Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

[Stuart Burns]

Can anyone confirm if it was Dostoyevsky who asked "Are we Orthodox because we are Russian, or Russian because we are orthodox?" and if it was him, anyone know of the source?

Thanks

Stuart

[Norman]

Church rituals are the outward signs of our immaterial relationship with the Living God. Dostoevsky wrote a remarkable parable about the growth of sectarian antiritualism in Russia during the last century:

They carry a vessel of very precious liquid; all fall down, all kiss and adore the vessel containing this precious life-giving fluid. And then, suddenly, people stand up and begin to cry: You blind! Why do you kiss the vessel? It is only the live-giving fluid contained in it that is precious; only the contents is precious and not the container; but you are kissing glass, simple glass; you adore the vessel and the glass, ascribing all the holiness to it, and you are forgetting about the precious fluid that it contains. You idol-worshipers! Throw away the vessel and break it. Adore only the life-giving fluid, and not the glass!

And the glass was broken, as we read further in Dostoevsky's parable, and the life-giving fluid, the precious contents, is poured out on the earth and disappears into the earth. They have broken the vessel and lost the liquid. What miserable, unhappy, benighted people! exclaims Dostoevsky as he ends his parable.

From:

The Fourth Commandment
by Fr. Victor Potapov
Russian Orthodox Cathederal of St. John the Baptist
Parish Life, November-December 1991
http://www.stjohndc.org/stjohndc/English/Command/9111.htm

In which of Dostoevsky's works can one find this parable?

[Eugene]

Dear Norman, this is from the Dostoevsky's "Writers Diary" magazine, January 1877 issue
This is the link:
http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/dostoevs/dostdn13.htm

[Eugene]

Oops, sorry, I meant "Writer's Diary"

[Fr Raphael Vereshack]

Dostoevsky's A Writer's Diary is available in English translation (in 3 volumes) from Northwestern University Press; Evanston, Illinois.

The link in Russian that Evgeny has provided is at the very beginning of Volume 2. The story about the vessel of precious liquid is found in Volume 2, p.818.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

[Norman]

Dear Evgeny and Fr. Raphael (Bless, Father),

I thank you both for the background information on the parable.

This parable and the attitude that it presents reminds me of two definitions from Josh Billings' (Abraham Lincoln's favorite humorist) Lexicon:

Conservatism: A bag with a hole to it.
Radicalism: A whole with a bag to it.

Let's hear it for Tradition!

[Norman]

...or rather, Tradition contained and decanted through Traditionalism!

[Herman Blaydoe]

or rather, Tradition contained and decanted through Traditionalism!

Not sure what that means. I am all for authentic transmission of the Apostolic Witness, but freezing the expression of that witness into a particular cultural milleu is mere taxidermy. I fear that "traditionalism" (as defined by some) is not the presrvation of a living witness, but merely curation of a dead museum. Truth does not change, but how we express that Truth can and has, even as history and TRADITION bears witness.

[Norman]

Dear Herman,

By Traditionalism, I mean, to borrow your words, "the preservation of a living witness."

I can't think of any Orthodox Christian who if for "mere taxidermy" or mere curation of a "dead museum."

Speaking of museums, I had the pleasure of taking my family to the the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Byzantium: Faith and Power exhibition. People had notably different reactions to the to these particular curated pieces representing the Faith and Power of Byzantium.

A lot of these people were obvious art lovers, chin strokers or connoisseurs of antiquities and ancient civilizations.

I was struck by the reactions of another group of people: teens, the middle-aged, seniors - crossing themselves, praying, meditating in front of these curated objects, objects that embodied a LIVING Tradition, a live Faith.

To some of these people, the icons, Gospel books and liturgical objects were interesting objects from a dead and bygone age. To others, the exhibition revealed the living roots of their Faith.

This particular "transmission of the Apostolic Witness": Byzantium Faith and Power (1261–1557) was dead to some and still living to others. I guess it all depended on what mindset or prejudices one brought before this exhibition.

I'm not optimistic of any changes within Orthodox praxis that deviates from the Saint-making praxis of Orthodox Christians past. If Orthodox conservatism (aka Traditionalism) is "bag with a hole to it" then I'm not too keen on making the hole any bigger for fear of losing its precious contents. I'm for Holy Orthodoxy not holey Orthodoxy!

Also I agree with the wise man who wrote: "It is truly said, giants envy their fathers; only pygmies their sons."

What will "Truth" look like as expressed through the modern American cultural milieu? How it compare to the expressions of past Orthodox cultural milieus? Then there were giants, but now?

[Norman]

Ritual Correctness

Patrick Henry Reardon on Enduring Liturgical Experts

The usual subjects were under consideration at our annual symposium of Orthodox clergy this past summer: parochial ministry, the formation of lay leadership, worship and music, Christian education, counseling, medical ethics, and so on. There was even a workshop on the use of the Internet in pastoral work. On the whole those discussions were useful and helpful to the ministry.

