Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 15

Liberation.

In the nineteenth century the dawn of freedom began to break over the Orthodox East. The Serbian uprisings of 1804 and 1815, the Greek uprising of 1821, and Russia’s war of liberation against Turkey in 1877 resulted in the rebirth of independent Orthodox states. Yet while national liberation freed the churches of these countries from Turkish control, it did not free them from its tragic consequences: national hostility and proud self-assertion, infection with theories alien to Orthodoxy, the subordination of the Church to the state or complete merging with it. Eastern nationalism, born as we have seen out of the decay of the Byzantine theocratic consciousness, now merged with a new, Western type of nationalism whose spirit had hovered over Europe since the French Revolution.
The Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian kings of the Byzantine era had dreamed of a universal Orthodox empire; now the standard had become self-determination of nations, national culture, and disputes over border provinces. The Bulgaria of Simeon or the Serbia of Dushan might have dreamed of the conquest of Constantinople, but they breathed and lived by a single Christian-Hellenic culture and a universal tradition of the Church of the Fathers and the councils. Now what was “native,” however partial, incomplete, or debased, gradually overshadowed the whole horizon of thought and became the idol for whose sake the great common past might be forgotten. If there was anything that could compete with this idol of nationalism, it would now be the West, which had acquired a sort of mythical halo. Only when the West itself finally came to recognize the value of the Byzantine icon, the profundity of the works of the Fathers, or the beauty of Eastern singing, would the Orthodox begin to show a certain interest in them. Before this happened, Western Europe became the real authority — political, spiritual, and even theological  —  for the Orthodox East. Traditional Orthodoxy was found only in the villages and the lower classes; the upper classes had begun to measure their faith and traditions by the standards of Oxford or Tübingen.

 

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