Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 8

Shallows and Hidden Darkness.

Of course one must not exaggerate either the success of Kievan Christianity or the depth of the Christianization that had taken place. It remained the sphere of the elite, a group of newborn ecclesiastical and state intellectuals. Certain writings, such as The Questions of Kirik for example, show an extremely elementary understanding of the nature of Christianity. One must note at once that Russia had accepted a ready-made Orthodoxy, at a time when conservative attitudes, an effort to refer everything to the past (the perfected model), and a fear of infringing on any of the ancient traditions were expressed with increasing strength in Byzantium itself. Russian psychology was from the first marked by this ritualism and by a somewhat hypertrophied, narrowly liturgical piety.

But it is much more important to note also that here paganism was preserved under Christian cover — a “dual faith,” as yet insufficiently studied but undoubtedly one of the keys to Russian religious psychology. Slavic paganism did not offer fanatical opposition to Christianity. It lacked organization, literature, or any developed cult; but this only made it especially vital and dangerous. This was “soft” paganism, based on nature and profoundly bound to natural life. Christianity was long a foreign religion — even doubly foreign, being Greek and coming from the prince as well, which meant its support by the Varangian druzhina, the ruling clique in Russia. To receive it required education; it was bookish by its very nature. Its external elements — the divine service, the ritual — were easily accepted; it charmed the people and won their hearts; but there was the danger that they would not see, or even try to see, the meaning or Logos behind these externals, without which the Christian rite would in fact become pagan in becoming an end in itself. The soul of the people continued to feed upon the old natural religious experiences and images. “Paganism did not die and was not overpowered immediately,” Father Florovsky declares.

In the murky depths of the popular subconsciousness, as in some historical underground, its own concealed life went on, now with double meaning and dual faith . . . The borrowed Byzantine Christian culture did not immediately become generally accepted, but for a long time it was the property and treasure of a literate or cultural minority . . . We must remember, therefore, that the history of this “daytime” Christian culture certainly does not exhaust the fullness of Russia’s spiritual destiny . . . One can see that the sickliness of the Old Russian development was due first of all to the fact that the “nighttime” imagination was too long and too stubbornly concealed, avoiding intellectual testing, verification, and refinement.[51]

Later, feeling, imagination, and tenderness would be proclaimed as the basic points of distinction between Russian and Greek Christianity, the latter being considered calculating and cold. But it would be more correct to see that the stubborn opposition of the “Russian soul to the Logos was one of the deepest reasons for many of the fateful crises in the course of Russian history.

 

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