CHURCH �

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WORLD
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Alexander
Schmemann
 University of St. Francis
GEN 281.9 S347c
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I '1 '/ "' Church, world, mission :

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CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION
 ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN

CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Reflections on Orthodoxy
In the West

8, n f\ rr\, vI
L l ""' ..-
l '\ ,.. ,
.
College of St. rranes
JOLIET, ill.

ST. VLADIMIR'S SEMINARY PRESS

CRESTWOOD, NY 10707
1979
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

(1963)
The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy
(1963)
Ultimate Questions: An Anthology of Russian Religious Thought
(1965)
Introduction to Liturgical Theology
(1966)
Great Lent
(1969)
Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism
(1974) Liturgy
and Life (1974)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Schmemann, Alexander, 1921-
Church, world, mission.
1. Orthodox Eastern Church-Doctrinal and controver-
sial works-Orthodox Eastern authors-Collected works.
2. Orthodox Eastern Church-Collected works. I. Title.
BX320.2.S29 281.9 79-27597
ISBN 0-913836-49-4

© Copyright 1979
by
ST. VLADIMIR'S SEMINARY PRESS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISBN 0-913836-49-4

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY
.ATHENS PRINTING COMPANY
NEW YORK, NY
 /;7 _:, ,(f··-I- ,�
,

CONTENTS
I
THE UNDERLYING QUESTION 7
II
THE ((ORTHODOX WORLD," PAST AND PRESENT 25
III
THE WORLD IN ORTHODOX THOUGHT AND EXPERIENCE 67

IV
A MEANINGFUL STORM 85
v
THE TASK OF ORTHODOX THEOLOGY TODAY 117
VI
THEOLOGY AND LITURGY 129
VII
RENEWAL 147
VIII
TOWARDS A THEOLOGY OF COUNCILS 159
IX
FREEDOM IN THE CHURCH 179
x
THE ECUMENICAL AGONY 193
XI
THE MISSIONARY IMPERATIVE 209
XII
THE WORLD AS SACRAMENT 217

5
 I
THE UNDERLYING QUESTION
"The time has come for the crisis
(judgment) to begin with the house
of God." 1 Peter 4:17

1.

The articles and essays collected in this volume were

written over a period of more than twenty years, for a great.
variety of readers, Orthodox as well as non-Orthodox, and
more often than not as an ad hoc response to, or reflection
upon, some event, some development that I considered to be
of vital significance for the Orthodox Church. If today, in
spite of the somewhat accidental and dated character of these
membra disjecta, I dare to give them "another chance," it is not
so much because of answers they contain or suggest, and which
may appear now as then tentative and incomplete, but because
of questions I tried to formulate and which, I am convinced,
remain as essential and urgent today as they were one or two
decades· ago.
These questions, as the reader will see, pertain to a wide
range of subjects: history, theology, liturgy, canonical order, the
ecumenical movement, mission ... What gives them, I hope,
a certain inner unity and common perspective is the one under-
lying question from which, in one way or another, they all
stem and to which ultimately they all refer: the question of
the destiny of the Orthodox Church in this second half of the
twentieth century, in a world radically different from that which
shaped our mentality, our thought-forms, indeed our whole
life as Orthodox, in a world moreover deeply marked by a

7
8 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

spiritual crisis which acquires with each passing year truly

universal dimensions.
I am convinced that this "underlying question," its essence
and its urgency, are rooted primarily in two developments
which, because both are new and unprecedented in the history
of the Orthodox Church, form the focus of a deep crisis per-
meating today the whole life of our Church. The first develop-
ment is the tragically spectacular collapse, one after another,
of the old and organic "Orthodox worlds" which only a few .
decades ago appeared as the self-evident, natural and per-
manent "home" and environment of the Orthodox Church -
and not merely their collapse but also their transformation
into the stage for a violent attack launched by an extreme and
totalitarian secularism against religion, against the spiritual
nature and vocation of man. The second is the rapid and
massive growth in the West of the Orthodox diaspora which,
however "accidental" it may have been in its origins, signifies
the end of the isolation of Orthodoxy in, and its total identi-
fication with, the "East," and thus the beginning of a new
destiny, in the West and within the context of Western
culture.
It seems to me that even a superficial analysis of these
developments would reveal their exceptional, truly crucial
importance for the Orthodox Church, as the end of one era
and the beginning of another. Indeed, what these two develop-
ments bring to an end is not something "accidental," something
marginal to the life of the Church, but that organic correlation
and mutual integration of the Church and a society, a culture,
a way of life shaped and nurtured by the Church, which until
quite recently was the essential and, in fact, the only mode of
the Orthodox Church's relationship to the "world." There
exists, to be sure, a profound difference between the tragic
fate of the Church under the totalitarian and militantly atheistic
regimes of the East and her apparent "success" in the free and
democratic West. This difference, however, ought not to con-
ceal from us a deeper meaning common to both developments,
which makes them into two dimensions, two "expresions" of
the same, radically new and unprecedented situation - a
situation characterized by Orthodoxy's loss of her historical
The Underlying Question 9
home, the "Orthodox world"; by her forced divorce from
"culture," i.e. from the entire texture of national and social
life; and, last but not least, by an imposed encounter with the
((West." Indeed, the ideologies in whose name Orthodoxy is
persecuted in the "East" and those which in a very subtle yet
equally powerful manner challenge her in the ((West" not
only are Western by their origin but also are, in spite of their
differences and their clash with one another, the result - the
"crisis" - of Western spiritual and intellectual development
and thus fruits of the same, unmistakably Western tree.
Thus the ultimate meaning of our present crisis is that the
world in which the Orthodox Church must live today, be it in
the East or in the West, is not her world, not even a "neutral"
one, but a world challenging her in her very essence and being,
a world trying consciously or unconsciously to reduce her to
values, philosophies of life and world-views profoundly
differently from, if not totally opposed to, her vision and ex-
perience of God, man and life. This makes today's crisis in-
finitely more radical and decisive than the one brought about
by the fall of Byzantium in 1453. The Turkish conquest was
a political and national catastrophy; it was not the end, not
even an "interruption," of the "Orthodox world," i.e. of a
culture, a way of life, a world-view integrating religion and
life and making them, however imperfectly, into "symphony."
For centuries the Orthodox lived under the Turks, yet in their
own world, by their own way of life, rooted in their own
religious vision. Today that world is gone and that way of
life is being swept away by a culture which is not only alien to
Orthodoxy but estranged more and more from its own Chris-
tian roots.
I have used the word crisis, which, as everyone knows, is
much abused today. If, however, we use it in its original, and
Christian, meaning - as judgment, as a situation calling for
choice and decision, for discerning the will of God and for the
courage to obey it - then the situation of the Orthodox Church
today is truly critical. This book is made up of reflections upon
and reactions to this crisis and its various aspects and dimen-
sions. It is an attempt, however tentative and incomplete, not
10 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

only to discern the true meaning of the crisis but also the will
of God which it reveals to us.

2.

What worries me, and there£ore constitutes the prime

motivation behind virtually every article printed here, is not
so much the crisis itself, which for reasons explained elsewhere
in this book I consider as potentially beneficial for Orthodoxy.
It is always good for the Church to be reminded by God that
«this world," even when it calls itself Christian, is in fact at
odds with the Gospel of Christ, and that «crisis" and the tension
created by it are, after all, the only "normal" mode of the
Church's relationship with the world, with any world. What
worries me is the absence of such a tension from today's
Orthodox consciousness, our seeming inability to understand
the real meaning of the crisis, to £ace it and to seek ways of
dealing with it.
We see, it is true, the reappearance within the Church of
that apocalyptic fringe which regularly emerges at each major
«turn" in the Church's earthly pilgrimage with an announce-
ment of the end of the world. But this attitude has never been
accepted by the Orthodox Church as expressing her faith, her
understanding of the Church's mission in the world. For if
the Christian faith is indeed eschatological, it is precisely not
apocalyptic. Eschatological means that by her very nature the
Church belongs to the end: to the ultimate reality of the
"world to come," the Kingdom of God. This means that from
her very beginning, since the "last and great" day of Pentecost,
she has lived in the "last days," in the light of the Kingdom,
and that her real life is always "hidden with Christ in God."
This means also that it is precisely her knowledge and constant
partaking of the (tend" that relates the Church to the world,
creates that correlation between the now and the not yet which
is the very essence of her message to the world and also the
only source of the "victory that overcomes the world."
Apocalypticism, on the other hand, is truly a heresy, for it is
the rejection of Christian eschatology, its replacement with
The Underlying Question 11

Manichean dualism, the abandonment of that tension between

being "in the world" and yet "not of the world" which is con-
stitutive of the Church and of her life. What our neo-apoca-
lyptics do not know is that, in spite of their self-proclaimed
exclusive faithfulness to "true Orthodoxy," they are spiritually
much closer to certain fringe movements and sects typical of
the ,western religious landscape than to the catholicity of the
Orthodox tradition, with its sobriety and its freedom from
emotionalism, fear and reductionism of any kind. Theirs is the
typical attitude of "defea tis ts" who, unable to face the crisis,
to discern its true meaning, have been simply crushed by it
and, like all their predecessors, seek refuge in the neurotic
pseudo-security of the "holy remnant."
But then, what about the "majority"? What about the
Orthodox "establishment" - hierarchical, ecclesiastical, theo-
logical? Here, precisely because we deal not with some sectarian
deviation but with the Church herself, the situation seems to
me to be even more serious. The attitude of this "establish-
ment" is that of a simple denial, conscious or unconscious, of
any significant crisis. Someone has once half-jokingly remarked
that our Greek brothers still do not know that in 1453 Con-
stantinople was taken by the Turks and since then has been
called Istanbul. Mutatis mutandis this remark can be extended
today to an overwhelming majority of the Orthodox people
everywhere. It is as if the radical changes mentioned above
were but passing "accidents" with no special significance for,
or impact upon, the Church's "business as usual."
This attitude is best expressed and illustrated by the rheto-
ric which has become virtually the only "official" language of
the Orthodox establishment, rhetoric made up of a mixture
of unshakeable optimism, obligatory triumphalism and amazing
self-righteousness. Those who do not use that language, who
dare to raise questions and to express doubts about the state of
the Church in a rapidly changing world, are accused of
disturbing the peace of the Church, of provoking troubles and,
in a word, of undermining Orthodoxy. The very function of
that rhetoric lies in its remarkable power to conceal reality by
replacing it with a wishful "pseudo-reality," and therefore
12 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

simply to wipe away the questions which the "real" reality

would unavoidably have raised.
Thus, if we take the first of the two major developments
mentioned earlier - the collapse of the organic "Orthodox
worlds" and the persecution of religion by militant atheism -
it becomes, in the "official" interpretation, a temporary victory
of "dark forces" after whose imminent defeat the inherently
good, faithful and innocent Orthodox nations, purified by
sufferings and adorned by their martyrs, shall enthusiastically
return to the eternal Orthodox ideals and way of life that have
once and for all shaped their "souls." As decisive proofs of
this forthcoming resurrection, several facts are noted: the
survival under totalitarian regimes of the Church as institution,
the renewed zeal of the faithful "crowding the churches as
never before," the growing interest in religion among the youth
and the intelligentsia .... Now, each of these facts is in itself
true, important and promising. But do they justify the inter-
pretation which so easily transforms an ineffable tragedy into
a potential triumph? What is missing here is not only a more
sober evalution of the facts themselves: the acknowledgement,
for example, that the survival of the Church is paid for by her
unprecedented surrender to the state, the ugly servility of her
leadership, and the almost total control of her life by the KGB
and its many equivalents; the explanation, at least a partial
one, of the overcrowded churches by their radical decrease
in number ( e.g. in Moscow there are some fifty "oper-
ating" churches for a population of nearly five million) ;
the recognition that the religious awakening among the young
and the intelligentsia leads them not only to Orthodoxy but,
in even greater numbers, to sects, to Zen, to astrology and to
virtually every form of the dubious and confused "religiosity"
typical nowadays of the �rest. . . . What is missing in the
"official" interpretation is, above all, the preliminary question,
encompassing within itself all other questions: Why and how
did all this happen? Why is it that the "dark forces" of secu-
larism, materialism and atheism, whose roots are ascribed, and
not without justification, to the \Vest, have triumphed in fact in
the East? Why did the "Orthodox worlds" prove themselves to
be so fragile and so vulnerable? Why, for example, is religious
The Underlying Question 13

resistance so strong in Catholic Poland and by comparison

so weak in Orthodox lands? But these questions are not raised
because all of them in some way or another imply and pre-
suppose questioning the past, i.e. that mythical "golden age"
of Orthodoxy which not only in today's official rhetoric, but
on a much deeper level of Orthodox mentality, constitutes the
only term of reference, the final destination of all "returns,"
the unique treasure of the heart's desire. To raise these questions
is to face that past, to probe and reevaluate it and, above all,
to ask whether the seeds of corruption and decay, of indeed a
tragic betrayal of something essential in Orthodoxy, were not
at work for a long time in those "Orthodox worlds," making
inevitable their spectacular and almost instantaneous collapse.
Even worse - in its blindness, in its insensitivity - is the
reaction of our "establishment" to the Orthodox diaspora in
the West. Here also the very existence of any serious problem
stemming from the implantation of Orthodox churches in a
different, and in many ways alien, culture is more often than
not simply ignored. The existence, in the first place, of a basic
canonical, ecclesiological problem. That ecclesiastically the
diaspora has resulted in the coexistence on the same territories,
within the same cities, of a dozen of "national" or "ethnic"
jurisdictions, is considered by an overwhelming majority of the
Orthodox people as something perfectly normal, as expressive
of the very essence of that diaspora whose main vocation, as
everyone knows and proudly proclaims, is the preservation of
the various "cultural heritages" proper to each "Orthodox
world." The existence, in the second place, of a much deeper
and more threatening problem: that of the progressive, al-
though often unconscious, surrender of the Orthodox "con-
sciousness" to the secularistic world-view and way of life.
For, paradoxical as this may seem, what makes this surrender
unconscious and undetected is precisely that very faithfulness
to the "heritage" by which one thinks to preserve and to assure
the Orthodox "identity." The Orthodox "establishment" and
the vast majority of the Orthodox living in the West do not
realize that the "heritage" which they claim to preserve is not
that only heritage which is worth being preserved and lived by:
the vision of God, man and life revealed in the Orthodox faith.
14 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

It is not even the rich and in many ways deeply Christian cul-
ture which grew up from that vision and which would force
us to discern and to face the challenge of the West, but a
miserable reduction of that heritage to a few superficial
"symbols" which, by creating the illusion of faithfulness to
the "faith of our fathers," masks the progressive surrender of
cereal life" to the great, and indeed "Western" heresy of our
age: secularism; the surrender not only of "secular" life, but
of the Church's life as well, of her approach be it to faith and
liturgy, to parish administration and pastoral ministry, or to
education and mission.
Our "official rhetoric" ignores all this, and the reason for
this is, once more, the inability of today's Orthodox con-
sciousness to come to terms with the past, a fundamental con-
fusion about the true content and meaning of our "heritage"
and thus of Tradition itself. If the Orthodox Church seems
unable to discern the radically new situation in which she
lives, if she is unaware of the new world surrounding and
challenging her, it is because she herself continues to live in
a "world" which, although it no longer exists, still shapes and
determines the Orthodox consciousness. Hence the tragic
nominalism which permeates the entire life of the Church and
prevents her from fulfilling her essential mission, her task of
judging, evaluating, inspiring; changing, transforming the
whole life of man, of generating that creative tension between
herself and the world which makes her into "the salt of the
earth." It is with this problem of the past, of its impact on,
and meaning for us today that I deal, however tentatively and
incompletely, in several essays in this book.

3.

