Archimandrite Constantinе: Fearless Accuser of Pseudo-Orthodoxy (1887 - November 13/26, 1975)

 

With the passing of Archimandrite Constantine, one may well say that a whole generation has departed. He was perhaps the last of the Russian religious intelligentsia of the first half of the 20th century, and in his faithfulness to Orthodoxy and the profundity of his religious-philosophical thought showed the path the intelligentsia should have taken but, sadly, for the most part did not take. His mature religious philosophy may be considered the Orthodox answer to the heterodoxy of Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and their like; but even more than this, his firm stand in Orthodox truth has given him an influence on and an importance for English-speaking Orthodoxy which as yet has been little appreciated.

Cyril Zaitsev (as he was known in the world) was from a family of converted Jews; and once he became fully aware of the truth of Orthodoxy, he manifested himself as an Israelite indeed (John1:47), mercilessly opposed to all pretense and lying in spiritual and intellectual life, and unbendingly upright in his confession of the chosenness of the "New Israel," the Orthodox Church.

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Cyril manifested himself as rather a "conservative" even in his student days (he studied economics and law at St. Petersburg and then abroad at Heidelberg), taking no part in the radical student movement inspired by the enemies of the Orthodox monarchy. But it was only after he entered government service just before World War I that he came to realize how terribly wrong were those who wished to "reform" Russia. He found the slanderous tales of government corruption, inefficiency, and cynicism to be quite without foundation in the two departments in which he was privileged to work (the Senate, Agriculture); there he found highly qualified personnel with a profound sense of duty and loyalty, as well as a refreshing freedom and personal initiative. "There was a striking contrast" – he wrote much later – "between the grandeur of our historical order of things... and the light-minded dilettantism of our society which was dreaming-while eating the bread of our still living and mighty 'history' - of new forms of life which doomed to destruction history in its entirety." (Here, of course, he has in mind such philosophies as Marxism, which would destroy the past entirely in order to establish a new "ideal" – whose name is "Gulag.") "Russia was destroyed," he wrote elsewhere, "not because the bureaucracy was bad, not because the Tsar remained autocratic, or because Russia had been 'left behind' in various ways. No, the misfortune was this: that she did not value the values of her past... The chief misfortune was that Russia ceased to value, as the highest value, her own age-old way of life, which had been infused with grace by her standing for many years in church Truth... One may find dark sides in historical Russia in all epochs... but as long as Imperial Russia stood, she not only did not compel one to lie, she rather served truth." (One may compare the state of the USSR today, as described by Solzhenitsyn and others, where lying has become part of daily life for everyone.)

Even before the Revolution, therefore, he had left the "mainstream" of the Russian intelligentsia, which prepared both the Revolution and then when the Revolution went rather beyond the expectations of the "liberals" – the pseudo-Orthodox "renaissance" that later was to give itself the appropriate name of "Parisian Orthodoxy." The unrepentant intelligentsia, even though it seldom mentioned him by name, never forgave him his "betrayal" of their cause (for in the "Parisian" view all intellectuals are supposed to be "liberals"), and the "fanatical" Orthodox views of his mature philosophy became for them something of a symbol of all that they hated in the old Russia and in genuine Orthodoxy.

In the Diaspora after the Revolution Cyril Zaitsev spent the '20's and part of the '30's in Western Europe (Prague and Paris), where he became noted as a conservative publicist, working in close cooperation on the journals Renaissance (Vozrozhdeniye) and Russia and the Slavs (Rossiya i Slavyanstvo) with their editor, Peter Struve – the Russian translator of the works of Karl Marx who came to see his error and worked after the Revolution for the restoration of the old Russia. These organs of the "struggle for national liberation" were conservative journals of political and literary comment and followed the maturing of P. Struve's own thought, whose last project was the "rehabilitation" of the great Orthodox Tsar Nicholas I, who is so little understood even now in the West precisely because of his Orthodoxy. But Struve never matured sufficiently to place Orthodoxy at the center of his thought, and in this Father Constantine was far to surpass him.

