Introduction: Divisions Outside the Church
The Western world began its separate and exclusivist existence when the Roman Papacy destroyed the Local Church entrusted to its care by enforcing a radical separation between clergy and laity, depriving the latter of communion with Christ. In this way Christians were no longer members of the Church, but subjugated to political clericalism. This centralising ideology of Papal supremacy replacing Christ dominated Western European history from the Gregorian Reform of the mid-eleventh century on, causing divisions everywhere. It was a radical departure from Orthodox Christianity, which the new ideologues hypocritically derided as ‘caesaropapism’. Moreover, it was the First Germanic Reformation of the mid-eleventh century, often called ‘the Gregorian Reform’ after the German Pope Gregory VII (c. 1015-1085), which led directly to the Second Germanic Reform, which essentially began in 1517. From here on, already much divided Catholicism split into thousands of protesting sects.
Divisions of the Russian Orthodox Church
Divisions Caused by Statism
Right-Leaning Groups: Nationalists and Provincials
In the 17th century changes in ritual in Russia, enforced by the State, created the tragic Old Ritualist schism. If the changes had not been enforced by the State and had been left to be enacted voluntarily, this schism would not have occurred. Indeed, under Tsar Nicholas II, the Church accepted both rituals, old and new, as equally valid. However, round about the same time, other State bureaucrats enforced a persecution of simple and pious Russian monks on Mt Athos, who considered that the Name of God was in itself holy. Instead of leaving the pious if simple and uneducated alone, State persecution created another unnecessary, though this time far smaller, division.
Atheist persecution in the USSR, tacitly complied with by weak bishop-survivors, again created division. Small groups of Russian Orthodox celebrated secret services in the ‘catacombs’. They were soon divided from one another and, with time, became increasingly small and sectarian, attracting only the uneducated. It was zeal without knowledge. The same atheist persecution also led to potential divisions among Russian exiles outside Russia in the small Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Already in the late 1940s there were zealous but poorly-educated individuals in it who began to propound the Cold War theory that the Russian Church inside Russia had somehow, at some point, mysteriously, ‘lost grace’ and therefore that its sacraments were no longer valid. This piece of self-flattery would mean that those individuals, living in the USA, formed the ‘One True Church’. Free of extreme right-wing political prejudices, the reasonable and the holy in Europe like St Seraphim of Boguchar and St John of Shanghai, or in Serbia, St Nikolai of Ochrid and St Justin of Chelije, naturally rejected such fantastic delusions.
Left-Leaning Groups: Modernists and Liberals
Already before 1917 there was a group of modernists in Saint Petersburg. Profoundly Westernised, they basically wanted to make Orthodoxy into Protestantism. The notorious seductor-priest George Gapon, encouraged and not defrocked by his liberal bishop, was a typical representative. After 1917 these proto-Protestants formed the renovationist movement, a schism actively encouraged and enforced by the atheist Communist Party in order to weaken the Church.
Meanwhile, outside the former Russian Empire, Russian emigres in the USA, in Paris and in the Paris-based Sourozh Diocese in the UK continued the legacy of Renovationism, though in much more moderate forms. It was partly the fault of such semi-renovationists that there was no jurisdictional unity within the Russian emigration either in Western Europe or in Northern America. Those more traditional could not accept the left-wing and sometimes iconoclastic politics of these semi-renovationists.
Divisions Caused by Nationalism
After the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, various national groups of the former Empire began forming their own nationalist ‘Churches’, separated from the Russian Orthodox Church. This was especially the case in the Ukraine and indeed, over 100 years on, the same Ukrainian nationalist separatism has been behind much of the present catastrophe in the Ukraine. They shout ‘Glory to the Ukraine’, and not ‘Glory to God’. They destroy themselves.
However, separatist and nationalist movements began elsewhere in the coming decades, notably in Latvia and Belarus, from where emigres formed separate Churches after 1945. In 1994, after the fall of the USSR, another division took place in Estonia, promoted by the power-hungry and dollar-backed Patriarchate of Constantinople and lately, after its similar disastrous recent adventure in the Ukraine, it has been tempted to start nationalist schisms in Belarus and Lithuania.
Divisions Caused by Sectarianism
Until the fall of the USSR at the end of 1991, the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, had a clear self-identity as the politically free part of the Russian Orthodox Church, free because it was outside Russia. As such it at last canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors. However, once atheist Communism had fallen inside the USSR, which then disappeared, ROCOR lost its identity. It had no more reason to exist as a separate entity. However, instead of taking up the cause of helping the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in Moscow to form new Local Churches on the continents where it existed, ROCOR gradually adopted a sectarian identity. In the 1990s some of its bishops uncanonically opened tiny communities inside (not outside!) the ex-USSR. This was in defiance of the views of such as Metr Anastasy and St John of Shanghai that ROCOR’s separate existence could only be temporary and that its meaning was to bring Orthodoxy to the rest of the world. At the same time some ROCOR bishops took up with sectarian Old Calendarists in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, though they were ignored by other bishops and the mass of the clergy and faithful.
When in 2007 the anti-sectarian part of ROCOR at last forced the sectarians to abandon such Old Calendarist fantasies and enter into canonical communion with the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, small groups left ROCOR and actually joined or formed various sectarian groups, some of them in effect becoming Russian Old Calendarists. Naturally, they were all divided from each other and warred with one another. However, this was not the end of the sectarian spirit in ROCOR. Despite strong and reasoned opposition, at the end of 2020 it returned with a vengeance and ROCOR created a schism with the Paris Archdiocese, both of them parts of the same Mother-Church! Worse still, this schism was suicidally encouraged by political elements in Moscow itself! Naturally, those who valued canonicity and moral justice left ROCOR for the canonical Orthodox Church. There now began in ROCOR a right-wing, Protestant-style, convert cult of isolationism, with some very strange and queer undercurrents.
Conclusion
Statism, Nationalism and Sectarianism. All are isms. The solution to overcoming all such temptations is to cease isolationism and engage constructively in forming and taking part in new Local Churches.