On unity

Union is possible with Rome. Unity alone is possible with Orthodoxy.
Alexey Khomiakov

A new sacrament?

Certainly, Christianity has a logical expression contained in the Creed; but this is not separate from other manifestations. It also has a logical teaching, which we call theology. But this is only a branch of general teaching. To isolate it is a great error; to give it exclusive preference is madness; to see in it a heavenly gift tied to certain functions is a heresy. That would be to establish a sacrament of rationalism.
Alexey Khomiakov

Of fops and dogs

Do not harness your intellectual freedom into a foppish dog-caller with the inscription 'Europe'.
Aleksey Khomiakov

Knowledge

...is not yet true enlightenment. Knowledge is the broadening of man’s intellectual endowment. True enlightenment, however, embraces in itself development of high moral and spiritual principles over and above knowledge. To acquire knowledge is not very difficult; to attain a high moral development, however is the highest aim of man and many people who are deprived of scientific knowledge b the circumstances of life but are deeply permeated by moral light are nearer to complete enlightenment than many who have knowledge but lack the power of spiritual life.
Alexey Khomiakov

Woe! (Nelly)

...woe to them who wish to defend the power of Christ with the impotence of man’s weapons!
Aleksey Khomiakov

The perpetual revolution

A doubt about the possibility or reality of a communication between living and dead through Christ and in Christ is too un-Christian to want an answer. To ascribe to the prayers of living Christians a power of intercession which is refused to the Christians admitted into heavenly glory would be a glaring absurdity. If Protestantism were true to logic, as it pretends to be, I may boldly affirm that not only Anglicans, but all Protestant sects (even the worst) would either admit serious and earnest addresses to saints and angels, or reject the mutual prayers of Christians on earth. Why, then, are they rejected, nay, often condemned? Simply because Protestantism is for ever and ever protesting.
Aleksey Khomiakov

Ugly and indecent

With regard to women’s clothes one should not even talk. They have always been either ugly or indecent, and most often ugly and indecent at the same time. Western dress continuously changes and is determined by so-called fashion, and what results? Somewhere (mostly in Paris) a well-known circle of people change the style of dress or hairdo according to their whims while the rest of the French and, after them, other nations hurry to adopt the change no matter how ridiculous it may be, not even daring to doubt its beauty. Consider impartially the reasons for this aping, and you will be convinced that it springs from spiritual bondage to the pseudo-superior, and wherever bondage is involved there the heart loses its purity and nobility. National dress is the free custom of the people. Its alteration for the sake of comfort may in a sense show a certain freedom, and even the reasonableness of man (for custom itself is created in this manner), but imitation of Western dress is nothing but recognition of bondage to the taste of a pseudo-superior society. Let those who like such an admission be given the respect which they deserve, the respect which man shows for an ape.
Alexey Khomiakov

Khomiakov and Orthodoxy

As I promised yesterday I am going to offer up a few thoughts on Alexei Khomiakov's thought and it's relation to modern Orthodoxy. I am by no means qualified to do so but I will try to make something coherent.

Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860) is most well known for his treatise on the unity of the Church entitled The Church is One and as the founder of the so-called “Slavophile” thought circle. [By the way: This page is linked only because it has a very good introduction to Khomiakov and his life. I in absolutely no way endorse anything else that may be found therein.] This essay was not published until after Khomiakov’s death so it is interesting to see the reception that Khomiakov had during his life and after his death in relationship to his writings. Khomiakov was first known as a poet (unfortunately I’ve only found one translated poem). Here is the one that I have found:

Oh, grief afflicts me! There descends thick gloom
In the distant West, the land of holy wonders:
The former lights are fading, burning out,
And the brightest stars are tumbling from the heavens…
Oh! Since creation earth has never seen
Above itself such fiery lights of heaven!
But grief! Their age has passed, a deathly veil descends
And covers up the West. There shall be gloom so deep…
So hear the voice of fate, arise in a new glow,
Awake, O sleep-bound East!

This poem illustrates the biggest question for Russia during the 19th century (now that I think harder it was a question longer than that, but I’ll leave it be…) – What is/should be Russia’s relationship to the West? Has, indeed, their age passed? This question was approached from different points of view, with different aims and with different goals. For Khomiakov, as a faithful Orthodox, this question, of course, was looked at from a spiritual point of view. He looked at the schism that had created by the Christians of the West by the breaking of unity with the Church:

In the ninth century the West, unfaithful to the tradition of the Church, appropriated the right to alter the ecumenical creed without consulting with its Eastern brothers and sisters… What was the inevitable logical consequence of this usurpation? When the logical principle of knowledge expressed in the exposition of the creed was separated from the moral principle of love expressed by the unanimity of the Church, a protestant anarchy was established in practice. … No sophistry can allow one to avoid this consequence. Either the truth of faith is given to the union of all and to their mutual love in Jesus Christ, or it can be given to every individual without regard to all other individuals.

