Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 24

The supernatural essence of Christian life has always required some absolute expression which would reveal the complete freedom of the Christian in relation to all the realities of this world.
Martyrdom was the first response to this demand, born from outward conditions; when these conditions changed and the world ceased to struggle against Christianity, but, on the contrary, proposed an alliance which could and very often did become more dangerous for spiritual values, which were not susceptible to “naturalization,” monasticism became a sort of affirmation of their independence. . . It brought nothing essentially new into the Church of the first centuries; it was an expression in a new form, created by new circumstances, of what is customarily called the “eschatological” nature of Christianity, of which the first Christians had been acutely aware and which they had expressed in martyrdom.
From the very beginning the ideal of chastity and of voluntary rejection in general of certain comforts, which were not evil in themselves, also developed alongside martyrdom. When the latter disappeared, monasticism inevitably became all that martyrdom had embodied and expressed.[4]

One might ask whether the essence of the early Church, the source and expression of its entire life, had not been the unity and the assembly of all together, crowned and expressed in the sacrament of communion by all with one bread and one cup. Does not the monastic ideal of solitude as a condition for salvation contradict the original experience of the Church? Yet here again, it was a reaction to the danger of easy sacramentalism, which had gained strength in the fourth century. The assembly of the Church became more and more obviously an assembly of citizens and its separation from the world as a “sacrament of the coming age,” increasingly nominal. Monasticism was a reminder that while the pledge and source of new life was the Eucharist and the grace it bestowed, still acceptance of it was a free act by man, so that Christ’s deed in no way diminishes human freedom or effort. While practicing asceticism in solitude, the monks convened on the Lord’s Day for the Eucharist, the assembly. Yet in their solitary asceticism they reveal the whole range of responsibility imposed on the Christian by his participation in the Sacrament, and demonstrate what absolute demands it makes upon the conscience of those whom it sanctifies.

Struggle against the devil, whom the Gospels call the “Prince of this world,” construction within oneself of a new man after the image of Christ, and as a final goal, “deification” — that is, communion with God and acquisition of “peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” as St. Paul had previously described the kingdom of God — these were the monastic ideals, and this was the experience that became imprinted upon the immense monastic literature. In the course of centuries the experience would be more and more precisely described, and the “art of spiritual life” analyzed to the last detail. By comparison with this experience, with its depth of perception of man and its knowledge of him, scientific psychology frequently appears petty and trivial.

 

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