One Page from the Diaries of Alexandra Schmemann: about (not)the Possibility of a Golden Age

Guseva Anna Andreevna PhD in Philosophy Scientific Associate, Department of Philosophical Problems of Social Sciences and Humanities 109240, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12, str.1 uhlein@rambler.ru Other publications by this author

The historical memory of the Russian emigration of the first wave is connected, first of all, with a retrotopic consciousness, dragging along certain processes of recommemoration, reconstructing the image of the past so that it takes on the features of the "golden age", a lost, sometimes painfully perceived topos that collects, structures and fills a person's life. More important than dates and events is the memory of them, collected in the myth – the story of Hierotopos; a geographically defined place is blurred in space, flowing into the era of the golden age, the story of which is impossible without "memory points", these are primarily religious holidays (in this case related to the tradition of the Orthodox Church), the narrative of the lost homeland, stored and protected speech. One of the "memory points" in Russian emigration is the Church, and the second is the idealized pre–revolutionary Russia.           

Prot. Alexander Schmeman, an outstanding theologian and church historian, kept diary entries throughout his life. Part of them, describing the decade from 1973 to 1983, was first published in 2005 and caused a huge resonance; discussions and disputes continue to this day, and this emphasizes the lively and polemical nature of the text.

            A man of Russian culture by birth, Fr. Alexander deeply absorbed both French and American culture – his early childhood was spent in Belgrade, then his family moved to Paris, where he studied in the cadet corps at Versailles, graduated from St. Sergius Theological Institute, taught church history; later, having created his family, moved to America. He, like many representatives of the emigrant circle, never returned to Russia (the image of Russia in the history of emigration gradually became what can be called a closed topos – "a place that is impossible to get to". Any sacralized space can become a place of pilgrimage, in this case we can talk about an open (hiero) topos, or a place transferred to a supramundane area, we will call it a closed (hiero) topos).

The environment that formed fr. Alexander lived with memories of the great Russia, which ceased to exist after 1917. Such an interruption of history - cf. translatio imperii as the transition of the metaphysical kingdom to another continuum - and its transfer to another space (which was perceived by some as an anti-space, "historical hole" - or "ascension beyond the world" to future times, this problem is solved in line with the choice between escapism and utopianism) was characteristic of representatives of the first generations of that wave. Finding a new place of residence by emigrants was often accompanied by the idea of recreating the motherland as a place of the golden age, and over time the place of the golden age became hierotopos, coinciding with the concept of an ideal place. It is curious that the topic of speech preservation also plays an important role in the theme of the golden age – and speech is not only the words themselves belonging to the language, obedient to the stylistic form. Penetrating through intonation and gestures, speech unfolds as what a person should do in the world, this is both the comprehension of physicality, and communicative interaction, and the handling of a thing - so, in fact, speech absorbs space. And space as speech (as part of speech) changes depending on the epoch and on the interpreters. Life "in memory", life as the retention of space became an integral feature of emigrant life.

Fr. Alexander Schmeman, on the contrary, as one might think, lives emphatically in the current history, solving the problem of the historical gap when memory goes into oblivion, turning again and again to the questions of what is considered the historical path of the church, Russia, Russian emigration. He is concerned about the problem of tradition, the correlation of "culture" and "piety", the connection between the church proper and the imperious.

The choice of the topic of the dissertation, which he wrote while studying at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute under the leadership of A.V. Kartashev, is very indicative from this point of view - "The fate of the Byzantine theocracy"; Fr. Alexander calls the main reason that provoked the fading of history "maximalism of Byzantine psychology", which led to a real tragedy – the theocracy honed over centuries "it rests on eschatology, on the abolition of history", when "the Church and the kingdom are thought of in their absolute aspect, in a perfect state, and not in their earthly reality" and the temptation becomes "anti-historicism, insensitivity of Christianity by Byzantium, as a way and history" ^[1]. This problem also belongs to the number of "spatial" - the expansion of the borders of any state always reaches the edge of the world (cf. the historical narrative vector "from sea to sea"), especially as it concerns the Byzantine Empire as a Christian ecumene.

The perception of Russia as a space present both in the world and above the world, its perversions, intertwining with the concept of the Golden Age is the most important theme that filled the texts of the Russian emigration of the first wave.

