Created and Renewed – Fr. Gabriel Bunge OSB

The translation is mine (Fr. Gregory) and has been an ongoing process. If you have any suggestions in correcting my English (I am not a native writer/speaker) pls do comment!

Created and Renewed after the Image of God

Concerning the Biblical-theological and Sacramental Foundations of Evagrian Mysticism

By Fr. Gabriel Bunge osb

Evagrios Pontikos (ca. 345 – 399)¹ has from time to time been referred to as a “Philosopher in the Desert”². This is certainly correct if we understand philosophy to be the “highest philosophy” as the Church historian Socrates³ thought of it. This is also how the early Church understood it, and how Evagrios himself – from before he became a monk – understood philosophy as “the highest philosophy.”⁴ For him it is the “doctrine of Christ our Saviour” which consists of praktike, physike and theologike, which is synonymous with “Christianity.”⁵ The very “wisdom” which is here said to be “loved” above all is not the “external wisdom”⁶, the “wisdom of the world”⁷, from which Evagrios expects nothing⁸, but the Logos of God⁹ the “essential wisdom.”¹⁰ To allege that Evagrian Mysticism is, despite its theology (which is admitted to be its “highest goal”) philosophical rather than theological at least in a Trinitarian sense¹¹ and that it is neoplatonic¹², is to fundamentally misunderstand the monk from Pontos. This does nothing to change the fact that such a destructive verdict on this monk who understands himself as a Christian, has been passed on him from a competent side.¹³

To convince oneself how ungrounded this verdict is, it is prudent to inquire into the specific theological foundations of Evagrian mysticism. According to biblical teaching human beings are “created after the Image of God”¹⁴ and in Christ are also renewed after the Image of the Creator¹⁵. This “renewal”, by which the human being becomes “a new creation in Christ”¹⁶ and is also renewed to the “knowledge of God”¹⁷, is received in holy Baptism. Therefore any mysticism which understands itself as Christian mysticism must ultimately have a sacramental foundation. Do we see this in Evagrios?

Some biographical points will first be provided here. Evagrios, when he left Constantinople was a deacon, and he remained a deacon for the remainder of his life.¹⁸ It is unlikely that he ever functioned as such in the Nitrian desert, where only the oldest of the eight priests celebrated.¹⁹ Evagrios spent the last sixteen years of his life as a monk, not as a cleric. This explains why there is so little mention of the Church, whose teaching, and above all Sacraments, practice and administration lie solely in the competence of the Priests (Bishop or Presbyter). When the Church is mentioned, it is only mentioned in a “spiritual meaning,” like one would expect of a “spiritual father.” In other words, Evagrios takes the “Catholic and Apostolic Church”²⁰ for granted; he explains and defends her doctrine and Sacraments only when they are attacked and where their neglect automatically endangers the “spiritual life.” Such is certainly the case when the “consubstantiality” of the Holy Spirit is denied.

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The way Evagrios read the Holy Scriptures of the Old Covenant in unison with the Fathers, teaches that human beings are created “after the Image of God”. Evagrios specifically applies this to man’s “intellect,”²¹ in so far as this is a bodiless nature,²² is like God Himself who in essence is a “Spirit,”²³ and that therefore He is bodiless.²⁴

Your hands have made me and built me: Made (pepoietai) was the soul, built (peplastai) was the body. Like it is said: Let us make men after our Image²⁵, and also taking dust from the earth he built him.²⁶

The Intellect, by which Evagrios means the “inner man,”²⁷ is simply referred to as the Image of God.²⁸ In principle this holds true even for the sinner,²⁹ despite the fact that Evagrios, reflecting on the “fallen image”³⁰, at one point said that man now has an “animal image”³¹ – in accordance with Ps 48, 13.

What we have here is of course the first of three creations known to Evagrios: creatio ex nihilo, also called the “transition from non-existence to existence”³² (ousiosis). This is a foundational act of the Creator, who makes man to be unchangeably what he is in accordance with his innermost being. The whole economy of salvation in behalf of the “fallen image” is constructed upon this original created being, while this “fallen image” is “renewed” in Christ and only in the eschaton will it be perfected in the “likeness.” But let us first once more return to creation.

From Holy Scripture and the New Covenant we know that only the Son is the “Image of God” the Father in an absolute sense.³³ The biblical statement that man is created after the image of God hereby gains a precise Trinitarian sense: he is after the Image of the Father, that is to say, he is an Image of the Son. In other words man is not “Image of God”³⁴ in the absolute sense. To make this fundamental distinction clear Evagrios sometimes uses Hebrews 1, 3 in this context to refer to both the Son and the Spirit. They are the “exact image and true radiance of the Father’s essence”³⁵ literally the “hypostasis of the Father.”³⁶ The intellect however is “true image and likeness of the Son and the Spirit.”³⁷ The conclusions Evagrios draws from this twofold Archetype – Copy relationship (Father – Son and Spirit, Son and Spirit – Intellect), we will examine below. It is sufficient here to state that the intellect is as it were a created image of the Image,³⁸ namely an image of a prototypos³⁹ or archetypos.⁴⁰

To understand this we must take a look at Evagrian “Christology,” even though at this point we can only establish the very basic outline of this fundamental theme in Evagrian thought. In his “Epistula ad Melaniam” Evagrios posits that the intellect is without mediation the image of the Son and Spirit. In the following “Kephalaion” it is said that:

In the Aeons God will change the body of our humiliation into the resemblance of the glorious body of the Lord⁴¹; and after all the Aeons he will also bring us to the resemblance of the image of His Son,⁴² if the image of the Son is essential knowledge of God the Father.⁴³

Evagrios, then, distinguishes between two phases of salvation. The first phase is that of the change (metas xematizei) and bringing to resemblance (summorphon) with the “glorious Body of the Lord” which will take place within time. For indeed, the aion is the spatial dimension of the kosmos that is commensurate with the temporal dimension of the material creation.⁴⁴ The second phase is that of the “bringing to the resemblance (summorphous) of His Son” which lies beyond this creation (meta ton panton ton aionon) when aion and cosmos have passed away.⁴⁵ As we will see, Evagrios develops the same thought while utilizing other biblical texts.

The implications (and problematic) of the above mentioned two phases, which are decisive for Evagrian eschatology, we cannot further discuss here. Important for our purpose here is the unambiguous distinction which Evagrios makes in the second phase between “Son” and “Image of the Son.” The “Image of the Son” is, as it were, hypostatic. But who or what is meant by this? This “Image of the Son” is “Christ.”

Let Your face shine upon us, and we shall be saved:

Christ is named face here because he is ‘the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation.’⁴⁶

“Here” (entautha) and on several other occasions Evagrios understands Christ in a fashion derived and further developed⁴⁷ from Origen, as ‘a certain rational and holy soul which came into the life of man⁴⁸ together with the God-Logos” when He became incarnate. He is called Christos – anointed one – because He – as the only one⁴⁹ – was anointed with the knowledge of the monas.⁵⁰ This knowledge of “oneness” is the fruit of his original,⁵¹ essential⁵² and inseparable⁵³ unity with the God-Logos. Thanks to this unity “Christ” (which here refers to a certain holy soul) is “God,” and the Logos is rightly called “Christ.”⁵⁴ When Evagrios thinks about the Son in this unity with “a certain rational and holy soul” he often adds: Christon de phemi ton meta Theou Logou epidemisanta Kyrion.⁵⁵

The unity between the God-Logos and a “certain holy soul” does not exist, according to Evagrios, until the humanization⁵⁶ of the Son of God⁵⁷ because the genesis of the asomata is timeless.⁵⁸ The humanization of the Son of God is an unrepeatable event⁵⁹ and is of decisive soteriological significance. Whenever God manifests himself in history – namely in the Old Covenant – He does so en Christo: the Old Testament theophanies are as a matter of fact christophanies.⁶⁰ The same holds true in case of the kosmopoiia⁶¹ and the creation of the material world.⁶² Consequently Evagrios identifies the “whole of material (enhylos) knowledge” with the “Kingdom of Christ”⁶³, because in Him the God-Logos is not beheld in his Divine Essence (hos pros auton) but in his actions for us (hos pros hemas).⁶⁴ In all this it is of course clear that the above mentioned distinction is strictly a matter of viewpoint (kat’ epinoian): The Lord is always one and the same!⁶⁵

Because it is a given that the soul of Jesus is of the same nature as ours⁶⁶ the question needs to be asked what the relation of this “certain rational and holy soul” is with the other souls. Christ as the Firstborn [of all Creation] (protokos pases ktiseos)⁶⁷, “before whom no others came to be and after whom others came into being”,⁶⁸ “before any rational nature” (pro pases logikes physeos) was created.⁶⁹ But not in a chronological sense since what is bodiless is also timeless,⁷⁰ which means that one intellect is not older than another intellect.⁷¹ The genesis of the logika is, as we have seen, a timeless act. The pro should much rather be understood in an ontological sense of before. A “certain rational and holy soul” is as it were the prototypos⁷² or archetype⁷³ for every rational nature. To put it differently: “Christ” is the hypostatic “Image of God” in which all the other souls participate.⁷⁴ This “rational and holy soul” is in an eternal and ideal purity which cannot be lost in which all souls were intended to be as well and for this reason potentially are. Consequently Evagrios defines the Image of God as “receptivity for the monas”⁷⁵, which is a state of unity between the triune God and his rational creation⁷⁶ – to put it a little less cryptically – as “receptivity for God.”⁷⁷

To be “receptive” (dektikos) means that one is also, in principle, receptive of the opposite,⁷⁸ that means – at least practically speaking – to loose the received good and to fail one’s goal. In reality – for reasons we cannot elaborate here – the entire physis logike exists as “fallen image” with the only exception of “a certain holy soul.” This is where the Evagrian soteriology starts; after all, the Creator is also the Redeemer!

As he killed them, they sought him:

When God kills the old man, which is being destroyed by treacherous desires,⁷⁹ they will seek the new man which is renewed after the Image of the Creator.⁸⁰

“Renewed after the Image of the Creator”, which according to what was said earlier can only mean – and Evagrios confirms it explicitly –, that God has “recreated him in Christ”⁸¹ and that he now “by grace”⁸² once again resembles the Image of the Creator. Only in this man who is “renewed after the Image of God” is there no more “male or female,”⁸³ neither “Greek nor Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian nor Scythian, neither slave nor free: but Christ is all in all.”⁸⁴ This is the fruit of the incarnation of the Son⁸⁵, which the believers receive in the second of three creations known to Evagrios, “the change from evil to good !”

By baptism is man recreated. He is a new creature in Christ.⁸⁶

Holy Baptism and its “spiritual seal”⁸⁷ are a sacramental act of the “catholic and apostolic Church,” in whom we are granted “the forgiveness of sins”⁸⁸ like the eagle sheds its old age⁸⁹ and “ in Christ” is radically “renewed according to the Image!” Whoever denies the true divinity of the Holy Spirit empties out Baptism from its soteriological content because Baptism is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit.⁹⁰ Whoever says the Holy Trinity is a creature, insofar as he says the Holy Spirit was created at a later time “blasphemes God”⁹¹ and immediately involves his own salvation. At the same time he also denies the spiritual life any ontological foundation.

