The Beginnings
In the village there is a chapel dug deep
beneath the earth, its entrance carefully camouflaged.
When a secret priest visits the village,
it is here that he celebrates the Liturgy and the other ser-
vices. If the villagers for once believe
themselves safe from police observation, the whole popu-
lation gathers in the chapel, except for
the guards who remain outside to give warning if strang-
ers appear. At other times services take
place in shifts..
The Easter service was held in an
apartment of an official State
institution. Entrance was
possible only with a special pass, which I
obtained for myself and for my small daughter. About
thirty people were present, among them
some of my acquaintances. An old priest celebrated the
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service, which I shall never forget.
.Christ is risen. we sang softly, but full of joy.. The joy that
I felt in this service of the Catacomb Church gives me strength to live, even today.
These are two accounts (Taken from the periodical Orthodox Life [Jordanville, N.Y.], 1959, no. 4, pp. 30-31)
of Church life in Russia shortly
before the Second
World War.
But if a few alterations were
made, they could easily be taken for
descriptions of Christian worship under Nero or Diocletian.
They
illustrate the way in
which during the
course of nineteen
centuries Christian history
has
traveled through a full circle. Christians today stand far closer to the early Church than their
grandparents did.
Christianity began as
the religion of
a small minority
existing in a predomi-
nantly non-Christian society, and such it
is becoming once more. The Christian Church in its
early days was distinct and separate from
the State; and now in one country after another the tra-
ditional alliance between Church and State
is coming to an end. Christianity was at first a religio
illicita, a religion forbidden and persecuted by
the government; today persecution is no longer a
fact of the past alone, and it is by no
means impossible that in the thirty years between 1918 and
1948 more Christians died for their faith
than in the three hundred years that followed Christ.s
Crucifixion.
Members of the Orthodox Church in particular have been made very much
aware of these
facts, for the vast majority of them live
at present in communist countries, under anti-Christian
governments. The first period of Christian
history, extending from the day of Pentecost to the
conversion of Constantine, has a special relevance for contemporary
Orthodoxy.
.Suddenly there
came from heaven a sound like the rushing of a violent wind, and it filled
the whole house
where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues like flames of
fire,
divided among them
and resting on each one. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. (Acts
2:2-4). So the history of the Christian
Church begins, with the descent of the Holy Spirit on the
Apostles
at Jerusalem during
the feast of
Pentecost, the first
Whit Sunday. On that
same day
through the preaching of Saint Peter three
thousand men and women were baptized, and the first
Christian community at Jerusalem was formed.
Before long the members of the Jerusalem Church were scattered by the persecution which
followed the stoning of Saint Stephen. .Go forth therefore,. Christ had said, .and teach all na-
tions.
(Matt. 28:19). Obedient to
this command they
preached wherever they went,
at first to
Jews, but before long to Gentiles also.
Some stories of these Apostolic journeys are recorded by
Saint Luke in the book of Acts; others are
preserved in the tradition of the Church. The legends
about the Apostles may not always be
literally true, but it is at any rate certain that within an as-
tonishingly short time small Christian
communities had sprung up in all the main centers of the
Roman Empire and even in places beyond the Roman
frontiers.
The Empire through which these first Christian missionaries traveled
was, particularly in its
eastern
part, an empire
of cities: This
determined the administrative structure
of the primitive
Church. The basic unit was the community
in each city, governed by its own bishop; to assist the
bishop there were presbyters or priests,
and deacons. The surrounding countryside depended on
the Church of the city. This pattern, with
the threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons,
was already widely established by the end
of the first century. We can see it in the seven short
letters which Saint Ignatius, Bishop of
Antioch, wrote about the year 107 as he traveled to Rome
to be martyred. Ignatius laid emphasis
upon two things in particular, the bishop and the Eucha-
rist; he saw the Church as both
hierarchical and sacramental. .The bishop in each Church,. he
wrote, .presides in place of God.. .Let no
one do any of the things which concern the Church
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without the bishop. Wherever the bishop
appears, there let the people be, just as wherever Je-
sus Christ is, there is the Catholic
Church.. And it is the bishop.s primary and distinctive task to
celebrate the Eucharist, .the medicine of
immortality. (To the Magnesians, 6, 1; To the Smyrnaeans, 8, 1
and 2; To the Ephesians, 20, 2).
People today tend to think of the Church as a worldwide organization, in
which each local
body forms part of a larger and more
inclusive whole. Ignatius did not look at the Church in this
way. For him the local community is the
Church. He thought of the Church as a Eucharistic soci-
ety, which only realizes its true nature
when it celebrates the Supper of the Lord, receiving His
Body and Blood in the sacrament. But the
Eucharist is something that can only happen locally .
in each particular community
gathered round its bishop; and at every local celebration of the
Eucharist it is the whole Christ who is present, not just a part of
Him. Therefore each local com-
munity, as it celebrates the Eucharist
Sunday by Sunday, is the Church in its fullness.
The teaching of Ignatius has a permanent place in Orthodox tradition.
Orthodoxy still thinks
of the Church as a Eucharistic society,
whose outward organization, however necessary, is sec-
ondary to its inner, sacramental life; and
Orthodoxy still emphasizes the cardinal importance of
the local community in the structure of
the Church. To those who attend an Orthodox Pontifical
Liturgy (The Liturgy: this is the term normally
used by Orthodox to refer to the service of Holy Communion, the
Mass), when the bishop stands at the beginning
of the service in the middle of the church, sur-
rounded by his flock, Ignatius of
Antioch.s idea of the bishop as the center of unity in the local
community will occur with particular
vividness.