As is common at these symposia, most of the presentations were made by ordinary parish priests who have become especially proficient in this-or-that aspect of the ministry and are willing to share the fruits of their mature experience with the rest of us. Moreover, ample time was provided for conversation among ourselves, and this informal discussion of the material was likewise helpful.

Expert Lows

I believe that the chance to discuss the practical aspects of the ministry with fellow ministers is probably the major advantage of these events. Without such opportunities, in fact, parish priests can become extremely isolated, so the concentrated opportunity to talk with (and worship with) one another and with our bishops is arguably the best benefit of our gatherings, and I invariably return from them with a general sense of refreshment.

It is inevitable, nonetheless, that “experts” are also invited to speak at these symposia, and, if one may speak candidly, the presentations of the experts sometimes provide the truly low points of the whole enterprise. On former occasions, for example, we have been obliged to bear up under onslaughts of “the renewal of feminine ministries” and to endure the ravages of rationalist biblical exegesis. This year we were, on the whole, mercifully spared such torture.

The single exception to this mercy was a disappointing lecture on “liturgical renewal” by a professor from one of the Orthodox seminaries. The material was essentially the same shortsighted nonsense that the Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans were forced to endure thirty or forty years ago.

We clergy, three quarters of us adult converts to the Orthodox Church, sat in sackcloth and inwardly groaned like pelicans in the wilderness, while a life-long Orthodox liturgical expert explained to us at length that Orthodox worship “no longer speaks meaningfully to modern man” and suggested ways in which an established panel of his cronies and clones might bring their expertise to bear on this crushing problem of Orthodox irrelevance to American life. They would pull our worship up to date and make it more meaningful to the refined sensibilities of contemporary society.

Growls and low rumblings were audible in the assembly. The fact that there was not a sudden, violent rush at the speaker’s podium is chiefly to the credit of Orthodox restraint and ascetical discipline.

Afterwards, by way of constructive reaction to the presentation, the more devout among us went off to the chapel to breathe deeply and recite the Jesus Prayer repeatedly in order to regain their inner composure. Others went out jogging with a view to lowering their blood pressure and using up the excess adrenalin that only a liturgist, or perhaps an exceptionally adept terrorist, is able to elicit. Neither devout nor strong, I confess that I was not to be found in either of these groups. Rather, I was among those lesser brethren gathered in the recreation room to deplore the event, regretting meanwhile my failure to tote along a flask of Scotch or Bourbon to serve as a restorative. In this age of international terrorism and liturgical renewal, one must take every precaution.

Among the more objectionable aspects of this most objectionable lecture was the sustained presumption that academic experts know more about the requirements of modern life than the rest of us do. Even a priori we should suspect that this is not the case, because a certain abstraction from the urgency of “life in the world” has always been considered one of the essential requirements of an academic education. Our prior suspicion on this point, moreover, is rather often justified by what the professional academic actually has to say.

A Quaint Cosmology

Let me cite a single example from the liturgical lecture that I just described.

Among the more deplorable shortcomings of traditional Orthodox liturgical texts, we were told, is the dominance of an outdated cosmology, evidenced in our liturgical references to the “four elements” in creation. How, we were asked, are such references going to strike “the average high-school student”? This hypothetical student, our lecturer assured us, knows that four is not the correct number of the world’s elements. He has studied the Periodic Table and, we were given to infer, he ponders it incessantly. Day and night he prowls the earth, this modern high-school student, reviewing in his mind the process of photosynthesis and reciting the formula for oxalic acid. Therefore, his imagination would be overly taxed by Orthodox liturgical references to the four elements, because these are quaint, confusing, and obscure.

In the refutation of such a suggestion, one hardly knows which of a thousand possible handles is the first to be grabbed.

My initial reaction was to inquire why in the world we should measure our liturgical texts by the dubious standards of contemporary high-school students. However, when I expressed this query down in the recreation room (drinking my Coca-Cola), a young deacon properly yanked me up short. Today’s high-school students, he pointed out, seem not to be so fixated on the Periodic Table. Indeed, they appear to experience no deep cognitive dissonance respecting the alleged four elements of the universe. One suspects this, in fact, from their apparent enthusiasm for literary and dramatic works based on that same cosmology.

This young deacon cited the Tolkien sensation as an obvious example. The companions of Frodo would probably have not the slightest trouble with the Orthodox Baptismal service, which refers to the water as one of the four elements of the world. Boromir, Gandalf, and their friends rather often speak of earth, water, air, and fire, whereas their allusions to calcium oxide and sodium nitrate are somewhat rare.

