Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 13

The Precious Core.

Nevertheless, we must also try to see something else, less obvious but perhaps more significant in spiritual history, which cannot be measured by the usual historical instruments. Few are those who have been able to find the unfading treasures that lay behind this bleak exterior; the Russians, unfortunately, least of all, as they adopted the scorn of a great power for Eastern Orthodoxy in its early period. Yet those few who, at a time when the Russian Church was outwardly at its height, made genuine contact with the Eastern Church were inwardly converted and could no longer be satisfied with all the official splendor of imperial Russian Orthodoxy.

For alongside ignorance, chauvinism, avarice, and other sins, there continued to live in the East a genuine Orthodox sense of the Church, which shone brighter in genuine spiritual beauty after it had shed the “squalid luxury” of the last period of the empire. One of the sensitive observers of the Christian East, Archimandrite Antoninus Capustin, whose diplomatic service in Constantinople, Athens, and Jerusalem brought him to recognize the universality of the Church at a time when no one seemed to remember it, wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century:

It is enough to see the Greek in the ruins of Athens or the Arab in the mud huts of the Levant, the Copt among the Libyan sands, or the Abyssinian . . . to become convinced that here there is another belt of spiritual geography, and other plants flourish here which have no need of our artificial fertilizers, nor waterings, nor graftings, nor our flowerpots or hothouses. God grant that our hothouse piety be equal to them. It is sad for me to speak against my own advantage, but what am I to do? As I stand in a wretched church in Suez and am possessed with the memory of so many of the splendid sanctuaries known to me, I would not be able to rise spiritually higher than the ugly and half-rotten rafters and boards of the roof above me. But the local inhabitant unquestionably prays here with an entirely Christian prayer to the heartrending sound of his native song. The wretchedness of the church does not signify the wretchedness of God for him, and it is a blessing for him.[41]

 

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