Straight from the Heart: Orthodox Bible Study with Father Lawrence

            In the beginning (to echo the words opening the Book of Genesis) God created the parish.  That is, when Christ first created and formed His Church, there was only the parish—groups of Christians assembling together in the cities and villages to offer the Eucharist, led by their clergy.  All the Christians lived in the world, but were not of the world, for they had left the world of secular paganism to follow Christ, and now belonged not to the world, but to God and His Kingdom.  At that time, no monasteries existed.

            There existed, of course, men and women in the parishes who had pledged themselves to celibacy (St. Paul commends this course as the better way in 1 Cor. 7), and a group of older women, the widows, who lived a life of singleness, prayer and service (St. Paul gives them guidance in 1 Tim. 5).  But monasticism per se did not yet exist.  All the Christians lived in the world, as part of the local parish.  And nothing in the New Testament writings suggests that this was somehow less than ideal, or that our salvation, healing and theosis could not be adequately undertaken while living in the world as part of a parish.

            Then came Constantine, and with him, the long Byzantine experiment.  Constantine has come in for a lot of flak over the years, much of it unfair.  (See the book The Christianity of Constantine the Great by T.G. Elliott for a more balanced appraisal of the man and his faith.)  And though the Christians of Constantine’s day welcomed him and the measures he took to protect and favour the Church (the Church had almost been obliterated by his predecessor, Diocletian), it is only in long retrospect that we can see that Constantine represented the turning point and the beginning of Byzantium.  (Of the Christians living in Constantine’s day, few thought the good times could last.)  Indeed, under the Emperor Julian (known to Christian history as “Julian the Apostate”), it looked like the good times were not going to last, and that Constantine’s kindness was but a passing flash in the pan.

            Happily, it was not a flash in the pan, and many other Emperors were to imitate the kindness of Constantine.  It was Julian who turned out to be the flash in the pan, and Christian Emperors were to be the norm for the next thousand years.  It was now lastingly safe to be a Christian.

            Perhaps a little too safe.  For it was now not only safe to be a Christian, but increasingly a good career move, and many more men were keen to put the title “Christian” on their resume than deserved the title.  The temptation to become merely nominally Christian appeared for the first time ever, and the Church now contained a number of people with a thin veneer of Christianity over their essentially unconverted hearts.  Such people darkened the church as the bane of a conscientious pastor’s existence, and St. John Chrysostom spent a lot of his preaching time trying to complete their conversion.  One could experience, as Chrysostom and many others lamented, a general lowering of the Church’s spiritual temperature.

            The Church did its best to cope with the new situation, refusing to let its saving standards slip:  it upped the time required of catechumens before they could be received by baptism to at least three years, it spoke of the Eucharist in terms of fear and trembling to scare off those who would receive it too easily and without sufficient piety.  (This approach survives in our present-day prayerbooks:  see the exhortation that one is to recite silently when approaching the chalice:  “Be awed, O man, when you see the deifying Blood.  It is a fire which burns the unworthy…”).  And, not least, the Church concentrated on its monasticism.

            It is not quite true that monasticism was the Church’s response to the inevitable lowering of temperature in the Byzantine era, for St. Anthony the Great left the world for the desert prior to the Peace of Constantine.  Monks existed even before the general temperature started to cool.  But it is true that, with the cooling of parish spirituality, the witness of the monks became ever more important.  So important, in fact, that many people began to equate spirituality with monasticism, and the spirituality of the Church at length came to be monasticized.  If you doubt this, try compiling two lists:  one of canonized saints who were monks and celibates, and another of canonized saints who lived as married men with their wives, and see which list is longer.  It will require a good knowledge of Church history to come up with any names for the second list.  Spirituality had become essentially monastic.

            As anyone can see who has not just emerged like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus from a long doze, the world is no longer Christian.  As Merlin the magician said, (in C.S. Lewis’s book That Hideous Strength, after emerging from just such a sleep), “No Emperor…this is a cold age in which I have awaked.”  A cold age indeed.  The Byzantine experiment, glorious while it lasted, is long over.  People in North America, the proud home of secularism, no longer darken church doors simply because it produces worldly advantage or looks good on a resume.  Most people who still attend church attend for more interior motives.  I believe this to be increasingly true.  The spiritual temperature of the non-monastic parish is on the rise.

            This means that the laity, the laos tou theou, the People of God, must now reclaim their central role in the Church.  In the beginning, when God created the parish, they occupied that central role.  They were hailed by St. Peter as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people (1 Pt. 2:9).  Spirituality was lay spirituality, for the laos, as defined above, was all that existed.  Obviously the Church still needs and values its monastics, just as it needed and valued St. Anthony before the long days of Constantine, when the laos was all there was.  But one must no longer think of being in the world as somehow second-best, as if monastic spirituality is the only real spirituality, and those outside the monasteries are somehow condemned to occupy a place which can never achieve holiness.  For holiness has always been about being in Christ, not about being in a monastery.  Monasteries are valuable because they witness, in a concentrated, industrial-strength way, to the common holiness available to all.

            In the beginning, when the churches were first founded, and sprang up like mushrooms all over the Roman world, and the New Testament was being written, it was possible to be holy in the world.  Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever:  this holiness in the world remains possible even today.