Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 16

It was now beyond doubt that Byzantium’s holy mission had passed to Moscow and that the theocratic dream of the East had found a new incarnation. Simeon, a priest-monk of Suzdal and an eyewitness to the fall of the Greeks at Florence, had written, “Orthodoxy is at its best in Russia.” And he proclaimed the Prince of Moscow a “reverent, Christ-loving, and pious, true Orthodox Grand Prince, the white Tsar of all Russia.” The final transfer of metropolitan power into Russian hands occurred in 1448, when St. Jonah was elected by a council of Russian bishops and a decree sent to Greece proclaiming the de facto independence of the Russian Church from the patriarch of Constantinople. While historically inevitable, this independence became in fact the basis of the final subordination of the Church to the Russian state and to its national and political calculations.

 

It must be recognized that this birth of Russian theocracy .
. .passed for a long time through the crucible of sufferings and struggles of conscience within the Church. It was not easy to cross out the historical authority of the Greeks. It was far more difficult to overcome the canonical authority of the Mother Church . . . The history of the scrupulous sufferings of Russia’s canonical conscience, over the independent installation of Metropolitan Jonah (1448), which amounted to autocephaly, presents one of the most outstanding pieces of evidence as to Russia’s canonical good faith. Grand Prince Vasili Vasilievich was tormented just as earnestly by the extremely crucial problem which unexpectedly fell upon him: should he take up the defense of Orthodoxy, which had faltered in its very shrine at Constantinople [because of the surrender of the Greeks to the papacy at Florence in 1439] and threatened in this way to disappear throughout the world?[57]

Russian religious messianism was indeed born in eschatological tension — in confusion and alarm.
But external events justified it. In 1453 Constantinople fell. In 1472, Ivan III entered into matrimony with the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and the two-headed eagle of the empire legitimately soared over Moscow. Finally, 1480 signalized the final liberation from the Tatars. Once more the Byzantine idea of a migrating empire was confirmed. Old Rome had wavered in its orthodoxy, and the empire had passed to the new Rome. Had not the time arrived for a new shift, to Moscow? So the theory of Moscow as the third Rome was conceived, its proponent being Philotheus, the teaching elder of the Lazarus Monastery in Pskov, an old city southwest of Novgorod and the future St. Petersburg. According to his letters to the Grand Princes Basil III and Ivan IV in Moscow, the Orthodox Church, like the wife in the Apocalypse, had first run from old to new Rome, “but found no peace there because of the union with the Latins at the Eighth Council. Then the Church of Constantinople fell, and the empire fled again to a third Rome, which is in New Great Russia . . . All Christian empires bow down to you alone: for two Romes are fallen, but the third stands fast; a fourth there cannot be; your Christian kingdom shall not be given to another .
. . You alone are Emperor over all Christians under the sun.”

 

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-6-russian-orthodoxy.asp?pg=16