In the Orthodox perspective, however, the problem of the

"past" can never be merely a "historical" one, left to the ex-
· elusive care of historians. It of necessity implies theology
because it is precisely for theology that the past presents
itself- and not only today but always - as a problem. Why?
Because for Orthodoxy the past is the essential channel and
The Underlying Question 15
carrier of Tradition, of that continuity and identity of the
Church in time and space which establishes her catholicity,
reveals her always as the same church, the same faith, the same
life. Tradition and past are by no means identical, yet the
former comes to us from the latter, so that the true knowledge,
i.e. understanding, of Tradition is impossible without the
knowledge, i.e. understanding, of the past; just as the true
knowledge, i.e. understanding, of the past is impossible without
obedience to Tradition. But here two dangers always threaten
the Church. The first consists in a simple reduction of Tradition
to the past, in such an identification of one with the other that
the past as such becomes the content as well as the criterion of
Tradition. As for the second danger, it consists in an artificial
separation of Tradition from the past by means of their common
evaluation in terms of the "present." Here one accepts from the
past - and thus makes into "tradition" - only that which is
arbitrarily considered to be "acceptable," "valid" .and «rele-
vant" today.
To seek the ways of avoiding and overcoming these dangers,
of assuring the correct {treading" of Tradition and therefore
the proper understanding by the Church of her own past, has
always been one of the essential tasks of theology, of the theo-
logical calling within the Church. Hence a second question,
implied in a second group of articles collected in this volume:
How is this task performed by our theology today? My answer
to this question also needs a few words of introduction.
The present .state of Orthodox theology seems to me to be
ambiguous. On the one hand it is impossible to deny that a
real theological renaissance has been taking place in the Ortho-
dox Church, which is expressed primarily in the return of our
theology to its essential source: the patristic tradition. This
"return to the Fathers" has greatly contributed to the progres-
sive liberation of Orthodox theology from the uw estern
captivity" which for centuries imposed on it intellectual cate-
gories and thought forms alien to the Orthodox Tradition.
Entire strata of that tradition, such as Palamism, have been
literally rediscovered, so that today hardly a study in Orthodoxy
would not refer to hesychasm, the philocalic tradition, and the
16 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

patristic vision in general. The importance of this "renaissance"

is self-evident.
On the other hand, I have the strange impression that
seldom in the past has our theology been more isolated from
the Church. Seldom has it had less impact on her life, has it
been so exclusively a "theology for theologians" as today in
the Orthodox Church. It was of ten said that the "westernized"
theology taught in Orthodox seminaries in the nineteenth
century - for a long time in Latin! - was divorced from the
Church. This is certainly true if by this we mean its inner alien-
ation from the sources and indeed from the entire "ethos" of
the Eastern Tradition. But this is not true of its influence. Its
alienation did not prevent that theology from having a pro-
found impact on the Church, on her life, piety, spirituality,
etc.- so much so that even today it is that impact which de-
termines for an overwhelming majority of the Orthodox their
very approach to the Church and to her religious demands,
discipline, worship and sacraments. The best, although ironic,
proof of this can be seen in the defense of that "westernized"
theology by our ultra-conservatives.
By comparison our present theology, with all its patristic
references and inspiration, with all its faithfulness to the Tradi-
tion of the Fathers and the Councils, seems to have very little
influence even when it is accepted and given proper respect.
It is as if the "real" Church did not know what to do with it,
how to apply it to her "real" life. Whatever aspect of that life
we consider - ecclesiastical government, _parish structure,
worship, spirituality and even theological education-, they all
seem to operate by a_ "logics," a tra_dition, a routine having little
if anything to do with the tradition rediscovered, studied and
exposed in theological books.
Why is this so? The theologians themselves tend to explain
this "discrepancy," this generalized indifference towards their
work, by the lack of education among the clergy, by the alleged
"anti-intellectualism" of the Orthodox laity and by other
similar factors, all extrinsic to theology itself. But this explana-
tion, even if it was true in the past, is no longer tenable today.
On the one hand, the divorce between theology and life is
typical not only of the older generation of clergy but also of
The Underlying Question 17

bishops and priests who received their theological education

in this new ( or old) patristic key and who usually are per-
sonally involved in promoting Orthodox education. As to the
laity, on the other hand, an ever growing number of them
have a lively interest in the teachings of the Church, in a more
conscious approach to their religion.
The inevitable conclusion is that something must be wrong
with theology itself. What is it? It is, I am convinced, its
failure to reveal the true meaning and therefore the power,
the saving and transforming power, of the genuine Orthodox
Tradition within the context of our present situation, to make
it into a consistent critique of, but also an answer to, the values,
the world-view and the way of life which stem from today's
spiritual and intellectual crisis. It is one thing to "rediscover"
the Fathers, their teachings and their "vision." But it is quite
another thing, and a much more difficult one indeed, to relate
that vision to the real, concrete life, shaped and conditioned as
it is now by a totally different vision. Such, however, has always
been and still ought to be the proper task of theology. If, by
definition, it deals with the "past;' this is in order to transform
the past, to reveal Tradition as being always alive, always
operating, "contemporary" in the deepest sense of this word.
And of this the Fathers themselves are the best example for
by their "theologizing" they exorcized, transformed and Chris-
tianized a world and a culture which were as opposed to the
"foolishness" of the Gospel as is our world and culture today.
In this task our theology seems to fail. And my suspicion
is that it fails because in a very subtle and unconscious way
it remains conditioned by a double reduction, historical and
intellectual, inherited from that very ccw est" which it claims
to oppose and to denounce. By "historical" reduction I mean
here the limitation of theology - or rather of its sources -
to texts, to "conceptual" evidence to the exclusion of the living
experience of the Church, from which the theology of the
Fathers stems, to which it refers arid bears testimony, without
which it cannot be understood in its total and precisely "ex-
.istential" meaning and significance. Hence the "intellectual"
reduction, which consists in dealing with the Fathers as if they
were "thinkers" working with concepts and ideas at the
18 CHURCH, WOR.LD, MISSION

elaboration of a self-contained and a self-explanatory "system."

Hence the transformation of the Fathers into "authorities"
·simply to be quoted for a formal justification of ideas, affirma-
tions and even "theologies" whose roots and presuppositions
may have very little, if anything, to do with the Orthodox
faith. There exist today manuals of Orthodox systematic theo-
logy with · patristic references and quotations on virtually
every page and which, in spite of this, contain the most
"Wes tern'.' and "scholastic" type of theology I can· think of.
The same can be said of the treatment by our theology of other
aspects and dimensions of Tradition: the ecclesiological, the
spiritual, etc. Here also a formal "re-discovery" seems to lead
nowhere, to remain an idea whose "applications" are not even
to be discussed. It is as if, having found something essential
and precious, we do not know what-to do with it except analyze
it in scholarly books and periodicals, from inside an academic
ivory tower standing in the midst of general, although re-
spectful, indifference.
No wonder then that the "real" Church, while paying· lip
service to theology - indeed, it has become quite fashionable
today to quote the Fathers and the Philocalia and to have books
on Byzantium in one's library-, virtually ignores it in her
"real" life. .And the first to ignore- it are the clergy whose very
place and function in the Church make them especially "real-
istic." It is not uncommon for a priest who wrote his seminary
graduation thesis on St. Maximus the· Confessor or the
"created" versus "uncreated". grace controversy -to. seek help
and guidance in his pastoral work in theories of psychotherapy
and in clinical techniques derived from a vision of man totally
{Efferent from the one implied in St Maximus . and in. the
Orthodox doctrine of grace. What is even more .remarkable
is that usually he does not see. any incompatibility or conflict
between those two approaches, between the dogma one finds
in theological books and the practice one learns from the
_scientifically proven wisdom of "this world."
. · ·. The situation is complicated but in reality not significantly
altered by the new wave of religiosity, of passionate interest
in "spirituality" and "mysticism," which seems to succeed today
those obviously exhausted movements of the "death of God/'
The Underlying Question 19

"secular Christianity" and "social involvement." Many wel-

come it as a sign of a genuine religious revival, of a decisive
breakdown of secularism. And in terms of quest, of "hunger
and thirst" for an authentic religious experience, this may be
true. Yet how can one fail to see that on a deeper level that
wave and that experience remain hopelessly conditioned by the
individualism, the narcissism and self-centeredness which con-
stitute the "religious" epiphenomena of secularism itself, of
the anthropocentrism inherent to it. The priest who yesterday
measured himself against the great idol of our society: the
therapist, would now gladly accept the role of the "staretz,"
but without noticing that this change of titles and "symbols"
in fact changes nothing in the religious situation itself.
This situation will last as long as our theology does not
overcome its own historical and intellectual "reduction" and
recover its pastoral and soteriolo gical dimension and motiva-
tion. As it operates today it is, in the words of a friend of mine,
better and better equipped to fight heresies defeated some
fifteen centuries ago, but apparently unable not only to fight
but even to detect and to name the real and truly destructive
heresies permeating our modern secularistic culture. Strangely
enough it supplies them with an "alibi" by covering them up
with Christian terminology and-vice versa- by introducing
concepts and entire categories proper to them into its own ter-
minology and, above all, by assuring that they are not "heresies"
but scientifically proven methods and techniques, which as such
cannot -contradict any-dogma of the Church. ·
. · Let there be no mistake: it is not a conversion of our theo-
logy to a cheap and superficial "relevance" that is being
advocated here, not a transposition of the "Christian message"
into terms and concepts supposedly understandable to the
"modern man." The disastrous effects of that obsession with
"relevance" and the mythical "modern man" in the West need
not even be mentioned .here. When I speak of the soterio-
logical motivation of theology I have in mind that unique
quality proper to patristic theology which makes it an eternal
"model" of all true theology: its constant preoccupation with
Truth as saving and transforming Truth, with Truth as a matter
truly of life and death, and therefore its awareness of error as
 . .
20 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

a truly demonic lie which distorts and mutilates life itself,

leading man to spiritual suicide, literally to hell. This "ex-
istentialism" of the Fathers, which is not to be confused or
identified with modern philosophical existentialism, stems
from the fact that Christianity for them was not primarily an
idea or a doctrine, as it would seem from some patrological
studies dealing with the "patristic idea" of this and the "pa-
tristic doctrine" of that. For the Fathers, Christianity was above
all an experience, the totally unique and sui generis experience
of the Church, or even more precisely: the Church as ex-
perience.
I know that the word "experience" has, especially in the
West, strong psychological, individualistic and subjectivistic
connotations which in the eyes of many theologians disqualify
it as a theological term, relegate it to the always ambiguous
area of "religious experience," of le sentiment religieux. This
is why, when using this word to denote the essential, although
more often than not implicit, source and term of reference
of all patristic theology as distinct from the "post-patristic,"
I define that experience as unique and sui gen eris, i.e. as ex..
perience which precisely cannot be reduced to the categories of
the "subjective" and "objective," "individual" and "corporate."
This is the experience of the Church as new reality, new crea-
tion, new life - as a reality, in other terms, not of some "other
world" but of creation and life renewed and transformed in
Christ, made into the knowledge of and the communion with
God and His eternal Kingdom. Jt is this experience - radically
new because it is not of "this world," but whose gift· and
presence, continuity and fulfillment in "this world" is the
Church - that for the Fathers constitutes the self-evident source
of theology, the source of its very possibility as precisely
theology; i.e. words adequate to God and adequate therefore
to all reality. This experience is the source, but also the "end,"
the beyond to which theology bears witness, whose reality,
whose saving and transforming power it proclaims, announces,
reveals and defends, and without which the theology of the
Fathers cannot be heard in its true significance and is "alien..
ated" either into an extrinsic and formal authority to be quoted,
or into ideas to be "discussed."
The Underlying Question 21

This essential connection and interdependence between

patristic theology and the experience of the Church is often
ignored because, as has been said more than once, the Fathers
do not "theologize" about the Church. They do not seem to be
interested in "ecclesiology" as we understand it today: a theo-
logical discipline having the Church as the object of its study
and investigation, aiming at the elaboration of a full and con-
sistent doctrine of the Church. But the reason for this is that
the Church for the Fathers is precisely not the "object" but
always the "subject" of theology, the reality which makes it
possible to know God and, in Him, man and the world, to
know the Way, the Truth, the Life and, therefore, truth about
all reality. The appearance of ecclesiology as a separate theo-
logical discipline is the fruit of doubt, of that need for justi-
fication which is inevitable, indeed "normal," in a theology
.which is itself conceived as "justification" - rational, or philo-
sophical, legal or practical - of the Christian faith and which,
as we know only too well today, always leads to (because, in
fact, it is rooted in) an evaluation of the "Church" and of her
faith and life in terms of the world, of its philosophies, of its
trends and of its needs, and thus, ultimately to a surrender to
the world. But the Fathers' theological demarche is exactly an
opposite one. For them it is only in and from the experience of
the Church that the world, i.e. man, society, nature, life, can
be truly known in its ultimate meaning and "needs" and there-
fore be (( acted upon." They too use the philosophical and
cultural categories of the world in which they live, of which
they are an integral part. In fact for the most part they speak
the "language of their time" better and more consistently than
we today speak the language of our time. But when they use
it, its meaning changes, its very ·((semantics" are transformed,
_it is made into a tool of Christian thought and action, whereas
modern theology succeeds at times in forcing even biblical
and patristic language to carry ideas hopelessly alien, if not
opposed, to the Christian faith and vision.
Thus I am convinced that the "alienation" of theology from
the real Church and her real life always begins with its divorce
from the experience of the Church, the Church as experience.
By this, as the reader will see, I mean primarily, although not
22 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

exclusively, the liturgical experience, that lex orandi which is

the very gift and expression of the Church's experience· and
which alone therefore transcends the past, the present and
the future, which alone actualizes Tradition into life, ful-
ness and power. This does not mean, as some may think, that
I advocate a liturgical reduction of theology. Just as they do
not theologize about the Church, the Fathers do not theologize
about the liturgy. Liturgy as the life, as the "sacrament"
of the Church is not the "object" but the source of their theo-
logy because it is the epiphany of the Truth, of that fulness
from which the "mouth speaks." Rooted in the experience of
the Church as heaven on earth, the theology of the Fathers is
free from "this world" and therefore capable of £acing it, of
"discerning" and changing it. Divorced from that experience,
today's theology appears to live in a permanent identity-crisis,
always in search of its own foundations, presuppositions and
methods, of its "legitimacy," and therefore with no effect be
it in the Church or in the world.
What the "world" needs today - as, indeed, it always
needs - is not mere ideas, not even mere "religion." Of both
it has plenty, for strange as it may seem secularism, the great
heresy of our time, is a powerful generator not only of ideas
and ideologies but also of "religiosity." It is a widely acknowl-
edged fact that the most "secularized" society of our time -
the American - is at the same time the most "religious" one,
is truly obsessed with religion in a way in which no other
society has ever been. But this "religiosity," like the various
"ideologies" clashing with one another, remains wholly con-
ditioned and determined by the secularistic experience and
vision of the world, and this even when it preaches and offers
an escape into "spirituality', or "utopia." What the world
needs, therefore, is above all a new experience of the world
itself, of life itself in its personal and social, cosmical and
eschatological dimensions. Of this experience the Church, in
her Orthodox understanding and "experience," is· the revela-
tion, the gift and the source. This experience our theology must
"rediscover" at its own source, so as to become its witness, its
language in the Church and in the world.
The Underlying Question 23

4.

Such, then, is the thesis underlying explicitly or implicitly

the writings collected in this volume, giving it its inner
unity. If, however, in an apparent contradiction with that
thesis, I often deal with problems pertaining to "external"
ecclesiology: councils, canonical order, liturgical practices, etc.,
it is because of my profound conviction that every attempt to
recover the true experience of the Church requires, as its very
condition, the removal of the one main obstacle which is in
fact blocking, and thus obscuring and mutilating that experi-
ence. This obstacle is nominalism, to which the Orthodox seem
so accustomed that for all practical reasons it itself has become
a part of our "tradition."
By nominalism I mean here the peculiar divorce of the
forms of the Church's life from their content, from that reality
whose presence, power and meaning they are meant to express
and, as a consequence, the trans£ormation of those forms into
an end in itself so· that the very task of the Church is seen as
the preservation of the "ancient," "venerable" and "beautiful"
forms, regardless of the "reality" to which they refer. Such
divorce, such nominalism indeed permeates the entire life of
the Church. In the canonical area it can be seen, for example,
in the nominalism of the episcopal titles, which in the early
Church had a great significance 'in that they expressed· the
Church's relation to, and place within the concrete, cereal"
world into which she is sent. But to what concrete reality cor-
respond the sonorous words adorning the titles of our Patri-
archs, primates and bishops: "New Rome," "All the East,"
"Pope and Judge of the Universe," or the names of the mythical,
non-existing cities and lands to whose equally non-existing
episcopal sees one can be elected, consecrated and occasionally
even transferred? Or, conversely, what does a "real" title
referring to a real location - e.g. "bishop of New York"-
mean when in fact the jurisdiction claimed is jurisdiction over
a particular ethnic group or, even better, people "in exile,"
i.e. people precisely not identifying themselves with any loca-
tion? Of the similar, and even greater, nominalism evident in
liturgical life ( where, for example, the very idea that an
24 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

evening service was originally related to the real evening and

thus, together with the entire liturgy of time, to real time,
appears to be a totally "irrelevant" one) I have written else-
where and need not speak here.
What is tragic is the acceptance of that nominalism as
normal, as "expressive" of Orthodoxy itself. We are told
that all this - titles, rites, customs, ceremonies - are symbolic,
that together they constitute the "rich symbolism" of which the
Orthodox are to be proud. But the only important question
seems to have been forgotten and ignored: symbolic of what?
For what it questions is not the Orthodox attachment to forms,
which is by no means "accidental" for it is rooted in a very
deep, and essentially Orthodox, experience of the Church as
truly an epiphany: the revelation of, the participation in, a
reality which because it is not "of this world" is given to us -
in "this world" - in symbols. What it questions is the radical
"deterioration" of the symbol, its progressive disconnection
from that reality, as in fact from all reality. And it is precisely
because symbolic realism is so essential to the Christian faith
that there can be no room for any symbolic nominalism in the
Church. Once accepted in any area, however minor, the latter
sooner or later begins to affect the whole life of the Church,
making it, horrible as it may sound, into a game. Thus there
is no more urgent task for Orthodox theology than that of
denouncing the nominalism that threatens us from all sides,
and of defending the true experience of the Church.
 II
THE ''ORTHODOX WORLD,"
PAST AND PRESENT

1.

