[Russia and the Universal Church] [Previous] [Next]
This preconceived determination that at all costs the center of the Universal Church shall be situated in the East indicates at the very outset a spirit of local egotism and racial hatred that is more likely to breed schism than to establish Christian unity. Would it not be better to put prejudice aside and look for the center of unity where it is actually to be found? If it is not to be found anywhere, it is surely childish to attempt to invent it.
Once it is granted that such a center is necessary to the normal life of the Church, it cannot be supposed that the divine Head and Founder of the Church did not foresee this necessity, or that He left the indispensable basis of His work to chance circumstances or human caprice. If facts compel us to admit that the Church cannot act freely without an international center of unity, we must also frankly confess that the Christian East has been deprived of this essential organ for the last thousand years and cannot therefore alone constitute the Universal Church. Surely, during so long a period the Universal Church must have manifested her unity elsewhere. That there is nothing serious or practical in this hybrid notion of finding a central government for the Universal Church somewhere in the East or of setting up an Eastern antipope is sufficiently shown by the inability of its advocates to agree on the following question, even when put as a mere theoretical plan or a pious aspiration: On which of the dignitaries of the Eastern Church is this uncertain task to devolve? Some are in favor of the “Œcumenical Patriarch” of Constantinople; others would prefer the see of Jerusalem, “the Mother of all the Churches.” If we here attempt briefly to do justice to these pathetic utopias, it is not because of their intrinsic importance, which is absolutely nil, but simply out of regard for certain estimable writers who in desperation have sought to substitute these imaginary notions for the true ideal of the reunion of the Churches.
If the center of unity does not exist by divine right, then the Church of the present day (which they regard nevertheless as a complete organism) must create for herself, after a life of eighteen centuries, that upon which her very existence depends. It is as if a human body, all complete but for the brain, were to be expected to manufacture this central organ for itself. However, since the general absurdity of the theory is not apparent to our opponents, we must go into their schemes in detail.
In conferring the primacy of jurisdiction upon one of her pastors, the Church may guide her choice either by the facts of religious history attested by ecclesiastical tradition or by purely political considerations. In order to lend an air of religious sanction to their national ambitions, the Greeks of Byzantium have asserted that their Church was founded by the apostle St. Andrew, to whom they give the title of protokletos (first-called). The legendary connection between this apostle and Constantinople, even if it were well established,1 could not confer any ecclesiastical prerogative on the imperial city, since neither Holy Scripture nor the tradition of the Church attributes to St. Andrew any kind of primacy in the apostolic college. The apostle could hardly communicate to his Church a privilege which he did not possess himself; and at the Œcumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451 the Greek bishops, desiring to attribute to the see of Constantinople primacy in the East and second place in the Universal Church after the bishop of “Old Rome,” carefully avoided any appeal to St. Andrew and based their proposal solely on the political eminence of the imperial city (βασιλευουσα πόλις). This argument, which is ultimately the only argument for the claims of Byzantium, cannot in fact justify them either in the past or in the future.2 If the pre-eminence of the “ruling city” carries with it ecclesiastical primacy, then the ancient city of Rome, which no longer enjoyed this pre-eminence, should have forfeited her leading place in the Church. Yet so far was anyone from daring to question her position that it was to the Pope himself that the Greek bishops came with their humble request that he would deign to approve the conditional and partial primacy of the Byzantine patriarch. As far as the situation today is concerned, what is to be done if the primacy belongs by right to that patriarch who is installed at the residence of the Orthodox Emperor, seeing that there is neither Orthodox Emperor at Constantinople nor patriarch at St. Petersburg? Or supposing this difficulty were overcome and Constantinople became again the ruling city of the Orthodox world and the residence of an Eastern Emperor, whether Russian, Greek or GrecoRussian — still for the Church it would be merely a return to the Cæsaropapism of the Second Empire. We know as a fact that the usurped primacy of the imperial patriarch was fatal to the freedom and authority of the Church in the East. It is clear that those who would escape the Cæsaropapism of St. Petersburg by removing it to Constantinople are merely jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire.
Jerusalem, the hallowed center of the national theocracy of the Old Testament, has no claim to supremacy in the Universal Church of Christ. Tradition calls St. James the first bishop of Jerusalem. But St. James had no kind of primacy in the Apostolic Church any more than St. Andrew and could not therefore communicate any special privilege to his see. Besides, for a long time he had no successor. At the approach of Vespasian’s legions, the Christians deserted the condemned city which, in the following century, lost even its name. At the time of its restoration under Constantine, the see of St. James was subordinate to the jurisdiction of the metropolitan archbishop of Cæsarea in Palestine, just as up to 381 the bishop of Byzantium was subordinate to the metropolitan of Heraclea in Thrace. Even after this, Jerusalem was for a long time a patriarchate only in name, and when she finally obtained independent jurisdiction she took the last place among patriarchal sees. Today the “Mother of all the Churches” is reduced to a coterie subservient to Phanariot phyletism and pursuing an exclusively national policy. If Jerusalem is to become the hierarchical center of the Universal Church, then the Pan-Hellenist clique must be dispossessed and a new order of things created ex nihilo. But even if such an achievement were within the bounds of possibility, it is obvious that it could only be brought about by Russia at the price of a definite rupture with the Greeks. And then what would become of the Universal Church for which Russia is to provide ready-made an independent center of authority? There would no longer exist a Greco-Russian Church; and the new patriarch of Jerusalem would be in reality only the patriarch of all the Russias. Certainly the Bulgarians and Serbs would do nothing to further the independence of the Church, and so we should have come back to a national Church with a hierarchy whose acknowledged leader could be no more than a mere subject and servant of the State.
The manifest impossibility of finding or creating in the East a center of unity for the Universal Church makes it imperative for us to seek it elsewhere. First and foremost we must recognize ourselves for what we are in reality, an organic part of the great body of Christendom, and affirm our intimate solidarity with our Western brethren who possess the central organ which we lack. This moral act of justice and charity would be in itself an immense step forward on our part and the essential condition of all further advance.
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1. It was the town of Patras which was hallowed by the martyrdom of St. Andrew and had the honor of originally possessing his relics.
2. We shall have to consider later this first great instance of Byzantine Cæsaropapism; in any case it has nothing to do with the infallible authority of the dogmatic decrees formulated by the Council.
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