Ritual and Liturgy

The ritual that developed at the patriarchate of Constantinople—known as the Byzantine rite—gradually replaced other local rites in the Orthodox East, and after the 13th cent. became, with local variations and translations, the standard of Orthodox worship. It is sometimes called the Greek rite, because the original language was Greek, but the liturgy has been adapted into Slavonic, Arabic, Estonian, and many other languages. The liturgy is not usually celebrated daily as in the West, and it is always sung. Leavened bread is used in the Eucharist, and communion is given to laymen in both kinds (i.e., both bread and wine). Infants receive communion and confirmation. The other sacraments are similar to those of the Latin rite, except in details; e.g., confirmation is conferred by priests. The frequency of confession varies in the different self-governing churches. The church buildings are generally square, with a solid sanctuary screen covered with icons (iconostasis; for the style, see Byzantine art and architecture). Parish priests may marry prior to ordination; monks and bishops may not marry.

Church Government

The old mode of government was the patriarchate (see patriarch), but now for the most part the churches, all of which are self-governing, are each governed by a holy synod, a board of bishops and laymen, often appointed by the government; where the head of the church is called patriarch, he is often only the moderator of the synod. The number of Orthodox churches recognizing one another as such is indefinite because of the fluid state of the relations of Orthodox bishops in countries to which communicants have emigrated.

There are many churches apart from those directly under the patriarchs. A unique, ancient church is that of Mt. Sinai, made up of the monastery of St. Catherine and its subject houses. The archbishop is also abbot. The monastic community of Mt. Athos in Greece is of special interest.

The Patriarchs and Churches

The four ancient patriarchates enjoy the highest prestige. The patriarchate of Constantinople, having the primacy of honor after Rome, was set up when the Eastern capital was established; it included Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula. From the time of Justinian I the emperor controlled the patriarch absolutely. The patriarch was freer under the Turks, who gave him civil and religious jurisdiction over all the Orthodox within the Ottoman Empire. The patriarch of Constantinople never succeeded in establishing jurisdiction in the East comparable to that of the pope in the West. First the Russians, then the Greeks and the Balkan countries set up autonomous churches, always opposed by the patriarch, especially in the case of Bulgaria. In republican Turkey the patriarch rules a remnant only, although some modern Orthodox churches in North and South America, Australia, and N Europe are under his direct control. The Orthodox patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch are minority churches (for the corresponding separated churches, see Copts; Jacobite Church), as is the patriarchate of Jerusalem. The patriarch represents Orthodox interests in the shrines.

There are seven national churches, each the traditional patriotic church of the people. The Church of Cyprus has been autonomous since the Council of Ephesus. The Church of Georgia is also ancient. In the 19th cent. it was absorbed by the Russian church but in 1917 resumed its autonomy. The head of the Georgian Church is titled catholicos.

The Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of the Orthodox churches, was led first by the metropolitan of Kiev, under Constantinople. The see was moved to Moscow, and in 1589 a new patriarchate was set up under the czar. The language of the ritual is Church Slavonic. In 1721, Peter the Great (Peter I) abolished the patriarchate and established a synod, which he controlled through its lay procurator.

In 1917 the patriarchate was revived, just before the Bolshevik Revolution began the weakening of the whole church structure. In the disturbances of the revolution many priests and bishops were killed or exiled. Churches were plundered of their sacred vessels, and seminaries were closed. In 1920, bishops residing abroad formed the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, leading to a split (1927) in Russian Orthodoxy that continued into the 21st cent. Relations between the two groups improved beginning in the late 1980s, and in 2007 they reestablished canonical communion, recognizing the overall authority of the Moscow patriarch while preserving the administrative independence of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia.

