Learning
from one another
Khomiakov, seeking to describe
the Orthodox attitude to other Christians, in one of his letters
makes use of a parable.
A master departed, leaving his teaching to his three disciples. The
eldest faithfully
repeated what his master had taught him, changing nothing. Of the two younger,
one added to the
teaching, the other took away from it. At his return the master, without being
angry with anyone, said
to the younger: ‘Thank your elder brother; without him you would not
have preserved the truth
which I handed over to you.’ Then he said to the elder: ‘Thank your
younger brothers;
without them you would not have understood the truth which I entrusted to
you.’
Orthodox in all humility
see themselves as in the position of the elder brother. They believe
that by God’s grace they
have been enabled to preserve the true faith unimpaired, ‘neither adding
any thing, nor taking
any thing away.’ They claim a living continuity with the ancient Church,
with the Tradition of
the Apostles and the Fathers, and they believe that in a divided and bewildered
Christendom it is their
duty to bear witness to this primitive and unchanging Tradition.
Today in the west there
are many, both on the Catholic and on the Protestant side, who are trying
to shake themselves free
of the ‘crystallizations and fossilizations of the sixteenth century,’ and
who desire to ‘get
behind the Reformation and the Middle Ages.’ It is precisely here that the
Orthodox
can help. Orthodoxy
stands outside the circle of ideas in which western Christians have
moved for the past eight
centuries; it has undergone no Scholastic revolution, no Reformation
and Counter-Reformation,
but lives still in that older Tradition of the Fathers which so many in
the west now desire to
recover. This, then, is the ecumenical role of Orthodoxy: to question the
accepted formulae of the
Latin west, of the Middle Ages and the Reformation.
And yet, if Orthodox are
to fulfil this role properly, they must understand their own Tradition
better than they have
done in the past; and it is the west in its turn which can help them to do
this. Orthodox must
thank their younger brothers, for through contact with Christians of the west
— Roman Catholic,
Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Quaker — they are being enabled to acquire
a new vision of
Orthodoxy.
The two sides are only
just beginning to discover one another, and each has much that it can
learn. Just as in the
past the separation of east and west has proved a great tragedy for both
parties
and a cause of grievous
mutual impoverishment, so today the renewal of contact between
69
east and west is already
proving for both a source of mutual enrichment. The west, with its critical
standards, with its
Biblical and Patristic scholarship, can enable Orthodox to understand the
historical background of
Scripture in new ways and to read the Fathers with increased accuracy
and discrimination. The
Orthodox in turn can bring western Christians to a renewed awareness of
the inner meaning of
Tradition, assisting them to look on the Fathers as a living reality. (The
Romanian edition of the Philokalia
shows how profitably western critical standards and traditional
Orthodox spirituality
can be combined). As Orthodox strive to recover frequent communion,
the example of western
Christians acts as an encouragement to them; many western Christians
in turn have found their
own prayer and worship incomparably deepened by an acquaintance
with such things as the
art of the Orthodox icon, the Jesus Prayer, and the Byzantine Liturgy.
When the Orthodox Church
behind the Iron Curtain is able to function more freely, perhaps
western experience and
experiments will help it as it tackles the problems of Christian witness
within a secularized and
industrial society. Meanwhile the persecuted
Orthodox Church
serves as a reminder to
the west of the importance of martyrdom, and constitutes a living testimony
to the value of
suffering in the Christian life.
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