An Introduction to Orthodoxy
Alec
by Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
e(xcerpt from a talk with non-orthodox).
The word "Orthodoxy" is a Greek word, and it has got two sides to it:
it is both right glorification of God and right faith in Him, and the
first thing which we would say is glorification, worship. God is not
someone about whom one can have notions, God is someone whom one
encounters, and the English word "God" if you look it up in an
etymological dictionary, proceeds from a Gothic root which means "one
before whom one prostrates in adoration". So this is the first and
basic sense which an Orthodox has of God - it is the One whom one
meets and the One before whom one bows down in adoration. The first
part of my sentence, 'the one whom one meets', is a very important one
because we speak very often in all denominations, in all forms of
religion, of the tenets of our faith, but the tenets of our faith are
the expression of people's experience, and it is not enough for a
person to adhere to a world outlook or to a theology or to dogma to
have a right to call himself either a Christian or a member of any
other religious body. One has got a right to say, I am this and that,
when it corresponds to one's personal experience, when one can say, as
an atheist put it in France in a book in which he described his
conversion, God exists, I have met Him. This is, I think, an essential
attitude of Orthodoxy to the approach to God and to the faith.
Obviously we do not all experience God with the same violence, the
same depth as St. Paul did on the way to Damascus but as long as we
can not say, I know for sure Who He is, I have an experience of His,
then we must say, My faith is borrowed, it is incipient, I do not yet
possess it. It is still an intellectual vision or perhaps, an
emotional approach, it is not life itself. And one of our ascetics of
the present day put it to me in the following manner, "No one should
dare call himself an Orthodox because to be an Orthodox means to know
God as He is and to worship Him according to His holiness, worship Him
in mind, in heart, in will, in one's very flesh and in one's actions."
So that this is the basic corner-stone of our attitude to Orthodoxy.
It must be an experience personal, direct, possessed by us however
frail and incipient but it must be our own and not simply a borrowed
faith, which we repeat, of which we repeat the gestures or the
formulas.
And yet formulas play a role because formulas or the various ways in
which a faith can be conveyed are in the end the only way of conveying
things. It is by the word that one can convey notions, even if these
notions are beyond words. When we say "beauty", when we say "God",
when we say "love", we use words, which in themselves are empty of
meaning except for one who knows what it is about. It is impossible to
convey in words the substance of things. Words are signs. And in that
respect the doctrinal statements of every faith including Orthodoxy
are attempts at putting into words what is beyond words or rather it's
an attempt at using words that will be openings and allow people to
enter into an experience. I have mentioned beauty, I have mentioned
God, I have mentioned love. Unless we have a slightest inkling of what
these things are the words remain meaningless but the moment we have
begun to discover the thing, then the words can be used for a deeper
understanding in order to share the experience of others and thereby
widening our own experience.
It is not only by words that one can convey ones faith. There is an
old saying that no-one can abandon the world and choose for God who
has not seen on the face or in the eyes of at least one person the
shining of eternal life. It is because one meets someone who arrests
one's attention that one can say, There is something beyond what I
have known hitherto.
But there are other ways in which meaning reaches us apart from the
words, as I have already said: icons, you have them on the wall, are
ways in which our faith can be conveyed. St. John of Damascus in the
VIII century says, "If an illiterate person comes and says, 'Tell me
what the Christian faith is about', take him to the church, place him
before an icon screen and let him look." And he will see several kinds
of things. Well, place him before a screen is what he said. Now I am
going to comment on it, I don't want to charge poor St. John of
Damascus with what I will say now. What you will see are icons,
representing Christ, the Mother of God, saints, but also scenes taken
from the Gospel: the Nativity of Christ, the Presentation to the
Temple and so forth. And for an illiterate person this is language, it
is a way of letting him see what these events are. Having been
confronted with the image, they can remember the event. But on the
other hand if you look at icons, you will see that they are not
realistic pictures. Well, certain elements are realistic obviously.
