The Eastern Orthodox Church

Its Thought and Life

Ernst Benz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138535305
• eBook ISBN: 9781351304740
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Western European Christendom finds it difficult to comprehend the Eastern Orthodox Church because it knows little about the practice and doctrines of Orthodoxy. Even what is known is overlaid by many strata of prejudices and misunderstandings, partly political in nature. One of the obstacles has been the natural tendency to confound the ideas and customs of the Orthodox Church with familiar parallels in Roman Catholicism. To escape this tradition pitfall, Ernst Benz focuses on icon painting as a logical place to begin his examination of the Orthodox Church.

Beginning with a brilliant discussion of the importance of icons in the Eastern Church--and the far-reaching effects of icons on doctrine as well as art--Benz counteracts the confusion, explaining simply and clearly the liturgy and sacraments, dogma, constitution and law of Eastern Orthodoxy. In brief history, he describes the rise of Orthodox national churches, schismatic churches, and churches in exile; the role of monasticism and its striking differences from Roman Catholic monasticism; the missionary work of the Orthodox Church; and the influence of Orthodoxy on politics and culture.

The role of the church can be defined in terms of the image. Benz writes that the church exists so that "members may be incorporated into the image of Jesus Christ a in that individual believers are aechanged into his likeness'" as Paul writes in the second letter to the Corinthians. Thus, Orthodox theology holds up the icon as the true key to the understanding of Orthodox dogma. The Eastern Orthodox Church will be valuable to anyone interested in learning more about the church, its thought, its life, and its ideals.

VII.

Missionary Work and the Spread of the Orthodox Church

1. DID ORTHODOXY FAIL AS A MISSION CHURCH?

The Eastern Church has often been charged with failure in its missionary work. Prejudiced observers have contended that it felt little impulse to convert the non-Christian peoples living in its midst or at its borders, that it was satisfied with preserving the status quo and preferred to keep its dogmas and liturgies to itself. A prejudiced opinion of this kind is largely due to ignorance, in western Europe, of the actual missionary work carried out by the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is also, perhaps, based upon the situation of the Orthodox remnants who found themselves engulfed by the triumphant sweep of Islam in the Near East and central Asia.

It is true that the tiny colonies of Orthodoxy in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as the Orthodox Thomaeans in India, and the battered Nestorian Church in Persia, display little missionary activity today. During the first spread of Islam, during the time of the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and again since the establishment of Turkish rule, these churches were subject to such violent persecution that the once flourishing Christian communities were almost wiped out. The Muhammadan authorities have forbidden the survivors to undertake any missionary work among Muslims. Islamic law, moreover, provides the severest penalties for the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. The Indian Thomaean Christians have become, under the influence of Hindu ideas of caste, a closed caste and have thus forfeited all missionary aspirations. Centuries of political repression of the Orthodox and schismatic churches in the Near and Far East snuffed out whatever missionary zeal might have been felt by those beleaguered Christians.

Even when times changed and repression was lifted, these churches were no longer capable of recovering their militancy. During the period of European colonial expansion Britain and France in particular wrote clauses concerning missions into their international treaties. Thus Roman Catholic and Protestant missions were able to begin their operations in the Near East under the most favorable terms. The contiguity of active Roman Catholic and Protestant missions in the Near East, alongside the old Christian churches whose character was stamped by centuries of passivity, greatly contributed to this notion that Orthodoxy is incapable of missionary work.

2. THE MISSIONARY METHODS OF THE BYZANTINE CHURCH

It is, however, altogether wrong to conclude, from instances of this sort, that the Eastern Orthodox Church has completely lacked the missionary spirit from the beginning. In fact, Orthodoxy engaged in the most vigorous missionary work during the period of its own most vital growth. By the third and fourth centuries it had penetrated eastward as far as Persia and India, and from those countries, in its Nestorian variety, to China, central Asia and Mongolia. It was also expanding westward; the Germanic tribes migrating through western Europe were first Christianized by missionaries from Asia Minor and Byzantium. The Byzantine Church also sent its missionaries to the north, northeast and northwest; West, South and East Slavs were converted by them. Much of this missionary activity was subsequently forgotten by the West because Roman Catholics later replaced the Orthodox missionaries, especially in Moravia, and incorporated the Germanic and West Slavic tribes into the community of the Roman Catholic Church. In its time, however, the missionary work of the Orthodox Church was a tremendous achievement, and its aftereffects survived for centuries, though overlaid by later Roman Catholic work among the heathen. We shall deal with the missionary activity and spread of the Orthodox Church in some detail for the very reason that it has been so largely ignored by the West.