One of the pages of the "Diaries" of Fr. Alexander Schmeman (February 26, 1974 – reflections on Grain, Solzhenitsyn, the canon of the Rev. Andrei Kritsky) raises the whole set of problems related to the historical memory of the Russian emigration, the role of the Church in history and society, understanding the huge distance in the historical consciousness formed between the first and second generation of emigrants of the first wave. The reflection of the events of one day in the diary allows you to touch the hard work of understanding what is connected with Russia as a real and ideal topos: the spiritual crisis of Byzantium and Russia, ecclesiasticism, the historical development of Orthodoxy as a universal vs. national religion, the life of the "emigrant" church of the 1970s. Reading one page - taken at random, opened by chance but after all, any page of diaries is both a part and a whole as an expression of an epoch – leads to the intersection of roads where other texts are talking and arguing, where the 1970s correspond to the 1940s and 1920s, and the voices of those who have been gone for a long time are heard. 

            Russian Russian emigration has been the subject of controversy and discussion of Russian refugees – poets, philosophers, scientists seeking to find meaning and justification for the transfer of space, becoming part of a subculture or, on the contrary, entering the culture of the host. The first wave rose from 1918 and lasted until the beginning of World War II; Paris, Berlin, Belgrade, Sofia, Prague, Harbin become the receptacle of the concept of home, which Russian emigrants understand as "their own", that is, includes the whole world of predicates, which include borders, the support of the universe, home, according to in fact, a kind of paronym of the personality itself, which, among other things, includes the image of the temple with divine services and sacraments.

Schmeman read the memoirs of like-minded people with special interest: "I read N.M. Zernov's Abroad ... a useful book, with its breadth, benevolence, culture. An undoubted contribution to the history of emigration. About the first years of the Movement^[1], the Institute^[2]. Again, the power of obscurantism, which denied and vilified all this, is striking – which continues to this day. ...I was thinking about the disputes of those years: “Church” or “culture”. Personal piety, spiritual comfort – or "responsibility"" ^{[2, p.78]}.

The constant return and delineation of the outline of hierotopic Russia can also be traced in the speech of those who arrived later – for example, for A.I. Solzhenitsyn, who settled in Vermont in 1976, communication with the emigrants of the first wave, including the Schmemann family, was extremely important because of the opportunity to understand the image of Russia preserved in the memory of emigration. At the same time, for Fr. Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself, he was a witness and guardian of Russia belonging to another historical series (this is how two modifications of the hierotopos collide). In the entry on February 26, 1974, a line of reflections on Solzhenitsyn is outlined, which is intertwined with one of the most important knots: "The Russian theme in 20th-century Orthodoxy is apparently not accidental, but very deep - Solzhenitsyn is, in fact, about it. Orthodoxy cannot bypass this crisis, it is a question of centuries of completely detached ecclesiasticism, of the spiritual collapse of Byzantium first, and then of Russia" [ibid.].

The theme associated with A.I. Solzhenitsyn develops throughout the diary. On January 7, 1973, the first mention of it appears in the "Diaries". O. Alexander highly appreciates the "GULAG Archipelago", but at the same time notes a little lower: "I feel more and more that the "crisis" of the Church lies in the fact that the central theme of her life has become the question of how to "save" the Church. But this question has changed the share of Christianity in the world… Solzhenitsyn, it seems to me, is not busy “saving the Church”, but a man. And this is a more Christian concern than the “salvation of the Church”, in the name of which any lie, any compromise is accepted and justified. The greatness of Solzhenitsyn and his significance lies precisely in the fact that he “changes” the perspective, changes the question. But this is exactly what people are most afraid of and understand least of all" [ibid., p. 62].