When we see the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem, if the icon is not
really too bad, you are aware that Christ is riding a donkey and not a
camel. So to that extent there is realism, but the aim of it is not to
present a realistic picture in the sense in which we speak of realism
in literature or in painting. An icon is there to use the forms of
this world, the visible elements of this world to convey meaning and
not only adventures or events. So that all that is meaningful will be
emphasised, all that is common ground will be just indicated. And some
things will appear very strange to you, I don't know whether there is
any of these icons on the wall but on number of icons, well, you see
buildings. And most of the buildings are very strange indeed. Say, a
house stands on two columns, a third one hanging in thin air as it
were, and for a long time people used to say, "How (?un...) this artist
were, how primitive. Couldn't they really put the last column on
something solid, isn't it absurd?" But the idea of it was to indicate
that all the things of this created world are just balanced unsafely,
that it is not an order which it immutable, solid, it is not even a
solid background for the life of the world. It is a transient world
which one day will be either fulfilled or collapse but not a world
which is self-sufficient and solidly established in itself.
Now, if you turn to the faces, then you will discover other things in
the same line. First of all you will discover that all icons represent
personages, Christ, the Mother of God, angels, saints, facing you,
never simply looking away from you because the purpose of an icon is
an encounter, and one does not encounter a person otherwise than by
being able to look into the face and into the eyes of a person. One
does not encounter persons in profile. On the other hand, if you are
prepared to look into a person's eyes, you must be prepared also to be
seen, for the other person to look into your eyes, and it is an
enormous risk, it's something which is very frightening at times; to
disclose oneself so completely because one longs to look into the
depth of a person's soul.
An icon is a call to all of us, to the person who contemplates it to
look deeply into the presence, into the presence of a saint, of
Christ, of the Mother of God, of an angel. And if you look at certain
icons you will discover that when demons are represented, they are
always represented in profile, because it is felt that you can not
look into the emptiness, the devastated emptiness of the demon's eyes
and remain safe.
Now, as far as faces are concerned, it is obvious that icons with a
very few exceptions are not portraits. We have no portrait of Christ,
of the Mother of God, of most of the saints. A few are nearing a
portrait because the saints are contemporary to the artist but on the
whole the aim of an icon is not to be a portrait. The aim of an icon
is to convey an experience and not simply a historical fact. If you
look at the icons of the Mother of God or of Christ, they are all
painted according to the same principle as caricatures. You know what
caricatures are made of: one singles out a few significant features
and the rest is left alone because obviously (?) everyone knows that
people have got cheeks and other parts of the face. But what is
important is the eyes, the brow, the mouth or this and that. Those of
you who may remember the caricatures of De Gaulle will remember that
what mattered was his nose. Well, this is the same principle which is
applied in painting icons except obviously that the aim is not to make
fun of the visage, of the face and the aim is to convey something
which is not amusing. And so you will find on icons eyes, eyebrows,
foreheads, mouth, a basic expression; and the rest is there but it is
of secondary importance. So that what you meet is what is expressive
of the person and not the general universal features.
Now, in this respect, an icon is also something which is rooted
simultaneously in the personal experience of the painter and in the
common experience of the members of his Church. An icon is never a
personal view how I imagine Christ. It's never an invented
countenance. And there it is an interesting rule which is given to the
icon-painters, that they should never copy slavishly an icon which was
painted before them, but at the same time they should never invent one
because you can not invent a spiritual experience but you can not
identify with someone else's experience to the point of being what he
was. And so an icon expresses a personal experience rooted in the
experience of the Church. The icons of the Mother of God are
practically always icons of the Mother and Child as the Vladimir icon
which you have got there, but it not true that it is only with Christ
that the Mother of God is represented. She is always related to Him
but not always so visibly and so obviously. There is one icon which is
now located in the south of Russia in which we see the Mother of God
alone. It is the face practically of a peasant girl. She has lost her
veil, her hair are falling right and left on her face, her gaze is
fixed, her hands, which is the only part of her body which one can see
apart from the shoulders and which are brought forward express agony.
And when you ask yourself, What, why? - you see in the corner of the
icon in very pale yellow a Crucifix. That is the agony of the Mother (?
but) about the Son.
