About a month ago I found an article in an 1872 edition of the Southern Presbyterian Review by George W. Leyburn on the Orthodox Church. Leyburn was a Presbyterian minister and missionary from Rockbridge, Virginia. He was a graduate of Princeton and was well versed in the Greek language. In 1836 he traveled to Greece to work as a missionary, but was prevented by the Greek government, which insisted he use the Orthodox catechism, or cease his activities. He returned to Virginia soon thereafter and resumed his pastoral duties in the vicinity of Appomattox Courthouse. During the the war, Leyburn served as a chaplain to the southern troops, although it is unclear whether or not he had a commission in the Confederate army. In 1875 he returned to Greece, at the insistence of the small group of evangelicals there, to continue his mission activity. After only living there a matter of weeks, Dr. Leyburn took ill and died. The work entrusted to him fell to his son, George L. Leyburn, and a Dr. Kalopothakes, a Greek convert and member of the Virginia Synod of the Southern Presbyterian Church.
I had to send away for a copy of the article since they have been archived by the Presbyterian Church in America, and no digital copies exist. I received a copy in the mail a few weeks ago, and though it was late when I returned home and picked up my mail (after midnight), I immediately sat down to read it, my eyes heavy with sleep. What I read did not please me. I mean, it did please me that I had a southern minister writing about Orthodoxy, but the content of that writing did not please me.
Leyburn, here referring to the Orthodox Church as the "Anatolic Church," writes: "Any Church that holds to tradition, and in the most gross and pernicious statement of it, as the Anatolic Church does, is radically degenerate, and even apostate." Leyburn scandalizes his readers with a litany of supposed heresies, ranging from the old hat - scripture versus tradition - to the worship of images and saints as gods and demigods. He calls the term "Theotokos," "dangerous" and "blasphemous," and takes language to mean that Mary is believed to have begotten God from before the ages. He takes the Synod of Jerusalem, held in 1672, as the definitive statement of what Orthodox Christians believe, although this synod was the product of a western influence within the Church, what Georges Florovsky has termed the "pseudomorphosis of Orthodoxy."
So we cannot blame Leyburn for the poor quality of his sources. He comes to the conclusion that the Orthodox are essentially pope-less Roman Catholics who lack the spiritual vitality of the same. He writes:
But as to vital, spiritual religion among the people of this great communion, there is a sad and terrible eclipse. The words are on the lips; the technology of piety is volubly used; - certainly so among the Greeks, and said to be so everywhere else in the communion; - you would think at first that you were talking with some of the most pious people in the world; and this has misled even missionaries at first. But alas! you soon find that, under this outward show, there is an utter want of true spiritual perception and understanding, - the shell without the kernel; - that every body is a Christian from baptism, and that repentance and faith, in their vocabulary, or rather, in their minds and hearts, have a meaning that falls far short, practically, of the true and saving one.Emphasis mine. I found Leyburn's wording interesting; they lack the "true spiritual perception and understanding."
Leyburn rails against the tangible, visceral aspects of Orthodoxy; he praises the iconoclasts:
Leo and other "eikonoklast" emperors had made, through fifty years, one of the last struggles against this invasion of idolatry. But the Empress Irene, well styled by historians "the infamous," triumphed, in the calling of this council, which decreed every thing that she wanted. And, though the murderess of her husband, she is adored in the Greek Church as a saint, and her name constantly crowned with praises.It is a mistake often made in the west of supposing Irene to be a saint, since Theodore the Studite praised her as a saint for restoring the icons. But she was never recognized as a saint by the Church, nor does she appear anywhere in the Menaion.
This section of the article was the most interesting to me because I'm fascinated with how southerners viewed Islam. The iconoclastic controversy was an outgrowth of the Byzantine Empire's contact with Islam, which was (and is) strongly iconoclastic. One common thread that appears in almost all of the writings I've read from southern intellectuals on Islam is their praise of Mohammed for bringing about the decline of an idolatrous nominal Eastern Christianity. Islam was often praised for being a more "pure" faith than Eastern Christianity, and for having a salutary effect on the benighted "barbarian" peoples of Africa and Asia. Leyburn, ignorant of the Orthodox evangelization of the native peoples of North America, finds no effort among the Orthodox to raise the "barbarians" from their, well, barbarism:
...if the body now spoken of be a true Church, even one of the parts of the true body of Christ, we might expect to find something of a gospel influence emanating from it upon the non-Christian races - at least those in immediate contact with it. But where has the "Greek" Church done the least particle of such work for ages upon ages past? What good and saving influence has she thrown out upon Mohammedanism?I think it would have surprised Leyburn - and probably worried him - to know that for nearly 80 years, Orthodox missionaries had been converting the "non-Christian races" of Alaska.
Leyburn continues on the subject of saints and icons:
In the Catechesis of Darbares, already cited from, and the most mild, guarded and apologetic of all the published statements of Anatolic faith ever published, unless we except that of Bishop Plato, we find, in the exposition of the first commandment, even where he is defining the violation of it, such language as this: "That person sins inexcusably and greatly against this commandment who offers to the ministers of God almost the same honor that he offers to God himself; who prays more and oftener to them than to God; who celebrates their memory or their [festival] days with more reverence than that of our Lord; who honors their pictures more than that of our savior," etc. The indirect intimations of this language are sadly significant. I can sympathize with Leyburn. There was a time when I would have been shocked by such language. Yet, here we have a catechism warning against idolatry. However, note that even when the Orthodox catechism warns believers against making saints equal to God, he still labels it as "creature worship:"
And, bad, in these things, as are her symbols of doctrine, the prescribed worship of the Anatolic Church is even worse. It is a dreadful fact that the larger part of the forms of worship found in the numerous collections of her church services, are addresssed to the Virgin and the canonized saints. And a large part of this vast accumulation may, without exaggeration, be called a compound of puerility with what a properly enlightened mind feels to be not only creature-worship, but even blasphemy and sacrilege of the most revolting kind....Emphasis mine again. Honoring the saints and asking for their intercession is
puerile. Only the "properly enlightened mind" can grasp that it is idolatry, blasphemy, and creature worship. I would love to see Leyburn's reaction to St. John Damascene's "Against Those Who Decry The Holy Images." And what's this business about the "larger part of the forms of worship" being addressed to the Virgin?
Had Leyburn not died so early into his mission efforts, I wonder to what extent he would have been successful. He did not have a clear understanding of Orthodoxy, of the development of Church dogma, or of its history. In part, he can't be blamed, since the sources that were available to him weren't the most accurate. The picture of Orthodoxy he was able to assemble was filtered through western sources - whether they were the "confessions" and catechisms of individual Patriarchs influenced by the West or English clergymen living in Russia who lent their "disinterested" and "objective" testimony to Leyburn's assertion that the Orthodox were idolatrous.
But there is also the anti-Catholic bias, which Leyburn could not help but betray (I should say he was happy to betray it), and that rubs off on Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, this is what many evangelicals today believe regarding the Orthodox.
It's what
I used to believe.
Finally, Leyburn's dismissiveness and self assurance simply annoyed me: "We need not take much time for the evidence," he writes, with all of the assurance of a man who
knows that he's right.
I shouldn't have been surprised at Leyburn's opinions regarding Orthodoxy. As I have found, almost without exception, southerners tended to take a low view of the Orthodox Church. The only real exception so far is the redoubtable George Fitzhugh, ever one of my southern heroes, despite his unfortunate racial notions (which, in his defense, he shared with pretty much everyone else at the time). How I wish I could transport myself back to that time and challenge Leyburn to a debate, but alas it can never happen.
