Orthospeak: An Outline
A bishop told me once, in response to a direct, publicly addressed question, that he put obedience to Church hierarchy above truth and justice. It was, paradoxically, a moment of truth: normally, this is the underlying maxim of what is done in practice, but it is not often so candidly acknowledged.
Christians should cultivate truth and reject hypocrisy, hush-ups, disinformation, and manipulation. These are instances of lies, and the father of lies is the evil one. I think almost all would agree with this in theory – but what happens in practice is a very different matter.
The language of truth should be alive and open to heavenly influences; it is poetical and paradoxical. There is, of course, the higher kind of truth: truth about God, which is not a system of ideas but communion with God himself, who said, “I am the Truth” (John 14:6). There is also the truth of what may be happening around us, the objectivity of facts, and of whether they concord, or not, with the Gospel. This kind of truth is not, either, of a fundamentally different kind from the higher truth, and its language should share the qualities of true dogma. As it shares the name, it shares something of its quality: it is linked to God’s justice, and it must be desired and searched for. Christians should follow truth — that is, reality — and put it above obedience to authority, whether to “tradition” or the State. “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). It is high time we worked to resuscitate this communion of everyday truth with Truth, which is God’s name.
Manipulative language in fiction: an interpretation key
The discourse of orthodox hierarchs — and of many others — tends to become what I call Orthospeak, an instantiation, within orthodox spheres, of Orwell’s Newspeak. Like Newspeak, Orthospeak has the effect of controlling or manipulating thought and evading truth and justice.
The influence of narratives and language on reality perception is well known in the speculative fiction, dystopia, and magic realism genres. The Ascians, a people living under a totalitarian system in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, were able to speak only in government quotations, referred to as correct speech; language didn’t exist anymore as a free medium. Expressing truth in these conditions became almost impossible. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, Newspeak is a distorted language designed to block any “subversive” thought and manipulate the understanding of reality in general. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, citizens were conditioned from childhood on through stereotypical maxims, which were repeated over and over again during sleep. These works of fiction express what is happening to a certain extent in totalitarian systems — and what also happens in some media through channeled disinformation and manipulation.
In Akutagawa’s story In a Grove, we read about a murder described by several people in very different ways. In the end, the details and some important facts differ so much in their testimonies that the reader cannot discern what really happened. This kind of reality-blocking, competing narrative—developed in the film Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa, based on this story—is called the “Rashomon effect.” It can be understood as an exemplification of how disinformation and propaganda work. Manipulators try to tell us that reality is very complex and no one is on the right side more than the other—the “one” being the victim of some injustice, and the “other” being in fact an aggressive, corrupted power. The story is a clear example of false narratives created by staged disinformation, which are de facto inversions of truth, mixing up and blurring the facts, a narrative strategy created to boggle the minds of people into not seeing what is obvious. They are perverse and distorted stories, which also work because they are repeated millions of times and are aided by trolls and algorithms.
It has been said that we live in the era of post-truth. Disinformation and gaslighting seem to conquer our minds more and more. We live in an era of omnipresent, quickly shared information; that is, also disinformation, smoke screens, constructed alternative realities, and conspiracy theories. And it is shocking to see that the orthodox Church is very fragile in the face of, and permissive toward, this post-truth culture. We tend to live in ghettos made by discourses that lose their meaning if they lose contact with reality. It is even more shocking that the Church’s official discourse feels very comfortable there. Why are orthodox believers so ready to be convinced of fake news? Why do so many official declarations of bishops follow and feed the patterns of post-truth, narrowly echoing Newspeak and Ascian speech?
These questions deserve a thorough analysis. My purpose here is merely to briefly show how this “Orthospeak” works.
Blurred narratives and incorrect equalization
A current narrative method in orthodox discourse consists of stating different facts and maxims that contradict each other and then concluding without taking a clear position — or by making it ambiguous. It is hypocritical and perverse because it is meant to seem Christian, critical, and well-balanced, but it is not. This is what numerous bishops did when writing declarations with “prayers for peace,” “fratricide war,” and “asking for dialogue” about the war in Ukraine, without “taking sides.” It is an instantiation of the Rashomon effect.