And so an icon is always connected with a certain number of doctrinal
views. We believe the Gospel in its integrity with, perhaps, a
simplicity which may surprise a certain number of people in the West.
We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ was truly God become truly man,
we believe that He was born of the Virgin, we believe that He lived,
taught, was betrayed, delivered unto condemnation, crucified, died and
rose again and ascended into Heaven. And all this is expressed in icon-
painting as well as in the doctrinal statements of the Church. To us
this is history, it is certainty, there is no question about it, and
to us it is a demarcation line at which we would say, "This is
Christianity, the rest is not or it is a Christianity which is
adulterated, watered down, submitted to the fantastic judgements of
people who try to put into acceptable imagery what is beyond the very
understanding which we possess." So that to us the Gospel stands, to
us the Creed stands and stands as total reality not as symbols and
approximations but it does not mean that a statement contains
everything that is to be stated. As I said before, a statement is a
door that opens. When we use the word "God" meaning "Him before whom
one falls down in adoration", we speak of an experience, we speak of
what happens to us, we do not describe God. And already in the IV
century St. Gregory of Nazians said that if we collect from the
Gospel, from the Old and the New Testament everything which God has
revealed about himself, if we put together everything which the
believers have experienced and discovered about God and try to make a
completely (?) coherent image and say, this is our God, then we have
done nothing but built an idol, because God can not been known in His
entirety as little indeed as a person can be known in her entirety. To
us the doctrinal statements of the Church, indeed the glimpses of
Revelation which we find in the Old and the New Testament concerning
God are like the night sky. Every glimpse is like a star but the
spaces between the stars are as important as the stars themselves. It
is the stars that give us the direction. If we could collect together
in one flaming, glowing mass all the stars of heaven, we would have an
enormous mass of fire and no sky left and no direction. It is because
God reveals Himself in a glimpse, in a moment that we can know that
much and as much as we can receive, perceive, commune to.
And as far as icon-painting is concerned, to come back to it for one
moment, there is a very interesting feature in the theory of icon-
painting expressed by one of our greatest painters Rublev, who lived
in the XIV century. He painted always things temporal in three-
dimensional perspective but all the things that were eternal, even on
the same icon, he painted in two dimensions. Because his idea was that
indeed you can see Christ riding into Jerusalem, you can see the
disciples, you can see the people, the trees, the houses and you can
stop to examine it and to see the relief, but things divine are shown
to us in a moment, it's a glimpse, and you have never time to place
them into a perspective. You know, a little in the way in which when
you look out of the window on a very dark night during a thunderstorm,
and when the lightening flashes, you see things but you can not place
them, establish a rapport of distance between them. You have seen but
what is near, what is far, what is the exact shape? It is enough for
you to have seen. And this is what we try to do doctrinally in our
teaching and iconographically in our icon-painting - we try to reduce
the elements of our faith to what was stated by the Scriptures and
what is experienced in worship but we do not try to make out of our
doctrinal system a sort of total natural history of the divine world.
I remember having read the book by a Western theologian that starts
with words: "Theology is a science of God as ornithology is a science
of birds." Well, it isn't. It's exactly what it isn't. Ornithology can
catch one bird after the other, examine it, plume it, cut it to
pieces, and say everything there is about it and if you have got a
tape-recorder even record its singing. You can do nothing of the sort
with God. You can have a glimpse and fall in adoration, that's all you
can do about Him.
And so that informs also our worship. Our worship is based first of
all on two things: on the fact that the only celebrant of a sacrament
in the Church is the Lord Jesus Christ and the only person who can
make real the event is the Holy Spirit of God. In the beginning of the
liturgy, the communion service, when the priest has vested, prayed,
prepared the bread and the wine that will be consecrated, when he is
just about to pronounce the first words of the service, the deacon
comes up to him and says, "And now, it is for God to act." You have
done all you could, you have prayed, you have prepared yourself in
devotion and prayer, you have vested yourself, you have prepared the
elements, but that this bread should become the Body of Christ, that
this wine should become the Blood of Christ is something which no
human agency can affect. You will pronounce words, you will make
gestures but the act will be of God, He is the only true celebrant.
That is a very important thing in our attitude to the celebrations.
