Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 16

It is characteristic that after the uprising of 1821, when an independent kingdom of Greece was founded, the Greek bishops themselves did not hesitate to be in schism with Constantinople for almost twenty years in order to obtain their own autocephalous Church; they hardly noticed that its constitution had actually been copied from Lutheran constitutions, and that in general it did not recognize any boundary between Church and state. The same purely nationalistic motives, not at all theological, nourished the schism between Bulgaria and Greece which persisted for sixty years, and similar causes led to the divisions between the Slavic states which are still in force today. How easily the age-old tradition — genuine tradition and not folklore — was sacrificed throughout these decades to pitiful imitations of the West! Konstantin Leontiev frequently and maliciously mocked this fascination with Western petty-bourgeois vulgarity,[44] which he contrasted to the Slavophil interests dominant in Russia; yet in his wrath we often discern a real assertion of the universality of Orthodoxy, so rare at that time, which had been destroyed by the clamorous blossoming of local nationalisms. “He saw,” Berdyaev wrote, “that the only reliable protection against the worldwide process of decay and vulgarization, which had involved all the Balkan peoples, lay in faithfulness to the traditions of Byzantinism.”

We concede that Leontiev too frequently interpreted Byzantinism esthetically, in the spirit of Western romanticism, but basically he was right; the voice of the Church was almost unheard in the free Orthodox states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their whole political and state structure and their entire culture somehow “bypassed” Orthodoxy, or in any case were not inspired by it, and the Church, for all its democratic guarantees, found itself held in honored captivity by the state, without being aware of it. The extinction of monasticism; the transformation of the clergy into civil servants and of theology into an applied professional field of knowledge to serve the clergy, or else into a narrow specialization; the decline of the divine services, which became either “showpieces” or performances from incomprehensible books; and finally, the “politicizing” of the state of mind of the Church — all these were characteristic results of the national revivals, to which the Church, incidentally, had contributed so much of its spiritual force. If signs of spiritual awakening are becoming more frequent in the Orthodox world in recent decades, they are linked with reasons outside the framework of this book — with the dawn of new catastrophes, the last and most terrible of all being the collapse of the old world.

 

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