In spite of the ecumenical encounter between the Christian

East and the Christian West, an encounter that has lasted now
for more than half a century, in spite of an officially acknowl-
edged state of "dialogue," in my opinion it is still very difficult
for a Western Christian fully to understand Orthodoxy, and
not so much the officially formulated dogmas and doctrines
of the Orthodox Church as the fundamental world view, the
experience that lies beneath these formulations and constitutes
their living and "existential" context. This, of course, is also
often true of the Eastern Christian in regard to Western "ex-
perience." The difference here, however, is that whereas the
West - its intellectual categories, its ethos and culture - has
in some form or another permeated the whole world, has truly
become universal, the experience of the Christian East is no
longer a self-evident component of Western civilization and
to a Western man remains extrinsic and even exotic. For us
Orthodox one of the most agonizing aspects of the ecumenical
encounter lies very often precisely in this inability of the
�'West" to grasp anything "Orthodox" unless it is reduced to
Western categories, expressed in Western terms and more
often than not, altered in its true meaning.
I begin with this somewhat harsh observation not only
because frankness and sincerity are the conditio sine qua non
of any genuine ecumenical· conversation, but also because this

• Originally a lecture given at Villanova University, Villanova, Penn·

sylvania, in 1968.

7:iv2,:t7 LIBRARY
25

College of St. Francis

IAI 1CT ill ft l _
26 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

fundamental difficulty is nowhere more obvious than in matters

pertaining to the immediate and burning issues of Church-
world, Church-state and Church-society relationship. Even
many Orthodox following the Western dichotomy between
cc Faith and Order" on the one hand, "Life and Work"
on the other, naively think that, the "re�l'' ecumenical diffi-
culties being concentrated in the area of dogma, the area of
life or "practical" Christianity presents no major problems,
This, I am convinced, is a very naive and superficial ass ump-
tion, although I concede that it is not easy to show why the
recent pronouncements on these issues by the Second Vati-
can Council, the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council
of Churches, and the theologians of "secular Christianity,"
different as they may be from one another and in spite of some
perfectly acceptable points, on the whole are representative
of an orientation which is deeply alien to the Orthodox mind
and from which the Orthodox "experience" is almost totally
absent.
The difficulty is further increased by what to a Western
Christian may appear as a rather poor record of Eastern Ortho-
doxy in the area under consideration. He may ask, and · not
without justification: Is it a mere "accident" that today some
ninety percent of Orthodox people live in totalitarian, atheistic
and militantly anti-Christian states? Does this not indicate a
failure of the Eastern approach to the problems of the world?
And, given that failure, what can the Orthodox contribute to
the present passionate search for new or renewed guidelines
of Christian action and involvement in and for the world?
To explain the Orthodox "experience," to answer these
questions is not easy. They must be answered however, and not
for the sake of an "apology" of Orthodoxy, but because in
answering them a different perspective, a different set of values
may be be disclosed, which is not, it is hoped, totally irrelevant
to the problems faced today by Christians everywhere. Now
that the crisis of all Christian "establishments" has reached
unprecedented proportions and requires, in order to be over-
come, a tremendous effort - that of rethinking and reevalu-
ating many of the presuppositions held hitherto· to be self-
evident-, the Orthodox vision of the world and of the state,
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 27

as well as of the Church's relation to them, may be of some

help.

2.

All historians would probably agree that the long and,

more of ten than not, tragic history of the relations between the
Church and the state has passed through three main stages:
an open and acute conflict at the beginning, then a reconcilia-
tion that led to an organic alliance of the Church with a Chris-
tian state and finally, in our own "post-Christian era," a di-
vorce between them resulting either in a more or less peaceful
and "legal" separation or in a new conflict. But if these three
stages are grosso modo common to both the East and the West,
the meaning given them, the way they were and still are "ex-
perienced," is without any doubt deeply different. Our first
purpose, then, is to outline briefly the Eastern experience in-
sofar as it has differed from the Western one.
So much has been written about the conflict between the
early church and the Roman Empire that we need not recall
the bare facts. One point however, pertaining not to facts but
to their interpretation, does require our attention, for on it
ultimately depends the understanding of the whole history of
the Church-world relationship, of its very basis. It has often
been affirmed that the "rejection" of the Empire by the first
Christians was rooted primarily in their eschatological world-
view, in their expectation of an imminent parousia. It is our
eschatology that allegedly made the entire outlook of the
Church a world-denying one and prevented her from any par-
ticipation and involvement in the "world." By the same token
the subsequent reconciliation with the world, state, society and
culture and a new and positive attitude towards them are
ascribed to a radical change, a real volte-/ace, in Christian
world-view, to its progressive liberation from the eschato-
logical obsession of the earlier period.
This theory, in my opinion, is wrong on two counts: first,
in its identification of early Christian eschatology with a mere
"world-denying" attitude, and second, in its affirmation that
this .eschatology therefore had to be, and in fact was, dropped
28 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

or at least radically altered before a positive Christian approach

to the world and its components - state, culture, etc.- could
take shape.
The crux of the matter here is the very notion of escha-
tology, a term so much used and also abused today. It seems
to me that no other area of modern theology is more confused
than that of eschatology. This confusion may be to some degree
explained, if not excused, by the fact that for many centuries
Christian theology simply lost its eschatological dimension.
There existed, to be sure, in manuals of theology a chapter
or rather an appendix entitled "de novissimis," in which all
kinds of information about the end of the world and what
comes after it were given. What disappeared, however, was
eschatology as precisely a dimension, a coefficient of the entire
theological enterprise, shaping and permeating the whole
Christian faith as its dynamic inspiration and motivation. And
thus when at first historians and then theologians rediscovered
the tremendous importance that eschatology had in the early
Christian faith, they either rejected it as precisely "past" - a
passing phenomenon characteristic of the primitive church but
of no value for our "scientific" theology - or then began to
reinterpret and to "transpose" it according to their own under-
standing of modern "needs." Hence the paradox of the present
situation: Everyone seems to attach a great importance to escha-
tology - past or present - but there is no consensus as to
what it meant in the past and ought to mean for the Church
today. To treat this crucially important subject, be it only
superficially, is obviously beyond the scope of this paper. But
since the whole problem of the Church and the world ulti-
mately depends on it, one must state very briefly our own
understanding of the meaning of eschatology in the develop-
ment of the Eastern "experience."
I submit in the first place that the eschatology in whose
light the early church indeed judged and evaluated everything
in this world was not a negative, but a highly "positive," ex-
perience, not a denial of the world but a certain way of looking
at it and experiencing it. For its ultimate content and term of
reference was not the world, but the Kingdom of God, and
thus rather than being "anti-world" it was a "pro-Kingdom"
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 29

attitude, in which it differed from eschatologies that developed

later. The Kingdom of God - announced, inaugurated and
given by and in Christ - stands at the heart of the early Chris-
tian faith, and not only as something yet to come but as that
which has come, is present no,w, and shall come at the end.
It has come in Jesus Christ, in His incarnation, death, resur-
rection, ascension and in the fruit of all this - the descent
of the Holy Spirit on/ the "last and great" day of Pentecost.
It comes now and is present in the Church, the "ecclesia" of
those who having died through Christ in baptism can now
"walk in the newness of life," partake now of the "joy and
peace of the Holy Spirit," eat and drink at Christ's table in
His Kingdom. And it shall come at the end, when, having
fulfilled all His dispensation, Christ will "fill all things with
Hin1self.''
Thus it is the experience of the Kingdom of God and not
a mere doctrine "de novissimis" - experience centered on the
Church's self-fulfillment in the Eucharist, on the Lord's Day-
that pertneates the whole faith and the whole life of the early
church and, supplying us with the key to the initial Christian
attitude towards the world and its "components" - time,
nature, society, state, etc.- explains the antinomical character
of that attitude, the correlation within it of an emphatic yes
to the world with an equally emphatic no. In the light of the
Kingdom, the world is revealed and experienced on the one
hand as being at its end. And not only because the Kingdom
of God, which is the end of all things, has already been revealed
and manifested, but also because by rejecting and condemning
to death Christ, the Life and the Light of all life, it has con-
demned itself to die, to be the world whose form and image
"fade away" so that the Kingdom of God "is not of this world."
This is the Christian no to theworld and, from the first day,
Christianity proclaimed the end of "this world" and required
from those who believe in Christ and want to partake of His
Kingdom that they be "dead with Christ" and their true life be
"hid with Christ in God." Yet, on the other hand, it proclaimed
that the world is redeemed and saved in Christ. This means
that for those who believe in Christ and are united to Him,
this very world - its time and rnatter.jts life, and even death-
30 . CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

have become "means" of communion with the Kingdom of

God, the sacrament, i.e. the mode, of its coming and presence
among men. "All is yours and you are Christ's." This is the
Christian yes to the world, the joyful affirmation that "heaven
and earth are full of God's glory."
I have tried elsewhere to show how this antinornical
correlation of the yes and the no constitutes the very foun-
dation, the initial 'ordo of the early Christian liturgy.' 'How,
for example, the sui generis Christian institution· ·of the
Lord's Day, the "first" and the "eighth" as the Fathers call it,
far from being a Christian substitute for the Jewish Sabbath
( this it indeed became in later piety), places all of time
in the perspective of the Kingdom, makes it "passage" towards
the "day without evening" and thus fills each moment of it
with meaning and responsibility; how Eucharist by being
primarily the sacrament of the Kingdom, of Christ's parousia,
i.e. coming and presence, refers the whole cosmos to escha-
tological fulfillment; how, in short, the fundamental liturgical
experience of withdrawal from "this world" ( Christ comes
"the doors being shut") is understood not in terms of a spiritu-
alistic or apocalyptic "escape," but as the starting point, as
indeed the foundation, of Christian mission and action in the
world, for it is this experience that makes it possible to see the
world in Christ. It is impossible here to reproduce the entire
argument. Let me simply state that in the light of the evidence
as I see it, the early Christian eschatology, rather than rejecting
the world, posits the foundation of a world-view which implies
a "positive" attitude towards the world in general, and towards
the state in particular. ·

3.

The state is, to be sure, wholly of "this world." It belongs

to the level of reality which in the light of the Kingdom "fades
away." This does not mean, however, that it is either evil or
neutral, an enemy to be fought or an entity to be ignored for
Cf. my Introduction to liturgical Theology (Faith Press, London, 1966;
1

repr. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, N.Y., 1977).

The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 31
the sake of "spiritual values." On the contrary, it is precisely
the experience of the Kingdom that for Christians gives the
state its real meaning and value. The fall consisted primarily
in the disconnection of "this world" from God and in its ac-
quiring therefore a pseudo-meaning and a pseudo-value which
is the very essence of the demonic, the Devil being "the liar
and the father of lies." To redeem the world, or anything in
the world, is then to place it in the perspective of the Kingdom
of God as its end and ultimate term of reference, to make it
transparent to the Kingdom as its sign, means and "instru-
ment." The eschatological world-view of the early church is
never a static" one. There is no trace in it of any distribution
C(

of the various essences of this world into good and evil ones.
The essence of all that exists is good, for it is God's creation.
It. is only its divorce from God and its transformation into an
idol, i.e. an "end in itself," that makes anything in this world
evil and demonic. Thus, as everything else in "this world,"
the state may be under the power of "the prince of this world."
It may become a vehicle of demonic lies and distortions, yet,
as everything else, by "accepting" the Kingdom of God as its
own ultimate value or "eschaton," it may fulfill a positive
function. As an integral part of "this world," it exists under
the sign of the end and will not "inherit the Kingdom of
God." But its positive and indeed "Christian" function lies in
this very recognition of its limit, in this very refusal to be an
"end in- itself," an absolute value, an idol, in its subordination,
in ·_short, to the only absolute value, that of God's Kingdom.
It is well known that from a purely legal point of view
the crime for which Christians were condemned and denied the
right to exist ("non licet vos esse") was their refusal to honor
the ·emperor with the title of Kyrios, Lord. They did not
denounce, reject or fight any other "defect" of the Roman
Empire be it, to use our modern "fixations," injustice (slavery),
colonialism ( the regime of imperial versus the senatorial
provinces), or imperialism ( expansion at the expense of other
states and nations) . Yet what they denounced and fought by
denying the emperor the divine title of Kyrios implied in fact
much more than all this, for it challenged once and for all the
self-proclaimed divinity of the state, its claim to be an absolute
32 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

value, a divine "end in itself." And it implied therefore not

only a negation, but also an affirmation.
In the first place it affirmed the coming into the world, into
time and history, of the one and true Kyrios, Jesus Christ.
"Thou alone art the Kyrios," says one of the earliest Christian
hymns, and this means infinitely more than a general belief in
divine providence or a remote divine government of the world.
It means that the Kingdom of God has become the decisive
factor of the "here and now," of the world's life and history,
and that human history develops from now on under the sign
of the kairos, the direct divine intervention into time and life.
It thus lays the foundation for an ecclesiology, a doctrine of
the Church, including into its scope and perspective the whole
cosmos and the totality of history.
In the second place this denial affirms the state as· also
belonging to the dominion of the one Kyrios, Jesus Christ.
In a deep sense it rejects the "separation" of Church and state,
if that separation is understood not in "institutional" or "legal"
terms ( the only terms ultimately retained in the \Vest) but
in those of a common perspective, a common reference to
the same "end." Limited as it is by "its belonging to· "this
world," the state is nevertheless capable of reflecting the ideal
of the Kingdom, of living by it; of truly serving the Kyrios of
the universe. Early Christian writings are surprisingly free from
either cosmical or historical "pessimism." They resound on the
contrary with a joyful expectation of a cosmic victory of Christ.
Nowhere in them does one find · any longing for a peaceful
isolation of the Church into a purely "spiritual" sphere, a
separation from the world and its "worries." Christians know,
of course, that they· are a "tertium genus." All home is exile
for them and all exile a home, but this leads them to no in-
difference or· "neutrality" or pessimism. For their exile is in
the Kingdom, and that Kingdom has been revealed in the
midst of the world as its true meaning, redemption and sal-
vation.
Finally, that Christian "denial" proclaimed and affirmed
the Truth as the very power and "mode of presence" of the
Kingdom in "this world," as the criterion for both its negation
and its affirmation, as the source of true .charity and justice, as
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 33

above all the criterion enabling men to "discern the spirits -

whether they are from God .... " The question "What is
truth?" of Pontius Pilate and behind him of the whole Roman
Empire implied indeed a distinction and a separation between
Truth on the one hand and Authority on the other; it also
implicitly denied the possibility for man to know the Truth
and to be guided by it. Hence the absolutization of Authority
and the divinization of Caesar. ttWhat is Truth?" asked Pilate,
suggesting the relativity of that concept and there/ore de-
manding an unconditional obedience to the emperor. "Au-
thority is Truth," such was the significance of that demand.
To it Christians answered by affirming that Truth is Authority.
Such indeed was the meaning of the Christian martyria, of the
martyr's blood which ultimately destroyed the greatest, the
most demonic of all idols.
Thus, in my opinion at least, early Christian eschatology,
rather than "rejecting" the state, posited in fact the funda-
mental principles of the next historical chapter, that of a
"Christian" state. But it posited them only inasmuch as it kept
at the center of its "world-view" the experience of the King-
dom of God.

4.

"The different interpretation given that "world-view": by

Western historians and theologians, who consistently ·view it
as · incompatible with the subsequent reconciliation of the
Church with the world, as a particularity of the primitive com-
munity soon to disappear under the pressure of reality, is not
accidental. For it is here indeed that lies the fundamental
difference between the two visions of the Christian world as
they developed respectively in the West and in the East. I am
convinced that basically, i.e. in vision and intention, in theoria
if not always in reality, the Christian East preserved the escha-
tological perspective of the early church, making it the basis
of its attitude towards the world, whereas the Christian West
replaced it at an early date with a different "vision," whose
main. ide_ological core and context can be termed juridical.
34 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Is it not indeed characteristic of Western ecclesiastical

development that the relations between Church and state were
virtually from the beginning understood, discussed and for-
mulated almost exclusively in juridical or legal terms - as a
relation between two institutions, two powers, two govern-
ments? Is it not true that in spite of substantial differences,
such historical phenomena as the medieval struggle between
the Papacy and the Western emperors, Luther's doctrine of
the two kingdoms, and the modern theories of separation of
Church and state do ultimately belong to the same ideological
level, for they all share as their basic presupposition a "juridi-
cal" understanding of the problem they try to solve. This
legalism moreover is so deeply rooted in the Western ecclesi-
astical mind that even when trying to understand and to for-
mulate other, non-Western patterns of Church-state relation-
ship, Western historians almost without exception begin by
reducing them in some way or another to "juridical" categories.
Thus, for example, when speaking of Byzantium, few of
them fail to define it as "Caesaropapism," i.e. to view it as a
simple case of subordination of the ecclesiastical power to the
imperial.
The truth, however, is that another type of Church-state
relationship, not exclusively juridical in nature and in its ways
of functioning, not only can, but in fact did exist, rooted in the
world-view which we termed eschatological. Such precisely
was the Eastern or Byzantine "type." Just as the initial conflict
between the Church and the empire was not a legal, but an
"eschatological" one, was focused not on rights and obliga-
tions, freedom of conscience or freedom of cult, but on the
decisive meaning for the world of one Person, one Event, one
Community, the subsequent reconciliation between Church
and state could not in the Eastern conscience, or maybe better
to .say "subconscience," have had any other basis. It is this
"eschatological continuity" which, in my opinion, constitutes
the starting point and the ultimate term of reference of the
entire Eastern "experience." The historical complexity, the
tragedies and failures of that experience should by no means be
silenced or minimized. But even their meaning cannot be fully
grasped unless they are referred to and seen in the light of the
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 35
experience from which they stem. To define that experience,
be it only schematically, is thus our next task.

5.

