Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 21

Whatever may be said about the swift development of the cult of saints, even of its monstrous distortions, the fact remains that the image of the saint himself and his life as it was read in the Church spoke of a new meaning in life and summoned the people to Him by whom this saint had lived and to whom he had completely given himself. However much men may have brought into the Church what they had seen and sought in pagan temples, when they entered it they now heard those eternal and immutable words about the Savior crucified for our sins — about the perfect love that God has shown us — and about His kingdom as the final goal of all living beings.

One historian has called the essential nature of this evolution in Church life the “consecration of time.” While its highest point and final meaning remained the Sacrament — that is, the anticipation of all the fullness and joy of the kingdom of God and of the timeless and eternal presence of Christ among those who have loved Him; and while the narrow way of baptismal renunciation of the sufficiency of this world was still the only road leading to the Sacrament; yet the rays of the Sacrament now illumined this world as well. The consecration of time, the consecration of nature, the consecration of life, a firm faith that “in the Cross is no harm but healing for creation,” the gradual illumination of all things by the image of Christ — this was the affirmative significance of what has so often been regarded as the growing worldliness of the Church. This “worldliness” should not be measured by its inadequacies or distortions, which were all too frequent, but by its positive inspiration; it revealed in a new way the same old catholicity, the Church’s integrated and all-embracing awareness of itself as a seed cast into the world for man’s salvation.

There was pressure from the state and enslavement of bishops. Yet in the final analysis it was Athanasius and Basil who were glorified by the Church as the “rule of faith” — not Eusebius of Nicomedia — and it was their truth that the state itself accepted and to which it submitted. This was not an accident. For the first time the principle of objective truth, independent of everything else in the world, was proclaimed superior to all powers and authorities. Today we hardly remember that the idea of objective truth, proclaimed by the whole modern world, entered the mind of man at this time, in the midst of disputes over words which may seem to us trifling; and that in them the mind of modern man was in the making: his faith in reason and freedom, his fearlessness in encountering reality whatever it might be, since there is something stronger than the external buffetings of reality: the truth.

Yes, there was a reconciliation with the world, an acceptance of its culture, the forms of its life, its language and thought.
Basil the Great and his friend Gregory the Theologian would recall with gratitude all their lives the golden years spent at the pagan university of Athens (along with Julian the Apostate). Basil would even write a little treatise for young men on the value of studying secular — that is, pagan — literature.
Gregory hymned the joyous mystery of the Trinity in classical stanzas. Yet this reconciliation took place under the sign of the Cross. It introduced into the world itself the image of absolute perfection, and therefore a judgment and a conflict. Everything was consecrated, but the coming Kingdom cast its shadow over all; the world had become finite and was recognized to be a pathway, struggle, and growth.

 

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