| Holy Prince Rostislav was the builder of the Smolensk Kremlin, and of the Savior cathedral at the Smyadynsk Boris and Gleb monastery, founded on the place of the murder of holy Prince Gleb (September 5). Later his son David, possibly fulfilling the wishes of his father, transferred the old wooden coffins of Saints Boris and Gleb from Kievan Vyshgorod to Smyadyn. In the decade of the fifties of the twelfth century, Saint Rostislav was drawn into a prolonged struggle for Kiev, which involved representatives of the two strongest princely lines: the Olgovichi and the Monomakhovichi. On the Monomakhovichi side the major contender to be Great Prince was Rostislav’s uncle, Yurii Dolgoruky. Rostislav, as Prince of Smolensk, was one of the most powerful rulers of the Russian land and had a decisive voice in military and diplomatic negotiations. For everyone involved in the dispute, Rostislav was both a dangerous opponent and a desired ally, and he was at the center of events. This had a providential significance, since Saint Rostislav distinguished himself by his wisdom regarding the civil realm, by his strict sense of justice and unconditional obedience to elders, and by his deep respect for the Church and its hierarchy. For several generations he was the bearer of the “Russkaya Pravda” (“Russian Truth”) and of Russian propriety. After the death of his brother Izyaslav (November 13, 1154), Saint Rostislav became Great Prince of Kiev, but he ruled Kiev at the same time with his uncle Vyacheslav Vladimirovich. After the latter’s death, Rostislav returned to Smolensk, ceding the Kiev princedom to his other uncle, Yurii Dolgoruky, and he removed himself from the bloodshed of the princely disputes. He occupied Kiev a second time on April 12, 1159 and he then remained Great Prince until his death (+ 1167). More than once, he had to defend his paternal inheritance with sword in hand. The years of Saint Rostislav’s rule occurred during one of the most complicated periods in the history of the Russian Church. The elder brother of Rostislav, Izyaslav Mstislavich, a proponent of the autocephaly of the Russian Church, favored the erudite Russian monk Clement Smolyatich for Metropolitan, and wanted him to be made Metropolitan by a council of Russian bishops, without seeking the usual approval from the Patriarch of Constantinople. This occurred in the year 1147. |
| The temporary division of one Metropolia of All Russia into two parts was caused by the dire consequences of the Council of Ferrara-Florence and the beginning of the Unia with Rome, which the Church of Constantinople first accepted, and the Russian Church immediately rejected. In 1448 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church, without the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople who was in the Unia at the time, elected St. Jonah as Metropolitan. At that moment the autocephalous life of the Russian Orthodox Church began. However, ten year later, in 1458, the former Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory Mammas, who was in the Unia and lived in Rome, consecrated an independent metropolitan for Kiev – Gregory the Bulgarian, an Uniate, and submitted to him the territories which are now parts of Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia. By the decision of the Council of Constantinople of 1593, in which all four Eastern Patriarchs participated, the Moscow Metropolia was elevated to the status of Patriarchate. This Patriarchate united all Russian lands, as is evidenced by a letter sent by Patriarch Paisius of Constantinople to Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 1654. In this letter Patriarch Nikon is called “Patriarch of Moscow, Great and Little Russia.” The reunification of the Kiev Metropolia with the Russian Church took place in 1686. It was done in a form of the Act signed by Patriarch Dionysius IV of Constantinople and members of his Synod. The document says nothing about the temporary nature of the transfer of the Metropolia, contradicting the current groundless allegations of Constantinople’s hierarchs. No statements concerning the temporary transfer of the Kiev Metropolia can be found in Patriarch Dionysius’ other two Letters of 1686, addressed to the Moscow tsars and the Metropolitan of Kiev. On the contrary, the Letter sent by Patriarch Dionysius to the Moscow tsars in 1686 provides for the submission of all the Metropolitans of Kiev to Patriarch Joachim of Moscow and his successors. “From henceforth and forever more they shall recognize as most senior and first in rank the current Patriarch of Moscow as having received the office of bishop from him,” the Letter reads. The interpretations of the meaning of the abovementioned documents made by representatives of the Church of Constantinople have no justifications in the texts. |
| The preparations for a Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church really intensified in 1961 at the 1 st Pan-Orthodox Conference which took place on Rhodes Island in Greece, His Holiness noted. It drafted a comprehensive list of over one hundred topics to be prepared and submitted for consideration to a future Council. A little later, in 1968, the 4 th Pan-Orthodox Conference in Geneva adopted the decision that further preparation of a Council should be made as part of Pan-Orthodox Pre-Council Conferences and Inter-Orthodox Preparatory Commissions preceding its convocation. This format of the preparation is valid today. At the 1962 Rhodes Conference, all the Local Churches were asked to state their point of view on the adopted topics. Speaking about the participation of the Russian Orthodox Church in the elaboration of these topics, Patriarch Kirill pointed out that it took it with all responsibility. In 1963, the Holy Synod established a special commission to be chaired by the late Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad. It included leading theologians of the Russian Orthodox Church – hierarchs, clergy and laity. For the five years of its existence the commission carried out an enormous work to prepare draft documents on all the topics of the list without exception. ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Russian Church made an unprecedented contribution to the preparation of a Pan-Orthodox Council and was not simply ready for it but proposed concrete well-considered Council’s draft documents, which was a resulted of the work carried out by the best theologians of our Church’, His Holiness stressed. However, in 1971, representatives of some Local Churches began insisting on the need to considerably reduce the proposed agenda of the Council. As a result, the 1 st Pan-Orthodox Pre-Council Conference in 1976 reduced the list to ten topics. Their further elaboration took place as part of Inter-Orthodox Preparatory Commission as well as the 2 nd and the 3d Pan-Orthodox Pre-Council Conferences in 1982 and 1986. |
