Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 10

From this it is clear that the theological tradition was not maintained at the high level which was maintained, despite all internal difficulties, to the very end of Byzantium. One may note here a theme that persisted throughout the whole Turkish period: the polemic against alien ways of worship, particularly against the Latins and later the Protestants. The enslavement of the Greeks by the Turks had opened new perspectives to the papacy, of which it unfortunately had not hesitated to take advantage. The whole period was marked by constantly increasing Latin propaganda in the East, and such prosletyzing injected new venom into relations between the separated Christian worlds. Whole armies of skillful propagandists were sent to the East, prepared in special schools, the most famous of which was the College of St. Athanasius in Rome, opened by Pope Gregory XIII in 1577.
A network of Roman episcopates covered the whole Orthodox East.

 It must be admitted that the Greek polemicists were not able to respond to this well-prepared attack in any substantial way. In most cases they simply repeated old Byzantine arguments which had long since lost their point. “The Orthodox had hardly bothered to study the Latin Church, either its morals or its ideals,” Lebedev has written, “and they retained the same antediluvian concepts of the Latins as they had of Egyptian torture chambers. The Latins had progressed in their ecclesiastical development, and when the Greeks were forced to answer them they floundered about in a sort of vicious circle.” However painful it is to admit, the deep-rooted hatred for the Latins that led Greeks even to rebaptize Catholics was primarily responsible for preserving Orthodoxy. Nicodemus the Hagorite wrote in his Peddion, “The fact that we have felt hatred and repulsion for the Latins for so many centuries shows that we think they are heretics, like the Arians, and the Sabellians.” The Turks, however, who disliked and feared the Latins as “representatives of European imperialism,” protected the Orthodox. When in the eighteenth century the Orthodox in Syria complained to the Porte of Catholic propaganda, the following decree was issued:

Some of the devilish French monks, with evil purposes and unjust intentions, are passing through the country and are filling the Greek rayah with their worthless French doctrine; by means of stupid speeches they are deflecting the rayah from its ancient faith and are inculcating the French faith. Such French monks have no right to remain anywhere except in those places where their consuls are located; they should not undertake any journeys or engage in missionary work.[38]

The text needs no comment; here are the results of the separation of the churches in the eighteenth century.

 

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