Russian Russian priest was waiting for an opportunity to talk to Solzhenitsyn – according to Prot. G. Mitrofanov, "the Russian priest was now supposed to meet the Russian prophet" ^[3]. On May 28-31, 1974, in Switzerland, they meet, and the diary entry reflects in detail the conversation that took place: Solzhenitsyn sees himself as an anti-Lenin, called to turn the space back, that is, on May 28-31, 1974, in Switzerland, they meet, and the diary entry reflects in detail the conversation that took place: Solzhenitsyn sees himself as an anti-Lenin, called to turn the space back, that is there is, in fact, in that very golden age, but only what role in this topos will be assigned to the Church is unknown, because Solzhenitsyn, if I may say so, did not find the epoch of the formation of the representation of the golden age "with the Church", and he himself has not yet been ecclesiastical: "I don't even know the service, but so, "in the people's way," only with my soul" ^{[2, 126]}. In an entry dated November 15, 1974: "I shared with Nikita my worries about S. slipping towards "ideologism" and "doctrinarianism", his misunderstanding of the church situation, etc. I love him the same, even more — because now with some pain for him. I perceive and experience everything given and presented by him in the same way — as one of the most joyful, big, decisive events even in my personal life. I do not renounce a single word written about him. But when you stumble upon the most sacred and “last thing” for yourself: not the Church for Russia, but only in the infinitely transcendent, self—evident, all—exceeding truth of the Church - both Russia itself and everything in the world, then you feel a self-evident border of agreement with them - even with saints and geniuses… Here he must accept, here is the truth, beyond his jurisdiction and, most importantly, irreducible to anything, even the most beloved, the most precious in the world "this"" ^{[2, p. 127]}.

A sharp long-term dialogue, the theme of which was something that neither of them had witnessed, was necessary for both of them, and for Fr. Alexander, the image of Solzhenitsyn contained the image of a Russian ideal person, searching, active, talented. "Despite the fact that he was born in Reval, lived abroad all his life and never visited Russia, in his personality there was the same Russia in exile, which absorbed many of the best features of that historical Russia, which no longer existed on the territory of the Soviet Union. Russian Russian patriot, Orthodox pastor, and Soviet writer trying to become a Russian patriot and Orthodox Christian are essentially the discussion of Fr. Alexander and AI Solzhenitsyn."^[3].

In the article "About Solzhenitsyn", published in 1970, Schmeman notes that he is "flesh of flesh and blood of the blood of that Russia, which now exists alone in reality – Soviet Russia. Not pre-revolutionary and not revolutionary, but Soviet. The novelty of Solzhenitsyn the writer is that, belonging entirely to this Soviet reality, he is just as completely and completely free from it. Solzhenitsyn's freedom, or rather its novelty, consists in the fact that none of the types of such “liberations" can be applied to him. He has not “gone“ anywhere, he is not looking for any ”compensation" in other cultures, he is not a romantic of the past or the future, he does not want to breathe any other air. The Soviet world remains to the end and organically its world, its reality, so that it can be said about it that it is not free from Soviet reality, but in Soviet reality. And this creates a very special relationship between him and this world, and – in creative terms – now makes him alone capable of revealing this world from within, creatively explaining and, finally, overcoming it" ^[4].

The theme of overcoming, breakthrough, struggle is always present in the narrative of the golden age. To understand it, to make it visible – or even to achieve it – it is necessary to go beyond borders (any road is a path to the golden age, whether it concerns medieval pilgrimage, missionary journeys of equal–to-the-Apostles saints, any trips beyond the seas), and the first step is crossed out anti-space. Prot. A. Schmeman "considered it morally imperative for himself to understand the Russia that had already become Soviet, to understand not in order to dissolve into it, but to overcome it," and in this way "Solzhenitsyn's creativity became for him ..." ^[3], and even his language, so unlike on the solid clarity and grace of Nabokov's or Bunin's style, he explains how the language of truth is, adding: "such is now the living language of Russia" ^{[2, 180]}.

Great Thursday, May 1, 1975 – again about the speech: "Yesterday morning – a conversation on the phone with Solzhenitsyn. As always, listening to his voice, you forgive him everything – that is, all doubts, disagreements, perplexities dissolve, disappear. He is so full of everything he says and does..." ^{[2, p. 181]}. Russian Russian University Speaking about Solzhenitsyn's plans to establish a Russian university in Canada to train agronomists and other specialists for the future of Russia, Schmeman closes the ring, pulling it to the point of the beginning of Russian emigration – "naive to tears… Paris of the 20s!" ^{[2, p. 185]}. And yet, on May 12, 1975, an entry appears: "His treasure is Russia and only Russia, mine is the Church" ^{[2, p. 183]}.