3. MISSION AND NATIONALITY

In its most flourishing period the Orthodox Church not only poured much of its spiritual dynamism into spreading the gospel among non-Christian peoples, but did so in consonance with a theological principle that distinctly furthered the success of this missionary work. The principle was: to preach to the various peoples in their own language, and to employ the ordinary tongue of the people in the liturgy for divine services. In the Syrian Church, Syrian; in the Armenian Church, Armenian; in the Coptic Church, Coptic; in the Georgian Church, Georgian; these were the languages of sermon, hymn and liturgy.

Behind this practice lay a specific theological view of the vernacular. The primitive Church had consulted the Bible and drawn from it certain conclusions concerning man’s linguistic evolution. Thus, the early theologians set up two parallel events: one was the story of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, and the other the story of the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit with its accompanying miracle of “speaking in tongues.” These were regarded as key points in the history of redemption. The confusion of tongues at Babel (Genesis 11) was seen as punishment for man’s defiance of God. The many languages thus engendered destroyed the unity of true knowledge of God and promoted the spread of false religions, so that each people created its own gods. The “miracle of tongues,” on the other hand, was a token of God’s mercy and his desire to redeem all nations. The Pentecostal miracle was considered to be the baptism of the vernacular tongues; henceforth the vernacular was exalted into an instrument for annunciation of the divine message of redemption throughout the world, among all peoples.

These concepts are still impressed upon the Orthodox believer, for they are incorporated into the liturgy:

“With the tongues of foreign peoples hast Thou, Christ, renewed Thy disciples, that they might thereby be heralds of God, of the immortal Word that vouchsafes to our souls the great mercy…. Upon a time the tongues were confounded by reason of the Tower’s blasphemy. But now tongues are filled with wisdom by reason of the glory of knowledge of God. Then God condemned the blasphemers by sin; now Christ has illuminated the fishermen by the Spirit. Then the garbling of language was imposed for punishment; now the harmony of languages is renewed for the salvation of our souls…. The power of the divine Spirit has solemnly united into one the divided voices of those who agreed ill in their thoughts, has joined them in concord by giving to the believers insight into knowledge of the Threeness in which we were confirmed…. When, descending, He confused the languages, the All-highest divided the peoples. When He sent out the tongues of fire, He called all to oneness. And in concord hymn we the Allholy Spirit.”

Since this was their belief, Orthodox missionaries of all countries and all epochs made a point of casting both gospel and liturgy into the vernacular of the peoples of their mission. Thus it was that the Orthodox missions in both West and East, in the Germanic, Slavic and Asiatic lands, had an enormously creative influence upon the development of the vulgar tongues. Many of the languages of Europe, the Near East, Siberia and central Asia were raised to the rank of literary languages by the work of the Orthodox missionaries in translating the Bible and liturgical writings.

Nowadays few people realize the significance of such translations. Translating the Bible into a vernacular means enlisting that language for the work of building the kingdom of God. The language is used to build the spiritual edifice, and lines are laid down governing its further literary development. Such a translation brings about both the rebirth and baptism of a language. The translator of the Bible is confronted with the creative task of expressing, with the often inadequate means of a hitherto nonliterary vernacular, the immense body of spiritual and earthly, natural and social, sacred and profane ideas that are contained in the books of the Old and New Testaments. To perform such translation means, in fact, to conquer for the first time the intellectual and natural universe for the language in question, and therefore for the people who speak that language.

4. THE MISSION AMONG THE TEUTONS

Beginnings of the Teutonic Mission

The Orthodox missionary work among the Germanic peoples has been largely forgotten. Yet the first important Teutonic state and the first Teutonic culture to emerge from the Völkerwanderung—the kingdom of Theodoric the Great—was largely shaped by Byzantine elements. Carried along by the advancing wave of Goths, the missionary work of the Orthodox Church extended far to the West.

The eastern Teutons had started their migrations from what would seem to have been their original tribal homes in Sweden. Prevented by other Germanic tribes from moving westward during the third and fourth centuries, they had violently broken through to the south and southeast and had poured into the Roman Empire in two great streams: the Goths by crossing the lower reaches of the Danube; the Vandals, Alans and Suevi, with the Burgundians following somewhat later, by crossing the Rhine. All these Germanic tribes were Christianized in somewhat the same manner as the East Gothic tribes, who had come under the influence of Orthodox Christendom. These East Goths, or Ostrogoths, controlled the region stretching from the Vistula to the lower Volga and the Crimea.

