Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 14

In a letter to Metropolitan Philaret he wrote: “When I examined the details of the religious life of the Greeks, I found in it so much of what we are taught in the Menologion and the Prologue that I would be repudiating my calling as an Orthodox priest and monk if I kept it from my Church.” There in the poverty-stricken East he suddenly became aware of a longing for the unity of Orthodoxy, for a new period in its history — a call “not for partitioning the Body of Christ any longer according to countries, peoples, languages, passions, needs, governmental systems or schools, but a reunification of all in a life together of the spirit of love, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit . . .” and for the revival of “a single, organically alive, strong, ruling Orthodox Church of Christ.”[42]

Once more behind the official history, which is filled with decline, sins, and weaknesses, another history is suggested, which contains the spirit of genuine Orthodoxy. In these years the Philokalia was completed, the peak of Eastern speculative experience, which by its profundity is now beginning to win over even the non-Orthodox.[43] The threads binding all these bearers of the age-old tradition into one family have not once been broken: the thirst for oneness with God, the longing for a perfect life. The great culture of the spirit, to which none of the refinements of the European nineteenth century can be compared in sensitivity, did not die.
Only recently, when not only official documents of the period but the popular legends of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria began to be collected and studied, has it been realized how what is most essential and elusive in Orthodoxy had entered the souls of the people.

 

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