www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology The Rule of the Mother of God

I pray it, on my own. I find using the truncated rule more in line w/ Eastern praxis.

Anything truncated is not Eastern praxis. We like it full on, repetitive, as long as possible and hard on the legs.

"No Father has ever taught the Immaculate Conception, with the possible exception of St. Dimitri of Rostov; but, as we all know, St. Dimitri, like many other Russian Churchmen of his era, was heavily influenced by Latin ideas."
http://orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/review_toc.aspx

Dear Father Ambrose,

Fr. John Meyendorff notes a few Orthodox churchmen who did accept the Immaculate Conception.

I don't know if they qualify as "Fathers," but they did. All my Meyendorff books are out on indefinite loan . . .

St Dmitri personally held the belief in the IC, as did all the graduates of the Kievan Academy and many professors there. I believe Alexander Schmemann or was it George Florovsky mentioned this in their writings.

That the Kievan Baroque was under Western influence . . . HELLO!

Alex

Bless Father Ambrose,

Then you will love the Rule of the Theotokos!

(I will stop nattering on this now . . .)

Alex

Bless Father,

Just two more things.

"More important" does not mean "replace." That is the assumption you yourself make.

The revelation about the Rule of Prayer of the Theotokos was made directly to St Seraphim of Sarov who also said the Rule was revealed by Her to a monk of the Thebaid in the 8th century i.e. to recite daily 150 Hail Mary's "and at one time all Christians recited it daily."

I pray this Rule daily, acquaintances of mine who are EC of the "Orthodox in communion with Rome" variety do so as well. There are also many RC's who don't pray the Rosary. Again, this is a private revelation which is mentioned in even such a text as the Orthodox Encyclopedia, 2003.

I don't replace anything by this Rule. If you'll forgive me, I pray seven akathists daily, the Rule of the Optina Fathers, seven Kathismata and others. In no wise has it ever occurred to me to lay aside any of this because of the Rule of the Theotokos.

Again asking for your forgiveness,

Alex

The Rosary is said by several in my parish. In my conversations with people I have not discouraged this as some do but I have encouraged them to use the Byzantine forms of the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be and the Nicene Creed rather than the Apostle's Creed and Troparia of the Feasts rather than just saying: "the first joyous mystery, the Annunciation"

Parish wise we encourage any prayer you will stick with. That might be the Rosary, the Jesus prayer, the Office, the Akathist, Lectio Divina.

Myself, I use it occasionally.

My mother prays it daily.

To accept that after faithfully maintaining its tradition for 1,700 years the Orthodox Church would introduce a new dogma is to seriously misunderstand Orthodoxy and the dynamics of tradition. The fact that a minor school of academics may have toyed with the IC in Kiev (hardly the centre of Orthodoxy) does not impose this dogma on Moscow or Jerusalem, Constantinople or Belgrade. While a few people in Kiev may have thought erroneously (remember that Saint Dimitri was called before the Holy Synod to explain this) the pleroma of the Church simply went on its way, with no thought of altering its Faith.

And, oddly enough, the converse holds true, with Catholic Churches rejecting the Immaculate Conception. This emanates from their ancestral Orthodoxy whose doctrine did not include the IC and so they never brought it with them when they entered into union with Rome. Refer to the Melkite section at http://www.ewtn.com/library/LITURGY/EASTRITE.TXT One could offer other references but I am sure you know them already.

Bless Father Ambrose,

Yes, the Kievan tradition did go through a period of Latinization.

One could see this as being inevitable, given the tremendous intellectual and cultural pressures emanating from the West which resulted in many Orthodox aristocratic families in western Ukraine fall prey, not to Eastern Catholicism/the Unia, but directly to Roman Catholicism.

At that time, Russia was an intellectual, cultural and theological non-entity, or as it was called in Kiev, "barbaric Muscovy." In the seventeenth century, almost all the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church were taken from "Little Russia" or Ukraine. Those bishops were academically well-trained, men of broad culture and deep spirituality.

They were also well-acquainted with Western Catholicism, sufficiently so that they could borrow much from the West with which they felt they could better combat the onslaught of Roman Catholicism led by the Jesuits.

Scholasticism had permeated Orthodoxy too - and directly from Western Catholicism rather than the Unia.

Perhaps Orthodoxy, at that time, did not yet have sufficient answers to the Western scholastic development - it needed to developed its own theoria and praxis to answer it and, in so doing, took on a number of influences as exemplified by wholesale acceptance of the Western doctrine of Original Sin (which inevitably led to the acceptance of the Immaculate Conception doctrine in a number of theologians and Orthodox saints - which in no wise prevented their glorification as saints by Orthodoxy nevertheless).

Kiev itself met the challenge to Orthodoxy by the West. The Kievan academy not only produced a flowering of great minds and souls for Orthodoxy - it overcame the Western view of the Orthodox East as being intellectually inferior and the like. Latin became, as we know, the lingua franca of the Kievan Mohyla Academy which attracted the best minds of western Europe until the 19th century.

And the Western scholastic influence affected Russian Orthodoxy as well beginning with Tsar Peter I who shared the West's estimation of much of Russian Orthodox culture.

What Moscow has today is largely what it took and inherited from its Mother, Kiev.

The Kievan Saints did not so much want to introduce new doctrines, as they wanted to use Western paradigms to understand Orthodoxy. They could well have erred in accordance with contemporary Orthodox standards. But they were no prevented from being glorified as saints by Orthodoxy nevertheless.

Russian Orthodoxy, for a variety of reasons, had a love-hate relationship with the Catholic West. Yet, Russian Orthodox intellectuals could find themselves at home within the Western cultural milieu. Russian Orthodox who entered the Church and rose in the ranks as Hierarchs and monastic leaders, such as St Tikhonn of Zadonsk, brought with them their deep personal culture, academic development and wide weltanschauung from within a profoundly Orthodox spiritual context.