Christianity apparently took hold among the Goths first in the region bordering the Black Sea. A bishop from Gothia appeared at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and the term “Diocese of Gothia” can be traced in the Crimea until as late as the tenth century. These Goths had been converted by priests and monks of the Byzantine Church. Missionary work among the Goths on the Danube likewise went forward during the third and fourth centuries, in part carried on by prisoners of war whom the Goths had captured during their raiding expeditions into Byzantine territory. Among the Fathers of the Church, Basil the Great took a particular interest in the Gothic Church, which he regarded as an offshoot of the Cappadocian Church. Around the middle of the fourth century a campaign of violent repression was launched against the Christian Goths by the Gothic king Athanaric (†381), a persecution that resulted in numerous martyrs. Groups of Christian Goths fled from their own lands into Byzantine territory, settling in Thrace. At the beginning of the fifth century Patriarch John Chrysostom (c. 347-407) provided the Goths in Constantinople with a church of their own in which services were held in the Gothic language.

Teutonic Arianism

The most important missionary work among the Goths was undertaken by the Arian Church of Asia Minor. The founder of that offshoot of Orthodoxy was one Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria (†336), whose interpretation of the nature of the Logos and of the relationship between the Son of God and the Father was later condemned as heretical by the Byzantine Church. But the newly converted Goths were scarcely conscious of Arius’ special Christology and of the subtleties of his theological speculations. They were called Arians simply because at the time of their conversion Arianism was the dominant doctrine in the Church of the Empire. They remained Arians after a shift in ecclesiastical politics resulted in the condemnation of Arianism as a heresy.

Wulfila

Bishop Wulfila (Ulfilas) (c. 311–83) was responsible for the religious, liturgical and constitutional character of Gothic Arianism. Wulfila’s grandparents had been Christians from Cappadocia in Asia Minor who were captured by the Goths in 264 and held prisoner. As the son of a Gothic father and Cappadocian mother, Wulfila commanded the Greek, Latin and Gothic languages. In his twenties he was sent to Constantinople as a member of a Gothic embassy. As emissaries of a group that had heroically withstood severe persecutions, he and his coreligionists were well received by the Emperor Constantius II. Wulfila received theological training in Asia Minor, and at the age of thirty was consecrated by Eusebius of Nicomedia as “Bishop of those of the Christian faith, living in the Gothic land.” He returned to his homeland and continued his work among Christian and pagan Goths for thirty-three years.

The success of Wulfila’s missionary work was due above all to his translation of the Bible into Gothic. This alone made it possible for the Gothic tribes to assimilate Christianity. Through this translation, moreover, Wulfila enormously extended the linguistic horizon of one Germanic people. He transformed the hitherto unwritten vernacular of the West Goths into a literary language that could be used for the dissemination of the new universal religion.

The Arianism of the Germanic tribes vanished completely after a few centuries—only a few churches in Ravenna and on the Iberian Peninsula still bear witness to its onetime sway over much of Europe. But the German language still bears the marks of Wulfila’s mighty literary achievement. The German words for God, devil, angel, church, bishop, penance, transgression, faith, and so on, were created by Wulfila, either taken from the native Gothic word-stock and given Christian meanings, or introduced directly from the Greek into Gothic, whence they found their way into German. Thus the spirit that a disciple of Near Eastern theology breathed into his translation of the Bible still affects the language and literature of the German people.

5. THE MISSION TO THE SLAVS OF CYRIL AND METHODIUS

The second westward missionary thrust of the Byzantine Church was led by the “apostles of the Slavs,” Cyril (t869) and Methodius (t885), who went first to the West Slavs, especially in the Moravian kingdom, and afterwards to the South Slavic tribes, the Bulgarians, Serbs and Dalmatians.

Methodius and Constantine (for that was Cyril’s real name) were brothers, Greeks from Salonika, who knew the Bulgarian-Macedonian dialect spoken in the Slavic settlements around their native city. Constantine was carefully educated in Constantinople. He early turned to missionary work and first went out among the Muhammadans, then to the kingdom of the Khazars on the shores of the Sea of Azov. Shortly before his death he became a monk and adopted the name of Cyril. His brother Methodius spent the early part of his life as a government administrator in the Slavic territories of the Byzantine Empire. He likewise became a monk and abbot of the famous monastery of Polychron.

Rastislav, Duke of Moravia (846-70) had established an independent West Slavic kingdom. In order to maintain his autonomy, he wanted to make the Moravian Church independent of the Frankish Church. He expelled the German priests and appealed to the emperor at Constantinople, Michael III, to send teachers for his people. Constantine and Methodius were chosen for this task. They arrived in Moravia in 864 and devoted themselves chiefly to teaching, in order to supply the Moravian Church with native Slavic priests. While in Moravia, Constantine translated parts of the Scriptures and the liturgy into the Slavic language. He is probably responsible for the creation of the oldest Slavic alphabet, the “Glagolitic” script; documents written in that script go back as far as the ninth century.