On the other hand, silence plays a very important role in our worship.
Quite often people who come to a church of ours say, "How bored your
congregation must be: they stand and stand and they don't say a word,
they don't sing; why?" If you ask a Russian about it and indeed any
Orthodox, they will say, this is the most precious thing which we
possess. We can come into the church and we are in the Presence, and
this Presence is a quality of silence. You know, the French writer
Georges Bernanos in one of his books presents us with a young priest
who says that at a certain moment he perceived a silence that was not
made of absence of noise but had density, was solid, real, and he
understood that the silence was a Presence. And this is a very
important thing because you can perceive the presence which is at the
heart of the silence only if you keep silent. If you stand and become
aware of this silence, if you listen to the silence, then you can
gradually become aware of its depth and at the core of it recognise a
divine presence. We have had examples of this. I remember a teacher of
small children who tried to make them understand what silence is, that
it has substance, and who allowed the form to go as wild as you
probably know and then at a certain moment she said, "Sh-sh, listen",
and everyone got quiet. And they discovered what silence was (that was
of course before the (flood?). But it's a reminiscences, you know like
the first chapters of Genesis. So that is one thing, this sense of
silence and discovery.
And I remember a man who came to us perhaps ten years ago or so. He
was an atheist, he was to bring a parcel to someone in the church and
he intended to come after the service because he expected no good from
what was happening in the church. Unfortunately he arrived a little
too early. So he sat at the back of the church and just waited. And
what he told me later was that while he was waiting, he became aware
of a density of silence he had never perceived in his life and of an
atmosphere. So he said to himself, "O, well, yes, that's collective
hysteria, produced by all these people praying, that is the
incantation coming from the priest and the choir, this is the sort of
way in which I am drugged by the incense to which I am not used, it
has nothing to do with anything." And yet it bothered him and he
decided to come later at the moment when there was no-one in the
church. So I opened the door for him, he settled and I left him there.
Later he said to me, "You know, it's extraordinary: there was no
incantation, there was no incense, there was nothing, no collective
hysteria, and I still felt this silence had a density and I thought,
is that what you mean by God?" Then he had another thought, he
thought, alright, supposing that is God, what's the use of God if all
there is to Him is that He lives in this particular building and
creates this atmosphere of deep silence? I need a God who will do
something about me. So he decided to come and watch the people in
church and after half a year he said, "You know, I've been watching
them. I don't know whether they are becoming any better but I see them
changed during the service. Something happens to them, they are
different from what they are in the street. I need being changed.
Could you do something to integrate me?" And eventually after a couple
of years he was baptised. So here is the experience of someone who
came without any expectation and who discovered through the silence
something important to him.
You may, being teachers, be interested to know how we teach our faith.
Well, I could put it in a nut-shell by saying, badly, because if what
I have said in the beginning makes any sense to you, it is not by
making children to learn doctrinal formularies or formal prayers or
any such thing that you make a person into a Christian or an Orthodox.
He must be introduced into an experience. And an experience can be
caught as one catches the flu, it is an infection, it's not something
which can be conveyed in a sterile manner. So that what we expect is
that in the family people should have a sense of worship. I do not
mean, do special things. It's not by praying before a meal or not
praying before a meal that one conveys a sense of a sacredness of the
event, but I remember one of our young theologians saying, "Everything
in life is an act of love divine even the food, which we eat, is
divine love that has become edible." And if the food is prepared with
love, if it is served with beauty, if it is shared with reverence, if
it is treated as a gift of God, a miracle, and for people of my
generation and that of my parents this attitude is easy because we
have gone so often without any food and in hunger, that really a peace
of bread or any form of food is an act of God or an act of human love.
So that is an example. The same could be applied to everything which
is the life of the home - the way parents treat children and children
treat parents.
