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.

The temptation of this era is the poorly assimilated Byzantine heritage, which gives rise to the sacralization of the kingdom and national messianism: "Moscow is the Third Rome." The temptation was overcome, if not always in the consciousness of the faithful, then at least in the deep consciousness of the Church, at the Great Council of Moscow (1666-1667), which condemned the Russian "Old Believers," the adherents of the kingdom of the "White Tsar" and legalistic Christianity, the religion of the letter, the law, the rite, etc. Weakened by this schism, the Russian Church was unable to prevent Peter the Great from abolishing the Moscow Patriarchate and replacing it with a Synod. ruled by a lay government official. The XVIII century is a tragic period for Orthodoxy: in Constantinople, the patriarchate becomes a toy in palace and ambassadorial intrigues; in Russia, the Church is enslaved by the state, which has imposed severe restrictions on the life of monasteries.

The Renaissance came at the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to a new awakening of "hesychasm." From Athos to Greece, from Greece to the Romanian principalities, from Moldavia to Russia, this movement paves the way, which found its expression in the compilation and translation of the Philokalia, an extensive anthology of mystical theology, permeated with a special luminous spiritual experience. In Russia, this renewal is combined with the need for contemplation, rooted in the very midst of the people, especially among women, and in the Greek world, beginning with Cosmas of Aetolia, with the social service and enlightenment of the people. On the threshold of the nineteenth century, Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, Paisius Velichkovsky, and Seraphim of Sarov, as if in opposition to the emerging triumph of the naked mind, testify to the radiant experience of the Holy Spirit. Suddenly, an exclusively personal and charismatic vocation to the "eldership" ("elder" – geronda in Greek) is awakened. Among the laity, the "spiritual father" spread the "Jesus Prayer" and was a mentor who helped others to carry out the feat of prayer in the modern world.

In the nineteenth century, the Christian peoples in the Balkans gained independence, and thanks to it there arose national Churches, which, however, are not free from traces of the ecclesiastical nationalism that corrodes today's Orthodoxy like an ulcer. The Council of Constantinople of 1872 branded it as vainly as unequivocally under the name of "phyletism." And yet, the encounter with the West and, independently of it, the renewal of the spirit of "Love of Love" caused an active awakening of Orthodox thought. The Fathers of the Church are translated into Russian and Romanian; Philaret of Moscow constantly relies on them in his sermons; The Epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs, united around the Patriarch of Constantinople, warns the Pope against the dogmatic definition of infallibility, insisting that the truth is preserved by all the people of God; Khomiakov and the Slavophile thinkers determine the main directions of the ecclesiology of conciliarity; finally, in prophecies and insights from Dostoevsky to Berdyaev, there is also a overcoming of modern atheism... When, in Dostoevsky's novel, the murderer and the prostitute, having opened the Gospel, read the story of the resurrection of Lazarus with tears in their eyes, we feel that here, as if for the first time, the Christian word is addressed to a modern atheist. And every Orthodox believer pronounces the same words, likening himself to a thief and a harlot, when he dares to approach Communion.

Industrial civilization and the analytical and utopian systems of thought generated by it have fallen with all their force on Orthodoxy, which is already poorly adapted to the modern world. It retained its spiritual prophetic basis among the clairvoyants, but among the masses it remained archaic. Slavophilism tried to build an Orthodox "conciliarity", but the reforms, and above all the reforms of Alexander II, which could have contributed to this, were not brought to an end, and Slavophilism itself slid into a lost rural idyll, unable to turn its face to industrial civilization, posing its own problems and gaining momentum in Russia at the beginning of this century. In Greece in the Ottoman era, the Church breathed life into the existence of independent communities, it was able to unite them, to reveal their beauty, but the pro-Western elite of independent Greece either did not know the life of the people, or neglected it, which gave rise to disintegration, which sometimes turned into frenzy. And therefore it is understandable that communism – not as a science, but as a messianic utopia – found a deep response among the peoples, first of all in the Russians, who had gone through immature secularization and subconsciously preserved the Orthodox hope of the Kingdom. It should be said that the clash between communism and Christianity in Russia, and later in the countries of people's democracy, was purely spiritual in nature. The Orthodox Church in these countries, without associating itself with any economic and social system, simply unconditionally accepted the new socialist order. But by virtue of this very position, burdened, it is true, by a certain servility (which can only be judged by those who know from experience the laws of survival under a prolonged totalitarian regime), the Church has revealed the very essence of the problem, which is primarily the problem of the purpose of man, who accepts or rejects the world of the spirit. In the interval between the two wars, the Russian Church experienced the most terrible persecution that the history of Christianity has ever known. Thanks to her civic loyalty, without concluding the slightest compromise in the doctrinal plan, she received very limited rights of citizenship in Soviet society. She was granted only freedom of worship as opposed to freedom of anti-religious propaganda, and therefore her uninterrupted prayer service remained the only and striking testimony to herself... A new attempt at strangulation, not bloody but ruthless, in 1959 and 1964 clearly failed, although it entailed the closure of many churches...

