The Apostasy Today

The Ecclesiological Aspect: Spiritual Authenticity – the Source of Canonicity

Metropolitan Photii of Triaditsa | July 27 / August 9, 2000 | Sofia

 

Dear N. in the Lord,

May God’s mercy be with you!

Thank you for your letter, for the information concerning the interconfessional seminar in Shumen on May 23 (N.S.) of this year. Your observations are yet another confirmation—albeit not as strong and vivid—of the fact that the truth of Orthodoxy cannot be preserved externally, formally, declaratively, “politically.” The termination of membership in the World Council of Churches remains an extremely limited, contingent, faceless church-administrative act, if it is not followed by a truly conciliar condemnation of ecumenism on the basis of serious theological analysis and a conciliar church evaluation of its essence.

Orthodoxy does not tolerate the category of “external correctness,” severed from the fullness of truth, from the spirit, from faith, from life, from the conciliar conscience of the Church. Here, perhaps, is the dark essence of the apostasy today: under the mighty pressure of contemporary anti-Christian civilization—with all its possible dimensions, levels, and driving forces—the very sense of Orthodoxy is being lost or severely obscured among the Orthodox themselves; in the souls of bishops and priests there ominously creep the cancerous metastases of coldness, insensibility, indifference, and contempt toward Orthodoxy, or else impulses overflowing with intellectual self-assurance toward its “rethinking,” “actualizing,” and “modernizing.” As a consequence, there grows, to varying degrees, an alienation from the spirit of Orthodoxy among an enormous majority of bishops, among a large part of the clergy, and among the theological cadres of the so-called official local churches. The result of this process dynamically extends across the whole spectrum, from the folkloric-everyday caricature of Orthodoxy, through the many-sided revisionist pathos for its “modernization,” to its fully conscious undermining and destruction at the highest ecclesiastical-administrative and theological level, sometimes concealed even under the mask of church-political “traditionalism.”

From this point of view, ecumenism is the predominant expression of the apostasy today, global in scope, but far from its only expression. Thus our goal is not simply “to restore the old calendar” or “to withdraw from the WCC,” but to preserve ourselves in this spiritual authenticity, in this sacred fullness of Orthodoxy, which gives birth to, nourishes, and fills the whole of church teaching, traditions, and customs, and fertilizes and gives meaning to the whole visible structure of the Church with its canonicality and officiality. The opposite tendency we see among the apologists of official Orthodoxy: they understand canonicality and officiality as a self-sufficient and unconditional guarantee of authentic Orthodoxy and as the supreme criterion of its unity. However, the conscientious among them cannot fail to notice that behind the facade of canonicality and officiality, Orthodoxy today on a worldwide scale is being vigorously destroyed and at the same time replaced by a grotesque double, by a new formal, “institutional” or “earthly” “Orthodoxy,” refashioned “according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ” (cf. Col. 2:8). And the hierarchs of the official local churches do not oppose this process in a purposeful and organized way.

Indeed, this “Orthodoxy” sometimes brazenly makes use of the sacred language of authentic Orthodoxy as an exalted but existentially non-binding theological metaphor for the spirit, the mind, and the conscience. Thus the category of “correctness” unnaturally disintegrates, loses its inner credibility, and becomes a metaphorical covering for a content incompatible with it.

I shall try to clarify what has been said with a concrete example. A senior Orthodox hierarch not only does not spread ecumenist or neo-renovationist ideas, but even organizes the public burning of books containing such ideas. At the same time, for years this hierarch scandalizes the public in the city in question by homosexual acts.

You will say: this is not a matter of confession of faith; these are personal sins, for which we ought not to judge. Yes, that is so; indeed, we ought not to judge. But if a hierarch commits such a sin and imperturbably continues to celebrate and administer the holy Mysteries to himself and to Christians, this is not simply his “personal sin”; such bold and sacrilegious behavior inevitably casts profound doubt on the Orthodoxy of such a hierarch’s views concerning faith and salvation.

Thus it is evident that confessional convictions, beyond a certain point, can hardly be “distilled” in pure form, regardless of a man’s spiritual and moral condition. I emphasize this with the important qualification that these two categories—confession of faith and spiritual-moral condition—must be handled with the utmost responsibility, with a spiritual worldview and with pastoral sensitivity to the limit; in no case should they be unscrupulously and indiscriminately substituted for one another with the unclean aim of disgracing and reviling an opponent.

Moreover, in the case under consideration, there arises a strong disturbance and doubt concerning the sincerity and Orthodoxy of the convictions and actions of the governing body of the local church in question, which for a long time remains silent, conceals the truth, and makes conciliar use of falsity and lies in order to “preserve” the authority of canonical church power. Is it really possible to act uncanonically in the name of canonicality? Can falsehood be a conciliarly approved means by which the authority of church truth is to be preserved?

We must not forget that the spiritual authenticity of Tradition, of teaching, of the customs in the Church, is the source of canonicality and officiality, and not that canonicality and officiality in themselves are the source of this spiritual authenticity. Moreover, these categories ought not to be in mutual contradiction. But it is precisely the disintegrating displacement, interpenetration, and contradiction between them that characterizes the principal direction of the apostasy among the Orthodox in our days.

The Spirit-bearing Fathers of the Church, the Orthodox hierarchy, and the faithful whom it serves and who entrust to it the administrative authority in the Church, constitute this primordial structural ecclesiastical unit which is the bearer of the mystical unity of the heavenly-earthly Church, that is, of the unity of Christ with His Body—the Church, of the faithful with their pastors, of the local with the universal, and of the eternal with the temporal.

It is precisely in this sense that our effort to abide in the fullness of Orthodoxy, our effort to abide in the Conciliar Church, which in the words of St. Maximos the Confessor is the right and saving confession of faith in God, aims at the preservation of this wholeness, which, bound together by the bonds of grace and love, weaves the very heart of Orthodoxy, of the true Body of Christ.

Your humble supplicant in Christ,
† Bishop Photii

 

Bulgarian source: Православно слово [Orthodox Word], No. 2, 2002, pp. 21-22.

Online: https://bulgarian-orthodox-church.org/ef/works1/v1_05.pdf