THE
TRUE CHURCH IN THE LAST TIMES
Vladimir Moss
© Vladimir Moss, 2005
CONTENTS
Introduction…………………………………………………………………...……….4
1. Dialogue between an Orthodox Christian and a
Genuine Seeker on the Orthodox Faith……………………………………………………...…...…………….5
2.
On Forgiveness, or: Catholic and Orthodox Ecumenism……………...……..14
3.
Memory and the Moscow Patriarchate…………………………………………27
4.
10 Reasons why the Ecumenical Patriarchate is not Orthodox….…………..39
5.
A Letter to an Anglican Friend on Heresy……………………………………..59
6.
On Mystery and Mystification, or: Anglican Ecumenism……….…………..64
7.
Fr. Seraphim Rose: A Modern St. Augustine………..…………...……………68
8.
A Review of “The Struggle Against Ecumenism”……………………………73
9.
Quo Vadis, Science?……………….……………………………………………...76
10.
Orthodoxy, Feminism and the Science of Man………..……..……………..103
11.
Abortion, Personhood and the Origin of the Soul…………………………112
12.
A Reply to David Bercot on the Mother of God……….……….…………..118
13. A Dialogue between an Orthodox Christian and a
Rationalist on the Body and Blood of Christ……………………………..………………………………….126
14.
Patristic Testimonies on the Body and Blood of Christ....…..…………….132
15.
An Orthodox Approach to Art………….….………………………………….139
16.
A Reply to David Bercot on the Holy Icons…………………………………155
17. The Icon of the Holy
Trinity……..…………………………...……………….160
18. On Christian Marriage…………………………………………………………166
19. The Marriage in Cana of
Galilee……………………………………………..174
20.
A Dialogue between an Orthodox Christian and a Manichaean on
Marriage……………..……………………………………………………………….178
21. Cultism Within: A Rejoinder…………………………………………………202
22.
The Diana Myth and the Antichrist………………………………………….207
23.
The Seal of the Antichrist in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia……………..211
24.
On Death, the Toll-Houses and the Judgement of Souls………………….232
25.
Is Hell Just?……………………………………………………………………...243
26.
God and Tsunamis……………………………………………………………..257
INTRODUCTION
This book consists of a collection of
articles and dialogues written in the last twelve years or so on various themes
relating to Orthodox Christianity. Most of them reflect controversies that have
divided Orthodox Christians in this period, such as: ecumenism, sergianism, the
icon of the Holy Trinity, the relationship between faith, science and art,
eldership in the Church, the nature of the sacrament of the Eucharist,
feminism, cloning, marriage and sexuality, abortion and the soul, the seal of
the Antichrist, the soul after death, the Last Judgement and the problem of evil. It is hoped that they will show that the
Orthodox world-view based on the teaching of the Holy Fathers is consistent and
able to answer all the perplexities posed by modern life.
Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers,
Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us! Amen.
January 24 /
February 6, 2005.
The Holy New Martyrs
and Confessors of Russia.
1.
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN AN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN AND A GENUINE SEEKER ON THE ORTHODOX
FAITH
Seeker. What is Orthodoxy?
Orthodox. “Orthodoxy” means “right glory”, giving the
right glory to God. For there is also a wrong glorification of God, a
glorification in which He takes no pleasure. “Unto the sinner God hath said:
Why declarest thou My statutes and takes up My covenant in they mouth?” (Psalm
49.17 (LXX)). Thus Orthodoxy is the giving of right glory to God through the
right faith and right worship. In fact, “Orthodoxy” is often equivalent to
“right faith”.
Seeker. Why is right faith necessary?
Orthodox. We cannot glorify that which we do not
know, and right faith is the true knowledge of God. Those who do not have the
right faith cannot glorify God rightly. To them the true believers say, not
with arrogance but in humble recognition of the treasure they have received:
“Ye know not what ye worship: we know what we worship” (John 4.22).
Seeker. What is the Orthodox Church?
Orthodox. The Orthodox Church is the Church which has
Orthodoxy – “the faith once given to the saints”(Jude 9) and the
“worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4.23) – that is, the worship of
God the Father in the Son, Who is the Truth, and in the Holy Spirit, Who is the
Spirit of truth. She is the Body of Christ, the Dwelling-place of the Holy
Spirit, the Ark of salvation, the True Vine. By another definition She is the
Church that is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic – One in Her unity in faith
and worship, Holy in Her sacraments and the multitude of holy men and women she
has produced, Catholic in Her wholeness in each of Her constituent parts,
Apostolic in Her origin and unbroken succession from the Apostles and in Her
fidelity to the Apostolic teaching. St. Germanus of Constantinople defines the
Church as “a divine house where the mystical living Sacrifice is
celebrated,... and its precious stones are the divine dogmas taught by the Lord
to His disciples.”
Seeker. What
bigotry! What, then, are the other Churches – the Roman Catholic and the
Protestant, for example?
Orthodox. They
are branches that have been cut off from the True Vine in the course of the
centuries. The Western Church was Orthodox for the first thousand years of
Christian history. But in 1054, after a long period of decline, Rome broke away
from the Orthodox East and introduced a whole series of heretical teachings:
the infallibility and universal jurisdiction of the Pope, the procession of the
Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son (the Filioque), indulgences,
purgatory, created grace, etc. The Protestants broke away from Rome in the
sixteenth century, but did not return to Orthodoxy and the True Church.
Instead, they introduced still more heresies, rejecting Tradition, the
Sacraments, praying for the dead, the veneration of Saints, etc.
Seeker. But
are there not good people among the other Churches?
Orthodox.
“Someone came and said unto Him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that
I may have eternal life? And He said unto him, Why callest thou Me good? There
is none good but One, that is, God. But I thou wilt enter into life, keep the
commandments” (Matt. 19.16-17).
Man in his present fallen state is not,
and cannot be, good. “There is none that doeth good, no not one” (Psalm 13.4).
Even the Apostles were called evil by the Lord (Luke 11.13). Man can
become good only through union with the only Good One, God. And this union is
possible only through keeping the commandments, of which the first is the
command to repent and be baptized. Unless a man has repented and been baptized
through the One Baptism of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,
thereby receiving God’s goodness within himself, he cannot be said to be good
in any real sense. For the “goodness” of the fallen, unbaptized man is not good
in God’s eyes, but “filthy rags”, in the words of the Prophet Isaiah.
Seeker. So the
Orthodox are good, and all the rest are bad? A pretty self-righteous religion,
I should say, just the kind of Pharisaical faith the Lord condemned!
Orthodox. No, we do not say
that all the Orthodox are good, because it is a sad fact that many, very many
Orthodox Christians do not use the goodness, the grace that is given to them in
Holy Baptism to do truly good works. And their condemnation will be greater
than those who have never received Baptism. “For it had been better for them
not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to
turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them” (II Peter 2.21).
“For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there
no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgement,
and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who has violated
the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses.
How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has
spurned the Son of God, and profaned the Blood of the Covenant by which he was sanctified,
and outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know Him Who said, ‘Vengeance is Mine,
I will repay.’ And again: ‘The Lord will judge His people.’ It is a fearful
thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Heb. 10.26-31).
Seeker. What a
bleak picture you paint! The unbaptized cannot do good, and those who sin after
baptism are destined for even worse condemnation!
Orthodox. Not
quite. Although we cannot be baptized again for the remission of sins, we can
receive remission of sins in other ways: through prayer and tears, through
fasting and almsgiving, above all through the sacraments of Confession and Holy
Communion. God does not reject those who repent with all their heart. As David
says: “A heart that is broken and humbled God will not despise” (Psalm
50.17).
Seeker. But is
not such repentance possible for all men? Did not David repent in the Psalm you
have cited, and receive forgiveness from God?
Orthodox. Yes,
but salvation does not consist only in the forgiveness of sins, but also in
acquiring holiness, that holiness “without which no man shall see the Lord” (Heb.
12.14), that holiness which is given only in the sacraments of the Church and
which can be lost unless we conduct an unremitting ascetic struggle against
sin. Moreover, original sin can only be remitted in the baptismal font.
Seeker. So not
even David was saved?
Orthodox. Not
even David was saved before the Coming of Christ. Even the Patriarch Jacob
anticipated going to Hades (Sheol) after his death together with his righteous
son Joseph: “I shall go mourning down to my son in Hades” (Gen. 37.35).
For “all these [Old Testament righteous], though well attested by their faith,
did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for
us [the New Testament Christians], that apart from us [outside the New
Testament Church] they should not be made perfect” (Heb. 11.39-40).
Seeker. What
is original sin?
Orthodox. A
certain contagion that we receive by inheritance through our parents from Adam,
who committed the original sin.
Seeker. How
can we be responsible for Adam’s sin?
Orthodox. We are
not responsible for it, but we are defiled by it.
Seeker. Even
children?
Orthodox. Even
children. For “even
from the womb, sinners are estranged” (Psalm 57.3). And as Job says:
“Who shall be pure from uncleanness? Not even one, even if his life should be
but one day upon the earth” (Job 14.4 (LXX)).[1] Again,
St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “Evil was mixed with our nature from the
beginning… through those who by their disobedience introduced the disease. Just
as in the natural propagation of the species each animal engenders its like, so
man is born from man, a being subject to passions from a being subject to
passions, a sinner from a sinner. Thus sin takes its rise in us as we are born;
it grows with us and keep us company till life’s term”.[2] That is
why the Church has from the beginning practiced infant baptism “for the
remission of sins”.
Seeker. It still seems unfair to me that anyone,
let alone tiny children, should suffer for someone else’s sin.
Orthodox. God’s justice is not our justice. And
remember: if it is unfair that we should suffer because of Adam’s sin, it is no
less unfair that we should be redeemed because of Christ’s virtue. The two
“injustices” are symmetrical and cancel each other out: “As by one man’s
disobedience many were made sinners, so by one Man’s obedience many will be
made righteous” (Romans 5.19).
Seeker. So it is impossible to be good outside the
Church, because sin and the roots of sin are extirpated only in the Church?
Orthodox. More than that: only in the Church can sin
be known. For only to the Church has the will of God been made known in
its fullness. And if we do not know what the will of God is, we cannot repent
properly of our transgression of His will. The Church is the only hospital in
which we receive both the correct diagnosis of the disease and complete healing
from it.
Seeker. Alright. But how, then, are miracles are
done outside the Church, and even in non-Christian religions?
Orthodox. Miracles – if they are truly from God, and
not from the evil one – are a proof, not (or not necessarily) of the goodness
of the human miracle-worker, but of the mercy of God.
Seeker. So if a Catholic or an Anglican or a Hindu
works a miracle, that is nothing, whereas if an Orthodox does it, it’s great!
Orthodox. I didn’t say that. What I said was that the
working of a miracle, if it is of God, tells us first of all that God is
merciful. Whether it also proves the goodness of the human miracle-worker (or
of the recipient of the miracle) is quite another question, which requires
careful examination.
I
do not deny that true miracles can take place outside the Church. After all,
God “maketh His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the
just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5.45). And when St. John forbade a man
who was casting out demons in Christ’s name “because he followeth not us”,
Christ did not approve of his action. “Forbid him not,” he said; “for there is
no man which shall do a miracle in My name that can lightly speak evil of Me.
For he that is not against us is on our side” (Mark 9.38-40).
On the other hand, the Lord also said: “Many will say to Me in that day,
Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name? And in Thy name cast out
demons? And in Thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto
them: I never knew you, Depart from Me, ye workers of iniquity!” (Matt.
7.22-23). So it is possible to work a miracle in Christ’s name, and yet be an
evil man. And God may work the miracle through the evil man, not in order to
testify to the man’s (non-existent) goodness, but purely out of compassion for
the miracle’s recipient. After all, Judas worked miracles – but St. John the
Baptist, the greatest born of woman, worked no miracles…
Nor must we forget that Christian-looking
miracles and prophecies can be done through the evil one. Thus a girl spoke the
truth about the Apostle Paul, exhorting people to follow him – but she spoke
through a pythonic spirit which Paul exorcised (Acts 16.16-18). I
believe that the vast majority of miracles worked in pagan religions such as
Hinduism are from the evil one; for “all the gods of the heathen are demons” (Psalm
95.5).
Seeker. If even miracle-workers can be of the evil
one, who can be saved?
Orthodox. One must always distinguish
between the possession of spiritual gifts and salvation. “Do not rejoice in
this, that the spirits are subject to you;” said the Lord, “but rejoice that
your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10.20). “If I have prophetic powers,
and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as
to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (I Cor. 13.2).
Seeker. Ah now that’s where I agree with
you! Love is the essential mark of the Christian. And I have to say that’s just
what I find distinctly lacking in your exposition. Such pride to think that you
Orthodox, and you alone, belong to the True Church! And such hatred to think
that everyone except you is going to be damned!
Orthodox. But I didn’t say that!
Seeker. You did!
Orthodox. I said that the Church of Christ, by which
I mean exclusively the Orthodox Church, is the only Ark of salvation. But I did
not say that all those in the Ark will be saved, for they may cast themselves
out of it by their evil deeds. And I did not say that those who are swimming
towards the Ark but who were cut off from entering it before their death,
cannot be saved. Who knows whether the Sovereign God, Who knows the hearts of
all men, may not choose to stretch out His hand to those who, through ignorance
or adverse circumstances, were not able to enter the Ark before the darkness of
death descended upon them, but who in their hearts and minds were striving for
the truth? “Charity hopeth all things” (I Cor. 13.7).
Seeker. [ironically] How charitable of you! But
this is more a pious hope than an article of faith for you, isn’t it?
Orthodox. Of course. From the point of dogmatic
faith, we can and must assert that, as St. Cyprian of Carthage said, “there is
no salvation outside the Church”.[3] For the
Lord Himself says, with great emphasis: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, unless
a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (John
3.5). And again: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, unless you eat of the Flesh
of the Son of Man, and drink His Blood, you have no life in you” (John
6.53). And the Apostle Peter says: “If the righteous man is scarcely saved,
where will the impious and sinner appear?” (I Peter 4.18).
Moreover, if we, arrogantly presuming to be more “merciful” than the
Merciful Lord Himself, take it upon ourselves to “absolve” those living in
false religions or heresies, we sin not only against dogmatic faith, but also
against love. For then we make ourselves guilty of misleading them and leading
them further into error by giving them the false hope that they can stay in
their falsehood without danger to their immortal souls. We take away from them
the fear of God and the spur to search out the truth, which alone can save
them.
Seeker. And yet you spoke earlier about “ignorance
and adverse circumstances”. Surely God takes that into account!
Orthodox. Of course He does. But “taking into
account” is not the same as “absolving of all guilt”. Remember the parable of
the negligent servants: “That servant who knew His master’s will, but did not
make ready or act according to His will, shall receive a severe beating. But he
who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, shall receive a light
beating” (Luke 12.47-48). In other words, ignorance of the Lord’s will
and of His truth can mitigate His sentence, but it cannot remove it altogether.
Seeker. Why? Did not the same Lord say: “If ye were
blind, ye would have no sin” (John 9.41)?
Orthodox. Because we are never totally blind, and,
being rational sheep made in the image of the Good Shepherd, always have some
access to that “Light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world” (John
1.9). Thus the Apostle Paul says plainly that pagans who do not believe in the
One Creator of the universe are “without excuse”; “for what can be known about
God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation
of the world His invisible nature, namely, His eternal power and divinity, has
been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom.
1.19-20). God “did not leave Himself without witness” even among the pagans,
“for He did good and gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons,
satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14.17).
The Holy Fathers say that every man has creation outside him and
conscience within to lead him away from falsehood and towards the Church, which
is the third great witness to the truth, “the pillar and ground of the truth”,
as St. Paul calls it (I Tim. 3.15). Creation and conscience alone cannot
reveal the whole truth to him; but if he follows that partial revelation which
creation and conscience provide, God will help him to find the fullness of
truth in the Church. Nor is there any situation in life, however remote from,
and opposed to, the Church, from which the Lord, Who wishes that all be saved
and come to a knowledge of the truth, cannot rescue the genuine seeker.
Seeker.
But what if the pagan or the heretic has never met the truth in the Church, or
has met only very sinful or ignorant representatives of the Church? Can he not
then be said to be blind and ignorant, and therefore not sinning?
Orthodox. Everything depends on the nature and degree
of the ignorance. There is voluntary ignorance and involuntary ignorance. If
there were not such a thing as involuntary ignorance, the Lord would not have
said on the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke
23.34). And His prayer was answered, for on the Day of Pentecost, Peter called
on the Jews to repent, saying, “I know that you acted in ignorance” (Acts
3.17), after which thousands repented and were baptized. Again, the Apostle
Paul “received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief” (I Tim.
1.13). But note that all these people responded to the truth when it was
presented to them. This showed that their ignorance had been involuntary, and
therefore excusable.
On the other hand, there is a hardness of heart that refuses to respond
to the signs God gives of His truth, the signs from without and the promptings
from within. This is voluntary ignorance. People who are hardened
in this way do not know the truth because they do not want to know it.
This stubborn refusal to accept the truth is what the Lord calls “the blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 12.32), which will not be forgiven in
this world or the next.
Seeker. Why can it not be forgiven?
Orthodox. Because forgiveness is given only to the
penitent, and penitence is a recognition of the truth about oneself. However,
if a man refuses to face the truth, and actively fights against it in his soul,
he cannot repent, and so cannot be forgiven. In fighting against truth, he is
fighting against the Holy Spirit of truth, Who leads into all truth (John
16.13). It is possible for a man to be sincerely mistaken about Christ for a
while, and this can be forgiven him, as it was forgiven to the Apostle Paul.
But if such ignorance is compounded by a rejection of the promptings to truth
placed in the soul by the Spirit of truth, there is no hope. So the pagan who
stubbornly remains in His paganism in spite of the evidence of creation and
conscience, and the heretic who stubbornly remains in his heresy in spite of
the teaching of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, are both
blaspheming against the Spirit of truth, and cannot be saved.
Seeker. So is there really no hope for the heretic?
Orthodox. While there is life there is hope. And
there are many examples of people who have remained in heresy all their lives
but have been converted to the truth just before their death. There is no hope
only for those who do not love the truth. Such people the Lord will not lead to
His truth, because they do not desire it. Rather, He will allow them to be
deceived by the Antichrist “because they refused to love the truth and so be
saved. Therefore God sendeth upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe
what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but
had pleasure in unrighteousness” (II Thess. 2.10-12).
Seeker. Alright. But I am still not convinced that
only your Church is the True Church. In fact, I am not happy with the concept
of “the One True Church” in general. It smacks of bigotry and intolerance to
me.
Orthodox. You know, tolerance is not a Christian
virtue. Love is.
Seeker. You amaze me! Is not tolerance a form of
love? And is not all hatred forbidden for the Christian?
Orthodox. No. The Lord our God is a zealous God, and
He expects zeal from us – zeal for the good, and hatred for the evil. “Ye that
love the Lord, see to it that ye hate evil” (Psalm 96.11). What He hates
most of all is lukewarmness: “I know your works: ye are neither cold nor hot.
Would that ye were cold or hot! So, because ye are lukewarm, and neither cold
nor hot, I will spew you out of My mouth… So be zealous and repent” (Rev.
3.15-16, 19). St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote: “The Lawgiver of our life has
enjoined upon us one single hatred. I mean that of the serpent, for no other
purpose has He bidden us exercise this faculty of hatred, but as a resource
against wickedness.”[4]
Seeker. But that still means we are not allowed to
hate human beings. Are we not meant to hate the sin and love the sinner? This
is the kind of teaching that leads to burning heretics at the stake!
Orthodox. No. Neither St. Gregory nor any other saint
of the Orthodox Church that I know of advocated persecuting people for their
religious convictions. Christian love abhors using violence as a means of
persuading people. But it does not go to the other extreme and ceases trying to
persuade them. Nor, if they persist in their false teachings, does it hold back
from protecting others from their influence! If we love the sinner and hate his
sin, then we must do everything in our power both to deliver him from that sin
and protect others from being contaminated by it.
Seeker. I think this is the kind of bigotry that
comes from believing that one is in “the One True Church”. It is the source of
religious persecution, the Inquisition, etc.
Orthodox. The cause of religious persecution is not
the claim to possess the truth, which all rational people who have thought out
their beliefs claim, but human passions.
Seeker. What about Ivan the Terrible? What about
most of the Orthodox emperors? Did they not discriminate against heresy?
Orthodox. Ivan was excommunicated by the Church, and
was rather a persecutor of the Orthodox than an instrument of their persecuting
others. As for the emperors’ discriminating against heresy, I am all in favour
of that. It is irrational to place truth and falsehood on an equal footing. St.
Theodosius of the Kiev Caves, one of the greatest saints who ever lived, said
that by honouring others’ faiths we dishonour our own. Do our schools give
equal honour to the theories of Ptolemy and Newton? Of course not!
Seeker. But that’s different! There we’re talking
about scientific facts!
Orthodox. I don’t see any difference in principle.
Our principle is: speak the truth at all times, reject falsehood at all times.
If scientists do that in their sphere, where there is no certainty and “facts”
are constantly being disputed by later investigators, why should we not do it
in the incomparably higher and more important sphere of religious faith, whose
incontrovertible facts have been communicated to us by the Truth Himself? For
as St. Paul says about the Gospel: “I did not receive it from man, nor was I
taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal.
1.12).
Seeker. And if everyone claims to have received a
revelation from God?
Orthodox. Then we must patiently investigate who is
telling the truth and who has been deceived by “the father of lies”. Just as
scientists have methods for comparing different hypotheses and determining
which (if any) is the correct one, so do we Orthodox Christians have methods of
determining what is truth and what is falsehood in the religious sphere. And
just as scientists will never accept that there can be more than one true
explanation of an empirical phenomenon, so we will never accept that there can
be more than one religious truth.
Seeker. Cannot different religious faiths each
reveal part of the truth?
Orthodox. No. The Truth is One, and has been revealed
to us by the Truth Himself: “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism” (Eph.
4.4).
Seeker. So there is no truth at all in any of the
non-Christian religions?
Orthodox. I didn’t say that. Satan likes to appear as
an angel of light (II Cor. 11.14); he mixes “truth with unrighteousness”
(Rom. 1.18). Thus with the bait of such fair-seeming ideals as “love”,
“peace” and “freedom”, which correctly interpreted are indeed goods from God,
he lures them into an abyss of falsehood. There is only one religion which
contains “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. All the
others, being parasitical on the One Truth, contain partial truths, but make
even these partial truths false by association with falsehood, just as even a
small dose of poison in a wholesome loaf makes the whole loaf poisonous.
Seeker. So there are partial truths in other
religions, but no salvation?
Orthodox. Right. For as St. Peter said of Christ:
“There is salvation in none other: for there is no other name under heaven
given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4.12).
Seeker. What about the Muslims and the Jews? Do
they not believe in the same God as we – the God of Abraham, their common ancestor?
Orthodox. The Lord said to the Jews: “If ye were
Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham” (John 8.39). And
St. Paul said: “Know ye therefore that they which are of the faith” – that is,
the faith in Christ – “are the children of Abraham” (Gal. 3.7). The God
of Abraham is the God of our Lord Jesus Christ; Abraham himself looked forward
to the Coming of Christ in the flesh – “Abraham saw My day and was glad” (John
8.56).
Seeker. Alright. But do not the Jews and Muslims
also believe in the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, Who is the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ?
Orthodox. We believe that the great majority of the
Old Testament Theophanies were in fact appearances of God the Son, not God the
Father. Contrary to the belief of the Jehovah’s witnesses, the “Jehovah” of the
Old Testament is Christ Himself; Moses and Elijah appeared with Christ at the
Transfiguration to show that it is He Who appeared to them in the cloud and the
fire and the still, small voice; it is He Who is the God of the Law and the
Prophets.
In any case, since God is a Trinity of Persons, it is impossible rightly
to believe in One of the Persons and not in the Others. For “whosoever denieth
the Son, the same hath not the Father” (I John 2.23).
Seeker. But do not the Muslims believe in Christ
after their fashion?
Orthodox. They believe that He is a prophet who is
coming again to judge the world. But they do not believe in His Divinity, nor
in His Cross and Resurrection – the central dogmas of our Faith. Moreover, they
believe in the false prophet Mohammed, who contradicts Christ’s teaching in
many respects. If they truly believed in Christ, they would not follow
Mohammed’s teaching instead of Christ’s.
Seeker. But the Jews are the chosen people, are
they not?
Orthodox. They were the chosen people, but
then God rejected them for their unbelief and scattered them across the face of
the earth, choosing the believing Gentiles in their place.
Seeker. But the religion of the Old Testament was
the true religion, was it not? And insofar as they practise that religion, they
are true believers, are they not?
Orthodox. The religion of the Old Testament was a
true foreshadowing of, and preparation for, the full revelation of the Truth in
Jesus Christ. But once the fullness of the Truth has appeared, it is impious to
remain with the shadow; indeed, to mistake the shadow of the Truth for the
Truth Himself is a grievous delusion. In any case, the Jews do not practise the
Old Testament religion.
Seeker. What are you talking about?! Of course they
do!
