Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 8

The same sad picture prevailed in the East as well, in the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, where Orthodox Arabs became the victims of this forced unification. All these offenses, stored up and concealed — all these unsettled accounts and intrigues — would have their effect when the Turkish hold began to slacken and the hour for the rebirth of the Slavic peoples drew near.

The Orthodox Church would enter this new period deeply disunited by these nationalisms, having lost the consciousness of its universal mission. Broken up into little worlds that treated each other with suspicion and hostility and felt no need for each other, it submitted to what Solovyov called the “provincialism of local traditions.”[36] Having first become Eastern, Orthodoxy would now become thoroughly national.

The root of the evil did not lie in the national element as such. The universal empire had long ago become a fiction, and with the co-operation of the Church had been replaced by these national states of mind, which found in Christianity a source of nourishment for their growth, establishment, and national contribution to Christian truth.
The nation and the people are as much a natural fact as society; therefore the positive aspect of its Christian meaning could and should be revealed within the Church. It was revealed in its own fashion during the period of the Turkish domination, when the people merged entirely with the Church and made it the bearer of all their best national ideals. The tragedy, however, was that it also tainted national self-consciousness with hostility to other Orthodox peoples, and thus the living unity of the Church was betrayed, replaced by a theoretical unity. The Church became not only the bearer of the Christian ideal but also a symbol of national struggle — a source of religious nationalism that poisons the Orthodox East down to the present day. Summoned to enlighten everything in the world by the Spirit and by truth, in the final analysis the Church itself submits to “flesh and blood,” Christian patriotism mingling with pagan nationalism.

 

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