the Orthodox today, and not just the greatest problem facing the outside student of Orthodoxy. Basically, we can say that if the rejection of the Council of Florence marks the definitive entry of the Eastern Church into schism, then from the beginning of its separate life until the nineteenth century its own vision of itself as a unity in plurality virtually disappeared in practice. Essentially, what we have between 1450 and 1800 are two mega-Churches, the Church of Russia, protected by the Tsardom,