Orthodox. Since the destruction of the Temple in 70
A.D., it has been impossible for the Jews to practise the main commandment of
their religion, which was to worship God with sacrifices in the Temple three
times a year – at Pascha, Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles. Thus has the
prophecy of the Prophet Hosea been fulfilled: “The children of Israel shall
dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without
ephod or teraphim” (Hosea 3.4).
Seeker. What is their present religion then?
Orthodox. Not the religion of the Old Testament, but
the religion of the Pharisees, which Christ rejected as being merely “the
traditions of men”. Its relationship to the Old Testament is tenuous. Its real
holy book is not the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament, but the Talmud, a
collection of the teachings of the Pharisees.
Seeker. And what does that teach?
Orthodox. The most extreme hatred of Christ and
Christians. Not only does the Talmud deny the Divinity and Resurrection of
Christ: it reviles Him as a sorcerer and a bastard, the son of a Roman soldier
called Panthera and an unclean woman. Moreover, it teaches a double standard of
morality: one for fellow Jews, quite another for the goyim, the
Gentiles, who are not even accorded the dignity of fully human beings.
Seeker. But is this not anti-semitism?
Orthodox. Anti-semitism as a racist attitude of
hatred for all Jews as such is of course contrary to the Christian Gospel. Nor
can Christians approve of those cruelties that have been perpetrated against
them (not the discrimination against their teaching, but the physical violence
against their persons) down the centuries. But this in no way implies that
Christians must participate in the campaign of whitewashing the Jews that has been
continuing for nearly a century in both religious and non-religious circles. As
the Gospels clearly indicate, the Jews killed Christ and brought His Blood upon
themselves and upon their children. Nor has their hatred of Christ and
Christians lessened down the centuries: anti-semitism is in large measure the
reaction of Christians and Gentiles to the anti-Gentilism of the Talmud, which
approves of all manner of crimes against Gentiles, including murder and
extortion. In recent times, as Winston Churchill and many others have
testified, the Jews were the leaders and inspirers of the anti-Christian and
anti-monarchical revolutionary movement; they plotted the Russian revolution
and put it into effect with the utmost ruthlessness – 95% of the leading
Bolsheviks were Jews. (Of course, the Bolsheviks were atheist rather than
Talmudic Jews. Nevertheless, the influence of the Talmud and the Rabbis on
their hatred of Christian civilization cannot be denied.) The promise, in the
same week of October, 1917, of a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine
was a “coincidence” no discerning Christian can ignore, and whose significance
for our times is immense. For the constant tradition of the Church has been
that the Antichrist will be a Jew ruling from Jerusalem in a reclaimed State of
Israel…
Seeker. But must we not love the Jews, even if they
are our enemies?
Orthodox. Indeed, we must love our enemies and pray
for them, as Christ commanded. In particular, we must pray that they will be
converted and return to Christ, as St. Paul prophesied would happen in the last
times. “For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what
shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” (Rom. 11.15).
Seeker. What you say makes sense, but I have one
fundamental objection to everything you say.
Orthodox. What is that?
Seeker. You claim that this is Orthodoxy, but I
know that it is not.
Orthodox. What do you mean?
Seeker. Your hierarchs participate in the
ecumenical movement, which is based on principles completely contrary to the
Orthodoxy you preach.
Orthodox. Actually, my hierarchs do not participate
in the ecumenical movement. However, your mistake is understandable, because
those large organizations and patriarchates which are associated in the public
eye with Orthodoxy, such as the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Moscow
Patriarchate, the Serbian Patriarchate, etc., do take part in the ecumenical
movement. But we have no communion with them, because they have betrayed
Orthodoxy.
Seeker. How can the leaders of Orthodoxy be said to
have betrayed Orthodoxy?! It’s like saying that the Pope has betrayed
Catholicism!
Orthodox. But he did! It was the Popes who in the
second half of the eleventh century betrayed Orthodox Catholicism and the
Orthodox Catholic Church, making it – or rather, that part of it which
submitted it to them – into something quite different: the Roman (pseudo-)
Catholic Church. In the same way, in the twentieth century, it is the leaders
of the official Orthodox Churches who have betrayed Orthodoxy, making it into
something quite different: “World Orthodoxy” or “Ecumenist Orthodoxy”.
You must remember that just as “he is not a Jew who is one outwardly” (Rom.
2.28), but only he who belongs to “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6.16), that
is, the Church of Christ, so he is not an Orthodox Christian who is one
outwardly, but only he who confesses his Orthodoxy in word and deed.
Fortunately, there are still Orthodox Christians who are so in truth, and not
merely in appearance, and who have separated from the prevailing apostasy. And
these, however few they are or will become, remain that Church against which
the gates of hell will not prevail (Matt. 16.18), and of whom the Lord
of the Church said: “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good
pleasure to give you the Kingdom” (Luke 12.32).
Seeker. Well, I am relieved to hear that. For I was
convinced by your words, but was beginning to think that nobody practised that
truth which I have come to believe in.
Orthodox. Welcome to the true Faith of Christ,
brother! And do not fear: however small the Church on earth becomes, the Church
in heaven is growing all the time, until the very end of the world. For “you
have come to Mount Zion and to the City of the Living God, the Heavenly
Jerusalem, and to innumerable Angels in festal gathering, and to the Assembly
of the Firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to a Judge Who is God of all,
and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the Mediator of the
New Covenant, and to the sprinkled Blood that speaks more graciously than the
blood of Abel…” (Heb. 12.22-24).
May 21 / June 3, 2004.
Holy Equals-to-the-Apostles Emperors
Constantine and Helena.
2.
ON FORGIVENESS, or:
CATHOLIC
AND ORTHODOX ECUMENISM
Introduction. The Papal Initiative.
On Forgiveness Sunday, 2000, according to the Orthodox Church calendar,
the Pope of Rome issued an appeal for pardon for the sins of Catholics over the
ages. “As the successor of Peter,” he writes in his Bull of Indiction of the
Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, Incarnationis Mysterium, “I ask that in
this year of mercy the Church, strong in the holiness which she receives from
her Lord, should kneel before God and implore forgiveness for the past and
present sins of her sons and daughters…. Christians are invited to acknowledge,
before God and before those offended by their actions, the faults which they
have committed… Let them do so without seeking anything in return… All of us,
though not personally responsible and without encroaching on the judgement of
God, who alone knows every heart, bear the burden of the errors and faults of
those who have gone before us.” Among the specific acts repented of by the Pope
are the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. He also admitted that the
Catholics had been unjust to ethnic and religious minorities, especially the
Jews, women and natives of the Third World.
How are we Orthodox Christians to react to this declaration? Is it
simply a political manoeuvre on the part of the world’s chief heretic, or is
something deeper and more sincere contained in it? Can we refuse forgiveness to him who asks us
for it? Must we forgive? These are some of the questions elicited by
this declaration by the Pope.
1 Our Sins and the Sins of our Fathers.
First of all, it is necessary to say that if we are talking about
personal sins committed against us personally, then we must not only forgive
him who asks us for forgiveness, whoever he might be and whatever faith he
might confess, but we must forgive him before he asks for forgiveness: the
Christian must immediately and “from the heart” forgive every one who has
offended him. For “if you will not forgive men their sins,” said the Lord,
“then your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matt. 6.15).
But can we forgive personal sins not committed against ourselves
personally, but against our ancestors? Can, for example, an Orthodox Englishman
forgive the Pope blessing the Norman invasion of England in 1066, which
resulted in the destruction of 20% of her population and the complete annihilation
of English Orthodox culture? Can an Orthodox Greek forgive the destruction of
Constantinople during the fourth crusade in 1204? Can an Orthodox Russian
forgive the persecution of the Orthodox by the Catholics in the 16th
and 17th centuries or the support given by the Pope to the
revolution of 1917? Can an Orthodox Serb forgive the deaths of 750,000 Serbs at
the hands of Catholic persecutors in Croatia in 1941?
This is a more complicated question, which demands a more detailed
reply. On the one hand, insofar as it was our ancestors who perished first of
all, it is up to them to forgive, not to us. And if amidst those who suffered
there were some who died without forgiving their enemies, we can only pray for
the forgiveness both of them and of their persecutors.
On the other hand, there is a definite sense in which we, being bound to
our ancestors by bonds not only of blood but also of spiritual kinship, suffer
together with them even to the present day. If the sins of the fathers affect their
children, then exactly the same applies to their sufferings and offences: “The
fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Jer.
31.29). In this sense, actions directed at the redemption of the guilt on the
part of the heirs of the persecutors can significantly lighten the bitterness
felt by the descendants of those who suffered.
But, leaving psychological considerations to one side, can we demand
repentance for sins committed against our ancestors? The answer to this
question depends on the answer to the following: what is the motive eliciting
this demand for repentance? If it is a desire to humiliate an opponent or in
some way take revenge on him, then the answer will be negative, for “Vengeance
is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rom. 12.19).
But if we are moved by love for justice, then the answer must be
positive, for the love of justice is natural for man, created as he is in the
image of the righteous God. Indeed, according to St. John of the Ladder, “God
is called love, and also justice.”[5] Thus the
desire for justice, if it is not mixed with any sinful passion, is good and
worthy of honour. This is evident from the words which may at first sight
appear a bloodthirsty cry from the souls under the altar depicted in the
Apocalypse: How long, O Lord, holy and true, will you not judge and be avenged
for our blood on those living on the earth?” (Rev. 6.10). For “they cry
out these words,” according to the English Orthodox Father, the Venerable Bede,
“not out of hatred for enemies, but out of love of justice”.[6]
Moreover, if the heirs of the persecutors come to recognize the sins of
their fathers, then they thereby come closer to the truth and to their own
salvation. And this is precisely the aspect that should interest Orthodox
Christians first of all in the Pope’s declaration. Are we witnessing the
return, albeit partial and not completely conscious, of the western papist
church to the faith of our fathers?
2. The Sins of the Papacy.
There are good grounds for adopting a sceptical and even cynical
attitude to this. The Pope remains a potential threat to the salvation of
millions of Orthodox Christians, having recently added to his many doctrinal
sins the heresy of ecumenism. He promised his church a jubilee gift for the
year 2000: reunion with the Orthodox, a gift which for the Orthodox would
signify spiritual death and which, however painful it is to say it, the
overwhelming majority of them have already accepted.
Moreover, the Pope’s repentance excludes that which is most important
for the Orthodox: repentance not so much for the personal sins of the Roman
Catholics as for the heresies of Roman Catholicism.
The Greek Old Calendarist Archimandrite Gregory of Dormition Skete,
Colorado, U.S.A. has expounded those thoughts that in his opinion would
constitute a more correct repentance on the part of the Pope:
“I, Pope John-Paul, would like to ask the forgiveness of the whole world
for spreading my evil and destructive doctrine, which is called Roman
Catholicism.
“Among the heresies I would like to renounce is the heresy of the Filioque,
which destroys the theological understanding of the Trinity. I would also like
to renounce the following heresies:
“our diabolical teaching on purgatory, which is similar to the teaching
of Origen;
“the teaching on the immaculate conception which we have thought up;
“our use of statues, like the pagans and idol-worshippers;
“the ban on our clergy entering into marriage;
“our introduction of the papist calendar;
“our distortion of all the sacraments which we accepted when we were
Orthodox – for example, our heretical practice of baptism by sprinkling, which
is like the practice of the Protestants, and our use of unleavened bread, which
is like the Jews;
“our teaching that I the Pope am infallible, a teaching that forms the
foundation of all the above-mentioned sins, which thereby witness to the fact
that I am not infallible.
“I would also like to repent of the fact that I have drawn the Orthodox
patriarchs of our century into the new heresy of ecumenism.
“From all the above examples it is evident that I have fallen away from
True Christianity, and therefore both my actions and those of my predecessors
are like the actions of the pagans, like whom I in the name of ‘Christianity’
killed, burned and destroyed everything that I could and everyone that I could
for the sake of spreading my false teachings.
“The list of such evil works includes the Inquisition, when innocent
people were burned at the pillar of shame, which witnesses to my unchristian
attitude to people; and the crusades, which ravaged the capital of Orthodox
Byzantium, Constantinople; the invasion and conquest of America, as a result of
which with my blessing the two main indigenous civilizations there were
annihilated; the murder by dismemberment of the holy Martyr Peter the Aleut, an
Orthodox Christian who suffered in San Francisco at the hands of my Jesuit
monks because he did not want to convert to my disgusting faith; and in our
century, my predecessor Pius XII’s blessing of forcible conversion in Croatia,
during which 800,000 Orthodox were killed because they did not want to convert
and be subject to my papal authority.
“From
all the above it follows that I am in a wretched condition, and I intend to ask
forgiveness. I intend to renounce this heretical teaching and accept Orthodox
baptism…”
Approximately some such list of sins would be demanded from the Pope if
his request for forgiveness were to correspond to the Orthodox world-view. But
insofar as the present declaration of the Pope is far from this, it is
difficult to quarrel with those who see in this act a purely political trap,
yet another move in the ecumenical game, a new tactic in the papacy’s age-old
attempts to draw the Orthodox into a false union with itself.
Some may object: but have not Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of
Constantinople already forgiven each other by means of the lifting of the
anathemas in 1965? If the Pope and the Patriarch no longer have anything
against each other, why should we renew the quarrel between them? Can an act of
mutual lifting of anathemas really be “invalid”, when anathematising someone is
so obviously an act of hatred?
No: an anathematisation of that which is truly false is an act of love,
not hatred. How can it be otherwise when the Apostle Paul himself anathematises
(I Cor. 16.22, Gal. 1.8,9), and when the Church herself in her
Seven Ecumenical Councils and on the Sunday of Orthodoxy anathematises all
heretics?
It is necessary at this point to return to the distinction between
personal sins and sins against the faith. We have the right and the duty to
forgive personal sins committed against us, even if the offender does not ask
for forgiveness. And if the original hurling of the anathemas in 1054
was caused by purely personal sins and passions, then the meeting of the
hierarchs some 900 years later, could, if not remove that original sin, at any
rate help to remove any residual bitterness passed down the generations. And it
seems that this is how the hierarchs understood the act. Thus the epistle sent
by the Pope to the Patriarch expressed his regret that the Church of
Constantinople had been offended by the papal legates in 1054: “We
deeply regret this, and all excommunications and anathemas that the legates
placed upon Patriarch Michael Cerularius and upon the Holy Church of
Constantinople we declare to be null and void”.
But if the “offence” is not (primarily, at any rate) a personal one, but
a sin against the faith, then it can be healed only by repentance specifically
for that dogmatic sin on the part of the sinner. But of such repentance
there was not a trace in the meeting in 1965: dogmatic differences, the
original and true cause of the schism, came into the discussion not at all. And
yet sins against the faith remain unforgiven until the sinner has completely
renounced them. For a sin against the faith is primarily a sin, not against man,
but against God, since it is in essence blasphemy, an affirmation that God is a
liar in His witness about Himself. In relation to such sins the words of David
are especially applicable: “Against Thee only have I sinned” (Psalm
50.4). And if the heretic sins against God alone, then only God can forgive
him. Or the Church of God, to which God has given the power to bind and to
loose, that is, to discern whether a sinner has truly repented of his sin. That
is why we, as individuals, cannot forgive a heretic his heresy, but only the
Church - through baptism and anathematisation of his heresies if he was not a
member of the Church in the first place, or confession if he is already
baptised.
As regards anathemas against heresies, these can never be removed. For
since God and His truth does not change, the sentence against that which
contradicts this truth is also immutable. People can change; they can change
from confessing heresy to confessing the truth; and so they can change from
being under anathema to being freed from anathema. But the heresy itself
remains under anathema unto the ages of ages.
3. False Forgiveness and Ecumenism.
It is significant that the papists began for the first time to ask for
forgiveness from their “separated brethren” (the Orthodox), from the Jews and
from others only when they accepted the heresy of ecumenism during the Second
Vatican Council in the 1960s. This permits us to suppose that there is a close
link between ecumenism and the false understanding of forgiveness.
It is often said that the essence of ecumenism consists not in some
particular heretical teaching, but in a false understanding of heresy in
general. One reviewer of a book on the Anglican Reformation in Church Times
remarked that the real heresy consists in the idea that there exists such a
thing as heresy! In other words, heresy does not exist! But if heresy does not
exist, then neither does truth. For heresy is simply the denial of a particular
truth about God.
The strange thing is that the same ecumenists who are so indifferent to
religious truth and falsehood, even denying that the latter exists, can be
extremely zealous for what they consider to be the truth in other,
non-theological matters. Only when the matter concerns Divine truth do they
suddenly become amazingly “tolerant”, thereby confirming the truth of the
apostolic words: “they received not the love of the truth, that they might be
saved” (II Thess. 2.10).
This is particularly obvious in the case of Patriarch Athenagoras – the
man who supposedly “lifted the anathemas” against the papacy in 1965. Fr. Basil
Lourié writes : « Athenagoras … did not consider [the Latins]
to be heretics. But his denial of their hereticalness was not a manifestation
of his special love for them: Athenagoras did not recognize the existence of
heresy in general! Having heard of a certain man who saw heresies everywhere,
Athenagoras said: ‘I don’t see them anywhere! I see only truths, partial,
reduced, sometimes out of place…”[7]
And so we can define the essence of
ecumenism as indifference to religious truth, or, in its extreme
manifestations, the absence of faith in the existence of objective truth
generally. In the words of Metropolitan Philaret of New York in his Sorrowful
Epistle to Patriarch Athenagoras, ecumenism “places a sign of equality
between error and truth”. This is the same indifference that was manifested by
Pontius Pilate, when, standing in front of Truth Incarnate, he wearily asked:
“What is truth?” – and would not stay for an answer…
But this is only one side of the question.
Ecumenism also displays a striking indifference to justice. Again, the
ecumenists, like everyone else, can be zealous in relation to justice in
non-theological, especially political, matters – for example, the injustice of
Third World debt or racism or sexism or some other form of discrimination.
Moreover, they do not fear to accuse God Himself of injustice, as when the
Anglican Bishop of Durham (Northern England) declared that if God permitted
Auschwitz, he was a devil… But when we are talking about injustices committed
in relation to Christians because they are Christians – for example, the
persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union, - then they become suddenly
silent. Here again we see a similarity with Pilate, who washed his hands after
committing the greatest of all injustices, while claiming to carry out the
duties of an impartial judge.
The most important value for the ecumenist
is peace – not peace with God or with the true people of God, but peace with
the world and the rulers of this world. And if truth and justice have to be
sacrificed for the sake of this worldly peace, then so be it. Thus Pilate
betrayed Truth and Justice for the sake of peace with, and out of fear of, the
Jews. And thus do the present-day leaders of the ecumenical movement, for fear
of the non-ecumenical confessions (primarily, Judaism and Islam), strive first
of all to establish peace amongst themselves so as to be able to present a
united front in their pursuit of a general peace with – or rather, capitulation
before – their enemies, whom they fear because of their secular power. But
“there have they feared where there is no fear” (Psalm 13.6); for it is
not fitting to fear the enemies of God, friendship with whom is enmity with God
(James 4.4), Whom alone they have to fear as being able “to destroy both
soul and body in gehenna” (Matt. 10.28).
Where there is no consciousness of sin, or
a distorted understanding of sin, a request for forgiveness is seen to be in essence
a request for something else – perhaps the conclusion of a non-aggression pact,
or an agreement on cooperation for the attainment of some common goal. “And the
same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together; for before they were at
enmity between themselves” (Luke 23.12). Why? Because their mutual
rivalry was less important than their mutual desire to placate the Jewish
religious establishment, to whom Christ was to be thrown like meat to a hungry
animal. In the same way the dogmatic differences between the Pope of Rome and
the “Orthodox” ecumenists are less important to them than their retention of a
place at the table of the world’s rulers – who are once again, as in the time
of Christ, mainly Jewish.
4. Orthodox Herods
and Catholic Pilates.
Let us continue for a time to draw out the
parallels between Pilate and Herod, on the one hand, and Catholic and Orthodox
ecumenism, on the other.
Were Pilate and Herod equally guilty in
the eyes of God? Not at all. Christ spoke with Pilate, but refused to speak to
Herod (Luke 23.9). Herod mocked Christ and arrayed Him in a gorgeous
robe, thereby mocking His assertion that he was the king of the Jews (Luke
23.11). But Pilate wanted to know more about Christ’s claims to a kingdom, and,
bringing Him out to the Jews, said, not without some genuine admiration:
“Behold your King!” (John 19.14). And again he asked, not without some
genuine fear: “Shall I crucify your King?” (John 19.15). Moreover,
overcoming for once his fear of the Jews, he refused to remove the inscription
on the Cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. We have no evidence that
Herod had any gnawings of conscience in handing over Christ, Who was in Herod’s
jurisdiction and Whom he could have released. But Pilate found no fault in Him
and was searching for a way of releasing Him. To the end he retained a definite
consciousness of his sin, and God had given him a further impulse to stand firm
through his wife’s exhortation. And even after he had betrayed Him, his guilty
conscience revealed itself in his washing his hands and saying: “I am innocent
of the blood of this Righteous Man” (Matt. 27.24).
Just as Herod’s sin was greater than Pilate’s, so the crime of the
Orthodox ecumenists is greater than that of the Catholic ecumenists. This
assertion may shock many Orthodox zealots who are accustomed to see in
Catholicism and the apostate West the root of all evil. But after some thought
it becomes obvious that, in accordance with the principle: “to whom much is
given, much is required”, greater responsibility is undoubtedly borne by those
to whom the treasures of Orthodox Tradition have been entrusted than by those
who have never been Orthodox.
The Orthodox ecumenists are like the Pharisees, who, having the keys to
the Kingdom of Heaven, shut up that Kingdom against men; for they neither go in
themselves, nor suffer those that are entering to go in (Matt. 23.13).
One of the most shameful documents in the history of Christianity is the
resolution accepted by the heads of the Local Orthodox Churches in
Constantinople on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, 1992. On that day the Orthodox
triumphantly declare about their faith: “This is the Apostolic Faith! This is
the Orthodox Faith! This is the Faith that supports the world!”, and anathematize
all the heresies, including those of the Catholics and Protestants. And yet in
their 1992 council these so-called Orthodox leaders officially renounced
proselytism among the heretical Christians of the West! It was as if they said
to the westerners “Yes, ours is the Apostolic Faith, and yes, we have just
anathematized your heresies. But these are only words. The world does not need
our faith. And the world need not fear our anathematisms. Remain where you are.
Remain in your heresy. We will not try and convert you.”
Nine years later, the Moscow Patriarchate’s Metropolitan Cyril
(Gundiaev) of Smolensk put it as follows: “In practice we forbid our priests to
seek to convert people. Of course it happens that people arrive and say: ‘You
know, I would like, simply out of my own convictions, to become Orthodox.’
‘Well, please do.’ But there is no strategy to convert people.”[8]
And this at a time when the Christians of the West are undergoing the
deepest crisis in their history, when thousands of Western Christians, and
especially Catholics, are turning their eyes to the Orthodox in the hope that
they will extract them from the terrible dead-end in which they find
themselves. Thus traditional Catholics brought up in accordance with the
decrees of their “infallible” first bishop, that their Church is the one saving
Church, and that their faith is the one saving faith, were profoundly shaken,
in some cases even to the extent of mental disorder, to learn, during the
Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, that not only the Catholics, but also the
Orthodox and even Protestants, Jews and Muslims belong to the People of God and
can be saved, and that that which they considered to be heresy was no longer
heresy, and that which they consider to be mortal sin was no longer mortal sin…
Is there a way out of this situation? One possibility is to declare,
with the Swiss Cardinal Lefèbvre, that the Pope of Rome has fallen into
heresy, that he is an anti-pope, and that the true Catholic Church is another
place, among the Catholics who do not recognize the present Pope. But if
the Pope is infallible, how can he fall into heresy? Of course, there were
Popes who fell into heresy even before the rise of the papist heresy itself –
Pope Honorius, for example, who was condemned by the Sixth Ecumenical Council.
But the papists have always tried to explain away such examples because the
idea of a heretical Pope actually undermines their faith at its very base. For
if the Pope falls away from the truth, he is no longer Peter, no longer the
rock on which the Church is built. And then the Catholics will have to look for
their Catholic faith outside the (pseudo-) Catholic Church, which is an
absurdity for them. For according to their papist faith, there can be no true
faith, and no true Church, without the Pope. If the Pope falls, then the
Universal Church falls with him[9], and the
gates of hell, contrary to the promise of the Saviour, have prevailed against
her (Matt. 16.18).
Another possibility is to declare that the
Roman see is temporarily vacant. But again: can the Church exist without Peter
according to papist doctrine? If the Church is founded on the rock, and that
rock is Peter and his successors, the Popes of Rome, how can the Church
continue to exist without the rock?
A third possibility is to declare,
together with the True Orthodox Christians, that the Roman Catholic Church is
not only in heresy, but has been in heresy ever since she fell away from her
true Mother, the Orthodox Church, to which her children must return if they
want to receive the grace and truth that is in Christ. And, glory to God, many
in the West, both Catholics and Protestant, are doing just that – to the extent
that the Orthodox ecumenists are allowing them.[10] In
England, for example, Orthodoxy has doubled in size during the last decade.