But besides the local community there is
also the wider unity of the Church. This second
aspect is developed in the writings of
another martyr bishop, Saint Cyprian of Carthage (died
258). Cyprian saw all bishops as sharing
in the one episcopate, yet sharing it in such a way that
each possesses not a part but the whole.
.The episcopate,. he wrote, .is a single whole, in which
each bishop enjoys full
possession. So is the Church a
single whole, though it spreads far and
wide into a multitude of churches as its
fertility increases. (On the Unity of the Church, 5). There are
many churches but only one Church; many episcopi but only one episcopate.
There were many others in the first three centuries of the Church who
like Cyprian and Ig-
natius ended their lives as martyrs. The
persecutions, it is true, were often local in character and
usually limited in duration. Yet although
there were long periods when the Roman
authorities
extended to Christianity a large measure
of toleration, the threat of persecution was always there,
and Christians knew that at any time this
threat could become a reality. The idea of martyrdom
had a central place in the spiritual
outlook of the early Christians. They
saw their Church as
founded upon blood . not only the blood of
Christ but also the blood of those .other Christs,.
the martyrs. In
later centuries when the Church
became .established. and no
longer suffered
persecution, the idea of martyrdom did not
disappear, but it took other forms: the monastic life,
for example, is often regarded by Greek writers as an equivalent to martyrdom. The same
approach is found also in the west: take, for instance, a
Celtic text . an Irish homily of the
seventh century . which likens the ascetic
life to the way of the martyr:
Now there are three kinds of martyrdom
which are accounted as a Cross to a man,
white martyrdom, green martyrdom, and red
martyrdom. White martyrdom consists in
a man.s abandoning everything he loves for
God.s sake.. Green martyrdom consists
in this, that by means of fasting and
labor he frees himself from his evil desires; or suf-
fers toil in penance and repentance. Red
martyrdom consists in the endurance of a
Cross or death for Christ.s sake (Quoted in J. Ryan, Irish Monasticism, London, 1931, p. 197).
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At many periods in Orthodox history the
prospect of red martyrdom has been fairly remote, and
the green and white forms prevail. Yet
there have also been times, above all in this present cen-
tury, when Orthodox Christians have once
again been called to undergo martyrdom of blood.
It
was only natural that the bishops, who, as Cyprian emphasized, share in the one
episco-
pate, should meet together in a council to
discuss their common problems. Orthodoxy has always
attached great importance to the place of
councils in the life of the Church. It believes that the
council is the chief organ whereby God has
chosen to guide His people, and it regards the Catho-
lic Church as essentially a conciliar Church. (Indeed, in Russian the same
adjective soborny has
the double sense of .catholic. and
.conciliar,. while the corresponding noun, sobor, means both
.church. and .council.). In the Church
there is neither dictatorship nor individualism, but har-
mony and unanimity; men remain free but
not isolated, for they are united in love, in faith, and in
sacramental communion.
In a council,
this idea of
harmony and free
unanimity can be
seen
worked out in practice. In a true council
no single member arbitrarily imposes his will upon the
rest, but each consults with the others,
and in this way they all freely achieve a .common mind..
A council is a living embodiment of the
essential nature of the Church.
The first council in the Church.s history is described in Acts 15.
Attended by the Apostles,
it met at Jerusalem to decide how far Gentile converts should
be subject to the Law of Moses.
The Apostles, when they finally
reached their decision, spoke in terms
which in other circum-
stances might appear presumptuous: .For it seemed good
to the Holy Ghost, and to us. (Acts
15:28). Later councils have ventured to speak
with the same confidence. An isolated individual
may well hesitate to say, .It seemed right
to the Holy Spirit and to me.; but when gathered in
council, the members of the Church can
together claim an authority which individually none of
them possesses.
The Council of Jerusalem, assembling as it did the leaders of the entire
Church, was an ex-
ceptional gathering, for which there is no parallel until the Council
of Nicaea in 325. But by
Cyprian.s time it had already become usual
to hold local councils, attended by all the bishops in
a particular civil province of the Roman Empire. A local council of this type normally
met in the
provincial capital, under the presidency
of the bishop of the capital, who was given the title Met-
ropolitan. As the third century proceeded,
councils widened in scope and began to include bish-
ops not from one but from several civil
provinces. These larger gatherings tended to assemble in
the chief cities of the Empire, such as Alexandria or Antioch; and so it came about that the bish-
ops of certain great cities began to
acquire an importance above the provincial Metropolitans.
But for the time being nothing was decided
about the precise status of these great sees. Nor dur-
ing the third century itself did this continual
expansion of councils reach its logical conclusion:
as yet (apart from the Apostolic Council)
there had only been local councils, of lesser or greater
extent, but no .general. council, formed
of bishops from the whole Christian world, and claim-
ing to speak in the name of the whole
Church.
In
312 an event occurred which utterly transformed the outward situation of the
Church. As
he was riding through France with his army, the Emperor Constantine
looked up into the sky and
saw a cross of light in front of the sun.
With the cross there was an inscription: In this sign con-
quer. As a
result of this vision, Constantine became the first Roman Emperor to embrace
the
Christian faith. On that day in France a train of events was set in motion which
brought the first
main period of Church history to an end,
and which led to the creation of the Christian Empire of
Byzantium.
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