A question to my Russian readers...

[anglomedved]

I’ll be short. I need to get away and think and write seriously, for 'Byzantium' and others, about what it is in the western experience – other than spiritual blindness or having wickedly rejected Orthodoxy in 1054 ­– that puts in its spiritual context this modern church architecture that Russians cannot get their heads round.

 My question is:

When we talk of ‘tradition’ (predanya) in the Russian sense, would it be right to say that it includes a large element of territorial/racial identity (in the sense of narod)? There is something in the your liturgy, in your whole way of going about things religious, which makes you feel at once Orthodox and Russian, there is a sort of double continuity….

I am beginning to suspect that part of the ‘problem’ of Catholicism is to have left very little space for this territorial/racial identity element. There is little or no ‘narodni' component left. Where it existed historically, it was put down. The Gallican church in France was crushed. Attempts by the German bishops to keep a separate German Catholic identity foundered in the late 18th century on lack of support from the political powers. The roots of the Old Catholics go back beyond Vatican I to when Rome imposed its own senior bishop on Dutch Catholics against local wishes in the 18th century. Anglo-Catholicism in the UK can be interpreted as people wanting Roman spirituality, but please in a form that feels part of a continuing English tradition.


There’s the same problem when carrying across Orthodoxy into a western context. But that’s another posting.

Comments

[romanierey.livejournal.com]

Возможно всё так как Вы написали. Но здесь проблема обоюдная - и католическая и православная.
Мне кажется, что русское православие (бытовое) и католицизм представляют из себя две крайности. С одной стороны этнофилетизм, с другой излишний "центризм".
Если же брать православие не бытовое, а святоотеческое, то места тому о чем Вы написали практически не остаётся.
Лозунг "Мы русские - значит православные" в святоотеческом контексте выглядит достаточно нелепо.

[ursusanglicanus.livejournal.com]

I hear clearly what you are saying by your reference to the early fathers. I wonder, though, if it is not an argument ex nihilo.

How would St John Chrysostom have reacted if he was told that from now on he was expected to work only in Latin and could no longer use his Greek books (even though this was the same faith)?

[romanierey.livejournal.com]

Ну, да. Это другая крайность - латинская. Хотя должен заметить, что русские по-русски тоже не могут служить, хотя вера та же самая:)

[igumen-aga.livejournal.com]

I recall only red eggs for Easter, in my childhood but, it isn't special russian tradition, I think.
I've come to Church when I was 25 and I never mix "Orthodoxy" with my "russian self-identification". Always, other traditions was interesting to me.
In a place of my present service the Yakut national tradition is more actual :))

Если позволите

[maitai1again.livejournal.com]

и если я верно понимаю вопрос: если мы говорим о _культурном_ контексте, куда _включается_ ортодоксия - то увы, Вы правы, думаю. Так обстоит дело в... скажем, девяти случаях из десяти. Контекст, контекст, дайте нам наш контекст - вопит всяк страстно ищущий и страстно нашедший же ^__^