Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 7

A certain quintessence of Orthodox Byzantinism was conveyed to Russia and adopted there; Russian thought entered into this tradition, and it became the basic source of Russian culture. The tradition was adopted not only passively but creatively as well. The first upsurge of Russian national self-awareness that marks Hilarion’s Word and Nestor’s Chronicle is linked with it. It is no accident that the prayer to God from the newly-consecrated people with which Hilarion ends his Praise to Our Prince Vladimir was accepted even into Church usage. His oration, “On the Law given by Moses, and on the Grace and Truth which were Jesus Christ, and how the Law departed while Grace and Truth filled all the earth and the faith spread to all languages and reached our Russian language, and praise to our Prince Vladimir, through whom we were baptized, and a prayer to God from all our lands,” composed between 1030 and 1050, during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, expresses as it were the ecclesiastical and national confession of newly-baptized Russia.

According to D. I. Cizevsky in his History of Old Russian Literature, this confession, like all writing of the early Kievan period, is marked by the spirit of majesty and Christian optimism. The Kievan ideologists were inspired by their concept of the unity of Russia and the growth of its idea of statehood, which was beginning in glory. This inspiration was rooted deep in the experience of baptism, in Russia’s acceptance of “grace and truth.” The Good News came to the Russians at the eleventh hour, but in the person of their prince, Vladimir, they were not diminished in the sight of other Christian peoples. In such Christian hope, in their awareness that God had called them, the Russian sense of nationhood arose, and in the future, at its highest peaks would use this as a standard of measurement and judgment.

 

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