The Unity of the Orthodox Church and the Significance of Resistance Movements in the Preservation of that Unity

by Archbishop [Metropolitan] Chrysostomos of Etna

Your Eminence, most esteemed Bishop Photii, Your Grace, Bishop Auxentios, gathered clergy and monastics, beloved Faithful of the True Orthodox Church of Bulgaria, and pilgrims:

I am always reticent about speaking in public, even if, as many of you can no doubt attest, I have no shortage of words, since lecturing, before I became a monk, was my art, as it were. The professorial curse still persists in me. My reticence comes not from a paucity of words, then, but from a sure knowledge that I have nothing of any real consequence to say, except for what I have learned and gleaned from my spiritual Superiors—Bishop Photii, an eloquent Patristic scholar, our revered and learned Father Sergius, my spiritual Father, Metropolitan Cyprian, and your elect and venerable clergy, among others. Putting aside caution and perhaps wisdom, however, I would like to make a few short observations today, hoping that they will help you better to conceptualize and to understand, at least at a psychological and historical level, the nature of resistance movements within the Orthodox Church. And hence, the title of my short talk, “The Unity of the Orthodox Church and the Significance of Resistance Movements in the Preservation of that Unity."

At the outset, I must firmly emphasize that what I have to say is not dogmatic in nature, but is simply speculative and reflective of my personal thoughts on the subject at hand. As the Latins say, a fonte puro pura clefluit aqua; that is, pure water flows from a pure spring. What I have drawn from the Fathers and from those with spiritual wisdom, in my following words, I therefore firmly commend to you. However, anything that I might say which is contrary to the spiritual traditions of the Church or the dogmatic witness of the Ecumenical Synods, dipping into the sometimes impure waters of my personal opinion, you should discard. If, in the end, given these guidelines, my observations provide an opportunity for growth in the Faith and for a better understanding of the burden of resistance to which we, the “small flock," are called, then I would ask that you draw on this strength for the edification and good estate of the Church.

The idea of resistance is found throughout Christian literature. In Scripture, it is used variously to describe both vengeful opposition to evil and righteous opposition to that which impedes spiritual health. On the one hand, our Lord tells us not to resist evil, but to turn the other cheek to those who offend us. This is a message reflected throughout the Savior’s teaching on love and one which we see put into action by the many Martyrs and Saints who not only did not resist those who harmed them, but even considered them their benefactors and embraced them. On the other hand, however, St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, speaks of righteous resistance, in referring to the sacrifice of our Lord “unto blood,’’ and characterizes the ideal of our Christian life as resistance against sin. In the Philokalia and throughout the writings of the great Hesychastic Fathers, we constantly see the spiritual life presented as one of resistance in this positive sense: as a positive struggle of resistance against the evil thoughts which pollute our minds, against the evil actions through which such thoughts are made manifest, and against the clouds of human despair and disbelief that have obfuscated the light of Christ which shines in our hearts.

In the history of the Church, too, resistance manifests itself to us in two forms. We see, in one instance, the resistance of the heretics to the revelation of Christian truth, those “stiffnecked and uncircumcised’’ of every age who, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, “always resist the Holy Spirit.’’ Such negative resistance has been the constant enemy of Church unity and has caused divisions, schisms, and disputes in the Church militant here on earth. But in other circumstances, we find in Church history very positive forms of resistance: opposition to the very resistance of the heretics to the Holy Spirit, a positive opposition empowered by the Holy Spirit, “resistance pleasing to God,’’ as St. Theodore the Studite calls it, the aim of which is Church unity and the preservation of the Holy Traditions revealed within the Church by the Holy Spirit.

It is this positive, salutary resistance in the spiritual life and within the Church that is the subject of my talk; this resistance sealed with the fervor and blood of the Cappadocian Fathers, the Iconodules, the Hesychasts and anti-unionists of medieval Byzantine times and, in our contemporary world, by the zealous opposition of pious believers to the religious syncretism of political ecumenism (and its by-product, the reform of the Church’s Festal Calendar) and to the political manifestations of anti-Christian hatred, such as Communism, which rose up against Orthodoxy in the bloody century which just ended.