The theme of national and universal, complex, multilevel and having no single solution, attracted, sometimes painfully, both Solzhenitsyn and Fr. Alexander Schmeman, and it is clear that the place of this confrontation was the image of the Russian Church. The universal Church contradicts the ideal of Russian Orthodoxy, which Schmemann describes as "detached" ethically, historically, ontologically from the "normal" Christian world, which leads either to pious reconciliation with evil, or to pious Manichaeism. The correlation of the universal and national in Christianity is indeed one of the acute problems of historical memory: Zernov is right, writes Schmeman, "the Russian church elite, unlike the Greeks, Serbs, etc., has always been aware of the universal nature of Orthodoxy. Russian Russian, but at the same time she lived in the “Byzantine” and “Russian” perspective, with an eternal turn to the Russian “special become”. The fact of the matter, however, is that neither Byzantium nor Russia are “universal” in themselves. Pushkin is “world-wide” because all his work is before the “historiosophical” temptation and the fall of the Russian consciousness. Every turn on oneself, every attempt to identify “one's own” a priori with the universal and universal immediately limits, and at depth leads to spiritual illness. The same eternal rule: do not create an idol for yourself" [ibid.], and this idol in this case just becomes the national golden age – hierotopos, a place that cannot be reached.

            The agonality of the national and universal, writes Schmemann, is also imbued with the Byzantine hymnography, which has entered the usus of Russian Christianity. In the recording on February 26, 1974 - "Yesterday in the church at matins they sang the whole second part of the canon [of Andrew of Crete]. And once again I was struck by the contrast between this divinely grandiose poetry, where God thunders, crushes, acts, reigns, saves, and the Byzantine troparia interspersed in it with their platonic focus on “my soul”, with a complete insensitivity to history as a Divine “theater". It is a sin there not to see God in everything and everywhere. Here – “impurity". There is treason, here is “desecration" by thoughts. There in every line is the whole world, the whole creation, here is a lonely soul. Two worlds, two keys. But the Orthodox hear and love mainly the second one" [ibid.].

The theme of the golden age implicitly directs, fills and inspires emigrant thought, forming the basis of historical consciousness, and, in essence, the comprehension of the purpose of Russia is caused by the same. For Schmemann, however, the golden Age was not a strictly historical concept, but rather a theohistorical one – it makes sense only in the context of Sacred History and Liturgy. Around the same time period (the 1970s), in one of his reports, Schmeman notes: "the dispute about Russia is one of the permanent dimensions of Russian history" ^[5]: "I remember from the first years of my life... one of the key emigrant phrases "The Church is all that we have left of Russia"" [ibid.]. At the same time, the church was the place where the emigrant entered Russia – it does not matter whether this church was converted from a garage or was in an apartment, if the liturgy was celebrated there. The Russian theme without any stretch, sincerely merged into the theme of the universal church, filling it with its content – so, on Good Friday, "the old metropolitan came out and over the shroud ... said, and Russia, like Christ, lies in the grave. And now Christ has risen – and Russia will rise again!" [ibid.], another example – while singing "On the Rivers of Babylon", "exile from paradise was perceived as exile from his country ... which the more time passed, the more it seemed like a lost paradise" [ibid.]. The rethinking happened because the church and faith require deepening and answering the question, "what do we remember when we sing "On the Rivers of Babylon"?" [ibid.]. And this leads to the idea that every person is an "exile on this earth," and the church abroad then because "we are abroad of this world," and the church, finding herself at home in a specific geographical topos, would betray herself, since Christians are exiles and wanderers.

(And here the disagreement with Solzhenitsyn becomes even clearer. On May 12, 1975, a year after the first meeting, Schmeman writes: "his worldview and ideology are reduced, in essence, to two or three terribly simple beliefs, in the center of which Russia stands as a self-evident focus" ^{[2, p. 183]}, "in Russia there is a certain conciliar personality, a living whole", it is necessary to return the "Russian spirit" lost in the Petrine era, returning to nature as an environment and to Christianity, "understood as the basis of personal and public morality" ^{[2, p. 184]} - however, for fr. Alexander, a completely different principle works: the place and role of Russia in the world requires a criterion that was it would be higher and greater than her, and this criterion is the fullness of the Church. The part cannot be the criterion of the whole, and therefore "the formula that the Church is only a projection of Russia had to be discarded" ^[6].)

