One of the continuing characteristics of any period of Church history has been the interaction, whether positive or negative, between the religious and political realms. Since the 19th century, the Church has faced a somewhat modified form of this relationship – a complex history of theological and ideological discourses that have mutually overlapped or repelled each other. Whether we like it or not, we live in a world shaped by modern ideological structures. Therefore, for Christians, to analyse the phenomenon of ideology from a theological perspective is an urgent and essential task.
Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is well-known for his impressive academic productivity, which is combined with an active presence in the Ukrainian public and media spheres. One of the areas of his scholarly activity, along with patristics and Church history, is political theology. In 2016, Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal published Fr. Cyril’s article “Ideology and Religion”. The significance of this study lies in the fact that the author has thoroughly researched and concisely presented the two-hundred-year history of the emergence and further evolution of the phenomenon of ideology, as well as the historical interaction between ideologies and Christian theology.
Fr. Cyril’s article explores the emergence of ideology as a phenomenon of secular culture during the Enlightenment, the crisis of ideologies in the 1950s and 1960s, and the attempts of ideological constructs to replace or modify religion. The author has also made an overview of modern liberalism and conservatism as derived from the two-party political life of the United States, examined contemporary ideological projects from the perspective of Church Fathers’ anthropology, and offered his thoughts on the essence of “political Orthodoxy” in Ukraine and the concept of the “Russian world” in Russia.
A review of Fr. Cyril Hovorun’s article by Fr. Andrii Shymanovych can be found at this link:
