Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 20

Another document of the period which reflected the final crystallization of Russian Orthodoxy was the Domostroi (Home-Builder) of the priest Sylvester, a contemporary and colleague of Makari. Florovsky calls it “a didactic book, not a descriptive one, and it outlines a theoretical ideal but does not describe daily reality.” However, it was clearly conceived out of desire to fix everything, even to the smallest details of domestic life, in a definitive system and actually to convert the whole of life into a ritual. In this rite, along with an unquestionably Christian attitude and asceticism, Asiatic crudeness also breaks out: beatings, for example, become one of the main methods of maintaining Christian life in all its splendor, and also of education. Professor Fedotov writes of this period:

The outlook of the Russian had become extremely simplified. Even in comparison to the Middle Ages the Muscovite was primitive. He did not reason but accepted on faith certain dogmas which sustained his moral and public life. But even in his religion there was something which was more important than dogma. Ritual, periodic repetition of certain gestures, prostrations, and verbal formulas, binds living life together and prevents it from slipping away into chaos, imparting to it even the beauty of formalized existence. For the Muscovite, like all Russians, did not lack an esthetic sense, only now it became oppressive. Beauty became splendor, and fatness was the ideal of feminine beauty. Christianity, when the mystical tendencies of the Trans-Volgans were rooted out, was transformed increasingly into a religion of holy matter. It was ritualism, but a ritualism which was terribly demanding and morally effective. In his ritual, like the Jew in the Law, the Muscovite found support for his feat of sacrifice.[61]

Because the Domostroi is not a description but an ideology, its very appearance may be regarded as a sign of the profound spiritual illness, the genuine crisis, concealed under the outward splendor and harmony of Church life in Moscow.

 

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