| Just as with the embassy, knowledge of the sovereignty represented may be approached through reading, visits, or tourism; but true knowledge is attained only by experience. It is not gotten by a map, shopping, or an adventure. Experience involves knowing the sovereign and his will, taking the responsibilities of full citizenship, and making that kingdom one’s home-including all the joys and sorrows of celebration and sacrifice, rewards and taxes, freedom and military service. Citizenship is open to all. Nevertheless, such a comparison between state and Church, sojourner and Christian, does not do justice to the simplicity, or the complexity, of God’s plan. Belief The classical statement of faith or belief within the Orthodox Church is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. The articles were written on the Father and the Son at the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea (A.D. 325) based upon a credo thought to be already in use. The articles on the Holy Spirit and the Church were added at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (A.D. 381), largely under the influence of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nazianzus. It has remained unchanged within the Orthodox Church since the Second Ecumenical Council. The Orthodox understanding of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is that it does not define (or redefine) the faith, but rather that it expresses the basic catholic belief-universal in time and place-of the entire Christian Church. Further, the content of the Creed may be altered only by an Ecumenical Council in the same way that it came into being. That is to say, any later interpolation into the Creed as occurred in the West (i.e., the filioque) is not acceptable to the Orthodox-regardless of whether the interpolation might be theologically correct-unless it is approved by an Ecumenical Council. That the Creed serves as the normative statement of faith is witnessed by the fact that it is read at every Baptism and Confession service, as well as at each Divine Liturgy. |
| In May 1913 the Council of Bishops of the Kingdom of Serbia appointed him Bishop of Nish. With the outbreak of the First World War the young bishop supported the soldiers spiritually and laboured to help refugees and orphans. When the Serbian Army retreated, he did not leave his residence and when Nish was occupied, he was interned by the Bulgarian forces of occupation. He managed to return to his see only in 1918. His health was seriously affected by his imprisonment. On his return, he set up orphanages, worked a great deal with young people and founded charities. He set up an orphanage for blind children in one of the monasteries of his diocese. Through his efforts, several memorials were put up in memory of the heroes of the nation, who had sacrificed their lives for the freedom of their homeland. After the First World War the new State of Yugoslavia took shape and conditions were favourable for the reunion of Serbian dioceses and metropolias into one Church. Bishop Dositheus took part in negotiations with the Patriarchate of Constantinople regarding the restoration of the Patriarchate of Serbia. These were successful, and on 12 September 1920 the reunion of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the restoration of the Patriarchate were triumphantly proclaimed in Sremski Karlovtsy On 1 December 1920 the Council of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church decided to send Bishop Dositheus to Czechoslovakia, at the repeated requests of Carpatho-Russians, Czechs and Slovaks. On 21 August 1921 Bishop Dositheus went to Subcarpathian Russia and visited the centre of Orthodoxy in the area, the village of Iza, where he was welcomed in triumph. Then Vladyka visited several villages and officiated. Visiting the town of Velikie Luchki, Vladyka received three Uniat schoolteachers into the Church. A meeting took place, chaired by the Bishop, at which delegates from sixty Orthodox villages discussed priorities for the organization of a Carpatho-Russian Church. The meeting resolved that the delegates should ask the Very Reverend Bishop Dositheus not to leave the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church without his care and commit to him the governance of the affairs of this Church until the definitive canonical resolution regarding the Eastern Orthodox Church in Carpatho-Russia. A constitution for the new Church was drawn up and Bishop Dositheus went to Prague for it to be approved at the Second Council of the Church of Czechoslovakia on 28 and 29 August 1921. |
