By Fr. Alexander Schmemann
On the event of Father Polsky’s e book The Canonical Place of the Supreme Church Authority within the USSR and Overseas
The early Church had a really robust consciousness of its independence and freedom from the world, of the truth that it’s a new individuals – the individuals of God, gathered from amongst all peoples in a brand new unity. And exactly due to this, as we have now already seen, the one precept of its group then was the native precept. Each church, wherever it was positioned and whoever it consisted of, was above all a joyful manifestation of this new individuals – united in Christ. And that’s why intra-church relations have been alien to any authorized formalism and have been constructed “in accordance with Christ, not with the weather of this world.” In a sure sense, every particular person native church was “autocephalous”, however together with that, it was additionally deeply conscious of its “dependence” on all the opposite church buildings that make up the Physique of Christ. There may be a lot debate today concerning the “interference” or “non-interference” of 1 “unbiased” church within the affairs of one other. Nonetheless, if St. Ignatius of Antioch, for instance, had been instructed that – by writing his epistles to the church buildings of Asia Minor – he was “interfering” of their inner affairs, he in all probability wouldn’t have understood this language. Self-evident to him was solely the unity of the physique of the Church, through which unity all of the members get pleasure from each other and undergo collectively. Due to this fact, the time period “autocephaly” – in line with its unique that means – signifies solely a sure type of embodiment of this similar native precept and is a regulating type of relationship between the church buildings, and in no way a precept of their division into absolute items of their juridical “independence”. The Church by no means divides – it all the time unites, it’s not a federation of “unbiased” items, however an organism that’s primarily based on the participation of all its members in Christ. Its unity all the time comes from above, from God, and by no means from under – from the world and its values. It’s unhappy to see how these days “autocephaly” – taken purely juridically – is known as some type of mutual self-defense between particular person church buildings, as their proud self-assertion. It’s even sadder when relations between church buildings are understood by way of worldwide legislation. All this can be a signal of the gradual substitute of purely ecclesiastical ideas with state-national ones, of the subjugation of church consciousness by a purely secular, “pure” psychology.
After all, the native precept has not been repealed and, in principle, continues to be a canonical norm. In follow, nonetheless, it was increasingly more embellished within the colours of the nationwide – to the extent that it regularly grew to become the primary criterion for church consciousness. At first solely combating for it, and ultimately having acquired their religious-national autocephaly-independence, the church-nations slowly shut in on themselves, imperceptibly strengthening their nationwide alienation from others, together with the sensation of “self-sufficiency”. Sure, the dogmatic unity, the unity of religion, is, after all, preserved, however the unity of life, the common consciousness, begins to fade away, giving approach to nationwide dislike and suspicion.
The Ottoman yoke additional separated the Orthodox East from Russia. If, nonetheless, the beneficiant assist and safety rendered by the Russians to their brothers of the identical religion in these troublesome centuries won’t ever be forgotten, then once more this could not cover from us the various transgressions towards the canonical precept and love dedicated at the moment by the Orthodox church buildings of their mutual relations. Aware of all its energy, the Russian Church used to look down on its Jap sisters, as poor relations who had misplaced that magnificence, enlightenment and even spirituality, which within the Russian thoughts have been preserved solely in “Russian Orthodoxy”. As a small however attribute instance right here we might level to the instruction given on the institution of the Russian Non secular Mission in Jerusalem, the place the Archimandrite and the 2 Hieromonks are prescribed “to endeavor little by little to remodel the Greek clergy itself … by elevating it additionally into its personal eyes, and within the eyes of the Orthodox congregation…”[26] The Jap church buildings, however, have preserved their ecclesiastical primogeniture amid their historic impoverishment and humiliation, valuing and accepting assist from Russia, and are used to wanting on the Russian ecclesiastical nice state with apprehension and suspicion. The identical nationwide enmity is rising within the East itself – between Greeks and Slavs, between Greeks and Arabs, and eventually – between the Slavic peoples themselves. Enmity or, in the perfect case, indifference got here to the place of council unity in life, and the unity of the Orthodox world started to be