Georgi Todorov in front of FACT: Historical regularities reveal a dangerous connection between power and the Church (VIDEO)

What are the acute questions about church tradition, catholicity, relations between the Church and political power and the influence of national ideologies on Orthodox consciousness. Here is what theologian Georgi Todorov shared with Lili Marinkova in the “FACT“ studio and the “Conversation“ program.

- Georgi Todorov, the famous theologian and publicist, is our guest. The occasion for the conversation is the upcoming celebration of the anniversary of the birth and ascension of Saint John of Rila. The Bulgarian Patriarchate has invited Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who will lead the festive services in the Rila Monastery and in Sofia. How do you assess the efforts of the Bulgarian Patriarch to improve relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate? Should previous disagreements be overcome?
- The very conduct of dialogue is a common human activity and cannot in itself be defined as worthy or unworthy. My main goal is to trace historical patterns and show how they shed light on contemporary church-political reality.
When we compare historical processes with what is happening today, in my opinion a serious problem emerges. History and theology can help us understand the present, as long as we do not succumb to pressure and do not comply with the interests of the powerful of the day.

- What is the main historical pattern that, in your opinion, is repeated in modern church life?
- It is about the influence of the secular hegemon on the Church. During the Roman Empire, the emperor had enormous influence on church affairs. According to my reading of history, when the emperor supported Orthodoxy, councils were convened that affirmed Orthodox teaching. However, when he supported heretical views, the state power could impose the corresponding line in church life.
It is especially dangerous when a given teaching receives the support of the supreme political power. Then it can influence the appointment of patriarchs and bishops and determine the direction of church policy. In my opinion, such processes can hardly be overcome only by intra-church means, until the political support for them changes.

- Who fulfills the role of this hegemon in the modern world, since we no longer have an Orthodox or heretical emperor?
- After the disappearance of the Roman Empire, the role of the supreme power changes. In certain historical periods, this was the Ottoman Sultan, and in more recent times we can talk about the influence of the so-called “deep state“ or the large geopolitical center of power.
In my opinion, the mechanism remains similar: the power that has a leading position in the international system also tries to influence church life. Of course, the question of who exactly exercises this influence today is complex, but I think the historical analogy is worth considering.

- You connect the emergence of world hegemony with the rise of Western colonial empires. How does this process develop, according to your thesis?
- According to my reading of history, world hegemony was formed gradually with the rise of colonial empires in the 16th century. At first it was collective - England, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands built their empires and competed with each other, but at the same time formed the dominant Western center of power. In the 20th century, especially after 1945, I think this system acquired a clearer leader in the person of the United States. Hence the question of what values and views the world hegemon spreads and how this affects church institutions.

- How do you connect the role of the United States with ecumenism and the activities of the World Council of Churches?
- In my interpretation of contemporary church processes, ecumenism is associated with the influence of the dominant Western center. I view the World Council of Churches as an institution through which ideas are spread that, according to my theological convictions, contradict Orthodox teaching.
The World Council of Churches was founded in 1948. I also draw attention to the fact that that same year is important for relations between the United States and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In my opinion, this coincidence should be considered in a broader historical context, although the coincidence of dates alone is not enough to prove a causal relationship.

- What role do you assign to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in these processes?
- In my opinion, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has a central place in the contemporary disputes about ecumenism. Historically, clerics who supported various theological positions, including those that were later condemned by the Church, have ascended to the Patriarchal Throne of Constantinople.
My thesis is that in some periods these processes were connected with the political will of the emperor or another dominant power. In my opinion, it is not always about the personal convictions of the individual patriarch, but also about pressure and interests that come from outside.

- Can you give a historical example of such an influence of secular power on church teaching?
- As an example, I cite the periods of iconoclasm in Byzantium. At that time, the state authorities supported the view that the veneration of icons was inadmissible, and this position also affected church governance. In my opinion, such processes show how political support can turn a doctrine into a dominant position for a certain period.
I also consider other historical examples in which different theological trends have received support from emperors. It is important to understand that in my opinion the influence of political power is not a random phenomenon, but a recurring historical pattern.

