Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 36

Culture Under Peter the Great.

Yet under this state pressure, which had become utterly alien, the life of the Church did not perish, and the synodal period, despite the very widespread conviction to the contrary, can in no way be considered a time of decay or impoverishment of spiritual forces, or any sort of degeneration. The great and profound culture that was gradually created within the Church at this time, unlike the Moscow period, is too frequently forgotten. True, it was started by a powerful injection of Western influences and traditions. Peter himself, in his ecclesiastical transformations, had relied on the Kievans and had used them to replace the native Russian bishops. Therefore the Russian divinity school (twenty-six seminaries were opened before 1750) was a Latin school in language and in the spirit of its teaching. There is no doubt that “this transferral of the Latin school onto Russian soil marked a rupture in the way of thinking of the Church, a dichotomy between theological ‘learning’ and ecclesiastical experience; people still prayed in Slavic but theologized in Latin.”[70] In the ecclesiastical and theological experience of the Russian Church, this theological Westernizing of course played a fateful role which must not be underestimated. Yet still, after centuries of Muscovite darkness, after the break with all scholarly and cultural traditions, mental discipline returned for the first time to the Church, and education and the inspiration of creative work returned as well.
Father George Florovsky has made a whole study of the development of Russian theology; there is no space here to list even its major names.

Even though it came through the West, from Latin or German books, the great forgotten tradition of thought, that of disinterested search for truth and ascetic service to it, were revived again in Orthodoxy. In cultural circles our divinity schools have had a bad reputation; they have been judged by Sketches of a Seminary by Pomialovsky, and such characters as Barnabas Prepotensky or Rakitin.
“Seminarism” became a term of scorn.[71] Yet in the obscurantism engulfing them on all sides, the lowering of all standards and the coarsening of all traditions, this divinity school, poor and downtrodden, despised and frequently helpless, comes to life as one of the glorious bulwarks of Russian culture, and in the history of Orthodoxy its contributions are great. The academic level and freedom of the professors of the Russian graduate seminaries — ‘‘holy academies,” as they were called by one Russian religious writer — were in no respect inferior to Western European or Russian secular scholars, and frequently surpassed them. This theology remained “scholastic”; its contributions were more in history and philosophy, or rather in preparing for a genuine theological renaissance. But it produced the Metropolitans Philaret and Nesmelov.[72] At the beginning of the twentieth century Russian theology was on the threshold of a genuine cultural flowering, a renaissance in all strength of the universal tradition of Orthodoxy. But the Revolution came.

 

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