Dear Brother in Christ, Andrew,<\/p>\n
Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n
I was just preparing to answer your last letter, intending to venture the guess that you will soon be receiving a \u201cfriendly open letter\u201d from Boston\u2014when lo and behold, with yesterday’s mail we received a copy of this very letter from Boston! Actually, it seems to be an open letter to the recipients of copies of your letter to Archbishop Nikodim, and it is there indicated that you are to receive also a private letter from them.<\/p>\n
The content, style and tone of the letter are what we had expected, having already had several experiences of this \u201cBoston approach\u201d to church problems\u2014and in particular of \u201cgetting rid\u201d of someone like you who dares to disagree with the \u201cBoston party line.\u201d I will tell you immediately our response to this letter.<\/p>\n
The purpose of the letter is:<\/p>\n
(1) To show how correct, sophisticated, sensitive, etc., are the fathers of Holy Transfiguration Monastery\u2014they have all the answers for you, and in addition they are tremendously humble and spiritual. They are prepared to answer any church problem anywhere\u2014and only they are so prepared.<\/p>\n
(2) Thoroughly to discredit you, show how you are stupid and\/or emotional, and totally incapable of discussing church questions. The only solution for you is to bow to the superior wisdom of the writers of the letter and then to get out of their way, perhaps by falling into a hole in the ground. About your spiritual welfare they couldn\u2019t care less.<\/p>\n
The letter itself does not need an answer. They are experts in this tactic and would tear any reply of yours into shreds, knowing how to make it appear that whatever you say is wrong.<\/p>\n
Of course, they are \u201ccorrect\u201d in much,\u2014but not all\u2014of what they say. I think they have established sufficiently a case that one may baptize in such circumstances, if the bishop approves; but that is not the most important question raised by the baptisms\u2014and this they do not see at all, because they themselves are part of the problem.<\/p>\n
If I am not mistaken, what most upset you about the Guildford baptisms was the \u201cfanatical\u201d tone it introduced into Orthodoxy in England: if this manner of reception from other jurisdictions is to become the norm, then our Church is in danger of falling into a Mathewite sectarianism. Our young converts of today are very prone to this kind of sectarian mentality, and Fr. Panteleimon has an absolutely magnetic pull on them\u2014they are afraid of being \u201cincorrect\u201d and hence \u201cun-Orthodox\u201d if they don\u2019t agree with his logic. In this respect you are correct, even if you can\u2019t establish a case for it from Fathers and canons; and they, for all their \u201cproofs\u201d on the purely technical question, are incorrect. But you can\u2019t argue this with them\u2014it\u2019s like discussing the infallibility of the Pope with a diehard Catholic. And in fact there is much that is papalist and Jesuitical in the \u201cBoston mentality.\u201d<\/p>\n
On several points the Boston epistle is wrong, most notably when they try to interpret our bishops\u2019 attitude to Moscow and Constantinople. In this our bishops refuse to be \u201clegalistic\u201d: to declare that these jurisdictions are \u201cschismatic\u201d and therefore devoid of grace. That is the Mathewite approach, which Fr. Panteleimon would apparently like to see prevail in our Church. Even today our bishops refuse to \u201cdefine\u201d in this manner and make everything \u201cblack and white\u201d; and I am sure that, perhaps without exception, our bishops not only refuse to declare them without grace, but positively believe (at least by giving the benefit of any doubt) that they do have grace. Fr. P. would like to be their spokesman and tell the world what our bishops should be believing\u2014but here he is going out on a limb which one day is going to break beneath him.<\/p>\n
But now to the important question. The attitude revealed by the Boston epistle is far more dangerous than anything you have been experiencing in English, which is only aftershocks of the \u201cBoston mentality.\u201d If there are those so uncertain about their status in Orthodoxy that they just have to be baptized, whether when coming to us from another jurisdiction or even after being in our Church for some time\u2014well, let them do it if the bishop permits, as long as this is not seen to be the rule or standard for all, not a model of Pharisaic \u201ccorrectness\u201d but rather a concession to weak consciences. If the issue is thus localized, there can still be peace in the Church, and neither side need pride itself that it is \u201ccorrect\u201d and the other \u201cincorrect\u201d or somehow inferior.<\/p>\n
But the \u201cBoston mentality\u201d which wants to legislate the standard of \u201ccorrectness\u201d for the Church\u2014is wrong, but with a wrongness that can\u2019t be proved by Fathers and canons as much as it must be seen spiritually. The \u201cBoston epistle\u201d is a good example: an Orthodox response to your letter, if they believed that you were wrong, would have been to write a warm and heartfelt letter to you (all the more in that the author is your fellow-countryman), no longer than 2 or 3 pages (how much time and leisure they have!), perhaps quoting a few of the canons to show that such baptisms may be performed, and begging your indulgence for weak consciences so that there may be peace in the Church and no one will be lording it over others with the superiority of their \u201ccorrectness.\u201d Instead, their open letter (and I dread to think of what they wrote to you privately) was a cold and calculating vehicle for their self-esteem, behind a mask of absolutely fake humility and \u201cspirituality\u201d (the Russians would call it \u201coily\u201d), with the purpose of discrediting and squashing you thoroughly and establishing a \u201cparty line\u201d of \u201ccorrectness.\u201d This approach is Jesuitical, not Orthodox. Father Herman, who has a thoroughly Russian approach to such things, said after reading the letter: \u201cthe man who wrote this does not believe in God,\u201d which is to say: everything holy, spiritual, and canonical in it is used for some ulterior motive, and the letter is devoid of Orthodox heart and feeling. I do not know Fr. Alexis, but I suspect that he is better than the letter\u2014in fulfilling the \u201cparty line\u201d of Fr. Panteleimon, he and other monks there put aside their own selves and become blind implements for the \u201ccause.\u201d<\/p>\n