Members of the Orthodox Church were at this time not conscious of any deep separation from the Church of Rome; in fact, the prestige of the two brothers in Moravia rested upon their feat of having brought the relics of Bishop Clement of Rome to Moravia from the Crimea—according to legend Clement had been exiled to the Crimea during the persecutions and had died there.

In keeping with this spirit the two brothers, although sent out by the Byzantine patriarch, hoped to have the Roman pope endorse their founding of a Slavic-speaking church in Moravia. A decree from Rome, they thought, would still the hostility of the Frankish clergy. Consequently, after laboring in Moravia for three and a half years, they made their way across Pannonia to Rome, where they were given a ceremonious reception by Pope Hadrian II. Constantine died in Rome on February 14, 869, and was buried in the Church of St. Clement. Methodius, after being consecrated archbishop and appointed papal legate to Pannonia and Moravia, was given an organizational and missionary assignment among the Slavs similar to that which Boniface had received for the German tribes a century and a half earlier. But because of the war then being fought between the Moravian and German dukes, Methodius remained in Pannonian territory, which had hitherto been the missionary zone of the Archbishop of Salzburg, who greatly objected to this intrusion. This was the beginning of a long series of disputes, in the course of which a Bavarian synod condemned Methodius and had him imprisoned for two and a half years. The central issue was the German clergy’s opposition to the introduction of Slavic liturgy and the establishment of a Slavic ecclesiastical province with Slavic as the official language of the churches. Finally the heads of the German churches succeeded in persuading the Pope to oppose Hadrian’s original plan. Pope Stephen VI forbade the use of Slavic in the Church. The pupils of Methodius were expelled from their posts. The newly established hierarchy was nearly wiped out by the Hungarian invasions after 900; in 950 Moravia was assigned to the diocese of Regensburg, and in 973 to Prague. This completed the destruction of what had been the essence of Cyril and Methodius’ lifework. The West Slavic tribes remained for the time being under the guidance of the German Church. In Poland, too, the Latin rite became established. The attempt to set up a West Slavic Church under the sovereignty of Rome, but with Slavic as the official language, had failed.

Nevertheless, some part of the work of the two brothers was unexpectedly saved. After their expulsion from Moravia the pupils of Methodius continued their work among the South Slavic tribes along the Danube and in the Balkans. In Bulgaria they set up a Slavic Church, no longer under the dominion of Rome since Rome had ruled against tolerating the Slavic ritual, but under the protection of the Byzantine Church which still subscribed to its old missionary principle of permitting each nation to conduct the liturgy in its own language.

Although the work of the “apostles of the Slavs” in the Moravian kingdom was not successful and was ultimately rejected by Rome, their literary achievements were of tremendous importance for future missions. Cyril became the creator of the Old Church Slavonic language by translating the Bible and liturgy into his native Bulgarian-Macedonian dialect. Many historical and philological problems connected with his work are still unsolved or the subject of much contention. But the fact remains that he laid the groundwork for a Slavic ecclesiastical literature on which later missions among the East Slavs could build.

6. THE MISSION AMONG THE EAST SLAVS

The Mission in Northeastern Russia

By the end of the eleventh century the territory of the East Slavs had been Christianized, though not completely so, from Novgorod in the north to beyond Kiev in the south—what the Russians called “the land along the road from the Varangians to the Greeks.” The princes of Rus, as the Duchy of Kiev was called, had actively encouraged this movement. The populations of other racial stock in the area had been only sketchily won for Christianity. This was true, for example, of the territory around Rostov, on the upper reaches of the Volga, known to Russian traders as the “way to the Saracens.” The direction of future Christian expansion was decided by political conditions; it had to be toward the northeast. The division of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I. The Orthodox Icon
• II. Liturgy and Sacraments
• III. Dogma
• IV. Constitution and Law of the Orthodox Church
• V. National Churches, Schismatic Churches, Emigrant Churches
• VI. Monasticism
• VII. Missionary Work and the Spread of the Orthodox Church
• VIII. Orthodox Culture
• IX. The Ethical Ideas of Orthodoxy
• X. The Political Ideas of Orthodoxy
• XI. Rome, Byzantium, Moscow
• XII. Russia and Europe
• XIII. Orthodoxy within the Universal Church Today
• XIV. Greatness and Weakness of Orthodoxy
• Bibliography