Prot. Alexander Schmeman speaks about another feature of Russians (although representatives of other nations have it too) – "to interpret their own history as a kind of organic development" (here he makes a reference to Schelling and Hegel). "... We are constantly looking for a kind of golden age in our history ... about which one could say: "This was the real Russia!"" [ibid.]. The starting point may be the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich (Moscow Rus), or Kievan Rus, which Florovsky called the "golden yardstick of Russian history", or the cultural flourishing between Peter and Alexander III. But in Russian history there has always been a "struggle" of two traditions – Schmemann defines the first as the tradition of "historical pride" (Metropolitan Hilarion and later the idea of the Third Rome) or the period of glory under Peter; the second line is evangelical, because although we sought to look at Constantinople, but "the soul of Russia from the moment of its baptism mystically stayed ... in Jerusalem", "where Abbot Daniel put a candle for the Russian land" [ibid.]. As the author of the diaries notes, there is only one way out - the rejection of "historical pride" and all the golden ages, since the golden age is able to create a kind of anti-space in which the tread of the Byzantine imperial cosmos is heard, where there is no place for a person going to God among "piety", "traditions", "glory". So the Church, as a "point of memory" in this key, ceases to be the guardian of that Russianness, which is rather an introduction to its own national idiom, which makes it possible to experience the state of a "fugitive" - giving the opportunity to live inside Sacred history, or even, paradoxically, without it, which becomes quite a difficult task for the emigrant consciousness XX century .

Returning to the understanding of the problem of time, prot. Georgy Mitrofanov speaks about the problem of non-historicism of church life ^[7]. Fr. Alexander wrote that the main problem in Orthodoxy was not the very essence of Orthodoxy, that is, the Truth, but the "Orthodox world", "unchangeable because it is Orthodox, Orthodox because it is unchangeable" [ibid.]. So a metaphysical component is mixed with the topos, which, however, cannot yet make it a hierotopos. Prot. G. Mitrofanov quotes: "Since this world was inevitably and even radically changing, the first symptom of the crisis should be recognized as a deep schizophrenia that gradually entered the Orthodox psyche: life in an unreal, non-existent world, established as real and existing. The Orthodox consciousness “did not notice” the collapse of Byzantium, Peter's reform, revolution, did not notice the revolution of consciousness, science, everyday life, forms of life... In short, it didn't notice the story... In fact, it (Orthodoxy) is defined from within, and colored, and suppressed by precisely those “changes” that it denies, defined by a kind of “anguish”. This anguished departure of everyone — be it to the “Fathers", be it to the Typicon or to Catholicism, to Hellenism, to “spirituality", to Russianism, to everyday life, to lack, but certainly withdrawal, denial — is stronger than affirmation... This impossibility for the Orthodox to understand anything, even each other, the complete absence of Orthodox thought as an understanding and evaluation of history: all this... the fruits of the same basic crisis — internal, deep “a- and anti-historicism” Orthodoxy or, rather, the Orthodox world, its inability to cope from within with the basic Christian antinomy — "in this world, but not of this world", the inability to understand that the most "Orthodox" world is still "of this world" and that any absolutization of it is treason" [there same]. This, perhaps, according to Schmeman, is explained by the fact that Orthodoxy was formed "in spite of" (there is a clear echo of agonality here - "against heresies, West, East, Turks, etc."). This explains a certain "self–affirmation complex, hypertrophy of inner triumphalism", when "to admit mistakes is to begin to destroy the foundations of the "true faith"." "The tragedy of Orthodox history is always seen in the triumph of external evil: persecution, the Turkish yoke, betrayal of the intelligentsia, Bolshevism. Never – in "inside"" [ibid.].

Such "agonal" missionism sounded and regardless of the problem of understanding the situation and socio-political tasks of the Church. Russian Russian emigration historical consciousness of the first wave of Russian emigration assumed a special mood for carrying out a mission – the emigration space, being "the same" Russia, carried a deictic (indicative) and anagogic (erecting) function, preserving and protecting the pre-revolutionary, pre-Bolshevik atmosphere. I.A. Bunin in the report "The Mission of Russian emigration", - pronounced exactly 50 years ago prior to the diary entry of Prot. A. Schmeman on February 16, 1974 (and this page from the diaries just became a kind of reference point for this article), he speaks of emigrants as fighters for "eternal, divine foundations of human existence", using images of Scripture and, in particular, the first fratricide. Cain is the Bolshevik government led by Lenin, who set the people against each other and imposed a civil war on the country, Abel is a bright, true Russia that has accepted suffering, for the salvation of which the entire civilized world must unite so as not to perish from the communist aggressor itself. The mission of the Russian emigration ("the mission, it is a heavy mission, but also a high one, is entrusted by fate to us") ^{[8, p. 67]} – to throw off the yoke, to save the true Russia, the Russia of Christ, by stepping outside of anti-space into emigration.

