Editor's note: below is an excerpt from the introduction by Fr. Seraphim (Rose) to the Vita Patrum. Although, sadly, the work is currently out of print, it is nonetheless of monumental value to Christians in the West. Fr. Seraphim writes with both spiritual perception and true scholarly concern. Currently there is a ruthless attack on Western culture, which proceeds from the "enlightened" ones of our times. Sadly they seek to systematically destroy the very history and legacy which profoundly formed what we know as the "West". (A process greatly accelerated by the revolutions of the 17 and 18 hundreds.) Thus for Orthodox Christians of today, and moreover those of us living in the "West", it is good to note that our culture and heritage is Christian, and the current aggressive obliteration of the Christian fabric of the West (what is left of it) is indeed a type of self hatred. This hatred is making itself more and more evident with every passing day. Thus in a very real sense those who are striving to continue in and hold fast to the Christian way are indeed those who are true patriots of the West, that is, they are the ones who realize the beauty of culture and heritage, which is founded on Orthodox Christianity. The current anti-culture of the day is a self loathing and destructive force, which once it cannibalizes itself will turn to annihilate anything of beauty that remains in the world, leaving only the stark bones of naturalistic dialectic materialism to adorn the barren wasteland of "progress".
So that we do not become skeletons on this marionette stage, we need to understand the deeply rich and Christian roots of the West, roots that are kept alive in the Orthodox Church. Thus in truly living Orthodox Christianity we are not living something simply "Eastern" but also something profoundly "Western", or better yet we are essentially Catholic, i.e. complete and universal. Thus if we would save the last shreds of our Western culture from the self-haters of the day, we must repent and live the Christian life of our ancestors. In this lies the reality of the West. The true culture and heritage of the West is alive and well in the Orthodox Church. If it looks funny, or strikes us as strange, it may just be that we have unwittingly traveled too far down the streams of amoralistic anti-western progress. The work by Fr. Seraphim reveals the heart of the "West", the only one that will bring it life again.
The reader may also see "Early Christianity in the West" on this blog for further reading on the subject.
Begin excerpt:
To
sum up this brief description of 6th century Christian
Gaul, we may say that here we find already the historical Orthodox
world which is familiar even today to any Orthodox Christian who is
at home in true (not modernized or renovated Orthodoxy) … In modern
times, 6th-century Gaul may most accurately be likened to
19th-century Russia. Both societies were entirely permeated with
Orthodox Christianity; in them the Orthodox standard was
always the governing principle of life (however short of it the
practice might fall), and the central fact in the life of the people
was reverence for Christ, the holy things of the Church, and sanctity
… Does
the Christian world of St. Gregory of Tours have any spiritual
significance for us today, or is it of no more than antiquarian
interest for us, the “out-of-date” Orthodox Christians of the
20th century?
Much
has been written in modern times of the “fossilized” Orthodox
Church and its followers who, when they are true to themselves and
their priceless heritage, simply do not “fit in” with anyone else
in the contemporary world, whether heterodox Christians, pagans, or
unbelievers. If only we could understand it, there is a message in
this for us, concerning our position among others in the world and
our preservation of the Orthodox Faith.
Perhaps
no one has better expressed the modern world's bewilderment over
genuine Orthodoxy Christianity than the renowned scholar of St.
Gregory of Tours and the Gaul of his times. In his book, Roman
Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London, 1926), Sir Samuel
Dill has written: “The dim religious life of the Middle Ages is
severed from the modern mind by so wide a gulf, by such a revolution
of beliefs that the most cultivated sympathy can only hope to revive
it in faint imagination. Its hard, firm, realistic faith in the
wonders and terrors of an unseen world seems to evade the utmost
effort to make it real to us” (p. 324). “Gregory's legends reveal
a world of imagination and fervent belief which no modern man can
ever fully enter into, even with the most insinuating power of
imaginative sympathy. It is intensely interesting, even fascinating.
But the interest is that of the remote observer, studying with cold
scrutiny a puzzling phase in the development of the human spirit.
Between us and the Middle Ages there is a gulf which the most supple
and agile imagination can hardly hope to pass. He who has pondered
most deeply over the popular faith of that time will feel most deeply
how impossible it it to pierce its secret” (p. 397).