I further reflected that I, even I, went to high school once. Admittedly, it was a very long time ago, and I was hardly a stellar student, but still it was during a period somewhat after the discovery of the atom, and I did pass some of my courses. I, too, was obliged to know that nitrogen was designated by the atomic number 7 and that the specific weight of helium was 4.003. Until this past week it had never occurred to me that such information would destroy my ability to pray the Psalms or sing the traditional hymns of the Church. Even though I have known, pretty much all my life, that the daily reappearance of the sun is a phenomenon caused by the spinning of the earth, I still find myself praying the Jam lucis orto sidere (“Now the lightsome star is risen”) when this phenomenon occurs, and, if feeling especially romantic at the moment, I have been known to refer to it as “sunrise.”

Let me suggest that most of us are like this. The last thing we need is a liturgist to tell us how to pray and how to look at the world. Should the Orthodox liturgy be reformed to rid our souls of the aforesaid anachronisms? I don’t think so. It would be more proper, rather, to study the Sermon on the Mount in order to remain in the State of Grace when dealing with liturgists.

From: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-10-012-v

[Norman]

Published by The Christian Century, December 2004
http://www.orthodoxnews.netfirms.com/157/Orthodox.htm

‘More Orthodox’ than the Orthodox

by John Dart

It’s commonly observed that converts to a faith are the most ardent defenders of it. That seems to be the case with American converts to Orthodoxy. The large number of converts attending Orthodox seminaries prompted Alexey D. Krindatch, a sociologist of religion, to wonder whether an “Americanization” of Eastern Orthodoxy might lie ahead. His conclusion: “Probably not.”

Responses from students at three seminaries of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) - the two largest Orthodox bodies in the U.S. - confirmed, he said, “the widespread notion that Protestant and Catholic converts tend to be ‘more Orthodox’ than persons who were born and raised” as Orthodox.

The converts expressed more conservative attitudes than Orthodox-born seminarians did on, for instance, accepting the authority of bishops and discouraging ecumenical worship and religiously mixed marriages. Krindatch reported his findings at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Asked why the tradition-bound, liturgically intricate Orthodox churches are attracting converts, Krindatch suggested in an interview that many of the former evangelical Protestants studying for the Orthodox priesthood see a “discrepancy” between their strong personal faith “and the fact that their churches have no historical roots in original Christianity, no apostolic succession and no liturgical atmosphere.”

In the case of former Catholics and Episcopalians, however, converts are attempting to “return to their churches” religious experiences of 20 to 30 years ago, when their churches were more “traditional.”

While both Orthodox-born seminarians and the converts were relatively similar in religious upbringing, education and family income level, the former evangelicals “come from much wealthier families” that were very active churchgoers. The ex-evangelicals were more likely to have a higher level of secular education as well as businessmen fathers, and they “were more definite in their plans to be ordained and serve as priests” than were their classmates.

Krindatch surveyed seminarians at Holy Cross (Greek Orthodox) Seminary in the Boston suburb of Brookline, where 25 percent of the students are converts, and at two OCA seminaries, St. Vladimir’s in Crestwood, New York, and St. Tikhon’s in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. The majority of the students at the latter two are converts, he said.

Krindatch recently was named director for campus ministry and church growth at the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute, which is part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Krindatch, a faculty member at the Institute of Geography in Moscow, had been doing his research as a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, California.

The institute in Berkeley previously has dealt mainly with theological and historical issues, said Krindatch, but it “hopes to concentrate its future studies more on the contemporary situation and social changes within various American Orthodox churches.”

Change has been slow by Western standards. In his survey, Krindatch found that 57 to 64 percent of convert seminarians agree that while most Orthodox Christians “are socially integrated into American society, the Orthodox churches as institutions are still perceived by the vast majority of Americans as ‘immigrant communities’,” compared to 46 percent of Orthodox-born who say that. At the same time, the proportion of the most pessimistic seminarians - those who say “the Orthodox churches still are and will remain ‘strangers’ to American society” - is higher among “cradle Orthodox” than among convert seminarians.

Cradle Orthodox students are also more pessimistic than the converts that the ethnically oriented Orthodox churches eventually will gain autonomy from mother churches abroad, or that a unified American Eastern Orthodox Church will emerge in decades to come.

Ex-Protestant seminarians may hope for ecumenical progress within Orthodoxy, but they tend to reject joint ecumenical prayers or services with non-Orthodox. Also, a significant proportion of both ex-Catholic (34 percent) and ex-Protestant (36 percent of ex-mainliners and 52 percent of ex-evangelicals) seminarians say that Orthodox priests should try hard to discourage mixed marriages. Seminarians raised in Orthodox churches are somewhat more lenient on the issue, though not as accommodating as current priests in Orthodox parishes.

A separate survey of priests in Greek and OCA parishes found that two-thirds take a more liberal position on mixed marriages, but stay within church guidelines. In other words, priests would conduct such weddings when they are held in the Orthodox Church, and would encourage the non-Orthodox partner to join the church. “Only a minority of all seminarians (31 percent of OCA seminarians, 48 percent of Greek Orthodox seminarians) share the same view,” Krindatch said.

Krindatch acknowledged that the seminarians’ conservative stances, even if reflective of a generational trend, may evolve during “actual work in the parishes.”