Greg excels at getting me unusual books for Christmas, and so this year I find myself with a fine collection of books on Orthodox history, thought and theology. Only one from Frederica is recent, the others are all old, and three are from the 1800’s. You’ve got to love the language and the pacing of these older books that come from the days when apparently no one was ever in a hurry. What was a better thing to do than read, and so why in the world would you write any sentence of less than 50 words? If there’s one thing I’ve figured out about your Victorian writers, it’s that they loved flowery prose.

But having given that disclaimer, I was amazed by the assessment of the Orthodox Church given in the introduction of “The History of the Holy Eastern Church” by Rev. John Mason Neale (pub. 1850). I offer it here just because though the writing is dated, I thought it was a wonderful:

I shall write of Prelates not less faithful, of Martyrs not less constant, of Confessors not less generous, than those of Europe; shall shew every article of the Creed guarded with as much scrupulous jealousy; shall adduce a fresh crowd of witness to the Faith once for all delivered to the Saints. In the glow and splendour of Byzantine glory, in the tempests of the Oriental middle ages, in the desolation and tyranny of the Turkish Empire, the testimony of the same immutable Church remains unchanged. Extending herself from the sea of Okhotsk to the palaces of Venice, from the ice-fields that grind against the Solevetsky monastery to the burning jungles of Malabar, embracing a thousand languages, and nations, and tongues, but binding them together in a golden link of the same Faith, offering the Tremendous Sacrifice in a hundred Liturgies, but offering it to the same God, and with the same rites, fixing her Patriarchal Thrones in the same cities as when the Disciples were called Christians first at Antioch, and James, the brother of the Lord, finished his course at Jerusalem, oppressed by the devotees of the False Prophet, as once by the worshippers of false gods, — she is now, as she was from the beginning, multiplex in her arrangements, simple in her faith, difficult of comprehension to strangers, easily intelligible to her sons, widely scattered in her branches, hardly beset by her enemies, yet still and evermore, what she delights to call herself — One, Only, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

ps: If you’re not a fan of the archaic styling, you can at least be in awe of the great feats of composition: that last sentence is 167 words long.

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Follow-up –
Lest all that sound too triumphalistic, I can offer the next paragraph as an admission that the Orthodox Church had her critics then as she has them now, even if Rev. John Mason Neale isn’t one of them:

Such she is: and yet being so, she has not escaped, any more than her Great Head escaped, the tongue of calumny. Protestant controversialists attack her, because she holds uncorrupted the Faith of S. Athanasius and S. Chrysostom; Roman theologians condemn her as a withered and sapless branch, cut off from the communion of the first See, and now ready for the fire; infidel travellers contrast the ‘noble simplicity’ of the Imposter of Mecca with the ‘complicated superstitions’ of the Christian East. Everywhere is the cry against her, that her Priests are sunk in ignorance, her people enslaved to bigotry; that she exists only because she has so long existed, and acts with the mechanism of an automaton; that her want of missionary zeal proves her deficiency in vital energy, and that the hour of peril will crush her, like a hollow image, to dust.

For eighteen hundred years [two thousand, now], it might be answered, this venerable Communion has fought the good fight, and borne about in her body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

I’m not sure if that helps with any unseemliness of the first passage, but when I first started investigating Orthodox history, I came to the same conclusion: we Orthodox don’t look at the Church and love her so much as we behold the miracle of her existing at all and love the Lord.

(Don’t know if that makes sense or reflects a common feeling or just a personal one, but heck, if Rev. John Mason Neale can pontificate a little, so can I, right?)