Mr
James Rutledge Roesch has written a noteworthy set of essays lately titled ‘The
Remnant’. The last is the best of the
three, and we would like to quote one part that we consider particularly
important for the folk of Dixieland. Mr
Roesch says about religion in the South,
We must go back to church – though not just
whatever your family’s traditional denomination was, but to an orthodox
Christian church of whatever denomination or maybe even of no denomination. For
one, it is what we always should have been doing together. The very reason that
the Jewish people had to survive as a ‘faithful remnant’ was that they betrayed
the covenant of their fathers for the false gods of the Philistines. For
another, it is the only way that we are going to endure these tribulations
together. The Jewish people were only able to remain faithful to their covenant
because they did not disperse as individuals but cohered together in diaspora
communities. Last, but not least, what Cleanth Brooks called ‘The Enduring
Faith’ of the South has historically been free from the Gnostic heresies of
Puritanism which revolutionised American Christianity and (in a secularised but
no less zealous form) America’s civic religion. ‘The best one can say,’
remarked Brooks, ‘is that a venerable tradition has not been wholly lost – that
there remains at least a foundation upon which to rebuild.’
--https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/the-remnant-part-iii/
Mr
Roesch definitely has the right idea, that Christianity is key to preserving
the South as a people. But he
nevertheless is unable to break free of the relativism inherent in
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism:
Dixie’s folk are to go ‘to an orthodox Christian church of whatever
denomination or maybe even of no denomination.’
This
is not how the Church works, whether under the Old Covenant or the New. The Jewish people, whom Mr Roesch refers to,
were not allowed the ‘freedom’ to create, recreate, or uncreate
‘denominations’. The Holy Trinity gave
them a particular form of worship from the Holy Prophet Moses, and they were
not to deviate from it. When they did,
there were severe repercussions (e.g., King Uzziah in II Chronicles 26; Korah,
Dathan, and Abiram in Numbers 16).
Likewise,
God gave to the Holy Apostles the form of worship for the New Israel, the
Church: the Divine Liturgy, the central
focus of which is the receiving by the faithful of the actual Body and Blood of
the Lord Jesus Christ. This form of
worship, like the Mosaic form, is not to be changed, either.
It
is precisely in this unity of worship that the unity of a people is
maintained. There may be (and often have
been) some cultural variations in the Divine Liturgy over the last 2,000 years
as Christianity has spread from Jerusalem to Spain to Japan, etc., but the core
elements remain the same. However, making allowance for ‘whatever denomination’
or ‘no denomination’ in Dixie’s religious life is a death sentence for her.
Mr
Roesch seems to understand this to a degree when he speaks of the need for a unifying
‘Southern Law’ akin to the Jewish Mosaic Law, and when he says in Note 4 of his
essay, ‘ . . . ‘the Real Old-Time Religion’ of the South, so to speak, had more
in common with the Christianity of Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot,
C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien.’ In
other words, the South must have something like the High-Church Anglican or
Roman Catholic worship to really be herself.
But as we alluded to earlier, the Protestant and Roman Catholic ‘branches’
of the Church have not been faithful to the Apostolic form of Christian life
and worship. The Apostles did not
designate kings to be heads of churches (Anglican) nor did they decree that one
bishop should reign supreme over all his brother bishops (Roman Catholic), to
name just a couple of ways these confessions have gone astray.
The
religious home that the South is seeking is not these but rather the Orthodox
Church. She alone has retained the
Apostolic Faith in its wholeness and purity, and she alone will be able to
protect the integrity of the Southern ethnos from the vicious assaults of her
enemies just as she did the Russians, Georgians, and others under the
Communists, the Greeks under the Turks, Constantinople under the iconoclasts, the
West and the East under the Arians, and so on.
Dixie’s
Christian roots, and those of the West and Africa in general, lie in the soil
of the Orthodox Church. Before there was
a Protestant Reformation, there was Orthodoxy.
