Orthodox People Apart
by Bishop [now Archbishop] Chrysostomos
I recently spoke with a member of the Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad, who had attended a symposium on
evangelization sponsored by the Antiochian Archdiocese. I was
surprised when this individual, an articulate and quite
well-mannered man, told me that he had been characterized at this
conference as a member of an uncanonical jurisdiction. He had,
indeed, tried to enlighten other conference members about the
true nature of his jurisdiction's witness, but was unable to do
so, not only because of their general lack of knowledge about
Orthodoxy, but because of the self-serving attitudes and
positions adopted by many modernist jurisdictions towards
Orthodox traditionalists—attitudes and positions that foster
arrogance and a spirit of confrontation. These modernist
advocates of the "togetherness" of Orthodox people
proved to be, in some ways, the source of much of the inaccurate,
ill-advised, and vulgar name-calling that keep Orthodox people
"apart."
I would like to respond to the rather
unbecoming characterization of the traditionalist Orthodox
believer in question by his modernist hosts. By any measure or
criterion of canonicity, the New Calendarists and modernists
are not canonical. Their claims to canonical status by
virtue of attachment to various Patriarchates is a form of
neo-Papism that is neither ecclesiologically correct nor
consistent with the Church's historical understanding of
canonicity. First, any right-believing Bishop in
Apostolic Succession and his Orthodox flock constitute the
canonical Church. The Orthodox Church is not
"Patriarchal" in the way that many superficial Western
observers imagine it to be. Second, when the Patriarchates and
local Churches have at various times in history been in heresy,
resistance movements such as those now undertaken by the Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad and the Old Calendarists of Greece,
Bulgaria, and Romania have preserved the canonical Church.
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and
South America, the Orthodox Church in America, and the Antiochian
Archdiocese, while they certainly are legitimate Orthodox
jurisdictions with valid Mysteries, are at the same time
uncanonical. They not only share in the uncanonical innovations
and ecumenical excesses of their New Calendarist or unhealthy
Mother Churches, but they deviate substantially from the
traditions of Orthodoxy, which are the foundation of canonicity.
The Greek Archdiocese is under the jursidiction of the
Jesuit-trained Patriarch of Constantinople, who fancies himself
an Eastern Pope. The OCA is so riddled by spiritual problems that
even the Russian Patriarchate, which granted it autocephly,
seriously considered rescinding that status last year. And the
Antiochian Archdiocese is the Exarchate of a Church held captive
and influenced theologically and spiritually by the Latin West
for centuries.
These and other modernist jurisdictions are
also beset by a deep ignorance of traditional Orthodox practice.
Their monasticism is largely a scandal. They imagine liturgical
services to be man-made and a question of taste, rather than
Divinely-inspired products of the consistent action of the Holy
Spirit in history. What little they know of liturgical traditions
is collected more by way of a "tradition of gossip and
rumor" than by any real knowledge of traditional liturgics.
And their guide in all of this is the unfortunate, un-Orthodox,
and wholly untraditional thought of the late Father Alexander
Schmemann on matters liturgical—work so poor and so
inconsistent with Holy Tradition, that the late Protopresbyter
Georges Florosvsky called it "tragic and intellectually
misguided."* They take the poorest work of an otherwise
competent scholar and elevate it to the heights, ignoring Church
Tradition, the more sober scholarship in this area, and the
living traditions of the Church. They come to disdain the holy
and to elevate what is far from the image of holiness to a status
which is both silly and a disservice to Father Schmemann, a man
who would have found particularly ludicrous notions that he is a
contemporary "Saint"!