We know from much bitter experience already that this \u201cparty spirit\u201d is entirely the work of Fr. Panteleimon\u2014he allows others to do the \u201cdirty work\u201d for him, but he supervises it all. The \u201cdirty work\u201d is sometimes so repulsive\u2014discrediting and discouraging people like you, taking over Synod publications (you aren\u2019t the first one!), undermining the authority of our bishops and theologians (their oily talk of how they act only with the approval of bishops is a totally false front)\u2014that we sometimes wonder if Fr. P. is even sincere, if all this \u201cspirituality\u201d and kindness and generosity aren\u2019t just an act. But we would prefer to believe as Dr. Kalomiros does (or did), that Fr. P. is a talented and sincere man who has been deceived by his own success and fallen into the fanatical mistake of believing he is always \u201cright.\u201d However that may be, he is one of the big problems in our Church today, and his Jesuitical web is so sticky that there is almost\u2019 no chance that he can become unentangled from it. He seems to be heading toward the formation of his own \u201cjurisdiction.\u201d Several of our bishops already openly speak of him as ready to follow the example of the Dutch Church\u2014even though it is obviously to his advantage to remain in our Russian Church as long as he can set the \u201ctone\u201d for everyone else.<\/p>\n
This whole episode has probably discouraged you immensely, perhaps even inspired thoughts of \u201cwhat\u2019s the use of laboring in the Church if this is the outcome?\u201d We have observed this response in others, and have even felt it a little ourselves, even though they haven\u2019t attacked us openly yet (they are still gathering their materials for the \u201copen letter\u201d to us and waiting to see if we might still remain \u201cobedient\u201d to them), and therefore we can tell you an antidote based on some experience: have as little contact with the Boston \u201cparty\u201d as possible. Do not accept them as an authority, but also do not waste time arguing against them (in the eyes of their audience they will always defeat the \u201cenemy,\u201d as always happens in party politics). Continue your labors as much as possible as if they did not exist. In other words, stay out of their web, don\u2019t be infected by their way of thinking, even to oppose. Think and labor independently from them.<\/p>\n
They have built a church career for themselves on a false but attractive premise: that the chief danger to the Church today is lack of strictness. No\u2014the chief danger is something much deeper\u2014 the loss of the savor of Orthodoxy, a movement in which they themselves are participating, even in their \u201cstrictness,\u201d To keep alive spiritually, we must be constantly striving to keep this savor\u2014something which Dr. Kalomiros also talks about, although sometimes he seems to relapse into the \u201ccorrectness\u201d syndrome himself. It is he, by the way, who told us that the Synod of Auxentios has now declared the new-calendarist Sacraments invalid, although he emphasizes that this is for a different reason than the Mathewites have\u2014the latter legalistically declaring them invalid because of \u201cschism,\u201d but the former because the heresy of the N.C.\u2019s has now become absolutely clear and open. I will look up his letter and quote what he says in a later letter\u2014he wrote us this last fall, I believe, but I know that several bishops opposed it (including Bp. Petros in N.Y.), and perhaps they have now split up into two or more jurisdictions over this point. May God preserve our Synod from this path! This \u201crightness\u201d which divides is probably largely responsible for the turn back to the \u201cleft\u201d which Archbp. Anthony of Geneva seems to be making. The path of true moderation is therefore in danger.<\/p>\n
Please tell us something of Archimandrite Cyprian of Phyle and his attitude to these matters. We have few contacts in Greece, and have not found there the balance which we see in the best representatives of our Russian tradition. Dr. Kalomiros writes us that Fr. P. went off the track when he saw that he knew better than the \u201csimple Greeks\u201d of the Old Calendar (and we see that he has the same attitude toward our \u201csimple Russians\u201d), but that thereby he lost contact with the living tradition of Orthodoxy, not receiving the tradition from those he loved and respected, but rather logically thinking it out himself. I think there is much truth in this\u2014but let the rest of us struggle the harder to love those who hand down the tradition to us and don\u2019t let what they give us be taken away by \u201clogic\u201d and \u201ccorrectness.\u201d<\/p>\n
We ask your prayers for us.<\/p>\n
With love in Christ our Saviour,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Brother in Christ, Andrew, Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ. I was just preparing to answer your last letter, intending to venture the guess that you will soon be receiving a \u201cfriendly open letter\u201d from Boston\u2014when lo and behold, with yesterday’s mail we received a copy of this very letter from Boston! Actually, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}