For Khomiakov the schism was a breaking of the bond of love “because it [the West] received death itself into its bosom when it decided to imprison itself within a dead letter; because it condemned itself to death when it decided to be a religious monarchy without organic principle”.
Khomiakov, along with his associates, had many interactions and debates with the Westernizers from the 1830s to the 1850s; however most of this took place in verbal interactions in salons or in personal correspondence. The government was very weary of Khomiakov’s “extreme” patriotism. In the words of an attendant of the Empress Khomiakov

shocks polite society very much because he wears a beard and dresses like a peasant…Government people call him a red revolutionary, and consider it very daring for anyone to have a greater mind and greater patriotism than they.

For Khomiakov Russian patriotism and Orthodoxy went hand in hand as he saw the Russian social structure, which had always been based upon the mir--the organic village commune, as inherently Orthodox. Khomiakov’s patriotism was one of the main reasons why he wasn’t allowed to publish during his lifetime. The ecclesiological essays published during his lifetime were published under a pseudonym ignotus [The Unknown One] and in the foreign press. These essays are responses to various articles by Western Christians, and his responses are generally clarifications about Orthodoxy and, I won’t mince words, condemnation of “Romanism” and Protestantism.

However, for all Khomiakov critique of the spiritual path of the West he did not totally discount everything about it. He was quite interested in the mechanization/electrification of Russia and even exhibited an engine in London that he had invented.
…
So now I will just state some general thoughts on Khomiakov’s acceptance in the Orthodox world. [I realized I’m going to have to do a lot more research in that area.] Since Khomiakov’s time there have been many critiques of the “Slavophile” school and, of course, as Khomiakov was at its head these critiques mainly focus on him (at least the ones I’ve seen). After Khomiakov’s death in 1860 his works began to be published in Russia and an introduction to his collected works was written by his good friend and pupil Yuri Samarin in 1867. He concluded this glowing appraisal of Khomiakov with a bang in describing him as a “teacher of the Church”—one who “by a logical clarification of one or another side of Church teaching, could win for the Church a decisive victory over some error or other”. I’m not going to analyze the validity of this statement at the present time but I will just move on to something else…

St. Pavel Florensky wrote a short essay on Khomiakov in 1916 that is highly critical of the above statement of Samarin and of Khomiakov’s way of reasoning in his critique of Catholicism and Protestantism. I’m not in a capacity to completely analyze this critique so I will just put that fact out there.
Berdiaev wrote a book on Khomiakov of which I’ve read the three chapters that have been translated; however, I’m not even going to venture on that territory…

After all this reading I’ve realized that as with all Orthodox writers (and saints) one has to take out what is beneficial and, depending on the leftovers, not put on the same level or even disregard some of their thought. In Orthodoxy there is no one authority but Christ and all others are seen through his eyes.

One thing that I have noticed in all of this, as I have many times before, is the wonderful harmony we have in Orthodoxy between our various thinkers and saints, and that it takes all of them to make the world go round…

The expression of the Church

Certainly, Christianity has a logical expression contained in the Creed; but this is not separate from other manifestations. It also has a logical teaching, which we call theology. But this is only a branch of general teaching. To isolate it is a great error; to give it exclusive preference is madness; to see in it a heavenly gift tied to certain functions is a heresy. That would be to establish a sacrament of rationalism.
The Church does not recognize a teaching Church other than herself in her totality.
Alexey Khomiakov

Stating the obvious

So when I was in high school my friends and I had a silly game that if someone stated the obvious you could punch them...this guy would be punched real hard:

Since for Xomjakov [sic] true philosophy could exist only in the realm of faith, in considering Xomjakov [sic] the philosopher one must consider Xomjakov [sic] the theologian. In his writings the line between philosophy, religion, and Orthodoxy often becomes dim, and the demarcation more convenient than precise. Conversely, his concept of sobornost’ although Christian, religious in character, has also ethical, ontological and epistemological significance.
Peter Christoff

It amazes me that a person could write a whole book on Khomiakov and yet state something like that. But on the other hand it makes perfect sense as he is approaching Khomiakov's thought, and Orthodoxy by association, in an academic and rationalistic way.