expressed primarily in official congratulations, that are exchanged by the heads of the Orthodox church buildings on solemn events. “Who is aware of – writes the great Russian connoisseur of the Orthodox East – if in time they’d requested to as soon as once more implement the Russian Church in a dwelling relationship with all of the separate elements of the Common Church, we would not have skilled the disastrous schism of the dwelling churchmen and the renewalists and if even the life within the Orthodox East itself would now, maybe, have averted painful and fateful temptations such because the secession of the Bulgarians, the Arab query, the neoterist [27] motion among the many Greek clergy, and so on. If we, utilizing our affect within the East, had been assisted in uniting all elements of the Orthodox world, it might in all probability not have half the remedy we are actually subjected to by the Greeks. Our diplomacy, nonetheless, endeavored to stop the election of patriarchs inconvenient to us (that’s, to the Ministry of International Affairs—simply suppose!) our Mission for twenty years earlier than the conflict quarreled with the Synod of the Holy Sepulchre, and embittered it …”.[28]
If, as we have now already stated, the that means of harmony consists in the truth that every a part of the Church lives with the expertise of the entire, that it displays and embodies in itself the lifetime of the entire organism, then we can’t however admit {that a} unhappy results of this pointless supremacy of the nationwide over the ecclesiastical was a weakening of the Catholic, of the conciliar consciousness. That the emphasis was positioned on one’s personal religion, with a tinge of distrust and even contempt for the overseas religion, as if the Russian religion was not the identical unchanging religion of the apostles and the holy fathers, as if ecclesiasticism didn’t all the time consist in extending one’s personal coronary heart and being to the fullness of the entire expertise of the Church, as if – ultimately – our Russian saints are holy with their Russianness, and never vice versa – with their holiness, with the acquisition of the Holy Spirit in themselves, they sanctified and enlightened their earthly homeland.
7. Legalism and paperwork
To what has been stated, we should additionally add the strengthening of legalism in church life, i.e. the discount of church relations – already throughout the native church buildings themselves – to the formal and to the executive, the perversion of the very nature of church life and the ideas of energy and governance in The church, linked with this similar state-national degeneration of church consciousness. In Russia, the described course of started with the Peter’s reform, which utilized to the Church the ideas of state administration and turned the Church – from the state’s viewpoint – into the “division of the Orthodox confession”. With a easy decree of the central church authority, for instance, bishops started to be transferred from one chair to a different (opposite to all canons), and never from any ecclesiastical necessity, however just by advantage of the appliance to the “religious division” of the purely civil and administrative precept of “absence from obligation” and “promotion”. Consequently, nonetheless, from a small native church, from an natural cell of the common ecclesiastical organism, uniting in an indissoluble unity the lifetime of the bishop, the clergy and the congregation, the diocese turns extra right into a sort of ecclesiastical province, considerably just like the civil ones, into probably the most atypical administrative district, ruled by edicts and circulars emanating from the nameless bureaucratic consistory. The conciliar episcopal administration of the Church (let’s not neglect that the canons prescribe the convening of the council of bishops from a given space twice a 12 months) is changed by a central super-administration, additionally appearing with decrees and round letters. Consequently, the genuine canonical consciousness, nourished by the ecclesial spirit and the need to construct the ecclesial life in settlement with the Custom of the Church, provides approach to blind obedience to “paper”. And once they announce to us concerning the “revival” of the Church within the USSR, supposedly free of the chief prosecutor’s administration, then, with out commenting on this freedom, it’s sufficient simply to learn in any challenge of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate[29] the chronicle of the “appointments and transfers of the bishops”, to be able to persuade ourselves that of the whole nice previous of the Russian Church, exactly this bureaucratic centralization of church authorities is being “revived” probably the most. To 1 diploma or one other, nonetheless, church life in all places suffers from this follow. And this can’t however result in a weakening of the congregational lifetime of the Church, through which – in line with the well-known definition from the Message of the Jap Patriarchs of 1848 – the guardian of reality and piety is all the time the physique of the Church, all the time the entire Church.
