Alexander Schmemann

5. The Dark Ages (16 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 9

Cultural Decline.

No less tragic was the decline of ecclesiastical education during the period of Turkish rule. True, even before the fall of the empire education had been aristocratic, not available to the broad masses within the Church. The faithful were educated by the services, and our liturgical texts themselves bear witness to the high level of knowledge of the people of the Church. It cannot be said that education died out completely during the Turkish period, but it declined and, most important, its spirit changed. Its purpose now was to preserve the spirit of Hellenism in its most extreme nationalistic form. According to a Russian traveler in Turkey in the nineteenth century,

The academic love of Hellenism, without systematic study of it, satisfied with excerpts, leads only to a limited, onesided education which is next door to ignorance. The consequence of it is pedantry and pomposity, resulting from a ridiculous desire to apply ancient Hellenic phrases in simple conversation, and, finally, scorn for ordinary but useful knowledge. The teachers prefer to explain something about the state of the country two thousand years ago than to acquaint people with its contemporary situation. Byzantine arrogance, which acknowledges that a man is of value only if he is a Greek, continues to sow the most nonhumanistic concepts among Christians.[37]

School education in one form or another never ceased. The Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople lasted throughout the period of Turkish rule, while the school of Patmos, where its founder the priest-monk Macarius taught without compensation for twenty-five years, and the school of Janina have left illustrious and memorable traces. The Athenian Academy of Eugenius Bulgaris had a brief but brilliant history: “I have been told that the monks set fire to it intentionally,” wrote Bishop Porphyry Uspensky, a Russian expert on the East, “for they thought that scholarship is not necessary for the life to come.”

Yet the general level of education was very low. In the sixteenth century the metropolitan of Thessalonica claimed that “not one monk in the diocese knows ancient Greek or understands Church prayers,” and at the beginning of the nineteenth century Constantine Oikonomos said that “simple reading of the service books, and often very badly at that, as long as it was done in a melodious voice, was the sole qualification for the position of priest or deacon.” Only by the middle of the nineteenth century was the need for special theological education recognized, and the first seminary was opened on the island of Chalcis in 1844.

 

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