By St. Hilarion (Troitsky) the New Hieromartyr
"The
truth of the Church was greatly distorted in the West after Rome had
fallen away from the Church. In the West, God's kingdom began to be
viewed more as an earthly kingdom. Latinism obscured the Christian
concept of the Church in the consciousness of its members with its
legalistic account of good deeds, its mercenary relationship to God
and its falsification of salvation. Latinism gave birth to a
legitimate, although very insubordinate, offspring in the form of
Protestantism. Protestantism was created from the soil of humanism
which was not a religious phenomenon; on the contrary, all its
leading ideas are purely earthly, human. It created respect for man
in his natural condition. Protestantism, having carried over the
basis of humanism into the religious field, was not a protest of
genuine ancient Church Christian consciousness against those forms
and norms which were created by medieval Papism, as Protestant
theologians are often inclined to claim. Far from it; Protestantism
was a protest on the very same plane. It did not re-establish ancient
Christianity, it only replaced one distortion of Christianity with
another, and the new falsehood was much worse than the first.
Protestantism became the last word in Papism, and brought it to its
logical conclusion. Truth and salvation are bestowed upon love, i.e.,
the Church - such is Church consciousness.
Latinism,
having fallen away from the Church, changed this consciousness and
proclaimed: truth is given to the separate person of the Pope, and
the Pope manages the salvation of all. Protestantism only objected:
Why is truth given to the Pope alone? - and added: truth and
salvation are open to each separate individual, independently of the
Church. Every individual was thus promoted to the rank of infallible
Pope. Protestantism placed a papal tiara on every German professor
and, with its countless number of popes, completely destroyed the
concept of the Church, substituting faith with the reason of each
separate personality. It substituted salvation in the Church with a
dreamy confidence in salvation through Christ in egoistic isolation
from the Church. In practice, of course, Protestants departed from
the very beginning and by roundabout ways, by contraband, so to
speak, introduced some of the elements of the dogma about the Church,
having recognized some authorities, although only in the area of
dogma. Being a religious anarchy, pure Protestantism, like all
anarchies, turned out to be completely impossible, and by that,
testified before us to the indisputable truth that the human soul is
Church-prone by nature. Still, the theoretical side of Protestantism
appealed to human self-love and self-will of all varieties, for
self-love and self-will received a sort of sanctification and
blessing from Protestantism. This fact is revealed today in the
endless dividing and factionalism of Protestantism itself. It is
Protestantism that openly proclaimed the greatest lie of all: that
one can be a Christian while denying the Church.
Nevertheless,
by tying its members by some obligatory authorities and church laws,
Protestantism entangles itself in a hopeless contradiction: having
itself separated the individual from the Church, it nevertheless
places limits on that freedom. From this stems the constant mutiny of
Protestants against those few and pitiful remnants of Church
consciousness which are still preserved by the official
representatives of their denominations … It is easy to understand
that Protestantism corresponds to the almost completely pagan outlook
generally approved in the West. There, where the cult of
individualism blossoms luxuriantly, finding prophets in fashionable
philosophy and singers in the belles-lettres, Christ's ideal of the
Church can, of course have no place; for it negates self-love and
self-will in people and demands love from them all … Even
independently of Protestantism, however, many now come to the denial
of the Church, assimilating, in general, the western European
attitude which developed outside the Church and which is completely
alien and even hostile to the spirit of the Church … love is forced
out by pride and self-love (which is called "noble" -
although the holy fathers of the Church speak of self-love and pride
only in connection with the devil), when self-denial is substituted
by self-assertion and meek obedience is replaced by proud self-will,
then a dense fog shrouds the truth of the Church, which is
inseparably linked with directly opposite ideals … Thus there is
nothing easier than to re-interpret Christ's teaching according to
one's personal taste and to invent "Christianity," passing
off, under this name, the dreams of one's heart and the images of
one's own idle fantasy. The sacred books of the New Testament were
written by practical, unscholarly apostles. Throughout the centuries
there have been "correctors of the Apostles," as Saint
Irenaeus of Lyons calls them, ones who considered themselves higher
than the Apostles, those "Galilean fishermen." Does it
become a highly educated European of the twentieth century to accept
on faith all that is said by some "fishermen"? So many free
themselves from the authority of the Apostles and desire to interpret
Christ's teaching while being guided only by their personal whims.
Excerpted from "'Christianity' or the Church?"