This is also what Archbishop Elpidophoros did in his declaration from January 26 about the Minnesota killings of innocent citizens by the ICE, when he at first condemns the murders but then expands on the necessity to help the authorities to do their work and not “provoke” them and not dehumanize the killers. “They should not be subjected to calculated provocation that seeks escalation,” he writes, thus putting the killers, if not explicitly, then narratively on the same (or perhaps even higher) level. “We must therefore push back against the deliberate strategy of dehumanizing the ‘other,’” he continues, throwing the stone toward the protesters, who are de facto accused of intentionally “dehumanizing” the aggressors.
What he writes in this second part is right in principle, but, as the East Bloc joke went, in principle we can buy anything, but we don’t know where that town, Principle, lies. Choosing to state this maxim about not provoking the authorities sounds little different from the question asked about a victim of rape, “How long was her skirt?” and also like hurrying to show the authorities a form of cowardly obedience.
Another example is Teoctist, the Patriarch of the Church of Romania under Ceaușescu, who used to write declarations about how good it was that our president “worked for peace,” because Christianity was about peace on Earth. By the way, the first part of this affirmation referred to the East Block discourse about the “battle for peace,” which was comparable with Palpatine’s sentence in Star Wars, “And then we will have peace!” and could have been described with Orwell’s Doublespeak maxim, “War is peace.”
It may be noble, in a general way, to admit that the enemy has good sides, but saying so in a totalitarian context serves to justify its hidden motivations and blurs the perception of reality. It is a true affirmation that God desires and brings “peace on earth.” But in that context, it was not simply stating that “two and two make four,” that is, telling what is true in principle—that God wants and brings peace—but encouraging corrupt state politics and perverse rhetoric. Telling a “simple truth” does not always bring the result of Orwell’s saying that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four.” “Two and two make four” means different things in different contexts, as Nicolae Steinhardt wrote in his Journal of Joy, reflecting on a comment on Orwell’s maxim:
“When people are being sawn in two right next to you, announcing that two and two is four means that you must scream at the top of your lungs: it is an injustice crying out to heaven that people should be sawn in two.” (Nicolae Steinhardt, The Journal of Joy, p. 29)
Steinhardt then specifies that it is not enough to say that two and two is four if one tells it in order to please or help a torturer; one should not put one’s signature next to that of the devil, even to recognize that two and two make four, or even to state that God exists.
So, when people are being mistreated, bullied, and killed by a paramilitary organization, “two and two make four,” a simple truth, means clearly condemning these acts as evil and expressing compassion for the victims without adding anything else. One cannot serve two masters.
Ideological cant and misapplied pious quotations
A bishop of the curia of Constantinople, now a high prelate, answered me once in response to a letter I had written to him because he had erased a critical comment on Facebook about the abuses of another bishop. I had asked him not to close this little space left to us for dialogue and the search for justice. He wrote in answer that we laypeople cannot take part in decisions, and it was normal for us not to know learn about the reasons for the synod’s decisions, and quoted St. Paul’s image of the Church as a body (1 Cor 12):
“In a body, as you yourself admitted describing the Church, not everybody is the head, not everybody is the hand, not everybody is the heart etc. Every member of the body has a different role, without any discrimination, because to be a body we need ALL MEMBERS. The problem usually begins when all members claim the role of the head: then we have many heads, which means division of the one body. The contrary (i.e. for the Head to ignore the rest of the members) cannot happen, especially these days, when the communication means have developed so much. Lay people can have their voice heard without difficulties. So, don’t lose your trust to the heads of the Church.”
In referring to the scriptural Body metaphor, the bishop tried to give authority to his argument. But the real use he made of his quotation is a denial of the fundamental rights and openness his Patriarchate pretends to defend. It is a misuse of this text:
St. Paul did not employ this image to mean that laypeople should always refer to the bishops (as “the head”) but rather to emphasize the richness and diversity of spiritual charisms, which should cooperate, and of the mutual care and trust the members should show toward one other. It is not a model of the hierarchical functioning of the Church.