In 1935 he went to the Far East, becoming a professor of the Russian Law Faculty in Harbin and giving lectures on literature and music (being himself an excellent pianist). Thoughts of "national liberation" and a return to the old Russia now had little meaning, and his thought became more and more religious and Orthodox; the center of his philosophy, from "historical Russia," now became, much more profoundly, "Holy Russia." He became an instructor in the Harbin seminary, and in general he found himself far more at home in the simpler, more fervent Orthodox world of the Far-Eastern emigration than among the Russian intelligentsia of Western Europe. In Harbin he became a spiritual friend of Blind Ignatius, the clairvoyant elder, with whom he would sit for hours reading the Lives of Saints and being instructed by his holy conversation, seeing at first hand, in the crowds who flocked to this holy elder, the closeness of the true Orthodox spiritual tradition to the heart of the common people. To this period belongs his first real Orthodox book, To Understand Orthodoxy – the testimony of a man who had come to Orthodoxy through the thorny path of the modern intellectual jungle, and now would be content with no diluted or "modernized" Orthodoxy, but only with the true, age-old Orthodoxy by which the whole of Russia had once lived and been great.

When the Communists came to rule in China, Cyril Zaitsev might have been considered to be at the end of his intellectual development and career. Hе was over sixty years old, and might well have been content to live out his days quietly in some corner of the vast Russian Diaspora, content enough if he could escape the fast-expanding worldwide Communist regime. But it was precisely now that he entered his most fruitful years, thanks to the inspiration, encouragement, and help of two far-sighted hierarchs of the Diaspora: Archbishop John Maximovitch and Archbishop Vitaly of Jordanville, both of whom keenly recognized the great contribution he could make to the Russian Church Outside of Russia.

After the death of his wife, he was ordained priest in 1945, and soon he joined the ranks of Archbishop John's clergy in Shanghai, participating in this great hierarch's labors of Orthodox enlightenment by giving lectures in the Shanghai cathedral on historical Orthodox Russia. On being evacuated from China together with Archbishop John, he was invited by Archbishop Vitaly to come to Jordanville to become editor of Orthodox Russia, the chief Russian-language organ of genuine Orthodoxy. Here, in 1949, he received the monastic tonsure. For the next quarter-century, it is no exaggeration to say, he was the most important single editor and publicist of any of the Orthodox Churches, writing in any language, who upheld true and uncompromising Orthodoxy. Let us list here only some of the accomplishments which are owing directly to him, leaving aside the many books printed by Holy Trinity Monastery in these years, most of which would have appeared without him.

1. Orthodox Russia. This twice-monthly Russian-language periodical became, under Archimandrite Constantine, the voice of genuine Orthodoxy in the 20th-century world, far surpassing other Orthodox publications in any language in its outspokenness, the breadth of its intellectual scope, and its upright confession of unchanging, age-old Orthodoxy against the innovations of "Parisian Orthodoxy" and the Russian schismatic groups of the Diaspora in general, against the tragically soul-destroying political path of the Moscow Patriarchate, against the increasingly open apostasy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and, other ecumenist Orthodox bodies; for those caught in any of these traps set by the devil for 20th-century Orthodoxy, the blunt editorials of Fr. Constantine became identified as the voice of the hated "Jordanville ideology" which, although never powerful numerically, constituted a stumbling-block to the cause of modernist "Orthodoxy," which was eloquently exposed by this literal conscience of Orthodoxy as a preparation for the coming of Antichrist.

2. Fr. Constantine added to the list of Jordanville's Russian publications a monthly periodical, Orthodox Life, for Lives of Saints and other material rather out of place in a polemical newspaper, and – his major theological contribution – a yearly theological review, Orthodox Way (or Path), a collection of major articles of theology and religious thought which is also unsurpassed among recent Orthodox theological publications in any language for the purity and sensitivity of the Orthodoxy expressed in it, uncontaminated by modernism and totally independent of the academic fashions which are expressed in the other supposedly Orthodox theological publications of our day. The Orthodox writers represented in this collection are, sadly, still almost unknown save to a small circle of Orthodox Russians; but it is in them that is to be found a good part of the true theological scholarship of Orthodoxy in the 20th century.