But this growth in converts to Orthodoxy
from the Western confessions has taken place not thanks to, but in spite of,
the preaching of the official Orthodox Churches. For how often have potential
converts to Orthodoxy been dissuaded from joining by the Orthodox hierarchs
themselves! Even when already Orthodox, these neophytes from the West have
often been made to feel like second-class citizens who cannot really know the
mystery of Orthodoxy because of their “western mentality”.
Thus one English Orthodox Christian, on
arriving at a Greek church one Sunday morning, was politely but firmly directed
to an Anglican church, in spite of his protests that he was Orthodox. The
explanation: “Orthodoxy is for Greeks and Russians: for the English there is
Anglicanism…” In this way do the heresies of ecumenism and phyletism grow into
each other, combining to shut the door on those searching for, and even those
who have already found, the truth!
Something similar to the present crisis in
the Roman Catholic church took place in the 14th-15th
centuries, when for many years there were two popes, and once even three! In
reaction to this crisis there arose the conciliar movement, which strove to
return to the Orthodox teaching on authority in the Church, declaring that the
highest authority in the earthly Church was not the Pope, but the Ecumenical
Councils. Here was a wonderful opportunity for the Orthodox to support this
beginning of a return to Orthodoxy, if not in the papacy itself, at least in a
large portion of its (former) followers), and direct it to its consummation in
the bosom of the Orthodox Church.
But this opportunity was missed largely
for the same reason as it is being missed today: because the Orthodox leaders of the time,
having lost the salt of True Orthodoxy themselves, were seeking a union with
Roman Catholicism for political motives. Thus in 1438-1439, when the most
representative council of the Western Church was convening in Basle in Switzerland,
so as to resolve the problems of the Western Church on the basis of
conciliarity, the Orthodox leaders preferred to meet the Pope in Florence and
conclude a false union with him, betraying the purity of the Orthodox Faith for
a mess of pottage. The victory of the Pope signified not only the fall of the
Patriarchate of Constantinople (fortunately, only temporarily), and of
Constantinople itself a few years later, but also the crushing of the hopes of
the conciliarists in Basle…
Of course, it could be argued that the
conciliarists were not really ready for Orthodoxy, not really seeking it, which
is why the Lord did not allow them to be united to it. That may be true. But it
does not remove the responsibility of those Orthodox hierarchs then and now who
put obstacles in the way of potential converts to the faith through their own
lukewarmness about that faith.
Thus the Orthodox uniates of the fifteenth
century, like the Orthodox ecumenists of the twentieth century, betrayed not
only their Orthodox flock but also the potential flock to be gathered from
those outside Orthodoxy. Through their refusal to carry out missionary work
among the heterodox, in accordance with the Lord’s command to go out and make
converts of all the nations (Matt. 28.19), they have in effect denied
themselves the right to call themselves Orthodox. For as St. Theodosius of the
Kiev Caves (+1054) said, he who honours the faith of another dishonours his
own…
Since the “Orthodox” ecumenists refuse to
carry out missionary work in view of their ecumenist convictions, why should
they object if the True Orthodox take this burden upon themselves? But this is
where the ecumenists show their true face. For while serving with and flatter
the heretics, whose faith is far from Orthodoxy, they actively persecute the
True Orthodox whose faith they supposedly share. They secretly kill their
priests, send the secular powers to take away their churches and in the West
deny their very existence. Like Herod, they claim that they, too, worship
Christ in the true faith, but will not accompany the true seekers, the Magi, to
Bethlehem, but will rather kill the innocents who bear witness to the existence
of the True Body of Christ.
Thus in the 1970s, as reported in Church
Times, an Australian journalist once asked Metropolitan Nicodemus of
Leningrad about the existence of the Russian Catacomb Church. “Have they got a
bank account?” asked the metropolitan (now exposed as KGB Agent “Sviatoslav”
and a secret Catholic bishop!). The journalist had difficulty in replying.
Nicodemus triumphantly concluded: “If it doesn’t have a bank account, then it
doesn’t exist!”
Actually, from the point of view of the
Orthodox Herods, this was a completely adequate answer. For to them the
significance of a Church is defined, not by the strength of its Orthodox faith,
but by its worldly strength – and worldly strength in the contemporary world is
measured by the size of one’s bank account. From their point of view, a Church
without a bank account is truly of no significance and can be swept off the
face of the earth without the slightest torments of conscience.
On the other hand, if an unbeliever has a
large bank account, then he is worthy of every honour and even of Orthodox
baptism – as was granted, for example, to the mayor of Moscow Luzhkov. And what
business is it of anyone’s that the mayor happens to be an unbeliever? For the
sergianist concept of “economy”, this is a trivial problem. Did not
Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk say, towards the end of the 1980s, that
true ecumenism is the gathering together into one Church or religion “of all
people of good will”, including even atheists?
In comparison with the cunning and spite
of this “Orthodox Herodianism”, the “Pilatism” of the Catholics and Protestants
looks almost innocent. At least they believe in their own faith, false though
it is, with sufficient sincerity and conviction to want to convert others to it
– and not in exchange for money, but at the cost of money. Thus the
Vatican organization “Aid to the Church in Need” offered a yearly subsidy of
$1000 to every priest in the Moscow Patriarchate![11]
Of course, such bribery cannot in any way
be approved. But it is hardly worse than the sheer mercenariness of, for
example, Archbishop Lev of Novgorod, who openly admits Protestants and
Catholics to communion in his cathedral, his obvious motivation being,
according to Liudmilla Perepiolkina, “the material benefit gained as a result
of attracting foreign tourists, along with their dollars, pounds and marks,
into the Patriarchate’s churches.”[12]
The truth is that many educated Roman
Catholics look with sincere respect at their “separated brethren”, the
Orthodox, and long for reunion with them, hoping that an injection of eastern blood
may reanimate, as it were, the ailing body of their own church. For they know
that the Orthodox Church is no less traditional than their own (in fact, much
more so), and that it occupies precisely those lands in Greece and the Middle
East that are the birthplace of Christianity. They would really prefer to be on
the side of the Orthodox, forming a “united front” of Traditional Christianity
against the ravages of modern secularism and atheism. Indeed, in the
subconsciousness of the Catholics a question arises concerning the Orthodox
Church: could this really be our real Mother? In the same way, Pilate secretly
respected Christ, was half-persuaded by his wife not to harm “that Righteous
Man”, Who, he suspected, might truly be the Son of God, and betrayed him only
because the respect he felt for Him was outweighed by his fear of the Jews.
It goes without saying that the above
paragraph in no way represents a justification of Roman Catholicism, nor a
denial that it remains a most dangerous heresy. Indeed, the corruption and
heresy of Roman Catholicism grows deeper every year, especially now that it has
absorbed all manner of Protestant ideas into itself. However, “the Spirit blows
where It wills” (John 3.8), and God can make sons of Abraham even out of
the stoniest of hearts (Matt. 3.9). Who could have foreseen, during the
savage persecutions under Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century,
that the Roman Empire would very soon be converted to Christ and remain, in its
Byzantine and Russian incarnations, the main support of Christianity right
until the revolution of 1917? And if, as the famous novelist F. M. Dostoyevsky
said, the heretical Roman papacy is the regeneration of the pagan Roman empire
in a new form, who can be certain that the grace of God cannot again
transfigure that organism, so that it suddenly, after centuries of cruel
despotism and proud blindness, loses faith in itself, begins to investigate its
past and beseech, albeit hesitantly and imperfectly at first, the forgiveness
of its sins?
Conclusion. The
Unforgivable Sin.
The Lord said on the Cross: “Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34). And many
were forgiven and joined the Church after Pentecost, because “you did it
through ignorance” (Acts 3.17). An important principle follows from
this. To the extent that we remain in ignorance, to that degree we can hope for
forgiveness from God, if we repent. Conversely, to the extent that we know that
we are sinning, but still continue in that sin, to that degree we remain
unforgiven, for forgiveness is given only to those who seek it through
repentance.
Even the greatest sins can be forgiven if
the sinner is truly, involuntarily ignorant. Thus the Apostle Paul wrote: “I
obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly, in unbelief” (I Tim. 1.13; Acts
17.30). For our Great High Priest is truly the One Who “can have compassion on
the ignorant, and on those who are led astray” (Heb. 5.2).
However, there is such a phenomenon as
voluntary, conscious ignorance. Thus the Apostle Paul says of those who do not
believe in the One God, the Creator of heaven and earth, that they are “without
excuse” (Rom. 1.20), for they reject that which is evident to all
through contemplation of creation. Similarly, the Apostle Peter says: “This
they are willingly ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of
old” (II Peter 3.5). Moreover, if someone says that he knows, when in
fact he is ignorant, this is counted to him as conscious ignorance. For Christ
said to the Pharisees: “If ye were blind, ye would have no sin; but now that ye
say, We see, your sin abides” (John 9.41).
Voluntary ignorance is very close to
conscious resistance to the truth, which, according to the word of God, will
receive the greater condemnation. Thus those who will accept the Antichrist
will accept him because “they received not the love of the truth, that they
might be saved. For this reason God will send them the working of deception,
that they should believe in a lie, that they all might be damned who believed
not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (II Thess. 2.10-12).
And if it seems improbable that God should
send someone the working of deception, let us recall that God allowed a lying
spirit to enter into the lips of the prophets of King Ahab, because they
prophesied to him only that which he wanted to hear (III Kings
22.19-24).
Voluntary, conscious resistance to the
truth is “the sin unto death” (I John 5.16) or the blasphemy against
the Holy Spirit, which, according to the Lord’s word, “will never be
forgiven” (Matt. 12.31). Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) writes:
“The Seventh Ecumenical Council in its fifth canon explains what a sin unto
death is. Here, in the Saviour’s well-known words about this sin, it is not
blasphemy in the usual sense of the word that is meant, but a conscious
opposition to the truth, to which one’s soul bears witness, as the Lord said:
‘If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they
have no cloak for their sin’ (John 15.22). Here is an example of an unforgivable sin.
The Lord first spoke about an unforgiven blasphemy in Mark 3.29, here
the Evangelist explains: ‘Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit’ (Mark
3.30). As you see, there was no direct blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, but
there was an opposition to evident truth.”[13]
It is not that God does not want to
forgive all, even the most terrible sins; he wishes that all should come to a
knowledge of the truth and be saved (I Tim. 2.4). The point is that if a
man stubbornly refuses to respond to the promptings of the Spirit of truth, Who
“guides into all truth” (John 16.3) about God and man, he cannot come to
repentance, which is based on a knowledge of the truth. And so he cannot
receive forgiveness from the Truth. As Blessed Augustine said: “the first gift
is that which concerns the forgiveness of sins… Against this free gift, against
this grace of God speaks the impenitent heart. And so this impenitence is the
blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”[14]
Voluntary ignorance can be of various
degrees. There is the voluntary ignorance which refuses to believe even when
the truth is staring at one in the face. This is the most serious form of
ignorance, which was practiced by the Pharisees and heresiarchs. But the
voluntarily ignorant can also be he who does not take the steps that are
necessary to find the truth. This is less serious, but still worthy of
punishment and is a characteristic of many of those who followed the Pharisees
and heresiarchs.
Thus we read: “That servant who knew his
lord’s will, and prepared not himself neither did according to his will, shall
be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and committed things worthy
of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is
given, of him shall much be required: and to whom men have committed much, of
him they will ask the more” (Luke 12.47-48).
A fitting commentary on this is provided
by Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria: “Some ask: ‘Let us grant that the man who
knew the will of his master and did not do it merited his punishment. But why
was there punishment for the man who did not know the master’s will?’ He too
was punished because he was able to learn the will of the master, but did not
want to do so. Because of his laziness, he was the cause of his own ignorance,
and he deserves punishment for this very reason, that of his own will he did
not learn.”[15]
And St. Cyril of Alexandria writes: “’How can he who knew it not be guilty? The
reason is, because he would not know it, although it was in his power to
learn.”[16]
And to whom does this distinction between
different degrees of ignorance apply? According to St. Cyril, to false teachers
and parents, on the one hand, and those who follow them, on the other. In other
words, the blind leaders are subjected to a greater punishment than the blind
who are led by them, but both the leaders and followers fall into a pit (Matt.
15.4).
In the light of this teaching, the
greatest and least forgivable sinners in the present-day ecumenical movement
are the Orthodox hierarchs. They know the truth; they know that the Orthodox
Church, and only the Orthodox Church, is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Church, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Tim. 3.15) and the only
ark of salvation. Those who follow these false hierarchs are also guilty,
albeit to a lesser degree, because although, in many cases, they may not know
the truth as clearly and fully as their leaders, they can easily take steps to
learn the truth, by more attentively studying the Holy Scriptures and Divine
Services of the Church.
As for the Western heretics who partake in
the ecumenical movement, some may know as much as their Orthodox colleagues and
are therefore as guilty as they. But generally speaking, the western heretics
must be considered to be less guilty than the Orthodox ecumenists. For while
they have the Holy Scriptures, they do not have the God-inspired interpretation
of the Scriptures that is to be found in the Holy Fathers and Divine services
of the Orthodox Church. Moreover, their striving for union with the Orthodox is
natural insofar as they feel themselves spiritually unfulfilled in their own
churches and seek to satisfy that hunger in union with Orthodoxy. The tragedy –
and it is a great tragedy for all concerned – is that when they seek the truth
from the Orthodox, the Orthodox usually push them back to their own spiritual
desert, saying that they are already in the truth. They seek bread, but are
given a stone…
And
so when we seek the causes of the present-day ecumenical catastrophe, let us
not accuse the western heretics first of all. Paradoxical as it may seem, the
further away a person is from the truth, the more forgivable and his blind
wanderings in the sphere of theology. That who “sit on Moses’ seat”, and call
themselves Orthodox and successors of the Holy Fathers – they are the ones who
bear the greatest responsibility. They build the tombs of the prophets, the
holy elders and hierarchs of Orthodoxy, and adorn the monuments of the
righteous, the shrines of the new martyrs and confessors, and say that they
would not have taken part in the shedding of their blood. And yet by their
betrayal of Holy Orthodoxy they witness against themselves that they are the
sons of those who killed the martyrs (Matt. 23.29-31).
March 6/19, 2000;
revised June 17/30, 2004.
Holy Monk-Martyr
Nectan of Hartland.
3. MEMORY AND THE MOSCOW PATRIARCHATE
I will not assemble their assemblies of blood,
Nor will I make remembrance of their names through my lips.
Psalm 15.4.
The Holy Church has decreed
the singing of “eternal memory” to all those who have died in the True Faith,
and glorifies a number of them by enrolling them among the saints, specifying
special days on which services are to be conducted in their honour. But she
forbids the public commemoration of those who have died outside the faith, and
even anathematizes certain of them – the heretics and heresiarchs. In this way
she has a selective memory, a memory that reflects the memory of God Himself,
who gives everlasting life to those who love Him but blots out those who betray
Him from the book of life.
The false church, the “church
of the evil-doers” (Psalm 21.16) also has a selective memory.
She “forgets” the saints who have rebuked her, and casts out their name as
evil. And she glorifies her own leaders, who have led her on the path to
destruction. Sometimes, if the glory of the true saints cannot be hidden, she
also “appropriates” them to herself – but carefully edits their words and deeds
to ensure that their real message will not get through to the people. As for
her own evil deeds and betrayals, these, too, are edited out…
Glasnost’ and Sergianism
Much of the past fifteen years
in the history of the Russian Church has been a struggle between true memory
and false memory. Fifteen years ago, Russia was in the throes of glasnost’, when Russians were learning, often with astonishment and
horror, the full depth of the fall of their people and their official “church”
in the Soviet period. The creation of such societies as Pamyat’ and Memorial symbolized the
process that was taking place – the recovery of the people’s memory. But then,
in June, 1990, the first major attempt to turn the clock back and the people
back to the amnesiac state of Sovietism took place. Metropolitan Alexis
(Ridiger) was elected as the new “patriarch” of Moscow. At a time when past
cooperation with the KGB was being denounced in the newspapers and on the
television, it was “forgotten” that this Alexis was a KGB agent whom the Furov
report of 1974 had called the most pro-Soviet of all the bishops after the
patriarch, and who had been prepared to report to the KGB even on his own
patriarch!
As if to confirm that, yes,
he was that most pro-Soviet of all bishops, and therefore probably the least
suitable person to lead the Russian Church into the new era, on July 4/17,
1990, the day of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, Alexis announced publicly
that he was praying for the preservation of the communist party!
But of course, “Patriarch” Alexis did not reach his lofty rank by being
stupid. And so after this gaffe he quickly recovered his balance, his sense of
which way the wind was blowing; and there was no further overt support of the
communists. True, he did attach his signature, in December, 1990, to a letter
by 53 well-known political, academic and literary figures who urged Gorbachev
to take urgent measures to deal with the state of crisis in the country,
speaking of “… the destructive dictatorship of people who are shameless in
their striving to take ownership of territory, resources, the intellectual
wealth and labour forces of the country whose name is the USSR”.[17] But the
patriarch quickly disavowed his signature; and a few weeks later, after the
deaths in Vilnius, he declared that the killings were “a great political
mistake – in church language a sin”.
Then, in May, 1991, he publicly disagreed with a member of the hardline Soiuz
bloc, who had said that the resources of the army and the clergy should be
drawn on extensively to save the people and the homeland. In Alexis’ view,
these words could be perceived as a statement of preparedness to use the Church
for political purposes. The patriarch recalled his words of the previous
autumn: the Church and the Faith should not be used as a truncheon.[18] By
June, the patriarch had completed his remarkable transformation from
dyed-in-the-wool communist to enthusiastic democrat, saying to Yeltsin: “May
God help you win the election”.
Still more striking was his apparent rejection of Sergianism. Thus in an
interview granted to Izvestia on June 6 he said: “This year has freed us
from the state’s supervision. Now we have the moral right to say that the
Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius has disappeared into the past and no longer
guides us… The metropolitan cooperated with criminal usurpers. This was his
tragedy…. Today we can say that falsehood is interspersed in his Declaration,
which stated as its goal ‘placing the Church in a proper relationship with the
Soviet government’. But this relationship – and in the Declaration it is
clearly defined as being the submission of the Church to the interests of
governmental politics – is exactly that which is incorrect from the point of view
of the Church… Of the people, then, to whom these compromises, silence, forced
passivity or expressions of loyalty that were permitted by the Church
leadership in those days, have caused pain – of these people, not only before
God, but also before them, I ask forgiveness, understanding and prayers.”[19]
And yet, in an interview given to Komsomolskaia Pravda only two
months earlier, he had said: “The most important thing for the Church is to
preserve itself for the people, so that they should be able to have access to
the Chalice of Christ, to the Chalice of Communion… There is a rule when a
Christian has to take on himself a sin in order to avoid a greater sin… There
are situations in which a person, a Christian must sacrifice his personal
purity, his personal perfection, so as to defend something greater… Thus in
relation to Metropolitan Sergius and his successors in the leadership of the
Church under Soviet power, they had to tell lies, they had to say that
everything was normal with us. And yet the Church was being persecuted.
Declarations of political loyalty were being made. The fullness of Christian
life, charity, almsgiving, the Reigning icon of the Mother of God were also
renounced. Compromises were made.” In other words, Sergianism, though sinful,
was justified. It may have “disappeared into the past”, but if similar
circumstances arise again, the “sacrifice” of personal purity can and should be
made again!…[20]
The patriarch showed that the poison of sergianism was in him still
during the attempted coup of August, 1991. When the Russian
vice-president, Alexander Rutskoy, approached him on the morning of the 19th,
the patriarch, like several other leading political figures, pleaded “illness”
and refused to see him. When he eventually did issue a declaration – on the
evening of the 20th, and again in the early hours of the 21st
– the impression made was, in Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s words, “rather weak”.[21] He
called on all sides to avoid bloodshed, but did not specifically condemn the
plotters.
As
Jane Ellis comments: “Though Patriarch Alexis II issued statements during the coup,
they were bland and unspecific, and he was widely thought to have waited to see
which way the wind was blowing before committing himself to issuing them. It
was rather the priests in the White House – the Russian Parliament building –
itself, such as the veteran campaigner for religious freedom, Fr. Gleb Yakunin,
as well as the Christians among those manning the barricades outside, who
helped to overthrow the Communist Party, the KGB and the Soviet system.”[22]
(During the 1993 attack on parliament he showed a similar
indecisiveness. “He promised to excommunicate the first person to fire a shot,
but when shooting… thundered around the ‘White House’, he forgot about his
promise.”[23])
It was not until Wednesday morning that the patriarch sent his
representative, Deacon Andrew Kurayev, to the Russian parliament building, by
which time several dissident priests were already established there. And it was
two priests of the Russian Church Abroad, Fr. Nicholas Artemov from Munich and
Fr. Victor Usachev from Moscow, who celebrated the first supplicatory service
to the New Martyrs of Russia on the balcony of the White House. Not to be
outdone, the patriarchate immediately responded with its own prayer service,
and at some time during the same day the patriarch anathematized all those who
had taken part in organizing the coup.
By these actions the patriarch appeared to have secured his position
vis-à-vis Yeltsin’s government, and on August 27, Yeltsin attended a
memorial service in the Assumption cathedral of the Kremlin, at which the
patriarch hailed the failure of the coup, saying that “the wrath of God falls
upon the children of disobedience”.[24] So in
the space of thirteen months, the patriarch had passed from a pro-communist,
anti-democratic to an anti-communist, pro-democratic stance. This lack of
principle should have surprised nobody; for the essence of sergianism, the root
heresy of the Moscow Patriarchate, is adaptation to the world, and to
whatever the world believes and praises.
But while he was now a democrat, the patriarch still remained a
sergianist – only in a more subtle way, appearing to distance himself from the
sin of sergianism while still insisting that it had to be done. Thus in
September, 1991, in an interview with 30 Dias, he said: “A church that
has millions of faithful cannot go into the catacombs. The hierarchy of the
church has taken the sin on their souls: the sin of silence and of lying for
the good of the people in order that they not be completely removed from real
life. In the government of the diocese and as head of the negotiations for the
patriarchate of Moscow, I also had to cede one point in order to defend
another. I ask pardon of God, I ask pardon, understanding and prayers of all
those whom I harmed through the concessions, the silence, the forced passivity
or the expressions of loyalty that the hierarchy may have manifested during
that period”.[25]
This is closer to self-justification than repentance. It is similar to
the statement of Metropolitan Nicholas (Corneanu) of Banat of the Romanian
Patriarchate, who confessed that he had collaborated with the Securitate and
had defrocked the priest Fr. Calciu for false political reasons, but
nevertheless declared that if he had not made such compromises he would have
been forced to abandon his post, “which in the conditions of the time would not
have been good for the Church”. In other words, as Vladimir Kozyrev writes: “It
means: ‘I dishonoured the Church and my Episcopal responsibility, I betrayed
those whom I had to protect, I scandalized my flock. But all this I had to do
for the good of the Church!’”[26]
KGB
Agents in Cassocks
One of the biggest fruits of glasnost’ – which did not, however,
lead to a real ecclesiastical perestroika – was the confirmation in
January, 1992 by a Russian parliamentary commission investigating the
activities of the KGB that for several decades at least the leaders of the
Moscow Patriarchate had been KGB agents. The records of the fourth, Church
department of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate revealed that Metropolitans Juvenal
of Krutitsa, Pitirim of Volokolamsk, Philaret of Kiev and Philaret of Minsk
were all KGB agents, with the codenames “Adamant”, “Abbat”, “Antonov” and
“Ostrovsky” respectively.
This news was not, of course, unexpected. Konstantin Kharchev, Chairman
of the Council for Religious Affairs from 1984 to 1989, confirmed in 1989 that
the Russian Orthodox Church was rigorously controlled by the Central Committee
of the Communist Party, especially its Ideological Department, and by the KGB.[27] Again,
Victor Sheimov, a former KGB major with responsibilities for upgrading the
KGB’s communications security system until his defection in 1980, described the
Fifth Directorate as being “responsible for suppressing ideological dissent,
running the Soviet Orthodox Church and laying the groundwork for the First
Chief Directorate’s subversive promotion of favourable opinion about the
country’s position and policy.”[28] One of
Sheimov’s jobs was to draft agents to infiltrate the “Soviet Orthodox Church”.