Before there was a Roman Catholic Papacy, there was Orthodoxy. Before there were Coptic separatists, there
was Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church is
the Church of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father,
and the communion of the Holy Ghost (II Cor. 13:14); the Church of the Fair and
Comely Tree of the Cross, the Uncreated Light of God, and the deification of
man and the cosmos; the Church of Pentecost, the Holy Apostles, and the Seven
Ecumenical Councils; the Church of Sts Anthony the Great and Macarius the Great
of Egypt and Moses the Ethiopian; of Sts Laurence the Archdeacon of Rome,
Patrick of Ireland, and Boniface of Germany; of Sts Herman and Jacob of Alaska
and Ephraim of Arizona. She is the Ascended
and Glorified Body of Christ, the Garden of the Holy Ghost, a lovelier paradise
than Eden. And she is earnestly crying
to the South, ‘Enter in!’
We
appreciate all the good things the Roman Catholics and the Protestants have
given the world (Bach, Tolkien, and so on), but, please forgive us, they are not
the Church. Sadly, those belonging to
those institutions have sundered themselves from the fulness of the Faith. How thankful we are, therefore, that more and
more Southerners are beginning to answer the invitation of the Orthodox Church
to ‘enter in’. But for those who are
still hesitant, one figure in particular might be helpful to highlight in order
to calm their unease, a Frenchman, one of Dixie’s kinsmen, named Father
Rene-Francois (later, Vladimir) Guettee (reposed in 1892):
The future Fr.
Vladimir was born 1 December 1816, in the town of Blois, on the Loire River in
central France. René-Francois, as he was
called, received an upbringing typical for a boy from a wealthy and respected
family of that time. From his first
lessons with the local curé, he went on to seminary and completed the graduate
program. Even then he sensed the error
of the scholastic approach, although it was still some time before he was
sufficiently equipped to be able to repudiate it.
Ordained a Roman
Catholic priest in 1839, he was first an assistant pastor in a small country
town, and later had his own flock elsewhere, where he organized a school for
children. His scholarship-his work in the libraries, his love for reading and
textual analysis-drew the attention of the local bishop. It was at this time that the 32-year old
Guettée came out with his twelve-volume History of the Church in France. Soon
thereafter Guettée moved to Paris, where he found himself under attack by the
cardinal of that city and the Jesuits, who vehemently objected to the strongly
Gallican spirit of his History.
With the promulgation
of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin (1854), which
likewise troubled many other clergy and laity, Guettée began publication of The
Catholic Review, a journal in which he tried to refute this error. As he himself later recalled, the issue
forced him to reexamine the grounds for the Roman Catholic teaching regarding
the papacy. "Here I began to look at the papacy first-hand. ... And I saw
it for what it really was. ... I re-read the words of the most erudite defenders
of the papacy, and I became convinced that it is based neither on Holy
Scripture nor on the Tradition of the Church Universal."
Guettée's examination
of the papacy opened his eyes to a whole system of errors, which, under his
scrutiny, "collapsed like the walls of Jericho at Joshua's trumpets."
Increasingly
disaffected by Roman Catholicism, Guettée would no doubt have wandered about in
limbo for some time were it not for a providential encounter with Fr. Joseph
Vassiliev, who served the chapel in the Russian embassy on rue Grenelle, and
who assisted Guettée in his move towards Orthodoxy. Fr. Guettée renamed his journal The Christian
Union. Initially published under the
editorial guidance of Fr. Joseph, the journal attracted a number of
collaborators, including the Russian slavophile, Alexis Khomiakov. It held aloft the banner of Orthodoxy,
deflecting the attacks and slanders of its adversaries, and exposing the
Catholic propaganda spread by Russians who had fallen prey to the Jesuits. In
its pages Vladimir Soloviev was soundly rebuffed for his Uniate pretentions.
The journal likewise proved valuable in acquainting Roman Catholic theologians
with the teachings of the Orthodox faith.
If Fr. Guettée had any
lingering doubts concerning Orthodoxy, they were dispelled by Bishop Leonty of
Petersburg, who came to Paris for the consecration of the Russian church. By
this time no half-way solution such as Jansenism or Old Catholicism could
satisfy Fr. Guettée. He saw that outside
of Orthodoxy, everything else simply wandered around or near the truth, but
only Orthodoxy possessed it.
