ABSTRACT

The Orthodox Church has a long history, and a memory even longer than its history, for it wove the fabric of the ancient scriptures into its own robe of experience, thereby enriching its psychic perception with a prophetic acuity that was steeped in deepest antiquity, yet ever looking to a radiant future of the age-to-come that stands in judgment on present conditions. It has come through the fires of political opposition, often bloody and totalitarian, as well as times of establishment support. The bane of the one, through many tears, often became a blessing for it; the blessing of the other, even in much apparent self-congratulation, often proved its bane. Over many centuries it has seen the profound courage and faithfulness of men and women in relation to the defense of the faith (their names are recorded in thick and heavy Synaxaria, or collections of saints’ lives), as well as observing an all too human weakness and unreliability in times of stress and crisis (though it has generally passed over the names of the lapsed and the apostates in a charitable silence, recording only the martyrs). It has learned from the Lord himself that there is an evil force abroad in the world (John 12:31, 14:30), a spirit that can even pass as an “angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14) and which will offer, to those susceptible, the kingdoms of the world if only for the price of falling down and worshipping it (Matt. 4:8–10). It has received as a warning from the same Lord the intelligence that the world will never love it, just as it has never really loved the King of Glory. 1 Indeed it has been told that the world will always tend to hate it, 2 precisely because of its constitutional spiritual oppositional stance to the Kosmos, 3 its character of always being “unknown” and unmanageable to the powers that attempt to rule the world’s affairs. 4