Again, in 1992 a former KGB agent, A. Shushpanov, described his experiences
working in the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Ecclesiastical
Relations. He said that most of the people working there were in fact KGB
agents.[29]
But it was the revelations unearthed by the parliamentary commission
that were the most shocking. They included:- (i) the words of the head of the
KGB Yury Andropov to the Central Committee sometime in the 1970s: “The organs
of state security keep the contacts of the Vatican with the Russian Orthodox
Church under control…”; (ii) “At the 6th General Assembly of the
World Council of Churches in Vancouver, the religious delegation from the USSR
contained 47 (!) agents of the KGB, including religious authorities, clergy and
technical personnel” (July, 1983); (iii) “The most important were the journeys
of agents ‘Antonov’, ‘Ostrovsky’ and ‘Adamant’ to Italy for conversations with the
Pope of Rome on the question of further relations between the Vatican and the
Russian Orthodox Church, and in particular regarding the problems of the
uniates” (1989).[30]
The parliamentary commission also discovered that Patriarch Alexis
himself was an agent with the codename “Drozdov”. It is now known that Alexis
was recruited by the Estonian KGB on February 28, 1958[31]; and in
the 1974 Furov report to the Central Committee of the USSR he (together with
his predecessor Patriarch Pimen) was placed in the category of those bishops
who “affirm both in words and deeds not only loyalty but also patriotism
towards the socialist society; strictly observe the laws on cults, and educate
the parish clergy and believers in the same spirit; realistically understand
that our state is not interested in proclaiming the role of religion and the
church in society; and, realizing this, do not display any particular
activeness in extending the influence of Orthodoxy among the population.”[32]
Moreover, according to a KGB document of 1988, an order was drafted by
the USSR KGB chairman to award an honorary citation to agent DROZDOV for
unspecified services to state security.[33] But
these facts were not made public because, according to Fen Montaigne, “members
of the parliamentary commission had told the patriarch that they would not name
him as an agent if he began cleaning house in the church and acknowledging the
breadth of cooperation between the church and the KGB. ‘So far, we have kept
the silence because we wanted to give the patriarch a chance,’ said Alexander
Nezhny, a journalist who said his comparison of the archives and church
bulletins convinced him that Alexis II is indeed ‘Drozdov’…”[34]
The parliamentary commission was almost immediately closed down by the
President of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbalutov, at the insistence,
according to Ponomarev, of Patriarch Alexis himself and the head of the KGB, E.
Primakov. One of the commission’s
members, Fr. Gleb Yakunin, “was accused of betraying state secrets to the
United States and threatened with a private persecution. Father Gleb remained
defiant. He wrote to the Patriarch in 1994:
“’If the Church is not cleansed of the taint of the spy and informer, it
cannot be reborn. Unfortunately, only one archbishop – Archbishop Chrysostom of
Lithuania – has had the courage publicly to acknowledge that in the past he
worked as an agent, and has revealed his codename: RESTAVRATOR. No other Church
hierarch has followed his example, however.
“The most prominent agents of the past include DROZDOV – the only one of
the churchmen to be officially honoured with an award by the KGB of the USSR,
in 1988, for outstanding intelligence services – ADAMANT, OSTROVSKY, MIKHAILOV,
TOPAZ AND ABBAT. It is obvious that none of these or the less exalted agents is
preparing to repent. On the contrary, they deliver themselves of pastoral
maxims on the allegedly neutral character of informing on the Church, and
articles have appeared in the Church press justifying the role of the informer
as essential for the survival of the Church in an anti-religious state.
“The codenames I discovered in the archives of the KGB belong to the top
hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate.”[35]
Keston News Service reviewed all the available documentary evidence from
the various activities of the KGB and concluded that long-standing allegations
that the Patriarch and other senior bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church
collaborated with the KGB were based on fact.[36] And,
writing in 1995, John Dunlop concluded that “the overwhelming majority of the
current one hundred and nineteen bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate were
ordained to the episcopacy prior to August of 1991. This suggests that each of
these bishops was carefully screened and vetted by both the ideological
apparatus of the Communist Party and by the KGB.”[37]
In 1992, Archbishop Chrysostom
of Vilnius declared to the Council of Bishops of the MP: “In our Church there
are genuine members of the KGB, who have made head-spinning careers; for example,
Metropolitan Methodius of Voronezh. He is a KGB officer, an atheist, a liar,
who is constantly advised by the KGB. The Synod was unanimously against such a
bishop, but we had to take upon us such a sin. And then what a rise he had!”
Memory Loss
At the same Council, a
commission of eight MP bishops headed by Bishop Alexander of Kostroma was
formed to investigate the charges of collaboration with the KGB. This
commission has so far (12 years later) produced absolutely nothing![38] In view
of the lack of a clear-out (chistka) of KGB
hierarchs, it remains true that, as the saying went, “the MP is the last
surviving department of the KGB” or “the second administration of the Soviet
state”.
As the memory loss in church
and society became greater and greater in the later 1990s, Patriarch Alexis
felt ready to return to the theme of sergianism. In an interview in 1997 he,
referring to the Church in the time of Patriarch Tikhon: “The Church could not,
did not have the right, to go into the catacombs. She remained together with
the people and drank to the dregs the cup of sufferings that fell to its lot.”[39] Patriarch Alexis here forgot to mention that
Patriarch Tikhon specifically blessed Michael Zhizhilenko, the future
Hieromartyr Maximus of Serpukhov, to become a secret catacomb bishop if the
pressure on the Church from the State became too great. As for his claim that
the sergianists shared the cup of the people’s suffering, this must be counted
as conscious hypocrisy. It is well known that the Soviet hierarchs lived a life
of considerable luxury, while lifting not a finger for the Catacomb Christians
and dissidents sent to torments and death in KGB prisons!
On November 9, 2001, the
patriarch threw off the mask of repentance completely, stating in defence of
Sergius’ declaration: “This was a clever step by which Metropolitan Sergius
tried to save the church and clergy. In declaring that the members of the
Church want to see themselves as part of the motherland and want to share her
joys and sorrows, he tried to show to those who were persecuting the church and
who were destroying it that we, the children of the church, want to be loyal
citizens so that the affiliation of people with the church would not place them
outside the law. So this is a far-fetched accusation…’[40]
But it is not enough to justify betrayal:
the traitor himself has to be canonized. And it is the canonization of
“Patriarch” Sergius, the author of the notorious declaration, that is the goal
of the MP. For such an act would complete the selective loss of memory that has
been taking place since 1990 and complete the justification of the “Soviet” church and its cooperation
with the KGB.
However, such an act needs a lengthy preparation. The opponents – those
whose memory is not completely gone – have to be neutralised. A first step was
taken by the patriarch already in 1991, when he wrote: “I believe that our
martyrs and righteous ones, regardless of whether they followed Metropolitan
Sergius or did not agree with his position, pray together for us.”[41] Then,
in 1993, he said: “Through the host of martyrs the Church of Russia bore
witness to her faith and sowed the seed of her future rebirth. Among the
confessors of Christ we can in full measure name… his Holiness Patriarch
Sergius.”[42]
It is as if he was contemplating a trade-off: if we recognize your
martyrs, he is saying to the opponents of Sergius, then you must recognize ours
– including Sergius himself.
Of course, Alexis still regarded the Catacomb martyrs as “uncanonical”.[43] But he
was prepared to canonize them, thus introducing the concept of “uncanonical
martyrs” into the Church (!), so long as Sergius himself, their betrayer and
persecutor, could also be canonized eventually. However, by the time of the MP’s
hierarchical council in 2000, at which many Catacomb martyrs were canonized,
the patriarchate still did not feel able to canonise Sergius – probably because
it feared that it would prevent a union with the ROCOR. But neither did it
canonise the leader of the Catacomb Church, Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd.
This suggested that a canonisation of the two leaders – the leader of the True
Church, and the leader of the false - was in the offing, but depended on the
success of the negotiations between the MP and the ROCOR.
Those negotiations were officially launched in May, 2004, during the
visit of the leader of the ROCOR, Metropolitan Lavr, to Russia. And the manner
in which they were launched is extremely significant. On May 15, the
anniversary of “Patriarch” Sergius’ death, Alexis demonstratively served a
panikhida for Sergius, and then, during a liturgy at Butovo, where thousands of
Catacomb Christians were martyred and sergianists killed in 1937, he had this
to say to his foreign guests:
“Today is the 60th anniversary since the death of the
ever-memorable Patriarch Sergius. The time of the service of this archpastor
coincided with the most terrible years of the struggle against God, when it was
necessary to preserve the Russian Church. In those terrible years of repression
and persecutions there were more sorrows. In 1937 both those who shared the
position of Metropolitan Sergius and those who did not agree with him suffered
for the faith of Christ, for belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church. We pay a
tribute of respect and thankful remembrance to his Holiness Patriarch Sergius
for the fact that he, in the most terrible and difficult of conditions of the
Church’s existence in the 1930s of the 20th century led the ship of
the Church and preserved the Russian Church amidst the stormy waves of the sea
of life.”[44]
And yet only the year before, in a book dedicated to the glorification
of Sergius (and Stalin), Sergius Fomin wrote: “If Metropolitan Sergius, in
agreeing in his name to publish the Declaration of 1927 composed by the
authorities, hoping to buy some relief for the Church and the clergy, then his
hopes not only were not fulfilled, but the persecutions after 1927 became still
fiercer, reaching truly hurricane-force in 1937-38”.[45]
Clearly,
Patriarch Alexis, “forgetting” historical facts and ignoring even the MP’s
panegyrists of Sergius, is determined to justify even his most shameful acts,
claiming that the “ever-memorable” Sergus indeed “saved the Church” by his
agreements with the God-haters. There can be no doubt, therefore, that he
remains a dyed-in-the-wool sergianist – that is, an adherent of the heresy that
the Church of God, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Timothy
3.15), can be saved by the lies of men. And there can similarly be no doubt
that Metropolitan Lavr, in listening to this speech in respectful silence and
without interjecting the slightest objection, is a sergianist, too.
Conclusion
The phenomenon of the loss of memory in
the Moscow Patriarchate is inseparable from the loss of historical memory in
Russia as a whole.
In a chapter entitled simply “Memory”, the
American journalist and historian of the Soviet Gulag, Anne Applebaum, has
written movingly and truthfully about this: “Ten years after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s
diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts and its seat at the
United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s
history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of
repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which
officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families. Throughout
the 1980s, competitions were held to design such a monument, but they came to
nothing. Memorial succeeded only in dragging a stone from the Solovetsky
islands – where the Gulag began – and placing it in the centre of Dzerzhinsky
Square, across from the Lubyanka.
“More notable than the missing monuments,
however, is the missing public awareness. Sometimes, it seems as if the
enormous emotions and passions raised by the wide-ranging discussions of the
Gorbachev era simply vanished, along with the Soviet Union itself. The bitter
debate about justice for the victims disappeared just as abruptly. Although
there was much talk about it at the end of the 1980s, the Russian government
never did examine or try the perpetrators of torture or mass murder, even those
who were identifiable. In the early 1990s, one of the men who carried out the
Katyn massacres of Polish officers was still alive. Before he died, the KGB
conducted an interview with him, asking him to explain – from a technical point
of view – how the murders were carried out. As a gesture of goodwill, a tape of
the interview was handed to the Polish cultural attaché in Moscow. No
one suggested at any time that the man be put on trial, in Moscow, Warsaw, or
anywhere else.
“It is true, of course, that trials may
not always be the best way to come to terms with the past. In the years after
the Second World War, West Germany brought 85,000 Nazis to trial, but obtained
fewer than 7,000 convictions. The tribunals were notoriously corrupt, and
easily swayed by personal jealousies and disputes. The Nuremberg Trial itself
was an example of ‘victors’ justice’ marred by dubious legality and oddities,
not the least of which was the presence of Soviet judges who knew perfectly
well that their own side was responsible for mass murder too.
“But there are other methods, aside from
trials, of doing public justice to the crimes of the past. There are truth
commissions, for example, of the sort implemented in South Africa, which allow
victims to tell their stories in an official, public place, and make the crimes
of the past a part of the public debate. There are official investigations,
like the British Parliament’s 2002 inquiry into the Northern Irish ‘Bloody
Sunday’ massacre, which had taken place thirty years earlier. There are
government inquiries, government commission, public apologies – yet the Russian
government has never considered any of these options. Other than the brief,
inconclusive ‘trial’ of the Communist Party, there have in fact been no public
truth-telling sessions in Russia, no parliamentary hearings, no official
investigations of any kind into the murders or the massacres or the camps of
the USSR.
“The result: half a century after the
war’s end, the Germans still conduct regular public disputes about victims’
compensation, about memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even
about whether a younger generation of Germans ought to go on shouldering the
guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin’s death, there
were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia, because the memory of the
past was not a living part of public discourse.
“The rehabilitation process did continue,
very quietly, throughout the 1990s. By the end of 2001, about 4.5 million
political prisoners had been rehabilitated in Russia, and the national
rehabilitation commission reckoned it had a further half-million cases to
examine. Those victims – hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more – who
were never sentenced will of course be exempt from the process. But while the
commission itself is serious and well-intentioned, and while it is composed of
camp survivors as well as bureaucrats, no one associated with it really feels
that the politicians who created it were motivated by a real drive for ‘truth
and reconciliation’, in the words of the British historian Catherine Merridale.
Rather, the goal has been to end discussion of the past, to pacify the victims
by throwing them a few extra roubles and free bus tickets, and to avoid any
deeper examination of the causes of Stalinism and its legacy.
“There are some good, or at least some
forgivable, explanations for this public silence. Most Russians really do spend
all of their time coping with the complete transformation of their economy and
society. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened
since it ended. Post-communist Russia is not post-war Germany, where the
memories of the worst atrocities were still fresh in people’s minds. In the
twenty-first century, the events of the middle of the twentieth century seem
like ancient history to much of the population.
“Perhaps more to the point, many Russians
also feel that they have had their discussion of the past already, and that it
produced very little. When one asks older Russians, at least, why the subject
of the Gulag is so rarely mentioned nowadays, they wave away the issue: ‘In
1990 that was all we could talk about, now we don’t need to talk about it any
more.’ To further complicate things, talk of the Gulag and of Stalinist
repression has become confused, in the minds of many, with the ‘democratic
reformers’ who originally promoted the debate about the Soviet past. Because
that generation of political leaders is now seen to have failed – their rule is
remembered for corruption and chaos – all talk of the Gulag is somehow tainted
by association.
“The question of remembering or
commemorating political repression is also confused…. by the presence of so
many other victims of so many other Soviet tragedies. ‘To make matters more
complicated,’ writes Catherine Merridale, ‘a great many people suffered
repeatedly; they can describe themselves as war veterans, victims of
repression, the children of the repressed and even as survivors of famine with
equal facility. There are plenty of memorials to the wartime dead, some
Russians seem to feel: Will that not suffice?
“But there are other reasons, less
forgivable, for the profound silence. Many Russians experienced the collapse of
the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old
system was bad, they now feel – but at least we were powerful. And now that we
are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful,
like speaking ill of the dead.
“Some – still – also fear what they might
find out about the past, if they were to inquire too closely. In 1998, the
Russian American journalist Masha Gessen described what it felt like to
discover that one of her grandmothers, a nice old Jewish lady, had been a
censor, responsible for altering the reports of foreign correspondents based in
Moscow. She also discovered that her other grandmother, another nice old Jewish
lady, had once applied for a job with the secret police. Both had made their
choices out of desperation, not conviction. Now, she wrote, she knows why her
generation had refrained from condemning their grandparents’ generation too
harshly: ‘We did not expose them, we did not try them, we did not judge them…
merely by asking such questions each one of us risks betraying someone we
love.’
“Aleksandr Yakovlev, chairman of the
Russian rehabilitation commission, put this problem somewhat more bluntly.
‘Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past,’ he told me, ‘because so
many people participated in them.’ The Soviet system dragged millions and
millions of its citizens into many forms of collaboration and compromise.
Although many willingly participated, otherwise decent people were also forced
to do terrible things. They, their children, and their grandchildren do not
always want to remember that now.
“But the most important explanation for
the lack of public debate does not involve the fears of the younger generation,
or the inferiority complexes and leftover guilt of those now ruling not only
Russia, but also most of the other ex-Soviet states and satellite states. In
December 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
thirteen of the fifteen former Soviet republics were run by former communists,
as were many of the former satellite states, including Poland, the country
which supplied so many hundreds of thousands of prisoners for Soviet camps and
exile villages. Even the Communist Party, former communists and their children
or fellow travellers also continued to figure largely in the intellectual, media
and business elites. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was a former KGB
agent, who proudly identified himself as a ‘Chekist’. Earlier, when serving as
the Russian Prime Minister, Putin had made a point of visiting the KGB
headquarters at Lubyanka, on the anniversary of the Cheka’s founding, where he
dedicated a plaque to the memory of Yuri Andropov.
“The dominance of former communists and
the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not
coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in
concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to
be carrying out ‘reforms’, even when they personally had nothing to do with
past crimes. In Hungary, the ex-Communist Party, renamed the Socialist Party,
fought bitterly against opening the museum to the victims of terror. When the
ex-Communist Party, renamed the Social Democrats, was elected to power in
Poland in 2001, it immediately cut the budget of the Polish Institute of National
Memory, set up by its centre-right predecessors. Many, many excuses have been
given for Russia’s failure to build a national monument to its millions of
victims, but Aleksandr Yakovlev, again, gave me the most succint explanation,
‘The monument will be built,’ he said, ‘when we – the older generation – are
all dead.’”[46]
This quotation is long because every point
it makes about the loss of memory and the corruption of memory in Russia as a
whole can be paralleled in that microcosm of Russia today that is the Moscow
Patriarchate.
If the Russian state and people want to
keep silent about the past, then so does the MP – and for very similar reasons.
If Putin the Chekist places a plaque to the memory of Yuri Andropov at the
Lubyanka, then Alexis the Chekist goes one better by building a church inside
the Lubyanka for the spiritual needs of the KGB agents who work in it. If Putin
now raises a toast to Stalin, then priests of the MP write articles glorifying
him (and Ivan the Terrible and Rasputin!). If Lenin still lies in his
mausoleum, an object of veneration as before, the same is true of the founder
of the Moscow Patriarchate, “Patriarch” Sergius. If a true and adequate
monument to the victims of the Gulag will not be built until the older generation
is dead, then the same is probably true about the holy martyrs and confessors
of the Catacomb Church: not until the present rulers of the Church and State in
Russia are dead or removed will they be given a fitting memorial...
A man is to a large extent constituted by
his memory. If he forgets his past, he has to a large extent lost himself. The
same applies to a nation. And to a Church. Therefore, lest the sleep of
forgetfulness overtake us completely before that glorious day of the full
restoration of memory comes, let us remember the words of the Lord: “Take heed
to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which
thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy
life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons” (Deuteronomy 4.9).
For the sin of forgetfulness - both of the
great deeds of God and His saints, and of the great iniquities of the devil and
his followers - is indeed the sin unto death. And the path to life for those
sitting by the waters of the Babylon of this world is the path of constant
vigilance and memory: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…
July 13
/ August 13, 2004.
Forefeast
of the Procession of the Honourable and Life-Giving Cross.
Hieromartyr
Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, and those with him.
4.
TEN REASONS WHY THE ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE IS NOT ORTHODOX
I. The Heretical Encyclical of 1920.
In January, 1920, Metropolitan Dorotheus,
locum tenens of the patriarchal throne, and his Synod issued what was in effect
a charter for Ecumenism. It was addressed “to all the Churches of Christ
everywhere”, and declared that “the first essential is to revive and strengthen
the love between the Churches, not considering each other as strangers and
foreigners, but as kith and kin in Christ and united co-heirs of the promise of
God in Christ.”
It went on: “This love and benevolent disposition towards each other can
be expressed and proven especially, in our opinion, through:
“(a) the reception of a single calendar for the simultaneous celebration
of the great Christian feasts by all the Churches;
“(b) the exchange of brotherly epistles on the great feasts of the
single calendar..;
“(c) close inter-relations between the representatives of the different
Churches;
“(d) intercourse between the Theological Schools and the representatives
of Theological Science and the exchange of theological and ecclesiastical
periodicals and writings published in each Church;
“(e) the sending of young people to study from the schools of one to
another Church;
“(f) the convening of Pan-Christian conferences to examine questions of
common interest to all the Churches;
“(g) the objective and historical study of dogmatic differences..;
“(h) mutual respect for the habits and customs prevailing in the
different Churches;
“(I) the mutual provision of prayer houses and cemeteries for the
funeral and burial of members of other confessions dying abroad;
“(j) the regulation of the question of mixed marriages between the
different confessions;
“(k) mutual support in the strengthening of religion and philanthropy.”[47]
The unprecedented nature of the encyclical consists in the fact: (1)
that it was addressed not to the Orthodox Churches only, but to the Orthodox
and heretics together, as if there were no important difference between them
but all equally were “co-heirs of God in Christ”; (2) that the proposed rapprochement
was seen as coming, not through the acceptance by the heretics of the Truth of
Orthodoxy and their sincere repentance and rejection of their errors, but
through various external measures and, by inference, the mutual accomodation of
the Orthodox and the heretics; and (3) the proposal of a single universal
calendar for concelebration of the feasts, in contravention of the canonical
law of the Orthodox Church. There is no mention here of the only possible
justification of Ecumenism from an Orthodox point of view – the opportunity it
provides of conducting missionary work among the heretics. On the contrary, as
we have seen, one of the first aims of the ecumenical movement was and is to prevent proselytism among the
member-Churches.
II. The Uncanonical Election of Meletius
Metaxakis.
In 1918 the traditionalist Archbishop Theocletus of Athens was
uncanonically defrocked “for having instigated the anathema against [the Cretan
Freemason] Eleutherios Venizelos”. Two years later, Theocletus was vindicated.
But the damage was done. In his place another Cretan Freemason, Meletius Metaxakis,
was enthroned as Archbishop of Athens in November, 1918. However, in November,
1920 he was defrocked “for uncanonical actions” and confined to a monastery on
Zakynthos as a simple monk. But by December, 1921 he was Patriarch of
Constantinople! How did this transformation of a defrocked monk into Patriarch
of Constantinople take place?
Bishop Photius of Triaditsa writes: “Political circles around Venizelos
and the Anglican Church had been involved in Meletius’ election as Patriarch.
Metropolitan Germanus (Karavangelis) of the Holy Synod of Constantinople wrote
of these events, ‘My election in 1921 to the Ecumenical Throne was
unquestioned. Of the seventeen votes cast, sixteen were in my favour. Then one
of my lay friends offered me 10,000 lira if I would forfeit my election in
favour of Meletius Metaxakis. Naturally I refused his offer, displeased and
disgusted. At the same time, one night a delegation of three men unexpectedly
visited me from the “National Defence League” and began to earnestly entreat me
to forfeit my candidacy in favour of Meletius Metaxakis. The delegates said
that Meletius could bring in $100,000 for the Patriarchate and, since he had
very friendly relations with Protestant bishops in England and America, could
be useful in international causes. Therefore, international interests demanded
that Meletius Metaxakis be elected Patriarch. Such was also the will of
Eleutherius Venizelos. I thought over this proposal all night. Economic chaos
reigned at the Patriarchate. The government in Athens had stopped sending
subsidies, and there were no other sources of income. Regular salaries had not
been paid for nine months. The charitable organizations of the Patriarchate
were in a critical economic state. For these reasons and for the good of the
people [or so thought the deceived hierarch] I accepted the offer…’ Thus, to
everyone’s amazement, the next day, November 25, 1921, Meletius Metaxakis
became the Patriarch of Constantinople.
“The uncanonical nature of his election became evident when, two days
before the election, November 23, 1921, there was a proposal made by the Synod
of Constantinople to postpone the election on canonical grounds. The majority
of the members voted to accept this proposal. At the same time, on the very day
of the election, the bishops who had voted to postpone the election were
replaced by other bishops. This move allowed the election of Meletius as
Patriarch. Consequently, the majority of bishops of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople who had been circumvented met in Thessalonica. [This Council
included seven out of the twelve members of the Constantinopolitan Holy Synod
and about 60 patriarchal bishops from the New Regions of Greece under the
presidency of Metropolitan Constantine of Cyzicus.] They announced that, ‘the
election of Meletius Metaxakis was done in open violation of the holy canons,’
and proposed to undertake ‘a valid and canonical election for Patriarch of
Constantinople.’ In spite of this, Meletius was confirmed on the Patriarchal
Throne.” [48]
Two members of the Synod then went to
Athens to report to the council of ministers. On December 12, 1921 they
declared the election null and void. One of the prominent hierarchs who refused
to accept this election was Metropolitan Chrysostom (Kavourides) of Florina,
the future leader of the True Orthodox Church, who also tried to warn the then
Prime Minister Gounaris about the dangers posed by the election of Meletius.
The Sublime Porte also refused to recognize the election, first because
Meletius was not an Ottoman citizen and therefore was not eligible for the
patriarchate according to the Ottoman charter of 1856, and secondly because
Meletius declared that he did not consider any such charters as binding insofar
as they had been imposed by the Muslim conquerors.
On December 29, 1921, the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece deposed
Metaxakis for a series of canonical transgressions and for creating a schism,
declared both Metaxakis and Rodostolos Alexandros to be schismatics and
threatened to declare all those who followed them as similarly schismatic.
In spite of this second condemnation, Meletius was enthroned as
patriarch on January 22, 1922; and as a result of intense political pressure
his deposition was uncanonically lifted on September 24, 1922! [49] Thus there arrived at the peak of power one
of the men whom Metropolitan Chrysostom (Kavourides) called “these two Luthers
of the Orthodox Church”. The other Orthodox Luther, Archbishop Chrysostom
(Papadopoulos) of Athens, would come to power very shortly…
III. The EP’s uncanonical annexation of vast
territories belonging to the Russian and Serbian Churches.
