soldier and
servant unto his life's end."
Tolstoi exalted only Christ's Sermon on the Mount, _i.e.,_ only Christ's
teaching, or part of Christ's teaching. The Orthodox Church exalted Christ
himself, as an exceptional, dramatic Person, suffering for good; as a
divine hero, fighting against all the evil powers of the world. A teaching
or a life drama--_i.e.,_ Tolstoi or Orthodoxy! The Church thought: there is
something greater than Christ's words, that is Christ Himself. His words
are extraordinary, it is true, no man spoke as He, but His person and His
life were more extraordinary still. Thousands of martyrs died for _Him_,
not for the _Sermon on the Mount_. His words died with His death and came
to life again only with His resurrection. The fate of His words was quite
dependent on the fate of His person. Consequently His words have been only
a shadow of His personal drama, only an inadequate expression of His
individuality and His world mission, only the secondary fascination for the
coming generation. He himself was the essence of the human drama; He
himself--the essence of God and Man; He himself--the incarnated good and
the standard of the good in the world's history. He is incomparably better
than Zeus, Jupiter, Wothan or Perun, because He is a reality, a divine
reality among men.
The "Petrified" Church.
So Professor Harnack from Berlin called the Orthodox Church of the East. I
know his reasons for that very well. Comparing the unchangeable image of
Christ, fixed in the East once for all, with the confusing thousand
_opinions_ of Christ in Protestant Germany, he was quite justified in
calling our Church by a striking name, so differentiating her from his own.
I am glad that he invented the name "petrified." With the proud spirit of a
Protestant scientist, I wonder why He did not invent a worse name for
Eastern Orthodoxy. I wonder much more that Professor Harnack, one of the
chief representatives of German Christianity, omitted to see how every
hollow that he and his colleagues made in traditional Christianity in
Germany was at once filled with the all-conquering Nietzscheanism. And I
wonder, lastly, whether he is now aware that in the nineteen hundred and
fourteenth year of our Lord, when he and other destroyers of the Bible, who
proclaimed Christ a dreamy maniac, clothed Christianity in rags,
Nietzscheanism grew up the real religion of the German race.
What is the fact about the "petrified" Church? If
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