The Importance of the Orthodox Ethos and Religious Tolerance in the Face of the Threat of Political Ecumenism to Orthodox Self-Identity

by Bishop Auxentios of Photiki

[Now Bishop of Etna and Portland]

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XVIII (2001), No. 3, pp. 18-26.

 

 

Most Reverend Bishop Photii [of Triaditsa], Archbishop Chrysostomos [of Etna], distinguished clergy, our eminent lay speaker for the day, Dr. Miller, beloved pilgrims, fellow Christians, and much-loved brothers and sisters of the true-believing Bulgarian flock:

The title of my humble talk, today, is “The Importance of the Orthodox Ethos and Religious Tolerance in the Face of the Threat of Political Ecumenism to Orthodox Identity."

I ask for your forgiveness and patience at the outset: that you will forgive my few superficial words and that you will forgive me for forcing you to endure these words. Through the prayers of all of you, perhaps, I will have something to say that may benefit us and inspire us in our struggle for the whole of the Orthodox Church.

We “Old Calendarists" are not, as all of you know, the worshippers of a calendar. We use the change in the Church's festal calendar—which was indisputably first ushered in to serve the ecumenical movement and, as the infamous encyclical issued by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1920 so boldly put it, to make the common celebration of Christian feasts a hrst move towards the union of all Christians “beyond the boundaries" of differences in faith and doctrine—as a sacred banner in our warfare against the kind of religious syncretism which equates the historical Church, the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Orthodox Church, with those heretical and wrong-believing bodies which have, over the centuries, separated from what our forefathers knew to be the Church established by our Lord, sealed as it was by the blood of the Martyrs and codified and expressed in the writings of the Fathers and the conscience of the Royal Priesthood of the People of God. Our struggle is against a direct and unrelenting assault against our Orthodox self-identity, our awareness that, however unworthily, we contain, preserve, and continue the very Church of Christ.

Our struggle, then, is not a struggle for a mere calendar of sacred events or a struggle against the so-called canonical or official Churches. Our struggle is to preserve those Holy Traditions (only one of which is the Church’s Festal Calendar) from which canonicity and officialdom arise. (And let me emphasize, here, something which Orthodox theologians unwisely ignore today; that is, that the spiritual authenticity of the traditional precepts, customs, practices, and teachings of the Church is the source of canonicity and officialdom and that canonicity and officialdom are not the source of spiritual authenticity). Spirit-bearing Church Fathers and the Faithful whom they serve and who in fact give them their administrative authority form that Gestalt which is the mystical union of Christ in Heaven with the Church on earth, the Faithful with their Shepherds, the local with the universal, and the transcendent with the temporal. Our struggle, within and for the Universal Church, is to preserve this integrated wholeness, joined in Grace and love, that is the core of Orthodoxy, the true Body of Christ.

Drawn to love in love, we are naturally zealous in our desire to preserve in full purity the Body of Christ, the True Church, the martyric Church of Orthodox Christians, protecting Her against every adulteration. What, then, can we feel, except revulsion and great sadness, when our Church leaders betray the uniqueness of Orthodoxy? The Patriarch of Constantinople has described the Orthodox Church as one lung, along with Papism, of the One Church of Christ. Other Bishops have signed ecumenical documents which attribute to the notion of the “True Church’’ such epithets as “medievalism,’’ narrowmindedness, ignorance, and intolerance. Adulterating the purity of Orthodoxy with that which rejects her and her Savior, interfaith ecumenism has called us to see all religions in the light of Christianity, even if they do not confess Christ or, like those of the Jewish and Moslem religions, actually formally reject any idea of His centrality to universal salvation.

