Why not? The absence of disability theology in Eastern Orthodoxy
- Petre Maican
- May 7
- 10 min read
Last year in January, I went to present a paper on disability at the largest and most important event in Orthodox theology, the International Orthodox Theological Association (IOTA) conference. Held once every four years, the conference gathers an impressive number of participants – this time the number was above 300 – including scholars, priests, laypersons, and even bishops from all around the globe. What was striking for me was that among all the panels and papers delivered only one was on disability and that was mine.
By comparison, almost any mid-size Roman Catholic or Protestant conference has at least two papers on disability and this without mentioning the number of publications coming out from these traditions. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants could fill a room with the books and articles they wrote on the topic, while the Orthodox would scramble to fill a bookshelf. The situation makes one look for reasons and to be honest, this is what I have been doing since January 2023.
It has been difficult to find a clear and definitive explanation, mainly because Orthodoxy is a rather complex tradition with its very particular dynamics. Challenges are rarely the same for all local Churches and there is no authority that could centralise or coordinate the answers provided to these local specificities. For instance, the reasons for being reluctant towards disability in the Romanian Orthodox context are going to be different from those in the United States – something I’m going to speak about shortly. Thus, any attempt to understand the Orthodox lack of engagement with disability is by default going to miss some nuances and particular reasons. In the following, I will provide my own reflections on this issue, but without claiming I have the last word or that other elements cannot be added to this list.
1. Fear of secularisation and culture wars
For a long time, it was easy to blame the communist legacy for the Orthodox disinterest in social issues, particularly in ex-communist countries where Orthodox majorities exist. The communists left the Church in a very bad state, so the Church had first to start organising social work and only then think theologically about social ethics and disability. This is not the case today anymore. Most Orthodox Churches in Eastern Europe have a privileged and powerful position in the social and political order of their own countries. In some cases, as in Romania, the Orthodox Church has even established a strong social network, which includes hospitals, care centres for old persons, and emergency services.
But, even here, the Church does not seem eager to reflect theologically on disability. In this case, the fear is that the Church will be identified with just another NGO rather than with the sacred institution that leads people to the truth of Christ. In the long term, this will make the Church irrelevant, just as it happened in the West. Or at least this is how a Romanian priest once explained to me the reticence of the Romanian Orthodox Church to think theologically about disability.
This Romanian insecurity towards the role of the Church in society is to a certain extent reflected in the landscape of North American Orthodoxy, where some of the Orthodox fear that the Church is being changed by the ‘leftist’ and ‘progressive’ Zeitgeist. For them, disability is just another leftist topic that comes at a package with support for the LGBTQI agenda and women's ordination.[1]
The association of disability with the progressive left might seem strange at first, but there is indeed something there. An important strand of disability theology is deeply indebted to liberation theology, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to the social inequalities prevalent in South America. Aiming to break down the social structures of injustice that prevented personal flourishing, liberation theology proposed a blend of Christian social doctrine and Marxism. This blend is not hard to notice in seminal texts such as The Disabled God of Nancy Eiesland’s, or Deborah Creamer’s Disability and Christian Theology. The recent book of Lisa Powell, The Disabled God Revisited, engages directly and quite at length with a number of ‘liberation theologies’ (e.g. feminist, queer) vehemently opposed by some Orthodox.
Disability theology, however, is far from being a monolith and the Orthodox would be surprised to find the writings of like-minded theologians. They would be surprised to read Protestant theologians arguing for the importance of Tradition and even innovative reappropriations of the Fathers, to a certain extent quite similar in spirit to the Neopatristic synthesis promoted by Georges Florovsky.
