A Victorian take on the Orthodox Church

  • Greg excels at get­ting me unusual books for Christ­mas, and so this year I find myself with a fine col­lec­tion of books on Ortho­dox his­tory, thought and the­ol­ogy. Only one from Fred­er­ica is recent, the oth­ers are all old, and three are from the 1800′s. You’ve got to love the lan­guage and the pac­ing of these older books that come from the days when appar­ently no one was ever in a hurry. What was a bet­ter thing to do than read, and so why in the world would you write any sen­tence of less than 50 words? If there’s one thing I’ve fig­ured out about your Vic­to­rian writ­ers, it’s that they loved flow­ery prose.

    But hav­ing given that dis­claimer, I was amazed by the assess­ment of the Ortho­dox Church given in the intro­duc­tion of “The His­tory of the Holy East­ern Church” by Rev. John Mason Neale (pub. 1850). I offer it here just because though the writ­ing is dated, I thought it was a wonderful:

    I shall write of Prelates not less faith­ful, of Mar­tyrs not less con­stant, of Con­fes­sors not less gen­er­ous, than those of Europe; shall shew every arti­cle of the Creed guarded with as much scrupu­lous jeal­ousy; shall adduce a fresh crowd of wit­ness to the Faith once for all deliv­ered to the Saints. In the glow and splen­dour of Byzan­tine glory, in the tem­pests of the Ori­en­tal mid­dle ages, in the des­o­la­tion and tyranny of the Turk­ish Empire, the tes­ti­mony of the same immutable Church remains unchanged. Extend­ing her­self from the sea of Okhotsk to the palaces of Venice, from the ice-fields that grind against the Solevet­sky monastery to the burn­ing jun­gles of Mal­abar, embrac­ing a thou­sand lan­guages, and nations, and tongues, but bind­ing them together in a golden link of the same Faith, offer­ing the Tremen­dous Sac­ri­fice in a hun­dred Litur­gies, but offer­ing it to the same God, and with the same rites, fix­ing her Patri­ar­chal Thrones in the same cities as when the Dis­ci­ples were called Chris­tians first at Anti­och, and James, the brother of the Lord, fin­ished his course at Jerusalem, oppressed by the devo­tees of the False Prophet, as once by the wor­ship­pers of false gods, — she is now, as she was from the begin­ning, mul­ti­plex in her arrange­ments, sim­ple in her faith, dif­fi­cult of com­pre­hen­sion to strangers, eas­ily intel­li­gi­ble to her sons, widely scat­tered in her branches, hardly beset by her ene­mies, yet still and ever­more, what she delights to call her­self — One, Only, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

    ps: If you’re not a fan of the archaic styling, you can at least be in awe of the great feats of com­po­si­tion: that last sen­tence is 167 words long.

    ***
    Follow-up –
    Lest all that sound too tri­umphal­is­tic, I can offer the next para­graph as an admis­sion that the Ortho­dox Church had her crit­ics then as she has them now, even if Rev. John Mason Neale isn’t one of them:

    Such she is: and yet being so, she has not escaped, any more than her Great Head escaped, the tongue of calumny. Protes­tant con­tro­ver­sial­ists attack her, because she holds uncor­rupted the Faith of S. Athana­sius and S. Chrysos­tom; Roman the­olo­gians con­demn her as a with­ered and sap­less branch, cut off from the com­mu­nion of the first See, and now ready for the fire; infi­del trav­ellers con­trast the ‘noble sim­plic­ity’ of the Imposter of Mecca with the ‘com­pli­cated super­sti­tions’ of the Chris­t­ian East. Every­where is the cry against her, that her Priests are sunk in igno­rance, her peo­ple enslaved to big­otry; that she exists only because she has so long existed, and acts with the mech­a­nism of an automa­ton; that her want of mis­sion­ary zeal proves her defi­ciency in vital energy, and that the hour of peril will crush her, like a hol­low image, to dust.

    For eigh­teen hun­dred years [two thou­sand, now], it might be answered, this ven­er­a­ble Com­mu­nion has fought the good fight, and borne about in her body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

    I’m not sure if that helps with any unseem­li­ness of the first pas­sage, but when I first started inves­ti­gat­ing Ortho­dox his­tory, I came to the same con­clu­sion: we Ortho­dox don’t look at the Church and love her so much as we behold the mir­a­cle of her exist­ing at all and love the Lord.

    (Don’t know if that makes sense or reflects a com­mon feel­ing or just a per­sonal one, but heck, if Rev. John Mason Neale can pon­tif­i­cate a lit­tle, so can I, right?)


    Related posts:

    1. Thoughts about the Ortho­dox Church and cap­i­tal punishment
    2. Becom­ing Ortho­dox by Peter E. Gillquist
    3. The Ortho­dox con­vert list
    4. Touchy Touch­stone
    5. Fred­er­ica on unity and chaos

    December 27th, 2005 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • The Par­son 12.27.2005

    Wow, that piece of writ­ing takes tal­ent, whether you like the sen­ti­ment or not. I’m glad, Grace, that you’re using a new medium–blogging–to high­light an old discipline–writing. I fear that email and blog­ging help in a great num­ber of ways, but writ­ing is not one of them. Tech­nol­ogy lends itself to the imme­di­ate, while dis­ci­ple­ship tends to be drawn in reflec­tion and med­i­ta­tion, more time-consumptive prac­tices. Thanks for shar­ing the piece.…

  • Mimi

    My good­ness, that’s beautiful!

    What a neat Christ­mas gift!

  • Grace

    Par­son:
    That ended up pretty Ortho-centric, didn’t it? Well, I updated the entry to include some­thing that at least touches on the fact that there are other points of view.

  • Grace

    Mimi:
    Yes, Greg did good. (And he knows it. Darn!)

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