Rather than with legal texts, this definition must begin with
the event which formed the spiritual and psychological foun-
dation of Byzantine "theocracy" and of its continuation in
other Orthodox lands, the spectacular conversion to Chris-
tianity of the Emperor Constantine.
We are not concerned here with what "really" happened
to Constantine on that mysterious afternoon, not even with
how he himself understood and later explained it. The unique
and indeed crucial significance of that event lies in its accept-
ance by the Byzantine Christian tradition as the self-evident
and sufficient basis for the Church's reconciliation with the
empire, or to use a Byzantine term, for their "symphony." Of
the many and varied formulations of that acceptance one of
the most explicit can be found in Byzantine liturgy, in that
cycle of "imperial" feasts and prayers whose constant theme
is Constantine's vision of the Cross and its implications for
both the Church and the empire. It is here, in this emphasis
on the election of Constantine "by God and not by men," that
one grasps the continuity of the Byzantine experience with
the early, "eschatological" attitude of the Church towards the
.
empire.
"Like Paul, thou hast received the calling not from
men .... " This in the eyes of the Eastern tradition is the
decisive factor in Constantine's conversion. He is called directly
by Christ, not even through the Church, and he is chosen not
as an "individual," but precisely as emperor, for the event of
that election occurs at a crucial moment of his imperial career,
his acceptance of Christ being the condition of his victory over
his enemies. In him, thus, the empire itself is called to accept
Christ and to become His politeuma. But this means that in
the person of the emperor, the empire acknowledges as its own
Kyrios the Lord of heaven and earth,' places itself in the per-
spective and under the dominion of His Kingdom. Thus ab
36 CHURCH, ·wo'.RLD, MISSION

initio the alliance between Church and state is based not on· any
"treaty," bargaining and agreement, not on any detailed
definitions of mutual rights and obligations, but on faith.
One does not "bargain" with God, and it is God who elected
Constantine and in him revealed the empire to be part of His
cc dominion." And in the eyes of the Church this act of faith
leading to the new attitude towards theempire not only by no
means contradicted the earlier one, but was indeed in full con-
tinuity with it. For the Church, when she opposed the em-
pire, did it not because of any political or social principles,
not for the sake of any particular doctrine of the state, but
uniquely in the name of-Christ whom God made the Kyrios of
all creation. In other terms, .she opposed the demonic "misuse"
of the state by the "prince of this world," and her very refusal
to acknowledge the emperor as Kyrios implied, as we have
said above, a positive attitude towards the state, faith in the
possibility for the Messiah to be accepted by the entire "house
of Israel." The Church in the Graeco-Rornan world never gave
up her hope to see it accept Christ and His Kingdom. The
heresies she consistently fought were heresies not of exagger-
ated "optimism" but those of dualism, docetism, escapism and
pessimism in all its forms. The conversion -of Constantine and
its joyful and confident acceptance by the Church meant there-
fore no change in faith, no alteration of its eschatol_ogical
content. To use a- term forgotten and dismissed. today but
absolutely essential in the language of the early church, the
conversion of the emperor and the empire were of the order
of. "exorcism." The power .of the. Cross - the. Church's es-
sential weapon against the demons - liberated· the empire
.frorn the power of the cc prince of this world." By. crushing .the
idols, it made the empire "open" to the Kingdom, available
·as its servant and instrument. .. But in no way, and this must be
stressed, did it transform the empire into the Kingdom. of
God. For it is the property of the early Christian eschatology
_that, while experiencing the Kingdom of God as an immanent
.factor in the life of "this world," it maintains intact its totally
transcendent character. It is always the presence in "this
world" of the "world to come," never the transformation or
the "evolution" of the former .into the latter. That this distinc-
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 37

tion was fully preserved is proved best of all by the fact that
Constantine received baptism only on his death bed, some
twenty-five years-after his "conversion." And when he died on
the day of Pentecost, dressed in his white baptismal garment,
it was as a Christian "neophyte," not as emperor. Later on,
the same symbol was preserved in the monastic tonsure received
by the dying emperors. The empire may be Christian, i.e. serve
the Kingdom, make it its own "highest value," but it is not
and cannot become the Kingdom, which, although always
present in "this world," remains forever "not of this world" -
at its transcendent end as judgement, goal and fulfillment.

6.

To remember all this is essential for the understanding of

Byzantine "symphony." Whatever· the motivations of Con-
stantine's policy towards the Church - and they certainly
changed and evolved, whatever the variations of the imperial
raison d'etat._ and they were numerous, the Church, as we
said above, asked for no formal or juridical guarantees, no
agreements, but gladly surrendered herself to the care and
protection of him whom Christ Himself chose and appointed
to serve His Kingdom. ··
It is on purpose that I use here the strong term "surrender."
For it is absolutely true that the Byzantine Church gave up her
"independence" in the juridical connotations of that term.
Administratively, institutionally, she indeed merged with the
empire to form with it but one politico-ecclesiastical organism
and acknowledged the emperor's right to administer her. In
the words of a canonical text, "the administrative structure
of the Church followed that of the empire," and this meant
in fact a rather substantial transformation of the Church's
organization on all levels - the local, the regional and the
"universal." To analyze this transformation here is impossible,
but it is certainly not a mere terminological change that is
attested by the introduction into the ecclesiastical vocabulary
of civil terms such as "diocese," "eparchy," "exarchate," etc.
The spectacular .rise of the hitherto unknown bishop of Con-
38 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

stantinople to the position of "ecumenical" ( i.e. imperial)

primacy is explicitly justified at the Second Ecumenical Council
by the fact that he "dwells in the city of the emperor and
senate." The emperor alone has the right to summon ecumeni-
cal councils, he legislates in matters of church discipline and
welfare, he appoints bishops, and the formula of the imperial
appointment is integrated into the ritual of episcopal con-
secration.
One could multiply ad libitum examples of this "surren-
der," and to Western historians they constitute unmistakable
proofs of Byzantine "Caesaropapism," of the total subjuga-
tion of the Church by the state, of the Church's loss of "in-
dependence." In fact it is their own subjugation to an exclusive-
ly juridical concept of Church-state relationship that prevents
them from discerning the true meaning of that relationship
in Byzantium, to see it in its own light and according to its
own presuppositions. They do not realize that for the Byzan-
tine Church - and precisely because of the eschatological
world-view which allowed her to accept Constantine's con-
version - the problem of her relations with the empire was
situated on an altogether different level where, it can be said
in all objectivity, she not only preserved what she meant by
her "independence" but, to use Western categories once more,
truly "dominated" the empire.
To explain this, an ecclesiological footnote is in order.
One of the reasons for the frequent misunderstanding and
misinterpretation of Byzantine "symphony" in the West is a
surprising ignorance of Orthodox theology and more particu-
larly of Orthodox ecclesiology, the doctrine of the Church.
Thus it is very important to understand the difference that
exists between the Western and the Eastern approaches to th�
whole institutional or jurisdictional aspect of the Church.
Whereas in the West for a long time and for reasons that we
do not have to analyze here, this aspect virtually absorbed the
whole of ecclesiology, in the East not only was it far less
central, but the very approach to it was different. Here the
Church was viewed primarily not as "power" or "jurisdiction,"
but as a sacramental organism whose function and purpose is
to reveal, manifest and communicate the Kingdom of God, to
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 39

communicate it as Truth, Grace and Communion with God

and thus to fulfill the Church as the Body of Christ and the
Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Church, to be sure, is institu-
tion, but of sacramental, and not juridical, nature. This means
that it exists only in order to assure the Church's "passage"
from "this world" into tithe world to come," as the sign con-
stantly to be fulfilled, as the "means" of the Church becoming
all the time «that which she is." Essential as it is for the Church
as sign and sacrament, the institution therefore cannot be
simply identified with the Church. As institution the Church
is of «this world," as fulfillment she is of tithe world to come."
This does not mean any separation within the Church between
«institution" and "fulfillment," for the whole purpose of the
institution is precisely to make fulfillment possible, to reveal
as present that which is "to come." The fulfillment is impossible
without the institution, just as the institution receives all its
meaning from that which it fulfills. What this means, however,
is that the Church's visible, institutional structure - episco-
pate, canonical order, etc.- is a structure not of power, but of
presence. It exists in order to assure the fullness of that pres-
ence and its continuity in space and time, its identity and
"sameness" always and everywhere. And this means finally -
and we must stress this point - that the Church claims no
"power" in this world and has no "earthly" interests to defend.
On the one hand, the whole world, the entire creation belong
to her because they belong to Christ, the Lord of creation,
and are therefore in their totality the object of her mission.
Yet, on the other hand, she does not possess them as her own
"property," for her only mission is to reveal and to "repre-
sent," to make present in this world, the Kingdom which is
not of this world and for the sake of which those "who possess
should be as if they possessed not."
Thus, in the Eastern perspective the relation of the Church
to the world is not "juridical" by its very nature and therefore
cannot be expressed in juridical terms. There may be and there
of necessity are "juridical persons" within the visible, institu-
tional Church - diocese, communities, monasteries, etc. But
as such they are "of this world" and, in their relation to the
state or society, live according to earthly laws and principles,
40 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

insofar as these do not prevent the Church from fulfilling

her essential mission. If the Church "abides" in a non-Christian
state, she claims, as we know already, nothing but the possi-
bility to "be herself," i.e. to preach and to confess Christ, the
unique Kyrios, and His Kingdom, to offer salvation to all men
everywhere.Yet in the case of a Christian state - the one which
by definition shares her "scale of values," her eschatological
faith - the Church has no difficulty in leaving to it the "man-
agement" of her earthly life, the care and the administration
-of her earthly needs. And between the two attitudes there
is no contradiction, for both are rooted precisely in the same
"eschatological ecclesiology," in the same fundamental ex-
perience of the Church.
In the light of this "footnote," we may understand now
why the basis .for Church-state relationship in Byzantium
was not a juridical principle _but the notion of Truth. Juridi-
cally, let us repeat once more, the Church indeed "surrendered"
herself to the empire and claimed no "independence" from
it whatsoever. But - and here is the whole point - the one
and absolute condition for that surrender was the acceptance
by the empire of the faith of the Church, i.e. of the same
ultimate vision of God, world and history; and this we call
Truth. It was this Truth - expressed in doctrinal formulations,
in the essential sacramental order, in worship, and last but not
least ( a point which we shall elaborate later) in the freedom
of each man to "leave" the human society of "this world" for
the sake of the Kingdom - that in the eyes of the Church
"guaranteed" her real independence, the fulfillment by her
of her mission. As long as the empire placed itself under
Christ's judgement and in the perspective, essential for the
Church, of the Kingdom of God, the Church saw no reason
to claim any "juridical', independence from it and, in fact,
gladly put the reins of ecclesiastical government and policy
in the hands of the emperor. In his care for the Church, in
the empire's function as the Church, s earthly "habitation," the
Church indeed saw the essential vocation of the Christian
empire, the very "note" of it being Christian.
But what in their digressions about Byzantine Caesaro-
papism Western historians seem to overlook is the unique and
·The tr Orthodox World," Past and Present 41
indeed crucial role played precisely by the notion of Truth
within that new relationship. Not only can one say without
··any exaggeration that the "surrender" always remained con-
tingent on the empire's faithfulness to that Truth, but that,
in another sense, it was itself transformed into the Church's
"victory.t'or even into the empire's "surrender" to the Church.
Every time the empire "tampered" with the Truth, tried to
"adjust" it to its pragmatic needs, the Church, be it only in
the person of her best representatives, protested and fought
the empire, opposing it whenever necessary with the martyria
of her blood and suffering. And ultimately each time it was
the empire, and not the Church, that "surrendered" and gave
.up its claims and demands.
From this point of view the great doctrinal controversies
which almost without interruption disturbed the life of
Byzantium from the fourth century till the ninth, from Ari-
anism to Iconoclasm, were a continuous crisis in Church-
state relationship as well as a slow purification of Byzantine
"symphony," the growth and deepening of that vision of
Christian empire which the Church accepted in the conversion
of Constantine. And on this level the real history of the Church
was made, her genuine consciousness expressed, not by a per-
ennially weak majority, not by bishops and clerics always
ready to pay with a compromise for another state grant or
privilege, but by men such as St. Athanasius of Alexandria,
the three great Cappadocians, St. John Chrysostom, St. Maxi-
mus the Confessor and so many others. Yet - and this is
the crucial point - it was their martyria that ultimately
triumphed. It was they who were "canonized," not only by the
Church but also by the empire, as bearers of Orthodoxy. It
was their "truth" that sooner or later triumphed and was
accepted by the entire Byzantine world.
That the effort of those martyrs and confessors was not lost,
that there was a slow but steady purification of the Byzantine
mind from the ambiguity of its pagan antecedents, that in
other terms the Church progressively imposed her view, her
concept of the Christian state, can be seen in Byzantine im-
perial legislation itself. Neither the code of Theodosius nor
that of Justinian are free from the presuppositions and the
42 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

categories of the old, pagan "theocracy." Accepted and exalted

as it is, Christianity remains "ontologically" subordinated to
the empire, as the sign and means of its "victory," as a divine
sanction for its existence. From a purely legislative point of
view Christian religion is given the place vacated by the old
state paganism. In a way it is still Christ who is understood as
"serving" the empire. But in the ninth century, in a document
like the Epanagoge, or in later imperial iconography, the
situation is altogether changed. It is the emperor who, kneeling
before the Christ-Pantocrator, offers and dedicates to Him
the empire. It is the empire itself which, at least officially and
symbolically, knows no other purpose, no other function but
that of serving Christ and of being His "habitation." This
victory is, beyond any doubt, the fruit of the long fight for
Truth, of the Christian martyria, which cleared the initial
ambiguities of pagan theocracy, "exorcised" it from its impure
elements. The very concept of "Orthodoxy," which at the end
of early Byzantium becomes so central in Byzantine conscious-
ness and forms henceforth the basis of all Byzantine "con-
stitutions," is in fact a direct result of that long fight, its most
significant and lasting consequence.
. All this is said of course on the level of vision and theory.
In reality, in practice, the theory failed more than once and
was betrayed much too often. There is no need to recall here
the history of these failures. It fills virtually every book on
Byzantium. My purpose here is not to defend Byzantium or
to "idealize" it. Anyone who has consulted any of my other
writings on this subject would readily agree that I am not
guilty of any such idealization. My point here is simply that
to see the history of Byzantine Christianity merely as an ex-
ample of Caesaropapism, to reduce it to a surrender of Church
to state, is not only to distort significantly the historical evi-
dence, but also to miss, almost completely, the spirit and the
psychological "make-up" of a society, of a "world" which for
more than a thousand years of its existence was Christian, not
only in intention but also in content.
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 4,

7.

We spoke of intentions. Let us now consider the "content."

In what sense, to what degree, can it be termed "Christian"?
It is clear, of course, that in the last analysis the answer to this
question depends on the meaning given to the adjective
"Christian," and it is precisely on this meaning that the mind
and the conscience of Christians is deeply split today. The
only objective approach therefore is to evaluate a society, an
experience, in the light of its own criteria and presuppositions,
and then to ask whether any aspect of that experience is of
lasting value.
For the Byzantines the term "Christian" as applied to the
empire meant, as we have seen, above everything else the
acceptance by the empire of a certain "truth," a definite vision
of the world and of history. We have satisfied ourselves that
the empire indeed had accepted that vision. But now the ques-
tion is: Did it "apply" that vision and live by it? Where is
the proof that the Church's understanding and interpretation
of Constantine's conversion was not a naive one and that
ultimately she was not "fooled" by her partner?
Here again the proof is to be found, first of all, in an event
which, in rny opinion, is as crucial for the Eastern "experience"
of the state as the conversion of the first Christian emperor.
This event is monasticism, or rather the place and the function
it acquired almost immediately in the Byzantine «world-view."
Here again, as in the case of Constantine's conversion, we are
concerned not with the content of monastic spirituality as such,
but with the way in which the monastic ideal was incorporated
into the Byzantine tradition.
One can consider as disqualified and abandoned the more
or less "radical" theories which some liberal historians of the
nineteenth century formulated concerning the origin of mo-
nasticism. Several first-rate studies have proved beyond any
possible doubt the continuity which in spite of many differences
existed between the early monastic ideal and the spirituality
of the primitive Church. For us here the main point is that this
. continuity '\YaS precisely that of the eschatological world-view,
44 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

of the faith centered primarily on the experience, expectation

and anticipation of the Kingdom of God. The difference was
one of "situation," not of "content." The early Christian com-
munity, because of the pagan context within which it lived,
was itself in many ways "monastic," as K. Heussi has pointed
out. To be separated from the world, one did not need to leave
it physically. As to the monastic "exodus" and "anachorisis"
of the fourth-fifth centuries, it was motivated by the reaction
of the same Christian maximalism to the spiritual dangers
created by the "reconciliation" of the Church with the world
and, first of all, to the very real danger of a nominal and "easy-
going" Christian life. What must be· stressed, however, is the
almost paradoxical mutual acceptance of monasticism by· the
empire and of the empire by monasticism, an acceptance which
constitutes one of the basic dimensions of the entire Eastern
t t
expenence.
• ',