- Do you think that today we observe a similar pattern in connection with ecumenism?
- Yes, in my opinion there is such a pattern. I consider the modern line of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a continuation of a process that took shape in the 20th century and is related to the ecumenical movement. In my assessment, this influence continues today.
I see continuity between individual patriarchal administrations and I believe that this line can be preserved in future successors. Therefore, the question is not only who occupies the patriarchal throne, but what theological and church policy the institution follows.

- What does all this mean for the Bulgarian Orthodox Church? How should it approach the dialogue with the Ecumenical Patriarchate?
- This is the main question we must ask ourselves. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church must participate in the dialogue, but in my opinion it should not allow the pursuit of good relations to displace theological judgment. It is necessary to carefully consider both historical experience and the specific actions and positions of church institutions.
For me, the essential thing is whether this dialogue is conducted while preserving Orthodox teaching and church autonomy. The very fact that a visit by the Ecumenical Patriarch is imminent does not provide an automatic answer to these questions. That is why it is important to discuss them openly.

- Why do you doubt the upcoming visit of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the Rila Monastery and his participation in the celebration of Saint John of Rila?
- I would not say that it is unacceptable for him to physically enter the monastery. The Rila Monastery is open to everyone. Orthodox Christians, people of other religions and atheists enter there. There is no ban on people visiting the monastery.
His presence alone does not hinder anyone and does not violate any canons. But his invitation to participate in the official celebration is something different from simply entering and bowing before Saint John of Rila. In my opinion, there is something indecent in this invitation – something like betrayal of church principles. No specific canon has been violated, but it seems that spiritual hygiene has been violated.

- The occasion is particularly significant – marks the 1150th anniversary of the birth of Saint John of Rila and the 1080th anniversary of his death. You are dedicating a book to the upcoming visit of Patriarch Bartholomew. What genre is it – satire or scientific research?
- This is a scientific research, one hundred percent. The title is “Patriarch Anaxios and the Holy Synod“. The copy shown is a model that we present to the audience.
“Anaxios“ in Greek means “unworthy“. This is an exclamation with which the church community expresses its attitude when it considers that a person is not worthy of episcopal ordination.

- The title and content of the book have obviously caused a reaction. Is it true that the Bulgarian Patriarchate has banned its premiere?
- The premiere was announced for Thursday at 6:30 p.m. As far as I know, under pressure from the Sofia Metropolis, the publishing house was proposed to postpone it until after Patriarch Bartholomew's departure.
No one has spoken to me personally. The idea, as far as I understand, is to avoid creating the impression that the book is a direct criticism of the patriarch during his visit.

- However, you claim that you do not judge Patriarch Bartholomew as a person. How do you distinguish his personality from his actions as a church leader?
- As Christians, we do not have the right to judge a person as a whole person. Patriarch Bartholomew is a servant of God and his Master is God. Only God's judgment has real meaning. My judgment of him as a human being is null and void.
But besides being a servant of God, he also holds the office of patriarch. When in this capacity he commits acts against the Church, it is no longer a question of his personal sins, about which we must remain silent, but of violations that we are obliged to expose.
The Holy Apostle Paul calls for the unfruitful works of darkness to be exposed. For a patriarch, such acts, in my opinion, are violations and crimes against the Church.

- Which specific actions of Patriarch Bartholomew do you define as violations against the Church?
- In the first place I put ecumenism, which I consider a grave crime against the Church and a heresy.
In the second place is the so-called pheneropapism – in my opinion, an attempt to gain power in the Church, which constitutes a serious violation.
The third is Hellenophilism – the disastrous overestimation of the Greek element in church life and the manifestations of Greek episcopal and linguistic imperialism.

- What do you mean by Greek ecclesiastical and linguistic imperialism?
- I am speaking specifically about the Church. Outside of it, Greek cultural expansion is not the subject of my criticism. But there are painful examples in Bulgarian church history. During the Ottoman period, the Bulgarian Patriarchate was liquidated, and the episcopate gradually became Greek-speaking. A long period followed during which the Bulgarian people were deprived of an episcopate speaking their language - that is, of bishops with whom people could communicate directly.
In my opinion, this has serious consequences. The priest at the local level can tell people not to steal and to observe basic moral rules, but the strategic perspective is the job of the bishop. When the bishop is a foreigner and you cannot talk to him, you lose the opportunity to have a common strategy. This is how historical memory, national identity and other important things are lost.
That is why I consider episcopal and linguistic imperialism in the Church as a serious attack specifically against the Bulgarian church community.