Reacting to an anti-ecumenical spirit of late, a number of Orthodox Churches have, admittedly, withdrawn from the world of religious syncretism that is the World Council of Churches, an organization that hopes to bring all of the religions of the world—religions, along with Orthodoxy, that it considers merely human and possessed only of partial truth—into union, so as to form a Super Church that draws all of the relative truths of every world religion into a composite truth. (Parenthetically, we should note that, by bringing all of these religions together, the World Council of Churches may, rather than combine all of the partial truths that they supposedly contain, combine all of the falsehoods that they embrace, thus creating a Super Church that reflects all evil.) This move by some Orthodox away from the World Council of Churches, however, has been the cause of even greater pain for us anti-ecumenical traditionalists. For, at the same time that these Churches and their leaders have reacted to the demands of the Faithful that irresponsible ecumenical activities come to a halt, they have, with a derisive wink of the ecclesiastical eye, turned to the ecumenists, assuring them that as soon as the “ignorances” of the people have been addressed, they will return to the world of religious syncretism.

Betrayal and condescending arrogance on the part of the Orthodox ecumenists is sad enough. But they have even fallen to self-contradicting hypocrisy by condemning us anti-ecumenists—who have walled ourselves off from them in the style of the Cappadocian Fathers, the Studite Fathers, and the anti-unionists of the Byzantine Middles Ages, during whose time political unions were forged, under imperial pressure, with the Latins—as uncanonical, heretical, and outside the Church. Not only would we remind these ecumenical voices, again, that what they are doing violates the Canons, exposes them to the charge of religious syncretism, and removes them from the Patristic consensus, but we would also note, with astonishment, that they condemn themselves as virtual hypocrites for embracing ecumenism. After all, ecumenism disallows words like “heretic” and preaches that no Church is official or true. It is hardly seemly for the ecumenists to condemn us, their brothers, as heretics for upholding what the Fathers teach, even if we do chastise them for their error and have walled ourselves off from the illness that besets them. How, indeed, if no Church has the truth, can the ecumenists declare us to be outside the Church? And how can they in good conscience open dialogues with Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Moslems, while they hate, revile, and condemn us? And if they would cite the extremists who preach hatred in the name of Orthodox traditionalism—and, as in any resistance movement, there are always those who deviate from moderation—, we would ask them to talk to us and not to those whose immoderation we criticize ourselves. Moreover, it is not we who created extremist resisters, but the very individuals, the ecumenists, who made resistance necessary in the first place.

When I was a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, a liberal institution which reflects the attitudes of the famous University of California at Berkeley, with which it issues joint graduate degrees, one of my professors—an internationally-known expert in liturgical theology and, though a Roman Catholic, a man of conscience and Christian uprightness—asked me why I did not follow the school’s liberal ecumenical policies. He said, “After all, the greatest scandal of Christianity is that Christians are separated from one another.” I agreed with this. It is a scandal. But it is not the primary scandal of Christianity. The primary scandal of Christianity, as Archbishop Chrysostomos consistently says, is that we Christians are separated from God. And when that separation is corrected, as it is through Jesus Christ and His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church of our Fathers, then the separation among Christians will come to an end. If heresy has divided us, a return to Orthodoxy can unite us. This was the ecumenism of the Fathers, the ecumenism which we embrace, and the ecumenism which, indeed, renders the political ecumenism of the contemporary Orthodox ecumenists—who are seeking worldly recognition, political gain, secular power, and all of the perquisites which accompany these things—something worthy of our revulsion, something worthy of our condemnation, and which demands that we wall ourselves off from those who are infected by this spiritual disease, so that we, too, weak as we are, do not become infected and ill; and so that we, who unworthily but boldly stand up against the force that has made our brothers blind, may help them to regain their vision, to overcome that bacterium of religious syncretism that, in the name of political ecumenism, false love, and the absolute relativism of religious syncretism has made them blind, spiritually feeble, and susceptible to the temptations of the world.

In our struggle for the preservation of the pristine identity of Orthodoxy, constituting, as we do, a minority within the Church, we are beset, as imperfect humans, by all of those things which threaten a minority. If the Holy Spirit gives us strength beyond our numbers and personal abilities, and if, to paraphrase one of the great Confessors of the Church, we are, by virtue of preaching the Truth, a majority in our minority status, we are nonetheless prone to the temptations of human frailty. Psychologically, resistance movements traditionally run the risk of becoming, not, as they should be, a body of healthy believers within an ailing greater body, but a body unto themselves, imagining themselves to be the very thing which they are, through resistance, trying to bring back to health. This has happened in today’s traditionalist movement, where many Old Calendarists have begun to think that they are the Church and not a resisting part of the Church. They run a risk like that of some of the Iconodules, who, after the restoration of the Icons, refused to relinquish their status as a resisting body, forgetting that they were part of the greater body of the Church, and were of necessity chastised and punished by the Church for this unwisely zealous blindness to the unity of the Church.

