Nations before Nationalism. by John A. ArmstrongReview by: Gale StokesSlavic Review, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 475-476Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496047 .

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REVIEWS

NATIONS BEFORE NATIONALISM. By John A. Armstrong. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. xxxvi, 411 pp. Maps. Tables. $30.00

Here is a potent book. At a time when historians are only beginning to react to the criticism that their scholarship is ever more narrow, John Armstrong has written a bona fide macrohistory. The question he attacks is as difficult as it is broad: why have ethnic identities persisted over long periods of time? Armstrong says he seeks not to establish general laws but to present abstractions that will illuminate patterns of ethnic identifica- tion. The historical record from which he derives these abstractions is that of the Christian and Moslem worlds before modern times.

Religion and politics are the independent variables for Armstrong. A nostalgia for nomadism has long underlain the Islamic sense of identity, whereas a nostalgia for sedentary ways marks the identity of Christians. Moslems stress genealogical legitima- tion; Christians stress territorial identifications. Each group has tended to define the other in the negative terms that we associate today with competing ethnic groups. Along the rough but clearly identifiable border of conflict between them, a frontier ideology of political legitimation arose. The defender of the faith, the ghazi, was an important element of Ottoman legitimation, for example, while the goal of driving out the Moors sustained the growth of Castillian power.

Armstrong calls these ideas mythomoteurs, or legitimizing ideals that have sustained polities over extended periods. One very persistent mythomoteur, which first appeared in Mesopotamia, was the idea that "the only truly sovereign state is the universe governed by the assembly of gods." The earthly polity was simply the secular shadow of that heavenly state, valid for all humanity. Alexander's belief that his empire had united all civilized humanity added a momentary breath of reality to the myth. Byzantium was a Christianized version of this sort of universal state in which the polis writ large extended its identity to the entire empire. But in Western Europe the myth could not be sustained because of the conflicts between Pope and King. In its place emerged variants of the idea that the ruler was the protector of the vicar of Christ, the Pope, and therefore had a special place both in God's eyes and in secular authority. The success of the French king in securing sacral legitimation from the Pope, while at the same time maintaining his magical Gebliitsrecht through primogeniture, made France a model for other European states, a necessary precondition, Armstrong holds, for the eventual emergence of a state system and, consequently, of nationalism.

Language, in Armstrong's view, is a dependent variable. For example, the large area stretching from Catalonia to Piedmont was linguistically homogeneous in the early Middle Ages, but the development of Castillian in central Iberia and French in Paris, both the result of political consolidations, prevented the emergence of a common Romance language in favor of distinct regional languages supported by powerful political interests. Thus the successes of the French and Castillian kings, rather than linguistic homogeneity, provided the true basis for the emergence of a French and a Spanish nation.

Armstrong's discussion of Eastern Europe is neither as neat nor as detailed as that of other areas, despite his expertise. He understands the mythomoteur of Russian identity, for example, to consist of five mutually reinforcing strands: the idea of the gatherer of the lands, the orthodoxy of the ruler, the right to expand beyond ethnic Russia, the Byzantine heritage, and the willingness to recognize multiple empires. This concept is consistent with the rest of his analysis but does not have the same impact as the other portions of the study.

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476 Slavic Review

Although Armstrong affirms that he is interested in ethnic identity, not in institu- tions as such, his basic point is that, in the past, over a long period of time, ethnic identity has been determined by political and religious institutions, even when it was not the basis of social organization. Recently this point has seemed more and more valid. Armstrong's original and powerful book will certainly reinforce that view.

GALE STOKES Rice University

MEDIEVAL SLAVIC AND PATRISTIC EULOGIES. By Julia Alissandratos. Studia Historica et Philologica, no. 14: Sectio Slavica, no. 6. Florence, Italy: Casa editrice Le Lettere Licosa commissionaria Sansoni, 1982. xix, 156 pp. Paper.

Though learned and instructive, this monograph makes for some frustrating reading. The frustration stems from the vagueness in title, focus, and - ironically - structure and composition of the book. The title indicates as its topic medieval Slavic and patristic eulogies, but Slavic and patristic are not, in fact, two mutually exclusive notions. For much of Slavic Orthodox writing during the Middle Ages, and in particular the specifi- cally eulogistic subgenres of Church Slavonic hagiography and homiletics (into which two main literary categories most eulogies fall), treat precisely the lives and sayings of the church fathers, that is to say, they are patristic. Also, the near synonymous terms eulogistic, panegyrical, and encomiastic are nowhere clearly defined or, for that matter, differentiated in the book. In addition to the medieval East and South Slavic literature dealing with Greek (and in exceptional instances Latin) fathers of the Church, some of the writings pertaining to local - Slavic - holy men (several of whom were canonized) would qualify for the label patristic, in substance if not in the narrow technical sense.

Since the focus of the study is primarily on Slavic Orthodox eulogies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the period known - with a slight misnomer - as the Second South Slavic Influence in medieval Russia, the title presumably intends to convey that the comparison here goes beyond the strictly Slavic literary sphere and includes some comparative observations on Byzantine works as well. Moreover, the time frame is extended to include also comparisons with earlier, Kievan pokhvaly or pokhval'nye slova. Finally, contrary to much, but certainly not all, previous research in the field, the author's attention is on matters of disposition of the material and compositional tech- nique rather than on style per se. It is in this context that one must particularly regret her decision not to use any headings for the five separate chapters or otherwise clearly indicate their contents.

Despite these reservations it should be noted that the author makes many subtle and on the whole compelling observations which correct, or at any rate put in proper perspective, some of the views held heretofore. The appended bibliography testifies to her great erudition in both primary sources and secondary literature, a few glaring omissions notwithstanding. Particularly notable among these is Det gammelrussiske helgenvita by J. B0rtnes, to date available only in Norwegian but discussed in consider- able detail by me in Die Welt der Slaven 23, 1978. It not only provides a cultural-historical reappraisal of Russia around 1400 but also offers a thorough structural analysis of Epiphanius's Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh, as well as of Nestor's much earlier Vita of Theodosius. Not available at the time of her writing, and admittedly with a more historical rather than strictly literary orientation, is G. Podskalsky's now indispensable Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus', in L. Miller's preface styled as an "Old Russian patrology" of sorts.

HENRIK BIRNBAUM

University of California, Los Angeles

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