On the one hand, for all its maximalism and "world re-
nouncing," monasticism did not either condemn or reject the
very principle of the "Christianization" of the world which
began with Constantine's conversion. On the contrary it _is,
in a way, for the sake of that Christian world, in order to keep
alive the martyria, the testimony to the Kingdom of God by
which the world is saved, that the monks "left the world,"
undertaking their spiritual fight. "How is the Church, how
is the empire?" is the first question addressed to a priest who
came to visit her in the desert by St. Mary of Egypt, the great
hero of Byzantine monastic literature, after she had spent some
forty years in total solitude. The question is by no means a
merely rhetorical one. Apart from· some radical and quasi-
Manichean trends, quickly eliminated, the classical monastic
tradition is totally alien to any utopianism, millenarianism or
sectarianism and is in no way comparable to the later radical
sects with their fanatical rejection of the state. Reading the
texts in which this tradition was later formulated ( cf. the
Byzantine Philokalia), one is rather amazed by its balance,
the absence from it of any exaggeration or "radicalism." The
"world" which monks renounce is the one which all Christians,
monks and non-monks alike, must renounce, for it is precisely
the world which is an end in itself, an "idol" claiming
The "Orthodox World,'' Past and Present 45

the whole man for itself. The renunciation is based on the same
and eternal ·Christian antinomy: "in the world but not of the
world." In itself, however, this renunciation and constant fight
are directed not against the "flesh and blood" of the world,
but against the powers of darkness that deviated God's creation
from God. They are means of liberation and restoration, not
of "negation" and destruction. All students of Eastern mysti-
cism stress the positive, joyful and in a sense "cosmical" spirit
that permeates it and which, as late as a century ago, shone so
brightly in a simple Russian monk, St. Seraphim of Sarov (
d. 1832). It is this spirit, the "joy and peace in the Holy
Spirit," that for centuries attracted millions and millions of
Orthodox pilgrims to monasteries where, while "in this world,"
one could taste of the ineffable beauty and bliss of the "world
to come." Monasticism thus was in continuation with that
same eschatological world-view which made St. Paul and the
early Christians, while fighting the imperial "idol," pray for
the emperor and the "established powers."
Even more revealing was the attitude towards monasticism
of the empire and the society it embodied. The Christian world
born out of Constantine's conversion not only did not reject
the monastic movement but, in an almost paradoxical way,
placed the monastic ideal, the monastic "scale of values,"
at the very heart of its own life and consciousness. Very soon
indeed the "desert" ceased to be limited to the wilderness at
the outskirts of the "inhabited world" ( oikoumene) and im-
planted itself, in the form. of numberless monasteries and con-
vents, in the "downtowns" of big· cities, becoming thus the
focus of spiritual guidance, leadership and inspiration. The
Fathers of the desert became the "heroes" of the entire society
and their vitae, the "bestsellers'<of Byzantine popular literature.
The monastic liturgy, the monastic piety invaded and reshaped
the liturgy of the whole Church, which, it can be said without
any exaggeration, "surrendered" herself to monasticism, just
as, in another sense, she surrendered herself to the empire.
Monasticism was thus "canonized" by the imperial-ecclesiasti-
cal organism as an integral part and expression of that Truth
which, as we have seen already, formed the very basis of
Byzantine "symphony." And nothing reveals better the depth
46 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION-

of that acceptance than the symbolic monastic tonsure of the

emperor at his hour of death. This ritual symbolized indeed the
"hierarchy of values" acknowledged by the empire, its total
subordination to the transcendent Kingdom of God, which
the empire as such does not inherit, of which it can be an in-
strument or servant in "this world," but whose ultimate in-
heritance requires a total renunciation of everything "earthly."
My emphasis on monasticism as the main expression of the
Byzantine world as Christian may seem strange and uncon-
vincing to the "modern" man. \X'hat I am trying to say,
however, is very simple. This "acceptance" of monasticism
meant, in £act, the recognition of the ultimate [reedom of man,
not of course in our modern and formal definition of that term,
but as recognition of man's transcendent destiny and vocation,
of his belonging to God and to His Kingdom, and not to any-
thing "in this world." It is not an accident that the iconoclastic
emperors, the first proponents of a secular idea of both state
and culture, led a violent attack not only against icons but also,
and maybe primarily, against monasticism. They realized per-
fectly well that the latter's function within Christian society
was precisely to affirm the transcendent freedom of man from
the state, to preserve the eschatological world-view which alone
makes this world Christian. The iconoclasts failed, as failed
all those in the· East who tried to reverse the "hierarchv of
J

values." Therefore, it can be said of the empire that whatever

its numberless failures, it lived by the "rnoto" inscribed by
Justinian on the altar of Constantinople's St. Sophia: "Thine
own Justinian and Theodora offer to Thee."

8.

A "built-in" tension and polarization between the empire

and the desert: such could be the adequate definition of the
Byzantine spiritual world, the context which makes it Chris-
tian. And the fruit of that tension, the tangible result of the
Christian politeuma, is a civilization, a culture whose depth
and meaning are being rediscovered today. This culture, in
spite of all its limitations, can indeed be called Christian, not
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 47

only nominally but essentially. It is a sui generis fruit of the

Church in "this world." One must remark that Western in-
terest in Byzantine civilization is of a relatively recent date.
For too long the cultural and psychological self-centeredness
of the West prevented it from seeing in Byzantium anything
but an exotic and, to some, fascinating world. It is only today,
through the efforts of a small group of Byzantinists, that the
various aspects of the Byzantine experience - its art, thought,
social and political organization, etc.-slowly begin to recover
their place in the Western "curriculum." And although it is
evident that there is no room here for even a most superficial
description or analysis of that culture, three points which are
relevant to the theme of this paper must be made.
I mentioned above the concept of Truth as the basis of the
Byzantine theory and practice of Church-state relationship.
But it would be wrong to see in this concept a mere set of rigid
doctrinal formulations or "symbolic" texts. In reality the con-
cept of Truth permeates the whole life of Byzantine society,
constitutes its essential Christian "coefficient." Not by accident
the Byzantine period of church history coincides with the
patristic age, with the unique and truly unsurpassed effort of
the human "logos" to Henter into the Logos of Truth," and,
in a synergeia with grace, to find words "adequate to God."
What from a purely formal point of view was a synthesis
between Athens and Jerusalem, Hellenism and Christianity,
meant on a deeper level the slow and creative transformation
of the mind itself, the moulding of new fundamental thought
forms, and not only for theology in the narrow, -technical
sense of this word, but for the entire intellectual enterprise of
man. To the Byzantine mind Christianity is, above all, the
revelation of divine Truth but, by the same token, of man's
"adequacy" to it, of his ontological ability to receive it, to
know it, to appropriate it and to transform it into life. The
great theological controversies of the patristic age are never
"abstract," never merely "intellectual." They are always sote-
riolo gical and existential in their ultimate significance, for
they deal with the nature of man, with the meaning of his life,
with the goals of his praxis. This existential character of pa-
tristic theology, the certitude permeating it that Truth is always
48 -. CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Life, the absence from it of any separation of the "theoretical"

from the "practical" - all this it may be good to remember
today when in the mind of so many Christians the "practical"
alone is exalted as if it had no need to be rooted in the theoria,
the all-embracing vision of God, man and the world. When
contemporary Orthodox theologians insist on a "return to the
Fathers" ( and it seems so often that theirs is a vox · clamans in
deserto), they call precisely to that vision and not to the contin-
gent expressions of a past age. Together with the Fathers they
affirm that "it all" ultimately depends on Truth, on knowledge
as life and transfiguration. To a modern man, even to a modern
Christian, the endless Byzantine debates on the '' enhyposta-
ton" or the two wills and two energies in Christ may appear
as the very example of the "irrelevant." In the Eastern mind
it is in these debates, in efforts to "appropriate" the great
theandric mystery, that are to be found the roots and the pre-
suppositions of all truly Christian "humanism," of a Christian
vision of the world. To dismiss them as useless for our prob-
lems and needs may be the greatest danger for today's Chris-
tianity.
The second aspect related to the first one, yet also distinct
from it, is the expression, the embodiment of that same Truth
as Beauty: the liturgical expression of Byzantine civilization.
But liturgy here means more than just worship or cult. If is
indeed a way of life· in which the "sacred" and the "secular"
are not disconnected from one another, but the entire life is
thought of as a continuation; a · "follow-up" of that. which
is revealed and communicated -in worship. For it is the very
purpose of worship to manifest the Kingdom of God, to make
people taste of its celestial beauty, truth and goodness, and
then live, inasmuch as possible, in the light· of that unique
experience. It is enough to enter St. Sophia of Constantinople,
even in its present "kenotic" state, to realize the vision and
the experience from which it was born and which it aimed to
communicate. It is indeed that of heaven on earth, of a Pres-
ence which transcends all human experience and categories,
yet relates all of them to Itself and reveals the world as Cos-
mos, in which heaven and earth are truly full of divine glory.
The paschal, doxological, "transfigurational".. and, at the same
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 49

time, deeply penitential character of Byzantine liturgy - which

includes architecture, iconography, hymnography, time, space,
movement, and whose purpose is truly to take the whole man
and in a way the whole world into its rhythm and scope -
makes it much more than "cult." It is the experience in "this
world" of the "world to come." It assumes the whole of cre-
ation - matter, sound, color - and transfigures all of it in its
sacramental passage and ascension into the glory of God's
presence. As they leave the church, the Orthodox sing: "We
have seen the true light, we have received the heavenly Spirit,"
and it is this light and this participation that are meant to
act upon life itself, to transform it, according to one Russian
religious thinker, into the "liturgy outside the temple." It is
because in the liturgical mystery we are first given to see the
new creation and to partake of it that we can then be its ser-
vants in "this world." When one considers in the light of this
Eastern experience the modern liturgical chaos, the confusion
about the very nature and purpose of Christian liturgy, one
is tempted to say that maybe it is not the liturgy that we ought
to make "relevant" to the world, but, on the contrary, it is
again in the unique liturgical experience of the Kingdom -
its light, truth, beauty and power - that the world could
be rediscovered as a ( ( relevant" place for Christian action.
Finally, a third aspect of the Byzantine Christian culture
can be adequately termed ascetical. Man's sin and alienation
fromGod, the radical illness of "this world," the narrow way
of salvation -.these are the essential components of Byzantine
religious experience, shaping in more than 'one way the whole
life of Byzantine society. It is, as I said already, a "monastic"
society· in the sense that it accepts the monastic ideal as the
self-evident norm and criterion of all Christian life. The
doxological spirit of worship, mentioned above, not only does
not exclude, but on the contrary implies as its very condition
a deep penitential emphasis: "I see Thy bridal chamber
adorned, and I have no wedding garment to enter therein .... "
It would be a mistake however - and I have mentioned it
already - to view this ascetical and penitential aspect as made
up of fear and pessimism. To be understood properly it must
be referred to and judged by its goal: by the theme, central
50 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

in Eastern spirituality, of tbeosis, the deification of man by

the grace of the Holy Spirit. For there is indeed no higher idea
of man than the one by which Byzantine society ultimately
lives and measures itself. Asceticism here is the "art of arts,"
for it is the means by which man ascends to his true nature
and calling, fulfills his eternal destiny. And if many a
"modern" Christian rejects it today as "anti-human" and "anti-
social'' escapism, it is because this modern Christian for all his
obsession with being "man-for-the-other," with serving man
and mankind, paradoxically enough does not seem to feel the
need to ask the preliminary question: to serve what man and
for the sake of what ultimate destiny of that man? Yet long
before the vague terms "freedom" and "liberation" became
the passe-partout slogans of modernity, they stood - but filled
with very concrete, very high and indeed "difficult" meaning -
at the very heart of an entire civilization, as its ultimate aspira-
tion and goal.
· It is true, of course, that there was much injustice and cru-
elty in Byzantine society, that by our present standards it was
"autocratic" rather than "democratic," that our concepts of
freedom and rights were unknown to it. Byzantium most cer-
tainly did not solve all its political, economic, social and even
"racial" problems. And yet, to use the key word of our modern
approach to these problems, there was no alienation in that
society and this precisely because of the one and unifying vision
of man, of his nature and destiny, a vision which in spite of all
injustice kept the society together, as one ·body. For in that
vision all men were ·not so much equal as equally destined for
the "honor of high calling:' This vision they all received, day
after day, week after week, in the leitourgia, in the common
and corporate celebration of and participation in the Kingdom
of God. A full - and long overdue - study of the social tex-
ture of Byzantine society, a deeper analysis of Byzantine
legislation, a fresh approach to Byzantine institutions - in
short, a new evaluation, based on the entire evidence, would
show, I am sure, that in spite of the apparent rigidity of its
social and political system, there existed in Byzantium, and
later in other Orthodox lands, a sense of community and inter-
personal relationship, a spirit of philanthro pia, a constant
The rr Orthodox World," Past and Present 51

opening towards a full human experience seldom achieved

elsewhere. The rich, to be sure, were rich, and the poor much
too often remained poor. Yet the poor, and not the rich, stood
at the heart of the Byzantine experience as its inspiring ideal.
One has only to read the funeral hymns of St. John of Dam-
ascus or the Byzantine mariological hymnology to grasp the
tremendous wave of compassion and solidarity, mercy and
brotherhood that never completely died in the daily existence
of the Byzantines. No doubt it was a pre-industrial, "agri-
cultural" and "primitive" society. But whether these definitions
invalidate altogether all principles on which it was founded
and render them totally "irrelevant" for us today, whether
furthermore the principles and ideals which have replaced those
of Byzantium have not, in fact, mutilated something essential
in man and are the main reason for his present "alienation" -
all this remains to be seen. Meanwhile it is my certitude that
there is no reason to discard disdainfully an "experience"
which, when all is said about it, can still teach and inspire us.

9.

The fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 by no means

meant the end of the Eastern "experience." The latter had its
continuation and also a creative development in states and
nations which, having received Christianity from Byzantium,
received together with it the Byzantine "theocratic" -ideal.
· · · Nowhere is this continuity seen better than in· the self-
identification of each of these nations with a "Constantine"
of its own, seeing the fundamental experience of his "conver-
sion" as an act of divine initiative and election. Boris, the first
Christian "Kaghan" of Bulgaria, Vladimir, the Baptizer of
Kievan Russia, St. Sava, the "Patron" of Orthodox Serbia -
each of them remained in the history and memory of his na-
tion as its Hfather in Christ," as the living symbol of its dedi-
cation to Christ' s mission in the world. We find here again
the ·same philosophy of history as in Byzantium, rooted in the
same "eschatological" perspective in which nations and king-
doms are related to the Church not by "juridical" agreements
52 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

but by a common "reference" to the ultimate Kingdom. What-

ever the political motivations the historian finds behind many
of those events, more important is their progressive trans-
formation into a national myth, their interpretation by the
nation's consciousness, interpretation which was the decisive
factor in shaping the very "psyche" of Orthodox nations.
·The Turkish conquest put an early end to the theocratic
dreams of the Southern Slavs, and thus it is the Russian "ex-
perience" that remains the most significant and creative chapter
in the history of the post-Byzantine Orthodox world. Here
only a few remarks concerning this chapter can be made.
The Turkish "yoke," by isolating the Orthodox world for
many centuries and by depriving it of its freedom, forced it
into a kind of "non-historical" survival, into an implicit re-
jection of history which, as we know, was so central in the
Byzantine theocratic consciousness. The sense of the universal
mission, of the cosmic and historical scope of the Church, of
her dynamic relationship with "this world," of her respon-
sibility for it - all this vanished if not "dogmatically" then at
least psychologically, and was replaced with a kind of non-
historical "quietism" which came to be viewed, by the Orthodox
and non-Orthodox alike, as the "essence" of Orthodoxy. Not
noticing the tremendous political and cultural changes, the
quick transformation of nearly everything in CCthis world,"
the Orthodox continued, and some still continue, to live in an
unreal, imaginary, symbolic and purely "static" world, a static
"empire," all the more static since, in reality, non-existent. The
early "eschatology" ·which gave birth to that world and whose
main content was precisely its "openness" ·to history· and to
God's action in it ·was now cc reversed," aimed .no longer at
pre-sent and future, but at one particular cc situation" of the past
and thus deprived of its meaning. The old imperial cities and
ecclesiastical centers - Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch,
now capitals of non-Christian states or sleepy Oriental vil-
lages-kept proclaiming their glorious ancient titles or claiming
their "rights" as if nothing had happened, as if it were not the
very nature of "this world" that its "fashion" always "fades
away," as if God's purpose and will were revealed and deci-
sively incarnated once and for all in one particular society,
The er orthodox World," Past and Present 53
state and culture. The Orthodox historians and theologians, I
repeat, do not seem fully to realize the depth of that meta-
morphosis of the Orthodox consicousness, of the tragic vanish-
ing from it precisely of that which constituted its very foun-
dation. And it is only against the background of that
metamorphosis that one can grasp the unique significance and
importance of the Russian "chapter."
Russia alone in the whole Orthodox world escaped the
isolation and the historical "kenosis" imposed by the Turkish
conquest and domination. Its political independence and growth
on the one hand, the collapse of Byzantium and of Orthodox
"empires" on the other hand, forced upon Russia a new his-
torical awareness, challenged it with problems which in turn
shaped its culture. Ultimately that challenge led Russia into
a creative rethinking of the initial Byzantine "experience."
This, however, would have never been achieved without
another challenge, that of the West. For only through a res-
toration of the universal consciousness and perspective, through
a return into "history" itself, could history become again the
object of the Church's interest and mission, be related again
to' the central "experience" of the Kingdom of God. By his
radical "Westernization" of Russia at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Emperor Peter the Great imposed on
the Russian mind a search for identity, a radical reevaluation
of both the "Western" and the "Eastern" historical and reli-
gious experiences, united and merged now within the same
culture. And it is out of that search, out of its agony and often
tragic· depth that emerged little by little a vision, a trend, a
spiritual and intellectual perspective which permeates and
unifies, in spite of all its internal diversity and even polarity,
the Russian culture of the nineteenth century and which Ber-
diaev termed "the Russian Idea."
There is no consensus yet about either the exact content
of that "Russian Idea" or its meaning for Orthodox theology.
Students of Russian history and culture, theologians and philos-
ophers disagree on it and interpret it each in his own way.
To some it means a creative progress of the Orthodox mind
itself, to others a dangerous deviation from Byzantine patterns.
No one denies, however, the fact itself of a tremendously
54 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

meaningful spiritual and theological revival in Russia during

the last century preceding the collapse of imperial Russia. No
one questions its general orientation. And this orientation is
precisely towards a new synthesis between eschatology and
history, towards a reintegration of "this world" - of action,
creativity and culture - into the perspective of the Kingdom
of God. Whatever the value of answers given so far, the
questions, the inspiration and the aspirations of that revival
bring us back to the starting point of the Christian experience
of the world, to the antinomical correlation of the yes and
the no in the attitude towards it. The radiant and paschal
spirituality of St. Seraphim of Sarov, the antinomical and pro-
phetic world of Dostoievsky' s writings, the daring intuitions
of Russian religious thinkers, the dreams of Russian poets -
each of these components of the "Russian Idea" can and must
be studied, evaluated and interpreted separately. All together,
however, they unmistakably reflect and point towards a com-
mon vision, challenge us with the same "ultimate questions."
And these are about God and the world, the Kingdom and
"history." In this sense the Russian spiritual phenomenon is
more truly in continuity with the real Eastern and Byzantine
tradition, with its eschatological roots and inspiration, than
the pseudo-conservatism of those who make Byzantium and
the Fathers a closed, rigid and absolute "world in itself," re-
quiring nothing but repetition and archeological cataloguing.
This continuity is proved by the facts. It was in Russia indeed
that after many centuries of acute "Westernization" Orthodox
theology recovered its genuine sources: the patristic thought,
the liturgical tradition, the mystical realism of the spiritual
theoria. It is not an accident that more and more of those who,
in the "East" as well as in the "West," are thirsty and hungry
for an authentic Christian vision, a vision in which the eternal
and transcendent truth would at the same time be truly "rel-
evant" for our age, begin to find it in this Russian "source."
But then what about the question we raised at the beginning
of this paper? What about the historical collapse of that
"Eastern" world, its catastrophic metamorphosis into the center
of atheism and materialism, state totalitarianism and denial
of all freedom? Does this not imply a failure also of the
The re orthodox World," Past and Present 55