In World War II, the Soviet government consented (1943) to the reopening of churches and to the election of a patriarch (the first since 1925). The new patriarch and his successors were loyal to the Communist government. As the Soviet Union annexed lands after 1939, the local Orthodox churches disappeared; the same was true of Catholic churches of the Eastern rites, and thus it was announced that the Byzantine-rite Catholics of Ukraine and Ruthenia had united with the Russian Orthodox.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was received (1988) at the Kremlin, the first such reception since World War II. Gorbachev oversaw a period of improved relations with the Orthodox Church, granting it legal status, returning relics seized by the state in 1920, and lifting other restrictions on worship. Since the end of the Soviet Union the church has seen enormous growth in Russia, and in 1997 it (along with other religions recognized under Soviet rule) was given special rights and legal exemptions. Legislation in 2004 gave the church the right to regain full ownership of its churches and other lands.

The self-governing Church of Greece dates from the Greek War of Independence. It is the state church and legally much favored. The patriarch at Belgrade heads the Church of Serbia, which suffered restrictions under the Communist government of Yugoslavia and developed a strong nationalist bent in the 1990s during the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Church of Bulgaria was severed from communion by the ancient patriarchates in the 19th cent., but the Russian church recognized it. Its ruler is an exarch. The Romanian Orthodox Church has a patriarch at Bucharest; it was probably the most carefully organized of the Orthodox churches. After 1945 the government announced that the Roman Catholic dioceses of the Romanian rite had been annexed by the Orthodox church; the status of these dioceses and their property has become a source of tension in the post-Communist era.

Other Orthodox churches are minority denominations of recent creation. The Albanian Orthodox Church suffered considerably under Italian rule during World War II, as well as under Communist rule since then. The Orthodox churches of Finland and of Poland, founded after World War I, lost most of their members when the eastern sections of the countries were repossessed by the Soviet Union in World War II. The Japanese Orthodox Church became autonomous under government pressure (1939). It had its origin in a Russian mission founded in 1860.

There are a number of autonomous Orthodox groups that began in emigration. Thus in the United States there have been separate hierarchies of Greeks, Russians, and others, sometimes in communion with each other. There have been many efforts to establish a single American Orthodox church, but no union has been effected. In 1950 several Eastern Orthodox denominations joined with Protestant groups in the formation of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America; almost all Orthodox churches in America are now members.

With the collapse of Communist rule in the countries of E Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s, their Orthodox churches revived and gained new members. Following the establishment in 1991 of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Russian patriarch, a breakaway church emerged and demanded independence from Moscow, but Constantinople refrained from endorsing the break. Constantinople's recognition in 1996 of Estonia's church as under its, instead of Russian, oversight led to strain between it and the Russian church.

Relations with Rome and the West

The relations between the Orthodox and the Western Church have been full of misunderstandings, which became grave as political and cultural ties loosened after the 5th cent. There were breaks between Constantinople and Rome in the 9th cent. (see Photius) and in 1054 (see Leo IX, Saint), but the main obstacle to reconciliation was the conduct of the Crusades, especially the Fourth Crusade (when the Crusaders seized Constantinople), since the whole of Western Christendom, most of all the pope, was inevitably blamed. In 1274 there was an attempt at reunion (Second Council of Lyons), and in 1439 another (see Ferrara-Florence, Council of); the second was repudiated (1472) by Constantinople.

In the Middle Ages the points at issue were papal authority, matters of worship and discipline, and the addition of the filioque to the Nicene Creed (see creed 1). There have been fractional reunions, notably the Union of Brest-Litvosk (1595) of Ukrainians, who retained their hierarchy and rites. A synthetization of Orthodox and Protestant beliefs was unsuccessfully attempted in the 17th cent. by Patriarch Cyril Lucaris. In the 19th cent. began the cultivation of cordial relations between Anglicans and Orthodox, and official exchanges between them have become frequent. In 1962 several observers from the Orthodox churches attended the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII. The following year the Orthodox churches (with the exception of the Greek church) agreed to open a dialogue with Rome on equal terms. Contacts between the Orthodox and Rome continued into the 1990s, but opposition to the dialogue is strong in some Orthodox churches. A 1997 Russian law granting special status to the Orthodox Church was widely deplored by Western religious leaders as contrary to the spirit of the ecumenical movement.