And that was to Orthodoxy's benefit in the long run. It helped the ROC overcome its tendency toward isolationism with respect to the West and its fear of losing its identity as a result of contact with the West.

St Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain as well delved into the spiritual literature of the West and even translated the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises (for which he got into a good deal of trouble - but refused to disown his translations of Western spiritual works).

Greek Orthodox teachers like St Nicodemos today have much to say to Roman Catholic and Protestant audiences because they established a bridge between East and West with their desire to reach out to Western devotional and spiritual traditions, in the process making them their own.

The contributions of not only the Kievan Saints, but also of those Greek theologians who could read Aquinas and invoke him privately, as Meyendorff noted, expanded not only Orthodox thought, but Western thought about Orthodoxy as well.

Alex

Whether the fear of losing its identity was a motivating factor for Russia, I do not know but it is not so these days as, thanks to the heavenly prayers of the millions of Russian martyrs of the 20th century, Orthodoxy is re-establishing itself there with great confidence and security. The fear now is that it is Western (European) Christianity which is facing a loss of identity.

I am no theologian but...... even I can see the impact of Augustinianism in the Russian Church.

It is obvious that there was a *reason* for the 1917 All-Russian Council and why it got rid of the western-style Most Holy Governing Synod; there was a reason that discerning traditionalists such as Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky of Kiev wrote what they did against the entrenchment of Roman-derived scholasticism (from which even the Board of Censors was not immune)... and this would have had a much more profound effect had the Revolution not happened when it did.

But I am only a lame-brained monk...

The regular Roman Catholic Rosary is also used in the Western Rite parishes of the Church of Antioch.

Bless Father!

I disagree most strenuously with what you have just said about yourself, Father.

You are, in fact, a deeply erudite and spiritual Orthodox holy father!!

You are more than correct re: Augustinianism in Orthodoxy. Ultimately, both East and West can find themselves in the writings of the Fathers.

For reasons not immediately obvious, Latin devotional practices in the 16th-18th centuries had a pulling influence on the Orthodox populace in Eastern Europe (as well as on those who had joined the Unia).

St Peter Mohyla brought in the Passia services (beautiful in themselves, and, as you know, popular throughout Ukraine and Russia to this day). Mohyla adapted many more Latin devotions to the Orthodox liturgical/para-liturgical framework - if I were going to do a master's or something like that in Eastern Christianity, I would focus on this fascinating subject!

And he did that to try to stop his Orthodox flock from becoming RC especially via those devotions. The UGCC did something quite similar which resulted in such things as the "Akathist to Christ the Lover of Mankind" (in effect, an extended litany to the Sacred Heart), the "Supplication Service" and others.

In many cases, the UGCC simply borrowed such from the existing texts and translations of the Mohyla Academy.

Throughout Galicia, there were Catholic roadside shrines which were set up by the people almost everywhere. Travellers would stop to pray before them and they were very popular. It was because they looked very Latin, with statues and the like, that Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky pursued an active agenda to get rid of them - which earned him a negative view among EC's especially at the time, in addition to the negative view of him owed to his pro-Great Russian stance.

It was, however, due to other circumstances that led to such close ties between Orthodoxy at Kiev and the Catholic West.

St Peter Mohyla, for example, was of aristocratic, even royal stock and he had family ties with the Royal Houses of Europe.

When St Athanasius, the Venerable Martyr of Brest, went to the Polish parliament to denounce its plan to impose the Unia of Brest on the Ruthenian peoples, the then king of Poland arrested him but brought him to Mohyla in Kiev to deal with him.

That act was one of courtesy out of respect for Mohyla's (quite illustrious) personal background. And Mohyla, for his part, told Fr. Athanasius Filipovich to "chill" a bit . . .

When the Lavra of Pochaev was returned to the Orthodox in the 19th century, Orthodox monks there complained to the Holy Synod that they didn't like the statues and other Latin decorations introduced at Pochaev by its greatest (Eastern Catholic) benefactor, Count Myron Pototsky (who is alluded to in the Orthodox akathist to the Theotokos of Pochaev, who gave of his inheritance to the staunchly anti-Unia skete of Manjava and who was interred at Pochaev in monastic garb). But the Synod simply told those monastics to leave everything as they found it, period.

The aristocratic Hierarch, St Joasaph (Zhevakhov), a descendant of St Joasaph of Belgorod, was a man of similar wide personal culture who dedicated himself to the Orthodox Church and who gave of his personal great fortune to begin archaeological digs at the site of the ancient monastery of Zverynetsky at Kiev.

It was perhaps because of this influence of Western theology on Orthodoxy then that resulted in the possibilities of cultural sharing being opened to the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe and Russia - I think that was to the benefit of both East and West.

Russian aristocrats who fled the Bolsheviks way back when came to live with my grandparents, my grandfather being an EC married priest and my grandmother a descendant of the Jablonowsky family - Auguste Jablonowsky having been a great friend of Count Pototsky and who worked with him to beautify the Pochaev monastery.

My grandparents protected them, nurtured them until they were ready to go on. My grandmother, who was a great Ukrainian patriot, often remarked, "Now those Russian aristocrats - they are a completely different pair of shoes, you know! "

The cultural imprint, both theological and secular, dating from the time of the Kievan Baroque, remains on Russian culture to this day. One need not keep the Augustinian/Western Catholic perspective, indeed they should be discarded.

As for the West and its religious identity - what can one say?

Kissing your right hand, I again ask for your blessing,

Alex

Proving that I am indeed unlearned I confess I do not know what Passia services are. Help!