In this
essay first published in Russian and French in 1950, the Elder Sophrony
(Sakharov), then a relatively young hieromonk, argues forcefully that Orthodox
ecclesiology must conform to Orthodox trinitarian theology. In striking
contrast with ideas later put forward by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas),
Sophrony understands the Orthodox dogma of the Trinity to reject any form of
subordinationism whatsoever, as subordinationism corresponds to papism. In
Orthodoxy, the Father begets the Son, but the Son is no less equal to the
Father for this. Therefore, there can be no primacy that places a certain
bishop or church over the other churches. Likewise, the institution of
autocephaly is fundamental to Orthodox ecclesiology as it expresses the
consubstantiality and equality of all the local Churches and teaches us that no
place and no race enjoys a greater fullness of divine grace than any other. For
Sophrony, the best canonical expression of Orthodox ecclesiology is Apostolic
Canon 34.
The Unity of the Church, an Image of
the Holy Trinity
(Orthodox
triadology as a principle of ecclesiology)
Nineteen centuries have passed
since Saint Paul, as he walked through the city of Athens examining objects of
worship, found an altar bearing this inscription: “the unknown God (Agnosto
Theo)” (Acts 17:23).
It is clear that this altar was
erected by the best representatives of human thought, by sages who had reached
the limits of knowledge, limits that remain unsurpassable even to our own day
for man’s natural understanding—for God is unknowable for logical thought. True
knowledge of the true God comes from Revelation.
In the divine economy of our
salvation, the Church marks certain events as being essential by commemorating
them with Feasts. They follow each other chronologically: Annunciation,
Nativity, Epiphany (in the Byzantine rite, this feast is called the Baptism of
Christ), Transfiguration, the Passion, the Resurrection, Ascension and the
Descent of the Holy Spirit. In God’s revelatory designs, each of these events
is tied to the others in an organic and indissoluble manner, but the day of
Pentecost, the day when the descent of the Holy Spirit is celebrated, has a
particular place because it marks the fulfillment of the Revelation of the
Great God Almighty, the Creator of all things.
God knows no envy, pride or
ambition. The Spirit of God follows man humbly and patiently on all the paths
of life in order to make Himself known to him and by this to even join him to
His divine eternity (cf. Acts 10:35). This is why in every age man could, to a
certain degree, attain knowledge of the true God. Apart from the Incarnation of
the Word and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, however, perfect
knowledge of God was impossible. Apart from Christ, who has come in the flesh,
no spiritual, philosophical or mystical experience allows man to know the
Divine Being as absolute Objectivity, an unknowable, in Three Subjects equally
absolute and unknowable; in other words: the consubstantial and indivisible
Trinity.
The nature of man, who is created
in the image and likeness of God the Creator, possesses the faculty of a
certain conjecture about the Divine Being. But this conjecture does not lead to
true knowledge of the divine mystery, as all historical experience shows us,
and this is why it is necessary for God Himself to reveal to man, to the degree
accessible to his understanding, the image of His existence.
We must not forget that the
Revelation of the New Testament was preceded by that of the Old. When
Christians immerse themselves in the contemplation of biblical Revelation, they
already hear in the first chapters of Genesis familiar words about the One God
who is, at the same time, multiple: “God says: let us make man in Our image,
according to Our likeness.” And again, “God says: behold, man has become like
one of Us” (Genesis 1:26, 3:22). The Psalms and the Prophets show us that the
Old Testament knew of God’s Word (Λόγος) and Spirit (Πνεῦμα).
“The heavens were created by the word (Λόγος) of God and all their host
by the breath (Πνεῦμα) of His mouth” (Psalm 33:6, and others). But we do
not find there knowledge of the Word and Spirit as Hypostases, as
Person-Subjects. They are seen there as energies. The humankind of the Holy
Testament desperately debated the notion of the One God, understood not within
the framework of Christian monotheism, but within that of non-Christian
henotheism (that is to say, God with one sole hypostasis). One cold even wonder
if it was not an account of the narrowness of the framework imposed by
henotheism that the Jews of the Old Testament felt so attracted to to polytheism.
But that path being forbidden to them by the Law and the Prophets, they
languished awaiting the promised Messiah-Emmanuel, Who would reveal to them the
entire truth about God (John 4:25).
If we examine the other part of
humankind before Christ, those who lived apart from the Revelation of the Old
Testament, we will see, alongside countless mistakes, remarkable approximations
of knowledge of the truth. This experience of a certain natural knowledge of
God is very precious for us. It shows us the limits of what is naturally
accessible. Each time that man wants to place reason at the head of his
spiritual life, in other words, each time that he tries to know eternal Truth
through the effort of his intellect, he inevitably falls into a pantheistic
conception of Being. This, it seems to us, is due to the fact that the
intellect is impersonal in the functions proper to it. Left to itself and taken
as the superior form of the human faculties, it necessarily tends toward
conflict with the personal principle in Being in general. But when man notices
that the personal principle is the basis of every rational essence, he
recognizes the inadequacy of personality, of the Ego, taken in isolation and
naturally turns toward polytheistic pluralism.
It is strange to note that the
impersonal monism of pantheists and even pagan pluralism belong, to a certain
degree, to human thought even into our own day.
The pantheistic understanding of
Being is superior to pagan polytheism inasmuch as it takes account of the
primordial unity of Being. The advantage of pagan pluralism, at its best,
consists of true knowledge of the person as a profound and ontological principle
all rational being and of understanding it as one of the Energies, one of the
manifestations of this principle.
Thus the experience of the
pre-Christian world, whether or not it participated in the Revelation of the
Old Testament, clearly teaches us that man gets lost in his misunderstandings,
unable to find a way out and to arrive at true knowledge of God. This way out
and this knowledge are given to humankind by the divine Revelation in Jesus
Christ and by the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.
But what is the knowledge of the
mystery of the Divine Being that were were given by this Revelation? Can one
express it in words and if that is possible, where are these words? It is the
Church of Christ Who keeps them, She Who teaches us that the true God is the
one God in three Persons. She speaks to us of the divine existence as an
inseparable Tri-Unity without confusion; as the consubstantial and indivisible
Trinity. Here we would like to cite an exposition of that teaching known under
the name “the Creed-Confession of our Father among the Saints Athanasius,
Patriarch of Alexandria.” [1]
“Whosoever seeks salvation must
first of all confess the catholic faith. There is no doubt that if one does not
hold this faith in its fullness and purity, one cannot avoid perishing for
eternity. Here is this Catholic faith: We worship the one God in Trinity and
the Trinity in unity, without confusing the Hypostases and without dividing the
Substance. For one is the Hypostasis of the Father, another That of the Son,
and another That of the Holy Spirit. But the Divinity of the Father, of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit is One, Their Glory is equal and their Majesty
coeternal. Such is the Father, such also is the Son and such is the Holy
Spirit. Uncreated is the father, uncreated the Son and uncreated the Holy
Spirit. Incomprehensible is the Father, Incomprehensible is the Son and
incomprehensible the Holy Spirit. Eternal is the Father, eternal the Son,
eternal the Holy Spirit: however, there are not three eternal things, but One
eternal. Likewise, there are not three uncreated and incomprehensible things,
but One alone is uncreated and incomprehensible. Likewise: almighty (Pantocrator)
is the Father, almighty the Son and almighty the Holy Spirit: however, there
are not three almighty things, but One Almighty. Thus, God the Father, God the
Son and God the Holy Spirit, but nevertheless there are not three gods, but One
sole God. Likewise: the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord and the Holy Spirit is
Lord; however, there are not three lords, but One Lord; Since we have been
brought by Christian truth to confess each of the Hypostases as God and Lord;
and at the same time catholic piety forbids us from naming three gods and three
lords. The Father was not created, made or begotten by anybody. The Son is from
the Father, still not created or made, but begotten. The Holy Spirit was not
created or made by the Father, but proceeds from Him. One alone is Father and
not three fathers. One alone is Son and not three sons. One alone is Holy
Spirit and not three holy spirits. And in this Holy Trinity none is first or
last. None is greater or less great. But the three Hypostases are whole,
coeternal to Each Other and equal. Thus it follows from all that has been said
that the Trinity is worshipped in Unity and Unity in Trinity. He who seeks his
salvation, let him think in this way about the Holy Trinity.”
