Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 31

The anxiety of the schismatics may be expressed as follows: if all this consecrated and holy past of Moscow, the third Rome, the last bulwark and hope of Orthodoxy, is guilty of so many errors and distortions, as the innovators claim — does this not mean that history is coming to an end and that the Antichrist is near? “It was not at all the ‘rite’ but the ‘Antichrist’ which was the theme and secret of the schism . . . The whole significance and inspiration of the first schismatic opposition did not lie in ‘blind’ adherence to separate ritualistic details of daily life, but in this apocalyptic riddle.”[66] The schism was nothing but the price paid for Moscow’s dream of a consecrated pattern of life and of a complete incarnation in history and on earth of the last Kingdom. At a deeper level, it was the price paid for the radical antihistoricism of Byzantine theocracy, which had rejected Christianity as a way and a creative process, and had wanted to stop history by “eternal repetition” of a single all-embracing mystery.

Both the perfectionism and the limitations of this theory are revealed here: the whole of Orthodoxy was measured externally, according to rituals and words; the dispute never once went beyond a stifling ritualistic casuistry. In a certain sense the schism did draw away from the Church its best forces — those for whom the outward tenor and pattern of life were not self-sufficient values, but only the outer form of the inner high ideal in their conception of Christianity and its adaptation to history. These people lived by an integral concept of the Christian world; it was not their fault that this concept, both in later Byzantium and especially in Moscow, was cut off from its vital sources — from the creative inspiration of the early Church, which had narrowed down to the Typicon and the Domostroi.

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-6-russian-orthodoxy.asp?pg=31