"world-view" by which it lived and which, as we tried to show,

was its spiritual foundation? In trying to answer these ques-
tions, we encounter the last and at present probably the most
serious Western misunderstanding of the East, rooted again
in the same inability of the Western mind to see the Eastern
reality except through Wes tern categories. It is indeed · the
West, and not the East, not Russia at least, that identifies com-
munism and the Soviet political system with Russia and makes
that identification the basic presupposition of all its dealings
with the communist world. In Russia itself long before the
revolutionary collapse, that collapse was prophesied and then
interpreted and understood as precisely a "Wes tern" pheno-
menon, the result of the rejection by Russia, in the person of
both its imperial bureaucracy and its "intelligentsia," of its
true historical and spiritual foundation, the result thus of a
surrender to alien ideas and "visions." Here the blindness of
the West, of its "experts" and "analysts," is simply incredible.
They do not seem to realize that if there is anything deeply
"anti-Russian" and "anti-Eastern" it is precisely the entire
psychological, intellectual and even emotional make-up of
men like Lenin and Trotsky, that if there is an example of a
total alienation of a group of men from their roots and tradi-
tion it is that of "bolsheviks" and that finally, the deep moti-
vation of "Bolshevism" was and still is a real, almost irrational,
hatred for "Russia." Maybe if they knew Russian a little better,
these "experts" would have discovered that even the Russian
language used by the Soviet officialdom is a language deeply,
if not radically, alien from that of Russian culture and always
sounds like a clumsy translation from a synthetic and uniden-
tified Western prototype.
All this does not mean at all that an attempt is made here
to make the West directly responsible for the Russian "col-
lapse" and to present Russia as an innocent victim of a Western
"conspiracy." This collapse is a Russian sin and Russia bears
the responsibility for it. What I am affirming is that it is a sin
against, and not a natural outcome and fruit of, the "Russian
Idea" mentioned above. The sin itself, however, and this must
be said, consisted primarily in a non-critical acceptance of a
"Western'' and not an "Eastern" idea. It was the acceptance
56 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

of the specifically Western eschatology without the "escha-

ton," of the Kingdom without the King, which reduced man
to matter alone, society alone, history alone, which closed his
spiritual and intellectual horizon with "this world" alone.
This reduction of man, his progressive alienation from his
divine and transcendent destiny began in the \Y/ est at the time
of the Renaissance, continued .through the Enlightenment,
and found its fulfillment in the "this-worldly" enthusiastic
utopianism of the nineteenth century. And the fact is that
throughout the entire nineteenth century, from Chaadaiev to
Dostoievsky, it constituted the very focus of the critique of the
West by the most creative and original Russian thinkers. Yet
at the same time it was more and more enthusiastically en-
dorsed by the ''Westernized" Russian intelligentsia. The latter,
as Berdiaev well put it, "busied itself not with politics but with
saving mankind without God," and this is exactly the scope
and content of the \XT estern "secularism" which today begins
to engulf Western Christianity itself. It is time to realize that
the Russian Revolution and the pseudo-messianic totalitarian-
ism which grew out of it was the triumph on Russian soil
of a "Western" idea, the reductio ad absurdum of a \Y/ estern
dream, the literal application of a Western program.
That this idea "succeeded" in the "East" and not in the
"West," in Russia and not in Western Europe, was due to
many complex factors, one of which, it must be conceded,
was indeed the initial acceptance by many Russians of the
Revolution as fulfilling the "eschatological" aspirations of the
Russian people, the interpretation of the "Western'' idea in
"Eastern" terms, and this in spite of the total and outspoken
frankness of the Bolsheviks themselves who systematically
and violently rejected such intepretation. In his famous poe1n
The Twelve, Alexander Blok, the most celebrated poet of the
Russian poetical "renaissance" of the twentieth century, de-
picted Christ as leading the twelve Red soldiers through storm
and snow, blood and murder. But-and this is of crucial impor-
tance - while in Russia this confusion came to a quick and
tragic end, it lasted and in many ways still lasts in the West,
preventing it from seeing the present Russian reality. When
he .realized the depth of the spiritual lie which in his The
The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 51
Twelve he presented . as truth, Blok literally died. of despair
and while dying kept asking his wife to destroy all copies of
his poem. Esenin and Maiakovsky, the two other poets re-
sponsible for that confusion, committed suicide. Already in
1924 Berdiaev in his "Reflections on the Russian Revolution"
denounced it as totally alien to the true Russian tradition and
affirmed that "Russia becomes that which it never was be-
fore .... " But in the West the myth of the specifically "Rus-
sian" ( if not "Eastern Orthodox'T) sources and nature of the
Soviet reality remains the basic presupposition of all approach-
es to and dealings with "Russian communism."
The basic fact which the West and even the Christian West,
because of its intellectual a priori, does not seem to acknowl-
edge is the obvious fact of the non-acceptance by the Russian
people in their overwhelming majority, and thus by "Russia"
itself, of Soviet communism. The evidence supplied by thou-
sands of books and testimonies is so conclusive that, con-
sidering the amazing blindness of the West towards it, one
is almost tempted to apply the words of the Gospel: "Even if
a man rises from the dead, they will not believe .... " Ironically
enough, it may be a real disappointment for the Western
Christians who, with their usual solemnity and seriousness,
prepare themselves for a "dialogue" with Marxists to discover
some day that there are no Marxists behind the Iron Curtain!
Thus we must reject as nonsense the interpretation of the
Russian "collapse" in terms of that Eastern "experience" which
,ve are trying to describe here. What happened in Russia is
one event within the great crisis of Western civilization, a
crisis which not only has not ended, but today enters its crucial
stage. In Russia itself however, beneath the ruins of that spiri-
tual collapse, one begins to detect a new and creative trend
towards the recovery of the "Russian Idea" and the Eastern
Orthodox sources that. fed and shaped it. The return of the
('Westernized" Russian intelligentsia to its spiritual father-
land, a return which began before the Revolution but was
limited to a few "prophets," becomes today an important,
even if silenced, factor in the life of Russia. Solzhenitzyn and
other Russian writers, mimeographed publications of the
samizdat, the renewed interest in Russian religious thought,
58 CHURCH, WbRLD, MtSSION

and so many other tt signs" are an unmistakable proof of all

this as is also, on another level, the truly miraculous survival,
after half a century of persecution, of the Russian Orthodox
Church. It is obviously much too early to write off the Eastern
experience" or to consider it as disqualified.
tt

10.

If anything is obvious today, it is the impossibility of think-

ing of the future in terms of a "Christian state" or a "Christian
society." The secularization of the world, i.e. its divorce not
only from the Church· but from all religious world-views as
well, is a fact and is therefore a self-evident presupposition of
all Christian thinking and planning. It is, however, in ap-
proaching and evaluating this phenomenon of secularism, in
reaction to it in thought and action, that the Christian West
and the Christian East, rooted as they are in their respective
"experiences," seem to come once more to different conclu-
sions. To understand this difference, to "compare notes," to
restore if possible a common Christian vision of the world and
of Christian action in it, may constitute today one of the most
important "ecumenical" tasks. As an Orthodox sees him, the
Western Christian is increasingly preoccupied, not to say ob-
sessed, with the world, society, history, etc. This preoccupation
may be "radical" or "moderate," "revolutionary" or "evolu-
tionary"; but a general consensus seems to exist as to the need
for the Church's reorientation towards the world, its needs
and its problems. Hence the acceptance if not of "secularism,"
then at least of the "secular" as the self-evident term of refer-
ence for both Christian thought and Christian action, as the
inner motivation and criterion of all Christian "renewal." This
consensus, since it becomes more and more the exclusive con-
text of the ecumenical movement, is forced, so to speak, upon
the Orthodox, and it is here, no doubt, that a new ecumenical
"malaise" is bound to develop even if at present neither the
ttWesterners" nor the "Easterners" seem fully to realize this:
the Westerners because they have always assumed that their
categories, theological fashions and approaches are ipso facto
The re Orthodox W 01·Jd," Past and Present

universal; the Easterners because with a very few exceptions

they are theologically silent and ecumenically passive. There
is growing evidence, indeed, that behind this silence and this
passivity a great majority of the Orthodox cannot help feeling
that something is deeply wrong with what, to them at least,
appears much more like obsession rather than preoccupation
of their Western brothers with the "world" and its problems.
So far this feeling has not been expressed in theological terms,
given a responsible theological interpretation and justification.
As so often happened in the past, the Orthodox reaction is
split between, on the one hand, so radical a rejection of the
\�l estern approach that it distorts and vitiates Orthodoxy itself
by reducing it to a fearfully "apocalyptic" rejection of the
world, and, on the other hand, the search for a compromise
which, as all compromises, only increases confusion. There is
thus an urgent need to transpose this "feeling" into a more
articulate and constructive critique, and this can be done only
by referring the present Western trend to the Eastern "ex-
perience" in its totality.
Our initial distinction in describing the two "experiences"
was between the juridical and the eschatological. We termed
"juridical" the Western approach to Church-state relationship
as it developed after the conversion of Constantine and the
reconciliation of the Church with the empire. Now it must be
stressed that this juridical approach was not limited to the
state alone, but implied a much wider, in fact an all-embracing,
"world-view" which from the Eastern standpoint can be defined
as non-eschatological. The medieval Christian synthesis in the
Latin West was based indeed on a progressive elimination of
the Early Christian notion of the Kingdom of God, elimina-
tion, of course, not of the term itself but of its initial Christian
understanding, as the antinomical presence in "this world" of
the "world to come," and of the tension implied in that anti-
nomy. For it is precisely the antinomy and the tension inherent
in the patristic notion of mysterion that the West eliminated
from its approach to faith, from its ultimate "intuition" of
God and creation, from sacramental theology and the doctrine
of sanctification, from ecclesiology and soteriology. If all the
old controversies between the Orthodox East and the Latin
60 . CHURCH,·WORLD�· MISSION

West - those about Filioque, original sin, created grace, es-

sence and energies, purgatory, and even the papacy- contro-
versies which to so many today appear totally irrelevant, were
transposed into an "existential" key, explained in terms of their
"practical" significance, it would become clear that · their
"common denominator" in the Eastern mind is, first of all,
the rejection by the West of the mysterion - the holding-to-
gether, in a mystical and existential, rather than rational, syn-
thesis of both the total transcendence of God and His genuine
presence. But this mystery is precisely that of the Kingdom of
God, the faith and the piety of the Church being rooted in the
experience now of that which is to come, in the communion
by means of "this world" with Him who is always "beyond,"
in truly partaking of tithe joy and the peace of the Holy Spirit."
For reasons which we cannot analyze here, the West ra-
tionalized the mysterion, i.e. deprived it precisely of its anti-
nomical or eschatological character. It replaced the tension,
essential in the early Church, between the "now" and the "to
come," between the "old" and the "new," with an orderly,
stable, and essentially extra-temporal distinction between the
"natural" and the "supernatural," between "nature" and
cc grace"; and then, in order to assure God's total transcendence;

it viewed grace itself not as God's very presence but as a created

"medium." Eschatology thus became exclusively "futuristic,"
the Kingdom of God a reality only "to come" but not to be
experienced now as the new life in the Holy Spirit, as real
anticipation of the new creation.Within this new theological
framework, "this world" ceased to· be experienced as passage,
as "end" to be transfigured into "beginning," as the reality
where the Kingdom of God is "at hand." It acquired a stability,
almost a self-sufficiency, a meaning of its own, ·guaranteed· to
be sure by God ( causa prima, analo gia entis), yet at the same
time an autonomous object of knowledge 'and understanding.
For all its "other-worldliness," the Latin medieval synthesis
was based in fact on the alienation of Christian thought from
its eschatological source, or to put it more bluntly, on . its own
"secularization." ·
Thus even before the formal "liberation" of the world
from the Church's control a.nd dominion, before· its "seculari-
The "Orthodox ·World," Past and Present 61

zation" in . the narrow meaning of that term, the "world" in

the West was secularized by Christian thought itself. In the
early Christian world-view the notion of "this world" is by no
means identical with that of a "secular" world. In its separa-
tion from and rebellion against God, "this world" may be a
sick, condemned and dying world, it may fall under the do-
minion of "the prince of the world" into a state of blindness,
depravity and corruption, but it is never "autonomous." The
term "this world" depicts a state, but not the nature, of cre-
ation, and for this reason "this world" is the scene of the
eschatological tension between the "old" and the "new" and
is capable of being experienced, in Christ, as the transfigured
"new creation." Eschatology is thus the very "mode" of the
Church's relationship with the world, of her presence and
action in it By abandoning this eschatological perspective, the
West rejected in fact the possibility of any real "interpenetra-
tion" of the Church and the world, or, in theological terms, of
the world's real sanctification. But then the only other possible
relationship between the Church and the world is precisely
the juridical one, in the deepest sense of this term, as a con-
nection in which those who are connected remain ontologically
extrinsic to one another. Within this type of relationship, the
Church may dominate and govern the world, as she did in
medieval society, or she may be legally separated from it, as
she is in our modern era. In both cases and situations, the world
as such remains essentially "secular."
·. · From this point of view, the "secularization" which began
at the Renaissance and continued without interruption through-
out the entire "modern" era was in reality a second seculariza-
tion, or rather a natural and inevitable result of the first one.
For it was a "secular" world that the medieval Church domi-
nated politically as well as intellectually. If politically she
claimed a power superior to that of the state, and intellectually
a source of knowledge superior to human reason, both claims
were essentially "juridical," i.e. extrinsic to the nature of that
which they claimed to dominate. Secularization changed a
relationship of "power," not of "essence." What the "world,"
i.e. state, society, culture, etc., progressively rejected was an
extrinsic. submission. to the authority of the Church, the
62 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Church's ultimate "jurisdiction" over them.ibut not an essen-

tially "Christian" idea of state, culture, etc. Revolutionary and
criminal as this rejection may have appeared to the Church,
accustomed as she was to her divine t=«. it meant no radical
change in the Western world-view itself. And in this perspec-
tive, the Reformation with its radically "secular" concept of
the world was in fact more in continuity with the medieval
synthesis than post-Tridentine Catholicism with its belated
struggle for power, dominion and control.
It follows from all this that the true novelty of the present
Western situation lies not in "secularization" as the world' s
autonomy from the Church's power and not even in "seculari-
zation" as culture's autonomy from "religious values." It lies
paradoxically enough in the recent acceptance by the Christian
West, or at least by Western theology, of what could be
termed the secular eschatology of the modern secular world,
This indeed is the new fact, the true focus of the theological
and ecumenical situation in the West. VI e call this situation
paradoxical, for it was, in fact, for the sake of the world's
"stability" and "order" that the Western Church gave up her
eschatological world-view, replacing it with immovable and
absolute norms, making "this world" a well-defined universe
with a fixed and closed horizon. As a reward for respecting,
i.e. not transgressing, this "law and order," man was given.
the promise of salvation in the "other world." Provided he
preserved that "stability," i.e. kept the required balance be-
tween his "secular" and "religious" obligations, man could
be at peace with God, the Church and the world. And yet this
"solution" did not work. The. most ironic and probably the
most tragic development of all "Christian" history is this
strange mutation of the eschatological world-view · from the
Church into the secular culture. It was indeed the Church, it
was Christian faith, that "poisoned" the human mind with
a certain vision and experience of cosmos and time, of matter
and history, that made the "world" a notion, an experience
correlated to that of the Kingdom of God and challenged
man with a kind of "impossible possibility." And it was the
Church in the West that "gave up" that vision and replaced
it with a universe in which no room was left for history and
The "Orthodox W arid," Past and Present 63
movement, for the historically unique and irreversible, for
the dynamic and disturbing ruah of the Spirit. But banished
from the Church, the "poison" not only survived, but little by
little became the· very spirit, the very motivation of the world's
"secularization," · i.e. liberation from the Church. From the
medieval sects and "revivals" through the Renaissance, Enlight-
enment, Rationalism, Romanticism, and the social and politi-
cal utopias of the nineteenth century, the idea of the Kingdom
stood as the center of the secular mind, but a Kingdom, and
here lies the tragedy, progressively deprived of its King, more
and more identified with "this world" as such. A secularized
eschatology, a faith in the immanent fulfillment by man of
his dreams and aspirations, a belief in "history," "justice,"
"freedom" and other pseudo-absolutes - such was, such still
is, the secular faith of the secular man, a faith which miracu-
lously survives and overcomes whatever wave of pessimism
and disillusion shakes it at more or less regular intervals.
It is this "secularized eschatology" that the Western
Christian, Catholic as well as Protestant, seems not only to
accept but to accept on its own terms, i.e. as the criterion of
Christian faith and action themselves, as the term of reference
of all Christian "renewal," as a valid framework and content
of Christian eschatology. As I already pointed out, after cen-
turies of almost total neglect, "eschatology" is becoming
again fashionable among Western theologians. The fashion,
however, is based not on an interest in the early eschatology in
which the transcendent Kingdom of God and not the world is
the escbnton, but on the desire to find a .cornmon language with
the secular world. Even where an attempt is made to preserve
the transcendent 'Kingdom, it is preserved as a vague "horizon
bf hope" and net as the radical reality of all · Christian ex-
perience. The obsession with "relevance" and "involvement,"
the incredibile discovery of Christ's social and political "radi-
calism," the enthusiastic "rethinking" of Christianity within
the categories of secular utopian ideologies - it all looks as
if having at· first "secularized" the world for the sake of a
totally transcendent God, the Christian West is about to give
up the "transcendent" as the very content of Christianity.
 . . . . .
64 . ·.. CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

11.