This creed of Saint Athanasius is
usually found in the Psalter. It is followed by the “exposition of the faith of
Saint Maximus, questions and brief responses.” Here is how he confesses the
Holy Trinity:
“If you want to know what God is
and how it is fitting to worship Him, understand and comprehend and truly know
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. One is holy, one desire, one will, one
wisdom and one power. One is not before all ages while Another is within the
ages; but the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are together. The Son is in
the Father, the Spirit is in the Son, together one Nature and one Godhead. This
Godhead is divided in Three in the Hypostases, but It is one in substance. This
is why, when invoking the Father, in glorifying the Son and in confessing the
Holy Spirit, we call upon God, since the divine nature is common to the Father,
to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. But the Names of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit are not names common to all the Persons, but particular to each of
the Hypostases. For the Father is not called Son, the Son is not called Father,
and the Holy Spirit is not called Father or Son, but God is always called
Trinity. I say three Hypostases, which is to say three Persons, but one image.
We do not say: three substances in three Persons; nor three natures, nor three
gods as the disciples of the accursed Arius say. But we confess one God, one
substance, one nature in Three Hypostases. We do not confess one sole
hypostasis like the accursed Sabellians: but we confess, pray to, and worship
Three Hypostases, Three Persons in one image and in one sole Godhead.”
This Revelation of the Triune God
is an inexhaustible source of wisdom, joy and light for every believer. It
flows out onto all manifestations of human life. It resolves all the problems
and misunderstandings of the mind and the heart. It leads us into the infinite
spaces of eternal life. However, when our intellect is detached from our heart,
which is filled by the grace of faith, and remains alone before Revelation with
the laws proper to reasoning, this Revelation presents itself to it as a series
of insoluble problems.
It is impossible for us to
imagine a personal Being Who is perfect Life and eternally realized, Life which
excludes any shadow of a process. In other words, a Being in Whose life
self-awareness does not precede the act of perfect self-determination and in
Which this self-determination is not anterior to the absolute fullness of
self-awareness.
It is impossible for us to
conceive of a personal Being Who, being absolutely free in its
self-determination and, consequently, not limited by any predestination
whatsoever, does not exclude an absolute objectivity of its nature and its
essence. Our intellect does not comprehend how nature or existence, which is
absolute and objective reality, does not in any way precede and determine the
absolute perfection of the self-determination of the Persons of the Holy
Trinity.
Such a personal Being appears
unthinkable for us, one Who, being absolutely unique and simple, is at the same
time triune, such that each of the Three is an absolute Subject Who bears in
Himself all the fullness of Divine Being; that is to say, Who is perfect and
unique God, dynamically equal to the whole Tri-Unity.
Our thought cannot access the
existence of a Triune Being in Whom the Begetter does not precede the Begotten,
nor Him Who proceeds; where begetting and procession in no way limit the
absolute freedom of the personal self-determination of the Begotten and of the
One Who proceeds.
The Being in Which the Three
Persons are distinguished from the one Essence, this Essence which is
distinguished from the energies, and Who at the same time absolutely simple and
excludes all complexity, This Being is beyond our understanding.
How can this Being, Who encloses
within Himself a series of acts, such that the begetting of the Son, the
procession of the Holy Spirit, acts of self-determination and self-knowledge,
be at the same time an absolutely simple act, outside of any process and any
duration? This is also beyond our understanding.
We cannot imagine a Being whose
ontological principle, the Father, precedes neither the begotten Son nor the
proceeding Spirit and is not ontologically superior to either, to the point
that it is possible to speak of Their coeternity and Their absolute equality in
honor, power and Divinity or, to put it better, of Their unity in power, in
honor and in Divinity; of their one glory, Their one energy, Their one will—and
all this to such a point that dogma “forbids” any thought of hierarchical
structure or subordination within the Holy Trinity. “And in this Holy Trinity
none is first or last, none is greater or less great, but the Three Hypostases
are whole, coeternal and equal to Each Other.”
The Church teaches us that God is
a Being who has His cause in Himself and Who, apart from Himself, has no being
that is independent and parallel to Him. She speaks to us of the perfect,
living God Who is, consequently, pure act. But when our understanding
stops before this Being, He appears as a pure fact on account of His
primordial and absolute perfection.
Confronted with this doctrine of
the Church, our intellect is filled with astonishment and silence. She does not
adapt herself to the narrow frameworks of our reasoning. And when we examine
what the Church teaches about the Incarnation of One of the Three—the Son, the
Logos—several even more complex problems arise before us. We cannot conceive
how the Infinite takes a beginning, how the Uncreated takes the form of a
created existence. How can the only Son be perfect God and perfect Man? How
does the one Hypostasis of the One Who became incarnate indissolubly and
distinctly unite two natures, two wills, two actions, divine and human? We
cannot conceive of dogma of the Church which speaks to us of the one nature,
the one will, the one action of the Holy Trinity and at the same time of the
two natures, two actions two wills united in One of the Three.
***
These are not the only problems
presented to our intellect when it encounters the doctrine of the Church. Some
will always present themselves and they will always appear unsolvable. And if,
despite Revelation, the divine Being remains for us inconceivable,
unfathomable, invisible, undefinable, unspeakable, then what is the new life
and the new knowledge that the dogma of the Church brings to us regarding the
Holy Trinity? We will pose another question here: When it happens that we fall
on a doctrine of a reality not corresponding to the concepts of our intellect,
which always reasons according to its own laws, is this contradiction a
sufficient reason to consider this doctrine false? The answer to this question
is formal: this reason is not sufficient. The history of human culture gives us
multiple examples. Countless facts that today belong to the domain of empirical
science until very recently still appeared impossible to all scientific minds.
Let us imagine that during the last century someone would have delved by
intuition into the structure of matter. This intuition would have revealed to
him the life of the atom and he would have developed modern theories without
always being able to demonstrate them experimentally. Of course, he would have
been considered a madman or at least a fantasist or dreamer.
On the other hand, as soon as
science has empirical proof of a phenomenon, it becomes foolish to want to
prove, through logical conclusions, the non-existence or impossibility of that
phenomenon. And now in the domain of science we find ourselves before the fact
of its empirically-established existence and our reason can no longer resist it
and so necessarily comes to terms with this fact. It is the same with the
Revelation given to the Church which speaks to us of a determined fact—the
Divine Being. When our reason follows this fact, it arrives to a certain degree
at knowledge of what was previously unknown and inconceivable.
***
The “Creed” cited above expounds
extremely concisely on the fulness of the knowledge of the Divine Being
accessible to man. This confession, which is the dogma of the Church, has no
need of logical proofs. To the contrary, she makes us see the supreme fact of
the Being Who acts as the foundation of all, of our life and of our knowledge,
which is to say of our whole being, which is simple and unique in its
wholeness. In order to arrive at this knowledge, there is no other path but the
one shown by the Church. The sciences taught in schools demand of the students learning
them submission to the methods and instructions of their teachers. The Church
has Her own science, which is knowledge of God. She has her path, her method,
which leads to this knowledge. Those desiring to reach it must follow this path
traced by the Church, which is that of faith and obedience to Christ’s
commandments.
God is Love and cannot be known
and contemplated except through love and in love. This is why Christ’s
commandments, which lead to knowledge and contemplation of God, are also
commandments of love. The mystery of the Trinity is only imperfectly conceivable,
as it surpasses the limits of our understanding and the powers of our created
being. But although it is inconceivable and hidden, it reveals itself to us
ceaselessly in an existential manner, through faith and through life in faith,
thus becoming an inexhaustible source of eternal life. Faith delves into depths
inaccessible to the intellect; it calls us to knowledge and possession of
divine mysteries not through logical reasoning, but through a life in Christ’s
divine commandments. “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And
you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31-32).
Along this path of Christ’s words, God comes in front of man and makes His
abode with him (Jean 14:23), by giving him true knowledge of Himself. It is at
that point that what appeared inconceivable becomes light that enlightens our
ignorance and our errors and reveals them to us as consequences of our sin and
our fall. At that point there appears to us fulness without limits, wisdom,
beauty, light and the truth of Divine Life, which is Love.