8. The query of church group in emigration
Every thing that has been stated to this point was meant to briefly characterize these illnesses and defects within the fashionable Orthodox church consciousness, which – being linked with very previous and long-entered into the psychology of the Orthodox individuals – make any query about church group and “canonicity” so troublesome. And the straightforward reminder of the primordial church norm, which derives straight from the very essence of the Church, seems like an extraordinary innovation or a groundless utopia. With particular energy nonetheless, this illness of ecclesiastical and canonical consciousness manifests itself in an emigrant atmosphere.
In all probability, for a lot of, all these theoretical and historic concerns might appear to be one thing kidnapped, one thing removed from the burning and painful questions of “present”. Nonetheless, shifting now to our “abroad” methods and extra exactly to Prof. M. Polsky’s e book, we are going to attempt to present why all our “jurisdictional” disputes can’t be resolved in some other manner than by the trail of genuine a return to the dwelling and full sources of Orthodox canonicity, i.e. to the Orthodox understanding of the essence of the Church.
In our deep conviction, the primary purpose for all these abroad church disputes and divisions lies exactly in the truth that from the start the unprecedented truth of the looks “overseas” was not theoretically thought of and realized within the gentle of the whole Custom of the Church. that’s, outdoors the territory of the personal native church, of the lots of of hundreds of Orthodox with their bishops and clerics. As a result of the query of how they need to canonically construct their church life in accordance with the dogmatic and canonical Custom of the Church, exactly due to the fully uncommon and new situations, required intense deliberation and conciliar settlement and was a matter for the whole Orthodox Church in all its common fullness, and never a non-public immigrant case, not even the case of a neighborhood church. In historical occasions, particular person church buildings weren’t afraid to debate even their inner, native difficulties with others, whereas right here the query was raised particularly about territories past borders and straight affected the whole Orthodox Church generally.
In the meantime, the true tragedy for Orthodoxy overseas is that the church life there was shaped not on the fullness of the Catholic Custom, however on details and grounds, representing in themselves the results of revolutionary upheavals. The canonicity itself was derived from the Supreme Church Administration within the Russian South or from related – equally short-term and unintentional – precedents, not paying sufficient consideration to the truth that there was a incontrovertible fact that went past atypical church administrative process and required inventive effort of church consciousness. And it was right here that the behavior of considering church life completely in state-national classes manifested itself with all its pressure, it was forgotten that not them, however the instructing of the Church, expressed within the dogmas and canons, was the norm of the church construction. Because of this psychology, nonetheless, it has been deemed unquestionable that analogously to Russia and the Russian Church in it, to the Russian emigration should correspond its Church Overseas: a phrase in itself contradictory from an ecclesiastical viewpoint, as a result of, in line with the profitable comment of the Alexandrian Patr. Meletius from his letter to Mitr. Antony, ecclesiastical guidelines solely know “boundaries” of church buildings, however know nothing of any “church buildings overseas.” In different phrases, the query of the canonical that means of the Orthodox diaspora and its ecclesiastical construction was not primarily raised from the start.
9. “The Church Overseas”
It’s clear that within the whirlwind of the revolution and the primary post-revolutionary years, within the first heroic interval of the lifetime of emigration, when each the upheavals and the adjustments in church life, and this nice church exodus itself, appeared like short-term misfortunes, and other people stood ” with ready suitcases”, church life was naturally constructed on short-term foundations. It’s comprehensible that, below these situations, each overseas ecclesiastical authorities formally known as itself “short-term”, and the bishops, contemplating their detachment from their dioceses one thing compelled and in addition short-term, stored their “territorial” titles, being aware of being individuals on the street, when, of necessity, “the boundaries of presidency shouldn’t have been narrowed.” St. Athanasius the Nice additionally needed to, hiding from the persecutions of the Arians, handle his church from the Egyptian desert. The Solovetsky bishops additionally dominated their dioceses whereas in exile. Nonetheless, the query is rather more sophisticated now, thirty years later, when Orthodoxy “overseas” has taken robust roots in nearly all international locations of the world, and when our church life can hardly nonetheless be perceived as in a state of march. awaiting a return to the earlier preparations.
