Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 19

But now the world itself had accepted and recognized the Lord. The emperor had placed his kingdom and the whole empire under His protection, and he wished to receive from the Church the sanction he had previously expected from the gods. Could the Church refuse this? Of course not, if it had affirmed, in the words of Athanasius, that “in the Cross there is no harm, but healing for creation.”

To abolish paganism meant, therefore, not simply to abolish idols and idol worship, but also to appease the eternal need which had nourished them, the need for divine aid, for a divine sanction for human life and everything great and little in it. More than that, it meant revealing the true meaning of life and illumining it with a new light. Historians sometimes assert that, in struggling against paganism, Christianity itself adopted pagan elements and ceased to reflect the evangelical reverence of God “in spirit and in truth.” Churchly piety, the development and increasing complexity of worship, and the reverence for saints and their relics which grew so swiftly in the fourth century — the increasing interest in the material aspect of religion, the holy places, objects, and reliquaries — all have been attributed directly to pagan influence in the Church and regarded as a compromise with the world for the sake of a mass victory.

The Christian historian is not required in his defense of Christianity simply to reject this accusation or to deny that there are any analogies between Christianity and pagan forms of religion. On the contrary, he may boldly accept the charge, for he can see no harm in such analogies. Christianity adopted and assimilated many forms of pagan religion, not only because they were the eternal forms of religion in general, but also because the intention of Christianity itself was not to replace all forms in this world by new ones, but to fill them with new and true meaning. Baptism by water, the religious meal, the anointing with oil, these basic religious symbols and rituals were not invented or created by the Church but were already present in the religious usage of mankind. The Church has never denied this link with natural religion, but from the first it has attributed to the connection a meaning, which is the reverse of what modern historians of religion see in it. The latter explain everything by “borrowings” and “influences,” while the Church, in the words of Tertullian, has always asserted that the human soul is “by nature a Christian,” and therefore even natural religion — even paganism itself — is only a distortion of something by nature true and good. In accepting any particular form, the Church in its own mind has returned to God what rightly belongs to Him, always and in every way restoring the fallen image.

In other words, we must ask not only whence the Church took a particular form and why, but also what meaning it has given it.
Particularly interesting from this point of view was Church building, which flourished so luxuriantly during and after the reign of Constantine. In the early era of persecutions the Church of course had no public buildings, but the first Christians sharply contrasted their concept of religion with the Judaic attitude toward the Temple at Jerusalem, on the one hand, and the pagan attitude toward a temple, on the other. For paganism the temple was the sacred dwelling of a god, but “sacred” meant distinct from “profane” — wholly contradictory to it. The temple united men with the divinity as much as it divided it from them. In the temple one could make sacrifices for people, propitiate the god, and render him what was due, but outside it everything remained profane and divided from the deity.

But the basic Gospel of Christianity was that from now on God had chosen man himself as His temple, and He no longer dwells in man-made temples. “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?” In this way the contradiction between sacred and profane was overcome, because Christ had come to sanctify man and his entire life, to make it sacred again and to unite it with God. In calling themselves the Body of Christ, Christians of course could not help connecting these words with the words of Christ himself about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and its restoration in three days. The place where Christians gathered was sacred, and the sanctity of the gathering made any place and the whole world a Temple.

 

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