- In your book you also talk about the Ukrainian church schism. Why do you consider it such a serious problem?
- In my opinion, this is a serious and bloody crime against the Church. In addition, it is an attack on catholicity and autocephaly.
The Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and Georgian churches are autocephalous. But in the document issued by Patriarch Bartholomew in connection with the Ukrainian Church, according to my reading, there is a contradiction: the newly created church structure by him is defined as autocephalous, but at the same time he is presented as its head.
For me, this is incompatible. If a church is autocephalous, it cannot simultaneously be subordinate to another patriarch. I see in this formulation an attempt to establish power over a church that should be self-governing.
I believe that such an approach affects not only the Ukrainian church question, but also the institution of autocephaly in general. If it is accepted that the Ecumenical Patriarch has authority over all other autocephalous churches, this undermines the conciliar principle.

- What does this position of yours imply for the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and its leadership?
- We not only have the right to expose what we consider to be violations against the Church – in my opinion, we are obliged to do so. If we remain silent, if we strive to please certain people or avoid criticism for fear of offending the Patriarch, this is bad for the Church and for Bulgaria.
I believe that to some extent similar behavior is also observed in the Holy Synod, including the Bulgarian Patriarch.

- You also claim that we have an incorrect history of the Church. What do you mean?
- While writing the book, I came to the conclusion that we do not have a sufficiently reliable history of the Church. Before that, I myself thought that we had one.
One of the problems, in my opinion, is that we use names and concepts that do not correctly reflect the church tradition. For example, we call the patriarch “Ecumenical“. As early as the 6th century, as I point out in my research, Saint Pope Gregory the Great, also known as Gregory the Two-Faced, criticized such a claim as a manifestation of satanic pride. The second problem is that we call him “Constantinople“...

- How do we practically participate in these delusions and how do we gradually get used to them?
- Georgi Todorov: All children know that Constantinople does not exist as a modern city under this name. However, these lies and utopias continue to exist and we are complicit in them. We fall asleep, we get used to them. At the level of the entire Church, these are micro-betrayals.
When I reveal this mechanism, I show how practically in our daily lives every time we say “Constantinople“ instead of “Istanbul“, we are complicit in this great deception. When we talk about the “Ecumenical Patriarch“, we are also complicit in it — out of courtesy, out of man-pleasing. We always find some small justifications. However, the truth is that we are complicit in a self-deception. He himself was also born into this self-deception and believes that this is right. Therefore, we must ask ourselves how we got here and why we accept these ideas as normal.

- Why don't we have our own history of the Church, built on Orthodox criteria?
- When Western Europe establishes itself as a world hegemon, universities are built there, books are written, printing is developed and a huge amount of scientific work is carried out. We are at that time under the Turkish yoke. We are not on this stage. Western scholars do all the work: collect the facts, establish the universities, conduct the research and publish the manuscripts. Thus a mountain of erudite work accumulates, largely first-class in the horizontal, but, in my opinion, mistaken in the vertical - in relation to Orthodoxy. These researchers do not have Orthodox criteria for things. When we enter the arena, it is already occupied. We begin to build our Orthodox house with their rotten boards. And they are rotten: you hammer in the nail, it sinks and holds nothing. It is for this reason that our church history is sick with the so-called Western captivity. Everyone admits this - the Western captivity of theology. But we have other captivity as well.
- What other captivity do you have in mind?
- We have a Hellenistic captivity. We look at history through the prism of Greek church imperialism, and this is evil. We are talking about Greek church imperialism and the so-called Megali idea — the idea of restoring the Byzantine Empire, which is Roman, Romaic, but already presented as a Greek national state. This is a very cunning utopia, because it tries to unite two different things: the imperial, Greek patriotic and national idea, on the one hand, and the writings of the holy fathers, on the other.
The reasoning is as follows: the holy fathers wrote in Greek, therefore the Greek empire was the empire of the holy fathers. But there is no such connection between the two. One is the Greek language that the fathers used, and the other is a certain state and national idea.
This state, in the form presented by the supporters of the Megali idea, does not exist. It is a utopia. You combine a truth with a lie, with a utopia, and you get this amalgam that they call the Megali idea.

