Biserică, naţiune și stat la frontierele creștinătăţii: experienţe instituţionale poloneze și ruse (I): Marea Spaimă și Cetatea lui Dumnezeu
Church, Nation and State at the Frontiers of Christianity: Polish and Russian Institutional Experiences (I): The Great Terror and the City of God

Summary/Abstract: Reconstructing the preliminaries of the modern state offers authors interested in the medieval genesis of the state restoration process of the XIII-XIV centuries the opportunity to deepen knowledge of the past from a perspective less dependent on event data, but without abdicating the rigors of critical thinking, by deepening the transfer of individual and community loyalties from the institutions that perpetuated the succession of the paradigm of the unity of the classical world, the Church and the Empire, towards the territorial state, under a dynasty that identifies itself with the nation and incorporates a hierocratic dimension through the ritual of coronation and thanks to exponents invested with the attributes of holiness. The process of restoring the state as the main institutional landmark in the community life had a better studied spiritual corollary in relation to Latin Christian nations, materialized in the so-called nationalization of the church, followed by the institutionalization of the Protestants, but manifested in less radical manner in the Orthodox world, by prioritizing local affinities in relation to the agenda of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. If the rise of the secular power generated a series of more or less violent disputes with the ecclesiastical forums that consecrated them at the beginning of their official existence, the fact did not mean the diminution of collective piety or the abandonment of religious values, preaching in the spoken language only led to the wider dissemination of the written word favoring the deep Christianization of the nations that had adhered to the faith formalized by the Edict of Milan (313). From this perspective, the study of the state restoration in the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian principalities after the Mongol invasion of 1241-1242 illustrates the decisive role that the conduct of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the faith of the masses played in the success of these experiments. On the other hand, the examples of two neighboring nations, but under the authority of the two apostolic seats of the Christian church, have the merit of highlighting a number of ethical and behavioral similarities of nations perceived as irreconcilable.

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