not mean, however, that other treatments of the Old Calendarists—few that such treatments are—have in general displayed any such charity, which observation all the more commends Metropolitan Kallistos’ estimable study.

Interestingly enough, His Eminence begins his essay with a quote from the fourteenth-century Byzantine Emperor of the Palaeologue dynasty, Andronikos II, who warned against division in the Church by any attempt to reform the calendar, and especially so among the “ignorant” (or “unlearned”). Indeed, when the calendar reform was introduced into the Orthodox Church of Greece in 1924, “under heavy pressure” from the revolutionary government then in power (p. 2), it produced an adverse reaction. This was, of course, not just among the “unlearned,” who at times were simply reacting against change rather than the practical consequences of the calendar reform, but among those for whom, as His Eminence very fairly writes, the reform was

very far from being merely a dispute about thirteen days [the difference between the Gregorian and Church Calendar dates—A.C.]. For the Orthodox Church there is an essential interconnection between theology and liturgical symbolism; any distortion in the Church’s worship will therefore have direct consequences upon the way in which the Orthodox Faith is understood and lived (p. 3).

He further observes that for the Palaioemerologitai (Old Calendarists), the reform of the Church Calendar represents not only an assault against the internal and external unity of the Church, but since the Church Calendar is for them “the touchstone of loyalty to the Orthodox faith in its true and full integrity” (ibid.), a violation of the Church’s primacy. The reform, as part of the ecumenical rapprochement between Eastern and Western Christianity ushered in by the famous encyclical of the Patriarchate in Constantinople in 1920, made reference to the adoption of a common festal calendar by all Christians and thus, they feel, equated Orthodoxy with heterodoxy. Quoting Professor Dimitri Kitsikis of the University of Ottawa, who sees this connection between the calendar reform and ecumenism as “the essence of the conflict” (ibid.), His Eminence goes on to quote Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Phyle, who says that the calendar issue is, for the Old Calendarists, “first and foremost bound up with the struggle against the heresy of ecumenism” (ibid.)—i.e., an assault against the primacy of Orthodoxy as the Old Calendarists envision it.

Metropolitan Kallistos then summarizes the history of attempts to reform the Julian Calendar, pointing out that it was used by the Nicaean Fathers “presumably because it was the calendar followed by the civil authorities,” whereas the Old Calendarists believe that it has assumed a “religious significance that it did not originally possess” (p. 4). Of course, the genius of the Church Calendar (which is a solar-lunar hybrid), and not simply the Julian Calendar, is the focus of more learned Old Calendarists. However, the Julian Calendar was used by the Nicaean Fathers to calculate the Spring equinox, and His Eminence is perfectly correct in pointing out that the Julian reckoning of that event has drifted from the date of the true equinox. This fact was not lost on the Byzantines, even if the Emperor and some Church authorities hesitated to effect a correction of the error, for fear of accusations of innovation or of misunderstanding among believers.

When Pope Gregory XIII authorized a reform of the calendar in 1582, there were efforts to introduce it to the Orthodox East. Metropolitan Kallistos notes that, nonetheless, not only was the Pope unsuccessful in his “approaches to Patriarch Ieremias II (Tranos) of Constantinople,” but “[s]ynods held in Constantinople in 1583, 1587, and 1593 [the documentation from which, incidentally, some scholars consider problematic— A.C.] rejected the Gregorian Calendar” (p. 6). The Patriarch, in rejecting the calendar reform, objected not on scientific grounds, but because a) he considered the reform a violation of the Nicaean formula for the date of Pascha (Easter); b) because “he saw the new Papal Calendar as a means of infiltration and proselytism” by Rome; and c) because he regarded the “continuity of Tradition” to be more important than “astronomical exactitude” (ibid.). The views of the Patriarch were much like those held by Old Calendarists today and, as His Eminence says, remained very much the essence of opposition to changes in the Orthodox festal calendar until 1920. As late as 1904 the Oecumenical Patriarch had characterized any move to change the Church Calendar as “premature,” likewise reaffirming the ecclesiastical primacy of Orthodoxy in no uncertain terms (ibid.).

