Despite calls for delay by Moscow, and a significant boycott, the historic Pan-Orthodox Council – the first for 1,200 years – started work this week

When Western people think of Eastern Orthodoxy, they often conjure up a picture of wafting incense in an ancient, icon-frescoed church, populated by bearded monks in ornate vestments and grandmothers holding candles for four-hour vigils celebrated in dead languages. This picture emerges from a myth of the “mystical and timeless East”. It can also accompany a polemic against the “medieval, petrified, barren, barbaric” Eastern churches. Both of these visions have come out in the Western media in and around the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church that has been taking place at the Orthodox Academy of Crete this week.
The truth is more complex. The council is dealing with the real Orthodox Church. It does not live in a mystical or ossified East. It is partially westernised and modernised – and under immense strain and continuing persecution from autocratic state powers, foreign ideologies and lingering historical wounds. But its divisions are also due to the fact that for several centuries Orthodoxy has been wrestling with how to articulate its identity as a body touched intimately by the West but not Western – with a faith that is pre-modern and non-western.