Let us nevertheless refrain from
going too far in the quest for a verbal definition of the mysterious principle
of this attribute of Divine Life, which is at the basis of the unity that makes
the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity only one Being. Our mind should stop at a
certain limit so that our confession of faith will not be falsified by
rationalizing dogma. However, since Revelation teaches us that God is Love and
our Savior has given us the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, for
these reasons we can conceive of the essence of the Divine Being as Love. This
does not mean that love, as an essence, preceded the Three Persons, that the
essence is anterior to the Persons, who in that case would only be the
manifestations of that Essence. No, Love is the Essence, the very Nature of the
Godhead, but in the sense of an absolute liberty of self-determination of the
Three Persons. This self-determination is not, however, a “psychological” and
subjective state of the Hypostases, but a reality, an objectively existing
nature. This is why the dogma of the Church distinguishes between the Persons
and the Essence in the Divine Being.
Man is preceded in his existence
by another existence. For him, this is an established an incontestable fact
that appears to limit his self-determination from the outside. Man manifests
his qualities over the course of his development, going through a certain
process, an evolution. This process and this evolution are totally absent in
the Divine Being. We must always remember this when we think of God, so as not
to fall into the error of anthropomorphism. Even though man is created in God’s
image, he nevertheless inverses the hierarchy of life when he seeks to
attribute to God notions inspired by his knowledge of himself. At that point he
starts to create God in his own image and likeness. The contrary path is that
of the Church. We do not create God in our own image, but rather, by following
Christ’s commandments, we discover within ourselves the attributes of our
nature which is created in God’s image.
Two commandments of Christ lead
man to deification: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is
the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your
neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:30-31). Of these two commandments, it is the
second that reveals to us more of the mystery of the consubstantial and
indivisible Trinity. Here’s why.
The first commandment tells us,
“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul,
with all your mind, and with all your strength.” It did not say, “You shall
love your God as yourself.” That would be pantheism. This commandment speaks to
us of a degree of love. We must know God as love, but at the same time it shows
us the limit between man and God. It causes us to participate in the divine
life, but it does not cause the difference of nature (ἑτερούσιον) to
disappear.
The second commandment, “You
shall love your neighbor as yourself,” not only teaches us the measure or the
degree of love, but by the expression “as yourself” it rather shows us a
profound ontological community of all our pan-human existence, of our consubstantiality
(to homoousion). Realized in life, this commandment leads us to the fact that
all humanity is nothing but one man. [2]
Love has the result of
transposing the existence of the person who loves into that of the beloved. He
who loves starts to live in the beloved. The person, the Ego, can thus be
penetrated by Love. The absolute perfection of love in the Trinity reveals the
perfect interpenetration of the Three Persons, to such a point that they are
only one will, only one action, only one glory, only one power, only one
Divinity, only one Essence. This is why each Person-Hypostasis is the bearer of
the whole fullness of the Godhead and is dynamically equal to the unity of the
Three.
It is in the image of this love
that the keeping of the second commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as
yourself,” reestablishes the consubstantiality of the human race, which was
broken by sin, and leads to the fullness of the human being becoming the
possession of each person. Realized in its final perfection, this commandment
reveals that man is one, one in his essence and multiple in his
hypostases. Thus man, in the image of the Holy Trinity, is a consubstantial and
catholic being. When love is realized in all its fullness, each hypostasis, by
virtue of its abiding in the fullness of catholic unity, represents the
fulfillment of the human being and is dynamically equal to all humanity, to the
One Universal Man, in the image of the Perfect Man, Christ who contains within
Himself all Man.
Thus, along the path of keeping
Christ’s commandments, which is the path of the Church, the mystery of the Holy
Trinity is revealed. This mystery is revealed in an existential, vital manner
that is neither abstract nor rational. There is no other way to knowledge of
the divine mysteries.
Before this Revelation of the
Church, words of profound astonishment have always rung out and shall ring out
until the end of the ages: “Strange words, strange doctrines, strange dogmas of
the Holy Trinity” (the Matins of Pentecost).
***
The fullness of dogmatic life in
the Church is never interrupted, never diminished. Nevertheless, various
historical periods bring out certain aspects of Her teaching which always
remain one overall, emphasizing these aspects in order to avoid the danger of
diminishing the wholeness of the truth by an error of detail. In our own day, a
great danger threatens the dogma concerning the Church within the Orthodox
Church herself. The idea of the Church, of this “Kingdom which is not of this
world”, the Kingdom of the Heavenly King, of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, of
this new life, established on earth by the incarnate Word, is in danger of
being once more distorted, which may cause immense harm to the work of our
salvation. It is thus natural that our attention be concentrated on this issue.
Periods similar to our own place
great responsibilities upon each of us, for according to the teaching of the
Church, perfectly expressed in the Encyclical of the Patriarchs of the East in
1848, it does not belong only to the hierarchy to protect the truth, but rather
this task is entrusted to the Church in Her fullness. [3]
Judging it impossible to remove
from us the responsibility that has been laid upon us, as a son of the Church,
although we are unworthy, we make a fervent appeal to all Orthodox Christians
to examine the danger that threatens them in all its profundity so that, aided
by the grace of God, we may remove this danger and preserve the truth inherited
from our Holy Fathers in all its purity. We call upon our brothers to consider
with full consciousness these dogmatic questions that are of cardinal
importance in the work of our salvation.
It is always painful to enter
into debates where people accuse each other of having abandoned the truth, but
that was the environment in which the Fathers lived in the period that we call
the Church’s golden age, that of the holy Ecumenical Councils. Let us recall
the history of the Fathers who fought for Orthodoxy, ready not only to endure
all suffering, but also to suffer death. Who does not remember Athanasius,
Patriarch of Alexandria, who spend the greater part of his life in incessant
struggles, in exile and misery, all for just one iota—“homoousios” against the
“homoiousios” of the Arians. We know the example of Saint Bail, who was ready
to die for this same iota. Let us remember Gregory of Nazianzus, Maximus the
Confessor, John of Damascus, Patriarch Photius, Simeon the New Theologian, Mark
of Ephesus, Gregory Palamas, as well as other Fathers whose names are great
before God, albeit little known to men. They all suffered without end and
accepted martyrdom of death for the true faith. In the writings of several
eminent Russian theologians such as Khomiakov, Bolotov, Nesmelov and others,
the exceptional importance of the dogmatic element for our salvation has been
forcefully demonstrated. May we all have the fire with which Bishop Ignatius
Brianchaninov burned when he wrote, “The world in no way enticed me. I remained
cold and indifferent to it as though it were devoid of any charms, as though it
didn’t exist at all! My spirit was absorbed with learning and at the same time
it burned with the desire to learn where the true faith was hidden, where the
true teaching was to be found, free from all dogmatic and moral error.” (The
edition of 1885, pp. 633-35. See also The Works of Bishop I. Brianchaninov,
vol. I, 1886, Biography, p. 13).
So great was the fervor of our
fathers for dogmatic questions because they were conscient of their importance
not only for their own salvation, but also for the salvation of the whole
world, for the very existence of the true Church on earth.
***
We have the task of showing in a
short exposition that the catholic principle of the Orthodox Church is a
reality in the image of the Holy consubstantial and indivisible Trintiy.
The Church has the goal of
introducing her members into the domain of Divine Life and, consequently, it is
inevitable that her historical reality reflections the image of that Life. The
dogma of the Church speaks to us of an inconceivable perfection of Divine,
Triune, Catholic Life. This dogma affirms the equality in divinity, in
kingship, in sovereignty or, more synthetically, the equality in the absolute
of the Three Hypostases of the Holy Trinity. “Nothing (in It) is first or last.
Nothing is greater or less great.” In the interior of trinitarian life, there
is no hint of submission, of subordination. The begetting of the Son, the
procession of the Holy Spirit, all while demonstrating one sole principle in
the Holy Trinity, nevertheless do not cause the Son or the Holy Spirit to be diminished
before the Father. “But the Three Hypostases are coeternal and equal among
Themselves.”
The Church is called to reveal to
us the image of this Triune Being. If someone asks us, “What are the forms or
the historical principles that reveal this image to us?” We could answer: the
principle of catholicity and that of autocephaly. [4] Translating these terms
onto another plane, we can say: the principle of love and of equality, that of
freedom and of consubstantiality. And again, by connecting these concepts we
will have: in the freedom of catholic charity and in the equality of consubstantiality.
