Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 22

Conservatism and Ritualism.

Behind all these disputes and irregularities one may perceive very clearly the gradual breaking off of official Russian Orthodoxy from the creative traditions of its universal past. Liberation from canonical dependence upon the Greeks came to mean distrust of everything Greek in general and the opposition of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian antiquity to Greek Orthodoxy. This was the meaning behind the famous Council of the Hundred Chapters of 1551, summoned on the initiative of Ivan the Terrible but expressing the attitudes of Makari and Sylvester in particular.
The council was to cure the scandalous defects in ecclesiastical society; Ivan’s plan was apparently a profound and many-sided reform. Yet it is characteristic that neither Ivan nor the participants in the council conceived of these corrections as a self-examination in terms of the sure criteria of the universal tradition of the Church, or the creative renewal of them under new conditions. Ivan was inspired by the West and did not like the “Greek faith.” The council responded to his “liberal” questions with the experience of olden times — what had prevailed under their ancestors — and not by affirming the truth. Even the correction of Church books, a problem that had already arisen even then, was a complete failure, reflecting the lack of any genuine perspective in the thinking of the pillars of Russian Orthodoxy. The semiliterate, unjustified translations accepted, and the helplessness in defining criteria, in themselves sowed the poison of schism.

For the first time, here, we see very clearly the distrust of thought and creativity. Salvation lay only in the strict preservation of antiquity; this helpless conservatism reveals all the tragedy and depth of Moscow’s break with living Orthodox culture. The road to salvation became observance of regulations and the performance of ritual. Because people did not understand it, the ritual became an end in itself, so that even obvious mistakes in the text were inviolable because hallowed by antiquity — it would be dangerous to the soul to correct them.

 

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