Orthodox Christianity
When Christianity began to spread in the world, it did not have an orderly hierarchical structure, and each group of believers created its own leadership. Christianity was pluralistic and democratic when the common denominator among its people was faith, spirituality and mutual support. Then the unbelievable happened: the entire Roman Empire, the one that persecuted the Christians for hundreds of years, became Christian, and the one who led the move was the emperor.
The defining event was a vision that appeared before emperor Constantine on the eve of the decisive battle for his reign, which caused him to become a Christian and to favor the Christian religion. Jesus appeared before him with the symbol of the cross in his hand and promised him that with the help of this symbol he would win the battle and establish his rule. This event happened in the year 310, starting a process that lasted 70 years, at the end of which Christianity became the official religion of the empire during the time of Emperor Theodosius (380 AD).
When the Romans became Christians, they decided that the organizational structure of the Church would rely on the administrative structure of the empire and remain decentralized, headed and governed by the emperor, while theology and belief would become dogmatic. The empire was religiously divided into four parts governed by the 4 central and largest cities of the empire: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch. Each part was recognized as an independent Church headed by a patriarch (another patriarchate was added in the 5th century – of Jerusalem because of its holiness). It was decided that all the patriarchs would be equal in rank under the leadership of the emperor, who would occasionally convene worldwide Ecclesiastical Councils, and so it was.
But over time, the western part of the empire fell to the barbarians and the imperial rule disintegrated. The vacuum created was filled by the Church under the leadership of the Patriarch of Rome, who decided on this occasion that his position was above the others. This is how Catholicism was created, as a deviation from the original way of Christianity. At first, it was a small and unimportant Christian denomination in the dark corners of the world, but over the years, as a result of unexpected historical developments that caused the importance of Western Europe to rise, Catholic Christianity became the largest and most important Christian denomination in the world.
The Churches that kept the original organizational structure of early Christianity called themselves Orthodox – keepers of the straight path. For hundreds of years they sheltered under the protection of the Byzantine emperor, successor of the Roman emperors, who controlled the eastern Mediterranean, and even after the fall of the Byzantine Empire they did not deviate from their path.
Over the years, new peoples converted to Christianity and created new patriarchies within the Orthodox world. The first were the Bulgarians who were recognized as the sixth independent patriarchate, immediately followed by the Russians and the Serbs, and today there are 15 independent Orthodox patriarchates led by 15 different patriarchs in different parts of the world (mainly in the Balkans and Eastern Europe), with all of them maintaining the traditional way of organizational independence.
The new Orthodox Patriarchates were founded as part of an effort of conversion aimed at the rising national cultural entities around Byzantium, such as the Bulgarians and the Serbs. consequently, they became national Churches of their people, flesh of their flesh, part of their essence and history. The meaning of a national Church is that religion cannot be separated from culture and national identiny and many times language, a bit like Judaism and the people of Israel. Therefor it is important for the traveler interested in Bulgaria to get to know the history and tradition of the Bulgarian Church. But first a general understanding of Orthodox Christianity is needed.
The Christian Mysteries
The ancient world at the time of Jesus was divided into two cultures: in the western Mediterranean people spoke Latin and the culture was Roman, while in the eastern Mediterranean people spoke Greek and the culture was Hellenistic. Both parts belonged to the same empire and yet were different in their culture and religious outlook. Later the Roman Empire was divided according to these division lines.
The ideal of noble life in the Roman-Latin world was one of discipline, order, values, hierarchy, and ritual; it was accompanied by a deep sense of guilt stemming from the Roman-Latin character. The ideal of noble life in the Greek-Hellenic world was one of participation in the mysteries, closeness to nature, and an attempt to see the order and divinity within it—a desire for purity stemming from faith. Greek-Hellenic culture cultivated the joy of life and art.
These two different ideals, that were based on cultural differences, are reflected in the differences between the nature of Western Catholic Christianity and the nature of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In the Orthodox Church, the essence of Christianity is not guilt (“we have sinned”) and obedience, but the mystery of life — a continuation of the mystery tradition of the ancient Greeks, who were connected to the forces of nature and enjoyed science and art. In other words, the Eleusinian mysteries continued through the liturgy of the Orthodox Christian Church.
The mysteries of the Greek-Hellenic world appear in Orthodox Christianity through conceiving various events in the life of Jesus as allegorical expressions of universal truths—a way to understand essential points and stages in human life and the path of spiritual development. The Christian story is interpreted as a cosmic drama of death and rebirth; the various events in the life of Jesus are interpreted as stages on the spiritual path, with the emphasis being on the resurrection of Jesus and not on the crucifixion.
In addition to that, the Christian liturgy is a celebration of sounds and smells, processions and colors, which express the richness of life and man. This attitude is expressed in art, and especially in icon paintings and Frescoes.
The main Christian Orthodox mystery is the possibility of turning a man into a God, and this is called Theosis, it is based on the saying of Athanasius the Great (Church father from the 4th century AD): “Jesus is the Son of God who appeared in a human form, in order to show Humans the way to become sons of God.” Theosis can be understood through the biblical figures of Elijah and Moses. The story of Elijah ascending to heaven is a story of a man who is granted eternal life, who joins the Gods thanks to his actions in this world, and is the same story of Hercules or other mythological figures who were privileged to join the Greek pantheon despite being born as humans.
There are other Greek mysteries motives that appear in a new Christian garment:
Mary, the mother of Jesus, replaces the great mother figures of the Hellenic world — Demeter and Gaia, the earth goddesses. And so, the image of the pagan goddess Gaia surprisingly appears in the mosaics of Orthodox churches and monasteries throughout the Balkans, since this is the same ground that Jesus walked on and is saturated with his blood, and hence it was sanctified. It is an earthly mother who contained God-Jesus within her, and therefore she is called — the Mother of God – Theotokos.