3. From the very beginning Fr. Constantine insisted that Holy Trinity Monastery publish a regular English-language Orthodox periodical (Orthodox Life). This was a project far "ahead of the times" and most difficult to carry out. In 1950 English-speaking converts in the Russian Church Abroad were almost unheard of; there was no "demand" whatever for such a publication, there was virtually no one to write for it, and the first translators more often than not had English as their second tongue. But for Father Constantine this was an absolute duty for the Orthodox mission in America, of which he was intensely conscious – despite the unfair accusations made by some against his narrow "Russianness." Despite the early difficulties (which were not helped by Father Constantine's own complicated literary style, difficult enough in his native Russian!), this periodical survived and prospered, giving actually the first real spiritual food and serious Orthodox material in the English language, apart from a few sporadic earlier attempts. This publication has had an incalculable importance for the Orthodox mission in America. Without it the English-language movement of true Orthodoxy – weak and frail as it still is – would not be what it is today, and perhaps would not exist at all.

4. Fr. Constantine wrote also a number of major books. One may mention his Lectures in the History of Russian Literature (Jordanville, 2 volumes, 1967-68), a compilation of his lectures in this course at Holy Trinity Seminary in which he teaches a principle quite unique to "literary criticism": all literature is viewed in its relation to Orthodoxy – a principle, to be sure, which holds valid in modern times for no country but Russia, where Orthodoxy penetrated so deeply the national culture that even the secular writers of the last century could not escape its influence. His articles on Russian composers in the Jordanville periodicals also probed far more deeply than any mere "music criticism," seeking always the very "soul" of the music, where the composer's relation to God is revealed.

A closely related book is his Chefs-d'oeuvres of Russian Literary Criticism (Harbin, 1938), an anthology of essays on Russian writers by other writers, with introductions by Fr. Constantine that place the great figures of Russian literature in the last century in their Orthodox context and perspective. His Ethics (Harbin, 1940) is a survey of both pre-Christian and post-Christian ethical teachings, giving a sound Orthodox evaluation of them. In such works as these he showed that true Orthodoxy, while 'precise and strict, is not narrow in its intellectual outlook, and that a fully developed Orthodox world-view has a sound and balanced approach to all manifestations of human knowledge and culture. His last book, The Miracle of Russian History (Jordanville, 1974), is a collection of his articles on Holy Russia and the state of Orthodoxy in the world today.

One of Fr. Constantine's smaller books has appeared in English: The Spiritual Face of St. John of Kronstadt (Jordanville, 1964). Written at the time of the Saint's canonization in 1964, it is largely a compilation of quotes by those who knew him, forming an excellent spiritual portrait of this great Saint; it is the best introduction to St. John for English-speaking readers.

But Fr. Constantine's major work, the masterpiece of his life, is his Pastoral Theology (Jordanville, 2 volumes, 1960-61), compiled from his seminary lectures. In this work his own rich life-experience, his great intellectual culture, his philosophical mind, his uncompromising stand for Orthodox truth, together with his priesthood and monasticism accepted late in life, flowered in a pastoral work unrivalled in the 20th century in any language. One has only to look at the "Paris" equivalent of this book to begin to realize its greatness. The Orthodox Pastoral Service of Archimandrite Cyprian Kern (Paris, 1957) is a course, based largely on Western sources, on "how to be a successful worldly priest, "always trying to catch up with the latest intellectual fashion, following one's worldly flock while pretending to lead it, keeping up always a proper" exterior and constantly looking at oneself in a spiritual mirror in order to calculate how well one is keeping up one's "image." Such an approach, totally foreign to Orthodoxy, was decisively rejected by Fr. Constantine, whose book, born in the blood and tears of 20th-century history, renounces every kind of fakery and affectation in order to teach Orthodox youth how to be a true Orthodox pastor in an age of apostasy and revolution, how to save one's soul and keep one's flock on the right spiritual path even when all religious values and even civilization itself is falling to pieces around one.

