Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 14

Consolidation of Russian Lands under Moscow.

In the middle of the fifteenth century the whole Russian land consisted of two great state groups of lands: the eastern, under the administration of the Muscovite autocrats, and the western, under the authority of the Lithuanian-Polish government. The Russian Church was also divided into two large provinces, the Muscovite and the Kievan. The Muscovite metropolitan, under the protection of the state, flourished within its borders, was adorned with outward splendor, and revealed from within a remarkable movement of enlightenment. The state, having recovered from misfortunes within and without, began an effort to assimilate the fruits of Western civilization. By the end of the sixteenth century the Church had reached the point of becoming an independent patriarchate.[55]

So runs an official history at the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, this introduction is in sharp contradiction to the subsequent expositions, from which it is highly apparent that “beneath a pious exterior an Asiatic moral coarseness was revealed.” Actually the Muscovite period in Russian Church history is marked by profound spiritual upheavals and is far from showing the organic unity people have so longed to find in it.

Moscow’s political triumph in consolidating the country coincided with the first great crisis in the thought of the Russian Church and is deeply marked by it. This was the temptation of the union of Florence and the catastrophe of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In the Russian mind both events were interpreted as apocalyptic signs and as a terrible break in the history of Orthodoxy. Their Greek teachers and mentors were revealed as traitors to Orthodoxy; perhaps even for this reason subjected by Providence to the Turkish yoke. From the very start the Russian mind, sensitive to grand historical-philosophical themes, had inevitably pondered these signs and drawn new conclusions from them.

True, the way had been prepared. Back in the fourteenth century a dispute had begun between Moscow and Constantinople, and Moscow was gradually liberated from the Byzantine theory of a single empire. This theory, which Greek missionaries had brought into Russia from the very first days of Russian Christianity and which in its essence had been accepted unconditionally at the time, had been shaken by the Greeks themselves — by their “illegal and venal way of dealing with the Russian Church under Metropolitan Alexei, the installation of Cyprian in his place, and especially by the arbitrary installation after his death of Abbot Pimen, who caused great harm to the Church.”[56]

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-6-russian-orthodoxy.asp?pg=14