There is a tendency—dangers which Bishop Auxentios clearly identifies in his presentation, today, on the ethos of love and toleration in the Orthodox Church—to speak of positive ecclesiastical resistance in terms that are at times superficial and directed, not at the loftier levels of ontology and cosmology, but towards worldly and political concerns. For example, there is a notion, often applied to the Byzantine Empire and the Russian imperial realm, that the force which “withholds” evil in the Church rests in the Orthodox monarchy. Indeed, St. John Chrysostomos, while clearly identifying the One Who “withholdeth” as the Holy Spirit, nonetheless affirmed that the fall of the Roman Empire would lead to Antichrist. If read carefully, of course, the Divine Chrysostomos wisely and correctly tells us that when Christian society collapses and the external, worldly laws which uphold Christian morality and the ethos of Christian spiritual life cease to be, mankind will slide into disbelief and all that accompanies this decline; mankind will succumb to Antichrist. He simply uses the image of the fall of the Christian Empire in making this point. Nonetheless, these words of St. John are often interpreted—albeit in personal statements about matters that do not touch on dogma—by holy men of tremendous stature to support the idea that the collapse of Byzantium or, as the spiritually eminent St. John of Kronstadt firmly believed and stated, of the Russian Empire would signal the end of time. This thinking with regard to the Russian Empire is further supported by an historiographical tradition that attributes to Moscow the title of a “Third Rome.”

I would not dare, of course, proffer as anything but speculation my own opinion of the eschatological significance of historical phenomena or the monarchical system which prevailed for over a millennium in the Orthodox Church. I would simply say that what has disappeared into history has disappeared, and that we must now face the realities of a new age with the age-old doctrines of the Church, which doctrines focus us, not on disaster (even if that is what awaits us), but on the hope that rises, in Christianity, above mere human disaster and suffering. Nor should we overstate historiographical facts and theological opinions in such a way that, taken beyond what they are meant to be, they become the servants of phyletism and national triumphalism or make us, who have but one homeland, that of Heaven, too fixed on the earthly life, however perfectly it may reflect the Divine realm in ideal. I wish to speak of resistance in a higher and noumenal way.

There is also a danger with regard to the acquisition of a higher understanding of resistance that lurks in our personal psychology, in the recesses of that fallen mind that all too often renders even our most sincere and well-intentioned spiritual motivations corrupt. Our resistance in the name of the Church can frequently lead us to think that the activity in which we are engaged is not, as we should indeed see it, an imperfect imitation of the sacrifices of the great Confessors of the Faith (who were indeed, resisters, in the positive sense of that word, par excellence), but somehow special and gifted. It is not uncommon, in the mental realm, for one to associate the attributes of a desirable goal or object with himself. This is why advertising is so effective: one comes to believe that by owning an object which supposedly brings upon its owner some desirable trait (an association that the advertiser carefully establishes), he in fact acquires this trait upon acquisition of the object. In the spiritual realm, we all-too-often come to believe that because our actions and our fidelity are God-pleasing, we too are God-pleasing, forgetting that the worst sinner can serve good aims, not because of some quality of his own, but because God, Who is not a respecter of persons, elevates him, by His Grace, above the sewer of his own motivations and fallen desires, so that he can serve Him. Moreover, it is not we who are elevated by God’s condescending kindness to us, in this process, but God Himself Who is magnified. Through our sin, God often shows the victory of His Grace, demonstrating that our “wickedness,” a wickedness that is ever before us, cannot prevail, as we aver each day in our evening prayers, over His “unutterable goodness and mercy.”