Is it necessary to insist on the
gap that exists between the ideal to which we are called and the historical
reality of the Church? Our distance from this ideal is so great that we can
neither feel nor comprehend it. There is no love in us and for this reason we
disregard the profundity of our consubstantial equality and unity. We
have lost our love and out of this result our divisions and our tendencies to
domination.
We have lost love and with it the
guidance of the Divine Light and we walk in the shadows of “dusky pride” and in
the death of hatred. It is to us that Christ said, “you are the light of the
world” and we have become a scandal to all.
We said above that a great danger
is making itself felt within Orthodoxy itself, threatening to disfigure the
teaching about the nature of the Church and, consequently, Her entire life,
since dogmatic consciousness is organically tied to the entirety of spiritual
life. It is impossible to change the least thing in our dogmatic understanding
without changing to the same degree the image of our spiritual existence.
And, conversely, a deformation in
the inner life will lead to a deformation of dogmatic consciousness. The loss
of dogmatic truth will have as an inevitable consequence the impossibility of
attaining true knowledge of God, the fullness of which the Church possesses.
The Church’s dogmatic confession forms an indivisible organic whole and it is
not permitted to treat the different parts of this confession separately. One
deformed detail will influence the whole. If the teaching on the nature of the
Church is disfigured, and as a consequence, as we have already said, also the
image of Her existence, how can She serve Her children on the path towards the
truth?
One may ask us, “In what is this
deformation currently manifesting itself?” We answer: in the neo-papism of
Constantinople which is tending to progress rapidly from theoretical form to
practical realization.
Papist tendencies in general are
only natural to our sinful world. They manifest themselves in the East as in
the West, in Byzantium as in Rome. But until now God has protected the Eastern
Church and these tendencies died out without disturbing the profound peace of
the Church. We do not want to pause here over the reasons that have caused a
new growth in these tendencies, limiting ourselves to examine only the dogmatic
basis of this question in order to show that papism, whether of First, Second
or Third Rome or of any important or unimportant city is foreign to the very
nature of Christ’s Church.
The dogma about the Church is
tightly bound to that of the Trinity and the Incarnation. That is to say, to
Triadology and Christology. The articles of the Rev Fr Kovalevsky, of Mr Lossky
and also of Hieromonk Silvanus, which appeared in Issue I of our Messenger
deal with the Christological aspect of the dogma about the Church. This is why
here we shall only touch upon the tradological aspect of this teaching.
This dogma teaches us that the
perfect Unity of the Divine Love of the Three Persons excludes any domination
by One of Them. Each time that Christian thought slid towards rationalism, it
became unable to contemplate this aspect of the divine nature. Rationalism,
which always tends toward logical monism, cannot avoid imagining either a
hierarchical structure within the Holy Trinity by affirming the superiority of
the First Person as an ontological principle or the confusion of the Three
Persons, thining of them as “modes” of manifestation of the One Essence of the
Godhead. Theology calls the first deformation “subordinationism” and the second
“modalism”. The principle of the papacy introduces subordinationism into the
inside of the Church. As only this principle interests us here, we will set
aside modalism and limit our analysis to the first triadological deformation.
The forms of subordinationism
vary. Sometimes people saw within the Trinity an ontological subordination,
independent of the relationship between God and His creation. This
“ontological” subordinationism was held by Origen. Sometimes people attributed
to the First and Second Persons a diminished importance and power with regard
to the creation of the world and the economy of our salvation. Tertullian and
Arius are examples of this “cosmological” or “economic” subordinationism. Over
the course of its development, ontological subordinationism naturally acquired
an economic aspect and vice-versa—economic and cosmological subordinationism
took on an ontological aspect, unless the Hypostases were treated as modes of
manifestation of God in the world.
The Church categorically rejects
every form of subordinationism. She professes her faith in the Holy Trinity in
these terms: “None is greater, none is less great (in the Trinity), but rather
the Three Hypostases are whole, coeternal with Each Other and equal.”
Triadological subordinationism,
transposed onto the structure of the Church, takes the form of papism, which
reflects one or another form of this false doctrine. Thus in ecclesiology Roman
Papism corresponds to the ontological aspect of Arius’ subordinationism, since
it gives the Bishop of Rome a place that separates him from the rest of the
body of the Church, raising him to a height that makes him not simply great but
of another nature (τὸ ἑτερούσιον). We must make clear that we are
not applying this parallel to the origin of Roman Papism, but to its current
form established by the Vatican Council in 1870. Its origin is nothing but a
survival from the pagan Roman Empire. Its dogmatic conception was later
influenced by the theology of the “filioque”, which leads to a specific
form of christocentrism. There then appeared a rupture between God and the
world: Christ became transcendent to the world and the Bishop of Rome took His
place in the earthly Church; the Holy Spirit, in practice, lost His absolute
hypostatic equality to the Father and the Son, becoming nothing but a power of
Christ, entrusted to the authority and judgment of the Bishop of Rome.
All these historical processes
are of an extreme complexity. They are the result of the reciprocal action of
countless influences, conditions and wills. In speaking here schematically
about Roman papism, we limit ourselves to only a dogmatic summary.
The modern papacy of
Constantinople is only in its embryonic phase. For the last 20 or 30 years, it
has appeared to seek ground. Its current development is very rapid, in contrast
to the slow development over centuries of Roman papism, which only attained its
final phase in 1870. In fact, the ideology of Constantinople’s papism has
varied several times in only a little time and it is still difficult to define.
The Russian adepts of this papism
are almost all found in France. Until 1948, we had not seen among them any
canonically or theologically-founded idea. As they themselves admitted, they
“were looking” above all “for a canonical basis” so as not to be outside the
Body of the Universal Orthodox Church after their separation from the Mother-Church
of Russia. With this goal, they began by recognizing a privilege of
jurisdictional right of the Patriarch of Constantinople inasmuch as he is
“Ecumenical”. Later, they attributed to the See of Constantinople primacy and
the right of Supreme Appeal in the Universal Church, forgetting the struggle
that the latter had waged for centuries against Rome’s pretentions to this
right; forgetting that these pretentions were precisely the cause of the
definitive Great Schism in the Church in 1054 and that at the Council of
Florence Rome sought above all from the East recognition of this supreme
arbitration in the Universal Church. They also forgot the multiple Canons of
the Ecumenical and Local Councils which refused to attribute these rights to
any given local Church, canons that even the Church of Constantinople
understood very well when she was firmly insisting on the Orthodox position in
order to combat Rome’s pretentions.
Until 1946, this group, loyal to
Metropolitan Evlogy, considered its dependence on Constantinople as provisional.
Starting from that date, they believed “to have found canonical truth” by
submitting to her definitively. At the same time, they sought not only a
canonical basis, but also a theological foundation for their position. Adopting
the principle of “development”, [5] particular to the theology of Roman
Catholics, they attributed to Constantinople exclusive authority over the
Orthodox “diaspora” in the entire world, denying other Autocephalous Churches
this same right with regard to their dispersed children. Unable to find for
this assertion any canonical basis or any example in the age-old practice of
the Church, they sought, following Rome’s example, to refer to the orders of
“God Himself”. Here is what they say:
“In order to maintain and
consolidate the Church’s unity, God (?) imposes upon us the obligation
to keep not only the unity of the faith and the sacraments, not only the unity
of love, but also the indissoluble unity of the holy hierarchy and of the
administration of the Church as much in the whole world as in every place
where the Church exists. This is why since apostolic times (?) the Holy Church
(?) our, to put it better, God Himself (?) has established a superior
Bishop first in the entirety of the Catholic Church and in each place or
each city one sole bishop, terrestrial vicar of His Son, with a single
clergy depending on him and in unanimous accord with the entire Orthodox
people, even if this people is represented by members of a different origin and
languages. The Holy Church does not know any other structure” (Messenger
of the Russian Church in Western Europe no. 21, 1949, p. 2, “Declaration of
the Diocesan Assembly”). [6]
Before continuing the exposition
of the “development” of the canonical and ecclesiological idea that we are
examining, we propose to compare the text cited above to another text that
seems to us to be characteristic of Roman Catholic doctrine. Here, for example,
is what the Catholic theologian the Rev Fr S. Tyshkevich says on this topic in
his “Treatise on the Church” (Paris, 1931, in Russian, pp. 232 and 233): [7]
“The Bishop of Rome possess a
jurisdiction that is 1) universal: it includes all questions of the
faith and the administration of all the parts of the Church and other things;
2) supreme: the Bishops of all the Churches, even those far away, appeal
to the pope. He even judges the Patriarchs. Without the pope’s approval, an
Orthodox Council is not possible; 3) ordinary: it includes all matters
requiring an intervention from the Supreme Authority, and not only in rare and
exceptional cases; 4) direct: that is to ay that it extends not only to
every Episcopacy, but, in case of need, directly to all the servants of the
Church and to all laypeople; 5) established by God and conferred by Christ
the Head and by the Holy Spirit and not by the Episcopacy or by “the people
of the faithful” (emphasis by the author, the Rev Fr Tyshkevich).
