The Sacred Mystery of the Church

Preface

In the early eighties of the 20th century, we happened to attend a conversation that took place in the house of a highly respected archpriest in the city of Sukhumi. This house was cut off from the outside world by a double barrier: a high iron fence formed the first impenetrable frontier; the other boundary was a solid wall of cypresses surrounding the house on four sides. The need for such an extraordinary conspiracy was caused by the fact that the archpriest was often visited by hermits from the surrounding Caucasus mountains: they lived there for many years illegally, and each of their visits to Sukhumi was fraught with numerous dangers and troubles on the part of the local Soviet authorities both for them and for the archpriest.

One of these desert dwellers was present at the conversation that took place over a cup of tea. He was a middle-aged man, tall, strongly built, with a thick beard, in a gray braided shirt and heavy tarpaulin boots. The content of his conversation with the archpriest has been erased from our memory: we remember only the extraordinary gray eyes, in which deep peace was reflected and which looked as if from another world.

The Caucasian hermits, who continued to live in the Abkhazian mountains in the early eighties despite decades of persecution by the Soviet regime (according to some sources, small groups of hermits still live in these places), were the spiritual heirs of the once very numerous host of monks who asceticized in those places at the beginning of the 20th century.

Among the latter was Schema-monk Hilarion, who in 1907 published the book "On the Mountains of the Caucasus". This book marked the beginning of the imiaslavtsy movement, which caused heated battles on Athos and a wide public discussion in Russia. The result of the Athonite disputes was the expulsion in 1913 of about a thousand (according to other estimates, about one and a half thousand) Russian monks from the Holy Mountain, which was the first powerful blow to Athonite Russian monasticism, a blow inflicted by the hands of the hierarchs of the Holy Synod of the Russian Church. The second blow was the revolution and the subsequent persecution of the Church in Russia, because of which the flow of "those wishing to live a fasting life" on Athos practically ceased, and Athonite Russian monasticism began to gradually die out.

Although the Athonite movement was condemned and crushed, interest in the problems discussed in the course of the imiaslav disputes did not fade away among Russian philosophers and theologians throughout the 20th century. Comprehension of the problems of name, word, and language became one of the main directions in the development of Russian philosophical thought. Theological comprehension of the meaning of the name of God also continued decades after the imiaslav disputes and resumed with renewed vigor at the end of the 20th century.

The final ecclesiastical assessment of the imiaslav disputes has not yet been given. The Local Council of 1917-1918 was supposed to make a decision on this topic, but it failed to do so, and the question of the Church's assessment of imiaslavie still remains open. Apparently, this is what has caused the revival of polemics around the veneration of the name of God in recent years. Recently, the Synodal Theological Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church included the question of the evaluation of the imiaslav disputes on the agenda of its work. We hope that the Commission will be able to address this topic in a comprehensive manner, and we see our work as a modest contribution to its reflection.

Our book is the first attempt at a detailed introduction to the history and problems of the imiaslav disputes [1]. The book consists of three parts. The first is devoted to the understanding of the name of God in the Holy Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church. In our opinion, the imiaslav disputes of the early 20th century have a centuries-old prehistory. The problems raised in the course of these disputes were discussed already in the Byzantine era, in particular, in the disputes between the Great Cappadocians and Eunomius in the fourth century, between the icon-worshippers and iconoclasts in the eighth and ninth centuries, and between Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria in the fourteenth century. The tradition of the Jesus Prayer, which existed in Eastern Christian monasticism since the fifth century and formed the basis of the Athonite practice of prayer, played a key role in the formation of imiaslavie. Some aspects of imiaslavie are rooted in the biblical understanding of the name of God. The formation of the imiaslav teaching, in addition, was influenced by the Russian theological tradition, especially the writings of St. John of Kronstadt. Therefore, we considered it necessary in the first part of the book to review those few traditions, acquaintance with which is necessary to understand the problems of the imiaslav disputes. The first chapter will be devoted to the theology of the name in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. In the second chapter, we will consider the thoughts of some of the Fathers and teachers of the Church about the names of God. The theme of the third chapter will be the prayerful invocation of the name of God in Orthodox worship and in the practice of the Jesus Prayer. Finally, in the fourth chapter we will touch upon the understanding of the name of God in Russian theology.

The second and third parts of the book are devoted to the history and problems of the imiaslav disputes. These disputes, in our opinion, are one of the rounds of the never-ceasing polemics within the Orthodox Church about the nature of Church Tradition. We are convinced that all the major dogmatic disputes that took place within Eastern Orthodoxy revolved around the theme of Tradition, whether it was the dispute over the names of God between the Cappadocians and Eunomius in the fourth century, the dispute over the veneration of icons in the eighth and ninth centuries, or the Palamite disputes in the fourteenth century. It was always a question of understanding the experience of the Church, of its most correct, Orthodox expression. At the same time, both sides in the dispute considered themselves defenders of Tradition: both appealed to the Bible, to the authority of the Fathers, to church practice. In the end, however, it turned out that only one side defended the true and original Tradition of the Church, while the other exhibited a distorted or perverted version of it.

It is in this vein that the imiaslav disputes will be considered in the second and third parts of this work. Consequently, we will be interested only in the theological and ecclesiastical-historical side of the matter. Philosophical problems will be touched upon by us only to the extent that it is absolutely necessary for the understanding of the Orthodox teaching on the name of God. As for the philosophy of the name in general, the philosophy of language, word, myth, symbol, etc., we will not talk about this specifically.

This book is written on the basis of existing documents, both published in print and stored in archives and still awaiting publication. We have looked through dozens of books on imiaslav problems, hundreds of articles from the periodicals, and numerous archival documents. Of course, many details escaped our attention. Some publications and archival documents were not available to us. In addition, due to the vastness of the material, we had to leave out some sources that are directly related to the topic [2]. We hope that these gaps will be filled by other researchers.

In 1937, Archpriest Georgy Florovsky complained that the "history of the Athos Troubles" had not yet been written: there was only polemical and very biased literature" [3]. 60 years later, the situation has changed little: according to the Russian scientist A. G. Kravetsky, "the literature devoted to the philosophical and theological understanding of this dispute is enormous, while the history of the imiaslav movement itself has not yet been written" [4]. We perceive my book not as a history of the imiaslav disputes, but as an attempt to review this history, as an introduction to this history: we wanted first of all to collect material on the history of disputes so that such a history could be written on the basis of this material.