- Why do you think that this idea was disastrous for the Greeks themselves?
- Because, in my opinion, they lost a lot of what they could have kept or gained after the First World War. Territorial changes were discussed, including issues related to Eastern Thrace and Edirne. Izmir was also under Greek rule. But, misled by the utopia of restoring Byzantium, the Greeks headed for a maximalist goal and ultimately lost a lot. Instead of adhering to realistic possibilities, they got carried away by the idea of restored an empire. Thus, they also lost their presence in Asia Minor. The Greek population was expelled from Asia Minor, including Cappadocia. In my opinion, this utopia had tragic consequences. There were also ideas for Constantinople to receive international status, including discussing international governance of the city. But such alternatives remain unfulfilled.

- How does this idea affect contemporary Orthodox consciousness?
- We continue to maintain the same utopia in the Church — that the Orthodox Church was Greek. But it is not Greek. It is Russian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, and Greek, of course. It belongs to all Orthodox peoples. Orthodoxy cannot be identified with the Greek national identity. Greek Orthodoxy is Greek, Bulgarian Orthodoxy is Bulgarian, but the Orthodox Church as a whole is not the property of one nation. All these ideas of normality, which have been instilled in us through a, in my opinion, falsely constructed history of the Church, are actually mental illnesses. We are all carriers of them. I myself was a bearer of some of these misconceptions until I opened the historical sources and saw how certain patterns were repeated.

- What do the historical sources show about the relations between secular power and church government?
- For example, in the 4th century, Emperor Constantius II was absent from the city when an Orthodox patriarch was elected. When he returned, he reacted with the question: "What have you done? This one is not up to the task." He removed him and installed his own man. In my opinion, similar mechanisms are repeated in more recent times. In 1948, Patriarch Maximus V ruled in Istanbul. The Americans intervened, removed him, and another patriarch was installed - Athenagoras. This shows how external political forces can influence church governance. When we study history, we must seek the truth about these mechanisms, and not accept uncritically established narratives. The moment we find the truth, the entire house of cards built on delusions begins to collapse. And then we come to the question of the holy synodality.

- What does the holy synodality tell us about power and primacy in the Church?
- It makes us ask one fundamental question: is there an ecumenical high priest? There is. Who is he? Christ. Christ is the ecumenical high priest. Christ is the Most Holy. And Patriarch Bartholomew and others before him, according to my thesis, usurp this title and put themselves in the place of Christ. Incidentally, Pope Gregory the Great also objected to the claim that any man on earth should bear the title of “ecumenical“. The argument is that Christ is our high priest. There cannot be another Christ who can take His place. Therefore, this is a matter of usurpation of titles and power, which in my opinion do not belong to any earthly first hierarch in this way.

- What are the consequences of this for church history and theology?
- The consequences are the creation of a self-deceptive history of the Church, a self-deceptive ecclesiology — doctrine about the Church — and a self-deceptive theology in all its dimensions. We dive into this ocean of deceptions and self-deceptions and begin to react inadequately to them. We accept certain things as normal, without realizing where they can lead us.

- How do you see the danger of these processes in the last times?
- This is an extremely serious question. In my opinion, if history continues in this way, the last hegemon will be the Antichrist, and he will push the last heresy — his religion. He will push it through the high priests, just as in the time of Christ the high priests condemned Him to death by crucifixion, using the Roman authorities and Pontius Pilate. They condemned Him through an unjust judgment. There is a danger that something similar will happen again in the last times, when the Antichrist comes. The difference between the current habituation to lies and what may happen then, in my opinion, is quantitative, not qualitative. The mechanism is the same: we bow down to a deception and make small apostasies. These are micro-apostas - small steps towards the great apostasy at the end of time, when people will recognize the Antichrist as Christ.

- I am sure that you have written an interesting book that deserves attention. I hope there will also be a real premiere, which will be an event for your connoisseurs and admirers...
- Look, nowadays real premieres also happen on the Internet.

- Yes, of course. For now, however, we will stick to previews. We will leave the official premiere for after October 20, and before that there will be several previews...
- I plan to write a short text called “100 Theses“, which will be an excerpt from the book. This will also be a preview on the Internet. By the way, I could upload the entire book to the Internet with two clicks and that would also be a premiere.

- Of course. And what has been done as a sanction against you is extremely oppressive and unpleasant.
- It is completely undesirable — not for us, but for them.

See more from the conversation in the VIDEO.