3 (of 3) AVATAR Mar. 9, 1987 at 23:18 Eastern (20668 characters) LESSON TWO THE CHURCH SPREADS ACROSS THE EMPIRE: THE CONCEPT OF "RITE" IN THE EARLY CHURCH. Fifty days after the Resurrection of Our Lord the Apostles, the Mother of Christ, and a group of other disciples of the Lord (About 120 in all, says the Acts of the Apostles) were gathered together in the Upper Room in obedience to the command Christ had given before His Ascension that his followers were to go to Jerusalem and to wait there for The Comforter Whom He would send. The Paraclete did, indeed, come. He came in a flash of flame, with the sound of roaring wind, and in tongues of fire. And from that room (which must have been a large room, indeed, to have held 120 people with any comfort) this tiny group set out to conquer a world. And that is precisely what they did, conquer a world. It took a while for them to organize a community in Jerusalem, even though they DID make 3,000 converts on that firct momentous day. Even though converts were made, it took a considerable amount of time to instruct them in the faith, and to strengthen them in it to such a degree that they (the new converts) could be trusted to hew to it under any and all circumstances. And there must have been a good many early defections, if for no other reason than from fear. It would have taken quite a while for the disciples themselves to have gotten over their shock and confusion, and to strengthen each other in the Faith, indeed, to begin grappling with it. Signs of confusion in the minds of the Apostles runs all through the New Testament, including Peter's own insights into his personal revelations. You may well be wondering what all this history has to do with sanctity, or with liturgy, or with Lent. You ought not. It is important for your own sanctification (which makes it important for the sanctification of this parish and of this village as a consequence) dhat you begin to understand the nature of sanctity and holiness itself - not as something achievable only by the especially gifted, but that sanctity itself has little enough intrinsic to do with quiet, placid manners, with gentle piety or even with the heroic patience and inherent loveableness we generally associate with "sainthood." Sanctity is not at all like that. It (the word "sanctity") derives from the Latin root "sanctus." It is usually translated as "holy," but its REAL meaning is "specially set aside for the exclusive service of [a deity]." And THEREFORE "sanctity" is "holiness," because holy things ARE ESPECIALLY SET ASIDE, CONSECRATED, DEDICATED, TO THE SERVICE OF DIVINITY. And, as we all know (Because St. Paul has so explicitly told us so) God does NOT choose for His special service the strong, the powerful, the brilliant, those who are inherently good; He chooses to make His might known through using the weak as His instruments. Men are called to the priesthood NOT because they are better men, but because they are WEAKER men, and in their sanctification the might and goodness of God becomes evident. You, each of you, are called to be Christians, not because you are somehow more virtuous than others, but because you are NOT. And again, God's might and goodness become manifest in what His grace permits you to achieve. Following the development of the Church and its early members allows us to understand how very real and very weak and insignificant human beings began to change the very nature of the world around them by little more than their devotion to and loving service of Jesus Christ. With the quality of these first Christians the Church itself would stand or fall. The first real break with the Jewish community in Jerusalem came with the vision Peter had of Christ on the rooftop at Joppa, where Christ showed Peter in a shockingly graphic fashion that mankind had, at long last, been cleansed, and purified, and that he, Peter, was no longer to call unclean what Jesus Christ had cleansed. Peter had been told in a vision to visit Joppa and go to the house of a Roman centurion named Cornelius, and to convert him to the cause of Christ without the formality of circumcision. It would be long before Peter grasped the full significance of this visit and this vision, and it would require Paul to remind him of it - but it had been made clear that mankind wac again one. This vision, this message, was no small thing, because it ran quite counter to the entire history of the Jews, a history which had marked them as a people set apart, and that apartness had been reinforced for a thousand years by dietary regulations, sabbath rules, rules of conduct both social and private, worship ritual and a host of other things that, quite apart from Jewish monotheism, set them even further apart from the rest of men than did their theology alone. A direct precedent had been established, at the command of Christ Himself, that Gentiles were to be allowed to join the Church without first observing the Mosaic Law - and the message had been given even before the famous controversy between Paul and Peter. The second great break came with St. Stephen's conversion of the eunuch, secretary to Queen Candace of Ethiopia. The eunuch was baptized in a running stream near the roadside, again without benefit of circumcision, and without the obligation of fulfilling or observing the other rituals of the Mosaic Law. Following these two incidents, Peter himself went up to Asia Minor to check on the work of Paul in Greece and the area now known as Turkey, and centered his activities in and around the provincial capital of Antioch, where Christians were first called by that name. He established himself there as head of the local community - and he continued to be acknowledged by the rest of the Apostles as leader of dhe College of Apostles, though doubtlessly none of them ever thought of it as such. It was here at Antioch that the famous dispute between Peter and aul finally came to a head. Paul was, however, doing such a tremendous job in the conversion of the Eastern Empire, it must have seemed advisable to Peter not to re- invent the wheel, and to see what could be done elsewhere. The other Apostles proceeded along much the same lines, and scattered themselves throughout the known world. Peter moved westward to Rome, the center of the Empire, leaving another in charge in his place. There he again established himself as head, not only of the group of Apostles, but again of the local community. There he died, first bishop of Rome. The archaeological