Meletius and his successor, Gregory VII, undertook what can only be
described as a wholesale annexation of vast territories belonging to the
jurisdiction of the Serbian and Russian Patriarchates. Basing his actions on a
false interpretation of the 28th canon of the Fourth Ecumenical
Council, which supposedly gives all the “barbarian lands” into the jurisdiction
of Constantinople, he and his successor created the following uncanonical
autonomous and autocephalous Churches on the model of the “Greek Archdiocese of
North and South America”:-
1. Western Europe. On April 5, 1922, Meletius named
an exarch for the whole of Western and Central Europe. By the time of Gregory
VII’s death in November, 1924, there was an exarchate of Central Europe under
Metropolitan Germanus of Berlin, an exarchate of Great Britain and Western
Europe under Metropolitan Germanus of Thyateira, and a diocese of Bishop
Gregory of Paris. In the late 1920s the Ecumenical Patriarch received into his
jurisdiction the Russian Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris, who had created a
schism in the Russian Church Abroad, and who sheltered a number of influential
heretics, such as Nicholas Berdyaev and Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, in the
theological institute of St. Sergius in Paris.
[50]
2. Finland. In February, 1921 Patriarch
Tikhon granted the Finnish Church autonomy within the Russian Church. On June
9, 1922, Meletius uncanonically received this autonomous Finnish Church into
his jurisdiction. The excuse given here was that Patriarch Tikhon was no longer
free, “therefore he could do as he pleased” (Metropolitan Anthony
Khrapovitsky). This undermined the efforts of the Orthodox to maintain their
position vis-à-vis the Lutherans. Thus under pressure from the Lutheran
government, and in spite of the protests of Patriarch Tikhon, Patriarch Gregory
allowed the Finnish Church to adopt the western paschalion. Then began the persecution
of the confessors of the Old Calendar in the monastery of Valaam.
“Even more iniquitous and cruel,” continues Metropolitan Anthony, “was
the relationship of the late Patriarch Gregory and his synod towards the
diocese and the person of the Archbishop of Finland. The Ecumenical Patriarch
consecrated a vicar bishop for Finland, the priest Aava, who was not only not
tonsured, but not even a rasophore. Moreover, this was done not only without
the agreement of the Archbishop of Finland, but in spite of his protest. By
these actions the late Patriarch of Constantinople violated a fundamental canon
of the Church – the sixth canon of the First Ecumenical Council [and many
others], which states, ‘If anyone is consecrated bishop without the consent of
his metropolitan, the Great Council declares him not to be a bishop.’ According
to the twenty-eighth canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, the patriarch
cannot even place a bishop in his diocese without the approval of the local
metropolitan. Based on precisely this same canon, the predecessors of Gregory
vainly attempted to realize his pretensions and legalize their claims to
control. This uncanonical ‘bishop’ Aava, once consecrated as bishop, placed a
monastic klobuk on his own head, and thus costumed, he appeared in the foreign
diocese of Finland. There he instigated the Lutheran government to persecute
the canonical Archbishop of Finland, Seraphim, who was respected by the people.
The Finnish government previously had requested the Ecumenical Patriarch to
confirm the most illegal of laws, namely that the secular government of Finland
would have the right to retire the Archbishop. The government in fact followed
through with the retirement, falsely claiming that Archbishop Seraphim had not
learned enough Finnish in the allotted time. Heaven and earth were horrified at
this illegal, tyrannical act of a non-Orthodox government. Even more horrifying
was that an Orthodox patriarch had consented to such chicanery. To the scandal
of the Orthodox and the evil delight of the heterodox, the highly dubious
Bishop Germanus (the former Fr. Aava) strolled the streets of Finland in
secular clothes, clean-shaven and hair cut short, while the most worthy of
bishops, Seraphim, crudely betrayed by his false brother, languished in exile
for the remainder of his life in a tiny hut of a monastery on a stormy isle on
Lake Ladoga.” [51]
On November 14/27, 1923, Patriarch Tikhon and the Russian Holy Synod,
after listening to a report by Archbishop Seraphim decreed that “since his
Holiness Patriarch Tikhon has entered upon the administration of the Russian
Orthodox Church, the reason for which the Patriarch of Constantinople
considered it necessary temporarily to submit the Finnish Church to his
jurisdiction has now fallen away, and the Finnish eparchy must return under the
rule of the All-Russian Patriarch.”[52]
However, the Finns did not return to the Russians, and the Finnish Church
remains to this day within the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and
the most modernist of all the Orthodox Churches.
3. Estonia. In February, 1921
Patriarch Tikhon granted a broad measure of autonomy to the parts of the former
Pskov and Revel dioceses that entered into the boundaries of the newly formed
Estonian state. On August 28, 1922, Meletius uncanonically received this
Estonian diocese of the Russian Church into his jurisdiction, under
Metropolitan Alexander. The recent renewal of this unlawful decision by the
present Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, nearly led to a schism between the
Ecumenical and Russian patriarchates.
4.
Latvia. In June, 1921 Patriarch Tikhon granted the Latvian Church a
large measure of autonomy under its Latvian archpastor, Archbishop John of
Riga, who was burned to death by the communists in 1934. In March, 1936, the
Ecumenical Patriarch accepted the Church of Latvia within his own jurisdiction.
5. Poland. In 1921 Patriarch
Tikhon appointed Archbishop Seraphim (Chichagov) to the see of Warsaw, but the
Poles, whose armies had defeated the Red Army the year before, did not grant
him entry into the country. So the patriarch was forced to bow to the Poles’
suggestion that Archbishop George (Yaroshevsky) of Minsk be made metropolitan
of Warsaw. However, he refused Archbishop George’s request for autocephaly on the
grounds that very few members of the Polish Church were Poles and the Polish
dioceses were historically indivisible parts of the Russian Church. [53]
Lyudmilla Koeller writes: “The Polish authorities restricted the
Orthodox Church, which numbered more than 3 million believers (mainly
Ukrainians and Byelorussians). [54] In 1922
a council was convoked in Pochayev which was to have declared autocephaly, but
as the result of a protest by Bishop Eleutherius [Bogoyavlensky, of Vilnius]
and Bishop Vladimir (Tikhonitsky), this decision was not made. But at the next
council of bishops, which gathered in Warsaw in June, 1922, the majority voted
for autocephaly, with only Bishops Eleutherius and Vladimir voting against. A
council convoked in September of the same year ‘deprived Bishops Eleutherius
and Vladimir of their sees. In December, 1922, Bishop Eleutherius was arrested
and imprisoned in a strict regime prison in the monastery of the Camaldul
Fathers near Krakow, from where he was transferred to Kovno in spring, 1923’.” [55]
Two other Russian bishops, Panteleimon (Rozhnovsky) and Sergius
(Korolev), were also deprived of their sees. The three dissident bishops were
expelled from Poland.
In November, 1923, Metropolitan George was killed by an opponent of his
church politics, and was succeeded by Metropolitan Dionysius “with the
agreement of the Polish government and the confirmation and blessing of his
Holiness Meletius IV [Metaxakis]”. Patriarch Tikhon rejected this act as
uncanonical[56],
but was unable to do anything about it. In November, 1924, Patriarch Gregory
VII uncanonically transferred the Polish Church from the jurisdiction of the
Russian Church to his own.
5. Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
According to the old Hungarian law of 1868, and confirmed by the government of
the new Czechoslovak republic in 1918 and 1920, all Orthodox Christians living
in the territory of the former Hungarian kingdom came within the jurisdiction
of the Serbian Patriarchate, and were served directly by Bishops Gorazd of Moravia
and Dositheus of Carpatho-Russia.
However, on September 3, 1921, the Orthodox parish in Prague elected
Archimandrite Sabbatius to be their bishop, and then informed Bishop Dositheus,
their canonical bishop about this. When the Serbian Synod refused to consecrate
Sabbatius for Prague, he, without the knowledge of his community, set off for
Constantinople, where on March 4, 1923, he was consecrated “archbishop” of the
newly created Czechoslovakian branch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which included
Carpatho-Russia. Then, on April 15, 1924, the Ecumenical Patriarch established
a metropolia of Hungary and All Central Europe with its see in Budapest -
although there was already a Serbian bishop there.
“The scandal caused by this confusion,” writes
Z.G. Ashkenazy, “is easy to imagine. Bishop Sabbatius insisted on his rights in
Carpatho-Russia, enthusiastically recruiting sympathizers from the
Carpatho-Russian clergy and ordaining candidates indiscriminately. His
followers requested that the authorities take administrative measures against
priests not agreeing to submit to him. Bishop Dositheus placed a rebellious
monk under ban – Bishop Sabbatius elevated him to igumen; Bishop Dositheus
gathered the clergy in Husta and organized an Ecclesiastical Consistory –
Bishop Sabbatius enticed priests to Bushtin and formed an Episcopal Council.
Chaos reigned in church affairs. Malice and hatred spread among the clergy, who
organized into ‘Sabbatiites’ and ‘Dositheiites’.
“A wonderful spiritual flowering which gave birth to so many martyrs for
Orthodoxy degenerated into a shameful struggle for power, for a more lucrative
parish and extra income. The Uniate press was gleeful, while bitterness settled
in the Orthodox people against their clergy, who were not able to maintain that
high standard of Orthodoxy which had been initiated by inspired simple folk.” [57]
In 1938 the great wonderworker Archbishop John Maximovich reported to
the All-Diaspora Council of the Russian Church Abroad: “Increasing without
limit their desires to submit to themselves parts of Russia, the Patriarchs of
Constantinople have even begun to declare the uncanonicity of the annexation of
Kiev to the Moscow Patriarchate, and to declare that the previously existing
southern Russian Metropolia of Kiev should be subject to the Throne of
Constantinople. Such a point of view is not only clearly expressed in the Tomos
of November 13, 1924, in connection with the separation of the Polish Church,
but is also quite thoroughly promoted by the Patriarchs. Thus, the Vicar of
Metropolitan Eulogius in Paris, who was consecrated with the permission of the
Ecumenical Patriarch, has assumed the title of Chersonese; that is to say,
Chersonese, which is now in the territory of Russia, is subject to the Ecumenical
Patriarch. The next logical step for the Ecumenical Patriarchate would be to
declare the whole of Russia as being under the jurisdiction of Constantinople…
“In sum, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in theory embracing almost the
whole universe, and in fact extending its authority only over several dioceses,
and in other places having only a superficial supervision and receiving certain
revenues for this; persecuted by the government at home and not supported by
any governmental authority abroad; having lost its significance as a pillar of
truth and having itself become a source of division, and at the same time being
possessed by an exorbitant love of power – represents a pitiful spectacle which
recalls the worst periods in the history of the See of Constantinople.” [58]
IV. The EP’s communion with the Russian
renovationist heretics and uncanonical deposition of ROCOR Bishops.
In 1922 the so-called “Living Church” came to power in Russia, deposed
Patriarch Tikhon, and instituted a programme of modernistic reforms that was
very close to those Meletius was to introduce. He promptly entered into
communion with the schismatics. As the synod of the “Living Church” wrote to
Meletius in 1925: “The Holy Synod [of the renovationists] recall with sincere
best wishes the moral support which Your Beatitude showed us while you were yet
Patriarch of Constantinople by entering into communion with us as the only
rightfully ruling organ of the Russian Orthodox Church.”[59]
Moreover, his successors Gregory VII and Constantine VI remained in communion
with the “Living Church”.
Patriarch Gregory first called for Patriarch Tikhon’s resignation, and
then demanded “that the Russian Metropolitan Anthony and Archbishop Anastasius,
who were residing Constantinople at the time, cease their activities against
the Soviet regime and stop commemorating Patriarch Tikhon. Receiving no
compliance from them, Patriarch Gregory organized an investigation and
suspended the two bishops from serving. He asked Patriarch Demetrius [of
Serbia] to close down the Russian Council of Bishops in Sremsky-Karlovtsy, but
Demetrius refused…”[60]
Gregory then decided to send a special mission to Russia to investigate
the church situation there.
Patriarch Tikhon wrote to Gregory: “Attached to the letter of your
Holiness’ representative in Russia, Archimandrite Basil Dimopoulo, of June 6,
1924, no. 226, I received the protocols of four sessions of the Holy
Constantinopolitan Synod of January 1, April 17, April 30 and May 6 of this
year, from which it is evident that your Holiness, wishing to provide help from
the Mother Great Church of Christ of Constantinople, and ‘having exactly
studied the course of Russian Church life and the differences and divisions
that have taken place – in order to bring peace and end the present anomalies’,
.. ‘having taken into consideration the exceptional circumstances and examples
from the past’, have decided ‘to send us a special Commission, which is
authorized to study and act on the spot on the basis and within the bounds of
definite orders which are in agreement with the spirit and tradition of the
Church’.
“In your Holiness’ instructions to the members of the Mission one of the
main points is your desire that I, as the All-Russian Patriarch, ‘for the sake
of the unification of those who have cut themselves off and for the sake of the
flock, should sacrifice myself and immediately resign from the administration
of the Church, as befits a true and love-filled pastor who cares for the
salvation of many, and that at the same time the Patriarchate should be
abolished, albeit temporarily, because it came into being in completely
abnormal circumstances at the beginning of the civil war and because it is
considered a major obstacle to the reestablishment of peace and unity’.
Definite instructions are also given to the Commission regarding which
tendencies [factions] they should rely on in their work.
“On reading the indicated protocols, we were in no small measure
disturbed and surprised that the Representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate,
the head of the Constantinopolitan Church, should without prior contact with
us, as the lawful representative and head of the whole of the Russian Orthodox
Church, interfere in the inner life and affairs of the Autocephalous Russian
Church. The Holy Councils... have always recognized the primacy in honour, but
not in power, of the Bishop of Constantinople over the other Autocephalous
Churches. Let us also remember the canon that ‘without being invited, bishops
must not pass beyond the boundaries of their own jurisdiction for the sake of
ordination or any other ecclesiastical affair.’ For that reason any attempt by
any Commission without consulting me, the only lawful and Orthodox
First-Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, and without my knowledge, is
unlawful and will not be accepted by the Russian Orthodox peoples, and will
bring, not pacification, but still more disturbance and schism into the life of
the Russian Orthodox Church, which has suffered much even without this. This
will be to the advantage only of our schismatics – the renovationists, whose
leaders now stand at the head of the so-called (self-called) Holy Synod, like
the former archbishop of Nizhegorod Eudocimus and others, who have been
defrocked by me and have been declared outside the communion of the Orthodox
Church for causing disturbance, schism and unlawful seizure of ecclesiastical
power.
“I, together with the whole mass of Russian Orthodox believers, and with
all my flock, very much doubt that your Holiness has, as you declare, ‘studied
exactly the course of Russian church life’. I doubt it because You have not
once turned to me for documentary explanations of who is the true and real
cause of disturbance and schism.
“The whole Russian Orthodox people long ago pronounced its righteous
word concerning both the impious meeting which dared to call itself a Council
in 1923, and the unhappy leaders of the renovationist schism… The people is not
with the schismatics, but with their lawful Orthodox Patriarch. Allow me also
to be sceptical about the measure your Holiness suggests for pacifying the
Church – that is, my resignation from the administration of the Church and the
abolition, albeit temporary, of the Patriarchate in Rus’. This would not pacify
the Church, but cause a new disturbance and bring new sorrows to our faithful
Archpastors and pastors who have suffered much even without this. It is not
love of honour or power which has forced me to take up the cross of the
patriarchy again, but the consciousness of my duty, submission to the will of
God and the voice of the episcopate which is faithful to Orthodoxy and the
Church. The latter, on receiving permission to assemble, in July last year,
synodically condemned the renovationists as schismatics and asked me again to
become head and rudder of the Russian Church until it pleases the Lord God to
give peace to the Church by the voice of an All-Russian Local Council.” [61]
Relations between Constantinople and the Russian Church continued to be
very frosty. Constantine’s successor, Basil III, broke communion with the
Living Church in 1929 – but then entered into communion with the Sovietized
Moscow Patriarchate of Metropolitan Sergius! When Metropolitan Peter came to
power in Russia in April, 1925, he was presented a letter from Patriarch Basil
III which called on the “Old Churchmen” to unite with the renovationists. His
comment was: “We still have to check whether this Patriarch is Orthodox…”
Metropolitan Sergius was also sceptical; he reacted to Constantinople’s
recognition of the renovationists as follows: “Let them recognize them; the
renovationists have not become Orthodox from this, only the Patriarchs have
become renovationists!” [62]
V. The EP’s false “Pan-Orthodox” Council of
1923 and acceptance of the uncanonical papist calendar in 1924.
At the beginning of 1923, a Commission was set up on the initiative of
the Greek government to see whether the Autocephalous Church of Greece could
accept the new calendar – the first step towards union with the West in prayer.
The Commission reported that “although the Church of Greece, like the other
Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, is inherently independent, they are
nevertheless firmly united and bound to each other through the principle of the
spiritual unity of the Church, composing one and one only Church, the Orthodox
Church. Consequently none of them can separate itself from the others and
accept the new calendar without becoming schismatic in relation to them.”
On February 3, Meletius Metaxakis wrote to the Church of Greece, arguing
for the change of calendar at his forthcoming Pan-Orthodox Council “so as to
further the cause, in this part of the Pan-Christian unity, of the celebration
of the Nativity and Resurrection of Christ on the same day by all those who are
called by the name of the Lord.”[63]
Shortly afterwards, on February 25, Archimandrite Chrysostom
Papadopoulos, was elected Archbishop of Athens by three out of a specially
chosen Synod of only five hierarchs – another ecclesiastical coup
d’état. During his enthronement speech, Chrysostom said that for
collaboration with the heterodox “it is not necessary to have common ground or
dogmatic union, for the union of Christian love is sufficient”. [64]
As one of the members of the commission which had rejected the new
calendar, Chrysostom might have been expected to resist Meletius’ call. But it
seems that the two men had more in common than the fact that they had both been
expelled from the Church of Jerusalem in their youth; for on March 6 Chrysostom
and his Synod accepted Meletius’ proposal and agreed to send a representative
to the forthcoming Council. Then, on April 16, he proposed to the Hierarchy
that 13 days should be added to the calendar, “for reasons not only of convenience,
but also of ecclesiastical, scientifically ratified accuracy”.
Five out of the thirty-two hierarchs – the metropolitans of Syros,
Patras, Demetrias, Khalkis and Thera – voted against this proposal. Two days
later, however, at the second meeting of the Hierarchy, it was announced that
Chrysostom’s proposal had been “unanimously” approved, but “with absolutely no
change to the Paschalion and Calendar of the Orthodox Church”. Moreover, it was
decided that the Greek Church would approve of any decision regarding the
celebration of Pascha made by the forthcoming Pan-Orthodox Council, provided it
was in accordance with the Canons…[65]
It was therefore with the knowledge that the Greek Church would support
his proposed reforms that Meletius convened a “Pan-Orthodox Council” in
Constantinople from May 10 to June 8, 1923, whose renovationist resolutions
concerned the “correction” of the Julian calendar, a fixed date for Pascha, the
second marriage of clergy, and various relaxations with regard to the clothing
of clergy, the keeping of monastic vows, impediments to marriage, the transfer
of Saints’ feasts from the middle of the week, and fasting.
However, hardly more than ten people, and no official representatives of
the Patriarchates, turned up for the “Pan-Orthodox Council”, so discredited was
its convener.[66]
And even Archbishop Chrysostom (Papadopoulos) had to admit: “Unfortunately, the
Eastern Patriarchs who refused to take part in the Congress rejected all of
its resolutions in toto from the very outset. If the
Congress had restricted itself only to the issue of the calendar, perhaps it
would not have encountered the kind of reaction that it did.” [67]
In his “Memorandum to the Holy Synod of the Hierarchy of Greece” (June
14, 1929), Metropolitan Irenaeus of Kassandreia wrote that the council was not
“Pan-Orthodox” but “anti-Orthodox”: “It openly and impiously trampled on the 34th
Apostolic Canon, which ordains: ‘It behoves the Bishops of every nation to know
among them who is the first or chief, and to recognize him as their head, and
to refrain from doing anything superfluous without his advice and approval… But
let not even such a one do anything without the advice and consent and approval
of all. For thus will there be concord, and God will be glorified through the
Lord in the Holy Spirit: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. He replaced
the Julian calendar with the Gregorian in spite of all the prohibitions
relating to it; he decided to supersede the Paschalion which had been eternally
ordained for the Orthodox Church by the decision of the First Ecumenical
Council, turning to the creation of an astronomically more perfect one in the
observatories of Bucharest, Belgrade and Athens; he allowed clerics’ hair to be
cut and their venerable dress to be replaced by that of the Anglican Pastors;
he introduced the anticanonical marriage and second marriage of priests; he
entrusted the shortening of the days of the fast and the manner of their
observance to the judgement of the local Churches, thereby destroying the order
and unity that prevailed in the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches of the East.
Acting in this way, he opened wide the gates to every innovation, abolishing
the distinctive characteristic of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is its
preservation, perfectly and without innovation, of everything that was handed
down by the Lord, the Apostles, the Fathers, and the Local and Ecumenical
Councils.” [68]
What made the council’s decisions still less acceptable was the reason
it gave for its innovations, viz., that changing the Paschalion “would make a
great moral impression on the whole civilized world by bringing the two
Christian worlds of the East and West closer through the unforced initiative of
this Orthodox Church…”[69]
The council was rejected by the Alexandrian, Antiochian and Jerusalem
Churches, and by the Russian Church Abroad and the Serbian Church. Metropolitan
Anthony (Khrapovitsky) called the calendar innovation “this senseless and
pointless concession to Masonry and Papism”.
That the adoption of the new calendar was an abomination in the sight of
God was clearly indicated by the great miracle of the sign of the cross in the
sky over the Old Calendarist monastery of St. John the Theologian in Athens in
September, 1925. In fact the new calendar had been anathematised by the Eastern
Patriarchs in three Councils, in 1583, 1587 and 1593, and synodically condemned
again in 1722, 1827, 1848, 1895 and 1904. By adopting it, the EP, as the
Commission of the Greek Church had rightly declared, became schismatic in
relation to the Churches keeping the Church calendar.
VI. The participation of the EP in the World
Council of Churches.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate was a founder-member of the WCC. It had
participated in several ecumenical conferences with the Protestants since its
official espousing of Ecumenism in 1920 and up to the founding congress of the
WCC in Amsterdam in 1948. A.V. Soldatov has chronicled the progressive
weakening in the Orthodox position during these years: “At the conference [of
Faith and Order] in Geneva in 1920 the spirit of extreme Protestant liberalism
gained the upper hand. It came to the point that when the Orthodox Metropolitan
Stephen of Sophia noted in his report: ‘The Church is only there where the
hierarchy has apostolic succession, and without such a hierarchy there are only
religious communities’, the majority of the delegates of the conference left
the hall as a sign of protest. At the next conference on Faith and Order [in
Lausanne] in 1927, victory again went to the extreme left Protestants. The
Orthodox delegation, experiencing psychological pressure at this conference,
was forced to issue the following declaration: ‘in accordance with the views of
the Orthodox Church, no compromises in relation to the teaching of the faith
and religious convictions can be permitted. No Orthodox can hope that a reunion
based on disputed formulae can be strong and positive… The Orthodox Church
considers that any union must be based exclusively on the teaching of the faith
and confession of the ancient undivided Church, on the seven Ecumenical
Councils and other decisions of the first eight centuries.’ But the numerous
speeches of the Orthodox explaining the teaching of the Church on the unity of
the Church seemed only to still further increase the incomprehension or
unwillingness to comprehend them on the part of the Protestant leaders of
Ecumenism. This tendency was consistently pursued by the Protestants at the
conferences in 1937 in Oxford and Edinburgh. Summing up this ‘dialogue’ at the
beginning of the century, Fr. Metrophanes Znosko-Borovsky remarks: ‘The
Orthodox delegates at Edinburgh were forced with sorrow to accept the existence
of basic, irreconcilable differences in viewpoint on many subjects of faith
between the Orthodox East and the Protestant West.’
“After the Second World War, the World Council of Churches was created.
It is necessary to point out that the movements ‘Faith and Order’ and ‘the
Christian Council of Life and Work’ were viewed by their organizers as
preparatory stages in the seeking of possible modes of integration of ‘the
Christian world’. The World Council of Churches differed from them in
principle. It set out on the path of ‘practical Ecumenism’ for the first time
in world history, declaring that it was the embryo of a new type of universal
church. The first, so to speak founding conference of the WCC in Amsterdam
chose as its motto the words: ‘Human disorder and God’s house-building’. At it,
as Archbishop Vitaly remarks, ‘every effort was made to destroy the teaching on
the One, True, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’. “[70]
Among the rules of the WCC which bind every member is the following: “A
church must recognize the essential interdependence of the churches, particularly
those of the same confession, and must practise constructive ecumenical
relations with other churches within its country or region. This will normally
mean that the church is a member of the national council of churches or similar
body and of the regional ecumenical organisation."