We also, as a minority, face the danger of retreating into our resistance movement as though it were a unique and separate refuge. Even if we do not fall to believing that we constitute the whole Church, in which we are but the confessing pleroma, to use an expression of St. Theodore the Studite, we can easily come to think that, having walled ourselves off from error, we are immune to error. This very thought, this very illusion of immunity, can lead us to the most dangerous of all sins, that of pride. And therein, we lose ourselves and our movement and betray our sacred responsibility towards the Church. This attitude of proud retreat and an almost paranoiac turning-in on ourselves can also foster unhealthy apocalypticism. Because of the influence of Protestant thought, the Orthodox Church is riddled with a fundamentalistic view of the end of the world. Even holy people have been innocently misled into personal theological opinions in this area that breed an almost pathological fear of the world and thus impede that joyous activity of spreading the Faith that occurs even in the most dire of circumstances. In the resistance movement, this apocalyptic extremism can lead one to reinforce the idea that the catholic nature of the Church has come to an end, that there is no hope for Church union, and that dialogue and exchanges will lead nowhere. This is a dangerous and deadly temptation that we must avoid at all costs, since the Christian lives in the “eschatological now,’’ in the renewed world that shines through the darkness of the realm of sin and which has already, in some ways, overcome the fruitless efforts and reign of Antichrist. This is not to say that we must not prepare for the reign of evil; but we must prepare by positive actions and by hope that, even when the end seems near, our repentance will move God and that the world will have yet more time to come to Him and to be transformed.

In referring to these dangers that face us, I mean simply to place our resistance in a sure context, exhorting all of you, and of course myself, to avoid all folly, all demonic distractions, however spiritually lofty they may seem to be, and everything that draws us away from the sacred task of maintaining our spiritual health for the sake of calling back our erring brothers to the fullness of the Faith. This task demands hope, and we must not be deterred by hopelessness, by turning in on ourselves, and by forgetting that we are called by God to work as the small flock within the greater Body of Christ.

In mentioning these dangers, now, I do not mean to suggest that we should not be vigilant and wise. Just as it would be foolish to view the present trend towards anti-ecumenism in the so-called official Churches without skepticism and an acutely critical eye, as I noted above, so we are equally foolish if we think that, after a century of the intense erosion of their Orthodox identity by political ecumenism, the Orthodox ecumenists and the so-called “official’’ Churches will regain their Orthodoxy in a single decade. Nor should we imagine that the fall of Communism, which was but one manifestation (and a political one at that) of the erosion of our Orthodox identity (let us not forget that Communism ravaged nearly the whole of the Orthodox world during the last century), has suddenly brought the national Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe to good health. Communism befell Churches that had in many ways failed in their witness long before Marxism came forth; Communism was a punishment for sin, as our more honest and enlightened Church leaders aver. That those innocent of sin also suffered under the Communist yoke is one of the tragedies of a fallen world. But what Communism did to the spirit of the Church and her Bishops is not something that will disappear quickly either. We must, in avoiding the dangers of the right—that is, the danger of believing that our resistance movement is somehow the Church itself—, never succumb to those of the left, imagining that somehow, with the fall of Communism, all of the evil of that system, as well as the evil which spawned it, has disappeared. We must walk a middle path between these two dangers.

