Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 32

But their opponents did not use tradition or truth to nourish their reform. The new books were better than the old, more correct, more sensible; but the hierarchy, which accepted the reform so easily, without reaching back to the sources of the faith and teaching of the Church, now too easily accepted other reforms so long as they came from the authorities and were made “by the will of His Majesty.” The schismatics were not so opposed to the Church as they were to the empire; but in the name of that other theory of empire, which — no matter how trivial it was made or narrowed down — saw and wanted to see itself as the Kingdom serving Christ. Their opponents were almost unaware of this purpose: the metamorphosis of Christian theocracy into the ideal of the Kingdom.

Thus in the seventeenth century relations between Church and empire again became strained.
From the patriotic services of Patriarch Germogen and the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergei in the time of troubles, through the peculiar “papocaesarism” of Patriarch Philaret, we come to Nikon and the schism. One feels that a transformation of the state has started, that its self-awareness has begun to change. Even the “Most Pacific” Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, offering repentance in the name of the empire before the relics of St. Philip, was essentially already remote in psychology from the Byzantine and Old Russian theocratic self-conception. The atmosphere of Western absolutism was more and more obviously coming into Moscow. Nikon’s break with the tsar in a certain sense repeated in Russia the Western dispute over relations between empire and priesthood; it was first of all a dispute over authority. But perhaps the schism made inevitable the triumph of state absolutism under Peter the Great.

 

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