The first text cited, that of the
“Declaration of the Diocesan Assembly”, ends with these words: “Those who teach
otherwise do not do so in the Spirit of God, but rather they sow discord and
enmity.” These words prove the degree to which the authors of this Declaration
are convinced “of having found the truth.” The Rev Fr Alexander Schmemann
writes in his precis “The Church and Her Structure” in response to the Rev Fr
Michel Polsky:
“The partisans of the ideas of
the Rev Fr Posky probably do not miss an occasion, not without irony, of the
‘tortuous path’ and the ‘jurisdictional variations’ of our Diocese. And indeed,
we have no pretense of possessing infallibility (?) like the Rev Fr Polsky. In
fact, our Diocese has more than once suffered commotions and acute crises. But
we believe that in seeking each time the right path prudently in communion with
the whole ecclesiastical organism, we have demonstrated a true spirit of the
Church, more than “the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad” [8] with tis
prideful attitude of infallibility. Errors and failures are always possible in
the life of the Church. History abounds in examples to prove it… In the tragic
conditions of the life of the Russian emigration, the search for the right path
sometimes presented great difficulties. Whatever the motives were that caused
Metropolitan Evlogy to turn to Constantinople, whatever his own understanding
of this step that he took, it is not this subjective and psychological aspect
that counts. What is truly important is the objective significance of
this measure in the eyes of the Church. As time passes, we we appreciate
more and more to what degree this measure was in line with the truth of the
Church. It has definitively broken the vicious cycle of subjective and
fortuitous attitudes toward the problem of the Church’s structure: a firm
canonical basis was found” (p. 22. Emphasis by the author, the Rev Fr
Schmemann).
Other representatives of that
group share this perspective. We read in issue 21 of the Messenger “Tserkovny
Vestnik” among the publications of the materials of the Diocesan Assembly:
“The unity of the Church will not
be reestablished so long as we have not heard from atop the Ecumenical See the
voice of the first hierarch and supreme leader [9] of the whole Orthodox
Church, whose authority is formal for us, as for the Synod of Munich” (p.
7). [10]
“The Universal Church is not
presided over solely by the authority of the Ecumenical Councils; those only
meet in extreme cases. She is presided over permanently by the person of the
supreme hierarch of the Orthodox Church. This place belonged to Rome
inasmuch as it had not fallen into the Catholic heresy. [11] From that moment
on, the Patriarch of Constantinople took his place” (p. 16).
All these citations, as well as
all the expositions of the Rev Fr Schmemann, indicated above, and of other
representatives of this tendency show us clearly how they arrived at such
conclusions. Having correctly understood the canonical principle of local unity
by the primacy of the authority of a head-bishop, they did not notice that this
personal primacy does not extend beyond the episcopal eparchy (see Apostolic
Canon 34) and, faithful to their principle of “development”, they took it “to
the end” [12] in giving it universal significance. [13] This is yet
another similarity to Roman Catholicism.
“In the Work of Christ and in His
Holy Church, Which is the fruit of this Work, there is nothing unfinished,
nothing incomplete, nothing unilateral. Everything in her is developed “to the
end.” Christ’s work knows no gaps, no ruptures, no stops. Thus, the
logical ascension of the degrees of the ecclesiastical hierarchy do not stop at
the rank of Bishop or of Patriarch, but rather goes toward the papism that is
its natural conclusion, required by the Church’s theandric nature. The Church’s
hierarchy of Priests and Bishops is unified “to the end.” It cannot be deprived
of this essential rank, without which it could not be one hierarchy, but would
rather only be a collection of several hierarchies” (Tyshkevich, op. cit. pp.
280-281).
Let us once more pause over what
has been said above. We have already demonstrated that each time that Christian
thought tended toward theological rationalism, it came to be incapable of
contemplating the Divine Life. It then bends under the influence of logical
monism, which is proper to rationalism, either toward subordinationism in the
sense of the superiority of the First Person of the Holy Trinity as ontological
principle to toward the Sabellian understanding of that considers the Three
Persons as modes of manifestation of one sole Divine Essence. This inevitable
tendency of rationalism toward logical monism has produced many heresies. In
endeavoring to push “the logical ascension” “to the end”, theological
rationalism falls into absurdity. Its difficulty consists of the fact that it
very rightly sees one or the other aspect of the truth.
The earthly Church is not made up
of members who have all attained perfection. Her members are not all filled
with the fullness of Her teaching and Her life, but they are born, grow and
develop though teaching. It is thus inevitable that there are teachers and
students, spiritual fathers and children. Consequently, the existence of an
ecclesiastical hierarchy is necessary. Taking this necessity into account, the
Roman Church pressed the hierarchical principle “to the end”, having invested
one sole Bishop, separating him from the whole of the Church, and attributing
to him alone the charism of infallibility. This has disfigured the face
of the Roman Catholic Church, causing it to lose the resemblance to the Holy
Trinity, one in Its essence and equal in Its Hypostases.
Protestantism is the opposite.
Seeing in the spiritual reality proper to man one of the aspects of the truth,
that of the vocation of each to the fullness of direct communion with God, it
likewise pushed to the extreme and through this falls into another excess—the
predomination of the subjective and the individual, which is inevitably
unilateral. This is why it wound up in disunion and the loss of a an
organically unified life in the image of the consubstantial life of the Holy
Trinity.
The exclusivity that results from
the logical development of only one aspect of the truth, which pushed “to the
end”, letting it absorb all the other aspects of this same truth, such is the
characteristic of numerous heresies caused by rationalism.
Let us now examine the papism of
Constantinople, which has found its most important expression in the Encyclical
of Patriarch Athenagoras addressed to the Orthodox world on the first Sunday of
Lent (called the Sunday of Orthodoxy), 1950. Here we find an increasing
resemblance to Rome. Constantinople’s essential idea consists of saying that
given that First Rome has apostatized, it is “Second Rome” that takes its place
with the same rights and the same arguments. In this encyclical, Patriarch
Athenagoras, like the popes of Rome, calls his see “the pillar of luminous
cloud”, “the invincible Acropolis of Orthodoxy and the high rock established by
God”, “the ark of grace”, “the Ecumenical See and Center to which the eyes of
all the Churches of God are turned. This center which brings together and
maintains all the Autocephalous, independent Orthodox Churches in an
administrative manner and by a canonical dispensation… these Churches which are
only united to the Body of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church through
the Mother-Church and through union and contact with Her…” “The Mother-Church,
whose entire existence was nothing but a struggle to preserve the faith and the
virtues of the ancestors, for the stability of the holy Churches of God, for
the salvation of the entire “pleroma” of Christians; this Church can in all
justice count on the obedience and devotion of her children and on the
accomplishment of their duty towards Her in a complete manner…”
This new phase of
Constantinople’s papism, transposed into a dogmatic formula, can be compared to
Tertullian’s subordinationism. The latter does not deny the consubstantiality
of the Father and the Son, but, in its stoic understanding of substance, confesses
its divisibility, and in unequal degrees “the Father being all, the Son, a
part.” Likewise, Constantinople does not claim to have a different essence from
the other autocephalous Churches, but rather imagines them to be diminished in
relation to herself. Constantinople is everything, it is the Universal Church.
[14] The others are only parts which only belong to the Ecumenical Church
insomuch as they are attached to Constantinople.
Is it necessary to demonstrate
that this form of papism is also an ecclesiological heresy, like the papism of
Rome? Is it necessary to say that, if applied to the life of the Church, it
would inevitably lead to a deformation of our entire spiritual existence? After
the example of First Rome, it attaches the right of authority and instruction
in the Church to one place (and in the case of Constantinople, we must add
here, to the Greek race) and brings us back to the time of which the Gospel
speaks: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem
is the place where one ought to worship” (John 4:20).