At the same time, the dispersion of millions of Orthodox Christians of all nationalities, especially Greeks and Russians, in our century has given Orthodoxy an undeniable geographical universalism. In Paris, Russian religious philosophy bore fruit and imparted new impulses to Western thought. Vladimir Lossky in France, Fr. George Florovsky, and Fr. John Meyendorff in the United States have once again discovered and explained for our time the great patristic and Palamite synthesis. Pavel Evdokimov in Paris and Fr. Alexander Schmemann in New York sought, proceeding from this synthesis and the great search for Russian religious philosophy, to creatively solve the problems of the nascent planetary civilization. In Arab Orthodoxy, the prophetic movement of Orthodox Youth, which spontaneously poured out from the depths of the Christian people, renewed the life of the Church, won the trust of Muslims and is now seeking a solution to the tragic problems of the countries of the Third World, without losing the spiritual meaning of the Orthodox tradition. In Greece, much apostolic work has been done by Orthodox brotherhoods, but the present regime controls and strengthens from the outside certain forms of Orthodox life, which are now in particular need of a new liberation of the spirit. The Romanian Church, which, like the Russian Church, went through severe trials in the 1960s, carried out remarkable work in understanding Orthodoxy at the meeting of East and West. Almost everywhere in the diaspora, but especially in France and the United States, the West seeks to meet Orthodoxy in order to realize and share with it the most essential thing that can unite everyone...

It would not be difficult to sum up this long history negatively: the temptation of religious nationalism, the ethical and political divisions in the diaspora, the general weakness of intellectual work, the lack of freedom in the countries beyond the Iron Curtain, the difficult adjustment to the modern world in Greece, the lack of coordination in the diaspora. But there are two threads that testify to the continuity and invisible fruitfulness of this story, and nothing could break these threads. The first of them is the golden thread of the monks, such as St. Nectarios of Aegina († 1920) and Elder Silouan of Athos († 1938); the second is the purple thread of the martyrs: the "new martyrs" of the Ottoman period, the innumerable martyrs in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s (but in the same years, before the eyes of many people, old icons were "renewed" with an unknown radiance), or the martyrs of Serbia during the Second World War. These signs of blood and light always accompany each other, according to the ancient saying: "Give blood and receive the spirit."

Orthodoxy has retained a sense of mystery and has always been reluctant to express it dogmatically. Dogma, in spite of the temptations of the fallen mind, which confuses or divides and strives for possession, preserves within itself the incomprehensibility of the Living God, Who, through love, becomes accessible to our whole being, and not only to reason. That is why the dogma is built on antinomy and glorification; it organically enters into the liturgical doxology and into the realm of reality that is revealed by contemplation. As they used to say in the old days: "A theologian is one who has pure prayer, who has pure prayer, is a theologian." In the heart of Orthodox thought and spiritual life lies the Paschal joy: God incarnate, God crucified, conquered death by death. He allowed hell and death – these two forces, inseparable from our lot here – to take possession of Himself, and like an insignificant drop of hatred He dissolved them in the blazing abyss of divine-human love. The glorified body of the Lord is woven from our flesh, from all the flesh of the earth, from the immensity of the cosmos, transfigured in Him. After Pentecost, this glorified Body, which is already a new heaven and a new earth, comes to us in the Life-Giving Spirit in the sacraments of the Church, in the Church as the sacrament of the Resurrected One. However, this presence, which embraces and gives life to the world, remains hidden out of respect for our freedom. "God can do everything," said the Fathers, "except to compel man to love." Only when personal holiness is attained is this hidden work of the Spirit visible. Only holiness can connect us to it, and not only us, but everything that surrounds us, "accelerating" its final manifestation in the world.