And
yet, for us who strive to be conscious Orthodox Christians in the
20th century it is precisely the spiritual world of
St. Gregory of Tours that is of profound relevance and significance.
The material side is familiar to us, but that is only an expression
of something much deeper. It is surely providential for us that the
material side of the Orthodox Culture of Gaul has been almost
entirely destroyed, and we cannot view it directly even in a museum
of dead antiquities; for that leaves the spiritual message of his
epoch even freer to speak to us . The Orthodox Christian of today is
overwhelmed to open St. Gregory's “Book of Miracles” and find
there just what his soul is craving in this soulless mechanistic
modern world; he finds that very Christian path of salvation which he
knows in the Orthodox services, the Lives of the Saints, the
Patristic writings, but which is so absent today, even among the best
modern “Christians,” that one begins to wonder whether one is not
really insane, or some literal fossil of history, for continuing to
believe and feel as the Church has always believed and felt. It is
one thing to recognize the intellectual truth of Orthodox
Christianity; but how is one to live it when it is so out of harmony
with the times? And then one reads St. Gregory and finds that all of
this Orthodox truth is also profoundly normal, that whole
societies were once based on it, that it is unbelief and “renovated”
Christianity which are profoundly abnormal and not Orthodox
Christianity, that this is the heritage and birthright of the West
itself which it deserted so long ago when it separated from the
one and only Church of Christ, thereby losing the key to the “secret”
which so baffles the modern scholar – the “secret” of true
Christianity, which must be approached with a fervent, believing
heart, and not with the cold aloofness of modern unbelief which is
not natural to man bu is an anomaly of history.
But
let us just briefly state why the Orthodox Christian feels so much at
home in the spiritual world of St. Gregory of Tours.
St.
Gregory is a historian; but this does not mean a mere chronicler of
bare facts, or the mythical “objective observer” of son much of
modern scholarship who looks at things with the “cold scrutiny”
of the “remote observer.” He had a point of view; he was always
seeking a pattern in history; he had constantly before him what the
modern scientist would call a “model” into which he fitted the
historical facts which he collected. In actual fact, all scientists
and scholars act in this way, and any one who denies it only deceives
himself and admits in effect that his “model” of reality, his
basis for interpreting facts, is unconscious and therefore is much
more capable of distorting reality than is the “model” of a
scholar who knows what his own basic beliefs and presuppositions are.
The “objective observer,” most often in our times, is someone
whose basic view of reality if modern unbelief and skepticism, who is
willing to ascribe the lowest possible motives to historical
personages, who is inclined to dismiss all “supernatural” events
as belonging to the convenient categories of “superstition” or
“self-deception” or as to be understood within the concepts of
modern psychology.
The
“model” by which St. Gregory interprets reality is Orthodox
Christianity, and he not only subscribed to it in his mind, but is
fervently committed to it with his whole heart. Thus, he begins this
great historical work, The History of the Franks, with nothing
less than his own confession of faith: “Proposing as I do to
describe the wars waged by kings against hostile peoples, by martyrs
against heathen and by the Church against heretics, I wish first of
all to explain my own faith, so that whoever reads me may not doubt
that I am a Catholic.” (“Catholic,” of course, in 6th-century
texts, means the same thing that we now mean by the word “Orthodox.”)
There follows the Nicene Creed, paraphrased and with certain Orthodox
interpretations added.
Thus
in St. Gregory we may see the wholeness of view which has been lost
by almost all of modern scholarship – another one of those basic
differences between East and West that began only with the Schism of
Rome. In this, St. Gregory is fully in the Orthodox spirit. In this
approach there is a great advantage solely from the point of view of
historical fact – for we have before us not only the “bare facts”
he chronicles, but we understand as well the context in which he
interprets them. But more important that this – particularly when
it comes to chronicling supernatural events or the virtues of the
saints – we have the inestimable advantage of a trained observer
on the spot, so to speak – someone who interprets spiritual
events (almost all of which he knew either from personal experience
or from the testimony of witnesses he regarded as reliable) on the
basis of the Church's tradition and his own rich Christian
experience. We do not need to guess as to the meaning of some
spiritually-significant event when we have such a reliable
contemporary interpreter of it, and especially when his
interpretations are so much in accord with what we find in the basic
source books of the Orthodox East. We may place all the more trust in
St. Gregory's interpretations when we know that he himself was
granted spiritual visions (as described in his life) and was frank in
admitting that he did not see the spiritual visions of others (HF V,
50).