excavations beneath St. Peter's Basilica under Pope Pius XII seem to have satisfied beyond reasonable doubt the ancient tradition that the body of Peter lies buried directly beneath the main altar of the basilica; that the ancient tradition seems to have been surprisingly accurate - far more accurate than scholars of a few decades ago would have believed. The other Apostles varied their activities at least as widely. St. Paul surely had no monopoly on missionary activity, though he left by far the greater number of Epistles behind him. Neither did St. Peter. St. Mark, traditionally the companion of St. Peter, is reported by tradition to have gone to Alexandria, Egypt, following Peter's death, and become its first bishop. St. Andrew is supposed to have travelled through Russia, Scandinavia, Scotland and the British Isles, through the Iberian Peninsula and back around through Italy and Greece to die on his X-shaped cross in what is now modern Turkey. St. Thomas, of course, is reputed to have converted thousands to Christianity in India, where there still remain Christians of Malabarese and Syro-Malankarese rite, still called to this very day "St. Thomas' Christians." It seems that the common hallmark of Apostolic activity was that their activities seem not to have been restricted to any single geographic area. Each Apostle seems free to have roamed where the Spirit moved him; that they made their converts when and where they could, then left another in charge to reap the harvest as they passed on their way to other pastures and other flocks. In this way they could cover the most ground and reach the most people, returning only occasionally (or sending emissaries to do the job for them) to check up on the conditions of the infant churches, and to correct any corruptions which may have crept in. The typical mode of operation seems to be similar to that employed by St. Paul in his three missionary journeys in his search for souls. As the Apostles moved around establishing churches, local communities, they appear to have appointed those who were to offer the Sacrifice of Christ to take their places on their departures, and these men naturally enough modelled their observances of the worship on the manner in which the individual Apostle offered his sacrifice. In the course of time, various additions and accretions crept in, and were incorporated into what became an increasingly stylized manner of offering the Sacrifice, as befits the dignity of the offering. But since there were so many different Apostles, and they were preaching to so very many different types of people, gith different mentalities, different customs, different outlooks on life, different culture, different law, different civilization, they took whatever of a given culture could be turned to the glorification of God. So, use of incense became common among Greeks and Romans, while dancing, drums and flute music became common among Ethiopians. Around the principal cities in any given area, the Liturgy (as it came to be called, from the Greek "leiturgeia," "serving") came to be practiced in a more or less uniform manner within the boundaries of given geographical and economic areas. The more influential the city, the larger the area of its sway. Still, the common language of the day was not, as so many have supposed, Latin, but Greek, a kind of 'lingua franca' of the day. Latin was a very formal language, customarily used at this point, only on formal occasions and for formal purposes, even by Roman citizens themselves. And since the common language of the Empire was Greek, and the language of the Liturgy itself remained Greek, there tended to be no great divergences between and among the various groups. The picture changed quickly and drastically, however, in the Fourth Century, and even more so in the Fifth. Shortly after his victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine moved the capital of the Empire to a little fishing village on the Sea of Marmara - Byzantium, it was called then. He called it "New Rome," but it wasn't long before it became "Constantinople," "The City of Constantine" in Greek. Now "Istanbul" - Turkish for "The City." By 325 A.D. the capital had been moved, all the nobles of Rome had been coerced into rebuilding their palaces and residences in New Rome, and the seat of government was now far closer to the geographic center than ever. When Constantine the Great moved the capital, Rome quickly became little more than a provincial backwater. Latin, heretofore the language of the educated classes, now became the common tongue once again as the Graecophones (Greek-speakers) moved eastward. As Rome lost her supply of Greek slaves (who taught, along with everything else, Greek language to their students, preparatory to teaching them Greek philosophy, mathematics and art) she reverted to her original language, Rome. And the language barrier between Eastern and Western portions of the Empire began to form with a surprising swiftness. By the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, the time of St. Jerome and of St. Augustine the Great, Bishop of Hippo, the western regions of the Empire were thoroughly Latinized once again. So much so that St. Jerome had found it practical to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Latin for the benefit of those who no longer spoke Greek. By 420, Rome had fallen to the barbarian hordes and been sacked. Soon the barbarian Ostrogoths had their own King in Rome, and Theodoric's dynasty was established, and within a century thereafter, St. Benedict of Nursia had established his communal life in Monte Cassino. The Benedictine Order had been born. Once the linguistic barriers were raised, problems multiplied in many areas. Not least among them the area of liturgical practice. Where there was little or no linguistic understanding there was soon no fraternal understanding, or compassion, for that matter. Differences were highly magnified and tended to increase with greater and greater speed until things developed to a point where what we now think of as "rites" (I.E., a collection of ceremonies, laws, customs and attitudes peculiar to a particular group of people), were now real entities. Previous differences had been viewed more as personal or local eccentricities, so to speak, and little consideration had ever been given to the idea that permission from elsewhere to do things somewhat differently would be needed. Indeed, in a world where everyone did, in fact, understand what others did and why, there would be no NEED to intervene. Intervention by Rome was not unheard of, but it was far from common. And "intervention" had never become confused with "interference," as it seems to be so often nowadays. 