Article I of the WCC Constitution reads:
"The World Council of Churches is a fellowship of churches which
confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures
(sic) and therefore seek to fulfil together their common calling to the glory
of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit." And the Constitution also
declares that the
primary purpose of the fellowship of churches in the World Council of Churches
is to call one another to “visible unity in one faith and in one eucharistic
fellowship, expressed in worship and common life in Christ, through witness and
service to the world, and to advance towards that unity in order that the world
may believe”.
Further, according to Section II of the WCC
Rules, entitled Responsibilities of
Membership, "Membership in the World Council of Churches signifies
faithfulness to the Basis of the Council, fellowship in the Council,
participation in the life and work of the Council and commitment to the
ecumenical movement as integral to the mission of the church.”
In accepting these terms the Orthodox
churches that entered the WCC clearly accepted a Protestant ecclesiology.
VII. The
Apostasy of Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras.
In 1949 there flew into Constantinople – on US President Truman’s plane
– the second Meletius Metaxakis, the former Archbishop of North and South
America Athenagoras, who in 1919 had been appointed secretary of the Holy Synod
of the Church of Greece by Metaxakis himself. [71] By an
extraordinary coincidence Athenagoras was a former spiritual son of
Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina, leader of the Greek Old Calendarists, so
that the leaders of the opposing sides in the Church struggle in the early
1950s were, like David and Absalom, a holy father and his apostate son.
Patriarch Maximus was forced into retirement on grounds of mental
illness and the 33rd degree Mason Athenagoras took his place. In his
enthronement speech he went far beyond the bounds of the impious masonic encyclical
of 1920 and proclaimed the dogma of ‘Pan-religion’, declaring: “We are in error
and sin if we think that the Orthodox Faith came down from heaven and that the
other dogmas [i.e. religions] are unworthy. Three hundred million men have
chosen Mohammedanism as the way to God and further hundreds of millions are
Protestants, Catholics and Buddhists. The aim of every religion is to make man
better.”[72]
In 1960 the Orthodox Churches in the WCC met on Rhodes to establish a
catalogue of topics to be discussed at a future Pan-Orthodox Council. “In the
course of the debate on the catalogue,” write Gordienko and Novikov, “the
Moscow Patriarchate’s delegation suggested the removal of some of the subjects
(The Development of Internal and External Missionary Work, The Methods of
Fighting Atheism and False Doctrines Like Theosophy, Spiritism, Freemasonry,
etc.) and the addition of some others (Cooperation between the Local Orthodox
Churches in the Realisation of the Christian Ideas of Peace, Fraternity and Love
among Peoples, Orthodoxy and Racial Discrimination, Orthodoxy and the Tasks of
Christians in Regions of Rapid Social Change)… Besides working out the topics
for the future Pre-Council, the First Conference passed the decision ‘On the
Study of Ways for Achieving Closer Contacts and Unity of Churches in a
Pan-Orthodox Perspective’, envisaging the search for contacts with Ancient
Eastern (non-Chalcedonian) Churches (Monophysites), the Old Catholic, Anglican,
Catholic, and Protestant Churches, as well as the World Council of Churches.” [73]
In other words, the Orthodox henceforth were to abandon the struggle
against Atheism, Freemasonry and other false religions, and were to engage in
dialogue towards union with all the Christian heretics – while at the same time
persecuting the True Orthodox and using ecumenical forums to further the ends
of Soviet foreign policy in its struggle with the Capitalist West!
It is not recorded that the EP objected to this programme…
Athenagoras’ apostate course received a boost from the WCC’s General
Assembly in New Delhi in 1961, which marked the decisive dogmatic break between
“World Orthodoxy” and True Orthodoxy. If, until then, it could be argued,
albeit unconvincingly, that the new calendarists had not apostasised, and that
only a few of their leaders were ecumenist heretics, this could no longer be
maintained after the summary statement signed by all the delegates at New
Delhi, which declared, among other things: “we consider that the work of
creating the One, Universal Church must unfailingly be accompanied by the
destruction and disappearance of certain outmoded, traditional forms of
worship”.
This was an outright challenge delivered to the Holy Tradition of the
One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church! And, having delivered it, the
Orthodox delegates seemed to lose all restraint. After the New Delhi congress,
convened, appropriately enough, in the centre of the Hindu world, the
ecumenical movement climbed into a higher gear, and even, within a decade or two,
into the realm of “Super-ecumenism” – relations with non-Christian religions.
Already before the Delhi Assembly, in April, 1961, the Greek Archbishop
James of North and South America (a Freemason of the 33rd degree)
had said: “We have tried to rend the seamless robe of the Lord – and then we
cast ‘arguments’ and ‘pseudo-documents’ to prove – that ours is the Christ, and
ours is the Church… Living together and praying together without any walls of
partition raised, either by racial or religious prejudices, is the only way
that can lead surely to unity.” What
could these “pseudo-documents” and “religious prejudices” have been if not the
sacred Canons which forbid the Orthodox from praying together with heretics?
Then, in April, 1963, he said: “It would be utterly foolish for the true
believer to pretend or to insist that the whole truth has been revealed only to
them, and they alone possess it. Such a claim would be both unbiblical and
untheological… Christ did not specify the date nor the place that the Church
would suddenly take full possession of the truth.” This statement, which more
or less denied that the Church is, as the Apostle Paul said, “the pillar and
ground of the Truth” (I Timothy. 3.15), caused uproar in Greece and on
Mount Athos. However, Athenagoras supported James, calling his position
“Orthodox”. From this time on, the two Masons went steadily ahead making ever
more flagrantly anti-Orthodox statements. As we shall see, there was some
opposition from more conservative elements in the autocephalous Churches; but
the opposition was never large or determined enough to stop them…
At a meeting of the Faith and Order movement in Montreal in 1963, a
memorandum on “Councils of Churches in the Purpose of God” declared: “The
Council [WCC] has provided a new sense of the fullness of the Church in its
unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. These marks of the Church can no
longer be simply applied to our divided churches, therefore.”
Although this memorandum was not accepted in the end (Fr. George
Florovsky objected to it in the plenary session), it showed how the WCC was
encroaching on the Orthodox Church’s understanding of herself as the One
Church. Indeed, it could be argued that the Orthodox participants had already abandoned
this dogma. For as early as the Toronto, 1950 statement of the WCC’s Central
Committee, it had been agreed that an underlying assumption of the WCC was that
the member-churches “believe that the Church of Christ is more inclusive than
the membership of their own body”. [74]
At the Second Pan-Orthodox Conference in Rhodes, in September, 1963, it
was unanimously agreed that the Orthodox should enter into dialogue with the
Catholics, provided it was “on equal terms”. In practice, this meant that the Catholics
should abandon their eastern-rite missions in Orthodox territories. The
Catholics have never shown much signs of wishing to oblige in this, but they
did help to make a dialogue easier by redefining the Orthodox, in Vatican II’s
decree on Ecumenism, as “separated brethren” rather than “schismatics”.
In 1968 the Fourth General Assembly of the WCC took place in Uppsala. It
considerably furthered the ecumenical movement, with the Orthodox, as the new
general secretary Carson Blake joyfully pointed out, taking full part in all
the sections and committees and not, as often in the past, issuing separate
statements disagreeing with the majority Protestant view. Archbishop Vitaly
(Ustinov) of Canada said to the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside
Russia: “At the opening of the Assembly an ecumenical prayer was read in the
name of all those assembles: ‘O God our Father, You can create everything anew.
We entrust ourselves to You, help us to live for others, for Your love extends
over all people, and to search for the Truth, which we have not known…’ How
could the Orthodox listen to these last words? It would have been interesting
to look at that moment at the faces of the Orthodox hierarchs who had declared
for all to hear that they, too, did not know the Truth. Every batyushka of ours
in the remotest little village knows the Truth by experience, as he stands
before the throne of God and prays to God in spirit and in truth. Even The
Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, which is completely subject to the
censorship of the communist party, in citing the words of the prayer in its
account of this conference, did not dare to translate the English ‘truth’ by
the word ‘istina’, but translated it as ‘pravda’ [‘righteousness’]. Of course,
everyone very well understood that in the given case the text of the prayer was
speaking without the slightest ambiguity about the Truth. Perhaps the Orthodox
hierarchs have resorted, in the conference, to the old Jesuit practice of reservatio
mentalis, but in that case if all these delegates do not repent of the sin
of communion in prayer with heretics, then we must consider them to be on the
completely false path of apostasy from the Truth of Orthodoxy… Ecumenism is the
heresy of heresies because until now each heresy in the history of the Church
has striven to take the place of the true Church, but the ecumenical movement,
in uniting all the heresies, invites all of them together to consider
themselves the one true Church.”[75]
VIII. The EP’s “Lifting of the Anathemas” on
the Roman Papacy.
On January 5 and 6, 1964, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras met in
Jerusalem and prayed together. This was a clear transgression of the canons
concerning relations with heretics (Apostolic canon 45). Archbishop Chrysostom
of Athens was reported as saying that “while the Pope is going to the Holy Land
to kneel before the Saviour’s sepulchre, you (Athenagoras) are going to kneel
before the Pope and bury Orthodoxy.”
Further intense activity led, on December 7, 1965, to the “lifting of
the anathemas” of 1054 between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. The
announcement was made simultaneously in Rome and Constantinople. It included
the following words: “Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I with his synod,
in common agreement, declare that: a. They regret the offensive words, the
reproaches without foundation, and the reprehensible gestures which, on both
sides, have marked or accompanied the sad events of this period [viz. In the 11th
century]. B. They likewise regret and remove both from memory and from the
midst of the Church the sentences of excommunication which followed these
events, the memory of which has influenced actions up to our day and has
hindered closer relations in charity; and they commit these excommunications to
oblivion.” [76]
It should be pointed out, first, that in
saying that the schism of 1054 was based on “reproaches without foundation”,
the Patriarch was in effect saying that the Papacy was not, or never had been,
heretical – although the Papacy had renounced none of its heresies, and Pope
Paul VI had reasserted papal infallibility as recently as Vatican II. Secondly,
while relations with excommunicated individuals or Churches can be restored if
those individuals or Churches repent, anathemas against heresies cannot be
removed insofar as a heresy remains a heresy forever.
In the journal Ekklesia Archbishop Chrysostom of Athens denied
that the Patriarch had the authority to act independently of the other Orthodox
Churches. And he said: “I am convinced that no other Orthodox Church will copy
the Ecumenical Patriarch’s action.”[77] From
this time, several monasteries and sketes on Mount Athos ceased to commemorate
the Patriarch.
On December 15, 1965, Metropolitan Philaret, First-Hierarch of the ROCA,
wrote to the Patriarch protesting against his action: “Your gesture puts a sign
of equality between error and truth. For centuries all the Orthodox Churches
believed with good reasons that it has violated no doctrine of the Holy
Ecumenical Councils; whereas the Church of Rome has introduced a number of
innovations in its dogmatic teaching. The more such innovations were
introduced, the deeper was to become the separation between the East and the
West. The doctrinal deviations of Rome in the eleventh century did not yet
contain the errors that were added later. Therefore the cancellation of the
mutual excommunication of 1054 could have been of meaning at that time, but now
it is only evidence of indifference in regard to the most important errors, namely
new doctrines foreign to the ancient Church, of which some, having been exposed
by St. Mark of Ephesus, were the reason why the Church rejected the Union of
Florence… No union of the Roman Church with us is possible until it renounces
its new doctrines, and no communion in prayer can be restored with it without a
decision of all the Churches, which, however, can hardly be possible before the
liberation of the Church of Russia which at present has to live in the
catacombs… A true dialogue implies an exchange of views with a possibility of
persuading the participants to attain an agreement. As one can perceive from
the Encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, Pope Paul VI understands the dialogue as
a plan for our union with Rome with the help of some formula which would,
however, leave unaltered its doctrines, and particularly its dogmatic doctrine
about the position of the Pope in the Church. However, any compromise with
error is foreign to the history of the Orthodox Church and to the essence of
the Church. It could not bring a harmony in the confessions of the Faith, but
only an illusory outward unity similar to the conciliation of dissident
Protestant communities in the ecumenical movement.” [78]
IX. The EP’s Heretical “Thyateira
Confession”.
In 1975, Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira and Great Britain
published, with the explicit blessing and authorisation of Patriarch Demetrius,
his Thyateira Confession, which expressed the novel idea that the Church
is a house without walls which anyone can enter freely and receive “eucharistic
hospitality”. And he wrote: “Orthodox Christians believe that the following
Churches have valid and true Priesthood or Orders. The Orthodox, the Roman
Catholic, the Ethiopian, the Copto-Armenian and the Anglican. The Ecumenical Patriarchate
of Constantinople, the Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Patriarchate of
Jerusalem, the Patriarchate of Romania and the Church of Cyprus half a century
ago declared officially that the Anglican Church has valid Orders by
dispensation and that means that Anglican Bishops, Priests and Deacons can
perform valid sacraments as can those of the Roman Catholic Church.”[79] This
heretical confession was condemned by Metropolitan Philaret and his Synod.
X. The EP’s Participation in “Super
Ecumenism”.
In
the early 1980s inter-Christian ecumenism was succeeded by inter-faith
ecumenism, or “super ecumenism”, with the EP, as usual, taking a leading role.
Already in the WCC’s General Assembly at Nairobi in 1975, the Orthodox
delegates, having signed an agreement to recognize the sacraments of the
non-Orthodox delegates, had declared that “the Orthodox do not expect the other
Christians to be converted to Orthodoxy in its historic and cultural reality of
the past and the present and to become members of the Orthodox Church” – which
gave the lie to their excuse that they were participating in the ecumenical
movement “to witness to the non-Orthodox”.[80]
Again, in 1980, the Ecumenical Press Service declared that the
WCC was working on plans to unify all Christian denominations into a single new
religion.[81]
Then, in 1982, an inter-denominational eucharistic service was
composed at a conference in Lima, Peru, in which the Protestant and Orthodox
representatives to the WCC agreed that the baptism, eucharist and ordinations
of all denominations were valid and
acceptable.[82]
But the greatest shock came in 1983, at the Vancouver General Assembly
of the WCC. This was attended by representatives of every existing religion and
began with a pagan rite performed by local Indians. The participation of
Orthodox hierarchs in religious services with representatives of all the
world’s religions required a rebuke – and a rebuke was forthcoming.
First, the Greek Old Calendarist Metropolitan Gabriel of the Cyclades
attempted to address the Vancouver Assembly. But he was not allowed to speak by
the ecumenists, who thereby demonstrated that they are “tolerant” and “loving”
to every kind of blasphemy, but not to the expression of True Christianity.
Then the Synod of the ROCA, also meeting in Canada, anathematised ecumenism,
declaring: “To those who attack the Church of Christ by teaching that Christ’s
Church is divided into so-called ‘branches’ which differ in doctrine and way of
life, or that the Church does not exist visibly, but will be formed in the
future when all ‘branches’ or sects or denominations, and even religions will
be united in one body; and who do not distinguish the priesthood and mysteries
of the Church from those of the heretics, but say that the baptism and
eucharist of heretics is effectual for salvation; therefore to those who
knowingly have communion with these aforementioned heretics or advocate,
disseminate , or defend their new heresy of Ecumenism under the pretext of
brotherly love or the supposed unification of separated Christians, Anathema.”[83]
The implication of this anathema was clear: since the EP was a fully
participating member of the WCC, it was under anathema and deprived of the
grace of sacraments. As I.M. has written: “There is no heresy without heretics
and their practical activity. The WCC in its declarations says: The Church
confesses, the Church teaches, the Church does this, the Church does that. In
this way the WCC witnesses that it does not recognize itself to be simply a council
of churches, but the one church. And all those who are members of the WCC are
members of this one false church, this synagogue of satan. And by this
participation in the WCC all the local Orthodox churches fall under the
anathema of the ROCA of 1983 and fall away from the True Church.…” [84]
In 1990, a Declaration was agreed at Chambésy in Switzerland
between a Joint Commission of theologians of the Orthodox (including the EP)
and the Monophysites (called “Oriental Orthodox” in the documents), in which
the Orthodox and Monophysites were called two “families of churches” (a phrase
unknown to Orthodox ecclesiology).
Paragraph Four of the Declaration said: “The two families accept that
the two natures [of Christ] with their own energies and wills are united
hypostatically and naturally without confusion, without change, without
division and without separation and that they are distinguished only in thought
(en qewria).”
This is already completely unacceptable from an Orthodox point of view,
and represents a heretical, Monophysite formulation. The two natures and wills
of Christ are not distinguishable “only in thought”, but also in reality.
Paragraph Seven also speaks of the two natures being distinguishable
“only in thought”, which implies, as Ludmilla Perepiolkina points out “an absence
of this distinction in reality”.[85]
Paragraph Five states: “The two families accept that the One Who wills
and acts is always the single Hypostasis of the incarnate Logos”. However, as
Perepiolkina again correctly points out, according to the teaching of St.
Maximus the Confessor,
“the concept of energy (activity) of nature is attributable only to nature as a
whole, and not to the hypostasis. This teaching was affirmed at the Sixth
Ecumenical Council. In the Chambésy Declaration, as it is evident from
Paragraph Five, natural wills and energies in Jesus Christ are attributed to
His Hypostasis. In other words, this Paragraph is a purely Monothelite
formula”.[86]
Paragraph Eight states: “The two families accept the first three
Ecumenical Councils which form our common heritage. With regard to the four
later Councils of the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox affirm that, for them,
points one through seven are also the teaching of these four later Councils, whereas
the oriental Orthodox consider this affirmation of the Orthodox like their own
interpretation. In this sense the oriental Orthodox respond positively to this
affirmation.”
An unclear statement, about which one thing, however, is clear: the
Monophysites do not commit themselves to accepting the Fourth, Fifth,
Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Councils in the way the Orthodox do, but only
“positively respond to their affirmation”, which means nothing in dogmatic
terms.
Paragraph Nine states: “In the light of our joint declaration on
Christology and the joint affirmations mentioned above, we now clearly realize
and understand that our two families have always loyally guarded the same and
authentic Christological Orthodox Faith, and have maintained uninterrupted the
apostolic tradition although they may have used the Christological terms in a
different manner. It is that common faith and that continual loyalty to the
apostolic tradition which must be the basis of our unity and communion.”
This is in flat contradiction to 1500 years of Orthodox Tradition. In
this period all the Holy Fathers unambiguously affirmed that the Monophysites
had not “loyally guarded the same and authentic Christological Orthodox
Faith”, and were in fact heretics. But the modern ecumenists claim that all the
six hundred and thirty holy Fathers of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, as well
as all the Fathers of all the succeeding Council that condemned Monophytism,
were wrong, and the whole controversy was simply based on some linguistic
misunderstandings!
Paragraph Ten of the Declaration states: “The two families accept that
all the anathemas and the condemnations of the past which kept us divided must
be lifted by the Churches so that the last obstacle to full unity and communion
of our two families can be removed by the grace and power of God. The two
families accept that the lifting of the anathemas and the condemnations will be
based on the fact that the Councils and the father previously anathematised or
condemned were not heretics.”
So the Seven Ecumenical Councils need to be amended, say these
“theologians”, and the anathemas against all the Monophysite councils and
fathers, including the notorious heresiarchs Dioscurus, Timothy and Severus,
lifted! This is a clear and explicit rejection of the Faith of the Seven
Ecumenical Councils! Of course, the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches (with the
exception of Jerusalem) have already implicitly
rejected the Councils and the Fathers by their communion in prayer and the sacraments
with all sorts of heretics, and even pagans, the WCC General Assembly in
Canberra in 1991 being perhaps the most extreme example. Nevertheless, it is a
further and important stage to say explicitly
that the Ecumenical Councils were wrong,
that the Monophysites should not have been condemned, that they were Orthodox
all these centuries although the Holy Fathers and all the saints of the
Orthodox Church considered them to be heretics. This is not simply a failure to
come up to the standards of the Ecumenical Councils: it is a renunciation of the standards themselves.
In essence, the Local Orthodox Churches, led by the EP, here placed
themselves under the anathemas against Monophysitism from the Fourth Ecumenical
Council onwards, and must be considered to be “semi-Monophysites”.
The ROCOR and the Greek Old Calendarists quickly condemned the
Chambésy agreement.[87]
Nevertheless, in 1992 the patriarchate of Antioch entered into full, official
communion with the Monophysites. There is every indication that the Moscow
Patriarchate wants to go along the same path. The MP’s relations with the
Armenian Monophysites are especially close.
Chambésy was followed by the Seventh General Assembly of the WCC
in Canberra in 1991, in which the Orthodox delegates blasphemed against the
Faith still more blatantly. Thus aboriginal pagans invited the participants to
pass through a “cleansing cloud of smoke” uniting Aboriginal spirituality to
Christian spirituality!
In March, 1992, the heads of the Local Orthodox Churches met in
Constantinople and official renounced proselytism among Western Christians. Of
course, this renunciation had been implicit in the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s
statements since the encyclical of 1920. But it still came as a shock to see
the “Church” renounced the hope of conversion and therefore salvation for
hundreds of millions of westerners.
Union with the Monophysites proceeded in parallel with moves for union
with the Catholics. In 1994 the Local Orthodox churches signed the Balamand
agreement with the Catholics, in which the Orthodox and the Catholics were
declared to be sister-Churches in the full sense, “two lungs” of the same
organism (with the Monophysites as a “third lung”?). The Balamand Agreement,
which was signed on the Orthodox side by Moscow, Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch, Romania, Cyprus, Poland and Finland, declared: “Catholics and
Orthodox… are once again discovering each other as sister churches” and
“recognizing each other as sister churches”. “On each side it is acknowledged
that what Christ has entrusted to His Church – the profession of the apostolic
faith, participation in the same sacraments, the apostolic succession of
bishops, and, above all, the one priesthood celebrating the one Sacrifice of
Christ – cannot be considered to be the exclusive property of one of our
Churches.” The baptism of penitent papists into the Orthodox Church was
prohibited: “All rebaptism (sic) is prohibited.” The Orthodox Church
“recognizes the Catholic Church in her entirety as a sister Church, and
indirectly recognizes also the Oriental Catholic Churches” (the Uniates).
“Special attention should be given on both sides to the preparation and
education of future priests with regard to the new ecclesiology, (that they
may) be informed of the apostolic succession of the other Church and the
authenticity of its sacramental life, (so that) the use of history in a
polemical manner (may be avoided)”.
This was an official acceptance of the “branch theory” of the Church.
There were protests in Greece and Mount Athos, but Patriarch Bartholomew forced
the protestors to back down. This was the same Patriarch, the most senior in
Orthodoxy, who said a few years later: “Orthodox Christian and modernist,
Protestant and modernist, Jew and modernist, Catholic and modernist: however we
worship, as long as we abide in our faith and unite it to our works in the
world, we bring the living and always timely message of Divine wisdom into the
modern world.”[88]
So the EP today combines the broadest welcome to almost all contemporary
heresies and false religions while persecuting those who hold to the True
Orthodox faith. To him and to those with him the Church proclaims: Anathema!
July 28 / August 10, 2004.
5. A LETTER TO AN ANGLICAN FRIEND ON HERESY
Dear C.,
I
think it’s a little unfortunate that this conversation centres on the calendar
question, because we can’t profitably discuss this question until we have
agreed on certain basic principles. But let me say this much before turning to the
more basic issues. The calendar question is not about astronomical accuracy: it
is about unity of worship. Unity of worship between the Heavenly and the
Earthly Church, and between all parts of the Earthly Church, has always been of
great importance to the Orthodox. That is why it occupied the heads of the
Churches in the second century (Rome and the East), at the First Ecumenical
Council (where the basic rules of our calendar were established), the Synod of
Whitby in 664 (unity between the Celts and Saxons), many Synods in East and
West in the 16th-18th centuries (England waited 169 years
before adopting the Gregorian calendar, and even then there were riots in the
streets), and in modern times. If unity of worship is unimportant to you, then
the calendar question will be unimportant to you. But it is important to us,
and has been important to most of the Christian world for most of Christian
history.
But let’s get down to basic principles. You haven’t answered my question
about how you interpret the Scriptural passages I cited. So let me take the
first: “If he refuses to hear even the Church, let him be to you as a heathen
and a tax collector” (Matthew 18.17). This passage indicates the great
importance of the Divinely founded institution of the Church – that institution
which St. Paul called “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy
3.15). The Lord says that we must obey the Church; St. Paul - that we cannot be
in the truth without being in the Church. Now we cannot obey the Church unless
we know where it is. So what are the marks of the Church? True faith and true
worship. (Using more technically theological language, the Creed says they are
Unity (or Singleness), Holiness, Catholicity and Apostolicity.) When quarrels
arose over what was the true faith and worship of the Church, the bishops got
together in Councils to thrash the matter out. When the Councils had reached a
decision, all the bishops were required to sign a confession of faith
expressing that decision. Those who refused, insofar as they were refusing to
obey the Church, were treated, in accordance with the Lord’s words, “as heathen
and tax collectors”. Of course, there were some “robber councils” – that is,
councils at which heresy, rather than Orthodoxy, triumphed. But over the years
and centuries seven particularly important Councils were accepted in both East
and West (excluding the Monophysite and Nestorian “Churches”) as having
particular authority. These define both the dogmatic faith and the canonical
discipline of the Orthodox Church to this day.