Resistance, then, is not something that arises out of our personal good, our personal worth, or our special spiritual status. It emerges from an acute knowledge of our sinfulness, which becomes ever more apparent to us as we become closer to God and His purity. Resistance is a response drawn out of us by God, Who, endowing us with His love, creates in us the desire, despite our sinfulness, to uphold what is true and good and to resist all of those things which act against us; and this we do, not in order to exalt or save ourselves, but to the end of saving our fellow man, knowing, as Scripture tells us, that there is no greater love than that which we have for our brother, even to the point of sacrificing for his sake at the cost of our own welfare. Here, too, resistance takes on a cosmological and transpersonal significance, elevating our efforts above what can be the sterile, arrogant, and self-serving illusion of righteous resistance.

Beyond the superficial aspects of positive resistance and the political and personal dangers that they can pose in Christian life, then, there is a notion of resistance that touches on Christian life at a universal level. This higher concept of positive resistance encompasses and transcends resistance as we normally think about and experience it. It is this concept and its crucial role in the maintenance of Church unity which I intend to describe, to the extent possible. In so doing, I will turn away from Scripture, the Patristic witness, and theology for a moment, casting an eye towards natural science and existential philosophy, which, though destructive if wrongly used and naively studied, can be very helpful in explicating the more sublime elements of Orthodox ecclesiology, to the extent that we apply them, to paraphrase St. Basil the Great, in service to the Church.

Positive resistance, that God-pleasing effort to preserve the immutable truths of Orthodoxy, is, in fact, the very existential glue that holds the Church together. It is the substance of Church unity. If this idea seems strange or vague, let us remember that it is the “small flock,’’ the leaven, and the beloved of the Lord who form the core of Orthodoxy. Just as the whole of the Church’s action in the world ultimately rests on Christ and His small band of Apostles, so the survival and the continuation of the Christian kerygma have always centered on a core of true believers who, however unworthily, give strength and power to the pleroma of the Christian people. The great historical resisters whom I mentioned earlier—the Cappadocians and Iconodules, for example—were not dissenters and protesters; they were nothing more than the core of the Church, always silently present in the properly functioning Church, but made to appear distinct, separate, and vociferous only when the integrated structure of the Church suffered from the assault of forces that introduced division, separation, disintegration, and alienation into the Body of Christ. They are nothing more or less than that inner core of fervent believers who, whether in the catholicity of the local Church or in the local focus of the Church catholic, serve to provide Orthodoxy with its inner identity and internal characteristics.

Let us now turn to the biological and physical world for examples that can help us to understand this matter more fully. In the world of biology, while a living cell is a unique unit, each part essential to the other, every structure in some sense symbiotically related, there is, nonetheless, a core at the living center of that cell, that is, its nucleus. And while that nucleus is dependent on the nutrients which reach it through the various structures and membranes of the cell, without it, the cell ceases to be. Without a nucleus, a cell becomes an ineffectual structure and loses its unique character. This is an observation that can also be made about physical particles and the nucleus of an atom. It is in the nucleus of the atom that its energy and its characteristic identity are determined. Even in the more contemporary models employed by theoretical physics, such as the complex and enigmatic model of physical structure proposed by “string theory,’’ one comes to understand that the integrity and identity of matter itself is somehow closely connected to a unifying principle which, while not separate or independent from that which it brings into cohesion, nonetheless contains within itself a cohesive influence and tendency, without which structural integrity simply vanishes.

The struggle to maintain the internal integrity of Orthodoxy, its characteristic wholeness—this resistance against the unnatural forces of division and separation, or spiritual entropy, as it were—, is at the center of every resistance movement of the Church and is essentially linked to the maintenance of the Church’s internal and external unity. As a consequence of this fact, while resistance movements may momentarily provoke separations and divisions (often even a century or more in duration), they are in fact not isomorphic or functionally similar to schism, since these temporary divisions, unlike schism, serve to focus the Church back on its core: drawing it back to what the “small flock’’ has preserved from the nucleus of the Faith, that is, from the very definitive character and nature of the Church. Resistance movements not only serve to protect the Church against that which compromises its internal identity, but they constantly renew the structures of the Church, placing them again and again in proper relationship to the internal core of the Christian message. Resistance movements redefine who we are in an old and constant way, giving us newness in our relationships and links to one another. They strengthen the links which unify us.