Patriarch Athenagoras makes
belonging to the Ecumenical Church depend on the tie to Constantinople. This is
not the belief and confession that have been transmitted to us from the Early
Church.
“The One Church is, before all
else, the Holy Church. But in the proper sense of the word “Only the Lord” is
holy. The Church is holy because she is sanctified by Him, because She
participates in the Divine Life and because the Divine Unity and the Church’s
communion with the Lord is the source of Unity in the Church. The Church is One
since She possesses one sole source of holiness and can only be One by the
power of this holiness. The Church is Holy in every place and not only in a
certain place our by virtue of a certain place. Thus the Council of Carthage
wrote to Pope Celestine, “The fullness of the grace of the Holy Spirit is not
diminished in any place.” The Church is One as the branches are united to their
vine, for She abides in union with Christ, the Source of Her life (John
15:1-5). The Lord prays that His disciples may be “perfect in unity” by virtue
of their ascension through Him to the fullness of Divine Life (John 17:22-23).
When Saint Paul speaks to us of the Unity of the Church, he does not make this
unity depend on one sole administrative center, but on the communion of one
sole bread and one sole cup, on the Body and Blood of Christ the Lord, Who is
the Only Head of the Church (1 Corinthians 10:14-17; Ephesians 4:15-16). (Journal
of the Patriarchate of Moscow 1948, issue 8, p. 68). [15]
“Drawing her sanctification
directly from the Spirit of God, each local Church is sufficient in Herself.
[16] But as this source of sanctification is one, She always remains One
Church. There can be no common earthly center to which all the local Churches
should submit, for the existence of such a center alongside the heavenly center
would introduce a dualism into the Church and break Her unity. (Troitsky, “On
Autocephaly in the Church” Journal of the Patriarchate of Moscow, 1948,
issue 7, p. 34).
If the theses of Patriarch
Athenagoras were applied in life, the Church would lose the truth unity proper
to Her, of which the great theologian Khomiakov speaks in these terms:
“The interior unity is true, the
product and manifestation of freedom; the unity based neither on a rationalist
science nor on an arbitrary convention, but on the moral law of mutual love and
prayer; the unity where, notwithstanding the hierarchical gradation of priestly
functions, none is subservient, but where all are equally called to be
participants and cooperators in the common work, so in the end unity by the
grace of God and not by a human institution, such is the unity of the Church.”
Then he says: “In Romanism,
properly understood, unity for Christians is uniquely the unity of obedience to
a central power. It is their subservience to a doctrine in which they do not
cooperate and which remains permanently exterior to them (for it resides
uniquely in the one hierarchical head)… It is evidently unity in the
conventional sense and not in the Christian sense” (The Latin Church and
Protestantism, pp. 301-302).
“The Chuch requires perfect
unity, just as She can only give in return perfect equality, for She
knows brotherhood but does not know subjugation” (p. 61).
“The Mother-Church… can in all
justice realy on the devotion and filial obedience of her children and on the
fulfillment of their duty to Her in an exact and eager manner.” Having the
pretention that Constantinople is the Mother of the Churches, Patriarch
Athenagoras, in this appeal, following the example of the Popes of Rome,
addresses himself directly to the Orthodox of the Universe, inviting them to
submit to him. Let us pass in silence with regard to which Churches and to what
degree Constantinople has been Mother. Let us allow that it can really call
itself the Mother of all the Churches. Nevertheless, to derive from this the
expectation for submission would be contrary to Orthodox triadology, according
to which the relation between the Father and the Son does not remove the
absolute equality of the hypostases. “He Who is begotten of the Substance is
equal to Him Who begets.” Thus think the Holy Fathers (Gregory of Nazianzus).
Even the Jews understand it. “… He said that God is is own Father, making
Himself equal to God” (John 5:18).
In the life of the Church, the
relation of Mother-Church and Daughter-Churches has never been recognized as a
basis for superiority of authority or even of honor. This becomes clear through
the example of the Church of Jerusalem, which is incontestably the Mother of
all the Churches, including that of First Rome. Rome is proud of possessing the
tomb of Peter. In Jerusalem, there is the luminous Sepulcher of the Lord, the
Savior of the world. Rome is proud of the “red blood” of Saint Peter and Saint
Paul. It was in Jerusalem that the Redeemer of the world shed His Divine Blood.
Rome is proud of the glory of the “eternal city”. In Jerusalem, the Lord, the
King of Glory, preached, suffered and rose again. In Jerusalem, on the Mount of
Olives, He blessed the disciples and ascended to heaven in glory. In Jerusalem,
in the Upper Room of Sion, the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles and
those who were with them. That is, upon the entire Church. It was in Jerusalem
that the Most Holy Mother of God spent her life. It was in Jerusalem that the
first Council of the Apostles, presided over by James, the Brother of the Lord,
took place. And, despite all this, in the period preceding the First Ecumenical
Council, Jerusalem even lost its independence and was placed under the
Metropolitan of Caesarea in Palestine.
A tendency to discredit the
principle of the equality of the local Churches seems to us to be the most
essential element of Patriarch Athenagoras’ encyclical. In other words, we
notice in it the start of a struggle against the principle of “autocephaly”.
This idea appears, for the first time in the Voice of the Church (Ekklesiastike
Phone, a journal in Athens) at the moment when the Bulgarian Schism was
coming to an end (1945). Mr Sepranzas, the ex-General Procurator of the
Synod of the Church of Greece of Athens, indignant at the resolution of this
schism by the Patriarch of Constantinople under Moscow’s influence and without
prior notice on the part of Athens, published a series of articles full of
insults toward the Bulgarian Church as well as the Russian Church and all the
other Slavic Orthodox Churches. At the same time, the fraternal invitation of
the Patriarch of Moscow to the Patriarch of Constantinople to attend his
enthronement being described by Mr Speranzas as an attempt to seek
Constantinople’s authority, he raises the question of the universal importance
of Byzantium’s authority and declares the principle of autocephaly to be
erroneous. (Not having the issues of this journal, we cite them from memory).
Among the Russian theologians, it
is especially the Rev Archpriest Basil Zenkovsky and the Rev Fr Alexander
Schmemann who have expressed themselves on this subject. Confusing the
idea of “autocephaly” with that of “nationalism” in order to reject both in the
name of a “universalism”, they destroy the very principle of the structure of
the Universal Church. The Rev Fr Zenkovsky writes, “Christianity went wrong in
allowing the formation of Churches called [17] national.” And again,
“Christianity being confined [18] in too narrow national frameworks did not
appear to the eyes of men in all Her fullness.” (Messenger of the Christian
Movement of Russian Students, Munich, 1949 issues 11-12, p. 10).
It is more difficult to limit
ourselves to a short citation from the precis of the Rev Fr Schmemann to
summarize his ideas. He reaches the same conclusions as the Rev Fr Zenkovsky by
exaggerating the role of the national moment, which is only an accidental
detail in the life of the Church. But, more objective than his elders, he
manages to touch upon the true reason that lies at the origin of the
inflammation of national feeling in the life of certain local Churches. To wit,
the narrow imperialism of the Greeks on the ecclesiastical and political
levels. He writes:
“In Byzantium’s understanding,
the baptism of new peoples necessarily implied their introduction into the
political and religious organism of the Empire and their submission to
ecumenical, Orthodox authority. But in reality, this Empire had long lost its
universal and supra-national character and for these newly-converted peoples,
this Byzantine ideology too often became a Greek imperialism in the
ecclesiastical and political domains” (p. 11).
Further on, speaking about the
“decomposition (?) of the universal consciousness within Orthodoxy”, he
identifies the concept of autocephaly with that of nationalism and
independence.
“The principal aim of each
people-state became obtaining autocephaly, understood as the independence of a
given national Church from the ancient centers of the East, and above
all from Constantinople… It is hard to deny that the principal cause of this
unfortunate process lies, above all, in the transformation of Byzantine
universalism into Greek nationalism. It is important to understand that the
identification of the meaning of autocephaly with independence is
a characteristic symptom of this new spirit which appeared at that time in the
Church and which shows that the Christian consciousness allows itself to be
inspired by a statist nationalism, instead of transforming and enlightening it”
(op. cit. p. 13).
