Abstract

The ecclesiastical schism in Bulgaria – here referred to as post-Byzantine - did not come up unexpectedly in 1992 to raise political, social, religious and psychological issues. This justifies the choice of the author to analyze the ecclesiastical schism in Bulgaria from a cultural-historical perspective within Byzantine and Russian Orthodox history, canon law and social psychology. The multidisciplinary approach of recently raised post-communist issues adds a methodological advantage, since it helps to disclose the “many faces” of communism as a messianic pseudo-religious mainstream in Eastern Europe, which was the main cause of religious, social and politically-driven tensions after 1990. In this way the religious schism can be tackled more adequately than if being analyzed solely through an empirically-driven social lens, or only from a church law point of view within a context where a spiritual résurgence of Christian Orthodox belief was on the go. This being said, we should not forget to take into consideration the fact that no religion could play the dominant power of real life in nowadays Europe after being "broken down" by the Protestant Reformation, because it seized to generate new mental paradigms, which is one of the modern issues of religious conscience raised in the present paper.