Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 21

Inner Crisis and Turmoil.

The numerous personal defects of Church members — the priesthood, the monks, and laymen — are attested by the Council of the Hundred Chapters, called by Ivan the Terrible.
Moreover, in addition to the decline of education, excessive ritualism, remnants of paganism, and so forth, one cannot ignore the straying or irregularities of thought and disturbances within the mind of the Church. Such a straying was evident even in the fourteenth century in the Novgorodian heresy of the Strigolniks, a rationalistic and anticlerical movement. Still more symptomatic in the fifteenth century was the heresy of the Judaizers, a peculiar magical combination of freethinking and dark astrological interests. Afterward began the disputes of the Josephites, followers of Joseph of Volotsk, and the Trans-Volgans,[62] monks of the Trans-Volga hermitages, whose chief leader later became known as St. Nil Sorsky. Outwardly this was a controversy over monastery possessions, the right of the monks to own “villages” — to be a propertied class within the state; and also about the execution of heretics.

Two distinct conceptions of the Christian ideal were, in fact, coming into conflict. In his book, The Ways of Russian Theology, Father Florovsky writes in this connection of the conflict of “two truths” and defines the truth of Joseph of Volotsk as the “truth of social service.” Joseph himself cannot be considered acquisitive.

He can in no way be accused of indifference or inattention to his neighbor. He was a great benefactor, a “helpless fellow-sufferer,” and he defended the monastic villages out of philanthropic and social motives alone. Joseph included the Tsar himself in the same system of “God’s obligation,” the Tsar too is subject to the law, and he holds his power only within the limits of God’s law and commandments.
One should not submit to an unjust or “obstinate” Tsar.

Yet whatever Joseph’s basic truth may have been, his system is fitted too neatly into the totalitarian nature of the Muscovite state and corresponded too obviously to its utilitarian psychology. From this point of view, the defeat of the Trans-Volgan movement, despite the political motives that complicated all these disputes, meant suppression of the spiritual freedom of the Church and of any recognition of its incompatibility with service exclusively to the state or society.
The Trans-Volgans lived by the original spiritual tradition of Orthodoxy, “by the process of the spiritual and moral constitution of the Christian personality.” Once again, in this experience of genuine spiritual freedom, social conscience also was aroused and entered a protest against the religious use of force — against Moscow’s all-devouring system of obligation and the subordination of human personality to the “construction” of it.

 

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