Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 35

Decay of the Universal Church

This evolution of Byzantium was immensely significant in the history of Orthodoxy. First, it meant a transformation of Orthodoxy into something like a national religion for a politically and culturally limited world. This “national” quality of Byzantine Christianity was still remote from the much later religious nationalism we shall see presently.
It meant only a perceptible narrowing of the Church’s historical horizon and orthodox way of thinking. In viewing the contrast, one may leave aside the truly universal conception of Irenaeus of Lyons, for example, and his joy in the unity of the Church throughout the world; and the awareness of the universal connection between all churches so forcefully revealed in the second and third centuries in the writings of Cyprian, Firmillian of Caesarea, Dionysius of Alexandria — and in Rome, of course, where ecumenical interests were never to disappear, although they assumed a new form.

Let us take only the example of the fourth century. This was a time when the union with the empire stimulated the mind of the Church, which regarded it as the source of a world triumph of Christianity.
We need only recall the promising buds of Syrian Christian literature, mention the names of Jacob Aphraates, St. Ephraim the Syrian, and later St. Isaac the Syrian, and indicate the possibilities of Coptic Christianity, so tragically cut off from Orthodoxy by Monophysitism; or the missions to the Abyssinians, Goths, and Arabs. Even in the difference between trends and schools, between the psychological profiles of Antioch, Alexandria, and Edessa, so unfortunately erased by the Christological dispute, were great possibilities for further development and mutual enrichment of the catholic tradition of the Church.

This is particularly apparent from the large number of Eastern and Egyptian liturgical rites that have come down to us from the period when the liturgy was not completely uniform according to the Byzantine style. With its victory over the empire, the Church was really beginning to express itself in various cultural traditions, making them part of the Church and in turn uniting the whole Mediterranean world. This by no means implies, of course, any absolute pluralism of traditions; Syrian and Coptic theologians remained within the framework of the same Christian Hellenism that had been the historic flesh of Christianity itself from New Testament times.
Still, it made possible the enrichment of this Hellenism, as did the later injection of the Slavic element and its development into Russian Orthodoxy and Russian culture.

The expansion of Islam cut off all these developments. But it is important to keep in mind that the psychological decay of universalism had begun even before this — that in the Christological dispute the East was torn from Byzantine Orthodoxy, preferring the historical and theological dead ends of Monophysitism and Nestorianism to enslavement under the Orthodox empire.
From this point of view the victory of Islam itself must be seen in relation to the first deep religious and political crisis in the Christian world: the first break on the historic way of Orthodoxy.

 

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