Patriarchs and Politics: From Cyprus 431 to Kiev 2019

Speaker: Bernard Casey, Social Economic Research, London and Frankfurt

This presentation is motivated by the reorganisation of the Orthodox church in the Ukraine at the end of 2018/start of 2019, which led to the installation of, for the first time, a Patriarch in Kiev. This prompted the Russian Orthodox Church to announce that it was breaking with the church led by Constantinople – the first schism since 1054. The creation of a Ukrainian patriarchy was, of course, highly political in its implications. But this was nothing new. Primates, patriarchs, their creation and the positions they have taken have often had a strong political dimension. Indeed, it is the politics of patriarchy that made a substantial contribution to Europe’s development.

Bernard H. Casey spent most of his professional career as an economist, working at various universities and research institutes and at the OECD. He has been pursuing the study of Late Antiquity, with special reference to the history of the Eastern Empire and especially of theological debates in the period from Nicaea to the Great Schism.