To use an existential model, it is in the interplay, in that tension, between mere existence and Being that resistance manifests itself as a unitive force. It is in the “groaning’’ of the universe, potentially renewed by Christ in Eternity, yet struggling with sin and the limitations of temporal life, that the unifying power of resistance takes full shape. Having our very being in God, in Whom we live and move, we are nonetheless captivated, captured by, and drawn to sin and the limitations of human existence, of the fallen human condition. Yet, each time that even one of us resists sin—each time that a single human rises up to the potential of the Divine within him, to theosis—, he unites, in some way, all of human existence to the vivifying, transforming power of Christ and our true being and life in God. Every struggle for the preservation of Godliness, every positive act of resistance to preserve the revealed path of human restoration, brings the whole of mankind into communion with God, unifying men and women in the salvific witness of the Church. Our resistance movements, to the extent that they reflect this communion between Christ and man, between Being and existence, are images, not, again, of division, separation, contention, and argumentation, but of the unifying force of the Faith rendered anew each time it is brought back to its core, back to the criterion of Truth which brings all dogma and doctrine into oneness and links them together in a common affirmation, a true kerygma and vision of Christ.

In conclusion, let me say something about that factor which separates negative resistance—what I characterized, above, as vengeful opposition—from positive resistance, that is, a righteous resistance to anything which assaults or defiles the saving Truth of Christianity. That factor is love. When we undertake to condemn evil in defense of ourselves, we act from arrogance and pride. When we undertake to defend the Truth, so as to preserve inviolate the path of salvation for ourselves and our fellow man, we act from love. Of course, as I also pointed out earlier, this love can become distorted and self-serving; however, in its ideal, a defense of the Faith through resistance to that which threatens it is, above all, an essential act of love. Now this love, let me note, also acts in a unitive way. For love never separates, but always joins that which is separate. For example, our opposition as Orthodox to the Filioque clause introduced into the early medieval Church some centuries before the separation of Rome from the Universal Church, if understood deeply, is not merely opposition at a procedural level. Our opposition derives from an understanding that any attempt to portray the love between the Father and the Son as the source of the Holy Spirit—a Scholastic assertion than can be traced to the presuppositions of the theology of the Filioque—does violence to the very nature of the Holy Trinity, in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one and are united in Love, which is the nature of God. Wherever love operates, then, unity in essence is the ultimate effect and end of its operation. Hence, positive resistance, resistance that is motivated by love and which comes forth from love, however polemical in apparent form, however divisive in its temporary and superficial effects, is destined to foster unity—not that unity which is of mere human origin and which comes from diplomacy and compromise, but that unity which flows forth from God and which is expressed in essential integration, in interdependent interaction, and in the image of the Body of Christ put before us by St. Paul, in which each member suffers for the other and in which the very blood of each member is that sacred Blood of our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I have not, again, tried to address the petite histoire of each of the various resistance movements that have surfaced in the course of the manifestation, in time and space, of God’s Grace through the Orthodox Church. Rather, I have tried to draw your attention to resistance at the ideational level. In so doing, I hope that I have accomplished the task of conveying to you the true nature of resistance, which is formed in love; the dangers that face us if we vulgarize our understanding of positive resistance and vitiate it by personal and political concerns and aims; and the absolute necessity of love in preserving our higher vision, experience, and realization of resistance, whatever its kind, to that which compromises and limits the boundless expanses of Orthodoxy, thereby assaulting the unity of the Church at its most essential level—namely, at the point where it unites the transcendent with the ephemeral and otherwise evanescent and makes what is transient eternal.

I thank you for your patience and your kindness in enduring my perhaps incoherent words on a subject which often defies coherence, on account of its immense subtlety.

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. 18 (2001), No. 3, pp. 11-17.