Alexander Schmemann

4. Byzantium (22 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 11

Victory for the Monastic Principle.

The victory of icon-veneration, therefore, was also a victory for monasticism, an inward triumph as well as an external one.
Persecution had revived and renewed this aspect of the life of the Church, and at the start of the ninth century we see a genuine flowering of Byzantine monasticism, linked above all with the name of St. Theodore of Studios. It was he in particular who finally formulated that definition of monasticism’s function in the Church, which would consolidate its triumph forever. In his “system” it is clearly defined as a special ministry of the Church (it had started as a private, lay, and individual movement). The monks were the Church’s “nerves and her support,” they were the “salt of the earth and the light of the world,” “a light for them that sit in darkness,” “an example and a declaration.” This was true because the goal of the monk was not different from that of the layman but the final goal of every Christian: the kingdom of Heaven, the soul’s salvation and one cannot save one’s soul except by renouncing the world.

“To ask where it has been revealed to us that we should renounce the world and become monks — an echo of iconoclastic doubts of the value of monasticism — is simply to ask where it has been revealed to us that we should become Christians.”[23] We must not think that St.
Theodore saw salvation in monasticism alone; but he does assert that Christianity is impossible without what in the Gospel is called renunciation.
And indeed, history confirms the fact that actually the Gospel’s call to “the one thing necessary” has been realized only in the monastic life. Essentially, all Christians are summoned to completely dedicated devotion, but historically this completeness is always being turned into minimalism, into compromise and worldly laxity. Therefore, the monastic life is in its own way an historic shadow of Christianity which the Church will continue to cast until it is fulfilled. According to St. Theodore, the monastery must be the active inner kernel of the Church, a perpetual reminder of the Christian’s ultimate calling and the Church’s support and affirmation. In Constantinople itself he revitalized the ancient monastery of Studios, which soon became one of the chief centers of Byzantine Church life. Monastic life was finally established in the heart of Byzantium.

This triumph also spelled the failure of the iconoclastic attempt to destroy the independence of the Church, and simply to fit it into the theocratic framework. Historians have often misunderstood the meaning of this victory. “In the struggle for Orthodoxy,” Harnack wrote, “the Church was victorious, in the struggle for freedom she was defeated.”[24] But what sort of freedom is in question here? The monks were not fighting for the separation of Church and state — still less for a clericalist subjection of the state to the Church — but only for that conception of theocracy which, since the days of Constantine’s conversion, had opened the arms of the Church so broadly to the empire. In opposition to Harnack and all historians who measure Byzantium according to Western criteria (which in fact did not exist in the West itself until considerably later), it must be affirmed that the Church, not the empire, was victorious in this struggle. Of course, there are no final victories in history; like the triumph over paganism under Constantine, this victory also had its negative aspects. But before mentioning them, we must try to pinpoint the essence and significance of this new, late-Byzantine conception of theocracy. Only then shall we have a reliable standard of judgment as to the success or failure of the Orthodoxy of Byzantium.

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-4-byzantium.asp?pg=11