Unfortunately, however, in the West since the rise of the Papacy, and
especially since the Reformation, the Ecumenical Councils have been
increasingly ignored, even despised. The result is that the West has not only
lost unity of faith and worship within itself: it has also lost it with the
Church of the Seven Ecumenical Councils – that is, the Church of the first
millenium of Christian history. Now anyone can proclaim just about any kind of
teaching, however far removed from Christianity, label it “Christian” and pass
muster as a “Christian” and a member of the “Church” (you can be a member of
the Methodist “Church” in England, for example, without even believing in
God!).
Until the early twentieth century the Orthodox Church retained both its
internal unity and its unity with the Early Apostolic Church through its
faithfulness to the teachings of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, “the seven
pillars of wisdom”. However, under the twin hammer blows of Communism and
Ecumenism (“Ecucommunism”, as I have called it), the major part of the Orthodox
Church has also fallen away. This should not surprise us: the Lord called His
Church a “little flock” and put the rhetorical question: “When I come again,
shall I find faith on the earth?” (Luke 12.40, 18.8). (Answer: not
much.) But He also said that “the gates of hell will not prevail against the
Church” (Matthew 16.18). So even in the last, most terrible times, when
the vast majority of mankind will fall into the abyss, there will still be the
opportunity for the lover of truth to find the One True Church, Christ’s
“little flock”; and even in our terrible times there have been literally millions
of martyrs for the truth, and great wonderworkers whom God has glorified with
great signs and miracles on the earth. However, to those who “did not receive
the love of the truth, that they might be saved,… God will send a strong
delusion, that they should believe the lie” (II Thessalonians 2.11-12).
They will include the “believers” of the last, “Laodicean” period of Church
history, of whom the Lord says: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor
hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth” (Revelation 3.16).
Now the modern, lukewarm “believer” trots out a number of standard
arguments against the view I have just propounded. I shall call them the
“persecution” argument, the “linguistic” argument, the “doctrine doesn’t matter
anyway” argument and the “God is merciful” argument.
1.
The Persecution Argument. This may be stated as follows: If we
become obsessed with doctrinal niceties, we’ll only end up killing each other
without anyone coming any closer to the “truth”. This is the way to the
Inquisition, to Auschwitz, etc.
Needless to say, arguments about fundamental truth do not always end in
blood; and the fact that they do occasionally should not put us off from “the
one thing necessary” – the search for the truth. In any case, as I have already
indicated, the Orthodox Church believes that peaceful persuasion, not physical
persecution, is the right method for bringing people to a knowledge of the
truth. That has been the method employed by all Orthodox missionaries and
preachers in all ages. The teaching that heretics should be killed was first
officially proclaimed, not by any Orthodox saint or council, but by Thomas
Aquinas and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, whence it entered the
bloodstream of the Early Protestants and Anglicans. The Inquisition was a
Catholic institution, and I know of no similar institution established by any
Church authority in any Orthodox land.
Some physical persecution has been undertaken by secular authorities, it
is true. For example, St. Constantine the Great exiled Arius and his followers
after the First Ecumenical Council, and his example was followed by some other
Orthodox emperors and kings. However, before condemning such an act, it would
be worth asking why it was done.
Two possible answers suggest themselves.
First, that, having failed with peaceful persuasion, the Emperor may have thought
that a little physical and psychological suffering would humble the heretics
and therefore dispose them to receive the truth, which always requires
humility. This is an unlikely explanation in this case, but it should not be
forgotten that “spare the rod and spoil the child” is a Biblical precept, and
that God Himself often imposes physical sufferings on His people in order to
bring them to their senses – there are many examples in the Bible from the
Babylonian captivity to the plagues of the Book of Revelation.
More likely, the Emperor recognised that the Arians were beyond
persuading, and that he exiled the heretics in order to protect those who were
still Orthodox, but weak or immature in their thinking, from the corrupting
influence of their teaching. Don’t forget that in the understanding of the
Early Church, and of the Orthodox Church to this day, heresy is a disease which
kills the soul, cuts it off from God; it is far worse in its effects than the
worst of physical afflictions. That is why the apostles were so severe in
relation to it. “If anyone preaches any other gospel to you that what you have
received, let him be anathema” (Galatians 1.8). “A heretic after the
first and second admonition reject” (Titus 3.10). “Whoever transgresses
and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God… If anyone comes
to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into your house nor
greet him” (II John 9-10).
2.
The Linguistic Argument. How often have I heard the argument, even
from very intelligent people: “These disputes were just about words; we mustn’t
quarrel just about words; the truth cannot be wrapped up in linguistic
definitions.” Of course, the truth cannot be “wrapped up” in words. But words
can point to a truth – or a falsehood. “You obeyed from the heart that form of
doctrine to which you were delivered,” says St. Paul (Romans 6.17).
Obviously he was talking about some teaching expressed in words. Again, “hold
fast the form of sound words you have heard from me,” he says (II Timothy
1.13). What is he talking about if not about some verbally expressed teaching
of the faith? Again: “With the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with
the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10.10). So our
words matter: with them we confess the truth or heresy, unto salvation or
damnation. By what other way, besides “the form of sound words” and “confession
with the mouth”, do we distinguish truth from falsehood?
If words
are vitally important to scientists and writers and lawyers, why should they be
any the less important to theologians? To say that Christ is “of one substance”
with the Father is to express a radically different idea from saying that
Christ is “of a similar substance” to the Father, yet this enormous difference
in ideas is expressed by the difference of only one letter (iota) in Greek
(“homoousios” as opposed to “homoiousios”). As the Lord Himself said, “not one
iota shall pass away…” In the fourth century, both learned people and simple
people, both Orthodox and heretics, understood both the difference in these
words and the enormous importance of the difference. Not now! Why? The answer
to this question brings me to:
3. The “Doctrine Doesn’t Matter Anyway”
Argument. For nearly nineteen centuries, Christians and heretics
argued about truth and heresy, but they had this in common: they agreed that
there was a difference, and that the difference was vitally important.
What distinguishes 20th-century heretics from almost all previous
ones is that they don’t even believe in the existence of heresy – or, if they
do, they don’t believe it’s important. I once read a review in Church Times
of a book on the wars between Anglicans and Catholics in sixteenth-century
England. The reviewer said that both sides were equally right, and the
“martyrs” on both sides were martyrs, even though they died for completely
contradictory “truths”, because the only real heresy is the idea that there is
such a thing as heresy. This is essentially the doctrine of ecumenism, which
would unite every conceivable truth and heresy in a pan-cosmic religious stew
in which everyone can believe as they like “because all paths lead to God”. But
this is simply the abandonment of reason and objectivity in favour of complete
subjectivism. And the Orthodox Church has officially defined it as “the heresy
of heresies” because it combines all heresies in itself while denying the very
existence of objective truth.
For if heresy doesn’t exist, then truth doesn’t exist either. And if the
difference between truth and heresy is unimportant, then Christianity and
religion in general are unimportant. Because if Christianity is anything at
all, it is TRUTH. “Father, sanctify them by Thy truth”, said the Lord. But if
anything goes, if anything is accepted as the truth, then where is the
possibility of sanctification?
Or of salvation? Until our inglorious twentieth century, all those who
called themselves Christians, heretics as well as true believers, accepted that
in Christ alone is salvation, and that the way to salvation is through true,
correct faith in Him – faith that is then expressed and confirmed by good
works. Faith without works is dead, and works without true faith, as the
Venerable Bede says, is also dead. It does not lead to salvation. Heretics are
not saved themselves, and lead others to perdition.
Let us hear some apostolic testimonies on this subject. “Their message
will spread like cancer. Hymenaeus and Philetus are of this sort, who have
strayed concerning the faith, saying that the resurrection is already past; and
they overthrow the faith of some” (II Timothy 2.17-18). “As Jannes and
Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt
minds, disapproved concerning the faith” (II Timothy 3.8). “Rebuke them
sharply, that they be sound in the faith” (Titus 1.13). “Heresies… and
the like: of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past,
that those who practise such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God“ (Galatians
5.20-21). “There will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in
destructive heresies, even denying the Lord Who bought them, and bring on
themselves swift destruction” (II Peter 2.1).
Do we need any more testimonies to the undeniable fact that heretics
destroy themselves and those who listen to them, and that, as St. Paul said,
“their mouths must be stopped” – by persuasion if they will listen, by
expulsion from the Church if they will not. For they are blind leaders of the
blind, as the Lord said – and both leaders and followers fall into a pit. They
are dry branches who will be cut off from the True Vine and thrown into the
fire, as the Lord again said.
But all this is too terrifying for some tender (St. Paul calls them
“itching”) ears, and they want to change the Gospel to make it “nicer”. So we
come to the following very nice “argument”:
4.
The “God Is Merciful” Argument. God will not condemn heretics, goes
the argument, for the simple reason that He is merciful. He is too compassionate
to send His creature to hell. The very idea is so uncivilized!
“Civilized” or not, it happens to be what we read in the Word of God –
and what we read in the word of God inscribed on our hearts, our conscience, if
only we read it honestly. Yes, God is merciful – to the merciful. But He is
also just, and rewards every man according to his works. Yes, He gives the
Truth – Himself – to those who love the truth. But the corollary is also true:
those who do not love the truth He gives over to the father of lies, Satan.
Sometimes this happens even in this life. Thus about one sinner St. Paul said:
“In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along
with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to
Satan for the destruction of the flesh” (I Corinthians 5.4-5). And St.
Peter wasn’t exactly merciful to Ananias and Sapphira… As David says in the
Psalms: “With the holy man wilt Thou be holy, and with the innocent man wilt
Thou be innocent. And with the elect man wilt Thou be elect, and with the
perverse wilt Thou be perverse…” (Psalm 17.25-26 (LXX)).
Any careful reader of the Gospel will agree that it is both the most
comforting, and the most terrifying book ever written. “Many are called, but
few are chosen.” “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “Depart from
Me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his
angels.” “Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him,
either in this age or in the age to come.” “It is more difficult for a rich man
to enter the Kingdom of heaven than…” “Depart from Me, I never knew you…” “You,
Capernaum,… will be brought down to hell.” “Better were it for that man if he
had never been born…”
Yes, God is merciful, because He gives us every opportunity to be saved,
and warns us in every way against the path that leads to damnation. But we are
unutterably foolish, because we want to rewrite the rules, as if we were the
Judge and not the man standing in the dock. “Wait a minute, you can’t really
mean that all who… will be damned!” “Okay, let Hitler and Stalin rot in hell,
but we’re such nice people, I’m such a nice person…!”
What a shock death will be for the vast majority of mankind! And all
because we do not want to believe what Christ has written with such clarity in
His Gospel. We want dispensations for our lusts and passions, for our criminal
indifference to the truth. We want to rewrite the Gospel, make it the Gospel
according to Luther, or John-Paul II, or George Carey, which absolves all
manner of heretics, all manner of evil perversions, all manner of betrayals of
the One Saviour of mankind. But St. Paul consigns all those who preach a
different Gospel to the terrible sentence of anathema. And what does the Apostle
of love and mercy say in the very last chapter of God’s Word? “I testify to
anyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to
these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book;
and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall
take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the
things which are written in this book….” (Revelation 22.18).
With love,
Vladimir.
September 3/16, 1999.
St. Edward the Martyr, King of England.
6.
ON MYSTERY AND MYSTIFICATION, or: ANGLICAN ECUMENISM
"None of the mysteries," writes Metropolitan Philaret of
Moscow, "of the most secret wisdom of God ought to appear alien or
altogether transcendent to us, but in all humility we must apply our spirit to
the contemplation of divine things." And so, in the Divine services of the
Orthodox Church, we are constantly being drawn to contemplate the mysteries of
our salvation - especially the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ, but also
those of the Holy Trinity, the creation of the world out of nothing, the Cross
and the Resurrection, the Church, the Second Coming and the Terrible Judgement,
man made in the image of God, eternal life and eternal damnation. By
contemplating these mysteries, our faith is strengthened and deepened, we draw
closer to God and His saints and further away from the abyss of unbelief and
heresy.
However, there is a trend in contemporary heretical thought that seeks
to use the concept of "mystery" to overturn faith in the mysteries
and replace it by a false religious mysticism and a pseudo-intellectual mystification.
This current of thought does not openly deny any of the mysteries of the faith
- with the exception of the mystery of the Church, upon whose denial the whole
of Protestantism is based. Rather, it loves to talk about "the eternal
Christ" of St. John's Gospel (their favourite because it is so
"mystical"), about "parousia" and "eternal life",
about "transfiguration" and "deification" and "resurrection"
- but in senses that are so alien to the Orthodox understanding that we have to
use these terms in quotation marks. Characteristic of this current of thought
is its blurring of the boundaries between psychology and religion, between
experiences of the soul and dogmas of the faith. Characteristic, too, is its
syncretism, its willingness, indeed determination, to identify Christian
concepts with pagan (especially Buddhist) ones, and the Christian world-view
with the scientific world-view - even those elements of the scientific
world-view, such as evolutionism, which are most contrary to traditional,
Orthodox Christianity.
When one asks the "mystifiers", as I shall call them, whether
they believe, for example, that Jesus Christ is God, the Creator of the
universe, one rarely gets a straight answer. Thus they may admit that Christ is
"divine" - but not that He is "God", that "God is
uniquely expressed in Christ" - but not that He created the universe. And
then if one shows some dissatisfaction by this lack of clarity, one is told
that one must not try to "analyze the mystery", that "words
cannot express the mystery", with more than a hint that one is not
"deep" or "mystical" or "apophatic" enough. And
if one counters that the Apostles and Fathers of the Church, who invented the
term "apophatic" and knew a great deal more about mysticism than any
of us, were nevertheless quite prepared to make the clear and categorical
statements of faith which the mystifiers are not prepared to make, one is
gently chided for being too "dogmatic" and "rationalist".
The unspoken assumption behind the mystifiers' "argument" is that
they, as educated people of the twentieth century, do not need the Apostles or
Fathers to guide them any more; like the gnostics of all ages, they know
better, they have a special insight into religious truth which does not
need words and definitions, because "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must keep silent"...
*
The leaders in this heretical trend are the Anglicans. Beginning from
the 1960s and the infamous book Honest to God, the Anglican Church has
undergone a most astonishing doctrinal degeneration. All the basic
truths of the faith have been denied, with astounding arrogance, from the
highest pulpits in the land, and with minimal resistance from the so-called
believers. The only issue which has produced any real rebellion has been the
ordination of women as priests - and this drew from the archbishop of
Canterbury the amazing reaction that those who believed in an exclusively male
priesthood (that is, 99.9% of all Christians, Orthodox and heretical, before
our present "enlightened" age) were "heretics"! In 1995,
after an Anglican priest was (very belatedly) defrocked for saying that God
"has no objective existence", 65 priests wrote an open letter to The
Times protesting the decision on the grounds that it was a “violation of
human rights”! It is in this "Church" of rampant liberalism, if not
outright atheism, that the mystifiers have flourished and prospered.
But the roots of Anglican mystification go much deeper; we see it
already in that issue which was at the heart of the Anglican Reformation - the
Eucharist. The early Anglican Reformers, being true Protestants, denied that
the sacrament of the Eucharist is the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and
truly His Body and Blood - and they were prepared to be burned at the stake for
this denial. However, since King Henry VIII remained a Catholic at heart, the
first Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, was forced to conceal his
Protestant tendencies and devise a form of words which could be interpreted in
either a Catholic or Protestant sense. Thus was invented the first
mystification of modern times - the doctrine of the "Real Presence"
of Christ in the Eucharist. The Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church could take it
to mean that Christ is “truly present” in His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.
The Low Church wing could take it to mean that Christ is not present
literally and physically, but only spiritually and symbolically. And the broad
mass of believers in the middle could take refuge from the necessity of
choosing between the two, mutually incompatible doctrines by saying simply that
it was an inexplicable mystery.
Of course,
the Eucharist is a great mystery. Of course, one cannot say how this, or
any of the other great mysteries of the faith takes place, nor subject them to
scientific analysis. But that is no reason for deliberate doctrinal ambiguity,
for making a mystification out of the mystery. The Apostles and the
Fathers of the Church were so conscious of the mystery of the Eucharist that it
was the one doctrine of the Church which was not proclaimed from the rooftops,
and which was hidden even from catechumens until after they had actually
partaken of it. But this is no way preventing them, when necessity (in the form
of the appearance of heresy) presented itself, of proclaiming the mystery
clearly and unambiguously - and of making the acceptance of the definitions of
the Seven Ecumenical Councils the touchstone of true belief in, and passport to
participation of, the mysteries.
That is why the Orthodox Church chants: "The preaching of the
Apostles and the doctrines of the Fathers confirmed the one Faith of the
Church. And wearing the garment of truth woven from the theology on high, she
rightly divideth and glorifieth the great mystery of piety." And again:
"The choir of the holy Fathers, which hath gathered from the ends of the
earth, hath taught the single essence of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and
hath carefully committed to the Church the mystery of theology." The
Church "rightly divides" the great mystery of piety from the mystery
of iniquity by uttering God-inspired definitions of the faith which are
immediately recognized by those who truly believe as expressing their own
faith. But those who are outside the Church, to whom the mystery of theology
has not been committed, instinctively feel that this definition does not
express what they believe; and so, if they are honest, they openly reject it,
and if they are dishonest, they resort to mystification.
Mystification like the following, which is to be found in the
theological novel Mystical Paths by the Anglican writer Susan Howatch:
"He paused again, and in that silence I heard the sentence resonate as the
footsteps of mysticism and Gnosticism echoed and re-echoed in the classic
Christian corridor. Then I saw Truth as a multi-sided diamond with the themes
of heresy and orthodoxy all glittering facets of a single reality, and beyond
the facets I glimpsed that mysterious Christ of St. John's Gospel, not the
Jesus of history but the Christ of Eternity who is turn pointed beyond himself
to the Truth no human mind could wholly grasp..." As if Truth were on a
par with heresy, or Gnosticism could co-exist with "classic"
Christianity, or "the Christ of Eternity" were not at the same
time "the Jesus of history"!
This passage comes in the middle of a "healing" session
conducted by an Anglican priest, which actually describes a psychic seance. And
this leads us to another important fact concerning the mystifiers: that in
rejecting the mystery of theology as defined by the Seven Ecumenical Councils,
they lay themselves open to a false and demonic mysticism. Hence the speaking
in tongues and emotional outpourings and "healings", the inter-faith
services and homosexual marriages and calling up of dead spirits by women
"priests". For just as Orthodox faith and obedience to all the
teachings of the Orthodox Church is the only entrance to true mysticism, so
heresy and mystification is the immediate passport to false mysticism, to
spiritual deception and, ultimately, to possession by demonic spirits. And such
possession can spread from individuals and groups of individuals to whole
churches and nations, as we see in the Russian revolution (which was preceded
by the spread, not only of Marxism, but also of Theosophy) and in the rise of
Nazism in Germany in the 1930s (which was preceded by the widespread practice
of occultism).
But the true mystics, such as St. John and St. Paul, were the sworn
enemies of all kinds of heresy, mystification and pseudo-mysticism. Thus St.
John says: "If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine,
receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed, for he that biddeth
him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds" (II John, 10-11). And
St. Paul says: "Examine yourselves whether ye be in the faith" (II
Corinthians13.5), and: "God is not the author of confusion, but of
peace" (I Corinthians 14.33), and: "The Spirit speaketh
expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving
heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons" (I Timothy 4.1).
*
The Greek word for "mystery" means literally that which is
shut or closed or hidden. Thus St. Paul was speaking of a mystery when he said
that he was "caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words, which it
is not lawful for a man to utter" (II Corinthians 12.4). These
words are hidden from us because we are not worthy, we are not in a spiritual
condition to receive them.
But this is not to say that mysteries cannot, in any
circumstances, be understood. On the contrary, that which is hidden from some
in some circumstances can be opened and revealed to others. Such was the
mystery of the Divinity of Christ, which was revealed to the Apostle Peter, as
the Lord Himself declared: "Blessed art Thou, Peter, Bar Jona, for flesh
and blood hath not revealed it [the mystery] unto thee, but My Father Which is
in heaven" (Matthew 16.18). As Blessed Theophylact, archbishop of
Bulgaria, comments: "He calls Peter blessed for having received knowledge
by divine grace. And by commending Peter, He thereby shows the opinion of other
men to be false. For He calls Him 'Bar Jona', that is, 'son of Jona', as if
saying, 'Just as you are the son of Jona, so am I the Son of My Father in
heaven, and of one essence with Him.' He calls this knowledge 'revelation', speaking
of hidden and unknown things that were disclosed by the Father."
In this sense, all true believers in the Divinity of Christ are
"mystics"; for to them has been made known "the mystery of His
will", they have been given "the spirit of wisdom and revelation in
the knowledge of Him" (Ephesians1.9,17). And indeed, "all
men" are called "to see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which
from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, Who created all things by
Jesus Christ, to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in
heavenly places might by known by the Church the manifold wisdom of God" (Ephesians
3.9-10). Thus the mystery is made known by the Father to the Church, which in
turn makes it known both to men and to the ranks of the angels.
From this it should be clear that the mysteries of God are neither
radically unknowable, nor is it impossible to express them in words - although
the understanding of the words, and the communication of the mystery, is
impossible without grace, the sending of the Holy Spirit from the
Father. Without grace the mystery will remain hidden; for faith is a gift of
grace (Ephesians 2.8).
But words, too, are important; for they show us whether a man has truly
received the mystery or not. Just as Christ is called the Word of God because
He reveals to us the mystery of the Father, so the words of our confession of
faith reveal the presence of the mystery of Christ in us. For "I believed,
and therefore I spoke" (Psalm 115.1). And "with the heart man
believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto
salvation" (Romans 10.10).
And that is why the words and definitions of the Seven Ecumenical
Councils must be accepted by all true Christians. For they are not foolish
attempts to express the inexpressible, as the mystifiers would have it, but
living words from the Word, "the garment of truth woven from the theology
on high." Therefore St. Paul says: "Hold fast the form of sound words
which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus" (II
Timothy 1.13).
It follows that those who refuse to give a clear and unambiguous
confession of faith, but rather resort to mystification on the basis of a
supposed reverence for "the mystery", are in fact strangers to the
mystery of Christ and partakers of “the mystery of iniquity” (II
Thessalonians 2.7). They will not express the right confession because they
do not have it - although they are not slow to express their judgement of those
who do have it. To them, therefore, we can with justice say: whereof you cannot
speak - because you do not believe it - thereof you should keep silent...
7. FR. SERAPHIM ROSE: A MODERN ST. AUGUSTINE
A Review of Monk
Damascene’s book, “Not of this World”
This is an instructive and moving book, big both in its length (over
1000 pages) and in its significance. The subject is the life of the
American-born member of the Russian Church Abroad, Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, who
died in 1982 at the age of 48 after an amazingly productive life as a
missionary and church writer. A man of Fr. Seraphim’s stature would be worthy
of a biography whatever age he lived in or country he came from. But his life
is of particular significance for our particular age and our particular
culture.
First, he represents one of the few, very few westerners who, having
brought up in our spiritual Babylon, have not only converted to the True Faith
of Orthodoxy, but have brought forth much spiritual fruit. This should lead us
westerners to study his life with particular attention; for, as Fr. Damascene
points out, Fr. Seraphim vaulted many of the hurdles that present such
difficulties to the Orthodox western convert, and his life and writings offer
many valuable “tips” for the convert. Coming from a typical White Protestant
background, he seemed set for a brilliant academic career as a Chinese expert. But
his agonized striving for the truth led him to reject the vanities of academe,
and after a brief descent into the hell of nihilism and the self-indulgent
life-style of the San Francisco hippie culture, his soul was resurrected in the
light of Orthodox Christianity.
Secondly, Fr. Seraphim’s brilliant and cultured mind, illumined by true
faith and honed on the writings of the Holy Fathers, produced book-length
studies of various theological topics that have deservedly acquired “classic”
status. Fr. Damascene quotes at length from his works on the soul after death,
the western saints, eastern religions, Blessed Augustine, evolution and other
topics, in which Fr. Seraphim’s contribution is second to none. However, on one
topic – the “jurisdictional issue” and the Soviet Moscow Patriarchate in
particular – Fr. Seraphim’s opinions do not reflect the consensus of the Holy
Fathers of our time, and Fr. Damascene’s uncritical acceptance of Fr.
Seraphim’s position here shows a certain bias.
Thirdly, Fr. Seraphim did not only speak
and write about the faith: he also put it into practice: as a monk and
co-founder of the Brotherhood of St. Herman of Alaska in Platina, California,
as a missionary, and as a priest and spiritual father. Much of the value of this
book resides in the accounts given by his spiritual children and his
co-struggler, Fr. Herman, that witness to his quiet wisdom and warm charity.
And this reviewer, for one, has no difficulty in believing the accounts at the
end of this book of his appearances to, and intercession for, his spiritual
children after his death.
So in turning now to the opinions of Fr.
Seraphim which are likely to prove less enduring and solidly based, we are in
no way disputing his reputation as one of the truly righteous men of his
century. Like Blessed Augustine, whom he so ably defended, he made errors while
remaining Orthodox. And so of him we say, as St. Photius said of St. Augustine:
“We embrace the man, while rejecting his errors.”