2. The theology of virtuous suffering
This mistrust in the notion of disability as a social construct is combined with a long tradition of understanding suffering as path to deification. Orthodox theology in general and the Greek Fathers in particular have seen suffering as an opportunity to develop spiritually. Origen was one of the most influential theologians who claimed that disability is not a curse from the gods nor a gift but a morally indifferent instrument that could be used either for good or evil. Going further, the Greek tradition reframed illness into a choice and hence a spiritual exercise. For Basil the Great, “illness is both the existential condition of fallen humanity and the treatment or cure for humanity’s fallenness, a pedagogue and a replacement for—if not a mode of—ascetic self-control.”[2] Of course, the monastics should not seek illness at any cost, reject medical treatment or continue with fasting when they are sick, but when illness appears it should be used for spiritual progress, sometimes illness being able to reveal the sanctity of the person.
Contemporary Orthodox theologians like Jean Claude Larchet follow this traditional line. Larchet does not reject the advancements of medicine nor does he recommend the interruption of medical treatment; he only opposes the physicalist perspective on which modern medicine is built because it reduces the human being to its physical components, with no place left for the soul and its own illnesses. Some illnesses, especially some of those placed in the category of mental illnesses, are not simply the result of physical dysfunctionalities in our brains, they can also have spiritual causes. These illnesses, Larchet contends, have been already dealt with by the Fathers of the Church and their advice can be helpful even today.
This approach is highly visible in the case of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Although extremely involved in the care of persons with disabilities, with an impressive number of ongoing social projects, and while declaring 2024 the commemorative year for the care of the sick, the word disability is rarely if ever used at all. Among the topics proposed for reflection this year are: God loves those who are patient in their illness, God reveals himself easier to those who are going through illness or physical suffering, and the care for the sick in the lives and writings of the Church Fathers.
There is no wonder that in this context the distinction between impairment and disability – where impairment is a physical or mental limitation while disability is a social barrier that prevents the integration of persons with impairment – is barely audible. The obstacle, whatever that might be and from wherever it might come, represents an opportunity for deification and not something to be fought against. The care that one can provide to the sick is through prayers and personal involvement, not through the reconfiguration of the polis in a way that would allow better access for persons with disabilities.
3. Different priorities: ecclesial or national
The Orthodox Church is without a doubt a complex edifice built on a variety of languages, cultures, and interests. It spans throughout the globe, reflecting not only its Byzantine or Russian legacy but also the long and complicated relationship with various political powers and structures. What remained common, beyond the liturgical worship and the Tradition of the Church, was the staunch support of ethnic/national interests, especially in countries with Orthodox majorities.
Generally, these interests take precedence or in some cases subdue the social vision of the Orthodox Church. Whenever a local Orthodox Church decides something regarding its social doctrine, it often follows the interest of the state. If the interests of that particular state or local church conflict with those of another local Orthodox Church, then one can find contradictory statements on the same topic. For instance, the document of the Russian Orthodox Church, The Basis of the Social Concept rejects the notion of human rights and replaces it with that of human dignity. Unlike human rights, dignity can increase or diminish in accordance with one’s ethical behaviour. Some commentators argued that the Russian Church adopted this stance in order to support the political interests of the state that wanted to suppress human rights and open democracy in Russia.
Be that as it may, more than a decade later, the Ecumenical Patriarchate issued its own document on the social doctrine of the Church. At times, the document stands in sharp contrast with that of the Russian Church. Although a comparative analysis is beside the point in such a short article, it is worth noting that the document of the Ecumenical Patriarchate supports human rights regardless of one’s ethical behaviour. Moreover, the document states that "Orthodox Christians should support the language of human rights – and presumably reject or ignore that of human dignity – not because it is fully adequate to all that God intends for his creatures, but because it preserves a sense of the inviolable uniqueness of every person and of the priority of human goods over national interests, while providing a legal and ethical grammar upon which all parties can, as a rule, arrive at certain basic agreements.” (For the Life of the World, paragraph 12).
