The patriarchate itself is located in a more secluded place. Not far from the Fener pier, there is a quiet street under the trees. From the side of the hill, a staircase leads to the gardens, located in tiers up to the Byzantine wall. We go out to a small square stretching between the church and the fountain covered with a huge tree. On the right are several modern buildings, very restrained in style. On the left is a very simple cathedral, built in the XVIII century, with an apse, here and there overgrown with grass, then alleys

pines, cypresses, roses. In the narthex there is a magnificent Byzantine mosaic depicting the Mother of God with the Child. His face seems serious and adult. The service ends. The worshippers leave the church; As usual in summer, there are many pilgrims and tourists among them. A tall old man in black appears, on his head is a black klobuk, which is worn by Orthodox monks. Anyone who wants to can follow him, tourists or vagrants, interspersed. Fifty people go with him to modern buildings. We pass through the gardens, along the alleys lined with white and black pebbles. We pass by jasmine, climb a high staircase. A person sits everyone in a spacious hall, and he settles down at the table. Large misted glasses of fresh water are brought, where a teaspoon of sugar mass is placed. There is no need to stir, he says, it is better to eat sugar first, and then drink water. Then he begins to speak and speaks for a long time in a hollow and firm voice. He speaks of the time in which we live as an era of human unity. "All peoples are good, all races. Everyone must find their place in human unity. I belong to all nations. The leaven of the unity of the human race must be the unity of Christians. The unification of humanity is an expression and at the same time a search for the full unity we have achieved in Christ, in whom we are all members of one another. I belong to all the Churches, or rather to one Church, the Church of Christ. The only theology is the proclamation of the Risen Christ, Who resurrects us and gives us the strength to love. People will soon reach the moon, but the meaning of life is unknown to them. We have nothing to ask for, nothing to impose, but we must bear witness to the fact that life has meaning, that it is immeasurable, that it opens up to eternity. Therefore God is, God exists, and He, the Unknown,

"Our friend."

You have already recognized this old man: he is Patriarch Athenagoras I, Archbishop of Constantinople, the first in honor in the Orthodox Church.

What is the Orthodox Church?

The Orthodox Church exists in a living and indissoluble connection with the ancient Church. It has never known a rupture, not only spiritually, but also historically, with the apostolic communities, and many of its episcopal sees are "apostolic sees." Not according to its merits, but by the mercy of God, it remains faithful to the Fathers of the Church as great witnesses of Tradition, as well as to the dogmas of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, which gathered in the East during the time of the Indivisible Church.

At the end of the first millennium, the process of estrangement between the Christian East and the Christian West intensified, as Father Congar says, and between 1014 and 1204 this process led to a tragic division, which the "Orthodox" East feels as the removal of Rome. Cultural factors that are now obsolete or obsolete also had a tremendous influence on the schism. However, from the Orthodox point of view, the causes of the schism are of a spiritual nature; the ancient Church understood the Roman primacy as a "presidency in love" that brings about the communion of the local Churches, as Eucharistic communities of perfect dignity. However, beginning with the Gregorian reform, which reached its apogee in the course of centuries at the First Vatican Council, Rome transformed its primacy into absolute authority over the universal Church and endowed the pope with "direct and truly episcopal jurisdiction" over all the faithful. Accordingly, Latin theology tended to replace the relationship of reciprocity between the Son and the Holy Spirit, "these two hands of God," by a relationship of one-sided dependence ("The Spirit proceeds also from the Son"), which undoubtedly strengthened the importance of hierarchy, the priesthood in persona Christi, to the detriment of the free prophecy of the laity. The criterion of truth is not quite the same in "Catholicism" and "Orthodoxy"; in the first case, it is the definition proclaimed by the Pope ex cathedra; in the second, it is the presence of the Holy Spirit, dwelling in the mysterious Body of Christ. This presence is clothed, of course, in concrete formulas of the teaching authority, but this authority is in close interaction with the entire people of God and their living "sense of the Church." In 787, the Seventh Ecumenical Council enumerated the conditions that make a council truly ecumenical: it must be recognized by the pope, be held with the consent of the patriarchs, and express the common interest of the entire Church. From the Orthodox point of view, the new Latin ecclesiology has upset the balance of these three principles.