"From my
conversations with His Grace," wrote Fr. Guettée, "it became clear
that although formally I was not Orthodox, I was nevertheless a genuinely
Orthodox writer....And I fervently desired to become Orthodox in deed, i.e., to
belong to the Russian Church." An
exception was made and, by order of the Holy Synod, Guettée was received into
the Orthodox Church in his clerical rank (under the present circumstances such
economy would clearly be inadmissible).
"I became Orthodox," said Fr. Guettée, "without having
read a single book about Orthodoxy, simply having studied the Fathers of the
Church, the decrees of the first ecumenical councils, and the incontestable
facts of the history of the Church."
In answer to those who
scornfully referred to Orthodoxy as a "schism," Fr. Vladimir titled
the first part of his theologico-historical work, The Schismatic Papacy. It was
followed by a second volume, The Heretical Papacy. Instead of any scholarly refutations or
arguments, Fr. Guettée was showered with abuse, anonymous letters, threats. Still, among the more perceptive and honest
of the Roman Catholic theologians were those who understood the essence of
these works. An eminent German
theologian responded, "This is one of those works which is absolutely
irrefutable!" Fr. Vladimir became Orthodox from within, from study and
reflection. Apart from the services in
the Russian Church in Paris, he was still not acquainted with the external
aspects of Orthodoxy. Then he went to Russia, where he found himself immersed
in a thoroughly Orthodox milieu. "Everything in the conduct of the services
was majestic, solemn, superb-without being in the least theatrical! Such a contrast to what we have become
accustomed in the West. This is what
struck me first. In their profound simplicity of services, which transport the
spirit back to the Church of the first centuries, the bishop, priest, deacon,
and devout people comprise a single entity, offering praise to God and
entreating His mercy."
At the recommendation
of the professors of the Moscow Academy, Fr. Vladimir was awarded the rank of
doctor of theology, and he was given a diploma written up by Metropolitan
Philaret himself. He also had the honor
of being received by Tsar Alexander II.
His enthusiasm and
love for Russian Orthodoxy did not mean, however, that in order to be Orthodox
one necessarily had to become Russian, Greek, Serbian... And this point of view, held by Fr. Guettée,
was wholly shared by his Russian friends and supporters.
Returning to France he
commenced work on his monumental History of the Church. The work was designed
to show "what seems evident enough-that the Orthodox Church is the heir of
the Early Church. And a faithful heir, having neither added to nor changed the
doctrines of the faith. For this reason
this is the true Apostolic Church of Christ."
In order to work in
peace, Fr. Guettée was compelled to emigrate from his native France. He moved
to Luxembourg, and there managed to produce seven of the ten proposed volumes
of his History. His missionary
accomplishments also include translation into French of the Divine Liturgy of
St. John Chrysostom, with explanatory notes, and publication of An Explanation
of the Doctrine of the Orthodox Church: Differences with other Christian
Churches. His autobiographical book, Memoirs of a Roman Catholic Priest Who
Became Orthodox (Paris 1889), was soon translated into Russian and, in view of
Roman Catholic proselytizing efforts today, deserves to be reprinted. Guettée
died March 10/23, 1892, at the age of 76.
His remains were brought back to Paris for the funeral and were buried
in the Batignole cemetery. On the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent, 1992, in
commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of his repose, clergy of the
Russian Church Abroad served a memorial service at his grave.
. . .
--Originally published in Orthodox America,
‘A Roman Catholic Abbe Who Became an Orthodox Priest’, https://web.archive.org/web/20170224063930/http://roca.org/OA/126-127/126g.htm
The
South has entered a dangerous time in her history, where she is facing hordes
of enemies within and without, perils from her own people and from
outsiders. A misstep now could be fatal;
likewise, a right choice could lead to immeasurable good. To try to unite around creeds and
institutions that have not been true to the Apostolic Orthodox faith and
worship would be suicidal for the South; but to enter into the life of the
Orthodox Church of her forebears, as her cousin Fr Rene/Vladimir did, would be
her greatest blessing.
These
are hard words for a South steeped in Protestant individualism, but those
Southrons who heed them will understand just how true they are.
***
Another
article about Fr Guettee similar to the one above is here:
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Vladimir_(Guett%C3%A9e)
His
book about the Papacy may be read here:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/Guettee_ThePapacy.pdf
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
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