The Gods

Probably the most important of the Middle Eastern religions was that which was developed by the peoples of Mesopotamia (i.e., the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians). These peoples, besides spreading their influence, absorbed contributions of the Hittites, the Phrygians, the Ugarites, and the Phoenicians. It was in Mesopotamia that the Sumerians implanted reverence for the sky and for high places. Later, when they came into contact with the Semites, new gods were absorbed into the pantheon. The result was a blend of religious thought, Sumerian and Semitic, in which everything—a tree, a stone, a fish, a bird, a person, or even an abstract idea—had a particular significance in the universe.

The highest authority was the triad of gods: the sky god Anu, the storm god Enlil, and the water god Ea, or Enki. Later a second triad arose: the moon god Sin, the sun god Shamash, and the goddess Ishtar (sometimes replaced by the weather god Hadad). As Babylon rose to supremacy in the 2d millennium B.C., the local god Marduk became important; a thousand years later Ashur of Assyria took his place. Thus many deities were determined by political conquest as well as by interchange.

There was a gradual development among the Middle Eastern cultures toward belief in a supreme god. One of the most widespread cults was that of the mother goddess (Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Cybele; see Great Mother Goddess). She was considered as more kindly disposed toward humans than the other deities but was also capable of cruelty and vengefulness.

The Role of Humans

People were, according to Middle Eastern beliefs, created for the benefit of the gods: they were to serve and obey, provide the gods with food, clothing, and shelter, and offer them reverence. There were personal gods who were protective of the individual and linked humans with the great deities, but essentially the ancient Mesopotamian peoples were at the mercy of gods whose behavior was arbitrary and often abusive. In response to this belief in negligence on the part of the gods, various city-states enacted public laws or codes of ethics (in addition to promulgating a large body of wisdom literature) that sought to promote justice and truth and to destroy wickedness. Of these law collections the most famous was probably the code of Hammurabi.

While originally the functions of priesthood were borne by the city rulers, in later times priests became a separate group and were assigned special and significant duties: some pacified the gods with hymns and liturgy; others were trained in divination and astrology (special functions in Middle Eastern religion that indirectly contributed to the growth of science); others—perhaps the most important—were concerned with protecting people from demons, who were considered actual creatures with distinct shapes and names and were to be repelled by magic, daily recitations, and exorcism.

Other Beliefs

Some beliefs—the story of creation, the perpetuation of life, the inevitable fate of humanity—have come down to us in Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, which was preserved in cuneiform writing on clay tablets. The epic of creation, the Enuma elish (2d millennium B.C.), describes the battle between the young gods (forces of order), led by Marduk, and the old gods (forces of chaos), led by Tiamat and her consort Kingu. Another well-known myth, symbolizing the death and rebirth of vegetation, is that of Ishtar's descent to the underworld in search of her lover Tammuz and her triumphant return to earth. Here is the resurrection theme common to later religions. Perhaps the most famous of all Babylonian myths is the story of Gilgamesh. Although the people of the ancient Middle East conceived of a sort of after-existence, they generally believed that a person's fate was decay and dust. Their beliefs foreshadowed the change from polytheism to monotheism, faith in some sort of divine benevolence, and even the idea of salvation so important in the religious mysteries and later in Christianity.

In the 18th cent., France supported the Turks against Russia and Austria. The Eastern Question came into sharp focus during the reign of Czarina Catherine II with the first two of the Russo-Turkish Wars (1768-74, 1787-92), when Russia, in alliance with Austria, planned the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople was the chief prize coveted by Russia, which lacked an adequate warm-water outlet to the sea. These designs aroused alarm in Prussia and, more especially, in Great Britain, which saw its dominance in the Mediterranean threatened by Russian ambitions. (Later it was the strategic importance of the Suez Canal that most concerned Britain.) The formation of a diplomatic alliance by Great Britain, Prussia, and the Netherlands and the Austrian defeats at the hands of the Turks offset Russian successes; yet the first stage of the struggle, terminating with the Treaty of Jassy (1792), left Russia with a foothold on the north shore of the Black Sea.

