Continuing the tradition of the famous homonymous Orthodox journal once published in Kazan, the present periodical exhibits a quality and range that put it well above most seminary publications in Russia and Eastern Europe. Also, it is worth mentioning that The Orthodox Interlocutor has secured the blessing of the Kazan and Tatarstan Archbishop Anastasius.
The present issue is divided into three uneven parts: Commemoration of the 425th anniversary of the finding and the 100th anniversary of the loss of the Kazan icon of Virgin Mary, Church History, and Ecclesiastical Studies.
The volume opens with Georgii Mueller’s article titled “On the Topic of Formation of the Iconographical Type of the Kazan Virgin Mary Icon” (Pp. 4-20). He takes for granted the post-iconoclast Byzantine legends that the first icons were created by Jesus when pressing his face onto Abgar’s towel or that they were painted by St. Luke. Actually, the first known image of the Theotokos with the Child is a mural in the Roman catacomb of Priscilla dating to the third century. Her cult began in earnest after the third ecumenical council in Ephesus (431 A. D.), but in the Apophtegmata Patrum and in some seventh-century Cyprus mosaics her image was still referred to as “AGIA MARIA.” Mueller discusses the iconographic type to which the Kazan icon belongs and reasonably rejects earlier claims that it was a Hodegetria (Gr. “Way Guider”).^[1] Mueller’s suggestion that the lost icon was created in Constantinople in the late tenth or early eleventh century is quite credible. At that time Byzantium waged a bloody war to conquer Bulgaria, and it may be assumed that the icon was taken to Kazan, the former center of the Volga Bulgars, by people fleeing from the massacres in the Balkans.
The next contribution is Dmitrii Hafizov’s chapter titled “Matrona – the God Seer from Kazan” (Pp. 21-69). He focuses on the narrative by Patriarch Hermogen about the visions and discovery of the icon by the little girl Matrona in 1579 and criticizes the numerous mistakes and falsifications that grew around it. Hafizov dwells on the many miracles, feasts, and copies of the icon, which spread all over Russia. A century after its disappearance, the icon still provokes conflicting sentiments because some adore it as a symbol of Russian power while others reject it as an ostensible instrument of “imperialist enslavement.”^[2] The next article, “The Virgin Mary Nunnery in Kazan: Landmarks of History” (written by Anatolii Eldashev), is devoted to vicissitudes in the history of the monastery where Matrona took the veil as the nun Maura, its abbesses, possessions, and graveyard. The theft and burning down of the renowned icon and the ensuing court case in 1904 is vividly described. In 1918, the nunnery complex was taken over by the Bolsheviks and most of its buildings were destroyed or became dilapidated. The Holy Sophia church was returned to believers in 1994.
The second thematical section of the journal opens with a rather revisionist contribution by Hieromonk Petr (Gaydenko). It discusses the role of the Russian Metropolitans in church-state relations in pre-Mongol Russia (Pp. 136-167). He traces their roots to the pagan epoch. The political drift of the country to the West was then counterbalanced by the strong spiritual dependence of Kiev on Constantinople. In addition, one cannot disregard the strong influence of Bulgaria at the time on Russia in the field of letters and art. The autonomy of the Kievan monasteries vis-а-vis the local metropolitans is a phenomenon that, in my opinion, can be explained by traditions formed as a reaction to the official iconoclasm in Byzantium.
Taking into account the present tensions in Christian-Islamic relations not only in Russia but around the world, the contribution by Mars Habibullin, who focuses on the activities of M. A. Mashanov in the St. Gurius Missionary Society, is of special interest (Pp. 168-205). Mashanov was alarmed by the return of the converted Tatars (kriasheny) to Islam, which, according to him, was due to several factors: the lack of state funding, active Muslim propaganda, the rise of Tatar nationalism, and the failure of missions to develop new methods in dealing with the non-Orthodox. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Mashanov was one of the prominent liberal theologians who sought to reform the conservative Russian Church.
The final contribution in the reviewed volume is an interesting article by Rev. Nikolay Diakov on the relations between the Russian and Anglican Churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pp. 206-252). The Archbishop who headed and founded the British Church (not to be confused with the later Anglican Church) in the seventh century was the Greek Theodore, who was born in Tarsus and lived as a monk in Rome.^[3] The first contacts between Petersburg and Canterbury took place in the eighteenth century, and these interactions significantly intensified in the next one. In this inter-confessional dialogue, the themes of church unity and validity of the Anglican hierarchy were of crucial importance. In his bull of 1896, Pope Leo XIII rejected offhand such validity, while the Russian Church hierarchs were more cautious. In the twentieth century, the Constantinople and Romanian churches, both engaged in ecumenist communication, recognized the Anglican ordinations, but the other Orthodox churches refused to comply. The Moscow Council of 1948, known by its vulnerable treatment of Roman Catholicism and ecumenism, decided that unity of faith with Anglicans had to be achieved before confirming the valid status of their hierarchy. Some recent tendencies, such as the ordination of women as priests (and even bishops) by the Anglicans, made the perspectives of this dialogue rather pessimistic, if not pointless. What Diakov is probably aware of but fails to cover is the growing threat of schism in Anglicanism over the ordination of homosexuals, which now constitutes a practice in the Episcopal branch in the US.
With all that said, the present issue of the Orthodox Interlocutor is quite a valuable contribution to several fields simultaneously: Russian history, art, theology, and the history of ecumenism. Many of these contributions may serve as guiding (or reference) materials for those readers encountering these subjects for the first time. The authors and editors deserve positive assessments for putting together these high quality articles.