There were those who thought that Fr. Constantine dwelled too much on the subject of the apostasy of our days and the coming reign of Antichrist, for which contemporary mankind is obviously preparing itself. These, indeed – together with his uncompromising stand against what he invariably called "Soviet Church" – were the center of the critical side of his thought, and it was not possible to deceive his keen mind with any of those "new" phenomena of our times which try to pass themselves off as Orthodox; he was quick to spot the lack of Orthodox substance in the "religious" writings of Pasternak, the pseudo-religious Berdyaevism of some later Orthodox writers in the USSR, the ecclesiastical fakery of the American "autocephaly." It was, however, our times – the age of the counterfeit in religion as in everything else – rather than his own basic views that made him seem sometimes a "negative" thinker. But far more fundamentally his outlook, deeply Orthodox, was positive and even optimistic. He encouraged and inspired young priests and religious writers, both Russians and converts; was an active supporter of the canonization of St. John of Kronstadt and, in his last years, of the New Martyrs of Russia headed by the Royal Family; supported and encouraged the veneration of Archbishop John Maximovitch; called for a positive and conscious assimilation of the values of true Orthodoxy and the Orthodox past; was a firm supporter of the much-persecuted and slandered Catacomb Church in Russia; and even hoped for – without false hopes – a stupendous miracle: the restoration of the Orthodox Monarchy in a renewed Holy Russia (albeit only for a short time before the end of the world), without which, he believed, the historical forces now in operation will lead mankind directly to the reign of Antichrist.

But Archimandrite Constantine was above all a Christian realist and ways placed his ultimate hope, not on anything earthly at all, but only in the Church of Christ. All the wealth of his cultural and intellectual attainments were of value precisely because they were placed in the correct Orthodox hierarchy of values, in which the Church and the things of God are the ultimate value, only in subordination to which does anything lesser have any value or meaning at all. "The only treasure," he wrote, "which we, the leftovers of historical Russia, possess is the joy of belonging to the true Church; it is in the power of our conscious membership in the Russian Church Outside of Russia. What are we in the many-colored pluralism of the free world, even of the Christian world? Less than a small minority – a tiny grain of sand, a nothing. But in this nothingness – from the world's point of view – we possess, inasmuch as we belong to the true Church, the path to the blessed eternity which arises for all of saved humanity at the Second Coming of Christ."

A great man has departed from us, leaving a rich intellectual and spiritual heritage for us who remain with the difficult task of being true Orthodox Christians in the darkest days of the apostasy of the last times. In particular. American Orthodoxy has great need of those who can absorb his Orthodox message and pass it on to others. This message is by no means only for some intellectual elite; it is the message of true Orthodoxy at a time when pseudo-Orthodoxy in a hundred forms threatens to engulf us!

Father Constantine to the end remained an "intellectual"; the task of understanding and defending Orthodoxy was his life's work. But Orthodoxy for him was not merely the answer to his intellectual search for truth; it became the whole of life for him, and was reflected in everything he did. In it he found deep peace, which flowered not only in polemical and theological works, but also in his life as priest and monk. He was a spiritual father for many, and for years he was the only English-language confessor at Holy Trinity Monastery. There were perhaps times when he was a little too painfully straightforward and honest; but even this "defect" was a proof of the wholeness of his acceptance of Orthodox truth.

Father Constantine had suggested to some of his students the compilation of a book on death – specifically, on how various people have met death, thus revealing their spiritual state. In his last years especially, he was concerned with this question, and with his own preparation for death; for here, indeed, is the proof of the depth and fullness of one's conversion to the truth. Suffice it to say that Fr. Constantine himself died a peaceful and Christian death, after receiving communion of the Holy Mysteries on that very day, on the feast of the great Father, St. John Chrysostom – just as the monastery was beginning the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the dedication of its cathedral the next day.

One of Fr. Constantine's spiritual children, A. P., supplies an epilogue to his earthly life: "I dreamed of Father Constantine the night that he died. He looked so good – 30 pounds heavier, fresh, with a bright face, although he was stooped. He asked why he hadn't seen me for so long, gave me blessings and said that he was very well. When I awoke, only then did I get the phone call that he had died, and I hadn't even known of his final illness."

One may have bold hope that Father Constantine, having carried through to the end his search for and discovery of Christ's truth, has indeed entered into that new life which is the answer to the feverish unrest of our unsettled times. Grant him, O Lord, eternal rest with the saints!

 

Source: The Orthodox Word, Vol. 12, No. 1 (66), January-February 1976, pp. 20-27.