As is clear from the above quoted kephalaion (KG VI 34) Evagrios sees the conformation to the Image of the Son of God as a process which – as has now become apparent – is founded in holy Baptism. Its eschatological completion is not attained “until all the aeons have passed.” This process unfolds gradually, as the following will show.

You have shortened his time:

We must first become like the “days of Heaven,”⁹² that is similar (homoious) to the holy Powers, and then also similar (parempherein) to the “Sun of Righteousness”⁹³ since the prayer of our Lord must be wholly and completely fulfilled. It is after all Jesus who prays “Father that they may be one in us, as You and I are one.”⁹⁴ This is how it will be with us: From then on neither increasing nor decreasing but rather living in the fullness of the Lord.⁹⁵

Evagrios considers the being after the Image of God to be a natural good which has been given to us at the creation of our nature.⁹⁶ The fulfilment of this being after the Image of God into the being in the likeness of God as they are indicated in Gen. 1, 26 (kat’ eikona hemeteran kai kath’ homoiosin) and in 1 John 3, 2 (homoi auto esometha) lies beyond our creaturely nature⁹⁷ and is, as custom has it, supernatural. Insofar as this, in itself eschatological fulfilment, has been graciously founded in the “new creature” by Baptism, our “spiritual life” in a real sense is already a supernatural event as will now become clear.

From Kol 3, 10 Evagrios takes it that the “renewal after the Image of the Creator” takes place eis epignosin in view of the knowledge of God. He is thinking of an unmediated knowledge of God which all physis logike originally possessed⁹⁸ but is at present unique to Christ.⁹⁹ This is where the Evagrian doctrine of the soul as after the Image of God is fully unfolded.

Evagrian mysticism is – despite all prejudices – deeply trinitarian. In KG VI 34 it is said that in the eschaton we will become similar to “the Image of the Son” and that this “Image of the Son” in fact means the “essential knowledge of God the Father.” Because the Primal Cause¹⁰⁰ and the Final Goal¹⁰¹ is strictly speaking the Person of the Father and for this reason Evagrios indicates Him to be the Producer of “essential knowledge.”¹⁰² For creatures the Father is known only – which is completely biblical¹⁰³ – by means of the Son and the Spirit, in fact – so says Evagrios – because of the double relation Archetype – Copy relationship in which as the Son and the Spirit stand to the Father so stands the Intellect to the Son and the Holy Spirit.¹⁰⁴ Due to its creaturely ‘being after the Image of God,’ the intellect is a “receiver of the knowledge of the Father,” and as Evagrios will specify more precisely, it is exclusively the intellect which has been renewed to the knowledge of the Image who also created it!”¹⁰⁵

As we have seen we are dealing with an eschatological event. “For ever,”¹⁰⁶ “without end,”¹⁰⁷ “unchangeably,”¹⁰⁸ creatures will delight in the “bottomless depth of the Father’s love,”¹⁰⁹ without creaturely mediation, but (only) through the mediation of His Son and Spirit, once the “beloved end”¹¹⁰ has become full reality. Yet the faith teaches us that, because of holy Baptism, we have a foretaste of the future glory. This is where mysticism begins with the personal experience of “final blessedness”¹¹¹ while yet here on earth during the time of prayer.

Because in a “true” prayer or “spiritual prayer” the prayer which is “in Spirit and in Truth” which is “the worship of the Father in His Holy Spirit and His Only-Begotten Son,”¹¹² does the intellect “dialogue with the Father”¹¹³ “without any mediation”¹¹⁴ of a creature or even the thought of a creature.¹¹⁵ Because now “it no longer honours the Creator from His creatures, but it praises Him in hymns from itself” (ex autou auton anhymnei).¹¹⁶ Such a praying person has in the true sense of the word become a theologian,¹¹⁷ since he does not merely know something about God but he has seen Him.¹¹⁸ And of course, this must not be forgotten; such a person is in Christ!¹¹⁹

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Let us sum things up. As we have remarked previously, Evagrios has been called a “philosopher in the desert,” and this is certainly correct insofar as one understands “philosophy” in an Evagrian sense. It would be more appropriate to call him “the great theologian of the desert,” and to use it in a very precise sense in which Evagrios himself uses this term. Theology is the pinnacle of a supra-rational, personal realization of unity with the triune God. Theology is ultimately reserved to the eschaton but a “pure heart” can tap into it already while yet here on earth by means of grace “at the time of prayer.”

Yet Evagrios also proves himself an excellent theologian in the modern sense of that word. His mysticism, after all, has a solid biblical and theological foundation: the doctrine that the intellect is after the Image of God, which alone makes it capax Dei. Perhaps most surprising to many is the fact that for Evagrios the “theologos” is not man in general, but only the man renewed after the Image of the “Creator” in Christ by means of holy Baptism, and who therefore is the “new man.” Put differently: Evagrian mysticism, despite its scarce references to Church and Sacraments, has an undeniable sacramental character; as one ought to expect from any mysticism which understands itself to be a Christian¹²⁰ mysticism.

Evagrian Christology which fell into disrepute¹²¹ rather quickly – I think because it has been completely misunderstood¹²² – finds its true raison d’ être in this mysticism of the being after the Image of God. It is here that Evagrios attempts to understand the essence of the Intellect “being created after the Image of God” and the “renewal” after this Image of the intellect by “a certain and holy soul” (the latter was from the moment of its creation essentially and indivisibly united with the God-Logos, and together with the Son also has become man). This “certain and holy soul” serves as an example to what the soul essentially is, and what the soul despite its fall will potentially always remain to be, and what the soul will eternally be in the end by virtue of the saving economy of the Son and the Spirit. Evagrian Christology is therefore not merely the at the heart of soteriology, but it is also the central theme which connects protology, cosmology, soteriology, and eschatology.

We have designated “a certain and holy soul” as the hypostatized “Image of God,” as the “prototype” (or archetype), after the example of which all other souls are created and renewed. This justifies the question how Evagrios thinks of “our Saviour Jesus Christ”, the Son of God who became flesh in the human Person of Jesus. It is now clear that Evagrios develops his Christology using the Incarnate One as his basis, because without the Incarnation we know nothing about “the soul of Christ”!¹²³ But how does he conceive of the Incarnate One Himself?

The answer to this question will not be found in the writings dedicated to physike, such as the “Kephalaia Gnostica,” but rather in writings of a more personal nature, such as the “Letters”¹²⁴ or the “Exhortation to a Virgin.” Here we encounter a very intimate Christ-mysticism which – it is important to notice that the “Exhortation to a Virgin” is directed to a nun – rises to a true bridal mysticism.¹²⁵ When Evagrios speaks¹²⁶ of “imitation of Christ” it is precisely the human Person Jesus Christ he has in mind, despite the present metaphysical context. By means of Jesus Christ, and His Old Testament prefigurations Moses and David, Evagrios makes clear what this “imitation” which alone makes us well-pleasing to God is: “Meekness” which for him is the concrete manifestation of Christian agape. It alone makes a human being receptive of the knowledge of God and His personal Presence. Love is the quintessential point of praktike¹²⁷, the practical-ascetical life which without having been completed there can be no mysticism and also no “theologia”.

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Translated by Fr. Gregory Wassen

1 On the person and work of Evagrios see besides the known lexicon articles also: G. Bunge: Evagrios Pontikos. Briefe aus der Wüste, Trier 1986. 17 ff.; M. O’ Laughlin: Origenism in the Desert, Diss. Cambridge Mass. 1987. For the life of Evagrios see also G. Bunge and A. de Vogüe: Quatre ermites égyptiens d’après les fragments coptes de l’Histoire Lausiaque, Bellefontaine 1994 (SO 60), 153 ff. – Abbreviations of cited works by Evagrios: Ep.: Epistula LXII, editor by W. Frankenberg, Evagrius Ponticus, Berlin 1912. Translation G. Bunge: Evagrios Pontikos. Briefe aus der Wüste, Trier, 1986. Ep. fid.: edited by J. Gribomont, in: M. Forlin Patrucco (Publisher): Basilio di Cesarea. Le Lettere, Vol. 1, Turin 1983, 84 ff. Ep. Mel.: Epistula ad Melaniam, edited by W. Frankenberg (first part); G. Vitestam: Seconde partie du Traité, qui passé sous le nom de “La grande letter d’Evagre le Pontique á Mélanie l’Ancinenne,” Lund 1964. Translation G. Bunge: Briefe. Gn: Gnostikos edited by A. Guillamont, Evagre le Pontique. Le Gnostique ou A celui qui est devenu digne de la science, Paris 1989 (SC 356). in Eccl: Scholia in Ecclesiasten, edited by P. Géhin, Evagre le Pontique. Scholies à Ecclesiasté, Paris 1993 (SC 397). in Prov: Scholia in Proverbia, edited by P. Géhin, Evagre le Pontique. Scholies aux Proverbes, Paris 1987 (SC 340). In Ps: Scholia in Psalmos. By the kind agreement of Mlle M.-J. Rondeau we use the collation of the Vat. Gr. 754 manuscript which she has made. See also the following.: Le Comementaire sur les Psaumes d’Evagre le Pontique, in: OCP 26 (1960), 307-384. KG: Kephalaia Gnostika, edited by A. Guillamont, Les Six Centuries des Kephalaia Gnostica d’Evagre le Pontique, Paris 1958 (PO 28). M.c.: De Diversis Malignis Cogitationibus. PG 79, 1200 ff. Mn: Ad monachos, edited by H. Gressmann, Nonnenspiegel und Mönchsspiegel des Evagrios Pontikos, Leipzig 1913 (TU 39, 4). Or: De Oratione Capitula CLIII, PG 79, 1165 ff. Instead of these fragmented – and corrupted text we use the manuscript Paris, BN Coislin 109, as in the Philakolia in the Bd. 1, Athen 1957 edition, 176 ff., the numbering and chapter division of which we also use. Pr: Praktikos, edited by C. and A. Guillamont, Evagre le Pontique. Traité Pratique ou le Moine, Paris 1971 (SC 170-171). Translation: G. Bunge: Evagrios Pontikos. Praktikos oder Der Mönch, Köln 1989.

2 So for example the title of a well known article by A. Guillamont “Un philosophe au desert: Evagre le Pontique,” RHR 181, (1972), 29-56.

3 Socrates, HE IV 23 (PG 67, 516 A).

4 Ep. fid. 1, 8 ff.

5 Praktikos 1. Ep. fid. 4, 20 f.

6 Ep. fid. 2, 5.

7 KG I 73; VI 22

8 In Ps 62, 4b.

9 See Ep. fid. 4, 19.

10 Ep. fid. 6, 2; See also 7, 9.

11 I. Hausherr: Les leçon d’un contemplatif. Le Traité de l’Oraison d’Evagre le Pontique, Paris 1960, 99.

12 Ibid. 7.

13 Besides Hausherr see also H. U. von Balthasar: Metaphysik und Mystik des Evagrius Ponticus, in: ZAM 14 (1939), 31-47. A. Guillamont expresses it much more carefully: La Preghiera pura di Evagrio e l’influsso del Neoplatonismo, in: Dizionario degli Instituti di Perfezione, vol. VII, Rom 1983, 591 ff., who attributes Neoplatonic influence to the verbal formulation of Evagrian mysticism, and in my opinion he does so correctly (ibid. 593).

14 Gen 1, 27.

15 Col 3, 10.

16 2 Cor 5, 17.

17 Col 1, 17.

18 See Palladios: Historia Lausiaca 38 (Butler 116, 6 and 117, 3).

19 Ibid 7 (Butler 26, 9 ff.).

20 in Prov 24, 6 (Géhin 266, 6).

21 M.c. 19; See also KG III 32.

22 in Ps 38, 6d.

23 Joh 4, 24.

24 in Ps 140, 2a.

25 Gen 1, 26.

26 in Ps 118, 73lb. Last quotation from: Gen 2, 7.

27 See G. Bunge: Nach dem Intellekt leben. Zum sog. “Intellektualismus der evagrianischen Spiritualität,” in Festschrift W. Nyssen, Köln 1989, 95-109.

28 Ep 28, 3; 48.

29 in Ps 118, 113.

30 Gn 50.

31 Ep. Mel 46. Here Evagrios refers to the opinion of someone else.

32 Ep. fid. 11, 7; in Ps 32, 9m (genesis = ousiosis).

33 2 Cor 4, 4; see also in Ps 16, 2a.

34 See KG II 23.

35 Ep Mel 19.

36 Heb 1, 3: apaugasma tes doxes kai charakter tes hypostaseos tou Patros. See also KG II 23.

37 Ep Mel 19.

38 See Origen, Comm. in Rom. 1, 3 (Philakolia, c. 25, 2).

39 See Pr 89.

40 See Gn 50.

41 Phil 3, 21.

42 Rom 8, 29.

43 KG VI 34.

44 in Ps 138, 16m

45 According to P. Arch. II, 6. The background to KG VI, 34 Com. In Rom. 1, 3.

46 in Ps 79, 8d. Col. 1, 15: protokos pases ktiseos.

47 See Peri Archon II, 6. For the background for KG VI, 34 see Com. in Rom. I, 3 (Philakolia 25, 2).

48 in Ps 131, 7e.

49 KG III

50 in Ps 44, 8z.

51 KG VI 18.

52 KG VI 79

53 KG VI 14.

54 KG IV 18.

55 in Ps 44, 8z; 88, 9d; 104, 15i; 118, 3b; KG VI 14 (the translation needs correction) [Fr. Bunge is referring to the Syriac translation of the original Greek].

56 in Ps 109, 3a.

57 KG VI 18.

58 KG VI 9, see also Ep 49, 1. Timeless is by no means equivalent to beginningless in Evagrios! Because the intellect is created it also has a beginning: Ep. Mel. 30.

59 in Ps 113, 11e.

60 KG IV 41. 43; Ep 33, 3.

61 in Eccl 6, 10-12 (Géhin 52, 14).

62 KG 58.

63 Ep. fid. 7, 22.

64 Ep. fid. 7, 42.

65 Ep. fid. 7, 11; 25.

66 KG VI 79.

67 Kol 1, 15.

68 KG IV 20.

69 in Ps 109, 3b.

70 Ep 49, 1.

71 KG III 45.

72 Pr 89.

73 Gn 50.

74 in Ps 104, 15i: “These christoi are called christoi because they participate in Christ (metechontes); Christ on the other hand is called christos because he participates in the Father. “I call Christos the one who is the Lord who came together with the God-Logos.” The being in the image of God of the soul is ultimately grounded in the Son who is the Image of God in the absolute sense. But in the Son in his union with a “certain rational and holy soul” in and through which He works ad extra. On the position of “Christ” see also the in depth contemplations of KG VI 14 (translation in need of correction).

75 KG III, 32.

76 This concept has a protological meaning in Evagrios (Ep. fid. 10, 19; KG I 49 etc.) and an eschatological meaning (Ep. fid. 7, 55; KG I 65 etc.). Right now only Jesus Christ possesses this state of being (KG III 2.3; IV 21 = in Ps. 44, 8j). See on this subject more fully Gabriel Bunge: Henade ou Monade? Au sujet de deux notions centrals de la terminologie evagrienne, in Le Museon 102 (1989), 69-91.

77 KG VI 73.

78 KG I 4.

79 Eph 4, 22.

80 in Ps 77 id; also in Ps 95, 1a; 149, 1a. Final quote: Col 3, 10.

81 in Ps 44, 4g

82 M.c. 18

83 Gal 3, 28.

84 M.c. 3 Final quote: Kol 3, 11.

85 Ep Mel 56 ff.

86 Ep Fid 11, 9ff., 3 quoting from 2 Cor 5, 17.

87 Mn 124.

88 in Ps 31, 1a; 84, 3a.

89 in Ps 102, 5j

90 Ep fid 10, 6-14; in Prov 22, 28 (Gehin 249, 6f.).

91 Mn 134.

92 Ps. 88, 30.

93 Mal 3, 20 according to Ps. 88, 37. Sun of Righteousness is a biblical symbolism name for Christ (the Logos in union with “a certain rational and holy soul”), in whom the Father abides (in Ps 18, 6b; also 26, 5d). The goal is therefore to achieve an abiding of the triune God in the soul which is at the present the exclusive prerogative of Christ. To this theme many sections of the Epsitula ad Melaniam are dedicated without the name Christ being mentioned even once!

94 Joh 17, 21For the various meanings Evagrios attributes to this verse see: G. Bunge Mysterium Unitatis. Der Gedanke der Einheit von Schöpfer und Geschöpf in der evagrianischen Mystik, in Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 36 (1989), 449-469.

95 in Ps 88, 46im.

96 Gen 1:27.

97 Ep Mel 62. Evagrios quotes from John 10, 10 and Dan 4, 36 (Theodotion).

98 KG VI 75; also II 3.

99 KG I 77; III 3; in Ps 44, 8 z; 8, 9, 8d; 88, 43ig.

100 Ep Mel 25.

101 Ep Fid 7, 9.

102 KG VI 28.

103 Mt 11, 27 (the Son), 1 Cor 2, 10 (the Spirit).

104 Ep Mel 12. 18. 19.

105 Ep Mel 16.

106 Ep Mel 23.

107 Ep Mel 63.

108 Ep Mel 14.

109 Ep Mel 31.

110 Ep Mel 67.

111 Ep fid 7, 19; see also Pr prol 51. Also G. Bunge, Das Geistgebet. Studien zum Traktat De Oratione des Evagrios Pontikos, Köln 1987, Kap. VI: “In Geist und Wahrheit.”

112 Or 59.

113 Or. 55.

114 Or 3.

115 Or 56-58.

116 Or 60.

117 Or 61.

118 KG V 26, also Or 4.

119 KG II 90. The image of “first light” and “both lights” perhaps originates with St. Gregory of Nyssa, C. Eun 1 (PG 45, 416 BC).

120 Here I remind the reader that von Balthasar qualified this mysticism as Buddhist rather than Christian in his article Metaphysik (Anm. 13).

121 According to A. Guillaumont: Les Kephalaia Gnostica d’ Evagre le Pontique et l’Histoire de l’Origenisme chez les Grecs et les Syriens, Paris 1962, 117 f.; F. Refoule: La Christologie d’Evagre et l’Origenisme, in OCP 27 (1961), 221-266; A. Grillmeier: Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche, Bd. 1, Freiburg 1982, 561 ff.

122 The misunderstanding lies in the way in which Evagrios uses the names of “Christ.” The Christology of the monk from Pontos cannot be reconstructed from the “Kephalaia Gnostica” alone. And it seems that the “Kephalaia Gnostica” was the only text available to the redactors of the 15 anathemas dating to 553. Only in the light of the “Scholias on Psalms” does it become evident that Evagrios took up Origen’s doctrine of the soul of Christ and independently developed it. Let it be noted here that Evagrios did not first develop this respective doctrine in Egypt under the influence of the Origenism of the Origenist monks. Rather, as we see in his “Epistula Fideï,” he presumes this kind of Christology to be a familiar one and completely non-offensive, and brought it with him from Cappadocia! The sources for this Christology are to be sought in the “Origenist” circle of Basil of Ceasarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, the two most prominent teachers of Evagrios.

123 From this it is possible to understand why Evagrios turns against “heretics” who “speak only of the soul of Christ” (in Ps. 108, 19 ie.). After all “he who rejects Christ cannot know God” (Mn. 134).

124 Bunge, Briefe [Anm. 1], 126 ff.

125 According to J. Driscoll: Spousal Images in Evagrius Ponticus, in SM 38 (1996), 243-256. See also P. Gehin: Evagriana d’ un manuscript basilien, in Le Museon 109 (1996), 59-85, hier: 71 ff. (A l’imitation du Cantique des cantiques).

126 M.c. 14.

127 Pr. 84.

M. Harl on Origen and the Heavenly Jerusalem

In my research for my MDiv thesis I came across an article referenced by Fr. John Behr in  his The Way to Nicea written by M. Harl. In it an interesting suggestion is made concerning Origen and the often repeated claim that he taught a preexistence of the disembodied soul and that embodiment is a result of sin in this preexistent state. My friend Fr. Christopher (a monk from St. John the Wonderworker Monastery, California) translated the passages in question and I have edited them for publication on my blog (I thought it might be interesting). The article is an older one and does not exist in an English translation (to my knowledge).

Fr. Gregory

The preexistence of souls or divine foreknowledge?

What does one of the most famous texts say which Origen cites to evoke the heavenly Jerusalem, (Hebr. 12 22-23), this place where the just shall be “gathered together/assemble” (and not dispersed), to wit, “the firstborn are inscribed there ekklesia prototokon apogegramemmenon en ou ouranois? Are we dealing here with a “preexisting” Jerusalem or Church in the sense in which the expressions of late Judaism are often understood? ¹ and which the Christians take up again on behalf of the Church borrowing from Psalm 73, 2 LXX according to which God “aquired for himself” his assembly “from the beginning,” ap’arches? Certainly one can say of this “heavenly Jerusalem,” which is “the City of God” (Ps. 47, 2-3 et al.), that according to the prophets, men have distanced themselves from this city and that they will be “re-established” there (apokathistamenon, in Ccels 7, 29). What is the meaning of this? Origen says that he has explained it in his commentaries on Psalms 45 and 47 (Ccel 7 31), which we do not possess. For him, if we accept the distinction between ktisis and katabole kosmou, all of the texts which say “before the constitution of the world,” or even “starting from the beginning,” can refer to the beginning of human history, to the beginning of this aion which is inscribed in time. He [Origen] uses Psalm 73 vs 2 to say that the Church did not begin with the coming of the Savior but rather that it has existed from the beginning of the human race which, however, does not refer back to a pre-cosmic or preexisting world. The Church is founded not only on the Apostles but also on the prophets and all the saints since the beginning of this world (Com. SoS p. 157, 13 s. GCS). Even though St. Paul says that God has chosen his saints “before” the katabole kosmou (Eph. 1, 4), this predetermination is not situated in a preexisting world but at the beginning of the history of the “world,” that is to say, of men. Origen places on the same level the following two expressions of Psalm 73, 2 (constitution of the Church) and Romans 8, 29 (the foreknowledge and predestination by God of those who will be in conformity with the Son’s image) (Com. SoS p. 157, 11-158, 13 and Comm. Mat. 17, 4). Does foreknowledge (or predetermination, for that is the problem) not explain that those who are destined to form the Lord’s assembly “shall be inscribed in heaven”? In his treatise On First Principles, Origen was unable to insist upon divine election, for this would offer an argument to the Gnostics in support of the determinism of natures, as one sees in P Arch II.9.7: that beings have various states not as a result of their works but “by the will of him who called them” “according to election.” In this context, Origen responds with “anterior causes,” which God knows and which direct the distribution of fates/destinies in a “just” manner; he thus touches on the theme of sins committed before birth in a way which remains in the realm of allusion and theory. In his later texts when he takes into account the theological meaning of the Epistle to the Romans which cites the example of Jacob and Esau (Rom. 9.10-13 with the citation of Ml 1.2 s.), he no longer speaks of “anterior causes,” but only – so it seems to me – of divine foreknowledge: in the large fragment on Rom. 1.1 preserved in Philokalia XXV, in Chapters 5 and 6 of the treatise On Prayer, and in the Commentary on Rom. 9, he says that “since the moment that infants come to birth” (from before they come thither) God knows the choice they shall make and organizes their fates in correspondance with these choices. “Before birth” may mean not in a previous life (which is no longer the question) but “from the maternal bosom,” as other biblical texts say. Likewise, “before the constitution of the world” (Eph. 1.4) means “since the beginning of this world (ab initio saeculi).” The “causes” that reconcile the inequality of human destinies with the affirmation of God’s “justice” are not in a pre-cosmic pre-existence, but in the foreknowledge, beyond this world, of all the history of men. I wish neither to affirm the disappearance of the thesis of the pre-existence of souls, nor its reconciliation with divine foreknowledge or election; rather, I wish to highlight two types of languag which emphasize different ideas.

1(God created the patriarchs ‘before the creation of the world,” all the souls “were prepared before the constitution of the earth”: 2 Enoch 23, 5 according to the long version[Note 13])

Justification by Faith (pt. iv)

Conclusion of Justification by Faith

So the gift of the Holy Spirit is not regarded by Protestants as something definitely imparted by an external sacramental act which may be done by Christ’s human representatives acting in His Name and Person (as e.g. in Acts), but as an inspiration which any man receives in aswer to his own interior desires, which is guarenteed to him by his own emotional and volitional response. So absolution from sin is for Protestants no longer something to be bestowed or withheld by Christ’s representatives (as in John xx) but something which any individual claims to obtain for himself at need in secret from God. So the Gospel rite of unction of the sick (Mk. iv. 13) has virtually been silently banished from Protestant practice, because the whole idea of God acting in response to or through an ecclesiastical material rite to either to give bodily healing or (still more) healing of the soul by the forgiveness of sins (James v. 15) is repugnant to the essential Protestant principle. Earnest prayer by individuals, i.e. prayer made with great psychological ‘attention’ by those praying, would be the only means to which a sincere Protestant would naturally look for such results.

There is left therefore only the organisation of opportunities for corporate prayer and praise as the main field of Protestant Church life. Corporate worship undoubtedly provides and safeguards those particular ‘values’ which indiviual worship cannot easily supply. But by no means all men equally appreciate the need of those particular ‘values’. If they do not want them or if they can find them for themselves in other ways, there is literally nothing which a Protestant Church can do for them which even a believing and religious man may not feel he can equally well do for himself, and which a spiritually slothful or undisciplined man will not claim to do for himself. The Church in such circumstances can have as such no decisive claim whatever on even the Christian life of its members. So far as individual Christians are concerned, it can only be at best or a convenience of the spiritual life for those who find it so. For others, stronger souls, it is something which they may have a duty to help and support, because it needs them, but which for themselves they could dispense with at will.

It is the same with the Ministry. Since the Sacraments do not cause grace in those who receive them but are only ‘tokens’ that the receivers have obtained grace in another (wholly individual) way, the Sacraments can no longer be conceived of as actions of Christ and His Body the Church (or better, of Christ through His Body the Church) really excercising His redemptive work on the receivers. They are actions of the receivers themselves, and only of them. Their administration is a set of ecclesiastical occasions for the edification of individual Christians, many or few, at which these can and should ecxercise their won faith and piety. There is therefore no need, nor indeed possibility, of a ‘priesthood’, of men authorised (as others are not) to act in the Name of Christ and His whole Church to perform these corporate actions of the Body towards individual members. The commission of the Christian Ministry is wholly other than this. They are men set apart to fulfil the function of proclaiming the fact of the Redemption accomplished in the first century A.D., which challenges individuals to make the saving act of faith. This is what the Church is for, and its Minsitry is essentially only a preaching ministry. As Luther said, Ordination is a ‘solemn ceremony for the appointment of public preachers in the Church’. Since the celebration of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is in fact only a species of preaching by symbolical actions, it is fitting that they should normally be conducted by those to whom the preaching office is committed. But in doing this they excercise no supernatural power or authority from Christ and His Church which other Christians have not received. All Christians are ‘priests’ (1 Pet. ii. 5). Any confinement of the performance of these actions to the ordained ministers is only for the purpose of seemliness in their administration and the good order of the Christian society. This is the classical Protestant conception of the Minsitry. (But it is right to say that all Calvinists have always laid much more emphasis on the disciplinary authority of those set apart for the discharge of the preaching ministry than have the Lutherand and Independents. And, in Scotland especially, Presbyterians since the seventeenth century have recovered from the Catholic tradition a definite doctrine that minesterial authority is derived from God by their ordination at the hands of othet ministers, and not from the Church by the fact of their choice by the congregation.)

You will see, I hope, how central is the doctrine of ‘Justification by faith alone’ in the whole of Protestant conception of Christianity, and how directly all the rest of the Protestant system flows from it, so that if that is removed the other ideas are left as it were rootless – mere negations.

Dom Gregory Dix OSB

Justification by Faith (Pt. iii)

Part iii of Justification by Faith by Dom Gregory Dix

Thus Protestantism retained the idea of the Church, despite its awkwardness in the Protestant scheme of thought. But the New Testament idea as the ‘Body of Christ’, not only His instrument to proclaim His Gospel, but His Body, one with Him, living with His life, holy with His holiness, energising with His Spirit, so that her worship is His worship of His Father, her mission is His mission to men, her faith is His unclouded vision of God, her action is His Redemption – all this was fatally impoverished. In the New Testament the Church is the ‘fulfilment of Christ (Eph. 1, 23) without which He Himself is incomplete and fruitless, but with which and through which alone He is ‘Redeemer’. A doctrine of ‘Redemption’ which had no logical place for all this, which made the Church only the secondary instrument of a Redemption which is completed in the recesses of the individual’s own mind, in essential independence of the life of Christ in the Church and through the Church, such a doctrine was something artificial and new. It could not regard the Church as the ‘organism’ of Christ, a life into which one must be incorporated to live in Christ at all. It was bound to regard the Church at best as an ‘organisation’ to serve Christ. And there was no sufficient reason why it should not be regarded as ultimately a purely ‘voluntary organisation’ for that end, with which the ‘Justified’ individual could dispense entirely if it did not seem to him to be serving that end; or which he could refashion to do so as seemed to him good, in order the better to proclaim the Gospel as he himself had found it in the Scriptures. In any case such an ‘organisation’ has and can have no further claims on his obedience than he himself chooses to give it.

You see once more how central in Protestantism is its doctrine of ‘Justification’. It leads directly and inevitably to the typical Protestant conception of ‘the Church’, as something to which a man adheres in so far as he finds it helpful to his personal religious life, not as something which embodies the God-given ‘redeemed’ life of souls into which each individual must come to share that life. You see, too, how it leads directly to the untrammelled religious individualism and the insensitiveness to schism which mark Protestant Church life. It leads, too, to the repudiation of all final authoritative standards of doctrine other than ‘the Scriptures’, and these uninterpreted. For the Church’s mission is only to ‘proclaim’  the self-sufficient Scriptures, and no human ecclesial authority can be allowed decisively to limit their meaning by imposing its own particular interpretation upon them.

It is the same with the Sacraments. Few other Protestants have had the courageous logic of the Quakers in simply disregarding the facts that our Lord instituted certain external or material signs, actions and forms for His followers, and that the New Testament plainly attributes to these operative significance in the life of grace. They were retained by most Protestants, but emptied of their Scriptural significance as signs which cause what they signify, and regarded instead as mere ‘tokens’ (either to the receiver himself or even other people) of a grace received wholly independently of them by psychological operations of the believer’s own mind. It is no wonder that in course of time they have sunk to the position of ‘optional appendages’ to the practice of Protestant piety.

Thus the rite of baptism is no longer for most modern Protestants what it is in the New Testament, the actual ‘putting on’ of Christ, the ‘incorporation’ into Him, so that the baptised are truly ‘one with’, ‘members of’ Him. So far as this mystical union is envisaged, it is attributed to the act of faith or to ‘conversion’. Thus it is not baptism which makes a man a ‘member’ of most Protestant Churches, or even the fact of being a communicant, but his own voluntary ‘adherence’. And his reception of these ordinances is nowadays regarded as an optional element in that adherence. Such use as he chooses to make of them is a consequence, not a cause, of his life and membership in that Church; and most English Protestant bodies no longer limit their administration of them strictly to their own ‘adherents’, but welcome to them any ‘believer’ who may present himself to them. Any other view would be incompatible with ‘Justification by faith alone’; for any other view there would be in such sacramental actions an element of human co-operation, of man’s own ‘good works’ combinig with the divinely-given confidence in the finished sacrifice of Christ, to bring about this ‘Justification’ and Sanctification. On the Protestant principles this is wholly inadmissible.

To be continued – and finished

Justification by Faith (ii)

Part II from Dom Gregory Dix on Justification by Faith

I have put it briefly, because I have no intention of criticising it here or of pointing out its great differences from the Catholic doctrine of Justification, except under one aspect. (I will only say in passing that it is a one-sided deduction from parts of St. Paul’s teaching, and that it is partly a development of and partly a reaction against teaching on the subject which was current during the fifteenth century mediaeval Latin Church, which we are always apt to forget was the nursing mother of all the Reformers.) But this root-idea of Protestantism had many consequences and ramifications, though, it has in itself – granted its catastrophic premises – a majestic and logical simplicity – too simple indeed to be adequate either to the profundity of the New Testament or the complexity of fallen human nature. All I want to point here is that it denied that thorough ‘renewal of the inward man’ by the action of God’s grace as a consequence of Redemption by Christm with which the New Testament fairly rings and thunders. And it left out altogether the ideas of the Church and the Sacraments from the whole operation of Redemption and sanctification.

Augsburg Confession

True, Protestants could not help seeing that the New Testament represents our Lord as having instituted the Church, and appointed His Apostles to act in the Church in His Name and Person. It also records that he deliberately ordered and instituted certain external actions and signs for His followers as having a vital relation to their being His. Neither of these facts was easily reconcilable with the doctrine of ‘Justification by faith alone’, which insisted not only that man needed nothing more but actually could do nothing more than know the story of Redemption in the first century A.D. and put his entire trust in that. Yet the New Testament made it impossible not to retain the Church and the Sacraments in some sense. Protestants therefore kept them both, but they were forced to empty them of much of their Scriptural meaning.

The idea of ‘the Church’ was reduced to the only one compatible with Protestantism – it was regarded chiefly as the divinely founded society for continually proclaiming the history of Redemption as it had happened long ago on Judea, and so challenging every individual in other ages and countries that first-century Palestine to make that personal act of faith which alone saves. The only necessary equipment for such a tasl was of course the authoritative account of how Redemption had actually happened – the Gospels – and the authoritative explanation of it and commentary upon it in the Old Testament and the other Apostolic writings. This alone was what could provoke the saving act of faith in individuals, and the Church existed to thrust it upon their individual notice. You see how directly the doctrine of ‘Justification by faith alone’ led to the idea of ‘the Bible and the Bible alone religion of the Protestants’. If the Church was necessary to present the Bible in every generation, yet the Church existed for the Bible, not the Bible for the Church. (In point of fact the Church had existed before the Bible and had compiled the Bible and authorised the Bible. Between 150 and 200 A.D. the Church began to select those particular documents which now make up our Bible out of many others, Jewish and Christian then in circulation, all professing to be more or less authoritative. These alone were after that to be received by the Church as ‘inspired’ and authoritative ‘Scriptures’. The ‘Old Testament’ was a selection from books then currently accepted as ‘Scripture’ among the Jews. The grounds for inclusion in the ‘New Testament’ were partly historical – evidence that these particular documents had genuinely come down from the Apostolic age and their competitors had not; partly doctrinal – that these documents agreed with the standard Christian teaching which had been going on in the Church ever since the Apostolic age, and their competitors did not. Thus there was a time when the teaching of the Church had been quite independent of our present Bible, viewed as a collection; and there was also a time when the documents of the Bible had been judged by the teaching of the Church and not vice versa. This was really fatal to the Protestant view both of the Bible and the Church. But the facts were not all known in the sixteenth century, and those that were known were ignored.)

To be continued

“Justification by Faith” (Pt. i)

… an excerpt from a letter (published in The Question of Anglican Orders: Letters to a Layman) by the Anglo Catholic theologian Dom Gregory Dix:

[The differences between Protestant ans Catholic accounts of Christianity are] not, as we often pretend, to be found in such questions as whether the Body and Blood of Christ are or are not substantially present in the consecrated Sacrament of the Altar (Luther, the original Protestant, sided with the Catholics on that point against the Protestants) or whether others besides Bishops can ordain, or whether we ought to say the Hail Mary or use incense in church, or the other side-issues on which English Protestants and Catholics usually concentrate. These things are only superficial symptoms. The really profound differences – and they are very profound indeed – all centre around the word ‘Justification’. One does not often hear it mentioned to-day in religious arguments or even in serious theological discussions. But when the Reformation was actually happening – in the sixteenth century – that word provided the dynamite for the whole terrific explosion. Everey Protestant leader insisted time and again that this and this alone was ‘the article of a standing or a falling in the church’, and that in comparison with this no other point in controversy was of final importance. (This would still be the case now, if Protestantism had not so greatly changed from its original principles during th nineteenth century.)

‘Justification’ is the technical term for the fundamental process in the religious life of any Christian man or woman: i.e. that by which fallen man, a creature born in a state of alienation from God and therefore prone to sin, unable of himself altogether to avoid actually sinning to some extent in this life, is through redemption by Christ brought into union with an infinitely holy God, to serve Him in righteousness, to love Him with his whole being and ultimately to enjoy Him eternally. You will see that this concerns the very heart of the Christian religion – and it was about this that Protestants and Catholics differed violently in the sixteenth century. How does the ‘Justification’ of the sinner through Christ happen?

The Protestant answer was unanimous and simple. It happened through a man’s total surrender to one particular idea and to the emotion it evoked; it happened entirely and completely inside a man’s own mind. Protestantism sprang from a radically and unrelieved pessimistic estimate of human nature. This was the personal invention of Martin Luther but it became the common presupposition of all Protestant teaching. Luther taught and Protestantism believed that man is totally and incurably corrupted in his nature by the effects of ‘original sin’, and that his ‘original sin’ is to be simply identified with ‘concupiscence’, i.e. with that susceptibility to temptation which we all know in ourselves. If this identification is accepted, there is no hiding the fact from ourselves that this ‘total corruption’ always persists in us, even in the ‘justified’ and those who appear to be leading and trying to lead a holy life. It is so irremediable, so ‘total’, that even a man’s apparently ‘good works’ are in themselves in the eyes of God damnably sinful. Nothing that a man can do in itself ever have the least value in the eyes of God, on this theory.

Man has therefore but one hope of salvation. God the Father sent His only Son to become Man and be crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem in the first century A.D.; thus He offered the one, true, perfect, sufficient and complete sacrifice to atone for all human sin. To the end of time anyone, however sinful, who believes and fully accepts that fact, and trusts altogether and only to the merit of that sacrifice, is forthwith ‘Justified’ in the sights of God. He needs nothing more, can do nothing more, than be conscious of feeling of confidence, for it is all that stands in between him and eternal torment. Yet even so, he cannot really undo the terrible effects of ‘original sin’ in his soul. The fact that he feels this confidence does not render anything he does or could do in itself pleasing to God. he is not in any way made holy even by ‘justifying faith’; otherwise his own actions would aid in his own redemption and sanctification; grace would no more be the absolutely free gift of God, but something man had at least partially ‘merited’. He is therefore emphatically not made holy but simply ‘accounted holy’ by God, for the sake of Christ, Whose righteousness is ‘imputed to’ the believing sinner by God through a sort of fiction. But in himself the redeemed and ‘justified’ sinner remaisn an entirely sinful sinner still,a nd only the consciousness of his own faith in the redeeming merits of Christ stands between him and the damnation his own inescapable sinfulness entails.  That is the famous doctrine of ‘Justification by faith alone’, which in the eyes of all Protestants was the very essence of Protestantism. ‘Justification’ was a matter of surrendering unconditionally to that one idea, something any individual can do – but can only do – for himself alone, in the absolute isolation of his own mind and heart.

( To be continued )

Ways to Church Reunion (III)

Part III and conclusion to Ways to Church Reunion

There still remains another point, namely, that of the canonical nature of any Reunion achieved through Eucharistic fellowship. There is a firm conviction that Reunion can only be the act of higher ecclesiastical authority. Possibly this may be true as regards complete Reunion of entire Church bodies, a reunion which is as yet outside historical relaity. Even so, such a Reunion from above, a so-called diplomatic Reunion, would have to acquire sanction from the body of Church people, which may even refuse to accept it. Generally speaking, the above point of view can only be accepted logically to the Roman Catholic Church, in which one can say that the voice of the Pope is the voice of the Church, but otherwise such a theory is quite out of place both for the Orthodox and the Anglican hierarchy. Within the same Church we find different sections and people, who even differ from one another dogmatically (as in the Anglican “comprehensiveness”). Even to a greater extent is this true of theological thought and cultural level. To expect, therefore, complete uniformity before Reunion is possible would be completely fruitless and unnecessary. Why cannot separate parts or groups belonging to the different Church bodies – Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican – unite in Intercommunion, if this actually expresses their true dogmatic and Church relationship?

One more objection might be raised here which has become stereotyped in the course of centuries and has trned into a real superstition – viz., that Eucharistic fellowship with the non-Orthodox impairs the priesthood and Sacraments of the entire Church, if any members of that Church enter into such communion. This would be even more true in a case of communion say with the Anglo-Catholics, for through them the Orthodox would enter into communion with Evangelicals and the Modernists, in so far as all the members of the Anglican Church are in communion with one another. Therefore, it is argued, such Intercommunion woud be impossible for the Orthodox. We feel that such prejudice is exaggerated if not absolutely incorrect. Actually the entire Christian world in a certain sense is in communion in so far as this concerns the Sacrament of baptism, which is recognized by all. Nevertheless, through this its priesthood is not impaired. One must interpret the power of priesthood in a much deeper and bolder way, so as not to be able to fear its being impaired through Eucharistric intercommunionwith those of the non-Orthodox who can truly participate in it sacramentally. Therefore group or partial intercommunion does not threaten the integrity of the priesthood in the participants, as it never impaired the priesthood of the Orthodox, who remained in intercommunion with the Roman Catholics for a long time after the schism of 1054. But this type of communion can only be canonically justified through the consent and blessing of the appropriate ruling bishop, for the fulness of the sacraments is concentrated in the bishop, and no priest can celebrate the Sacraments who has severed the link with his bishop. Actually the Church is a union of bishoprics, but every ‘cell,’ that is diocese, lives also with its own special life, though in contact with the others. Consequently, it is all a question of fact. Will a diocese be found in which the corresponding groups of persons could enter into Eucharistic Communion, within the realm of Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, and also of Roman Catholicism? It is a question of the limits of Church centralism. Do the bishops form independent centres, though ones which are co-ordinated with one another? Or, is there only one centre, the episcopus episcoporum, the Pope, who may be one person, or a collective? (The last two alternatives are the same for our particular problem.) A partial, or local union of different Church bodies in the Eucharist, their organic merging, might serve as a mystical and religious foundation for the Reunion of the Churches, which is vainly expected along the paths of canonical and dogmatic Church diplomacy alone. Meanwhile it is important to make a beginning with Church Reunion in those points where it is possible, and so ultimately to carry the problem forward beyond the existing deadlock which our sinful fear and indifference has produced.

# # # #

Ways to Church Reunion (II)

Part II of Ways to Church Reunion

 

There is no doubt that in the course of ages quite a number of dogmatic differences have emerged between the Western and the Eastern Church, although all these are not of equal significance. There are the questions of Filioque, of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, of Purgatory, of the Pope, and all the other dogmatic definitions of a doctrinal nature which have come to be accepted by the Catholic West (and following in its steps, to some extent Orthodoxy), in its struggle with the Reformation. In this Roman

Filioque?

Catholicism is distinguished by the greatest dogmatic maximum in so far as it attempts to transform every thesis of theological doctrine into dogma (an example of this may be seen in the Council of Trent). In such a method all doctrinal postulates acquire equal significance. One should learn to abandon such dogmatic prejudice when striving towards Reunion, if one ceases to interpret it, of course, as absorption of individual Christians either by the Orthodox or the Roman Catholic Church. In the general context of dogmatic differences which exist between the Churches, we must learn to discern the essentially important dogmatic teaching which finds its expression in the Eucharistic dogma, and contrast it with other dogmatic assumptions which should be set aside as calling for further consideration and elaboration as theologoumena. And we must also have faith that a union in Eucharistic love before the holy Chalice will give us greater power to overcome them, than tournaments between theologians which never result in complete union, for the ‘human,’ the all to human, always dominates them.

It is also unfortunate for the Church that from the most ancient times it has acquired the method of stating dogma in the form of anathemas against those who think differently, whilst a hasty anathema always represents an unnecessary further obstacle to discussion. The idea of a dogmatic agreement in necessaeriis for the purpose of Eucharistic union, which precedes complete dogmatic agreement instead of succeeding it, does not by any means imply dogmatic indifference. But in the question of dogmatics a certain hierarchy of order should be maintained, by virtue of which things should be put in their proper places. One cannot, for instance, assign to the doctrine of transsubstantiation the same compulsory significance as to the Christological and Trinitarian dogma. (The same remark would be true of the majority of the definitions of Trent, which so obviously bear the imprint of Medieval Scholasticism.) We have a whole series of dogmatic definitions which really possess only the significance of theological doctrine. They are valuable in their intention, but certainly not in the form of their expression. In relation to these, for the time being, the principle of in dubiis libertas should be applied.

But we may find that some may argue that the drawing of such distinction between dogmas, their classification as Eucharistic and non-Eucharistic, the more important and the less important, would serve to undermine the infallibility and self-sufficiency of the Church (infallibilitas or indefectibilitas), in which all is equally important and valuable, by introducing an intolerable relativity. Such an objection is based on an abstract Roman interpretation of infallibilitas. This should really be understood not as formal abstraction but as something historically concrete. The Church possesses indefectibilitas in the sense that the Church is complete or self-sufficient. In this sense with a divinely inspired infallibility it meets the needs of its dogmatic consciousness in every epoch. Thus early Christianity, notwithstanding all its dogmatic simplicity and the fact that dogma had not been expressed, was no less indefectibilis, than the later dogmatic epochs, each of which has its own particular style. This style is comprised not only of the postulates which are of abiding value (such as Christology) even when they are expressed in the dogmatic language of a particular epoch, but also of those propositions which minister par excellence to the specific requirements of that age. Revelation, generally speaking, is concrete and historical, but it certainly does not represent a mechanical dictation of infallible truths, nor a sort of automatic script. Therefore it is absurd to accept that an abstract equipollence of all the parts of dogmatic teaching in accordance with a formal stamp of ‘infallibility,’ because the former is conveyed to us ‘at sundry times, and in divers manners’ (Heb. i. I).

Ex Cathedra

In Roman-Catholicism the main barrier to the establishment of such a preliminary dogmatic minimum – the Eucharistic dogma in the extended sense – is represented by the Vatican dogma of Papal infallibility. This dogma in itself constitutes a sort of dogmatic microcosm of Roman Catholicism, a criterion for all Roman dogmatics, which attributes its own peculiar significance to any dogmatic definition. In practice this dogma constitutes the main barrier to Reunion, for it turns Reunion into a simple absorption by the Roman Church. Its rejection makes reunion with Rome impossible, while it is unreserved and unconditional acceptance is impossible for the non-Roman Catholic. Therefore the destinies of the Reunion with Rome depend on how far the Roman Church would wish it and would find it possible to consider its Vatican dogma among those which should be subjected to a soborny investigation as regards its relationship to the whole of the Universal Church. In relationships between the Orthodox and the Anglicans, of course, this Vatican barrier is non-existent.

To be Continued

Ways to Church Reunion (I)

by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov

[This is a sketch of certain ideas, already expressed in an article "By Jacob's Well" (John iv. 23), Journal of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, No. 22, Dec., 1933]

As long as divided Christianity is merely concerned with a  preliminary discussion of the whole problem of Reunion, the real practical difficulties which obstruct the way are not perceived. But whenever a practical approach is made to this problem difficulties emerge which are insuperable. They will remain insurmountable as long as the main postulates of the whole problem are not radically reconsidered in an attempt to liberate them from a mistaken hierarchical and dogmatic maximalism, which so frequently dominates this whole realm. These obstacles to Reunion emerge, firstly, in the sphere of theological doctrine, in so far as this tends to regard itself as compulsory dogma; and, secondly, as a result of hierarchical centralism, which identifies the body of the Church with the central organ of the hierarchy. Such an approach to the problem is, in its very essence, Roman. It cannot be justified outside the limits of the Roman Catholic Church and, in our opinion, even in that communion it can be considerably moderated. Such an approach to the problem is illustarted by the Florentine Unia (1439). The more important hierarchs of the East and of the West with the Pope and the Patriarch investigated all the dogmatic differences which then existed, and after achieving (apparent) agreement, recognized the highest hierarchical organ in the person of the Pope. The agreement was then sealed by Communion from the same Cup. The Union was proclaimed by a corresponding edict (a pala Bull and an Order of the Emperor) to the whole Christian people, who in the East, however, simply refused to accept it. From the Roman Catholic point of view the procedure was more or less congruous, for every Reunion in the Roman Church can only be interpreted dogmatically as absorptionnot correspond to a true understanding of the Church, where the hierarchy does not command, but merely gives expression to the ‘soborny’ consciousness of the Church through submission to Papal authority. From the Orthodox and generally speaking the non-Roman Catholic point of view, however, such a conception does not correspond to a true understanding of the Church, where the hierarchy does not command, but merely gives expression to the ‘soborny’ consciousness of the Church.

Nevertheless, even up to the present day,* the whole course of Church Reunion (in particular the relations between the Anglican Church and the Eastern Churches) still follows this same path. Here also it is taken for granted that Reunion may be accomplished by an agreement achieved merely between the higher organs of the hierarchy, without any active participation of the people of the Church. Such an approach is no less utopian than it was in the fifteenth century.

On the other hand it is not only a complete agreement in dogma which is sought, but agreement also in dogmatic doctrine. This, as a matter of fact, does not even exist within the limits of the same Church. Whenever theological thought develops with intensity different theological movements are bound to emerge. This happened at the height of the Patristic age (e.g., in Alexandria and Antioch). In practice even within the fold of the Roman Church there is no dogmatic unanimity, although this may be disguised by an iron discipline and the enforced silence of the dissentients. This fact is unexpectedly observed here and there. In our search for dogmatic unity, therefore, it is necessary to fix a dogmatic minimum, which comprises an

A controversial Orthodox Metr. comuning at a Roman Catholic Altar

essential condition for Church Reunion. This should not only be done according to external factors (viz., the dogmas of the ancient undivided Church), but also according to their inner significance for Church Reunion. But then the question arises, how can we be attained to in some distant future, and is thus the last and not the first step along the path of Reunion?

All dogma is characterised by the fact that it is not only a norm of teaching, but a basis of life, not only theoretical doctrine, but a quality of religious life. It is from this living power of the dogma that we should proceed in our definition of the required dogmatic minimum at the beginning of Reunion. The life of Grace which flows in the Church in its Sacraments, pre-eminently in Baptism and the Divine Eucharist, represents the universal and basic fact which fulfills and sums up the dogmatic teaching of the Church. The division of the Churches not only gives rise to the spirit of heresy  aiÀresis – which stands for the discord and one-sidedness of teaching, but similarly to a heresy of life, which results in the fact that the Christian world in a light-hearted and painless way reconciles itself to a separation before the Holy Chalice. Somehow or other it has become a self-evident fact [ which one should note here has never been proved by anyone] that dogmatic agreement is the prius, and the eucharistic, the posterius, a sort of result of the first. The call to unity which springs from the Eucharistic Chalice itself, remains unheeded. In spite of this, actually, the divided Churches are united by the oneness of the Chalice, which cannot become a reality to them. This constitutes the paradox of Church divisions. The efficacy of the Sacraments is mutually recognised by the divided Churches, at least by Orthodoxy and Rome (for the moment I put aside the question of Anglicanism). The Sacrament of the Eucharist is also regarded as effective: it is valid, but not effective beyond the limits of one’s own Church for the members of the divided Churches. Of course if we absolutely deny the validity of the sacraments outside a particular confession (as is the case still with certain Orthodox theologians who are of this opinion, viz., the Metropolitan Anthony and others) then the very question of any union in the Sacrament falls to the ground. But if we recognize the validity of the Sacrament, which is in fact the case with the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, then the question arises, may not this efficacy of the Sacrament become real in actual Intercommunion; and if so, what can this Intercommunion represent both dogmatically and canonically? Here, of course, it is no longer a question of complete unanimity on all the dogmatic points, in all their local and historical peculiarities, but precisely in the dogmas without the recognition of which the Sacrament of the Eucharist cannot be contemplated.

It is not difficult to make clear the primary assumptions on which the Sacrament of the Eucharist is based. Firstly we must recognize the real (and not the symbolically-significatory or the subjective-reminiscent) character of the Sacrament. In it we have the preasentia realis, the true Body and Blood of Christ through the changing of the bread and wine. One may add here the actual theory of the change – “transubstantiation” or any other – does not constitute a dogmatic postulate for the efficacy of the Sacrament. This is obvious from the fact that the early Church throughout the first 1, 000 years of its existence had no Eucharistic doctrine at all. But belief in the actual change, or the praesentia realis – without which the Sacrament loses all meaning and power – already takes for granted faith in Christ as the Son of God and the God-man. In other words it comprises all the Christology of the Church, and further, as a necessary link, also the doctrine of the Trinity. (It is completely incompattible of course with any liberalism or unitarianism which deny both).

But such a condition de facto implies the acceptance of all the Seven Ecumenical Councils in their fundamental Christological definitions, outside which there can be no question of a true Christian faith. (Of course the same is not true of some of their special definitions, which have no dogmatic significance, but only canonical value. The Seventh Ecumenical Council we can also view as a Chrsistological one, because of its insistence on the divine-human nature in Christ.) The demand for an acceptance of the Seven Ecumenical Councils is usually founded on the fact that their definitions stand for a commoni confession of the one faith of the ancient Church. The Eucharistic foundation in our opinion is more essential than this chronological basis, because apart from the Christology of the Church there can be no true Eucharist.

Another dogmatic-canonical postulate of the truth of the Eucharist is the efficacy of the celebrators as of the hierarchy of the ‘apostolic succession’ – in other words the existence of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. The apostolic succession of the Church which has been voluntarily broken by Protestantism. As a result of this Eucharistic life within Protestantism has been destined to diminution and to a certain weakening, if not to direct ineffectiveness. The Eastern and the Western Churches were never divided in their recognition of the necessity of the hierarchy, and even now the hierarchy of the divided Church is mutually recognized. The Anglican hierarchy occupies here a special place for its destinies were involved in the general turmoil of the Reformation, as a result of which its validity came to be questioned. However, the Anglican hierarchy, which is not recognized by Rome, finds growing recognition by Eastern Churches – at least in so far as its hierarchy is concerned, and consequently the Eucharist which it celebrates.

The laying on of hands by the bishop is absolutely essential for the validity of the Eucharist, and consequently the Eucharist celebrated by pastors, who have not received an episcopal laying on of hands, is not a true Church Eucharist (even if we do not deny its possessing a certain kind of Eucharistic significance, a ore precise definition is outside our immediate scope). Therefore if Protestantism really wants to enter into the bosom of the United Church, it must overcome the results of the Reformation at this point, and re-establish within itself the sacramental priesthood of ‘apostolic succession.’ It must do this in the name of tradition namely also of Church love, so as not to separate itself in such an essential fact from the whole of the Christian world. (I am not speaking of sects here which are born of a spirit of sectarian particularism, for historical Protestantism does not desire to be a sect, but it becomes a sect in so far as it persists in rejecting the episcopal laying on of hands.)

As things stand, three branches of historical Christianity fit into the scheme we have outlined – Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism (assuming that we recognize the validity of Anglican orders), and have a dogmatic and sacramental possibility of uniting before the Holy Chalice. Let us, however, consider the dogmatic and canonical difficulties which stand in the way.

To be Continued

* The present day is 1935.

By Jacob’s Well

The Journal of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, no. 22, 1933, p. 7-17.

by

Fr. Sergius Bulgakov

Jacob's well

An article on the actual unity of the apparently divided Church: in prayer, faith, and sacrament (John 4, 23).
The language of the New Testament frequently coins the term :”the Church” or “the Churches.” On the one hand there is the mystical unity of the Church as the Body of Christ, on the other hand there are the specific communities in which such life was realized. We still use the same terms, not only in the abovementioned sense but als in that of different Christian confessions. We must admit that such use of the “Churches” often shocks us, for in our own minds, for example we often think that actually there exists only one Church, namely the Orthodox Church — whereas all that stands outside Orthodoxy is not the Church. But the evidence of the use of language cannot be explained away by mere civility ot hypocrisy, for it contains a concept that a sort of these “non-Churches” belongs to the Church.” For actually these Churches are distinct to us from the non-Christian world. Already in the Gospel narrative we trace this relativeness in connection with the idea of the Church. Our Lord, who came not to destroy teh law but to fulfill it, belonged himself to the Jewish Church. He was a faithful Israelite carrying out its precepts, and this in spite of all its exclusiveness. And yet we get a solemn witness about the Church universal in our Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well. We are equally struck here both by the very fact that this conversation (which so astonished teh disciples) took place, and by the universal “good news” of Our Lord’s message. Believe Me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem … but the hour is coming, indeed is already here, when true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: that is the kind of worshipper the Father seeks (Jn 4, 21, 23). And he then reveals to her, a Samaritan, that he is the Christ.

All the events in the life of Our Lord have not only a temporary but also an eternal significance, ad this is also true of his conversation with the Samaritan woman. For even at the present time we find that we stand by Jacob’s well and also ask Jesus Christ about where we must worship the Lord. And even now we, who are the “Jews,” know what we worship “for salvation is from the Jews” (Nulla salus extra ecclesiam – “Outside the Church there is no salvation”). And in our day also Our Lord reveals himself to the Samaritan woman and calls on all to worship in spirit and in truth. The harsh, unbending, unrelenting institutionalism of the one saving Church conflicts here with a service in the Spirit, which “blows where it pleases, and you can hear the sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from and where it is going.” (Jn 3, 8). There exist between the Church and the Churches not only a relationship of mutual expulsion but also one of concordance. This unity is simultaneously something already given and something we must attain to. Ni single historical Church can so confine its attention to itself alone as to ignore the Christian world beyond its own limits. Even heresies and schisms are manifestations taking place only within the life of the Church — for pagans and men of other faiths are not heretics and schismatics to us. One can picture differently the ways to Church unity, but its very existence already assumes the fact of actual unity. The Church is one, as life in Christ by the Holy Spirit is one. Only, participation in this unity can be of varying degrees and depths.
Therefore, quite naturally, there are two aspects in the relation of Orthodoxy to non-Orthodoxy: a repulsion in the struggle of truth with an incomplete truth, and a mutual attraction of Church love. History and a sad realism apprehended more of the former aspect of this relationship, for the spirit of schism and division is not only a characteristic of “heretics” and “schismatics.” The will for division is the evil genius that first split up the West and East, and which ever since persues its devastating work further and further.
But can the realization of the truth of our Church be silenced even for a moment, or conversely, can we ever fail to be aware of the untruth of those who think differently? Might not such an attitude result in the sin of lack of faith, which seeks to avoid confessing its own truth and perhaps suffering for it? And so in repulsion and attraction, unity and division, we see a peculiar dialectic of Church life, which compromises the thesis and the antithesis, and we observe that the greater exertion of the one, the acuter the other. The way of “ecumenical” Church life, which strived for Church unity, is simultaneously associated both with a fuller realization of confessional differences and a growing consciousness of unity. But although there seems to be no escape from this antinomy, the Spirit of God actually transcends it through a new kind of synthesis that is brought about, not by means of a new agreement or compromise, but by a new inspiration. The distinction between various confessions lies first of all in dogmatic differences, and then in religious and practical discrepancies that result from them. These are on the surface and are apparent to all. But that which constitutes Church unity (that which is already given) — this is hidden in the very depths. Meanwhile this task is a duty both of Church love and of practical utility. One must realize and express the positive spiritual basis of Christian “ecumenicsm” not only as an idea but also as an actuality existing by grace. We experience it as a breathing of God’s Spirit in grace, as a revelation of Pentecost, when people begin to understand one another in spite of the diversity of tongues.
Let us try to express quite concisely this positive basis of unity, which actually exists even now in the Christian world.

Prayer

The division that occurred in the Church, whatever its origin, was associated with a separation in prayer and remains as an unhealed wound in the Body of the Church. Such is the logic of our frail nature, which cannot contain the entire truth, but only parts of it. Dissociation in prayer, having once arisen, strives to become permanent, lasting, and constant. We are now faced by the strange and provoking sight of Christians praying to God and their Saviour, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in separate communities. Moreover, this division is enforced in the rules of the Church, which, arose, it is true, in the fourth and fifth centuries, but which retain even now the force of actual law. They have not been cancelled formally, although life itself cancles them. The general purpose of these rules in the first place was of course to banish “indifference” by applying protective measures, which were then in accord with the accute struggle with heresy. But measures of defense loose their significance when there is no attacking party — and we see this state of affairs in a whole range of interconfessional relationshps in our own time. We are bound to recognize not only that whuich separates us, but also that which remains common to us all, notwithstanding divisions. The ability to distinguish in life all that constitutes the common heritage of the whole Christian world is the great achievement (only possible through grace) of contemporary “ecumenism,” namely the movement striving for Church unity. An encounter between Christians of different confessions, as Christians, is a great joy that is bestowed on us in our time by the Holy Spirit and a new revelation of the universal Pentecost. Nothing is easier to criticize than this “pan-Christianity” by pointing out that there can exist no “Christianity in general,” but only one true Church in its indestructible concreteness and wholeness. This is true, no doubt, in the sense that the fullness of worship in an ordained and divinely inspired cult can only exist in unanimity. But even so tehre still remains Christianity as such — as faith in our Lord, love for him, and worship directed to him — and this Christianity endures not only in Orthodoxy but as something common to all confessions. We are particularly clear about this and aware of it in missionary work where Christians are compelled, when confronted by pagans, to get a fuller and deeper consciousness of their own Christianity.

The united prayer of Christians, belonging to different confessions, in Churches and outside them, is becoming a more and more usual occurence at the present time. This new practice is not merely a liberty that is quite out of place where strict discipline is exercised, but a common Christian achievement, a capacity for uniting in that which is an actual reality. A time will dawn when the Orthodox Church will define certain rules for this practice and will give the required directions. Meanwhile all this is done in a groping manner, as circumstances demand. This united common prayer can be based dogmatically on the fact that the name of Our Lord is hallowed and called on by all Christians. Christ is present in his name to each one who prays thus, “For where two or three meet in My name, I am there among them” (Mt 18, 20). In truth all Christians who call on Christ’s name in prayer are already actually one with Christ; when we lift our eyes to heaven, earthly barriers cease to exist for us.

But is this actually so? Do these barriers remain even in our union in prayer? Yes, in a certain sense they remain. For we cannot unite in everything with our brethren in prayer. For example, we cannot pray to the blessed Virgin and to teh saints with Protestants. We can find differences in worship even with Roman Catholics, although these differences may not be so essential. But we are not compelled to be silent over these differences, and, if so, is this not treason to Orthodoxy? We must not close our eyes to the fact that such dangers, generally speaking, do exist. The position of Orthodoxy in its relation to the Protestant world is especially unfavorable in this case, precisely because Orthodoxy, for the sake of communion in prayer, is forced to adapt itself by, as it were, minimizing itself, thereby losing some of its fulness. Of course, if this is done out of love for the sake of Church “economy” it is permissible, for it is then regarded as a sacrifice of love, in accordance with the Apostle Paul’s principle of being “all things to all men.” Our brtethren, however, should realize that this is only a sacrifice of love and a condescension to their weakness, not a denial of our own faith.

However, in communion in worship with the non-Orthodox we must “know our measure” so that no distortions or poverty may result in our prayer life. But there is also a positive side to this communion in prayer. We are wont to pride ourselves on our liturgical wealth, as compared to the severe and simple rites of the Protstants. And yet we must not close our eyes to the fact that, in actual practice, we are far from realizing to the full this wealth of ours. so that in some instances it lies upon us as a dead weight of custom. Protestantism, in spite of, its apparent liturgical poverty, knows a living extempore prayer, in which the human soul in a childlike way turns directly to Our Father in heaven. This is the wealth of Protestantism even though it is associated with liturgical poverty.

The Word of God

The Holy Gospels are the commin property of the entire Christian world. Through the Gospels Christ himself speaks directly to the human soul. The soul listens to him and adores him in worship. Generally, in our attitude to the non-Orthodox, we underestimate the power of the Gospels. The four Gospels give us a marvelous icon of our Saviour, drawn by the Holy Spirit of God — a veritable icon in words. When the Eternal Book is studied not only by the mind but also with the heart, when the soul “bows down over the Gospels,” then the sacrament of the Word, born in that soul, is celebrated.

People incline to minimize this direct impact of the Word of God (efficiateas verbi - “efficaciousness of the Word”), addressed to every single soul, stressing in an exaggerated way the significance of holy tradition for its correct understanding. In practice the significance of holy tradition for a living response to the Word of God should not be exaggerated. It has bearing on theology and on certain disputed questions of a dogmatic nature. One might add here that the importance of tradition does not in any way exclude, but actually presupposes, a direct response to the Word of God, which has its life in the Church — both in its soborny (Catholic, communal) consciousness (tradition), and in personal interpretation. And what is especially important is the fact that nothing can replace our personal life with the Gospel (the same applies to the whole Bible). We should be ready to admit the fact that among Orthodox nations the personal reading of the Word of God is considerably less widespread than it is among Protestants, though this is partly replaced by its use in divine worship. The Bible and the Gospels are common Christian property, and the entire Christian world, without distinction of confession bends in prayer over the Gospels. It may be urged that a true understanding of the Gospels is given only to the Church. This is, of course, the case in one sense, yet sincere and devout readers of the Gospels through this alone are already within the Church — that is, in the one and Evangelical Church.

The Spiritual Life

A Christian who lives in the Church necessarily has also his personal life in Christ, which is simultaneously both personal and “of the Church.” Dogma and dogmatic peculiarities cannot fail to be reflected in this personal experience. But in the absence of Christological differences there is a wide field of common faith, even where dogmatic divergences actually do exist. For can one say that “Christ is divided” for a contemporary Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or believing Protestant? In their love of Our Lord and their striving towards him, all Christians are one. This is why the language of the mystics and their experience is common to all. We find that spiritual life, in which the divine is really tasted, unites Christians to a far greater extent than does dogmatic perception. When we sense these tremulous contacts our souls respond to them independently of confessional relationships. It may be that this is the most important result of interrelations of various confessions, which though not reflected in formulae and resolutions, represent a spiritual reality. During the Lausanne Conference this feeling of a kind of common spiritual experience of unity in Christ was remarkable strong. It became clear to all that something had happened above and beyond anything written down in the reports and minutes. On the other hand, apart from this kind of experience as such, there cannot be any Christian unity; for this can only be realized through Christian inspiration in a new vision of Pentecost, for which we aspire and which, in part, we already obtain. This unity in Christ, established by the similarity of Christian experience, is a kind of spiritual communion of all in the one Christ, established long before Communion from the same Chalice can take place. This de facto similarity in the experience of the Christian world, in spite of all its multiplicity, insufficiently realized. Unfortunately, we tend to stress our dogmatic disagreements much more than our common Christian heritage. A mystical intercommunion has always existed among Christians, and in our days more so than previously. Mutual fellowship among the representatives of theological thought, an interchange of ideas, scientific and theological research, a kind of life in common “over the Gospel” — all this tends to make the existing division between Christian confessions already to a certain extent unreal. Symbolic theology is also tending more and more to become “comparative” instead of being “denunciatory.” This is even more evident when we come to mystical, pastoral, and ascetic works, and especially to the lives of the saints. With what attention and devotion the Western saints, such as St. Genevieve, St. Francis of Assisi, and others. And we ought to cultivate deliberately this spiritual interpenetration, which is naturally increasing more and more. In this way we shall appropriate to ourselves the gifts that have been bestowed on others, and through comparison we shall come to know our own nature more fully and deeply.

Thus there exists even now a certain spiritual unity within the Christian world, although this is not expressed in any formulae. But we should add to this mystical, adogmatic unity of the Christian world the reality of its dogmatic oneness. Owing to a certain onesided-ness, Christians of various confessions are actually sensitive to their dogmatic differences, while they do not feel their mutual agreement in the same way. The definition “heretic,” which is really only applicable to certain features of a world outlook, is extended to the entire man, who is completely anathematized for a particular heresy. This was so throughout the course of Christian history. But it would be absolutely inconsistent for us to adopt such language today. For it is time at last to say openly that there exist no heretics in the general sense of the term, but only in a special and particular sense. Such an interpretation, among many others, can be given to the words of the apostle Paul: “It is no bad thing either that there should be differing groups among you” (1 Cor. 11, 19). Of course, in itself, a special heresy stands also for a common affliction, which is detrimental to the spiritual life without, however, destroying it. And it is perhaps difficult and impossible for us really to define the extent of this damage during the epoch when the particular dogmatic division arose. We must not also lose sight of the fact that in addition to heresies of the mind there exist heresies of life, or one-sidedness. One can, while remaining an Orthodox, actually tend toward monophysitism in practice, by leaning either toward Docetic spiritualism or Manicheism, or toward Nestorianism by separating the two natures in Christ, which leads in practice to the “secularization” of culture. And perhaps in this sense it will be found that we are all heretics in various ways. Yet it by no means follows from this that Orthodoxy and the Orthodox Church do not exist. It only shows that heresy, as a division, only exists within the limits of the Church and not outside it, and it implies a defectiveness in Church life.

From this it follows that heresy is only partial damage, we must take into account in dealing with heretics not only that which is heretical but also that which is Orthodox in them. For example through having an incorrect doctrine on the Filioque, do Roman Catholics cease to believe in the redemptive work of Our Lord, or in the sacraments of the Church? And although this seems obvious, all Christians must yet realize not only their divisions but also their agreement. Our Creed, The Nicene Creed (it is true, in its defective form owing to the Filioque), together with the ancient Apostolic and Athanasian Creeds, concstitute the general confession of Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism, and we must never lose sight of this basis of our dogmatic unity.

The Sacraments

At the present time it is in the sacraments that the Christian confessions are most effectively separated from one another. Sacramental fellowship is still only a remote aim, which still remains unaccomplished in the relationships between Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism. In the relationship between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism on the one hand, and Protestantism on on the other, the main barrier is the absence of valid orders and apostolic succession. This barrier does not arise between teh first two confessions. Now, in the vast majority of Christian confessions, sacraments are recognized, in spite of all the diversity of theological teaching associated with them. What attitude ought we to adopt toward the efficacy of these sacraments, and in what measure can this or that theological interpretation associated with them be considered decisive? Although the latter can effect the efficacy of sacraments (only, however, from the side of ex opere operantis, and not of ex opere operato), nevertheless, given the existence of a common faith (say in the Eucharist), the significance of doctrinal diversity in the realm of eucharistic theology may be greatly exaggerated.

We ought to insist first of all, as a general principle, on the efficicacy of teh sacraments in various Church communities. But can we adopt such a principle as our guiding line? Or are sacraments, generally speaking, ineffective beyond the canonical limits of a Church organization, to be regarded only as devout customs, or according to the blasphemous opinion of some as “sacraments of the demons?” The latter opinion is the child of confessional fanaticism that can never be confirmed by theological arguments, and is on the contrary in direct contradiction to the true mind of the Church. One might also add that a mere recognition of teh power of teh sacraments outside Orthodoxy is sufficient, for such a reduction of the question merely to that of their subjective effectiveness (ex opere operantis) evades a direct answer to the question as to their objective value (ex opere operato). It undoubtedly holds that, in the absence of canonical Church fellowship, the sacraments celebrated outside the canonical limits of a given Church organization — canonically and practically, as it were — cease to exist. But does this canonical ineffectiveness (nonefficitas) imply their mystical invalidity (nonvaliditas)? Does it mean that on being separated canincally, and in acertain measure dogmatically also, we find that we are separated from our mysterious unity and fellowship in Christ and in the gifts of the Holy Spirit? Has Christ been really divided in us, or are the non-Orthodox thereby no longer “in Christ,” being estranged from his Body? One ought to think deeply before answering this question, which is perhaps the most essential for us in our relations with the non-Orthodox. This question falls into two parts: the significance of canonical divisions and that of dogmatic divisions, in relation to effectiveness of sacraments.

The first question is answered by stating that canonical divisions (raskol) only prevent the possibility of a direct and unmediated communion in the sacraments and do not destroy their efficacy. The invisible fellowship therefore of those who have been separated is not broken. This constitutes great joy and consolation when we are faced with the sad and sinful fact of canonical divisions in the Church. We ought to consider that although we are canonically divided from the Roman Catholic Church, we never ceases to remain with it in an invisible sacramental communion (ex opere operato) so to speak. Generally speaking, if one wanted to be consistent in denying the efficacy of the sacraments on a canonical basis, one could only do it by accepting the Roman Catholic teaching on the supremacy of the Pope and obedience to his jurisdiction as an essential condition of belonging to the Church. However such a deduction is not made even by the Roman Catholic Church, which admits the effectiveness of sacraments in Orthodoxy. The Romanizing tendency in Orthodoxy sometimes goes further than Rome in this direction, conditioning the effectiveness of sacraments by canonical stipulations, though theologically such a point of view cannot be supported. Conversely, one could say that teh divided parts of the Church, at least where apostolic succession exists, are in an invisible, mysterious communion with one another through visible sacraments, although these are mutually inaccessible.

Now let us consider to what extent a digression from dogmatic teaching can destroy the efficacy of teh sacrament. We ought to mention here, first of all, the cases where damage affects not separate sacraments but their celebrants. We speak here of Protestantism, where, through the destruction of a rightly ordained priesthood through grace, teh question of te actual efficicy of the sacrament is raised in spite of its full recognition in principle. Can one speak of “sacraments” in Protestantism? Fortunately there are grounds for answering this question not only in the negative. The basis of the answer lies in the fact that the Orthodox Church recognizes the efficacy of Protestant baptism, which is evident from the fact that it does not re-baptize Protestants who join it. This admission is of extraordinary significance. It testifies to tha fact that, at least in regard to the sacrament of spiritual birth in the Church, we abide in fellowship with Protestant Christians as members of the One Body of Christ. Baptism also contains within itself the general possibility of a mysterious life in the Church; in this sense it is the potential of all future sacraments. In Protestantism there is only a partial existence, both because of the diminution of the number of sacraments, and especially, through the absence of priesthood. But even so, does this allow us to draw any conclusions as to the complete inefficacy of sacramental life in Protestantism, in particular, for example, regarding Holy Communion? Strictly speaking we have no right to come to such a conclusion, and not only because of the subjective basis pointed out by Bishop Theophanes, but also because of the objective principle of a sacrament, according to which the sacrament belongs to the entire Church — although it is realized through the priesthood by virtue of its inevitable participation. There is no such priesthood in Protestantism, but the people of the Church — the “royal priesthood” — remain there and the potential power of of Holy Baptism is fulfilled and revealed there in other ways, in certain devout rites and prayers instead of in effective sacraments. But if these are ineffective, can we say they are nothing? One cannot say this, for the priesthood is not a magical apparatus for the celebration of the sacraments, but a ministration of the Church that exists in the Church and for the Church. Therefore we ought to interpret Theophanes’ expression “according to their faith it shall be given them” in the sense that our Lord does not deprive this flock of His grace, although it has been separated from the fulness of Church life. Nevertheless we can speak of communion in sacraments (apart from baptism) in relation to Protestants only in the general and indefinite sense of their participation in the life of the Church through grace, but of nothing beyond this. A more direct and true communion in the sacraments with the Protestant world is hindered by the absecne of a rightly ordained priesthood: this is the threshold over which Protestantism must pass, the reestablishment of an apostolically ordained hierarchy.

These barriers do not exist, however, for those sections of the divided Church that have retained this succession and have therefore a correctly ordained priesthood. Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism belong to this category, together with the ancient Eastern Churches (as well as the Episcopal Church in Protestantism and Anglicanism*, particularly in the case of a positive solution of the question of Anglican ordination). The priesthoods of Roman Catholicismand Orthodoxy are mutually uncanonical owing to the existing schism, but this does not prevent their mutual recognition of each other. The following conclusion, of the utmost importance, follows from this: Churches that have preserved their priesthood, although they happen to be separated, are not actually divided in their sacramental life. Strictly speaking, a reunion of the Church is not even necessary here, although generally this is hardly realized. The Churches that have preserved such a unity in sacraments are now divided canonically in the sense of jurisdiction, and dogmatically, through a whole range of differences; but these are powerless to destroy the efficacy of the sacraments.

What is required for a complete reunion, and where do we start? The predominant formula runs: sacramental fellowship must be preceded by a preliminary dogmatic agreement. But is this axiom so indisputable as it appears? Here on one scale of the balance we have a difference in certain Christian dogmas and teological opinions, and an estrangement that has been formed through centuries; on the other we have the unity in sacramental life. May it not be that a unity in the sacrament will be the only way toward overcoming this difference? Why should we not seek to surmount a heresy in teaching through superseding a heresy of life, such as division? May it not be that Christians sin now by not heeding the common eucharistic call? And, if this siiso, then for Orthodoxy and Rome there still remains a way to their reunion on the basis of a fellowship in sacraments.

Of course, the Holy Spirit alone can make it clear that reunion is not far away, but already exists as a fact that only needs to be realized. But it must be realized sincerely and honestly for the sole purpose of expressing our brotherhood in the Lord. And the way towatrd reunion of the East and West does not lie through tournaments bnetween theologians of the East and West, but throigh a reunion before the altar. The priesthood, celebrating the one Eucharist; if the minds of the priests could become aflame with this idea, all barriers would fall. For in response to this, dogmatic unity will be achieved, or rather, a mutual understading of one another in our distinctive features. In necessaris unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas — “In what is necessary unity, in what is of lesser importance freedom, in all things love.”

A realization of our unity as something given, and at the same time, of our disunity as a fact that we cannot ignore is present, is a vital antithesis in the soul of the modern Christian. This antinomy cannot leave him in peace. He cannot remain indifferent to it, for he must seek its resolution. The ecumenical movement of today** is the expression of this search.

* Fr. Sergius is speaking of Anglicanism prior to the ordination of women and of the Episcopal Church prior to the ordination of a practicing homosexual to Bishop.

** Today is 1933. Fr. Sergius observations need to be qualified in the present situation.

Fr. Dcn. Gregory Wassen