The one major question on which, in the
reviewer’s opinion, Fr. Seraphim was wrong was the jurisdictional issue, or, if
we accept that “there are no such things as jurisdictions, only the Church”,
the question: Where is the True Church? While accepting that inter-faith and
inter-Christian ecumenism were heresies, as also the policy of submitting to
atheist political power that is called sergianism, Fr. Seraphim did not accept
that the Orthodox Churches which practiced these heresies officially were
heretical and deprived of the grace of true sacraments. Again, there is a
remarkable similarity here to St. Augustine, who rejected the Donatists as
schismatics while accepting their sacraments.
Fr. Seraphim had not always been a
“liberal” on this question, as early issues of his monastery’s publication, The
Orthodox Word, demonstrate. However, from the mid-1970s another influence
began to bear on his views on the subject: the “zealot” rejection of the
sacraments of the ecumenist Orthodox on the part of the “Hartford” monastery, a
pseudonym for the Greek-American Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration in
Boston. Finding the Boston monastery and its “super-correct” followers lacking
in charity and the true warmth of Orthodox piety, and quite rightly rejecting
their views on other subjects such as the soul after death, Fr. Seraphim
over-reacted, in the present reviewer’s opinion, by adopting the “liberal”
position rejected by Boston.
Another factor that influenced his
conversion to the liberal position on this matter was the so-called “rebaptism”
controversy. Boston, with the blessing of Metropolitan Philaret, first-hierarch
of the Russian Church Abroad, had baptized several converts to Orthodoxy who
had been received into the Russian Church Abroad without baptism. Fr. Seraphim
considered this practice over-zealous and harmful (he himself had been received
from Protestantism by chrismation only).
Now since the “rebaptism” controversy
started, as Fr. Damascene says, in England in 1976, and since the present
reviewer was the first to be “rebaptised” there, it may not be out of place for
him to correct Fr. Damascene on certain points of fact in this connection.
First, the English converts were not
“rebaptised” since they had never received baptism in any Orthodox jurisdiction
(Anglican sprinkling is not baptism in any sense). Secondly, in asking for
baptism, they had not acted at the instigation of the Boston monastery, but at
the promptings of their own conscience; nor, contrary to what Fr. Damascene
writes, was Archbishop Nicodemus of Great Britain, who granted the converts’
request, in any way influenced by Boston. Thirdly, neither Archbishop Nicodemus
nor the converts insisted that everyone else in a similar situation to theirs
should be baptized, or that they had been outside the Church before their
baptism (for they had previously been received into the ROCOR by confession).
Now it may be that Fr. Seraphim felt that he and others who had been received
into the ROCOR by “economy”, i.e. without baptism, would now be forced to
accept “rebaptism”, which would explain Fr. Damascene’s vehemence against the
“rebaptism” in England. However, we can only reaffirm that neither Archbishop
Nicodemus nor the priest who baptized us nor we ourselves had any such ideas.
What is true is that we asserted
that when we moved from the Moscow Patriarchate to the ROCOR, we moved from a
heretical “church” into a true one, and that the chrismation we received in the
MP was graceless. This opinion Fr. Seraphim contested on several grounds: (1) Hieromartyr
Cyril of Kazan had accepted the sacraments of the MP in 1934; (2) the ROCOR had
not made any declaration on the subject, and (3) there were still supposedly
great confessors in the MP – for example, Fr. Demetrius Dudko. Let us look
briefly at each of these arguments.
1. Metropolitan Cyril expressed his
opinion with great caution and admitted that he might be being over-cautious.
Moreover, he asserted – this is an important point always passed over by the
“liberal” tendency – that those who partook of the sacraments of the MP knowing
of its evil partook to their condemnation. In any case, Metropolitan
Cyril’s opinion was expressed in 1934, when the schism of the MP was
incomplete, since both sides still commemorated Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa.
It is extremely unlikely that Metropolitan Cyril would have continued to
maintain what he admitted might be an over-cautious position after the death of
Metropolitan Peter and the completion of the schism in October, 1937. Moreover,
already in March, 1937 he wrote a letter in which, while not expressly saying
that the MP was graceless, he noted that it was “renovationist in essence” and
that enough time had passed for people to evaluate its nature and leave it. And
by his death in November, 1937, according to Catacomb sources, he had come to
full agreement with the “zealot” position of Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd
on this point before they were shot together in Chimkent. Can there be any
doubt what his opinion would be now, when the MP has added, among many other
crimes, the “heresy of heresies”, ecumenism, to its original sin of sergianism?
2. It is true that the whole ROCOR
Synod made no declaration on this subject. But individual leaders did – and
they were not speaking only for themselves. For example, in his encyclical of
1928 Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev declared in the name of his
whole Synod that the leaders of the MP were schismatics and apostates. This
declaration was quoted by Metropolitan Philaret in his 1969 encyclical on the
American Metropolia, and in 1977 the same Metropolitan Philaret told the
present writer in the presence of witnesses that he should remain faithful to
the anathema of the Catacomb Church against the MP. Other members of the ROCOR
Synod who adopted this zealot position were Archbishop Averky of Jordanville,
Archbishop Nicodemus of Great Britain, Archbishop Anthony of Los Angeles,
Archbishop Andrew of Rockland, Protopresbyter Michael Polsky and Professor
Andreyev, the last three of whom had all been members of the Catacomb Church.
Even Fr. Seraphim himself once compared the sergianists and ecumenists to the
iconoclasts, who were graceless heretics.
The position of the Catacomb confessors on
this question is critical, since they knew the MP at first-hand and were in the
best position, canonically speaking, to judge it. Among the martyr-hierarchs
about whose zealot views there can be no doubt we can mention Bishop Maximus of
Serpukhov (who said that the Catacomb Church had formally anathematized the
MP), Archbishop Demetrius of Gdov, Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd, Archbishop
Andrew of Ufa, Archbishop Theodore of Volokolamsk and the four bishops who
attended the Ust-Kut Council of 1937. Again, Fr. Ishmael Rozhdestvensky, whose
life was translated by Fr. Seraphim, forbade his spiritual children even to look
at churches of the MP.
3. Fr. Seraphim defended Fr. Demetrius out
of a sense of deep compassion. Now compassion, when purified, is a great
virtue. But it should not be allowed to hinder sober and dispassionate
judgement, and there is no doubt that Fr. Seraphim allowed his heart (“the
heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer. 17.9) to cloud his judgement
in this matter.
Let us consider the facts. Fr. Demetrius
was a priest of the Soviet church who refused the invitation of the Catacomb
Church to join it. He was an ecumenist – he revered the Pope and asked his
blessing on his work, and those who published the English edition of Our
Hope told the present reviewer that they had had to edit out large amounts
of ecumenist material from the work. And he was a sergianist – under pressure
from the authorities, he once told a 15-year-old spiritual son of his to return
to the Komsomol. In 1980 he publicly recanted of his anti-Soviet activities on Soviet
television. When the ROCOR first accepted parishes on Russian soil in 1990, he
stubbornly refused to join it, although there was now far less danger in doing
so. And towards the end of his life (he died in June, 2004) he became an ardent
advocate of the canonization of – Stalin!
When speaking about Fr. Demetrius, Fr.
Seraphim’s usual discernment seems to have deserted him. Thus he wrote that Fr.
Demetrius’ “fiery, urgent preaching hasn’t been heard in Russia and probably
the whole Orthodox world since the days of St. John of Kronstadt” (p. 859) – an
amazing exaggeration which placed Fr. Demetrius above Patriarch Tikhon and
other great preachers among the true martyrs and confessors of Russia. Again,
he often said that he was in the same Church as Fr. Demetrius, quoting his
words: “The unity of the Church at the present time consists in division” (p.
863), as if to assert that the obvious division between the MP and the ROCOR
either did not exist or was of little significance.
When Fr. Demetrius “repented” before
Soviet power in 1980, thereby fulfilling the prediction of Metropolitan
Philaret, who stated quite bluntly that he would fall because he was not in the
True Church, there was much talk about the danger of “gloating”. But nobody gloated.
Fr. Demetrius’ fall was clearly a matter of profound sorrow, not triumphalism.
But neither Fr. Demetrius nor anyone else was served by denying that it was a
fall – which is what many liberals tried to assert. The present reviewer heard
from a spiritual son of Fr. Demetrius, now a priest of the True Church inside
Russia, that he was never the same after his public recantation. And, as was
noted above, in his later years he actually became an ardent supporter of the
worst aspect of the MP, its worship of Stalin. For the fact is that his house
was built on sand, the sand of Soviet communism, and this alone is the reason
why he fell (Matt. 7.27).
However much compassion he felt for Fr.
Demetrius, Fr. Seraphim was wrong to hold him up as a role model and
“confessor”. First, because he did not belong to the True Church and did not
confess the True Faith (which is not to say, of course, that he did not
sometimes write, good things). And secondly, because to glorify a priest of the
Soviet church, however courageous, is to undervalue the podvig of the
true confessors of the Catacomb Church. If it is possible to be a “martyr” and
“confessor” while belonging to a false church and confessing heresy, why should
anyone take the trouble and undergo the danger of joining the True Church? But
many thousands, even millions, did just that, preferring death to doing what
Fr. Demetrius did; and we must recognize that their position was not only
canonically “correct”, but the only Christian way.
To take just one example: in the 1970s, at
precisely the time that Fr. Demetrius was preaching his fiery sermons, the
Catacomb hierarch Gennadius (Sekach) was living near Novy Afon in the Caucasus.
The Soviet hierarch Ilia of Sukhumi (a KGB agent since 1962 and now “patriarch”
of the official Georgian church), hearing of his whereabouts through spies,
offered Gennadius a comfortable place in the Soviet church organization.
Gennadius refused, saying that if he accepted the offer he “would lose
everything”. Ilia then denounced him to the KGB, who put him prison in Georgia
and tortured him till the blood flowed…
Gennadius was a true confessor – and Fr.
Seraphim devoted a chapter to him in his book Russia’s Catacomb Saints.
But then why did he devote another chapter to Dudko, who did everything
Gennadius refused to do? How could they both be confessors?!
The present reviewer’s position may
perhaps be criticized as being “over-logical” and “super-correct”,
demonstrating typically convert pride and lack of compassion. Certainly, he can
recognize many of the traits Fr. Seraphim identifies as being typical of the
convert mentality in himself. But God forbid that we should ever devalue the podvig
of the true confessors by glorifying false ones – that is not the path
of true humility and compassion. For let us make no mistake: if we glorify
pseudo-confessors, we both injure them (by confirming them in their heresy or
schism), and may end up falling away from the truth ourselves. Which is
precisely what happened, tragically, to some of Fr. Seraphim’s fellow
strugglers after his repose…
Fr. Seraphim himself, in spite of his
errors, remained in the True Church until his death, and deserves to be
remembered among the true confessors. Indeed, the present reviewer believes
that if he had lived to witness the ROCOR’s Anathema against Ecumenism in 1983,
and the extraordinary pagan festivals of the ecumenists in Vancouver in 1983,
Assisi in 1986 and Canberra in 1991, not to mention the unias of the Orthodox
ecumenists with the Monophysites at Chambesy in 1990 and with the Roman
Catholics at Balamand in 1994, he would have returned to his earlier, more
zealous position and the common mind of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Church on this question. For there is only One Church, just as there is only
one true confession of the Faith; and all those who deny that fact, such as the
present-day Moscow and Ecumenical Patriarchates, have no part in that Faith and
that Church, according to the sacred canons and dogmas.
To recognize this in a humble and obedient
spirit is not to be “super-correct” or pharisaical, but correct and Orthodox;
for “Orthodoxy” means “correct belief”. Moreover, it is to be truly
compassionate; for “the greatest act of charity,” as St. Photius the Great
says, “is to tell the truth”. It follows that if we arrogantly mock the need
for such correctness while glorying in our “Orthodoxy of the heart” – which
none of the Holy Fathers did – we run the risk of condemnation. For, as the
Lord Himself said: “Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least
commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the
Kingdom of Heaven…” (Matt. 5.19).
Revised June 19 /
July 2, 2004.
St. John Maximovich.
8.
A REVIEW OF “THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ECUMENISM”
The
Struggle against Ecumenism by the Holy Orthodox Church in North America
(Boston, Mass., 1998) has two aims, the first explicitly stated and the second
implicit. The first is to provide a history of the True Orthodox Church of
Greece, the so-called “Old Calendarists”, in its struggle against the heresy of
Ecumenism from 1924 to 1994. The second is to provide an apologia on
behalf of the “Auxentiite” branch of the Greek Old Calendarist Church, and in
particular of its North American affiliate centred in Boston and calling itself
the Holy Orthodox Church in North America. In its first, major aim this book
must be judged to have succeeded; it is probably the best book on its subject
to have appeared in English, and quite possibly in any language. With regard to
its second aim, however, the present reviewer remains unconvinced that the book
has proved its case.
The heresy of Ecumenism was first officially proclaimed by the
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in its Encyclical, “To the Churches
of Christ wheresoever they may be”, dated 1920. In addition to recognizing the
Catholics and Protestants as “fellow-heirs” of Christ with the Orthodox, this
Encyclical made a number of proposals of a renovationist character, including
the introduction of the new, papal or Gregorian calendar, all with the aim of
bringing union between the Orthodox and the western heretics closer. That is
why the introduction of the new calendar is regarded as the first concrete step
(apart from the 1920 Encyclical itself) in the introduction of the heresy of
Ecumenism.
In 1924, the new calendar was introduced into the State Church of
Greece, and later in the same year into the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the
Church of Romania. This provoked the emergence of the Old Calendarist movement
in Greece, Romania and some other places where the Ecumenical Patriarchate had
jurisdiction (e.g. the Russian monastery of Valaam, which was on the territory
of the Finnish Church, which had been granted autonomy by Constantinople). From
1924 to 1935 the movement had a predominantly lay character, consisting of
several hundred thousand Greek laymen and women with only a few priests (mainly
hieromonks from Mount Athos) and no bishops. In 1935, however, three bishops
from the new calendar State Church of Greece (two of them consecrated before
1924) returned to the Old Calendar and consecrated four new bishops. They then
proclaimed that the State Church had fallen into schism and was deprived of the
grace of sacraments.
The years 1935 to 1937 probably represented the peak of the Greek Old
Calendarist Church, with a united and rapidly expanding membership that posed a
serious threat to the official church. In 1937, however, after persecution from
the State Church had reduced the number of Old Calendarist bishops to four, a
tragic schism took place between two factions that came to be called the
“Florinites” (after their leader, Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina) and the
“Matthewites” (after Bishop Matthew of Bresthena) respectively. The “Florinites”
declared that the new calendarists were only “potentially” and not “actually”
schismatics, and still retained the grace of sacraments. The “Matthewites”
considered that this was a betrayal of the 1935 confession and broke communion
with the “Florinites”.
By the late 1940s the Florinites had only one bishop (Metropolitan
Chrysostomos) but the majority of the clergy and laity, while the Matthewites
had two bishops (Matthew and Germanos, the latter of whom was in prison).
Attempts at union between the two factions foundered not only on the question
of grace, but also on Metropolitan Chrysostomos’ refusal to consecrate any more
bishops (even after Bishop Germanos had rejoined him). So in 1948, fearing that
the Old Calendarist Church would again find itself without bishops, Bishop
Matthew was persuaded (not immediately, but only after several years of
pressure from his supporters) to consecrate some bishops on his own, the first
of whom was Bishop Spyridon of Trimythus (Cyprus).
At this point the authors of The Struggle against Ecumenism make
their first error of fact. On page 64 they write: “The saintly Spyridon of
Trimithus spent the last years of his life in seclusion, refusing to celebrate
as a hierarch because he had repented of being consecrated in this completely
uncanonical way [that is, by one bishop alone].” This is not true. In 1981
Bishop Spyridon's closest disciple, Abbot Chrysostomos of Galactotrophousa
monastery, near Larnaca, Cyprus, told the present reviewer a very different story
– which is supported by the letters to him of Bishop Spyridon himself. He said
that shortly after starting to serve as the only Old Calendarist bishop in
Cyprus in 1949, Bishop Spyridon was exiled from the island to Greece by the
British acting at the behest of the new calendarists. After some years, the
Matthewite Synod decided to replace Spyridon as bishop in Cyprus. They invited
Monk Epiphanius to Greece and ordained him to the priesthood. Then, in 1957 an
election took place in Cyprus at which Fr. Epiphanius was elected to the
episcopate, which was followed by his consecration in Greece. All this took
place, however, without the blessing of the still-living Bishop of Cyprus,
Spyridon, who refused to recognize Bishop Epiphanius. And he told his disciples
on Cyprus, including Abbot Chrysostomos (who had been his candidate for the
episcopate), not to serve with Bishop Epiphanius. Meanwhile, he entered into
seclusion in Greece and did not serve with the Matthewites as a protest. After
some time Abbot Chrysostomos entered into communion with Bishop Epiphanius, for
which he was punished by his spiritual father, Bishop Spyridon. So he again
broke communion with Epiphanius. The Matthewites responded by defrocking Abbot
Chrysostomos (although he was simply following the command of his spiritual
father), but did not touch Bishop Spyridon until his death in 1963. A few years
ago, shortly before his death, Abbot Chrysostomos' defrocking was rescinded by
the Matthewite Synod. When his remains were exhumed they were discovered to be
partially incorrupt...
In spite of this error the schism between the Florinites and the
Matthewites is in general treated with admirable fairness by the authors of
“The Struggle against Ecumenism”. This is important, not only because the
schism still exists (and has now been transposed onto Russian, American and
West European soil), but also because existing accounts in English are heavily
biassed in favour of the Florinites. But the Boston authors, while in general
inclining towards the Florinites (as does the present writer), not only note
that “Bishop Matthew’s integrity, personal virtue, and asceticism were admitted
by all” (his relics are very fragrant, and he was a wonderworker both before
and after his death in 1950), but also give reasons for supposing that a union
between Chrysostomos and Matthew could have been effected if it had not been
for the zeal without knowledge of certain of Matthew’s supporters. They also do
not conceal the fact that in 1950 Metropolitan Chrysostomos repented of his
confession of 1937 and returned to his confession of 1935, declaring that the
new calendarists were deprived of sacraments. In fact, this remained the
official confession of faith of all factions of the Greek Old Calendarist
Church until the appearance of the “Synod of Resistors” led by Metropolitan
Cyprian of Fili and Oropos in 1984…
The Boston authors continue their history of the Old Calendarist
movement by relating how the Florinites, after the death of Metropolitan
Chrysostomos in 1955, eventually received a renewal of their hierarchy through
the Russian Church Abroad in the 1960s, and how the Matthewites also achieved
recognition by the Russian Church Abroad in 1971. Again, the treatment of this
phase in the history is objective and fair. Especially valuable is the
translation of all the relevant documents in full and with a helpful
commentary.
The rest of the book is mainly devoted to a defence of the Florinite
Archbishop Auxentius of Athens, who was defrocked by a Synod composed of the
majority of the Florinite bishops in 1985. The Boston authors do not hide the
fact that Auxentius made many mistakes; but their account of these mistakes,
and especially of his trial in 1985, is sketchy and biassed. They write: “Some
of His Beatitude’s mistake were notable, while others were debatable… His
errors were often mistakes made in good faith, often on the advice of clergy
who wittingly or unwittingly misled him.” (pp. 125, 129). However, it is one
thing for the Boston authors to try and see extenuating factors alleviating the
guilt of their archpastor – charity (and the canonicity of their own
ecclesiastical position) demanded that. But it is another to slander those
other Orthodox bishops who tried to introduce canonical order into the Church
in the only canonical way open to them – by a hierarchical trial conducted
according to the holy canons. Whatever the personal virtues of Auxentius, in
the opinion of the present reviewer the Boston authors have not succeeded in
demonstrating that his defrocking in 1985 was not canonical and just.
The second half of the book consists of a number of useful appendices on
various topics related to Ecumenism.
In conclusion, this book can be recommended both as a history of the
Greek Old Calendarist Church and as a good introduction to the ecclesiological
issues surrounding the great heresy of our time, Ecumenism. However, for those
seeking to find a clear answer to the question: which of the many Greek Old
Calendarist jurisdictions is the most canonical and true?, this book will
provide a mixture of light and darkness. Such seekers will have to conduct
further research, and investigate other points of view.
9.
QUO VADIS, SCIENCE?
I am Thy slave and the son of Thy handmaid,
a man who is weak and short-lived, with little understanding of judgement and
laws; for even if one is perfect among the sons of men, yet without the wisdom
that comes from Thee he will be regarded as nothing... For a perishable body
weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind. We can
hardly guess at what is on earth, and what is at hand we find with labour; but
who has traced out what is in the heavens, and who has learned Thy counsel,
unless Thou give him wisdom, and send Thy Holy Spirit from on high?
Wisdom of Solomon 9.5-6, 15-17.
Only Christianity is a reliable and useful
philosophy. Only thus and for this reason can I be a philosopher.
St. Justin the Philosopher.
Introduction
What is the truth about science? Is it, as
its worshippers claim, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Or are there
other truths that both stand independent of science and contradict it, both in
its general assumptions and in some of its most cherished and universally
accepted hypotheses? To what extent can we trust scientists? What is the
relationship between science and faith, and can we expect any change in that
relationship in the future?
Such questions cannot be avoided by any
Orthodox Christian who has a conscious attitude towards his faith. For science
is now more powerful than ever; it transforms the external conditions of man’s
existence at an ever-accelerating rate, and generates an ever-growing army of
servants with ever-increasing demands for money and resources. So unquestioned
is the dogma that the well-being of mankind depends on scientific progress more
than anything else that science may be said to rule governments and their
budgets rather than being ruled by them. One of the two greatest powers of the
twentieth century, the Soviet Union, fell in the 1980s largely because it
bankrupted itself in the arms race, which was a struggle for scientific and
technological superiority. The one that survived, the United States, retains
its military, political and cultural power largely because it is able to
attract more top-grade scientists from all over the world, and do more
scientific research in every field, than any other state – at the price of the
largest federal deficit in history.
But these material and external effects of
science pale into insignificance beside its spiritual, internal effects:
the corrosive effect of the scientific world-view on all traditional religions,
and its self-exaltation above all other faiths as their ultimate arbiter and
judge.
Bertrand Russell once wrote: "Almost everything that distinguishes
the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which
achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."[89] Michael
Polanyi confirms this judgement: "Just as the three centuries following on
the calling of the Apostles sufficed to establish Christianity as the state
religion of the Roman Empire, so the three centuries after the founding of the
Royal Society sufficed for science to establish itself as the supreme
intellectual authority of the post-Christian age. 'It is contrary to religion!'
- the objection ruled supreme in the seventeenth century. 'It is unscientific!'
is its equivalent in the twentieth."[90]
At first, from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the scientific
world-view coexisted in an increasingly uncomfortable and schizoid manner with
various forms of the Christian and other traditional religious world-views. But
it has ended, in the twentieth century, by more or less completely banishing
Christianity from the minds of "educated" men, whether or not they
still call themselves "Christian". Science has indeed become the god
of our age, worshipped both by scientists and by non-scientists, both in the
democratic West and in the non-democratic East. Indeed, one of the most
powerful arguments for the superiority of democracy and the market economy over
other forms of politico-economic organization is that it promotes science,
which in turn promotes peace, prosperity and democracy: authoritarian forms of
government are rejected because they undermine the flee flow of ideas and
criticism that fosters the scientific enterprise. There is no getting away from
the influence of science: even the power of prayer to produce healings is now
subject to controlled scientific experiments.
The cult of science was described in dark, almost apocalyptic colours by
Dostoyevsky: "Half-science," says one of his characters, "is
that most terrible scourge of mankind, worse than pestilence, famine, or war,
and quite unknown till our present century. Half-science is a despot such as
has never been known before, a despot that has its own priests and slaves, a
despot before whom everybody prostrates himself with love and superstitious
dread, such as has been inconceivable till now, before whom science trembles
and surrenders in a shameful way."[91]
Dostoyevsky was careful to distinguish between science and
"half-science", or what we would now call "scientism". This
implies that he saw science as a legitimate pursuit, but one in danger of
subjection to its parasite or counterfeit, “half-science”.
How can this be?
The
Foundations of Science
Science obviously contains some measure or
kind of truth, otherwise it would not have such formidable predictive power or
generate such wonderful technologies. It has therefore been a natural and
laudable quest on the part of educated Christians to try and find some way of
resolving the apparent contradictions between science and Christianity. Indeed,
this is a necessity of our faith. For if the universe is one and created by one
God, we must believe that the truths of the faith and the final conclusions of
science (if such there can ever be) are compatible. To believe otherwise leads
to a kind of epistemological Manichaeism postulating two kinds of mutually
impenetrable universes which cannot be comprehended from a single viewpoint,
or, alternatively, to a kind of solipsistic Buddhism according to which one of
the two realms is considered to be illusory.
Thus Fr. Seraphim Rose writes: “Even though revealed knowledge is higher than natural knowledge, still we know tha