Such are the feelings which move the members of the Greek Catholic Church. Intercourse with God is achieved through the cult of a mystery, and by means of hundreds of efficacious formulas small and great, signs, pictures, and consecrated acts, which, if punctiliously and submissively observed, communicate divine grace and prepare the Christian for eternal life. Doctrine as such is for the most part something unknown; if it appears at all, it is only in the form of liturgical aphorisms. For ninety-nine per cent, of these Christians, religion exists only as a ceremonious ritual, in which it is externalised. But even for Christians of advanced intelligence all these ritual acts are absolutely necessary, for it is only in them that doctrine receives its correct application and obtains its due result.
There is no sadder spectacle than this transformation of the Christian religion from a worship of God in spirit and in truth into a worship of God in signs, formulas, and idols. To feel the whole pity of this development, we need not descend to such adherents of this form of Christendom as are religiously and intellectually in a state of complete abandonment, like the Copts and Abyssinians; the Syrians, Greeks, and Russians are, taken as a whole, only a little better. Where, however, can we find in Jesus’ message even a trace of any injunction that a man is to submit to solemn ceremonies as though they were mysterious ministrations, to be punctilious in observing a ritual, to put up pictures, and to mumble maxims and formulas in a prescribed fashion? It was to destroy this sort of religion that Jesus Christ suffered himself to be nailed to the cross, and now we find it re- established under his name and authority! Not only has “mystagogy” stepped into a position side by side with the “mathesis,” that is to say, the doctrine, which called it forth; but the truth is that “doctrine”— be its constitution what it may, it is still a spiritual principle—has disappeared, and ceremony dominates everything. This is what marks the relapse into the ancient form of the lowest class of religion. Over the vast area of Greek and Oriental Christendom religion has been almost stifled by ritualism. It is not that religion has sacrificed one of its essential elements. No! it has entered an entirely different plane; it has descended to the level where religion may be described as a cult and nothing but a cult.
Nevertheless, Greek and Oriental Christianity contains within itself an element which for centuries has been capable of offering, and still offers here and there to-day, a certain resistance to the combined forces of traditionalism, intellectualism, and ritualism—I mean monasticism. To the question, Who is in the highest sense of the word a Christian? the Greek Christian replies: the monk. The man who practises silence and purity, who shuns not only the world but also the Church of the world, who avoids not only false doctrine but any statement about the true, who fasts, gives himself up to contemplation, and steadily waits for God’s glorious light to dawn upon his gaze, who attaches no value to anything but tranquility and meditation on the Eternal, who asks nothing of life but death, and who from such utter unselfishness and purity makes mercy arise—this is the Christian. To him not even the Church and the consecration which it bestows is an absolute necessity. For such a man the whole system of sanctified secularity has vanished. Over and over again in ascetics of this kind the Church has seen in its ranks figures of such strength and delicacy of religious feeling, so filled with the divine, so inwardly active in forming themselves after certain features of Christ’s image, that we may, indeed, say: here there is a living religion, not unworthy of Christ’s name. We Protestants must not take direct offence at the form of monasticism. The conditions under which our Churches arose have made a harsh and one-sided opinion of it a kind of duty. And although for the present, and in view of the problems which press on us, we may be justified in retaining this opinion, we must not summarily apply it to other circumstances. Nothing but monasticism could provide a leaven and a counterpoise in that traditionalistic and ritualistic secular Church, such as the Greek Church was and still is. Here there was freedom, independence, and vivid experience; here the truth that it is only what is experienced and comes from within that has any value in religion carried the day.
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