And right here earlier than us is a paradoxical phenomenon – it seems that the council of bishops, formally calling itself “abroad”, i.e. not having its personal territory, has divided the entire world into dioceses and districts and has known as its bishops the bishops of Brazil, of Canada, Australia, and so on. In different phrases, he based native church buildings. And this isn’t a slight, neither is it a nagging. The primitive titling of the bishop by place has its deep that means and is linked with this similar fundamental dogmatic precept of the ecclesiastical construction, about which we spoke above. To today, when the hierarchs of the East signal themselves, they typically write merely “of Chalcedon” or “of Smyrna,” and this displays the traditional consciousness that there might be just one bishop in a single place, that the authority of the bishop, his “jurisdiction,” is inextricably certain up together with his territorial church. Thus, the designation “Canadian” or “Australian” truly signifies that the precise bishop heads the native Orthodox Church, and never that he’s an “abroad” bishop, who on this case has a diocese on the territory of his native church, from which he’s briefly separated. On the similar time, all these de facto native dioceses de jure proceed to contemplate themselves as overseas, emigrant, and their inner administration – a matter that doesn’t have an effect on anybody else, as it’s the enterprise of the Russian native church.
That is exactly this unusual state of affairs, Fr. M. Polski needs to result in a canonical foundation, for him it appears fairly regular, what’s extra – solely appropriate. He proceeds from a premise that he considers “axiomatically easy and indeniable”: “The autocephalous nationwide church buildings – writes Fr. M. Polski – they’ve the necessity and the appropriate, at their will and below their very own direct administration, to discovered missions, parishes and dioceses outdoors their international locations, on the territories of different Orthodox church buildings, with their permission” (p. 185). Nonetheless, we think about this very premise of his to be decidedly incompatible with the primordial and common Custom of the Church, with this fundamental precept of the church construction, which, as we tried to indicate within the first a part of this text, can’t be modified, since it’s organically linked with the very dogmatic essence of the Church. How might Fr. M. Polski ought to discuss a short lived association associated to the difficulties of our emigrant existence, however no – he refers exactly to the “norm” and considers his personal premise to be fully canonical and ecclesiastical!
From this textual content you must have the braveness to attract the self-imposed conclusions that each autocephalous and nationwide church is nothing greater than a spiritual projection of the given individuals or much more – of the given state and that subsequently not the native however it’s the nationwide precept that determines the construction of the Church. In such a case, the Orthodox Church seems to be a federation, an atypical union of nationwide church buildings, whose relations are constructed on the atypical analogy with the relations between fashionable states, i.e. on the precept of mutual non-interference in a single’s personal affairs, on the “safety of 1’s personal rights”, and so on. In order the topic of any state retains his subjection overseas, so each member of any nationwide church is topic to it and to it alone, no matter circumstances. Not with out purpose at Fr. M. Polski typically talks about defending and preserving the “properties” of the Russian Church from “encroachments” on them by different church buildings. It’s attribute that the identical viewpoint – primarily based on the analogy with worldwide legislation – was defended not way back within the pages of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate by Prof. S.V. Troitsky, a long-time canonical professional of the Karlovac Synod in emigration. Each right here and there, the place to begin remains to be the identical – sharp church nationalism, deliberate emphasis on “independence”, safety of “personal” from “overseas encroachments”, and so on. After all, from such a viewpoint, not solely it’s unhappy, however quite the opposite – it’s fairly regular and mandatory for a similar territory to have as many nationwide “jurisdictions” as there are nationwide teams dwelling on it, as is already taking place in North America. The centuries-long disintegration of the common consciousness and the clouding of the consciousness of the Church as a gracious and supernatural unity in Christ should be brazenly acknowledged as “regular” phenomena and the unity of the Church should lastly be decreased to the purely pure and nationwide, and why not ideological values. As a result of actually – it’s a lot simpler to really feel and understand the already present worldly and pure unity (nationwide, racial, psychological) and to crown it ecclesiastically, than to broaden your individual earthly nature and limitation to the Catholic fullness “in creating the physique of Christ” (Eph. 4:12).
