Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 23

What was the meaning of this swift growth and development? Many historians, again deceived by external analogies, insist on deriving it from some non-Christian source, seeing in it the usual “metamorphosis” or transformation of the “white” Christianity of the early Church into the “black” Christianity of the Middle Ages. There is an analogy here in the ascetic practices worked out in such detail by the monks, the basic forms of which we do indeed encounter outside Christianity as well. Solitude, struggle against one’s thoughts, “concentration of attention,” impassivity, and so forth — all allegedly entered Christianity through the ascetic stream which in that period was growing in strength; and this stream was in turn connected with dualism, with the recognition that matter was evil and the source of evil. Monasticism, by this evaluation, is thus presented as a Christian form of Manichaeism, a dualistic sect which had great success in the fourth century.

On the other hand, while renunciation of the world is fundamental as its original inspiration, it must be recognized that this renunciation cannot be considered something so absolutely new for the Christian mind as to need derivation from Manichaeism or Neoplatonism, as Harnack and other historians have held. While in the course of its development monasticism borrowed much from other ascetic traditions, and while there were even extreme tendencies and distortions within it, neither these borrowings nor the distortions were the reasons for its rise, just as Greek philosophy did not give rise to Christian theology, although its language was used in theological development.

In fact, painstaking studies of the early records carried on in the last few decades have indicated that monasticism is only the expression under new conditions of the original evangelical concept of Christianity, which had ruled the life of the early Church. Renunciation of the world is a condition for Christianity: .” . . Who does not leave his father and his mother . . .” Renunciation is neither condemnation nor denial of the world, but in Christ the glory of the coming Kingdom was revealed to man, and in its light “the image of this world passes.” All is now driven toward that final point, and everything is measured by it. In this world, however, evil continues to reign; it hinders us from reaching the Kingdom, tearing us away from it by thousands of temptations and illusions. The road of the Christian is to be the narrow road of struggle; does not the Gospel speak of the strength of evil, of the struggle against it, or of renunciation for the sake of the Kingdom?

In the era of persecutions, the simple fact that a man belonged to the Christian religion already separated him from the world and its life. As Karl Heussi, the historian of monasticism, has written, “It is enough to imagine the situation of the first Christian communities within the pagan world, their complete separation from public life, from the theater and the circus, from all celebrations, the limited space in which their outward lives proceeded, to be convinced of the ‘monastic’ nature of early Christianity, which lived within the world but separated from it.” Yet the closer the world came to the Church and the more it penetrated into its inner life, as we see in the moral decline of many Christians at the end of the second century, the stronger grew the monastic tendency within the Church itself among those who strove by a standard of high evangelical idealism to hold themselves apart. We find many examples of this isolation of ascetics even in the third century, and it may be said that by the beginning of the fourth all the component parts of monasticism were present. Athanasius has stated that “before Anthony no single monk had yet known the great desert,” yet the decisive influence for Anthony himself was that of a hermit from a neighboring village already “trained in a life of solitude.” One of the most recent investigators of early monasticism has written:

 

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