In the light of all that has been stated above, it hardly

needs to be said that this whole perspective is alien to Eastern·
Orthodoxy. It is true that until now there has been no consistent
and explicit response on the part of the Orthodox, only- ·a
general feeling of alarm and anxiety about the seemingly
growing surrender of the Christian West to "secularized escha-
tology." The purpose of this paper, however, was to show,
be it only in general terms, that the deep reason for that anxiety
is not the often-alleged Orthodox indifference towards the
world and its problems, indifference rooted as some W esterri-
ers affirm in the "liturgical," "sacramental" and "contem-
plative" character of Eastern Orthodoxy, but in · an entirely
different world-view, a different experience and vision of the
world itself. We call this world-view eschatological, but not
in the sense given this term in the deeply Westernized systems
of postpatristic theology. This eschatological dimension is to
be found in the total experience of the Church and primarily
in her liturgical experienceas well as in her unbroken spiritual
tradition. These indeed were the real sources and the living
content of patristic thought, which, when it is isolated from
them, simply cannot be understood in its real significance.
The ultimate meaning of that world-view can· be expressed
in a simple formula: to be fully·in the world, tobe of any "use".
to it, to fulfill their historical, cosmic and anyother "function,"
the Church and the Christian· must be .at the same time· totally
not of this world. This "not" implies . no negativism, however,
no connotations of escape, contempt, quietism, or, in short,
no "spiritualistic" indifference. It· is a highly positive notion
for it means immersion in ·and partaking of the Kingdom of
God, of the spiritual reality already "inaugurated" by the
Holy Spirit, already given now although yet to come. 0£
this reality the Church, in "this aeon," is the sign and the
sacrament, the gift and the promise. Without this reality
nothing in this world has any ultimate meaning or value.
Thus that which to a Western "activist" appears to be the
cause of Eastern "otherworldliness" - the "liturgical," the
 The "Orthodox World," Past and Present 65

"sacramental," the "contemplative" - is, in fact, the very

condition of any true discovery of the world and the source
of any genuine theology of Christian action and involvement
in it.
It is in a way irrelevant to ask what a return to that escha-
tological world-view and experience may mean in "practical"
terms, how it can "contribute" to the solution of the world's
agonizing problems. The whole point of our argument is that
without the recovery of that experience, no clear pattern of
Christian thought and action can be detected. As long as the
Church is imprisoned by the world and its ideologies, as long
as she accepts and views all "problems" facing humanity in
their secular and worldly formulations, we remain within a
vicious circle without any hope of breaking through it. Before
it can be put to any "use," the notion of the Kingdom of God
is to be purified of all "utilitarianism." It is when, in the words
of an Orthodox eucharistic hymn, we "lay aside all earthly
cares" that the world and all its problems may be discovered
again as the object of all Christian love, as the stage for Chris-
tian mission and action.
One thing, however, can and must be said. Only a recovery
by Christians of their eschatology can, in the last analysis, be a
response to the "secularized eschatology" of the modern
world. One wonders indeed whether the Christian West in its
enthusiastic endorsement of that "secularized eschatology" is
not in reality misreading and misinterpreting its true signifi-
cance. While Christians, in their eagerness to be "relevant,"
shift the emphasis from the "transcendent" to the "immanent,"
one detects in the world a growing thirst and hunger for that
which can transcend, i.e. fill life with the ultimate meaning
and content. Behind the sometimes cheap and romantically
naive rebellion against "systems" and "establishment," behind
the rhetoric of "revolution" and "liberation," there is a genuine
longing not only for the Absolute but for communion with it,
for its true possession. Behind the "juridical," it is for the
"eschatological" that the modern man is longing, and this
means for the Kingdom of God. But have we not "seen the
true light," have we not "partaken of the Spirit"? Who else
66 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

but the Church ought to be able to satisfy that hunger, to name

the King and manifest the Kingdom?
 III
THE WORLD IN ORTHODOX
THOUGHT AND EXPERIENCE
1.

The very fact that, after almost two thousand years of the
Church's presence in the world, we feel compelled to ask our-
selves about the meaning of that presence and about the role
of theology in expressing it is a clear proof that something has
"happened" ( to the Church? to the world?) which requires
from theology a new effort of reflection, a renewed "reading"
of Tradition. What has happened? My purpose in this paper
is to attempt to answer this question by trying to locate the
problem whose pressure we all feel, and to outline, be it only
in very general terms, my understanding of the ways leading
to its solution.
Needless to say, my task is not an easy one. In the first
place, strange and even paradoxical as this may appear, the
very notions whose relation to one another, whose presence in
one another, we are to elucidate: i.e. the Church and the world,
haveonly recently made their appearance in Orthodox theology
_as objects· of specific theological study and analysis, as distinct
"chapters" within theological systems. We are just beginning
to emerge from a· long theological era whose main character-
istic", it may be said without exaggeration, was precisely the
absence of ecclesiology, i.e. of such reflection on the Church
which implies - as its very basis - a radical distinction between

* A paper originally presented under the title "The Problem of the Church's
Presence in the World in the Orthodox Consciousness," at the Second Congress
of Orthodox Theological Schools, Athens, August, 1976; originally published
in St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 21.1 (1977), pp. 3-17.

67
68 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

the Church and the world and therefore of necessity posits the
problem of their relationship.
The first difficulty then is that we cannot even begin to
discuss our problem ("the Church's presence in the world")
without having first deciphered the meaning of that "ecclesio-
logical silence." Is it, as some seem to think today, a mere
deficiency of our theology, a deficiency which, however serious
it may be, ought to be corrected by another massive injection
into Orthodoxy of Western theological categories, by our
acceptance of the current Western fixation on, if not a real
obsession with, the Church-versus-the-world dichotomy and
problematics? Or is that "silence" to be viewed as being itself
part of our tradition, in which case it is no longer simply silence
or absence, but an indication, maybe even an "eloquent" one,
of an experience and vision substantially different from those
adopted today in the West? Obviously the very understanding
of the problem we are to discuss, and its formulation, primarily
depend on which of these two approaches we adopt, and on
how we justify our choice.
However tempting the first approach may appear to be ( it
has for a long time been the fate of Orthodox theology to be
"tempted" by the West and to "find itself" mainly b.y reacting
to those temptations), there is no doubt, in my mind at least,
that it should be rejected. For whatever the numerous and
sometimes very serious deficiencies, the truly tragical one-
sidedness of our post-patristic and precisely heavily "\Vester-
nized" theology, the "ecclesiological silence" mentioned above
clearly antedates its appearance and· development-within· the
Orthodox Church and has its roots in a much- deeper level of
Orthodox consciousness. The question is: Where?
My answer is: In that "Christian world": which shaped the
historical consciousness of Orthodoxy and which still consti-
tutes the essential context for the Orthodox experience of the
Church, of the world and of their relationship with one another.
-If for several centuries our theology felt no need to reflect upon
that relationship -and this means to distinguish between the
Church and the world - the reason for this is to be found in
the Christian oikoumene which grew out of the reconciliation
between the Church and the Graeco-Roman Empire, and which
The World in Orthodox Thought and Experience 69
throughout the entire "Constantinian period" remained the
only self-evident expression and experience of the Church's
"presence" in the world. Therefore it is that experience, or
rather its ecclesiological significance, its place and meaning
within our tradition, that constitute the equally self-evident
starting point of any Orthodox reflection about the Church
in her relationship to the world.

2.

To state this, however, is not to solve the problem. For if

the historical knowledge of that "Christian world" in its
various aspects and dimensions - political, cultural, social,
etc.- has been steadily advancing, the same cannot be said of
its theological understanding. The very question of its ecclesio-
logical meaning - the question on which depends our own
reflection upon the Church and the world - has hardly been
raised. ·We know that the reconciliation between the Church
and the empire resulted not in a juridical agreement, a con-
tract which, while defining the respective rights and obligations
of both parties, the Church and the empire, would have pre-
served their structural distinction fram one another. We know
that the result of that reconciliation was such an interpene-
tration of the Church and the empire, of their structures and
functions, that this was consistent! y expressed in terms of an
organic unity, comparable to that of the soul and the body.
We know that this favorite Byzantine image was not a rhe-
torical exaggeration, that the Christian oikoumene truly was,
in theory and consciousness as well as in reality, an organism
within which neither the Church nor the world - state, society,
culture - had a separate existence or could be "constitu-
tionally" distinguished from one another. We know all this,
and scores of historical books and dissertations are here to
confirm this knowledge. The only thing we seem not to know
is the meaning of all this for our own theological reflection
about the Church's presence today in this present world.
The reason for this is simple, although to state it is to point
out our second and truly major difficulty: the continuing power
70 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

which the "Christian world" of the past still has in shaping

and determining the present Orthodox consciousness, in re-
maining in fact a virtually unique, albeit subliminal source
of today's Orthodox mentality and world-view. To put it
bluntly, as Orthodox we still live in that «Christian world"
of the past, ignoring the historical fact of its collapse and
disappearance. And we ignore it because for us - and this is
essential - not only does the "Christian world" survive in and
through the Church, but also to make it survive, to assure its
continuing "presence," has in fact become the main, if not the
exclusive, function of the Church.
Do I have to prove this? Is it not evident that for an over-
whelming majority of the Orthodox, whether individuals or
churches, the very word "Orthodox" is virtually meaningless
and abstract unless given substance by adjectives which, al-
though formally they belong to the categories of the "world,"
are inseparable from an Orthodox Christian's experience of
the "Church," and in fact truly expressive of it. Greek, Rus-
sian, Serbian ... These adjectives transcend, in their eccle-
siastical usage, mere nationalism, understood as natural attach-
ment to and interest in the destinies of a nation, a country,
a culture. If the Orthodox diaspora has eloquently proven
anything, it is precisely this: the Orthodox, even when they
willingly leave their "Orthodox" country, even when they
forget their original language and fully identify themselves
with the life and the culture of another nation, find it both
natural and desirable that their "Orthodoxy" remain Greek,
Russian, Serbian, etc. This is so not because they cannot imagine
any other expression or form of Orthodoxy, but because it is
precisely the quintessential "Hellenism" ( and not Greek Or-
thodoxy) or "Russianism" ( and not Russian Orthodoxy), of
which the Church is the only "presence," the only symbol in
the "modern world," that they love in Orthodoxy, that con-
stitutes the treasure of their heart's desire. And this is true not
only of the "diaspora," which merely reflects and intensifies -
sometimes to the point of a reductio ad absurdum - the Or-
thodox mentality, but of Orthodoxy as a whole. Everywhere
Orthodoxy is experienced primarily as representing - as
"making present" - another world, the one of the past which,
The World in Orthodox Thought and Experience 71

although it can also be projected into the future as a dream

or as a hope, remains fundamentally alienated from the pres-
ent one. Everywhere even the basic canonical structures of
the Orthodox Church remain determined by the geographical
and administrative organization of that "world" whose lan-
guage and thought forms, culture, and indeed whose whole
ethos, still shape and color from within the present Orthodox
consciousness. And it is primarily because of that identifica-
tion, because the "Church" itself is experienced as the ideal
and symbolic existence of a nonexistent "world," that it is so
difficult for us to understand the real meaning and values of
that past world, the meaning of our past for the present.
In the first place, this identification makes it almost irn-
possible for the Orthodox consciousness to evaluate that "Chris-
tian world" in ecclesiological terms, to distinguish in it be-
tween that which, revealing its "success," remains normative
for us, truly a part of the Church's Tradition, and that which,
by deviating from and mutilating that Tradition, must be
termed "failure." It is here, in this inability to evaluate, that
we can grasp the unique and indeed crucial significance of an
event which is ignored by the Orthodox consciousness and
which, precisely because it is ignored, still dominates that
consciousness. This event is the historical end and disintegra-
tion of the Christian oikoumene.
Indeed the collapse, one after another, of the organic
"Orthodox worlds," beginning with that of their common
source and archetype, the Byzantine Empire, brought about a
profound transformation of their experience in the Orthodox
mind. That experience contained in itself, as its very focus -
and we shall speak of this later - the belief that the "Christian
world," born under the sign of victory ( en touto nika), cannot
collapse, is indestructible, and has as its proper vocation to
last until the end of the world. This explains why the trau-
matic shock of its collapse, paradoxical as this sounds, resulted
in a denial of that collapse, not in its historical reality of
course, but as a "meaningful" event challenging the accepted
Orthodox world-view. Since the "Christian world" cannot
disappear, it has not disappeared. Its external collapse is but
a temporary "suspense," a God-permitted "temptation." Such
72 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

was - such still is - the content and the meaning of that

denial which made, and still makes, Orthodoxy to live as if
nothing happened, as if nothing changed.
In reality, however, what changed is the Orthodox con-
sciousness itself. It is after the collapse of the Christian world,
and because of the denial of that collapse, that the "Christian
world" was transposed and transformed into an almost
mythical and archetypal golden age, to be "restored" and
"returned to," the ideal past projected therefore as the ideal
future, as the only horizon of the Church's vision of history.
And in this transformation the initial experience was reversed:
If before its collapse, the value of that world for the Church
lay in the fact that it accepted her as its "soul," as the ultimate
content and criterion of its own existence, now it is the Church
that began to be experienced as the "body" expressive of, and
living by, the "Christian world" as its "soul."
From this springs the ecclesiological silence mentioned at
the beginning of this paper, the inability of our theology to
distinguish between the Church and the world, to evaluate the
central Orthodox experience of the "Christian world," its
"success" as well as its "failure." This silence is not broken
and overcome by the noisy and confused controversies about
the rights and privileges of this or that Church, the canonicity
of this or that particular development - controversies which
today, alas, seem to exhaust the life of the Orthodox Church.
Rather they themselves are the result of that silence, of the
absence from the present Orthodox consciousness of a clear
ecclesiological perspective which would clarify the very terms
and notions so indiscriminately used in those controversies,
which would relate them to the whole of the Orthodox faith
and experience.
Neither is that silence broken by the equally noisy Orthodox
quarrels about the "world." Here the Orthodox consciousness
seems to be polarized between the "optimists" and the "pes-
simists." Yet the whole point of that polarization is that it
remains conditioned by, or - better to say - is itself a result
of, that psychological enslavement to the past, to the golden
age of the Christian world, which, paradoxically enough, is
the common source of both the Orthodox "optimism" and
The World in Orthodox Thought and Experience 13
the Orthodox "pessimism." For grosso· modo the difference
between them is this: that while the "optimists" believe in
the forthcoming resurrection of the Orthodox world of the
past, the "pessimists" have given up that hope, and for them
the apparently irreversible triumph of the evil "modern world"
acquires an apocalyptic significance, becomes the sign of the
approaching End.
The "optimists" may condemn the «pessimists" as fanatics.
The "pessimists" may excommunicate the "optimists" as
apostates. Both may even be right to some extent, for if the
Orthodox "optimism" results more often than not in a non-
critical, passive and unconscious surrender to the modern world,
the Orthodox "pessimism" leads to a Manichean and dualistic
condemnation of that world. All this, however, remains in
the deepest sense of the word irrelevant, for what is absent
from that quarrel is precisely the "world" itself, the world as
object of theological reflection, as the necessary and essential
term of reference of ecclesiology: the reflection by the Church
on herself, and there£ore on her presence in and relation to
the world.

