(Above) Illustration of Alexei Karamazov’s “Speech at the Stone” at the end of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, by Fritz Eichenberg. The “one good memory” he mentions as potentially salvific in life bears relation to the Symbol of Faith in the spiritual life of the Orthodox Christian.
In Orthodox Christianity, tradition is experiential, and is the believer’s communal way of knowing in our Lord Jesus Christ in His Church, His Body.
Our goal, as the Orthodox poet Donald Sheehan put it, commenting on the works of Dostoevsky as based in Orthodox tradition, is to empty ourselves in Christ, not to assert ourselves. A term in Slavic tradition for the communal nature of this tradition is sobornost, which means spiritual unity. The root of the word is a Slavonic gloss on the term catholic in the Greek Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. But in Orthodox fashion it indicates more the communal solidarity, the hidden spiritual unity, of catholicity, than the way the term catholic developed in the Latin West to mean universal spatiality. That fed global claims by sectarian schismatic and heterodox movements with emphasis on individualism, organizational centralization, and rationalism, a combination that paradoxically encouraged the global technocratic and consumerist secularism we face today.
But the way of knowing truth in the Orthodox Church always grows from and focuses on Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, in His Body. For example, in the Church, there are only three men in history given the title Theologian (the Apostle John the Evangelist, and Saints Gregory the Theologian, and Symeon the New Theologian), and they all were given this for their holy experiential knowing and service in the Church, not academic degrees or knowledge divorced from the Divine Wisdom, Christ. The limited number thus granted that title is a reminder of this!
Both the Creed and the Russian-style Orthodox Prayer Rope known as the Lestovka serve, in different ways, to express this experiential way of knowing in Orthodox Christianity, as briefly outlined below.
(Above) Painting by Mikhail Nesterov “The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew”
The Symbol of Faith
The Orthodox Church’s main source of memory of Tradition, including Holy Scripture, arguably is found in the Symbol of Faith (the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed) repeated at every Divine Liturgy (usually sung, often with a bell ringing), and at Small Compline and other services. The Liturgical Tradition of the Church as a whole, such as the Odes at Matins, form an entire constellation of experiential memory of the Christian Tradition including Scripture. However, the Creed can be considered a condensed version, shaped by Ecumenical Church Councils, and providing a framework for Church Fathers and Elders as well as young children taught to memorize its 12 articles.
This can be seen in how a major Catechism of the Orthodox Church, St. Philaret of Moscow’s 19th-century text, focuses on unpacking for the catechumen each of the 12 articles of the Creed, and in how a major source of the heretical schism of Roman Catholicism from the Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages was the altering of the Creed in Catholicism to include the Filioque.
Alexei Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, which includes many themes of the Orthodox Christian faith in storytelling form, states that even one good memory may be enough to save a man. The Symbol of Faith, experientially used in Liturgy and often in private prayers such as Small Compline as a traditional evening prayer, or just in a prayerful repetition, is a pre-eminent example of that type of memory in the real life of the Orthodox Christian. In a non-Orthodox example from secular literature, the Anglican writer CS Lewis (who had an attraction to Orthodoxy late in life) wrote in his fictional The Silver Chair of children who are given a formula of simple directions to remember for their salvation in the story. Without the living Tradition of the Church, they mix up and forget those directions, until providentially reminded of them. So is the Creed to the believer.
(Above) A Lestovka or Prayer Rope made by the monks of St. Dionysius Monastery in Virginia, USA.
The Lestovka (Prayer Rope)
The Jesus Prayer, in short form “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” is a preeminent way of remembering God and the faith in Orthodox Christianity, reflecting the experiential knowing of holiness, aspiring toward thesis, in our faith’s emphasis on ascetic struggle in synergy with the uncreated light of divine grace. It has been pointed out that the short prayer evokes the Holy Trinity, for in calling Jesus Lord it follows the leading of the Holy Spirit, and in referencing Christ, the Father’s anointing of the Incarnate Son one ffect, and in the name Jesus the Son Himself. In addition, the five words of the short prayer in Greek and Slavonic, or the shorter “Lord Jesus Christ mercy me” in colloquial English, remind us of the Apostle Paul’s comment that five words spoken in truth are better than long wordy prayers. The Jesus Prayer has long been a source of “getting the mind into the heart” and engaging in “prayer without ceasing” in Orthodoxy, as exemplified in the writings of the Church Fathers known as the Philokalia, the five-volume collection edited in Russian by St. Theophan the Recluse from the Slavonic version compiled by St. Paisius Velichovsky from Greek texts. Their work and the tradition of the Jesus Prayer helped shape the holiness of the Saint-Elders of Optina Monastery in Russia during the 19th and early 20th centuries, whose legacy still bears fruit and shines through the intervening history of huge persecutions and glorious martyrdoms during the Bolshevik Yoke.
In Russian tradition, a form of prayer rope developed by the faithful especially in the Old Believer tradition but now also increasingly popular among Orthodox Christians at large, is the Lestovka or Ladder. Like the Creed, but in a different way, it exemplifies experiential memory of the Tradition including Scripture. This involves personal use of the Prayer Rope in the left hand, focusing prayers through the “steps” of the leather circle of the Ladder, sometimes while Crossing one’s self with the right hand and also prostrations or bows. Such uses of the Prayer Rope may follow the “Optina 500” prayers or adapted versions, under the guidance of an experienced spiritual father.
A common version of the Lestovka includes preliminary steps involving Alleluia prayers and expressions of “Lord have mercy” related to smooth sections at the start and end indicative of our shared earthly experience. Then the actual loop of steps includes 12 for the Apostles, 38 for the weeks of gestation of our Lord in His Mother’s womb, then 33 for His years on earth, and 17 for the Holy Prophets (including the Forerunner John) who pointed to Christ’s coming. Each step encloses a tiny text of the Jesus Prayer. The whole loop of 100 is augmented by the preliminary steps and a step between each of the above sections, totaling 9 additional prayers, symbolizing the nine ranks of Angels in Church Tradition. Flaps indicate the Four Gospels and enclose reminders of the seven mysteries of the Church. Taken all together, the Lestovka as a focus for prayer serves as a reminder experientially of central aspects of Church Tradition including Scripture.
Developed of course in days before smart phones and wireless devices and AI, the Lestovka is a different and experiential sense of “wireless” knowing, distinct from increasingly oppressive secular technocracy and academic knowledge alike, which today seek to overwhelm us with denial of the Incarnation of Christ in what the Evangelist John called the spirit of Anti-Christ. That the gates of hell cannot prevail against our Lord’s Church, His Body, inheres in the Symbol of the Faith and the Prayer Rope as, again in different dimensions, reminders of the experiential and embodied epistemology of Orthodox Christianity. Among the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit developed in Holy Scripture, knowledge is identified with faith. May the Lord give us good strength and wisdom!