We repeat: it is just mandatory to specific your thought to the tip and above all to not use the expression “native church”, which has nothing to do with such an understanding of the Church. And actually what can the expression “abroad a part of the Russian Native Church” imply (p. 127)? Properly, it’s apparent that the native church is, to start with, restricted by its place and can’t have elements outdoors of it, which on the similar time brazenly declare that “they aren’t linked to territories” (p. 128). Certainly, to substantiate this complete building, Fr. M. Polsky refers back to the long-existing overseas – “with out anybody’s consent” – and missions, and church buildings, and dioceses which are subordinate to the Russian Church. Within the first place, nonetheless, the Church Overseas can hardly be equated with a mission, which by its very nature is one thing both short-term (when it’s despatched to non-believers to evangelise Christianity to them and ends with the institution of a brand new native church), or restricted to a sure activity (such because the Russian Mission to the Holy Land, geared toward spiritually caring for Russian pilgrims visiting these locations). As for the “ambassador church buildings”, their inclusion as a canonical “precedent” is uncertain in any respect. Within the second place, and that is a very powerful, we must always not, for the canonical justification of our personal viewpoint, make the most of phenomena which themselves have come because of a weakening of the canonical consciousness and themselves want such a justification. Properly, not every little thing that existed 100 years in the past is a mannequin of canonicity and authenticity, beginning with the synodal authorities of the Russian Church, to which the late Miter gave a lot energy to his criticism. Antony, and, together with him, the perfect a part of the Russian episcopate?
In any case, it’s not such “precedents” that may justify the Synod of Bishops with its common jurisdiction, and it’s significantly better to easily declare, as one other of its representatives just lately did, that “the Church Overseas is a phenomenon with out precedent”.[30] The try of Fr. M. Polski to derive the legality of the Synod of Bishops from the variety of bishops who compose it. For him, “the canonicality of the synod is decided generally by the presence of the bishops, who’re clothed in the next grace and are the successors of the apostles, whatever the diploma of their administrative rights” (p. 114). Nonetheless, this wonderful assertion is meant solely for many who have by no means opened the Canons of the Church or should not accustomed to the very foundations of Orthodox ecclesiology. The Orthodox Church doesn’t acknowledge any “bishops in any respect” and each non-functioning bishop (be it retired or vicar), preserving, as rightly famous by Fr. M. Polski, his “episcopal honor and ministry”, can’t carry out any episcopal actions with out being permitted or ordered by the bishop ruling the native church. In different phrases (and that is the alphabet of canon legislation), outdoors the boundaries of his diocese no bishop can have any “jurisdiction”. That’s the reason the bishops, for years preserving the names of their dioceses, despite the fact that they’ve already been changed of their chairs in Russia, have solely emphasised their non-canonical place.
(to be continued)
* “Church and church construction. About books prot. Polish Canonical place of the very best church authorities within the USSR and overseas” – In: Shmeman, A. Assortment of articles (1947-1983), M.: “Русский пут” 2009, pp. 314-336; the textual content was initially revealed in: Church Gazette of the Western-European Orthodox Russian Exarchate, Paris, 1949.
Notes:
[26] Cited by: Cyprian (Kern), archim. Quote ibid., p. 116. See additionally: Kapterev, N. F. The Character of Russia’s Relations with the Orthodox East within the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries, Sergiev Posad 1914.
[27] From the Greek phrase νεοτερισμός – “innovation”, “innovation”, “modernization” (word trans.).
[28] Cyprian (Kern), archim. Quote ibid., p. 110.
[29] Official publication of the Moscow Patriarchate, revealed since 1931 (word trans.).
[30] Assortment Nativity of Christ, Ed. ep. Nafanaila, Paris 1948.
