by Hieromonk Seraphim of Platina (a talk given in 1979)
Bound up
with this is a disease of today’s Orthodox Christians which can be
deadly: the “correctness disease.” In a way this is a natural temptation
to anyone who has just awakened to Christian faith and to spiritual
life — the more one finds out about Christian doctrine and practice, the
more one discovers how many “mistakes” one has been making up to now,
and one’s natural desire is to be “correct.” This is praiseworthy,
although in the beginning one is probably going to be too artificially
“strict” and make many new mistakes out of pride (to which we are
constantly blind). If you are critical of others, self-confident about
your own correctness, eager to quote canons to prove someone else is
wrong, constantly “knowing better” than others — you have the germs of
the “correctness disease.” These are signs of immaturity in spiritual
life, and often one outgrows them if one is living a normal spiritual
life.
But
especially in our days, the spirit of worldliness is so strong, and
there is obviously so much wrong in our church life — that there is a
strong temptation to make “correctness” a way of life, to get stuck in
it. And this is not only a disease of converts; one of the best bishops
of the Old Calendar Greeks, Bishop Cyprian of Sts. Cyprian and Justina
Monastery near Athens, has written that this spirit of “correctness” has
already done untold damage to Orthodoxy in Greece, causing fights and
schisms one after the other. Sometimes one’s zeal for “Orthodoxy” (in
quotes) can be so excessive that it produces a situation similar to that
which caused an old Russian woman to remark of an enthusiastic American
convert “Well, he’s certainly Orthodox all right — but is he a
Christian?”
To be
“Orthodox but not Christian” is a state that has a particular name in
Christian language: it means to be a pharisee, to be so bogged down in
the letter of the Church’s laws that one loses the spirit that gives
them life, the spirit of true Christianity. In saying this my aim is not
to be critical or to point to anyone in particular — we all suffer from
this — but only to point out a pitfall which can cause one to fail to
take advantage of the riches which the Orthodox Church provides for our
salvation, even in these evil times.
Even when
it is not fanatical, this spirit of “correctness” for its own sake turns
out to be fruitless. As an example, I can tell you of a very good
friend of ours, one of the zealot fathers of Mt. Athos. He is a
“moderate” zealot, in that he recognizes the grace of New Calendar
sacraments, accepts the blessings of priests of our Church, and the
like; but he is absolutely strict when it comes to applying the basic
Zealot principle, not to have communion not only with bishops whose
teaching departs from Orthodox truth, such as the Patriarch of
Constantinople, and not only with anyone who has communion with him, but
with anyone who has communion with anyone who in any remote way has
communion with him. Such “purity” is so difficult to attain in our days
(our whole Russian Church Abroad, for example, is “tainted” in his eyes
by some measure of communion with the other Orthodox Churches) that he
is in communion with only his own priest and ten other monks in his
group on the Holy Mountain; all of the rest of the Orthodox Church is
not “pure.”
Perhaps
there are only ten or twelve people left in the world who are perfectly
“strict” and “pure” in their Orthodoxy — this I really don’t know; but
it simply cannot be that there are really only ten or twelve Orthodox
Christians left in the world with whom one can have true oneness of
faith, expressed in common communion. I think that you can see that
there is some kind of spiritual dead-end here; even if we had to believe
such a narrow view of Orthodoxy according to the letter, our believing
Christian heart would rebel against it. We cannot really live by such
strictness; we must somehow be less “correct” and closer to the heart of
Orthodox Christianity.
In
smaller ways, too, we can get carried away with “correctness’:’ we can
like well-done Byzantine icons (which is a good thing), but we go too
far if we are disdainful of the more modern style icons which are still
in many of our churches. The same goes for church singing, architecture,
the following of correct rules of fasting, of kneeling in church, etc.
While striving to be as correct as we can, we must also remember that
these things belong to the outward side of our Orthodox faith, and they
are good only if they are used in the right spirit of the true
Christianity St. Tikhon talks about. Vladimir Soloviev, in his Short
Story of Antichrist, ingeniously suggests that Antichrist, in order to
attract Orthodox conservatives, will open a museum of all Christian
antiquities. Perhaps the very images of Antichrist himself (Apoc. 13:14)
will be in good Byzantine style — this should be a sobering thought for
us.
Source- thoughtsintrusive.wordpress.com
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