In 1920, with many of the countries in which Orthodoxy was the dominant or official state religion having adopted the Gregorian Calendar for secular use, the Oecumenical Patriarchate issued its aforementioned encyclical. The encyclical (actually issued by the locum tenens of the Patriarchate) made mention, as I noted earlier, of a universal calendar for celebrating the great Christian Feasts and called for ecumenical cooperation among all churches. Metropolitan Kallistos discusses with objectivity and accuracy the events that unfolded with these new realities in Constantinople, including the conference “convened” there “in haste” in 1923, “at a time of grave political insecurity” for the Patriarchate (ibid.). It was at this conference that the calendar reform was enacted. With refreshing honesty, His Eminence states that the “Revised Julian Calendar” that it adopted was, in effect, the Gregorian Calendar, but fearing anti-Roman feelings among some Orthodox, the participants in the congress were assiduous to avoid charges that they had “adopted the ‘Papal’ Gregorian Calendar” (ibid.).

His Eminence also quite delicately but very aptly recounts the role of Oecumenical Patriarch Meletios IV (Metaxakis) in the calendar reform and the conference of 1923. “Meletios was himself (to put it mildly) problematic,” as he remarks, and Meletios’ controversial person and the other egregious innovations proposed did nothing to lessen public reaction to the “gravely unrepresentative character” of the conference—which, styled as “‘Panorthodox,’ was in fact nothing of the kind” (p. 8). All of the deficits of the conference and of the calendar reform, which was not adopted by the majority of the Orthodox world, eventually led to a compromise, proposed by Archbishop Chrysostomos of Athens. This settlement left in place the Nicaean formula for calculating the Paschal Feast, with the remainder of the year determined by the Gregorian Calendar. This, as Metropolitan Kallistos avers, truncates or sometimes obliterates “the fast preceding the Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul” (p. 10).

He goes on to assert that it was “the unrepresentative character” of this ill-conceived conference and the “mixed reactions to its decisions in the Orthodox world” that “paved the way for the future calendar schism in Greece” (ibid.). The New Calendarist historians of the Old Calendar movement have consistently played down the initial reaction to the calendar reform in Greece. Eyewitnesses (including a number of relatives on the Greek side of my family) portray a far different reality. In any case, by 1933 the Church of Greece, as Metropolitan Kallistos writes, had begun to admit that the Old Calendarist resistance was a “‘sizeable minority,’ which constituted ‘a threat to national unity.’” By 1934, the Hierarchy “used yet more alarmist language,” conceding that the Old Calendarist resistance “posed an immediate danger of schism and division, not only within the Church but within the nation” (ibid.). It is a truism that the powers that be write the prevailing history of events, and even the most seemingly objective histories of the Greek Old Calendar movement by those outside of it tell the story of the first years of the movement as prevailing accounts would have it. (This is not to say, of course, that the histories of the movement offered by the Old Calendarists were always accurate either.) Metropolitan Kallistos, therefore, is to be commended for admitting that, taking into account the difficulty of defining just what an Old Calendarist was, the movement “may have well exceeded a million” in the 1930s—though what I consider objective sources at the time reported that a much larger portion of the population of Greece opposed the calendar reform.

I will not examine in great detail His Eminence’s commentary on the Old Calendar movement between the time of the calendar reform and 1935, when three Bishops of the State Church assumed its leadership. This history is well known to our readers, and if I have carefully attended to the period before the calendar change, it is simply because it is not as well known and because Metropolitan Kallistos covers it so skillfully. This is not to say that he does not show the same aptitude in discussing the first years of the Greek Old Calendar movement. Fie impartially discusses both the “martyrology” of the Old Calendarists under the boot of persecution by the police authorities (and I might add, sadly with the collaboration of ecclesiastical dignitaries in some instances), as well as the excesses of the extremist Old Calendarists, such as one fanatic’s attempt to cut off the beard of the Archbishop of Athens in 1927, slightly injuring the Prelate in the process. Here, as elsewhere, Metropolitan Kallistos is very even-handed in his writing.

I would, however, like to make mention of his reference to the theory that the three State Church Bishops (Germanos of Demetrias, Chrysostomos, former Metropolitan of Phlorina, and Chrysostomos of Zakynthos) who agreed to direct the Old Calendar movement in 1935 did so partly for political reasons. “If we read between the lines of the proclamations which the three issued at this time,” His Eminence asserts, “it was clearly not their intention to assume leadership of a separate Old Calendarist movement” (p. 12). To be sure, one need not read between any lines. Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Phlorina and Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Zakynthos spoke openly about the temporary or provisional nature of the Old Calendar movement. Along with Metropolitan Germanos, they expressed their desire to return the Church of Greece to the traditional festal calendar and restore a more traditional ecclesiastical life. That some have tried, as Metropolitan Kallistos comments, to see the Old Calendar movement as a struggle between Royalists and Venizelists and the movement as a sort of “coup d’eglise” (ibid.) is at best speculation. Moreover, if one examines the arguments put forth by those who hold to this view, they have no evidence and no historical data to support it. The return of these three Bishops to the Old Calendar movement in the midst of yet one more change of governments among many in the Greek political life of the time was probably nothing more than coincidence or a strategic move by the Bishops to act at a propitious time. In any event, the diversity of political views among the Old Calendarists at the time, easily established by examining the debates that it sparked, speaks against some political conspiracy.