Without letting ourselves be
carried along into a detailed analysis of this quote, we will limit ourselves
for the moment to saying that we do not agree with the author’s conclusions,
forming our opinion in terms that are almost his own, but reversing the sense
of his affirmations. We think that despite the national and political elements
brought along by the Orthodox peoples in their quest for the constitution of
their Church, it is the very essence of the Church, a theandric
organism, which imposed the forms of this constitution. We justify our
conclusion opposed to that of the Rev Fr Schmemann by the incontestable fact of
the existence of these forms since the beginning of the Church. These forms
were not a new invention of a national and statist consciousness; they were
simply transmitted to new Christian peoples.
Let us continue our examination
of the principle of autocephaly. It is no surprise that Constantinople has now
started a struggle against this principle: it is in the nature of every papism.
Rome does not accept this principle either. Here is what the priest Tyshkevich
says in his “Treatise on the Church”, cited above:
“In the universal Church, local
churches are acceptable as parts of one sole organism, like branches depending
on the one, central trunk, but not as completely independent, whole and
autocephalous ecclesiastical formations, united only by an exterior resemblance,
by a common spirit and a common faith. The “centralization” of the Church can
strengthen or weaken under the influence of temporary and local conditions, but
the complete autocephaly of the local churches is not admissible under and
pretext. The Church would then be polycephalic, with many heads, which is
impossible for her theandric nature” (p. 34).
“… the confessions that allow the
carving up of the Church into sects or even into “autocephalies” completely
free and independent from the center can be neither the true Church nor even a
“branch”, a part of the Church. One sole hierarchy is proper to the Church; the
federation of several completely independent hierarchies is in contradiction
with her nature. The complete autonomy of the parts is impossible. The Church
is not a union of organisms, united only by an identical principle of
spirit and belief, but a theandric organism, animated ‘by the same Spirit’,
sanctified and governed by one sole uninterrupted and tightly bound hierarchy
having at its head one sole supreme hierarch” (p. 152).
An extraordinary resemblance
between the teaching of our neo-papists and Roman teaching, not only in spirit
but also in argumentation has been picked up by the Romans with visible
satisfaction. The Bulletin of the Russian Catholic parish of Paris (Rue François
Gérard), Our Parish, issue 7, 1950, pp. 17-19) has published long
extracts from the speech given by Mr S. Verkhovsky at the “Diocesan Assembly”
of the Russian Exarchate of Constantinople (Messenger “Tserkovny
Vestnik”, issue 21, 1949) with the following comments:
“… We publish… some interesting
excerpts from the Tserkovny Vestnik, the official organ of the Russian
Exarchate in Western Europe, which clearly show that we are not fantasists in
affirming that primacy that belonged to the Sovereign Pontif of Rome within the
Early Church was not only a primacy of honor, but also a superiority of
authority” (following an extract from p. 15 of the Tserkovny Vestnik).
Further on we read:
“In the same bulletin we find
ideas that we can endorse and consider as our own. There follows a long
citation from the Declaration of the Diocesan Assembly (p. 2) where we find the
following words particularly highlighted: “This is why since the age of the
apostles, the Holy Church or, to put it better, God Himself established a
superior first bishop in the whole of the Catholic Church, the earthly Vicar of
His Son… Those who proclaim another teaching do not do so in the spirit of the Lord,
but rather sow trouble and discorde…” [19]
In another Roman Catholic
newsletter, Toward Christian Unity (November 1949, issue 17), we find an
article by the Rev Fr C. Dumont “Russian Orthodoxy and the Primacy of the
Ecumenical See” in which the author, analyzing the decisions of the Diocesan
Assembly, writes, “These declarations, the importance of which one will have no
difficulty realizing, have provoked vehement condemnation on the part of two
other jurisdictions. The accusation of ‘papism’ was to come very naturally
under the pen of contradictors, even if to our mind this reproach is not
entirely well-founded, since the message still remains far from the Roman
understanding of a Primacy instituted by Christ Himself; One will have, in
fact, noticed the formula: ‘since apostolic times, the Holy Church, or, to put
it better, God Himself.’ It remains nonetheless that this affirmation aims to
revive within Orthodoxy a principle and a practice that were progressively
banished from it and whose restoration could well mark a new stage along the
path of a greater understanding of the position of Roman Catholicism.”
***
What then is the reason why the
principle of the autocephaly of the local Churches is so dear to Orthodoxy? Why
does it seem to us to be not only the natural form of the Church’s life, which
belongs to Her essentially, but also the indispensable condition for faithfully
keeping the tradition of the truth and the ways that lead toward knowledge of
that truth?
As has already been said, the
term “autocephaly” is, philologically speaking, quite imperfect. It does not
express the idea that it contains, which allows rationalist spirits to deform
and oppose it. The true meaning of this term being the affirmation of the fact
that the fullness of ecclesiastical life belongs to every place where there
exists a Christian community that possesses an integral priesthood (a Council
of Bishops) and which keeps dogmatic teaching incorruptible, as well as the
Tradition of the Universal Orthodox Church. The canonical code of the Orthodox
Church contains the famous letter of the Council of Carthage (the second
addressed to Pope Celestine), which proclaims clearly and forcefully, “The
fullness of the grace of the Holy Spirit is not diminished in any place.” The
Fathers of Carthage base themselves on the authority of the first Council of
Nicaea. Thus we see that the principle of autocephaly is the historic
expression of a consciousness that is profoundly proper to the Church. To wit,
that grace is not lesser in any place. The true meaning contained in the term
“autocephaly” is the Orthodox understanding of the consubstantiality of the
Church corresponding to the consubstantiality of the Persons of the Holy
Trinity, which excludes Tertullian’s stoic idea of the divisibility of the
Substance, and that into equal parts.
The principle of autocephaly
expresses the conviction that the Catholic Church in every place appears in the
fullness of the grace that is confided to Her and, through the power of this
fullness of gifts, She is everywhere the One Catholic Church. The principle of
autocephaly teaches us that no place, no title, no race possesses within the
Church superiority of authority or teaching over other places or other peoples.
It also tells us that “the Spirit blows where He wills” and His breath in the
Church does not depend on the will of a hierarch.
The principle of the autocephaly
of the local Churches teaches us their equality in honor in the image of the
Divine Persons and in its final realization, it expresses our common hope to
see not only each local Church, but also each of Her members, each human
person-hypostasis as the bearer of all the catholic fullness of the life
of the Church in the image of the Holy Trinity, each Hypostasis of Which bears
in Itself all the absolute fullness of Divine Being; and this is not by
excluding or absorbing the other Persons-Hypostases, but by abiding in the
fullness of the unity of the Substance.
The autocephaly of the local
Church is neither historically nor spiritually the result of elements foreign
to the Catholic Church, such as phyletism, nationalism, statism or politics. In
the early Church, each Christian community was, in fact, autocephalous. History
shows us that on the territory of a single state there can coexist several
autocephalous Churches. This was the case in the Roman Empire before its
division, in the Byzantine Empire of the East and later in the Turkish Empire.
In contemporary Russia, there exist two autocephalous Churches.
The life of the Universal Church
does not require a single administrative center. But the principle of
autocephaly does not exclude the possibility of founding a common center,
coordinating the life of the Churches which, however, should never under any pretext
take the form on an “infallible” Vatican which would transform the inner life
of the Church into a State with its external authority. This would be
equivalent to the loss of religion as such.
We believe that we have clearly
demonstrated that outside the principle of autocephaly, which is to say,
without confessing the consubstantiality and equality in dignity of the
local Churches and of the Episcopacy in general, the true catholicity of the
Church, which is in the image of the Catholicity of Divine Being would
disappear on account of this. In discarding the freedom of catholicity which
is consubstantial and equal in dignity, we will inevitably lose the path
toward knowledge of the Trinity Who is only revealed in union in love and not
in any hierarchy taken separately that places itself on the margins of this
law. The great Khomiakov spoke of this in his works, but it is, unfortunately,
almost forgotten at this time.
If we fight against the
neo-papism that has appeared within our Holy Church, we are only fighting
for the Truth as the Church confesses it, the eternal Truth. We reject any
idea of “Rome”—First, Second or Third—as soon as this idea tends to introduce
the principle of subordination into the life of the Church. We reject all
papism, whether it is in Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, London, Paris, New York
or in any other place. We denounce papism as an ecclesiological heresy that
deforms Christianity.