Events in the life of Jesus, both before his birth and after his death, are seen as representing a mystery that reflects upon our lives here and now. Such is the mystery of the annunciation in Nazareth: the angel says to Maria the words: “Blessed are you among women”, and immediately she becomes pregnant by the mere utterance of the word. There is a mystery here of the creation of a thing by a word, just as God created the world in the beginning, and this thing is so far-fetched that even Joseph, Maria’s husband, finds it difficult to believe; However, it also appears in our lives in the form of “we become what we think about” – we think in words and they come true (this idea recently appeared in a popular movie called “The Secret”).
Another mystery is the first miracle Jesus performed: turning water into wine at a wedding in Kana village. This mystery draws directly from the ancient Greek Dionysian traditions. The wine is the essence of change that turns man into God. Dionysus is half God and half man, a man who discovered the God within him, and like him we too can discover the God within us. At the Last Supper, Jesus passes the cup of wine among his disciples and tells them: “This is my blood that you are drinking.” Here is a continuation of the first miracle, the wine is turning into blood.
Wine in the ancient world represented the attribute of the soul and therefore alcohol is called Spirits in English. Man is empty and low in spirit, but drinking wine is enough to make him happy. What is the source of the happiness? The answer of the ancients was that it comes from the wine. Wisdom also comes from wine: the ancient Greeks used to hold a symposium after the meal where they would lie on sofas, drink wine and talk philosophy. It was the wine that was considered the bringer of the spirit of wisdom!
Water is the property of matter without spirit; Wine is matter with spirit. What, then, is the secret of turning matter without spirit into matter with spirit? This secret is taught by Jesus. This is the mystery that appears in the story of a seemingly simple and mundane miracle … there was no wine; therefore, he performed a miracle, because he can do everything … and it is not as simple as that. There is a hidden meaning in the story, at least according to Orthodox Christianity.
The miracle of the loaves of bread and fishes is another Mystery, in which Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fishes and feeds the multitudes with them, with twelve full baskets remaining. Usually when you divide something it decreases accordingly, but here something is divided, and it multiplies. What is the mystery behind this? What is the secret of abundance? The secret is love; It gets stronger the more you give it. This is the new covenant, the covenant of the heart, a situation where one and another are more than two. This can be our situation if we do the right things in life – the abundance will only increase and continue to flow.
The miracle of transfiguration on Mount Tabor is another mystery that includes within it the possibility of change from the physical to the spiritual light. According to Christian Orthodox mysticism, it is not Jesus that changed, but the disciples who went up the Mountain with him. Thanks to this change that happened upon them they could see the real Jesus. The real change is to see things as they really exist in the spiritual world (the world of ideas according to Plato). On Mount Tabor the disciples got to see for the first time the spiritual light of Jesus, it was always there but they did not notice it.
There is no doubt that the greatest mystery of all is death and the possibility of eternal life, in Orthodox Christianity it appears through the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. The meaning of the crucifixion is that in order to gain eternal life we must first kill our “old self”, the ego, turn the “I” into “nothing”. All the mysteries of the ancient world, from Egypt to Eleusis near Athens, involved a ceremony that simulated death in order to allow rebirth into a new and eternal life. These were rites of passage, initiation, in which the believer stayed in a dark place in the depths of the earth for three days, just as Jesus stayed for three days in the tomb and was resurrected.
The mystery of the resurrection stems from the crucifixion that happened before; it teaches us that true resurrection is a spiritual awakening. This is the hidden meaning of the story, which if taken literally is fiction. The meaning of the resurrection is that there is something spiritually dormant within us, something that Jesus awakens through his sacrifice. Jesus takes us through the dark night of the soul, through the valley of sorrow, he leads us through the pain of renunciation (crucifixion), to discover the true Jesus nature within us, which is immortal.
There are other mysteries in Orthodox Christianity, which appear in the stories of the life of Jesus and the saints and reflect motifs that existed in the mysteries of the ancient world. There is the mystery of the removal of the head of John the Baptist. We should note that beheading of saints is a common motif in the Balkan, there is symbolism in this, that the path to God is not a rational act but an emotional jump of belief. Therefore, it is necessary and desirable to lose one’s head on the way to God.
There is the mystery of the birth of Jesus in a cave in Bethlehem and the three wise men from the east, who came to visit him following the star they saw in the sky. The same star injects the mystical ray of light into the forehead of Jesus. In the same way the birth of the nature of Jesus within us takes place within the cave of our interiority, into which the mystical ray of light penetrates.
There is the mystery of baptism, during which the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in the form of a dove. Baptism is not only a physical purification but also a spiritual purification. The mystery here is that the path to enlightenment is through purification first, “catharsis” in the words of the ancient Greeks and the Gnostics.
And so, on and on.
In the Hellenic Greek world that preceded Christianity there were three preferred subjects of study: athletics, art and mythology. Through mythology, people learned the mysteries of human life, thus gaining unmediated knowledge. The Christian story replaces the mythology of the Greek Hellenic world and continues it. In the Christian story there are deep mythological human archetypes. In addition to this, it can be argued that Christian art replaces to some degree the classical art, and only athletics was abandoned by the new religion, and instead of adoration for the human body and human characteristics as the measure for all things, it developed adoration for the figure of the spiritual man (athlete) – the Theosis.
Knowing the tradition and meaning of the Orthodox mysteries allows us a new and deep understanding of the principles behind the art and architecture of the Churches and monasteries in the Balkans, as well as understanding the meaning of the various rituals, and even to some extent the Folklore traditions and legends.
