Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 27

Encounter with the West.

The first theme brings us back to the Kievan metropolitanate, which in the fourteenth century had remained outside the borders of Muscovite Orthodoxy, just as the Russian lands began to be gathered around Moscow. This division of the Russian Church into two metropolitanates may be explained in the first place by the rivalry between Moscow and Lithuania for a central position in pulling the state together. In the fourteenth century Lithuania was in fact a Russian land and had claims as good as Moscow’s to draw together the appanages. Hence the Lithuanian princes strove to acquire their own metropolitan, who would be independent of Moscow, and by the fifteenth century they were successful. Even earlier, through the marriage of Yagailo to Jadwiga of Poland in 1386, the Lithuanian kingdom was at first in personal union with Poland, and later, after the last upsurge of Lithuanian independence under Vitovt (1398), in political union. After the middle of the fifteenth century the southwest metropolitanate was under the authority of Roman Catholic kings and in direct contact, first with Catholicism and later with Protestantism — that is, under the constant and very strong impact of alien forms of faith. That bitter struggle cannot be described here; it is difficult to imagine anything more remote from genuine unity of the Church than the campaigns — conducted by fire and sword, and with falsehood and violence — that broke the spirit of the people and poisoned Christianity with hatred, all in the name of unia, or unification! The union of Brest-Litovsk of 1596, which started a period of bloody persecution of Orthodoxy in Galicia, Lithuania, and Volynia, was a fitting end to the Byzantine “unions,” with the sole distinction that the latter, thanks to the Turkish yoke, proved ephemeral whereas Brest-Litovsk poisoned the southwestern Slavs with hatred, divisions, and discord for many centuries to come. Real persecutions of Orthodoxy have flared up here even in the twentieth century.

But this history has another distinguishing mark. When almost all the Orthodox hierarchy at the end of the sixteenth century seemed drawn to union (or rather, that is, to the rights and estates of Polish Catholic bishops), the defense of Orthodoxy was undertaken in the first place by Orthodox intellectuals, and secondly by the people of the Church themselves. Among the followers of the influential Prince Ostrozhsky the first cultural center was formed, a college was founded, and Orthodoxy defended by pen and book. Prince Kurbsky and the first Russian printer, Ivan Fedorov, took refuge in Ostrog, and here the famous Ostrozhsky Bible was printed (1580-81).

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-6-russian-orthodoxy.asp?pg=27