The Healing of Schism

One of the differences between the West and the Eastern Orthodox churches is in full display this week as the Orthodox are observing Holy Week. In Orthodoxy, Holy Week is not part of Lent proper, and began last Friday evening with services of Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday (then connection between the two is suggested in John 11.)

Why the difference in the dates of Easter? Don’t ask me. It does have a great deal to do with the fact that Orthodox use the old Julian Calendar, which runs 13 days behind the “new” Gregorian Calendar. If you base your dating on the first full moon after the Spring equinox, as it was stated in an early church council, then March 21 becomes the baseline. Except that when the Julian Calendar reads March 21 it’s April 3, hence the full moon that is counted may not be the same one used by the other.

Why can’t everyone adopt the “new” Gregorian Calendar? While some Orthodox Churches in the West have finally done so (except for dating Easter), the fact that the new calendar bears the name of a pope (Gregory XIII in 1582) has not helped it gain wide acceptance among the Orthodox.

It’s no secret the Orthodox have problems with the papacy, although there have been great strides in opening up dialogues beginning in the 1960s, when the official anathemas that precipitated the Great Schism were lifted. Pope John Paul II fervently hoped for and worked for reunion. Last November he arranged for the return of relics of two saints dear to the Eastern Church—John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzus. The relics had been taken from Constantinople during its sacking by soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, a date and event that lives in infamy among the Orthodox. (The relics were taken to Venice then Rome, where they remained in the Vatican until 2004.)

I have heard modern arguments break out about 1204. Christians are called upon to forgive sins against each other and the Lord makes that clear in the Gospels. One thing that I would point out to Western Christians baffled by Orthodox sensitivity to something that happened 800 years ago is that Orthodoxy does have a very real, palpable sense of the oneness of the past and present of the Church. For this reason the martyrs of the early centuries are very much present in the daily consciousness of the observant Orthodox; and the fathers of the Church, such as John and Gregory, speak in the hearing of our own ears in 2004 with a living voice. (I do not mean to imply that other churches have no sense of this.) There is, I think, less idea of time as linear, more (in emphasis at least) an experience of the whole history of the church as still present.

I say this not to excuse any lack of charity but simply to note that something being simply “a long time ago” in the Orthodox Church is not quite how its history is viewed and experienced. It stems in part, I think, from its peculiarly intense orientation to liturgical time.

Such run the subtle differences between East and West: some of them perhaps due to historical circumstances, others due to differences in theological emphases. The history of Russia, homeland of what is counted the largest Orthodox Church, is a case in point of historical circumstances that create a separation that remains ever present.

Whenever I think of the Russian view of its own place in Christian Europe, I think of this this notion of separation expressed by Pushkin:

“The division of the churches separated us from Europe. We did not take part in a single one of its great events. But we had our own special predestination. Russian and its vast expanses absorbed the Mongol invasion. The Tatars did not dare cross our western borders. They retreated to their deserts and Christian civilization was saved. To achieve this goal our way of life underwent a change that, while preserving us as Christians, alienated us from the Christian world.” (Written October 19, 1836. My source for this quote is the screenplay of The Mirror, by Andrei Tarkovsky.)

The historical experience of Orthodox cannot simply be thrown off as something a long time ago, and grasping this alienation might aid in drawing closer together. Of course, there may be other events in the future, known only to God, that will bring Christians closer to one another. But those we cannot know nor engineer.

We can only take practical steps as wisdom dictates. One bit of wisdom I recently picked up was from the film The Fog of War. In this documentary, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara noted that the one lesson learned during the Cuban missile crisis that helped Russia and the United States avoid nuclear war was the realization that the President’s best hope for a peaceful resolution was to put himself in the shoes of Krushchev and figure out what he needed to do that would allow them both to back off and at the same time save face.

Of course Christians have the “luxury” (via our Lord’s teaching) of acting in humility and asking forgiveness of one another. Also, bearing the wounds and burdens of the other. Those who can place themselves in the shoes of the East may offer, outside of intervening acts of God through history, the best way forward in healing our schisms, of which the differing date of Easter is but a symptom.