***
The eternal substance of the
Church is reflected in all aspects of human life on earth. The canonical
structure of the Church is one of the projections of Her pure, holy spiritual
nature. In being reflected in this world, the elements of the purely ecclesiastical
reality are confused with conventional and relative elements of the natural
order. But God’s idea and purpose—which, consequently, are those of the
Church—remain inalterable even in this confusion. This purpose is the salvation
of the world—so that “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this
mortal must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:53) through communion with
divine grace.
In the conditions of our fallen
terrestrial life, the “projection” of the Church’s holy and incorruptible
nature inevitably takes a certain nuance of convention. This is why the
canonical constitution of the Church is not an absolute juridical norm; it bears
in itself traces of imperfection of our historical existence. There are
temporary elements responding to such and such a condition of the age. Certain
details have undergone change more than once and such changes are not
impossible in the future. Nevertheless, the canonical constitution always
preserves its deep roots, its inalterable essence, which cannot be in
contradiction with our dogmatic consciousness. Thus, since we confess that “it
is neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem” that the Father is worshiped, but
rather “the true worshippers worship the Father in spirit and in truth”, how is
it possible that the canons of the Church impose upon us a local principle as
the indispensable condition of belonging to the true Church?
Here is a classic example of the
papist mentality: “Let us never forget that between God and us there is a link
and this link is Rome…” (The sermon of the Rev Fr Valette in the newspaper La
Croix, October 7, 1949, issue 20.261).
If His Holiness Athenagoras,
Patriarch of “Second Rome” addresses to us today an encyclical to preach
submission to the See of Constantinople as a formal condition of belonging to
the Universal Church, what true Christian, “worshipping in spirit and in truth”
will accept these words?
Let us imagine that some
catastrophe causes First and Second Rome to disappear. Would this disappearance
leave the world deprived of true communion with God, since the “links” that
connect us to Him have disappeared? Of course, that is a “voice of strangers”
(John 10:5). This has never been our Christian faith.
We have attempted to demonstrate
with the present overview that ecclesiological teaching cannot be in
contradiction with triadological teaching: that even in its historical aspect,
the Church must reflect the image of Triune Life. The canon that establishes
unity between the Bishops of the local Churches in the image of the Holy
Trinity and which is at the same time the closest reflection of this unity is
Apostolic Canon 34. [20]
It is toward a similar unity that
His Holiness Patriarch Alexei of Moscow and all the Russias calls us:
“… Christ told His disciples,
‘whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. 27 And
whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave’ (Matthew
20:26-27). May the Lord open the spiritual eyes of the Roman Pontiffs, that
they may acquire, with God’s help, the power of the Spirit, so that they may
renounce the vain pretention of establishing on earth their domination over all
the heirs of the Apostles! Oh, if the Lord deigned to allow us to see the happy
day of the union of the Bishops of the Church as brothers equal in
rights! This would serve as a beginning for peace in the entire world…” (Acts
of the Moscow Conference, vol. 1, p. 90; Journal of the Patriarchate of
Moscow, special issue in French, 1948, p. 16).
Thus, “the Church calls to Her
bosom all nations and hopefully awaits the coming of Her Savior. She sees with
a tranquil eye the flow of the ages, historical storms and agitations and the
currents of human passions and thoughts rolling and churning around the rock
upon which She relies and which She knows to be unshaken. This rock is Christ.”
(Khomiakov, The Latin Church and Protestantism, pp. 303-304
NOTES
1. This
creed is known to us as being by Saint Athanasius. To a great extent it does
depend on the writings of this Father. But certain passages of the trinitarian
exposition are of a perfection and precision that could not be attributed to
such an early period. Thus this Creed is considered to be a universal
confession of the Orthodox Church.
2. This
teaching of the Church on the unity of human nature in the image of the Holy
Trinity is admirably expressed in the first works of Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky), “The Moral Value of the Dogma of the Holy Trinity” and “The
Moral Value of the Dogma of the Church”. We advise all those who already know
these works to reread them attentively and those who have not yet read them to
become familiar with them. It is a masterpiece of Russian theological thought
which appeared in 1892 in the journal of the Moscow Academy, the Theological
Messenger (Bogoslovsky Vestnik). A second edition was published in
Yugoslavia in the 1930s, in a collection of the Metropolitan’s works on the
occasion of his jubilee. Unfortunately, these works have never been translated
into French.
The same
dogmatic doctrine is summarily but brilliantly expounded in French by Vladimir
Lossky in his work The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (see
Chapter VI).
3. The great
Khomiakov says that “the true Church does not recognize the teaching Church”
because “all the Church, in other words: the Church in her entirety
teaches.” Consequently, he says further on, “This is an incontestable dogmatic
fact. The Patriarchs of the East, gathered in Council with their Bishops, have
solemnly declared in their response to the encyclical of Pius IX that
“infallibility resides uniquely in the universality of the Church united
by mutual love and that invariability of dogma and purity of rite were
entrusted to the safekeeping not of a certain hierarchy, but of the entire
people of the Church, which is the Body of Christ.” This formal declaration of
all the clergy of the East, received with respect full of fraternal gratitude
by the local Church of Russia, has acquired all the moral authority of an
ecumenical testimony. (A. S. Khomiakov, The Latin Church and Protestantism
from the Perspective of the Eastern Church, Lausanne and Vevey, pp. 48-49).
“To make teaching into a prerogative is madness. To make it into a heavenly
gift attached to certain offices is a heresy” (ibid., p. 54).
4. “Autocephaly”
is not a philologically felicitous term. It does not express the idea that it
contains, but, following the example of the Fathers, we will limit ourselves to
analyzing the principles, without discussing words.
5. “We are
all children of the Russian Church, heirs of Her (?) tradition, which we seek
to keep and to develop abroad.” “We have the awareness of bearing, of keeping,
of continuing and of developing the sacred Tradition of the Russian Church” (Messenger
of the Russian Church in Western Europe, no. 21, pp. 3 and 18).
6. Emphasis
ours.
7. All these
texts from the Treatise are translated from Russian into French by us.
8. This is
the Synod of Munich, held by the group of Russian dissidents headed by
Metropolitan Anasatasy.
9. The
original expression, “nachalo-vozhd”, is completely foreign to the language of
the Church. Translated literally, it would be “archi-führer”.
10. Emphasis
ours.
11. This is
the first time in the history of the Church that we hear tell of the “Catholic”
heresy.
12. An
expression taken from the Gospel of John 13:1.
13. It is
necessary to analyze up to the end the nature of the Church so as not to fall
into this unhealthy state (that is, “nationalism in the Church”).
Archpriest B. Zenkovsky in the Messenger of the Christian Movement of
Russian Students, Munich, 11-12, 1949, p. 19). “We repeat, we must go up to
the end of reasoning and especially avoid the expression ‘local Church’; this
expression has nothing to do with such an understanding of the Church” (Rev Fr
A. Schmemann, op. cit., p. 19).
14. These
pretentions of Constantinople are all the more strange since it is currently
“diminished to an extreme degree” (this expression belongs to the Rev Fr A.
Semenov-Tian-Shanksy.
See the Messenger
“Tserkovny Vestnik”, issue 23, p. 9). It is diminished and reduced
to such a point that in our day it makes up only 1/20,000 of the Orthodox
Church.
15. So far
as we know, this text belongs to Prof. S. Troitsky and had been proposed by the
Russian Church to the Moscow Conference in 1948 as “the Message to the
Christians of the World”. This text, however, was abandoned in favor of that
proposed by Metropolitan Stephen of Bulgaria. (See “the Acts of the Conference
of the Heads and Representatives of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches, held
in Moscow in 1948”, vol. 2, p. 413).
16. As
possessing the fullness of grace.
17. By whom
are they “called national”?
18.
[Footnote blank]
19. Translated
from the Russian by us.
20. See the
“Analysis of Apostolic Canon 34” made in French by the Rev Archpriest E.
Kovalevsky in our Messenger issues 2-3, p. 67 and his article in Russian
“Ecclesiological Problems” in the Messenger issue 4, p. 11.
Source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190717171152/https://orthodoxsynaxis.org/2019/04/20/archim-sophrony-sakharov-unity-of-the-church-an-image-of-the-holy-trinity/