Sir
Samuel Dill notes that access is denied him, as a modern man, to the
world of St. Gregory's “legends.” What are we, 20th-century
Orthodox Christians to think of these “legends”? Prof. Dalton
notes, regarding the very book of St. Gregory which we are presenting
here, that “his Lives of the Fathers have something of the
childlike simplicity characterizing the Dialogues of St. Gregory
the Great” (vol.1, p. 21). We have already discussed, in the
“Prologue” to this book, the value of this “childlikeness”
for Orthodox Christians today, as well as the high standards of
truthfulness of such Orthodox writers as St. Gregory the Great (as
contrast with the frequent fables of the medieval West). The
extraordinary spiritual manifestations described by St. Gregory of
Tours are familiar to any Orthodox Christian who is well grounded in
the ABC's of spiritual experience and in the basic Orthodox
source-books; they sound like “legends” only to those whose
grounding is in the materialism and unbelief of modern times.
Somewhat ironically, these “legends” have now become a little
more accessible to a new generation that had become interested in
psychic and occult phenomena as well as actual sorcery and witch
craft; but for them the whole tone of St. Gregory's writings will
remain foreign unless they obtain the key to its “secret”: true
Orthodox Christianity. St. Gregory's “wonders and terrors of an
unseen world” open up for us another reality entirely from that of
modern unbelief and occultism alike: the reality of spiritual life,
which is indeed more unseen than seen, which does indeed account for
many extraordinary phenomena usually misunderstood by modern
scholarship, and which begins now and continues into eternity.
There
is, finally, another aspect of St. Gregory's writings which modern
historians find generally not so baffling as disdainfully amusing,
but to which, again, we Orthodox Christians have the key which they
lack. This aspect is that of the “coincidences,” omens, and the
like, which St. Gregory finds significant but which modern historians
find totally irrelevant to the chronicling of historical events. Some
of these phenomena are manifestations of spiritual visions, such as
the baked sword which St. Salvius (and no one eles) saw hanging over
the house of King Chilperic, portending the death of the king' sons
(HF V, 50). But other of the manifestations are simply dreams or
natural phenomena of an extraordinary kind, which either fill St.
Gregory with foreboding (Hf VIII, 17) or of which he says in all
simplicity, “I have no idea what all this meant” (HF V, 23). The
modern historian is only amused at the idea of finding “meaning”
behind earthquakes or strange signs in the sky; but St. Gregory, as a
Christian historian, is aware that God's Providence is ate work
everywhere in the universe and can be understood even in small or
seemingly random details by those who are spiritually sensitive; he
sees that the deepest causes of historical events are by no means
always the obvious ones. Concerning this theological point we may
cite the words of a contemporary of St. Gregory in the East, Abba
Dorotheus, to whom the writings of St. Gregory would have been not in
the least strange. “It is good, brethren, to place your hope for
every deed upon God and to say: Nothing happens without the will of
God; but of course God knew that this was good and useful and
profitable, and therefore he did this, even though this matter also
had some outward cause. For example, I could say that inasmuch as I
ate food with the pilgrims and forced myself a little in order to be
host to them, therefore my stomach was weighed down and there was a
numbness caused in my feet and from this I became ill. I could also
cite various causes (for one who seeks them, there is no lack of
them); but the most sure and profitable thing is to say: In truth God
knew that this would be more profitable for my soul, and therefore it
happened in this way.” (St. Abba Dorotheus, Spiritual
Instructions, Instruction 12.)
St.
Gregory, like St. Abba Dorotheus, was always seeking first of all the
primary or inward cause of events, which concern the will of God and
man's salvation. That is why his history of the Franks, as well as of
individual saints, are of much greater value than the “objective”
(that is purely outward) researches of modern scholars into
the same subjects. This is not to say that some of his historical
facts might not be subject to correction, but only that his spiritual
interpretation of events is basically the correct, the Christian one.