The divisions which followed the 1935 emergence of the Old Calendar movement as an organized body in ecclesiastical resistance are very sensitively, intelligently, and accurately covered in Metropolitan Kallistos’ essay. He rightly points out that the question of the presence or absence of Grace in the Mysteries (sacraments) of the New Calendarist Churches lies at the very heart of the first schism in 1937. Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Phlorina maintained that Grace was present (though at one point he wavered in his firmness in expressing this view, in an effort to restore unity to the movement), while the extremist position that the New Calendarist Mysteries were invalid was inexorably preached by Bishop Matthew of Vresthene (one of the four Bishops Consecrated in 1935 by the three New Calendarist Bishops who decided to serve the movement), as it is by his followers today. The position of Metropolitan Chrysostomos has been supported to varying degrees, though inconsistently, by his successors, who trace their Episcopacy, after his death, to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Without entering into the endless vagaries of the various factions that have appeared among these successors in the last five decades (and wisely so), His Eminence remarks that

[a]mong the existing Old Calendarist jurisdictions, the one which continues most directly the tradition of Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Fiorina is the group headed by Metropolitan Kyprianos of Oropos, with its centre at the Monastery of Fill [the Holy Monastery of Sts. Cyprian and Justina—A.C.] in Attica. Its dependency in North America, under Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna, issues theological publications of solid value. The Fill group, which is affiliated with the ROCOR,* consistently refuses to condemn the sacraments of the New Calendarists as invalid. By contrast, most if not all of the other Old Calendarists... now adhere to the ‘Matthewite’ [referring to Bishop Matthew of Vresthene (vide supra) — A.C.] standpoint, condemning the sacraments of the ‘mainstream’ Orthodox Churches as invalid and devoid of sanctifying Grace. Thus, the ‘Matthewite’ position, which initially was upheld by no more than a small minority of Palaioemerologitai, has gradually become the majority view (p. 17).

* [This was true until 2007, when the ROCOR, or the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, was reconciled with the Moscow Patriarchate and union between the two Synods was sadly severed—A.C.]

For the foregoing paragraph and quotation, I may be chastised by some for self-advocacy. I would simply respond by pointing out that I am a very outspoken critic of extremist Old Calendarism, which in my opinion risks sectarianism in many of its manifestations, and, like Metropolitan Kallistos, I believe that the actual division within the Old Calendar movement is precisely as he describes it. That I belong to the one party and not to the other is a simple fact. As for his appraisal of the theological studies that we produce and publish in the American Exarchate of our Church (at the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies), I play only a minor role in these activities and am aided by some wonderful scholars and co-workers, some of them, in fact, not affiliated with our jurisdiction or with the Old Calendar movement. I am gratified, on my colleagues’ behalf, for Metropolitan Kallistos’ kind comments, and I would like to believe that they commend, as they should, our moderate ecclesiology and our attempts to avoid the inflexible and intolerant views of those who make of resistance and traditionalism an impediment to dialogue and intelligent discourse of an honest and candid but civilized and Christian sort.

Happily, Metropolitan Kallistos tackles, in his essay, the question of the Old Calendarist population statistics in Greece. He remarks that many Old Calendarist groups have claimed as many as a million followers (and several outlandish sources even more, I would add). While in the 1930s the State Church of Greece certainly had every reason to understate the number of Old Calendarists (and did, in my opinion), the present-day population of Old Calendarists in Greece is not even close to one million. At the same time, the statistics cited by Metropolitan Kallistos (57,229 by a government-sponsored census and 30,110 according to the State Church) are also inaccurate, as His Eminence also opines. In his own words, “I would accept as not unreasonable the estimate given in the Fili/Etna publication, The Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Greece: ‘they still number in the hundreds of thousands’” (p. 18). I would qualify our estimate by noting that it does not take into account the constant and rapid decline in the population of Old Calendarists in Greece in very recent years, on account of an observable trend towards extremism and a decidedly sectarian mentality in some circles. Moreover, this dated estimate included Old Calendarists in the diaspora. As for monastics, His Eminence reckons that, while the State Church absurdly numbers Old Calendarist monastics at about 146 monks and 1,152 nuns—compared to 180 and 324, respectively, by the government census—“[p]erhaps today (not counting Mt. Athos)” the Old Calendarists “have a total of about 2,000-2,500 monks and nuns, which is roughly equivalent to the number of monastics in the State Church” (ibid.).