The accentuation of the future, intense intention, striving for the golden age is reflected in the "modal" titles of publications, titles of texts, reports. Thus, the first literary magazine of Russian emigration was called "The Coming Russia" (in 1919-1920 two volumes were published, but due to financial difficulties the publication stopped, and later resumed and was renamed to a more neutral one - "Modern Notes"). Since 1920, the magazine "Will of Russia" has been published. There was movement in all this, a desire to remove borders and reach "your" space "on foot, along blurred roads" (Georgy Ivanov "When we return to Russia", 1936).

Written speech is an incredibly important form of testimony, storage and hope directed towards the golden age, while archaization can be perceived as something timeless, removing time, erasing boundaries. In emigrant publications, the old spelling was used, since it was believed that due to the fact that the reform was carried out by the Bolsheviks (although it was prepared before the revolution - and discussed in the presence of F.F. Fortunatov and A.A. Shakhmatov in 1904), the new spelling led to the anti–world. So the theme of speech is again intertwined with the theme of space.

The space is not only protected by missionaries - it is recreated. After the destruction of the Iver Chapel in Moscow on the night of July 29-30, 1929, emigrants to the fold in July 1931 (architect V.V. Stashevsky) built the same in Belgrade. The outgoing, tortured golden age (and in this case it is precisely the recreation of the golden age itself), thus, can be kept by reproducing aesthetic forms. 

          The problem of the Golden Age presupposes spatial, speech, visual and aesthetic symbolism. (Curiously, echoes of the theme of the Golden Age are also heard in the score of the so–called Silver Age - a complex era of transition, the metaphysics of which was often emphatically unchristian.)

          The theme of the sacralization of space – hierotopic and utopian in narratives, memory, historical consciousness - also suggests an appeal to the golden age. And the theme of sacred space sounds especially strong when it comes to the topos of the memory of the emigration of the first wave – in relation to the abandoned Russia, which from the object of mourning and protection passes into the system of hierotopos of historical consciousness, closing in with the space of the temple and Heavenly Jerusalem. Fr. Alexander's position is completely different – the heavenly and the earthly are united only in the space of the temple ("Introduction to Liturgical theology"). Interestingly, for fr. Pavel Florensky culture, in fact, is the organization of space ^{[9, p. 20]}, which, in turn, can move along two axes depending on the type of historical consciousness.

          Let us turn to the theme of space in the interpretation of Fr. Alexander Schmemann in connection with the context of understanding the temple and the liturgy. "The Byzantine medieval tradition is characterized by a developed theological concept of an image and a place of worship (temple), where spatial representations are realized primarily in symbolic, iconic forms" ^{[10, p. 156]}. Schmemann "sees the origins of the iconic perception of the sacred space not so much in the Christian liturgical tradition as in the Hellenistic mystery religiosity" [ibid., pp. 156-157], since sanctification is the leading idea in the mystery, and the idea of mediation is more important in the Old Testament tradition ^{[11, pp. 119-122]}.

          "Through participation in the mystery, a person is sanctified, initiated into the higher mysteries, receives salvation, communicates to "holiness". In its form, the mystery is a religious-dramatic, ritual representation and reproduction of a certain myth, a certain "drama of salvation"" [ibid., pp. 122-123]. It is interesting that the emigrant myth about Russia [U1] can be understood as mystical, since the theme of salvation, expressed very acutely, is accompanied by the construction of a space that repeats that - pointing and leading to the place of the golden age, hierotopos. "Every consecrated space presupposes some kind of hierophany, some kind of invasion of the sacred, as a result of which some territory is allocated from the surrounding outer space, which is given qualitatively different properties" ^{[12, p. 25]}.