What is probably even more striking is that in the current climate of the war in Ukraine, in which two Orthodox countries are involved, the interest in disability is still limited. Since the war started in February 2022, millions of people left Ukraine, tens of thousands have been displaced, lost a family member, or have acquired a disability and yet there are very few articles, blogs, or podcasts speaking about those who went through these traumatic experiences and about what can the Church do to help. Yet, for the past two and a half years, the number of articles, panels, blogs and podcasts speaking about Ukrainian autocephaly, the Russky Mir heresy, political theology, and even the deposition of Patriarch Kiril has increased considerably. (I refer here, particularly to the English-speaking world).
Although the picture might seem bleak, I dare to be optimistic. I think that once the war is over, the Orthodox Church will wake up to the reality of disability that will continue to be there for decades. At some point, all those involved in the pastoral activity of the Church will realise that the narrative of virtuous suffering is either insufficient or burdensome for some faithful, because not everyone has the same relationship with her disability or the disability of her loved ones. Some persons with disabilities might need to hear a different story or no story at all, preferring simply to be held by hand in their moments of distress and more importantly, feel accepted as full members of the body of Christ. This might also be the moment to understand that the ascetic struggle with disability, no matter how inspiring and personally edifying, needs to be supported by practical measures that facilitate the integration of persons with disabilities in public spaces.
Through my work, I try to navigate between these anxieties and priorities by showing that disability theology should not be understood as simply another form of liberation theology that against the theological proposals of the Fathers – in this sense, I’m currently editing a collective volume on Disability in the Greek Fathers – nor can disability theology be feared for challenging the ethnic diversity of Eastern Orthodoxy. Quite the opposite. Disability theology needs to be enriched by the cultural and linguistic variety found inside Eastern Orthodoxy, as I have pointed out in my recent article on the Romanian word “neputință”.[3]
My main goal, however, remains that of showcasing the centrality of inclusion for the Eastern Orthodox theological edifice. When we think of Eastern Orthodoxy, we usually think of deification and when we think of deification we tend to imagine a spiritual mother or father somewhere in a monastic setting. Dumitru Stăniloae, in whose work I find my inspiration, proposed a wider understanding of deification that extends to the entire creation. For Stăniloae, the entire world is meant to be transformed into a sacrament of communion with others in God. He argues that God created the world with its inner plasticity so that it can be moulded by humans into a place for communion. The example that best illustrates his point is that of the Eucharistic bread and wine. Neither the bread nor the wine exists as such in nature. They are the result of human effort and ingenuity that learned how to transform the raisins and the grains into something else. Both, the bread and the wine can be used for individualistic purposes (e.g. being sold to others) just as they can be used for community building (e.g. sharing the bread and the wine with others). It is in this latter sense that they are used in the Eucharist. When the bread and the wine are brought to the altar to be consecrated and then shared (împărtășite), they become bonds of union with others and God in Christ. The same process should be extended to the whole world. All its elements should become mediators of the human-divine communion.
Although Stăniloae does not think specifically about accessibility or the rights of persons with disabilities, it does make sense to understand his vision also through this lens. To me, it would be incomprehensible to have this beautiful discourse about the transformation of the world into a sacrament of communion and not be willing to install ramps at the entrance of churches or to avoid making accommodations for persons with disabilities. Even more problematic would be to read these passages from Stăniloae without any reference to persons with disabilities, because this would simply show how much we actually exclude them even from our theological imaginary; it would show that we treat them as an exception from the rule of abled bodiliness, rather than the very premise of our anthropology. Thus, to me, an Eastern Orthodox theology that does not prioritise disability is one that does not fulfil its vocation, as the transfigurative salt of the earth.
[1] It should be mentioned here that the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the US has issued a document on disability and the importance of integrating persons with disabilities in Orthodox communities since 2009. https://www.assemblyofbishops.org/news/scoba/disability-and-communion#:~:text=The%20key%20in%20relating%20to,part%20of%20the%20whole%20person.
[2] Andrew Crislip, Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2012), 91.
[3] Petre Maican, ‘Powerless in Christ: A Romanian Orthodox Insight into Disability Theology’, Journal of Disability & Religion 28, no. 2 (2 April 2024): 285–303.
This text first appeared in German in Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West 9/2024
Comments