| The confrontation between the Church and the anti-Christian forces becomes even more obvious and acute. The attacks were particularly noticeable in the pre-election and post-election periods, showing their political hidden motive, including an anti-Russian one. Various means are employed, and a planned campaign of systematic defamation is launched. Clergymen are involved in provocations; archpastors and priests are in the focus of close attention of the discontented who are seeking the slightest pretext to distort everything and to supply dirty arguments for information. Recently, a series of acts of vandalism and the desecration of churches have taken place, beginning with the blasphemy in the Cathedral Church of Christ the Saviour on February 21, when a group of persons committed a sacrilegious act on the ambo near the holy sanctuary, particles of the Robe of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Robe of the Most Holy Mother of God, and relics of the great saints. А man attacked thirty icons of great spiritual, historical and artistic value in the Cathedral of St. Procopius in Velikiy Ustug on March 6, and on March 18, the Church of St. Sergius of Radonezh in the city of Mozyr was defiled by blasphemous inscriptions and an outrage upon the Precious and Life-Giving Cross. On March 20, a man rushed into the Cathedral Church of the Intercession in Nevinnomyssk with a hunting knife. He smashed up icons, drove a knife into the veneration cross, beat up the priest, broke up the Royal Doors and desecrated the Lord’s sanctuary. It is in this context that a slanderous informational attack is being made on the Primate of the Church. All these incidents are components of the campaign against Orthodoxy and the Russian Orthodox Church. New loud accusations and statements by the foes of faith are not excluded in the future. The danger of the tactics used against the Church lies in that, in compliance with the rules of manipulation of public opinion, there are to be found nearby genuine facts; that what is not profitable is hushed up; cynical statements are made that evoke anger, fear, hatred, indignation, and spite. All devices of black rhetoric are set going, such as ignoring a part of facts, changing the meaning of what is going on, the direct leading people into error, and deception. |
| The dialogue on the correlation between primacy and conciliarity is conducted in the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. However, at present in this dialogue there has taken precedence only one of the possible approaches to the topic of the correlation between primacy and conciliarity connected with the theological ideas of Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon. Metropolitan John’s personal contribution to the development of Orthodox theology is significant and his ecclesiology is of course worthy of being studied, but the precedence of a single point of view to the detriment of others harms theological dialogue since it narrows the area down for discussion. The Russian Orthodox Church as a participant of this dialogue through the endeavours of the Synodal Biblical-Theological Commission has prepared a document entitled The Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Issue of Primacy in the Universal Church . The document proposes a theological vision of the problems discussed in the context of the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue. The document was confirmed by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church at its session on 25 to 26 of December 2013. The document’s appearance underlines the importance for the Russian Orthodox Church of Orthodox-Catholic dialogue and the problems that it examines. 3.What does the Russian Orthodox Church propose in her document on primacy? I will focus on several key propositions of the document which, in my view, may become a beneficial contribution to the discussion on primacy both within the framework of dialogue in the Joint Commission and further afield. First of all, I would like to note that the document affirms the already formed consensus between the autocephalous Local Orthodox Churches regarding the importance of primacy at the universal level. The document not only does not deny primacy at the universal level, but also states that at the present this primacy ‘belongs to the Patriarch of Constantinople as first among the equal First Hierarchs of the Local Orthodox Churches’ (2.3). The document also states that ‘the way the content of this primacy is filled is defined by a consensus of the autocephalous Local Orthodox Churches, expressed, in particular, at Pan-Orthodox convocations for the preparation of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church’ (5), which in particular was demonstrated by the gathering that took place in Istanbul. |
| In the West, Pope Gregory II rejected Leo’s theological claims [we shall look at the Iconoclastic position in a few minutes] but sought to boost Leo’s popularity in Italy because of the need for Byzantine troops in the West to defeat the approaching Lombard hoards from the North. In 730, Leo passed an edict ordering the destruction of all icons in the Empire. Patriarch Gelasios refused to sign this document and was aptly deposed. A new Iconoclastic patriarch, Anastasios, was chosen and ecclesiastically sanctioned the edict. Even two representatives of Pope Gregory III from Rome were imprisoned for standing against Leo. Consequently, a great rift was created from this time forth between both East and West. In 754, after the Lombards captured Ravenna, the papacy formally aligned itself with the Frankish king Pepin, establishing the foundations for the new Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne in 800 AD. Leo’s successor, his son Constantine V (741-775), intensified the persecutions against the Orthodox, the term that by this time was gaining popularity to describe the “correct” teaching of the Church. In Hieria, in the year 754, 338 carefully selected Iconoclastic bishops (minus the sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem) convened at a council ordered by the theologically articulate Constantine, to establish their own dogma against the icons. Consequently, great figures such as St. John of Damascus, a champion for the Orthodox cause, were excommunicated. The total destruction of all the icons was ordered. Monasteries, the centers of theological learning and certainly from which the greatest support for the icons came, were forcibly closed. Many monks and clergy were imprisoned, tortured, exiled, or