          In the Byzantine era, there was a "breakthrough" of mystery religiosity in Christian culture in terms of temple space – and topography in general ^{[10, p. 158]}. Schmemann describes a change in the vision of the sacred space: "Prior to the deliberate attention paid by Constantine to Jerusalem as the main city of the Savior's earthly life, this city is not marked by any special veneration, and the bishop of Elia Capitolina at the beginning of the fourth century is the "suffragan" of the Metropolitan of Caesarea of Palestine. Like the idea of the temple, the idea of Jerusalem, St. Zion, central in the Jewish understanding of the Messianic fulfillment, undergoes "transposition" in the Christian faith, is interwoven into the same Eucharistic and eschatological ecclesiology" ^{[11, pp. 133-134]}. And since the IV century, it has become possible to experience the holy place, "rooted in the mystical religiosity of the epoch" [ibid.]. The emergence of new "spaces" with the veneration that develops around them is connected with the need for the "present" sacred, which must be introduced "into the very fabric of natural life, as its religious sanction or "sanctification"" [ibid.]. "Where there was no such holy place, it was created by acquiring or transferring holy relics, correlating a certain place with one or another minor event of Sacred history, and later – in the creative transfer of a sacred spatial image to a new "place"" ^{[10, p. 159]}, and something similar can be seen when forming the image of Russia in the historical consciousness of the Russian pre-war emigration, a specific geographical space is first transferred to another territory, and then a kind of transcendental transition takes place, as a result of which Russia appears as a heavenly city, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a metaphysical space is born, connected with the theme of sacrifice and sacrifice.

           Russian culture, at least from the second South Slavic influence to the beginning of the Peter the Great era, was "Grecophile", which was reflected, among other things, on church-state relations and on the structure of worship. Whether this was a pseudo-morphosis in the Spengler sense or not is a separate question (O. Spengler distinguished in the history of Russia the Peter's pseudo-morphosis and the Bolshevik pseudo-morphosis ^{[13, p. 193]} - and O. Alexander himself also used the term pseudo-morphosis in relation to the new Russia), but the Hellenic-Byzantine trace in the forms of public Russian life attracted controversy for many years (cf. Chaadaev's "unhappy Byzantium", etc.). This was especially true of the relations between the church and the authorities, since the idea of the city of God appears most clearly and mercilessly here. The background of this problem was also the fact that the Russian emigration of the first wave carried with it church customs and traditions familiar to pre-revolutionary Russia; in emigration they could acquire a slightly different ideological coloring. "The state has long since lost its religious nature, which once justified its sanctification by the Church. But among the Orthodox, not only has this religious nationalism not weakened, but it has intensified, replacing faith in the Church and its self-sufficiency with pagan worship of flesh and blood and unrighteous worship in their absolute value. This nationalistic pride, this praise of flesh and blood, from which Christ brought us freedom, is the disease of the church consciousness that must be overcome through a sober and attentive deepening into the tragic lesson of the Byzantine theocracy" ^[1].

          Two images shining through the traditional culture associated with the church tradition in a broad sense - Russia and Byzantium - are intertwined by complex relationships familiar to the Grecophile cultures of the Eastern Christian area. In addition to the stressed, sometimes redundant reference to exemplum, the perceiving culture carries a rigid agonality in relation to the Greek (Byzantine), and this may be expressed in the inability to accept the "imitation" of one's own world, which is perceived as secondary to the perceived culture.

          Fr. Alexander sees Russian (Slavic) Orthodoxy as a mirror image of Byzantine Christianity. "And if this Slavic Orthodoxy is separated from its external, political destinies, then there remains a real unified Orthodox world, having one person, feeding on the same roots, saturated with the same spirit. And this unity turned out to be stronger than political and national divisions. Slavs showed themselves to be creatively receptive to the best fruits of the Byzantine tradition – to the ideal of deification, illumination, “bright cosmism”, as they say now. Byzantinism simultaneously poisoned the Slavs with its theocratic “Messianism” and forever fertilized it with the inexhaustible wealth of its Chalcedonian, God-human aspirations. This is tacitly attested, in addition to saints, reverends, and martyrs, by the amazing religious art of the Balkan Churches, which is only now revealing its spiritual beauty to the world. Here is the best evidence of the deep churching of the Slavic "psyche", the best fruit of Christian Byzantium" ^{[14, p. 317]}.