During the Napoleonic era, when attention shifted elsewhere, Russia, after another war with Turkey, again secured favorable terms in the Treaty of Bucharest (1812). Russian conquests against Persia and in the Caucasus were confirmed in the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmanchai (1828). These developments and the outbreak of national aspirations among the oppressed peoples of the Balkans again made the Eastern Question a major European problem. The Holy Alliance was committed to defending the territorial integrity of Turkey, but the rival imperialistic interests of the Great Powers, each of which hoped to profit from Ottoman disintegration, soon caused the abandonment of this principle.

In the Greek War of Independence (1821-30), both England and Russia assisted the Greek insurgents, each trying to impose its influence on the newly formed state. The Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29, connected with the Greek war, ended successfully for Russia (see Adrianople, Treaty of), but the subsequent Russian assistance to Turkey against Muhammad Ali of Egypt, followed by a Russo-Turkish alliance (1833), greatly disquieted Britain and France. Still, the five Great Powers (Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia) acted in concert in the final settlement of the Egyptian question, and a treaty signed (1840) in London offered international guarantees of the Ottoman Empire's integrity.

In 1853, however, rivalry among Britain, France, and Russia brought on the Crimean War. The treaty that ended it (see Paris, Congress of) attempted to deprive Russia of pretexts for intervention, to check Russia's naval power on the Black Sea, and to place the empire under international protection. By this time, Turkey had become the "sick man of Europe," and its disintegration could not be arrested.

Events in Bosnia and Herzegovina once more led to a Russo-Turkish War (1877-78); the Treaty of San Stefano was so favorable to Russia that Britain went to the verge of war to compel a revision. The Congress of Berlin (see Berlin, Congress of) revised the Treaty of San Stefano—a setback for Russian influence—but it created fresh problems. The new Balkan states, dissatisfied with their borders, turned to individual great powers to back their claims.

Austria, allied with Russia in the late 18th cent., had come to fear Russian influence in the Balkans; after its defeat by Prussia in 1866, it had joined in an alliance with Germany (see Triple Alliance and Triple Entente). Germany, which had assumed the role of "honest broker" at the Congress of Berlin, became increasingly interested in extending its influence over the Ottoman Empire. The German-Austrian Drang nach Osten [drive to the East] policy became manifest in the reorganization of the Turkish army by German officers, the construction of Baghdad Railway, the crisis over Morocco, and the Austrian annexation (1908) of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russian Pan-Slavism in the Balkans and the almost total disappearance of European Turkey in the Balkan Wars caused Turkey to seek German and Austrian support and to join the Central Powers after the outbreak of World War I. The war destroyed the Ottoman Empire and closed the old Eastern Question, but the problem of maintaining stability in the area once ruled by the empire remained.

Two mountain ranges forming the edges of the Deccan plateau in southern India. The Eastern Ghats extend about 700 mi (1,100 km) along the southeastern and eastern coast north to the mouth of the Mahanadi River; their average elevation is about 2,000 ft (600 m). The Western Ghats run some 800 mi (1,300 km) along the southwestern and western coast north to the mouth of the Tapti River; their average elevations range from 3,000 ft (900 m) to 5,000 ft (1,500 m). Because they receive heavy rainfall during the monsoon season, the Western Ghats comprise peninsular India's principal watershed.

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Main watershed of eastern Australia. It consists of a series of plateaus and mountain ranges roughly paralleling the coasts of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria that stretches for some 2,300 mi (3,700 km). Beginning in the north on the Cape York Peninsula, Queen., the range heads generally south to become the Australian Alps near the New South Wales–Victoria border. The range bends west in Victoria, ending in the Grampians, while a southern spur emerges from the Bass Strait to form the central uplands of Tasmania. First traversed by Europeans moving into the Australian Outback in 1813, the region is now important for agriculture, lumbering, and mining, and its national parks and other natural areas are major tourist attractions.

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