Now, this middle path, to bring my words into their final focus, is the very ethos of Orthodoxy, the “Royal Path’’ of the Fathers. And it is on this path, within this ethos, that we discover the one guiding light that must never wane, if we are to carry out our resistance against the attack on our Orthodox identity by political ecumenism. We must keep this beacon forever bright and see that it never dims. That beacon shines with the light of tolerance. Never, in protecting the Orthodox Faith and our Orthodox identity, above and beyond the dangers of a personal kind that I have identified, must we violate the tolerant ethos of Orthodoxy. If heretics are separated from the truth, it is our duty—our sacred duty—to treat them with kindness and love. St. Maximos the Confessor, in expressing absolute disdain for heresy and those things which defile our Faith, nonetheless dismisses as abhorrent any harm directed against heretics themselves. He clearly separates the heresy from the heretics. Our Orthodox identity and the ethos of the Faith, which is immersed in love, are intimately bound together. And in this union, there is not a single instance in which intolerance, condemnation, and the dismissal of the worth of any human being is possible. If we condemn beliefs that threaten us, we do not condemn those who adhere to those beliefs. Satan is the source of evil doctrine, and we condemn him and his minions and the poison that they spread. But those who are poisoned by Satan are not his; they are, rather, creatures of God, suffering from the deadly, soul-destroying jealousy of the Evil One.

In our struggle against ecumenism, while we should—indeed, must—condemn this assault against the self-identity of the Orthodox Christian and against the essence of the Orthodox Church itself, we must not condemn those who have fallen, either out of naivete or even because of sinful, worldly inclinations, to its lure. Rather, we must show a spirit of tolerance, such that the ecumenists do not, in their folly, imagine that we, who uphold the uniqueness of the Orthodox Church, do so with a spirit of intolerance towards other Christians or even those of different religions. After all, our outrage at the religious syncretism that accompanies contemporary ecumenism is not simply a matter of the denigration of something which we love; it is more than this. Our outrage rises out of the great sadness that befalls us when we see the criterion of Christianity, the sole answer to man’s dilemmas, auctioned off in the market of ecumenism, as though it had no value, and thus also see those who are suffering in darkness and delusion denied the sure cure for human ills that is contained within the Church of the God-Man, the Orthodox Church, the pleroma of which is united to Christ and thus restored and made new. It is the loss of potential and the denial of salvation to our fellow men that must most outrage us about ecumenism, for in being upset by these things, we are acting out of love. And when we act out of love, we act in God, Who is love.

As outrageous as the betrayals and at times hokey and simplistic platitudes of the ecumenists may be, we should not ridicule them. We should not individually and unilaterally condemn them as heretics. We should not rage and pontificate against them. In so doing, we deviate from the Royal Path, from the behaviors and ethos of the Fathers, opening up ourselves to accusations of intolerance. Nor, despite the excesses and the outright hypocrisy of political ecumenism, should we lose hope for those in the grips of its force. We must work sedulously and untiringly to see that they come to their senses. In the case of those who are misled by the false “goodness” and hypocritical love of ecumenism, as well as by its absolutist and totalitarian relativism, we must show patience, guiding them slowly and gently into an understanding of what it is that has overtaken their reason. Those who are agents of political ecumenism, who have gained from their association with it, and who hypocritically seek the world through its pseudo-religious precept—these, too, we must approach with love. We must answer their insults and slander against us anti-ecumenists, but understand, in answering them, that they are defending a sickness that has blinded them in soul and mind. Thus, while our medicine, the true teachings of the Church, may sting them, it must be applied with care, attention, and calm, soothing support, just as a physician would apply iodine to a wound: telling the patient that it will burn, helping him to endure the pain, and assuring him that the result of the application of this unpleasant agent will be the cure of an insidious infection and the eradication of the bacteria which cause it. In the words of St. John Chrysostomos, we must not “inflict wounds” but “heal them.”