The rights of women...(and men)

Many have attacked these imaginary rights of women; many more have defended them. But amidst all the eloquent verbiage that has aroused so many good souls and weak heads, no one has ever cited those principles of moral responsibility and world-wide truth upon which the concept of rights might depend, and about which a sensible controversy might at least have been carried on. ... The real subject of the controversy…was not the rights of men and women, but their mutual responsibilities that determine their mutual rights, those responsibilities of women and men that are obvious to every sensible creature. But it is quite natural that they did not realize this, because of their habit of considering rights as something independent and because of their blind faith in the science of the immaterial.
Alexey Khomiakov

Ceaseless agitation

Every day, in her ceaseless agitation, the West declares her own thoughts to be lies and exchanges the old lie for a new one, or exchanges its own old scandals for new ones.
Aleksey Khomiakov

True in 1845 true in 2006.

The 'authority' of the Church

No—the Church is not an authority, just as God is not an authority and Christ is not an authority, since authority is something external to us. The Church is not an authority, I say, but the truth—and at the same time the inner life of the Christian, since God, Christ, the Church, live in him with a life more real than the heart which is beating in his breasts or the blood flowing in his veins. But they are alive in him only insofar as he himself is living by the ecumenical life of love and unity, i.e., by the life of the Church.
Aleksei Stepanovich Khomyakov

St. John, St. Gregory, St. Symeon, St. Gregory Palamas and Calvin(?)

Calvin the "Theologian"

A true definition of Theologian from Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos:

...theologians of the Church should be called "those who have reached theoria (vision of God)", who formerly purified their heart from passions or at least are struggling to purify them.

Further:

…the beholders of God, specifically those who follow the whole methodology of the Church and attain perfect faith -the illumination of the nous.

From the pen of Fr. John Romanides:

The true Orthodox theologian is the one who has direct knowledge of some of God's energies through illumination or knows them more through vision. Or he knows them indirectly through prophets, apostles and saints or through scripture, the writings of the Fathers and the decisions and acts of their Ecumenical and Local Councils. The theologian is the one who through this direct or mediated spiritual knowledge and vision knows clearly how to distinguish between the actions of God and those of creatures and especially the works of the devil and the demons.

And from St. Neilos:

"If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian"

From a true Theologian:

...He makes my disobedience His own as Head of the whole body. As long then as I am disobedient and rebellious, both by denial of God and by my passions, so long Christ also is called disobedient on my account. … But when all things shall be subdued unto Him on the one hand by acknowledgment of Him, and on the other by a reformation, then He Himself also will have fulfilled His submission, bringing me whom He has saved to God. For this, according to my view, is the subjection of Christ; namely, the fulfilling of the Father's Will. But as the Son subjects all to the Father, so does the Father to the Son; the One by His Work, the Other by His good pleasure, as we have already said. And thus He Who subjects presents to God that which he has subjected, making our condition His own. Of the same kind, it appears to me, is the expression, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" It was not He who was forsaken either by the Father, or by His own Godhead, as some have thought, as if It were afraid of the Passion, and therefore withdrew Itself from Him in His Sufferings (for who compelled Him either to be born on earth at all, or to be lifted up on the Cross?) But as I said, He was in His own Person representing us. For we were the forsaken and despised before, but now by the Sufferings of Him Who could not suffer, we were taken up and saved. Similarly, He makes His own our folly and our transgressions; and says what follows in the Psalm… For in His character of the Word He was neither obedient nor disobedient. For such expressions belong to servants… But, in the character of the Form of a Servant, He condescends to His fellow servants, nay, to His servants, and takes upon Him a strange form, bearing all me and mine in Himself, that in Himself He may exhaust the bad, as fire does wax, or as the sun does the mists of earth; and that I may partake of His nature by the blending. Thus He honours obedience by His action, and proves it experimentally by His Passion. For to possess the disposition is not enough, just as it would not be enough for us, unless we also proved it by our acts; for action is the proof of disposition. …by the art of His love for man He gauges our obedience, and measures all by comparison with His own Sufferings, so that He may know our condition by His own, and how much is demanded of us, and how much we yield, taking into the account, along with our environment, our weakness also.

St. Gregory the Theologian

And a swift kick in the pants from Khomyakov:

...having rejected legitimate tradition, it has deprived itself of every right to condemn a man who, while acknowledging the divinity of the Holy Scriptures, might not find in them the refutation of the error of Arius or Nestorius

Aleksei Stepanovich Khomyakov

By what right? [incendiary comment]

...by what right can those who base their beliefs on the learned propositions of their forefathers begin to use tradition as a means of support? ...to believe in the infallibility of learning, moreover of a learning which works out its propositions dialectically, is against common sense.

Aleksey Khomiakov (1804-1860)

I love quotes from the past like this one that are so apropos to the present. Khomiakov has very many such quotes so you will hear from him again.