Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 13

The monastery of St.
Sergius at Radonezh, near Moscow, soon became the seedplot of monasticism for all northern Russia. Within a century and a half almost one hundred and eighty monasteries were created, providing spiritual formation for a great number of saints. The monastery became the center of spiritual life for the whole society in a period of darkness and barbarism: an extreme of national life in which the people found consolation, instruction, and aid — and, most important, became convinced of the reality of absolute values because they had come into contact with holiness.

As we study the religious life of that time, we see first of all a polarization, a psychological contradiction between the sinful world and the monastery. This is also true of the religious life. There is the crude faith of the illiterate or semiliterate “white” clergy, who were so exploited by the bishops that in 1435, in Pskov, the clergy and the people attacked the bishop’s emissaries. There is superstition, drunkenness, and debauchery; Metropolitan Jonah in a letter to the citizens of Viatich reproves the inhabitants because some of them took wives five, seven, or even ten times, and Yuri of Smolensk brutally killed Princess Juliana Viazemsky because she refused to satisfy his passion. Yet amid all this darkness and decay there was the pure air of the monastery, evidence of the possibility of repentance, renewal, and purification. The monastery is not the crown of the Christian world, but on the contrary, its inner judgment seat and accuser, the light shining in the darkness. This must be understood for a comprehension of the origins of the “Russian soul.” In the midst of its degradation it stretches toward this limitless brightness; it contains the tragic discord between the vision of spiritual beauty and purity expressed in monasticism and the sense of the hopeless sinfulness of life. Those who see a wholeness in the Russian religious mind of these ages are deeply mistaken, for just then, in the centuries after the Tatar invasion, the dualism which would mark its future course began to enter into it.

 

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