In the 7th century, Islam overwhelmed, but did not completely destroy the old patriarchates of the Middle East, and the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, became the center of Orthodox life and thought for many centuries. A missionary center, for after the conversion of the Slavs and Romanians, the Christian mission spread over the territory from the Balkans to the Arctic Circle. The center of civilization, where culture sought to become a prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem. The grandiose liturgical poem, composed in the sixth and seventh centuries, was composed by Hellenized Syrians, who knew how to combine the pathos and sensual imagery inherent in the peoples of the Bible. It was this poem, which so in Greek combined euphony with the poetics of light, that as a "Byzantine rite" became the only rite of the Orthodox Church, not legally, but in fact. Byzantine theology, the fruitfulness of which is revealed to us more and more by following the path of the Church Fathers, finally completes the transformation of Hellenism in the crucible of biblical Revelation. St. Gregory Palamas, whose teaching was approved at the Councils of Constantinople in 1341 and 1351, distinguishes the incomprehensible essence of God from His energies, or uncreated light, in which He gives Himself to the whole man, both his body and soul, and thereby becomes really accessible to us. In its mystical reflections on the Holy Spirit, Byzantium, in the person of St. Symeon the New Theologian, returns to the vision of the prophets, and calls the acquisition of the Spirit "life in Christ" – after the title of the book of the 14th-century secular theologian Nicholas Cabasilas – i.e., participation in the "sacraments" in which the Resurrected One gives Himself.

Being a synthesis of East and West, Byzantium was destroyed by both in turn. The Latins took possession of Constantinople in 1204 in a rage of vengeance. The Turks took possession of it in turn in 1453 in a rage of purification. They put an end to the existence of the fragile Byzantine Empire, which had recovered after the first defeat.

For a long time, the Church has separated its fate from the fate of the empire, its temporary refuge. The "hesychast" renewal of the fourteenth century (from the Greek word h?sychia: silence and peace of union with God), which became a powerful spiritual movement, not only sowed the seeds of light in the Orthodox world, but gave rise to an internal reform that allowed the Eastern Church to adapt to Ottoman rule, and in the sixteenth century to avoid the schisms of the Christian West. The Patriarch of Constantinople, who since the time of the Turkish conquest had been responsible to the Sultan for the "Christian people" of the empire, continued to enjoy the primacy of honor among the representatives of all the Orthodox Churches and regularly gathered the Eastern Patriarchs and their bishops at councils... The monastic republic on Mount Athos remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox ecumene, accepting novices from everywhere, sending everywhere witnesses of the Spirit, genuine internal missionaries of the Church. In the proper sense, the mission among non-Christians was entrusted to the Russian Church, which alone could act in conditions of complete freedom, within the framework of the new Orthodox empire, which the Russian state now became. The mission developed throughout northern Asia all the way to America, reaching the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, China, and Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was accompanied by a tremendous work of translating the Scriptures and liturgical texts, similar to the work of the Greek missionaries, who created the Cyrillic alphabet and the Old Church Slavonic script, which served to evangelize the Slavic peoples.

In relations with the Christian West, Orthodoxy from the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century went through a long period of isolation and self-defense. Nothing has yet replaced Byzantine culture and its ever-reviving humanism, this homeland of the comprehension and expression of its faith. On the other hand, the Counter-Reformation is directed to the East; and it is not the will for dialogue between the two Churches that moves it, but the will for conquest. Thus occurs the rejection from Orthodoxy of entire regions annexed to Rome while preserving the former liturgy. The Polish and Austrian authorities, with all state unceremoniousness, promote the formation of "Uniate" Churches, which later became a stumbling block between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and experienced a tragic fate, which is not completed to this day...

In spite of the fact that the Orthodox theology of schools will prove to be infected with the problems of its opponents, the self-consciousness of the Church will live on in the liturgy and spiritual life; the great councils of the seventeenth century, which met in Iasi, Moscow, and Jerusalem, defend the sacramental nature of the Church in the face of Protestants, and the "epiclectic" structure of the sacrament in the face of the Catholics: the Holy Spirit, humbly "invoked" by priests and people (epiclese means invocation), changes the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.