The Eternal Character of the Priesthood

Archimandrite Akakios of St. Gregory Palamas Monastery, Etna, CA

 

Orthodox theology, it would be trite to say, does not share with Western theology a spirit of legalism. Let me risk being trite by focusing on this oft-repeated but seldom understood observation about our Church's theological traditions. Western Christians have traditionally approached the Church with an eye toward questions of authority (the teaching authority of the Pope, the primacy of Scripture, etc.), consistency in confessional formulae (a desire for logical cohesion in Christian belief), and the systematic categorization of elements in the Christian confession (the distinct areas of Christology, Mariology, or soteriology, for example). Traditional Orthodox theologians, on the other hand, have always taken a more organic approach in looking at Christian belief. The Orthodox Church makes statements about authority in the Church, but they always rest on a recognition of spiritual primacy. While Bishops, Scripture, and Holy Tradition constitute elements of Church authority, their authority can only be understood as it acts in consort with the spiritual primacy of Christ and the Divine oikonomia. To be sure, the Church is also the source of a number of confessional statements, but even the most important of these are not considered mere statements of belief, but are called "symbols," suggesting that they contain spiritual dimensions of a kind that transcend simple human confession. Orthodox theologians, of course, uphold the cohesiveness of Christian doctrine, but they often define it in an apophatic way, finding cohesion in what is apparently contradictory. And finally, the artificial separation of theological concerns into distinct areas of investigation has never compromised the unity of doctrine in the Orthodox Church, as it so often has in the West.

This more open, fluid nature of approaching theology in the Orthodox Church is particularly obvious when we examine the Church's teachings on the Priesthood. There is no single dogmatic statement about the nature of sacerdotal service; rather, that service must be understood as it is discussed in Patristic writings, in the canonical witness, and in actual practice. All of these elements must be brought together in order to form the composite mosaic of theological truth about the nature of the Priesthood that no element or separate piece of the Church's experience alone yields. Moreover, this composite image must be carefully placed into an historical context, with a constant striving, not for the exceptional or for that which fits the theological whim of a single age or period in Church history, but for that thin line of continuity, as the late Father Georges Florovsky described it, that forms the consensual witness of the Church and which is consistent with the Apostolic understanding of the Priesthood. The influences of Western theology, the legacies of the heretics, personal caprice, and short-term practice wrongly endowed with the authority of tradition often obscure this consensus in Church belief and practice, so that one must be extraordinarily persistent and cautious in his pursuit of an accurate understanding of what a Priest is and what his service to the Church constitutes.

There is a common misunderstanding of the nature of the Priesthood in the Orthodox Church today. It comes from an incautious study of the Fathers, the Canons, traditional practice, and has, oddly enough, transformed a Western notion of the ministry into a supposedly Orthodox view and attributed to the West a notion of the Priesthood which is actually the Orthodox view. Thus we hear amateur theologians, albeit endowed with the authority so glibly granted to the unaccomplished in our day, making the claim that Roman Catholicism traditionally grants to the sacerdotal office an "eternal" character—"once a Priest, always a Priest"—, while the Orthodox Church affirms that the Priesthood can be set aside and that a Priest can be "laicized," allowed to marry, and measure his final stand before God by the standards appropriate to a layman. This assumption violates every tenet of the Church's understanding of the Priesthood. Its origins, especially in the Slavic Churches, are, again, Latin, not Orthodox.

The Orthodox Church has always maintained that the character of the Priesthood is eternal. A Priest, once ordained, is always a Priest. This is the very consensus of the Fathers, the witness from which the Latin Church rightly draws its understanding of the eternal nature of the Priesthood. He will stand before the Judgment Seat as a Priest, since Ordination comes not from men, but from God alone. It is true that heretics and those who have denied the Faith, if they were clergymen before this denial, lose every faculty of their Priesthood, but this is because their damnation is self-evident in their separation from God by disbelief. A deposed clergyman, however, will, again, stand before God as a clergyman. As St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite writes in his commentary on the twenty-eighth Apostolic Canon regarding the complex question of Mysteries performed without the blessing of the Church, even the Mysteries performed by a deposed clergyman, save for the case of condemned heretics, are effective—though, he opines, the Church does not put these into "force or effect." It is clear, then, that the seal of the Priesthood exists eternally on those who, even though forbidden to exercise Priestly orders (for which reason the Church deems their Mysteries invalid), nonetheless persist in celebrating the Mysteries. (The Mysteries of those falsely deposed by the Church, such as those of St. John Chrysostomos, are of course wholly valid.)

Now, the Orthodox Church does today "laicize" deposed Priests, though this is not because it concedes that the Priesthood can be set aside. The Church simply states that such a clergyman is free to live as a layman and that, since he is not authorized to perform the Church's Mysteries, he will be treated by the Church as a layman. With regard to marriage, since clergymen have consecrated their bodies to God, a monk or hieromonk who is excommunicated by the Church, according to some Church authorities (see St. Nicodemos' note on the forty-fourth Canon of St. Basil), cannot marry. If a married clergyman should be deposed and subsequently remarry, this act, quite technically, the Church can accept only by economy, since, once again, a deposed clergyman, even if reduced to the status of a layman, still retains the seal of the Priesthood. And it is with this seal that he will stand before the Judgment Seat.

It is obvious that the Orthodox Church's understanding of the Priesthood and its treatment of deposed clergymen are not bound by intractable provisions of the "law," but express the Church's concern for the individual, its "economic" provisions for human weakness, and its wisdom in dealing with the mystery of spiritual life in an open-ended, prudent manner. The Priesthood is eternal. The consensus of the Church forever establishes this fact. Human weakness is present even within the confines of the Church, whose servants often fail to reach Her spiritual standards. This, too, the Church acknowledges. Thus, the Church has not rigidly codified its actions with regard to those who fail in Priestly service. For such rigidity would compromise the nature of the Priesthood itself. Nor has the Church adopted a Latin theological stand passing, in our day, as an Orthodox one. It has left to prudence and pastoral considerations the standard of its actions.

 

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. 9 (1992), Nos. 2 & 3, p. 34.