If we should fail in this world to win over those who have been infected by heresy, let us then remain tolerant and loving into the next world, hoping that, if we cannot be reconciled with them here on earth, somehow by God’s mercy we will be reconciled in the other world. We must pray for those who die in heresy or under its influence. We must maintain hope for them. And even when, because they will not recant, those deadened by heresy have been condemned by the Church and cannot be the object of our public prayer, let us in our private prayers pray for them and hope for their return to God. In this vein, let us remember that the Fathers of the Third (Ecumenical Synod, when they condemned the accursed heresy of Nestorios, about whom we hear such strong statements and condemnations, nonetheless, at a personal level, did so while “shedding tears’’! Heed this phrase each time that you hear eloquent condemnations of “Nestorios the heretic’’; for this phrase reveals to us the context in which such condemnations must be placed. It tells us of the ethos of Orthodoxy: toleration that, even when it can longer endure heresy, acts strongly while “shedding tears.’’

When the world was left in darkness and the majority of humankind did not know the true God, what did God do? Did He condemn man? Did He revile those who reviled Him? No. Unable to bring mankind back to Himself, having chastised men and women— cajoling them with calamity and loving wrath—with no success, God became man, so as to lead mankind back to his lost Paradise. This He did in love, providing for our example His Only-Begotten Son, the Eternal God before the Ages. In this act, God teaches us how to reach out to those who do not know Christ and who reject Him. We must never treat them with intolerance. We must never despise them. Rather, we must pity them and show them love, even when we criticize them. St. John Chrysostomos, in referring to the Jews, for example, calls them “wretched.’’ But he does not do this because he hates them, or in a spirit of retaliation for their rejection of Christ. He does so out of pity for the wretched state in which they find themselves, bereft of God and reaping the evil benefits of having Crucified the very One Who came to redeem them. We must follow this path, pitying and decrying the wretched state of those who do not know and who reject Christ, but doing so out of love and from Christian hearts wounded by the departure of God’s own creatures from the path that He set out for them. We must never show intolerance for anyone, even if we revile the hateful doctrines and beliefs that may have separated men from God and made them, however tragically, enemies of God. To see them as anything but brothers and sisters is to insult and betray God Himself. As the Divine Chrysostomos tells us, we “converse with them gently; for nothing is stronger than gentleness and mildness.’’

Finally, the Orthodox ethos, which is rooted in tolerance, is fragile. When we violate it, and especially in the name of resistance to ecumenism, we bring down the wrath of God and the condemnation of our fellow man on ourselves. First, God, as I have said, does not countenance our usurpation of His chastising love, since our chastisement, imperfect as we are, more often than not lies in hatred and personal resentment, in ethnic prejudice and learned bigotry, and in corrupt souls. We are not capable of loving fire, which burns yet does not consume. Second, if we oppose ecumenism because it wishes to bring all men into unity with God and to foster toleration and kindness between people, or to end war and poverty where possible, then we oppose Christianity. We do not oppose these things. Rather, we affirm and teach that none of them is possible without Christ. That is our witness and our message. Nor can the political ecumenists obtain these goals by sacrificing Orthodoxy on the altar of the social Gospel. Nonetheless, the goals remain sacred. In an imperfect world, we may not attain them; but in an imperfect world, the role of the Christian is to hold them up as the ideal. It is we traditionalists who must champion toleration and love, never allowing our opposition to the fruitless and merely human efforts to attain them to take on the hue of intolerance or opposition to such high goals. Never!

In short, we must live the dogmas of the Church in love. If they should not be bartered in the ecumenical circles of religious syncretism, they also must not become dead, formal, external statements by which we elevate ourselves and denigrate those who disagree with us. Our dogmas are made in love, within the ethos of tolerance, and through the age-old passivity that derives from that love and which represents the spirit of the Fathers even in their most rash moments. Let me close my remarks with a statement by the great Greek miracle-worker of our age, St. Nektarios of Aegina, whose irenic writings are too often ignored and whose witness, though often misrepresented, evidences a truly Patristic spirit that should guide us in our resistance to ecumenism, religious syncretism, and Orthodox apostasy:

“Dogmatic differences, reduced to an issue of faith, leave the matter of love free and unchallenged; dogma does not set itself against love.... Christian love is constant, and for this reason the deformed faith of the heterodox cannot change our feelings of love towards them.... Issues of faith must in no way diminish the feeling of love.’’ I leave you, then, with an exhortation to embrace the quintessential tool of resistance: that tolerant spirit that rises out of love.