          Fr. Alexander describes the study of the history of the Church as a work that results in the liberation of a person from incessant looking back at the past as the only true and possible. The perception of time, therefore - and even the purpose of time – is different from the usual one. It seems that by the work of understanding, passing a certain path, we must take time off in order to go out into the timeless, to the eternal, to know the true Church, having passed her path and discarding the steps passed so that they do not interfere with seeing the path cleared of all roads. The appeal to Byzantium, Ancient Russia is seen as "enslavement to the past", "typical of the Orthodox consciousness" ^{[2, p. 123-124]}.

          In the entry dated November 26, 1973, bitter words: "All these escapes – who to Byzantium, who to "Dobrotolubie", who to the island of Patmos, who to icons… Orthodoxy is now something like a supermarket. Everyone chooses what they want: era, style, identification" ^{[2, p. 48]}. The escape points are the modes of perception and comprehension of Orthodoxy, various stories about it, which speak, in fact, about the types of historical consciousness that have acquired frozen forms. That is, the attitude towards Byzantium (in distant retrospect, Byzantium as a point of memory) was transformed into appeals to the golden age to justify the present century, while in the historical consciousness Byzantium, of course, differs significantly from the empire of the Romans.

          "Orthodoxy cannot bypass this crisis, it is a question of centuries of completely detached ecclesiasticism, of the spiritual collapse of Byzantium first, and then of Russia." And in the same entry, below, we are talking about the pseudo-morphosis of Orthodoxy. "How can I explain to myself, first of all, that I love Orthodoxy and am more and more convinced of its truth, and more and more I dislike Byzantium, Ancient Russia, Mount Athos, that is, everything that is synonymous with Orthodoxy for everyone. I would have died of boredom at the “congress of Byzantinists”. Only to myself can I admit that my interest in Orthodoxy is inversely proportional to what interests me – and so passionately! – Orthodox" ^{[2, pp. 236-237]}.

          The need to find a kind of memory point in Orthodoxy – as an image, a door leading to the golden age, implies an appeal to certain epochs, styles, directions of Christianity, but behind all this there may be a serious danger of escapism. "In America, there is a reduction of Orthodoxy to icons, all sorts of "ancient" singing and all the same "Athos" books – about spiritual life. “Byzantinism” triumphs, but without its inherent cosmic reach. I can't get rid of the feeling that all this is primarily romanticism. Love for this image of Orthodoxy, and love because this image is radically different from the image of the modern world… Flight, withdrawal, reduction of Orthodoxy to itself, protection of it with all kinds of "slingshots"" ^{[2, p. 539]}.

          The problem of understanding the role of Orthodoxy in emigrant Russia is also extremely important because the choice of the type of behavior and attitude to Orthodoxy (the choice of mode) was directly related to what is called the missionism of emigrant consciousness (cf. the winged expression of D. S. Merezhkovsky – "we are not in exile, we are in the message"). Attributing oneself within the Orthodox tradition to a certain "door" of memory suggested a narrative about the Russia that was kept in the emigrant environment.

          Four emigrant myths: "the emigrant as a Theurgist who creates the world according to the laws of beauty; the emigrant as the Messiah; the emigrant as the last representative, guardian and continuer of Russian culture; the emigrant as a suffering genius sacrificing himself" ^{[15, p. 148]} - could only be told about Russia sacrificing itself – and in need in sacrifice, preserving the last European culture in a dying world – and ruining it, creating a new world – but also reproducing the one that is gone, which is constantly being created in the historical consciousness of the undefeated keepers.

          A point of space transferred to another world undergoes reinterpretation and historical transcendence, becoming from Russia itself a form of Russia, a reflection of the golden age, and this is akin to a religious perception involving service, redemption and sacrifice. The Russian Church, pre–revolutionary Russia as "memory points" are becoming a golden age - moving so far into the depths of metaphysical history that this idealization becomes possible. So the entry on February 16, 1974, taken at random page "Diaries" prot. Russian Russian emigration Alexander Schmeman, in fact, collects and builds the lines and "painful moments" of the first wave of Russian emigration: the memory, folded like a puzzle, of hierotopic speech, the narrative of the lost homeland, the need to carry the mission of Russian culture in the world, takes on a new golden age, immersing it in the waves of shared experience experienced again and again.

^[1] Russian Student Christian Movement.

^[2] St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute.

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