Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 28

It is true that there was even sharper controversy here with Protestantism, which was gaining strength in Poland and Lithuania, but the important thing was this conception of cultural action in Orthodoxy — this first refuge of the “Greek-Slavic” tradition. In the face of terrible pressure from the Jesuits sent to Poland to combat Protestantism, beginning in the 1580’s, the decisive factor was the opposition of the people, which found expression in brotherhoods. Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, as he was passing through Russia in 1586, gave a charter to the most ancient brotherhood of Lvov; it could expose those opposed to the law of Christ, even excommunicate them from the Church, and bring accusations even against bishops. After Lvov, brotherhoods arose in Vilno, Mogilev, Polotsk, and other cities. After the Council of Brest, the brotherhoods are the centers of resistance, using literary polemics and theological work. The brotherhoods organized schools, opened printing presses, and published books. In 1615 the famous Kievan Brotherhood was founded, and the Brotherhood school was opened with the co-operation of the Cossacks. Here in Kiev the main center of southwestern Orthodoxy was created.

While the first influences here were those of Byzantine tradition, this began to be more and more mixed with Western influence. In struggling against the Latins, “by necessity they turned to Western books. The new generation passed through entirely Western schools. The Western, Latin example attracted them.”[64] The whole significance of this Kievan chapter in the history of Orthodoxy lay in the fact that at this time Orthodox theology, in defending Orthodoxy from aggressive unia, armed itself gradually with Western weapons, and Orthodox tradition slowly shifted into Latin scholastic categories. The influence of the famous Kievan metropolitan, Peter Mogila (1633-47), proved decisive. “He was a convinced Westernizer, a Westernizer by tastes and habits.” In Kiev, to counterbalance the Slavic-Greek school of the Brotherhood, he founded a completely Latin-Polish institute which soon engulfed that of the Brotherhood. Its program was taken from Jesuit schools, and teachers who had graduated from Polish Jesuit colleges taught there. Here the question of Orthodoxy and Catholicism was transformed into a purely “jurisdictional” one; these Westernizers did not sense any difference in faith, or rather the pattern of their own minds was by now wholly Latin. The main theological document of this movement, the “Orthodox Confession,” usually ascribed to Mogila, was essentially Latin, and was written in Latin. True, it rejected papal primacy, but its whole spirit was Latin.
After Mogila, Latin formulas and theories also began to penetrate Orthodox theology.

It is true that there was even sharper controversy here with Protestantism, which was gaining strength in Poland and Lithuania, but the important thing was this conception of cultural action in Orthodoxy — this first refuge of the “Greek-Slavic” tradition. In the face of terrible pressure from the Jesuits sent to Poland to combat Protestantism, beginning in the 1580’s, the decisive factor was the opposition of the people, which found expression in brotherhoods. Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, as he was passing through Russia in 1586, gave a charter to the most ancient brotherhood of Lvov; it could expose those opposed to the law of Christ, even excommunicate them from the Church, and bring accusations even against bishops. After Lvov, brotherhoods arose in Vilno, Mogilev, Polotsk, and other cities. After the Council of Brest, the brotherhoods are the centers of resistance, using literary polemics and theological work. The brotherhoods organized schools, opened printing presses, and published books. In 1615 the famous Kievan Brotherhood was founded, and the Brotherhood school was opened with the co-operation of the Cossacks. Here in Kiev the main center of southwestern Orthodoxy was created.

While the first influences here were those of Byzantine tradition, this began to be more and more mixed with Western influence. In struggling against the Latins, “by necessity they turned to Western books. The new generation passed through entirely Western schools. The Western, Latin example attracted them.”[64] The whole significance of this Kievan chapter in the history of Orthodoxy lay in the fact that at this time Orthodox theology, in defending Orthodoxy from aggressive unia, armed itself gradually with Western weapons, and Orthodox tradition slowly shifted into Latin scholastic categories. The influence of the famous Kievan metropolitan, Peter Mogila (1633-47), proved decisive. “He was a convinced Westernizer, a Westernizer by tastes and habits.” In Kiev, to counterbalance the Slavic-Greek school of the Brotherhood, he founded a completely Latin-Polish institute which soon engulfed that of the Brotherhood. Its program was taken from Jesuit schools, and teachers who had graduated from Polish Jesuit colleges taught there. Here the question of Orthodoxy and Catholicism was transformed into a purely “jurisdictional” one; these Westernizers did not sense any difference in faith, or rather the pattern of their own minds was by now wholly Latin. The main theological document of this movement, the “Orthodox Confession,” usually ascribed to Mogila, was essentially Latin, and was written in Latin. True, it rejected papal primacy, but its whole spirit was Latin.
After Mogila, Latin formulas and theories also began to penetrate Orthodox theology.

The injection into Russian Orthodoxy of this “Ukrainian baroque” — even before the time of Peter the Great and his “window into Europe” — which made all Russian theology and the whole Russian theological school dependent upon the West, was extraordinarily important in the, history of Russian Orthodoxy. “The Western Russian monk, taught in the Latin or the Russian school, molded according to its example, was also the first who brought Western science to Moscow.” The fathers of the new Russian school theology were two obvious Latinists, Simeon of Polotsk and Paissy Ligarid. Jesuits appeared even in Moscow, and the dispute “over the time of the transformation of the Holy Gifts,” which arose in the 1670’s in Moscow was a typically Western dispute by its theme alone. The first schools opened in Moscow followed the model of those in Kiev, and when the time of Peter’s reforms arrived, Russian theology would be already “Westernized”! The Church did not oppose these influences. There was no free encounter of Orthodox tradition with the West; it was the conquest of unarmed Orthodoxy by Latinism.

 

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