RUSSIAN PIETY
Author NICHOLAS ARSENIEV
Publisher THE FAITH PRESS
ISBN 71640314 5
I have given a short review on a couple of books written by Arseniev. As his name would suggest, he was a Russian, an Orthodox Christian who became a seminary professor in Germany and spent the last years of his life teaching at St Vladimirs in New York. He did not write in English but his writing is beautiful and does not suffer under translation one bit. Evidently he was a man with a heart burning for God and that, blended with his evident scholarly abilities make for a little book on the Russian soul and its pathway in Christian life that is intriguing and causes the reader, if thoughtful, to breathe an atmosphere that is indeed filled with presence of Christ. Most Christians from the West would not have even considered the spiritual life of the Russian Orthodox church nor of its prelates and monks and those from the poor peasant stock who had a heart to know God. Yes, there is plenty here to cause questions for those of Protestant Evangelical background but there is an opening of a world of Russian spirituality in these chapters about saintly life and its humility, generosity, prayerfulness and adoration. True, we wonder about the use of ikons and the beauty and pomp and ceremony of the Orthodox forms of veneration but here all is set against a kind of gallery of intimate pictures, portraits and an anthology of quotations from so many Russian saints of the last ten centuries. So much suffering, so much literature, communism and its avowed endeavour to expunge all Christian testimony and its failure to do so. All this and more is to be found in these pages. Russian history is complex, the soul of the Russian people has incredible capacity for both the largeness of experience that the Risen Ascended Christ Jesus can bring into the believing heart. As I read I could not help but compare the superficiality of the American soul. The contrast is immense. Russia has a great cloud of witnesses, men and women martyred because they refused to deny the Living Christ Jesus. At this point in history the USA does not possess such, but, changes are coming. Communism faltered and fell against the Rock of the Kingdom of God as kept alive in the Russian Orthodox church and the ‘old believers’ and the like. From a completely different perspective the reader will see both the nature and the indestructibility of the church of God in the pages of this book.
