By Fr. Seraphim Rose
The
20th century Orthodox Christian will find little that is
strange in the Christianity of 6th century Gaul; in fact,
if he himself has entered deeply into the piety and spirit of
Orthodoxy as it has come down even to our days, he will find himself
very much at home in the Christian world of St. Gregory of Tours.
The externals of Christian worship – church structures and
decoration, iconography, vestments, services – after centuries of
development, had attained essentially the form they retain today in
the Orthodox Church. In the West, especially after the final Schism
of the Church of Rome in 1054, all these things changed. The more
tradition-minded East, by the very fact that it has changed so little
over the centuries even in outward forms, is naturally much closer to
the early Christian West than is Catholic-Protestant West of recent
centuries, which had departed far from its Orthodox roots even before
the present-day “post-Christian” era arrived.
Some
historians of this period, such as O.M. Dalton in the Introduction to
his translation of St. Gregory's History of the Franks
(Oxford, 1927, two volumes), find much in Christian Gaul that is
“Eastern” in form. This observation is true as far as it goes,
but it is made from a modern western perspective that is not quite
precise. A more precise formulation of this observation would be the
following:
In
the 6th century there was one common Christianity,
identical in dogma and spirit in East and West, with some differences
in form which, at this early period, were no more than minor and
incidental. The whole Church met together in councils, both before
and after this century, to decide disputed dogmatic questions and
confess the one true Faith. There were numerous pilgrims and
travelers, especially “Westerners” going to the east, but also
“easterners” going to the West, and they did not find each other
strangers, or the Christian faith or piety or customs of the distant
land alien to what they knew at home. The local differences amount to
no more than exist today between the Orthodox Christians of Russia
and Greece.
The
estrangement between East and West belongs to future centuries. It
becomes painfully manifest (although there were signs of it before
this) only with the age of the Crusades (1096 and later), and the
reason for it is to be found in a striking spiritual, psychological
and cultural change which occurred in the West precisely at the time
of the Schism. Concerning this a noted Roman scholar, Yves Congar,
has perceptively remarked: “A Christian of the fourth or fifth
century would have felt less bewildered by the forms of piety current
in the 11th century than would his counterpart of the 11th
century in the forms of the 12th. The great break occurred
in the transition period from the one to the other century. This
change took place only in the West where, sometime between the end of
the 11th and the end of the 12th century,
everything somehow was transformed. This profound alteration of view
did not take place in the East, where, in some respects, Christian
matters are still today what they were then – and what they were in
the West before the end of the 11th century.” (Yves
Congar, O.P., After Nine Hundred Years, Fordham University
Press, 1959, p. 39, where he is actually paraphrasing Dom A.
Wilmart.)
One
might cite numerous manifestations of this remarkable change in the
West: the beginnings of Scholasticism or the academic-analytical
approach to knowledge as opposed to the traditional-synthetic
approach of Orthodoxy; the beginning of the “age of romance,”
when fables and legends were introduced into Christian texts; the new
naturalism in art (Giotto) which destroyed iconography; the new
“personal: concept of sanctity (Francis of Assisi), unacceptable to
Orthodoxy, which gave rise to later Western “mysticism” and
eventually to the innumerable sects and pseudo-religious movements of
modern times; and so forth. The cause of this change is something
that cannot be evident to a Roman Catholic scholar: it is the loss of
grace which follows on the separation from the Church of Christ. And
which puts one at the mercy of the “spirit of the times” and of
purely logical and human ways of life and thought. When the Crusaders
sacked and desecrated Constantinople in 1204 (an act unthinkable in
earlier centuries for the Christian West), they only revealed that
they had become total strangers to Orthodoxy, and therefore to the
Eastern Christians, and that they had irretrievably lost what their
own ancestors in 6th century Gaul had preserved as the
apple of their eye: the unbroken tradition of true Christianity.
From: Vita Patrum by St. Gregory of Tours, Introduction by Fr. Seraphim Rose, pp. 69-71.
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