I commend His Eminence for discussing the matter of population statistics, since it is a subject which perfectly well illustrates the fact that so little accurate data exist about the Old Calendar movement. Much of what one reads is motivated by political and ecclesiastical rivalries and published with no scholarly peer review of any kind. As an example of what one encounters, in 1980, during Communist times, I visited our Sister Old Calendarist Church in Romania. On my return to the U.S., I complained to the Romanian Embassy in Washington, D.C., about certain violations of the human rights of our brethren there. I was flatly told that Old Calendarists did not exist in Romania. When I protested that our Church was in communion with them and that I had been there and seen them, I was told that they were probably pari of an anti-Communist charade to discredit the country (a kind of anti-Communist Potemkin village, I guess). The Old Calendarists in Romania, who then numbered over a million, are, while far fewer today, still reticent, after years of harsh maltreatment, to identify themselves even in a census by their own Church. Though more than a half million of them did so a decade or so ago, their situation is instructive.

This same reticence obtains among some Greek Old Calendarists, who are quite reluctant to identify themselves as belonging to a movement which has been persecuted, which is often viciously ridiculed, and which has been shamed in the press for certain public scandals (real and untrue), by factionalization, and by sectarian radicalization in some sectors that reflects negatively on the whole body of Old Calendarists. The many “histories” of the movement by sundry factions of the less moderate Old Calendarists, filled with outrageous accounts presented as objective history, also speak to the general problem of accurate portrayals of the Old Calendar movement. This problem is complicated, too, by polemics and propaganda from some segments of the official Church of Greece, which has—with some admirable and important exceptions—not always dealt in an upright manner with the Old Calendarists. As well, for years Old Calendarists were not allowed to study in theological schools in Greece. Though this is no longer true, the lack of formal theological education made it difficult for the Old Calendarists, even when possessed of an intuitive understanding of their place in the history of the Church, to articulate their views in an apologetic way. This external impediment to theological education is why, as Metropolitan Kallistos writes, the Old Calendarist movement has never had “a seminary for the training of its clergy” (ibid.), though in actual practice Priests were schooled (and some exceptionally well) in monasteries. (Thus our Synod has two training schools for clergy, one at the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery in Etna, California, and the other at the Holy Monastery of Sts. Cyprian and Justina, in Phyle, Greece). While many of our clergy for years did not have university degrees in theology, some studied in other fields (from law to medicine to philosophy) and, as I have said, in monastic communities.

At the end of his essay, Metropolitan Kallistos points out that the Old Calendarists maintain certain objects of liturgical and personal piety (the traditional garb, uncut beards, and uncut hair of the clergy, Churches without pews, oil lamps, beeswax candles, etc.), which some Orthodox wrongly dismiss as the mere “externals” of the Church or, as he asserts, as “cultural” phenomena. “Let us not be too quick” in doing so, he brilliantly and eloquently retorts, since “[i]n the traditional Orthodox world view outward actions and gestures possess an inner and symbolical nature, and every liturgical action finds its place within an all-embracing whole in which nothing is purely incidental” (p. 19). He goes on, then, to pose some very perspicacious and challenging questions about what future the Old Calendarists have—and especially in view of their fragmentation—in modern times and in a country like Greece, now facing the modernizing (and unifying) effects of membership in the European Union. In response to these questions, he notes an increasing trend towards conservatism in the Orthodox world, and especially after the fall of Communism and the increased presence of the influence of the huge Orthodox Church of Russia, which follows the Old Calendar in its worship. This trend, he suggests, signals that the Old Calendarists may yet have a renewed role to play in the Church (p. 20). If so, the way will have been in some ways paved by the kind of objective consideration given to us and our witness by distinguished voices such as those of Metropolitan Kallistos, whose sympathetic and amiable words may help to moderate the more extreme among us and to reinforce the more moderate among us in taking heard in our hope for eventual unity in Holy Tradition.

 

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XXVII (2010), No. 2, pp. 3-10.