420 was a critical year in the history of the Church. Until that time, even though the Empire was still locked in some considerable confusion as a reselt of the shift of capitol cities, it still liked to THINK of itself as one empire. Once Rome was sacked and had fallen to the barbarians, leaving Constantinople (as it thought) the sole defender of Orthodoxy within the Empire, (These barbarians were heretics, commonly known as Arian. The term has nothing to do with our modern-day term "Aryan," which is another word entirely), since only the area under the control of Constantinople was, properly speaking, either "orthodox" in its doctrine or within the ambit of empire. Peter had definitely moved the sphere of his activities to Rome precisely BECAUSE it WAS the center of the Empire, administratively, economically and otherwise. It was most assuredly the center of Imperial communications. Now that center had fallen to heretics and pagans. Was it not natural, considering the state of political theory of the time, that there would be some confusion as to the real source of authority within the Church? Where there is confusion, there is bound to be error. Not all error is ill-intentioned. Some of it is honest. Honest mistakes, however, remain mistakes, and the consequences of honest mistakes are every bit as devastating to those who feel its impact as a deliberate act. Over the next couple of centuries, although the question of political supremacy was never really explicitly settled, it was at least ignored in the apparent interests of harmony, and some sort of working arrangement was beached when it was decreed in Council that the See of Constantinople, never one of the Apostolic Sees, but by this time raised to the Patriarchate because of its proximity to the Imperial Throne, would henceforward be second in pre-eminence to the See of Rome. I find it rather astonishing that there would be any real question of historical evidence for the early pre-eminence for the See of Rome (as so many non- Catholic groups do) since a pre-requisite for such an arrangement would necessarily be the quite explicit understanding and acceptance OF the pre- eminence of Rome. At this point in the development of the Church, these people were no farther from the death of St. John (or not much more so) than we are from our own Declaration of Independence. For some centuries, up until the eighth century and the rise of the Carolingian Empire (Charlemagne), relations were reasonably good, with occasional friction erupting and finding expression in doctrinal or ritual disagreements. Nothing outrageouc - yet. But from the eighth to the tenth centuries there was an unfortunate degeneration in the moral life of Western clergy, while that of the East remained relatively high. The untoward influence of the rulers of the new empire which arose after Charlemagne's death in the selections of occupants of the papal throne quite disgusted Eastern Christianity. One suspects largely because they viewed the Western Emperor as a competitor to their own splendid court. The very center of western intellectual activity was in Constantinople, where were found the best schools of the time, the highest culture, the finest art, the best clerical training. Western figures suffered greatly by comparison, often ignorant in the extreme, and the personal manners and mannerisms of westerners were offensive to the Imperial court. For example, the Patriarch Photius, though he split with Rome several times and re-united several times, was one of the most intelligent men of his time, fluent in several languages (including Latin, unlike his western counterparts, who all too often could read no Greek, whose Latin was often poorer than his), broadminded, cultured, and a man of unimpeachable personal morals. His opposite number in Rome, the Pope of his day was, unfortunately, a man of far less relative personal capability. It is good to remember that God's grace requires no brilliant men through whom to work, only men willing to serve Him faithfully. As did Peter. This unfavorable comparison raised its ugly head all too often and sowed further seeds of dissension. Here were what Greeks considered to be uncouth barbarians presuming to dictate the Truths of the Faith to those who were far better versed in intellectual training and capability. Why, for pity's sakes, the Pope couldn't even read GREEK! And, appropriately shocked, they reacted quite predictably. The situation continued to grow worse until the unfobtunate events of the eleventh and twelfth centuries - the decisive split of 1056 making more or less permanent the split between West and East. Those who had previously been "Orthodox" now became "Catholic" while those who had been "Eastern" now became "Orthodox." All of which did little to reduce the levels of confusion, anger, bitterness and vitriol. And with that split, the concept of rite became solidified. The West, looking upon the 'tradition', as they called it, of heresy and schism in the East, could find no trust in their hearts for their Eastern brethren, even though it took several centuries more to finalize the break permanently with seferal groups. The Russian group, for example, broke finally only in the fifteenth century, after the Council of Florence. Until that time they had maintained sporadic relations with both Rome and New Rome. Saintly and brilliant men such as Saint Isidore, Archbishop of Kiev, did wonderful work in maintaining relatively harmonious relationships between the two groups, in addition to his lucid thinking at the Council itself. But the seeds of mistrust were sown, and Western tendencies to use law, force and authority upon those whom they mistrusted began to assume the uppermost positions of awareness in Western minds, and the West began to grant 'permissions' for what had theretofore been considered the natural prerogative of individual groups. The situation worsened steadily, and finally erupted in what is known as 'The Reformation.' And I am convinced to this day that, had the schism between East and West never occurred, there would have been no Reformation, eidher. Next: the basic differences between Eastern and Western Rites; attitudes, customs, mentality, laws, approaches, spirituality.