killed for their faith. Constantine’s son, Leo IV (775-780) was a moderate defender of his father’s holocaustic campaigns, abandoning his father’s anti-monastic persecutions. Leo’s premature death made his wife Irene co-emperor and regent for their ten-year-old son Constantine VI. Resolute in her commitment to restore the icons, Irene appointed the Iconophile patriarch Tarasios to the throne of Constantinople and convened the 7 th Ecumenical Council at Nicea in 787 AD, composed of 350 bishops from all over the Empire and giving the Church its first respite. (As we shall see, there was a second wave of Iconoclastic persecution!) Iconoclastic writings were condemned and ordered to be burned, and the icons, along with St. John the Damascene, were restored to their rightful place in the Empire. In 802, Charlemagne from the West acknowledged that there was no emperor in Byzantium, by virtue of the fact that Irene was a woman and had actually overthrown her son, making her the sole monarch in the East. Charlemagne’s proposal to Irene to marry him (in order for him to increase the size of his empire) was rejected and Irene was exiled to a monastery, where she later died. |
| Basil would then be baptized at age 27. It is important to note that although infant baptism was practiced from the earliest days of the Church, delayed adult baptism of Christians was not uncommon during the first four centuries. We find both practices from Apostolic times. The Monastic Tonsure and Preparation for Debate Basil then headed to the Cappodocian region of Asia Minor (Turkey) to live for a time in the caves there. Prior to his Cappodocian departure, Basil would give his material goods to the poor, thus marking his monastic embarking with great Christian philanthropy. Upon his return from Cappodocia, he founded a monastic community on his family’s estate. It was within the monastic context that as part of the cenobetic rule of life in community that Basil would expose that is was with the understanding that it was to be a life of service to both those within the monastic community and to those outside of its walls. For Basil, asceticism in of itself could be self-serving and demonic if it were not tempered by service to others. Thus, his contribution to monastic endeavor was not limited to the ordering of a community, but in that community’s outreach and service to the greater community as a sense of mission and purpose. In his theological works, Moralia and Asketika, he outlines the guidelines for proper Christian living in the secular world 2 and within the monastery walls. 3 During this time, Basil would begin his great engagement of and in the tumultuous theological debates and controversies of the time. Namely, his contributions and renown would be made at the Council of Constantinople in his affirmation of the term” homoousios” (“the same essence”) in reference to Christ against the Arian heresy. It was his defense and articulation of the orthodox Christian teachings on the Holy Trinity, Christology and Incarnation that helped shaped the one holy catholic and apostolic Church’s theological formulations on these crucial matters of faith in the fourth century. Of all of his copious theological works which are too numerous to mention here, his On the Holy Spirit stands out as his appeal to Scripture and Tradition as the illuminators to the facts of the divinity and consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. 4 Thus, providing the formulation of three distinct “hypothesis” (Persons) in on Divine “ousia” (essence). |
| Music in the Early Church The oldest musical tradition is common to the synagogue and to the Church, of course. We know from the Acts of the Apostles that after the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the newly-baptized continued " daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house " (22:16). In a passage in his Epistle to the Ephesians (5:19), St.Paul tells the followers of Christ to speak to themselves " in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. " From a historical point, psalmody was the greatest legacy of the synagogue to Christianity. Generally speaking, the initial formulae and cadences of the Psalm-tunes changed very little. It is very close to the Russian method of reciting the Psalms in church. We also inherited from the synagogue the litanies or the congregational prayers of supplication and intercession, the chanted prayer of the priest, acclamations and interjections like " Amen, " " Hosanna, " " Alleluia. " Even the beginning of the liturgical workday with Saturday afternoon is a Jewish inheritance, and the liturgical calendar starting with September. Now you see where the roots are, where we should search for the roots of Church sacred art. St. Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians makes mention not only of Psalms, but also of hymns and spiritual songs. But by hymns in the early Church we understand the fourteen canticles taken from the Bible, and which have remained parts of the Orthodox hymnography up until this day. In their musical form, the canticles are related to the Psalms. They are plainly chanted during Great Lent, without flowery melodies. Immediately after the Apostolic period, the element of Psalmody is less often mentioned than that of the spontaneous hymn. The entire Eastern Church in particular was partial to hymns. Many heretics, like the Gnostics, tried their hands in the writing of hymns, and their disciples neglected the Psalms. Then the Church had to take radical measures. The ecclesiastical authorities complained that the lectors under the influence of heretical hymns, cared too much for singing and paid too little attention to reading or reciting. The Council of Laodicea (361) had to take radical measures, strictly prohibiting the singing of nonscriptural texts. Especially monks of strict rule – the hermits -- rejected every kind of singing. Read this story from the Patericon: |
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