Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Old Believers

Going Along: Closing This Topic Off: "First things first: The Old Believers were right. The historical studies inaugurated in Russia during the nineteenth century and—in some sense—“completed” in Paul Meyendorff’s Russia, Ritual, and Reform presents the reality that with respect to the criticisms of praxis forwarded by the Old Believers, they had more than ample ground to stand on. The three-finger Sign of the Cross became normative in the Byzantine East between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries; the Slavonic liturgical texts, though lacking in uniformity, represent older practices than those enshrined by the Greeks in their seventeenth-century printed texts; the orthographical alterations in Slavonic were, by and large, unnecessary and contributed nothing significant to the liturgical texts themselves"