I remember a scene that moved me very much. It was during the German
occupation. I lived opposite a family, the family of one of our great
theologians Vladimir Lossky. I came one morning on a Sunday to fetch
them to go church, and I found the children, four of them standing
side by side, and the father and the mother speaking to them and
saying that they intent to make a confession and to receive communion,
and they could not receive absolution from the priest and forgiveness
from God if they did not forgive them the wrongs they had done to
them. And they knelt in front each child asking for forgiveness. I
remember another scene in the same family: three of the children being
prepared to go to church and the fourth one not. And the fourth one
said, "What about me?" "No, to go to church is a privilege, you have
been so objectionable this week that you have no place there. You must
first make your peace with your brothers and sister." Well, this was a
lesson, I think, much more convincing than the child being taken by
the arm and dragged to church while all his heart is elsewhere. He
knew now that he had no place in the church because the church is a
place of mutual love and there was space for someone who had been a
demonstration of carelessness and lovelessness.
We have, alas, Sunday schools. I say "alas" because it is an evil. It
is an evil because Sunday schools exist only because families proved
incapable of teaching their children all they have to teach. If the
family could convey all the faith of the Gospel, all the glory of God,
all the wonder of a transfigured life by the power of God, there would
be no need of taking them to a Sunday school, because the Sunday
school obviously attempts that very thing in circumstances that lend
themselves very poorly to this. Within an hour, within two hours,
within half an hour you can not convey what the totality of a
transfigured, transformed life could convey. Yet, we use it because
there are families in which this is not being done or families which
are incapable of doing it simply. But it is not a good thing in
itself.
Worship together with the grown-ups is a very important thing. One of
the great things which the child discovers is that in church there is
no such thing as a grown-up who is always right and a child who is
always wrong or wrong when everything clashes with the grown-ups.
Everyone is a child of God, yes, but a sinner who is in the process of
salvation or otherwise, someone who stands before God exactly in the
same terms whether he is as small as that or as big as anyone else.
And that is a very important thing. We baptise and anoint with holy
chrism the children at the same time which means that they are full
members of the Church from the very beginning and already as babies in
arms they receive communion. When they become a little bit bigger the
moment they can stand on their feet, they are not taken by their
parents to receive communion, they come individually with all the
dignity they feel when they walk on their own feet and not the misery
which they feel when they are taken under someone's arm and hang like
this to receive communion. It's a very important thing. The sense of
dignity is essential. God claims dignity from us, God is the one who
respects our dignity and the children must be taught that.
They are taught also the elements of the faith and the Gospel in a
simple and natural way if the parents or the teachers are capable of
conveying things. But it is a vision of a life transfigured by faith
and by the real presence of God that is the convincing power. I
believe that apart from this one can adhere to the tenets of ones
religion, one can not have the experience of it deeply within oneself.
I can speak for myself, I have never received any religious education
when I was a child because my childhood coincided with the First World
War, with the Russian revolution, with the years of emigration, and
there was really no time and no chance with homelessness and lack of
food and moving from country to country. I must say to that, really to
my shame perhaps and to your pleasure, that I was not a very mystical
or devout child by nature. I was taken to church once a year for Good
Friday, and I discovered on my first visit to the church a wonderful
thing: I discovered that if I walked into the church about three
paces, breathe deeply and inhale incense and then stop breathing, I
fainted at once and I am removed for another year from the church.
This was, I must say, my last experience of religious education.
Before that I have had one which was really not more convincing. I was
a little boy at school in Austria and on the first week as I had been
registered 'Orthodox' by my parents who did not realise that in German
speaking countries Orthodox means orthodox Jew, and to be an Orthodox
Christian you must be Greek Orthodox, I was sent to the rabbi; and I
settled in my place, and the rabbi looked round us and said, "Why
haven't you got a little cap on your head?" And I said, "O, because my
mother told me that one should never have a covered head in a room
because there may be a Crucifix or an icon." He looked at me and said,
"You are a Christian?" I said, "Yes!" "Out of here!" Out I was in the
corridor and then the headmistress caught me for (loan?) a boy of
seven and said, "O, you are a Christian", and took me to the Roman
Catholic priest, who looked at me, asked for my name, for a few
details and said, "What, you are a little heretic! Out of this place!"
And this was the end of my religious education in words and in
examples.
Well, I think, I will stop here my introduction to Orthodoxy. If I can
answer questions I will, but you are welcome to ask.