Orthodox who "write" Icons
["Ikons"]; who are immersed in the exotic concerns of
the superficies of Orthodoxy; who have more often than not been
received incorrectly into Orthodoxy by an abuse of economy; who
know almost nothing of fasting and the day-to-day traditions of
the Church; whose clergy, with shaved faces and Roman collars,
thus affirm their conversion to a Byzantino-Protestant rite of
the "Eastern Church;" who cannot properly bless a meal;
who revive dead liturgical rites and shun learning the difficult
services that mark the Orthodox pleroma; who distinguish
"Traditions" from "traditions"—a
scholarly device no where found in the Fathers—, in order to
pick and choose from Church customs; who hold "theosis"
picnics and who "rock for Jesus" to a music which
Orthodox canons forbid as raucous vulgarity; who have no
hesychasts and real monastic guides, but, rather, revile
traditional spirituality; who fancy themselves, after a few years
of superficial reading in spiritual texts, possessed—and
possessed they may be—of prayer of the heart; who live an
Orthodoxy of accommodation and romanticism; and who have, in some
cases, entered Orthodox jurisdictions from Protestant cults
without Baptism, without proper Ordination, without adequate
catechism, and without a proper understanding of Orthodox
ecclesiology—such Orthodox are certainly not
canonical.
Orthodox modernists must understand that the
term "uncanonical" is only rightly applied by us: those
who are in resistance to their innovations. Their modernism, lack
of experience in the Church, and wholesale immersion into
American religious culture, with all of its money-motivated
interests and outright chicanery, place them outside the pale of
Orthodox canonicity, just as surely as do the ecumenical excesses
and betrayals of the Mother Churches and Patriarchates to which
some of them belong. They are uncanonical, not we. While we,
despite their lack of canonicity, do not commonly throw such
epithets at them, they nonetheless freely shower us with these
unjust accusations. And because of their ignorance of Orthodox
theology, they often think that, by accusing us of being
uncanonical, they are thereby asserting that we are without
Apostolic Succession or valid Mysteries.
Against those of us from families that have
been Orthodox for untold generations—many of us from
families which shed their blood for Orthodoxy—, these
immature, half-converted creators of a new Orthodox religion in
America, an Orthodoxy made valid only by its minimal claims to
Apostolic Succession, relegate us "ethnics" and
"traditionalists" to a place outside the Church. As we
watch their incorrectly celebrated and truncated services and
hear their smug and ignorant statements about the false
traditions with which they have replaced Holy Tradition, we are
endlessly perplexed, scandalized, and repulsed. This is
especially true when the unhealthier elements in the modernist
movement, in a spirit of vile hatred that makes even the small
minority of extremist traditionalists seem kind, attack us with
rumors, lies, and the most vulgar of personal assaults—the
final refuge, of course, of those who find no substance in the
positions which they vainly defend.
We True Orthodox must, however, resist the
natural impulse to revile what is inauthentic and fake. For many
of the modernists to whom all that I have written aptly applies
have nonetheless simply been misled into a form of modernist
cultism by leaders interested in money and growth—and this
at a time that the Church approaches the age of the remnant. Many
of these people have been taught hatred instead of love;
judgmentalism instead of circumspection; arrogance instead of
steadfastness; and a false Orthodoxy in the place of True
Orthodoxy. Undoubtedly a great number of these misled modernists
seek Orthodoxy and its traditional truths. Certainly they are
capable of being enlightened by the truth. And just as surely,
their corrupt leaders, who have blinded them to what they seek,
will come to justice.
Given this, we traditionalist Orthodox must
check our outrage, control our righteous indignation, and
overlook the silliness of those who know nothing, but nonetheless
stand in judgment of us caretakers of the Church's wisdom. We
must go among these people and teach them with love—though
with an uncompromising love—of the lie which they have been
told, of the stone which they have been given instead of bread.
For their condemnation, we must return the true facts. For their
ridicule, we must show them compassion. For their arrogance, we
must give back humility. And to their concocted Orthodoxy, we
must answer with True Orthodoxy. Only then will we truly teach
them that canonicity is not a matter of the law, or something to
be used by unscrupulous Churchmen to expand their domain in the
name of human "officialdom;" but that canonicity is a
matter of spiritual primacy, is based on living links with the
past, and encompasses an honest, sober, and ultimately
apocalyptic view of the future.
From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. IX, No. 1, pp. 25-26.
|