The bishop finally advised me to ask help and protection from my own bishop — that is, the same bishop who had applied the unjust treatment I was complaining about in the first place — which sounded very cynical but was probably only proof that he had not read my first letter attentively and was simply reciting prefabricated language.
My bishop, Job of Telmessos (now of Pisidia), on the other hand, had publicly told people who tried to participate in the life of their diocese and comment on some of his arbitrary decisions, quoting St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Where the bishop is, there the Church is.” He repeats and justifies this image of the Church in his new position as Permanent Representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the WCC in public statements, saying that this is true Orthodox conciliarity, where laypeople are fully recognized and free to speak only through their bishops, who supposedly always hear them out and thoroughly represent them. Meanwhile, this highly hierarchical view of the Church and, what is more, Archbishop Job’s authoritarian practice of it, was not what St. Ignatius meant and not what was practiced in St. Ignatius’ time.
These are two instances of hierarchs quoting revered texts in a bent manner and squeezing a meaning almost to the opposite of the original sense. If bishops abuse their position of service, guidance, and trust, then how can they also be the true representatives of the people? The use they make of these phrases shows another widespread aspect of Orthospeak, “ideological cant.”
The concept of “ideological cant” (the closest equivalent to langue de bois, wooden language, in French) was thoroughly analyzed by Françoise Thom. She debunks the Soviet practice of a rigid, stereotypical, conformity-signaling, power-imposing way of speaking, much resembling the language of the Ascians from Gene Wolfe’s novel mentioned above. It is sad to observe that bishoply discourses often seem to share this “wooden,” or “cant,” quality. The Church’s discourse should not be a stereotypical rendering of what we think is tradition nor merely a chain of quotations from Scripture. A spiritual discourse should have meaning that liberates instead of enslaving our perception, and Scripture should have a “living plant” quality in our speech instead of that of “dead wood.”
Quoting the Fathers or the Scriptures is not enough to render a discourse spiritual or true. The devil himself can quote the Scriptures, as we see, for instance, in the episode of Christ’s temptations in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11). The quotation the devil uses there is another example of narrative deformation of Scripture, as this phrase is true, but only in a different context, and surely does not mean we should not use God like a magical power source. Orthodox statements and public discourses often fall into this misuse of revered texts and thus may well serve lies, not truth.
Subverting Orthospeak
In choosing these two features and a few examples, I feel I have only scratched the surface of the problem. I have also knowingly set aside the most extreme examples, such as those of Patriarch Kiril’s discourses about a “holy war,” which many others have already analyzed and condemned. The corrupting quality of the examples I chose is more subtle and goes unperceived more often than the extreme deformation and crass misuse of Christian doctrine in Moscow’s discourse.
In outlining some characteristics without a more thorough analysis, I am perhaps only preaching to the already convinced. Can this interpretation help people who have been brought up and formed in a culture of obedience and cowardice toward authorities, or people who have acquired the habit of thought that leads them to believe distorted discourse?
To understand and debunk Orthospeak is the first step to being immunized against it and perhaps to being more able to help others to do so. It is important that more Christians face these mechanisms like the child in Andersen’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and yell, “The king is naked!” We should operate in an almost subversive manner in order to smash this petrified, bent language and break through to the true wells of life and knowledge that true Christian tradition contains. We should follow the example of Christ in the Gospels, when he denounces the discourse of the Pharisees and the Scribes and specifies he had not come to abolish the Law but to accomplish it. We should, to begin with, cultivate wakefulness and intelligence as a virtue, like Steinhardt reminds us:
“Nowhere and never did Christ ask us to be stupid. He calls us to be good, tender, honest, and humble-hearted, but not idiots. … The Lord loves purity, not imbecility. … God, among other things, commands us to be intelligent.” (Nicolas Steinhardt, The Journal of Joy, pp. 23-24).
To be intelligent is to keep watch (Mat 25:13) and to remember that the Gospel frees our eyes and teaches about truth. To see that Truth, which is God’s name, must be searched for with open eyes and acted upon.