Translated from Bulgarian
[I apologize for imagining
myself apt to the task...]
myself apt to the task...]
Zeitgeist, the Orthodox Church and
Its Mission in Our Modern Times
Its Mission in Our Modern Times
A Letter by Bishop Photii of Triaditsa
to a Bulgarian Orthodox priest
to a Bulgarian Orthodox priest
bishop Photii of Triaditsa [1]
Dear Father N.
May God’s grace be with you!
May God’s grace be with you!
First I would like to thank you for the kind words and best wishes in your letter of March 1st this year, and then I will try and respond to your supplication by sharing views of mine on the Church ‘s mission in our times.
Let me start with a thought from your letter to me:
I understand that the question of the church calendar is something that seriously concerns you and a field in which you undoubtedly are competent to the possible utmost extent. Such a conversation takes a special attitude within the Church, just as well as a certain level of knowledge. We are still leading a survival fight, and when you chase the overall you miss out on detail. Meanwhile, we must not lose sight of the especially great need for a mission that would face the modern man.
The question of our survival in the Church is for us not so much a matter of survival in a horizontal dimension, that is physical and social survival of the Church as an institution – and that, at any cost. Such a view, such an emphatically empirical sense of the Church’s survival has intensively been formed in this country during the years of communist dictatorship. In Russia, under a persecution – monstrous in its cruelty – of the faithful, the practical application of this concept for the Church survival was rejected by the majority of new martyrs and confessors of the Orthodox Faith and was called “Sergianism”. According to that kind of perception, according to that view for the survival of the Church of Christ – not only under persecution but also in [the conditions of] spiritually destructive processes within and without her – the primary, solid, tangible reality of the Church is above all the ecclesiastical institution, the visible structure of the Church as a social body [organism/constitution] in terms of its physical and social functioning. An organism with such an understanding of its own essence inevitably begins to struggle for survival primarily in the mainstream of the laws and logic of this world through adapting and compromising, which ultimately can provide its physical and social survival – but at the same time, put it in a deep contradiction with the Church’s essence as a God-man body. From this point of view, the basic reality for the Church survival – the heavenly-earthly Church as the Body of Christ, in which we can only survive as living members in Faith, in spirit and in truth, to which the institutional structure is but an external expression – becomes an “idea”, an “ideal”, something sublime, supposedly desirable in word but abstract and ultimately conditional on the reality of the institution, on the empirical social organism as a massive church body, which, however, loses its authentic church spirit. And so, in our understanding of the survival battle the overall and the detail emerge in a somewhat different light. To us overall, basic, and defining is the spiritual authenticity of the Tradition, of the doctrine, of the customs of the Church. Affiliation with this spiritual authenticity and fullness of Tradition is for us the major condition for our survival as members of the Church, the Body of Christ. In this context, the church calendar, too (or to put it more precisely, the calendar-and-paschal system of the Great indiction), being an expression of the Church’s liturgical unity ever since the sixth century, is to us an integral part of the Church Tradition, and not some immaterial detail liable to mechanical separation from the Tradition fullness. And it is by virtue of this feature exactly of the calendar that it should neither be underestimated, nor [made to] grow into an unlawfully enlarged and self-sufficient criterion of “orthodoxy”.