3.

Only now can we raise the essential question: If such is

our present theological situation, where and how are we to find
for the problem which we discuss in this paper ( "the Church's
presence in the world") a ground, a context, a perspective that
would be both objective and Orthodox? - "Orthodox" mean-
ing here: rooted in the Orthodox faith and experience, and
not in some artificially adopted Wes tern categories, and "ob-
jective": free from that enslavement to that "Christian world"
which, as we have tried to show, precludes proper ecclesio-
logical evaluation of our own past, of its meaning for our
present. Our difficulty at this point seems to stem from the
apparent incompatibility of these two terms: "objective" and
"Orthodox." For if, on the one hand, without having
understood the situation we cannot properly formulate the
essential question, to have understood it, on the other hand,
74 CHURCH, WORLD; MISSION

seems to make an answer to it impossible. Yet the whole point

of this paper is to try to prove that it is precisely this difficulty,
this apparent vicious circle that, once it is properly understood,
opens to us the only perspective which satisfies the two require-
ments mentioned above ('«objective" and "Orthodox") and
leads us to the adequate, i.e. theological, formulation and
solution of our problem. Indeed, the real usefulness of that
vicious circle, and thus of the entire .analysis that makes us
aware of it, lies in the fact that they literally force '-:lpon us
the discovery, or rather the rediscovery, of the third "reality":
the one which, although it infinitely transcends the "realities"
of the Church and the world, constitutes for the Christian
faith the ultimate term of reference for each of them, and
therefore the only permanent principle and criterion of their
distinction from one another as well as of their relation to one
another. This reality is the Kingdom of God, whose announce-
ment precisely as reality, and not merel y idea or doctrine, stands
at the very center of the Gospel or, better to say, is the. Gospel
and .also the eternal horizon: the source and the content of
Christian experience. As long as we do not relate all other
realities to that ultimate reality, as long as we try to under-
stand and define the Church's presence in the world in terms
of a hopelessly "worldly" perspective and experience, i.e.
without seeing both the Church and the world in the light of
the Kingdom of God, we are bound to reach a dead end, to
find ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, in a vicious circle.
For there is - there can be - no true ecclesiology, i.e. no true
understanding of the Church, of the world and of their inter-
relationship, without eschatology, i.e. the Orthodox faith in
and experience of the Kingdom of God.
It may be useful and even necessary at this point to em-
phasize that by eschatology we do not mean merely the chapter
which we usually find at the very end of our theological
manuals, which deals almost exclusively with the fate of man's
soul after its separation in death from the body. In fact this
futuristic and individualistic reduction of eschatology is one
of the greatest deficiencies of our post-patristic theology, the
worst fruit of its long Western captivity. Properly understood,
eschatology is not so much a separate "chapter" or "doctrine"
The lP" orld in Orthodox Thought and Experience 15
( which, being distinct from all other Christian "doctrines,"
can and ought to be treated "in itself') as it is the essential
dimension of the Christian faith and experience themselves,
and therefore of Christian theology in its totality.
The Christian faith is essentially eschatological because the
events from which it stems and which are its "object" as well
as its "content": the life, death, resurrection and glorification
of Jesus Christ, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the "in-
stitution" of the Church, are seen and experienced not only as
the end and the fulfillment of the history of salvation, but also
as the inauguration and the gift of a new life whose content
is the Kingdom of God: knowledge of God, communion with
Him, the possibility while still living in "this world" to fore-
taste and really to partake of the .. joy, peace and righteousness"
of the "world to come." Thus eschatology, being the essential
term of reference of the Christian faith itself, penneates the
whole of Christian theology and indeed makes possible theo-
logy itself, i.e. the transforrnation of our human and hopelessly
limited words into theoprepeis lo goi, "words adequate to
God," truly expressive of the eternally transcendent divine
truth.
So also it is eschatology that "posits" the proper under-
standing of the Church and of the world and, in doing this,
reveals the nature of their relation to one another. In the first
place it reveals the Church as the epiphany, as the manifesta-
tion, the presence and the gift of the Kingdom of God, as its
n sacrament" in this world. And again the whole Church, as
both "institution" and "life," is eschatological because she has
no other foundation, content and purpose but to reveal and
to communicate the transcendent reality of the Kingdom of
God. There is no separation in her between "institution" and
"life": as institution she is the sign of the Kingdom, as life
she is the sacrament of the Kingdom, the fulfillment of the
sign into reality, experience, communion. Being in "this world"
(in statu viae), she lives by her experience of the "world to
come," to which she already belongs and in which she is
already (tat home" (in statu patriae).
The eschatological "being" of the Church explains the
Orthodox "ecclesiological silence" during the classical, pa-
76 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

tristic period in the history of our theology. If, as it has often

been noticed, the Fathers do not define the Church, do not make
her into an object of theological reflection, it is because none
of such definitions can truly or adequately comprehend and
express the essential mystery of the Church as experience of
the Kingdom of God, as its epiphany in "this world." Even
the scriptural images of the Church: the Body of Christ, the
Bride of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, cannot be
construed as "definitions." To say that the Church is the "Body
of Christ" is indeed perfectly meaningless to someone who has
no experience of the Church and of her life. Thus the Church,
for the Fathers, is not an "object" of theology but the very
"subject" in them of their theologizing, the essential reality
which by revealing the Kingdom of God, i.e. the ultimate and
saving truth, makes it possible to have a new life and to bear
witness to it. They do not define the Church because when
abstracted from the experience of that reality, she becomes
a pure form about which there is essentially nothing to say.
And from the subsequent history of Christian theology, es-
pecially Western, we know what happens when ecclesiology,
abandoning its eschatological dimension, foundation and con-
tent, selects as its proper "object" precisely the form of the
Church, gives it, so to speak, an existence in itself, and by
doing this, by changing ecclesiology into ecclesiolatry, muti-
lates the entire "experience" of the Church. All this, as we
shall see, is of great importance for the proper evaluation of
the "Christian world" and the place in it of the Church.

4.

Revealing the Church, her nature and her vocation, es-

chatology of necessity reveals the world or, better to say, the
vision and understanding of it in the Christian faith. If the
essential experience of the Church is that of the new creation,
of a new life in a renewed world, that experience implies and
posits a certain fundamental experience of the world. First
of all, it implies the experience of the world as God's creation
and therefore positive in its origin as well as in its essence,
The ·World in Orthodox Thought and Experience 77

reflecting in its structure and being the wisdom, the glory and
the beauty of the One who created it: "Heaven and earth are
full of Thy glory!" There is no ontological dualism of any
kind, no cosmic pessimism whatsoever in the Christian faith,
which fulfills the essential biblical glorification of God in
.His creation. The world is good.
· In the second place, the eschatological experience of the
Church reveals the world as the fall en world, dominated by
sin, corruption and death, enslaved to the "Prince of this
world." This ·fall, although it cannot destroy and annihilate
the essential goodness of God's creation, has nevertheless
alienated it from God, made it into "this world" which, because
it is "flesh and blood," pride and selfishness, is not only
distinct from the Kingdom of God but actively opposed to it.
Hence the essentially tragic Christian view of history, the
rejection by the Christian faith of any historical optimism
that would equate the world with "progress."
And finally, the ultimate experience: that of redemption,
which God accomplished in the midst of His creation, within
time and history, and which by redeeming man, by making him
capax Dei, capable of the new life, is the salvation of the world.
For as the world rejects, in and through man, its self-sufficiency,
as it ceases to be an end in itself and thus truly dies as· "this
world," it becomes that which it was created to be and has
truly become in Christ: the object and means of sanctification,
·of. man's· communion with and passage to . God's eternal
Kingdom.·

5.

\Ve can now return to the "Christian ·world" which, as I

have tried to show, blocks the "Orthodox consciousness" by
continuing to dominate it. The eschatological perspective as
the common ground for the Christian experience and under-
standing of the Church and of the world makes it possible for
us truly to evaluate our past and, on the basis of that evalu-
ation, to discern our present: the basic norms for an Orthodox
approach to the world as it exists and challenges us today.
78 CHURCH, WORLD, insSION

If to evaluate primarily means to distinguish "success" from

"failure," to evaluate the complex reality of the "Orthodox
world" of the past is to distinguish its truly Christian and
therefore lasting achievements from its betrayal of its own
Christian ideal. Yet it is that ideal itself which, I am convinced,
constitutes the first and the essential "success" of the Christian
world, and its lasting value for us and our own situation. If
the Church so readily, so enthusiastically and without any
reservations, without any legal or "constitutional" conditions,
accepted the "world" which for more than two centuries denied
her the very right to exist, if she accepted it as the form of her
own existence and for all practical purposes merged with it,
it is because in the first place that world, i.e. the Graeco-Rornan
Empire, accepted the Church's faith, and this means that it
subordinated itself, its own values, its entire self-understanding,
to the ultimate object and content of that faith: the Kingdom
of God. In other terms, it accepted as its own foundation, as
its sui generis basis, the Christian eschatological perspective.
And this happened not only in theory, not only nominally.
We are so accustomed to the "Western'' evaluation of the
"Christian world," i.e. its evaluation almost exclusively in
terms of Church-state relations and more specifically in terms
of the relationship within it between two powers, the im perium
and the sacerdotium, that we are virtually incapable of dis-
cerning the real locus of that unique alliance between the
Church and the world: their essential agreement as to what
constitutes the ultimate value, the ultimate "term . of.. refer-
ence," the ultimate horizon of human existence in all its di-
mensions.
Obviously to prove that this non-written and yet real
"agreement" existed, and that, in spite of all human failures
and betrayals, it worked, would require a detailed analysis of
the entire culture and ethos of that "Christian world," analysis
impossible within the scope and the limitations of this paper. I
am convinced, however, that such analysis would es-
tablish beyond any doubt the fundamental openness of
that culture and of the society which produced it to the
Christian eschatological vision, as the unique inspiration,
as indeed the "soul" of their very existence. Whatever aspects
The World in Orthodox Thought and Experience 79

of that world we consider - its art, which in each given

"society" is a main expression of its vision of life, its lifestyle,
and, to use another of the favorite modern terms, the
entire "discourse" of its culture - we find that their inner
consistency, their style in the deepest sense of the word,
comes to them, in the last analysis, from the Church's
eschatological experience, from her vision and knowledge of
the Kingdom of God. If monasticism, for example, is for that
society its ideal pole, the "exceedingly good" way to perfection
which shapes its worship, its piety and indeed its whole men-
tality, it is because the monk personifies the eschatological
nature of the Christian life, the impossibility of reducing
Christianity to anything in "this world" whose "fashion fa des
away." .In this sense repentance, in the radical sense of the
evangelical metanoia, constitutes the fundamental tonality of
the "Christian world," permeating its prayer, its thought and
the essential symbols of its whole life. This the modern Chris-
tians forget much too easily, although in the light of the re-
ductionism characteristic of our modern civilization this should
be remembered more than anything else.

,
' .

6.

If such is the essential "success" of the "Christian world,"

the same eschatological perspective which reveals it to us also
reveals that world's ·.fundamental "failure." I call it "funda-
mental" in order-to· distinguish it fromallother defects: crimes,
cruelty, conflicts, of which the ·"Christian world," as any other
human society, had its· full share. What, however, transcends
all those "human, all too human" deficiencies and tragedies
is the inner betrayal by the "Christian world" of its own ulti-
mate vision, its progressive subordination to a different vision,
subordination which because it remained virtually subcon-
scious was all the more tragical.
Using categories familiar to us today, I would define that
betrayal as denial of history, and this means denial of that ex-
perience of time, of its meaning and function, which are im-
plied in Christian eschatology. It is indeed the mark of Chris-
80 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

tian eschatology that, by revealing the eschaton, the ultimate

end and thus the ultimate "term of reference" of the world, it
posits the world as history, as a meaningful process within a linear
time. The Christian world-view is dynamic. It liberates the
world from its enslavement to a static "sacrality." By
revealing the Kingdom of God as the Beyond which never-
theless is present within time as its leaven, as that which gives
it its value, meaning and orientation, the Church generates in
man the thirst and hunger for the Absolute, the unsatiable
desire and search for perfection.
The initial "agreement" between the Church and the world
not only contained this dynamic world-view but indeed was
based on it. By accepting the Church's eschatological faith, the
"world" accepted to be "journey" to the Kingdom, a world
open to the prophetic vision, the prophetic voice of the Church.
Even if, according to the biblical scheme applied to it by the
Church, the Graeco-Roman oikoumene was to be the last in
the sequence of the great empires that measured the history
of salvation, even if, by accepting Christ as its supreme Basileus
or Pantokrator, it thought of itself as the Christian politeuma,
the ultimate response of the world to God, all this did not
alter - for the Church - the empire's essential "historicity,"
its belonging to the world whose "fashion is fading away."
With time, however, that vision began to change. From a
dynamic one it became, little by Iittle and 'almost unconsciously,
a static one. And although it would obviously be impossible
even to mention here the various reasons which led to' that
metamorphosis, all of them are rooted, in one way or another,
in the inertia that characterizes social organisms.' in their
"natural" tendency to divorce their form from the· content
which alone justifies that form and thus to absolutize the latter
as an end in itself, as a sacred form-for-ever. Nothing illustrates
better that metamorphosis than the change, and again an un-
conscious one, in the eschatological emphasis. It is precisely
then that that individualistic and almost exclusively futuristic
reduction of eschatology began to develop and to deprive
even the sacraments, the Eucharist itself, of their eschatological
dimension and to put it bluntly, to remove the Kingdom of
God, at least in theological reflection, into the. future alone,
The World in Orthodox Thought and Experience 81

to make it into a mere doctrine of rewards and punishments

after death.
The real context of that reduction, however, is not merely
theological. It reflected the growing change in the very men-
tality, the very consciousness of the '(Christian world," the
progressive abandonment by it of its own eschatological vision.
On the one hand, its self-understanding as the last earthly king-
dom, as the providential locus of Christ's victory, began to be
experienced - rather than interpreted - as the end of history:
the end, not of time but precisely of "history," i.e. of that time
which is open to new events, to meaningful developments.
All such developments, all historical happenings, were now
to be squeezed somehow into a static and unchanging pattern,
denied their historical specificity and uniqueness. On the other
hand, and simultaneously with that growing a-historicity, there
developed within the Christian world a sense of its own per-
fection, not of course in its "members," who remain sinful,
but in its forms and structures, which were experienced more
and more as final, God-given and therefore unchangeable.
All this, I repeat, took place little by little and on a subcon-
scious rather than conscious level. The theory did not change,
only the '(experience" of it. But the results of that change
constitute without any exaggeration the greatest tragedy of
Christian history. What it provoked was a progressive eman-
cipation of the human mind - and of the "thirst" and
"hunger" injected into it by Christianity- from the "Chris-
tian world," and therefore their growing secularization,
their rebellion against Christianity itself. Prevented from
developing within the framework - religious, cultural, psy-
chological - of the "Christian world," blocked by the
latter's static self-absolutization, the human mind, shaped
and inspired by Christian eschatological maximalism, began
to see in the "Christian world" the main obstacle to
that maximalism, a structure of oppression and not of
freedom. The sad history of the divorce between man and
his "search" on the one hand and the "Christian world" on
the other hand, has been told many times. What is important
for us is, of course, the indelibly "Christian" mark on the
"modern world," the one which grew out of this divorce, and
82 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

this in spite of the world's rebellion and, sometimes, apostasy.

This is truly a post-Christian world because, in the last
analysis, even the most secular, the most anti-religious and
anti-Christian ideas and ideologies by which it is moved, are
in one way or another - "des verites chretiennes devenues
folles" - the fruit of a secularized eschatology. It is the Chris-
tian faith which, by injecting into man's mind and heart the
dream - the vision - of the Kingdom of God, made possible
the fundamental utopianism of the "modern mind," its worship
of history, its almost paranoic belief in a forthcoming kingdom
of freedom and justice.

7.

Now the last question: What does all this mean for us, for
our own theological reflection on the Church's presence in our
own "modern world"? Our task was to find the ecclesiological
perspective implied, rather than formally expressed, in the
central Orthodox experience: that of the "Christian World,"
of its "success" and "failure"; to discern its significance, its
normative character for our present tasks.
It seems to me that the essential meaning of that which I
termed "success" lies in the very fact of the "Christian world,"
which, above all, reveals the Orthodox belief in the possibility
for the world to be sanctified - the belief, in other words, in
the world not as a hopelessly "extrinsic" reality, alien and
irrelevant to the uniquely "religious" preoccupations of the
Church, but as the object of her love, concern and action. And
this is very important especially in view of the dangerous and
potentially even heretical tendency pervasive today among the
Orthodox to accept an almost Manichean, dualistic view of
the world and thus to make the Church into a self-contained
and self-centered religious ghetto. Our own past, our own
Tradition bears witness not only to the possibility of a
"theology of the world" but indeed makes such theology an
organic dimension of ecclesiology.
If, then, that "success" liberates us from Manichean
dualism, it ought to liberate us also from the opposite, yet
The World in Orthodox Thought and Experience 83

equally pervasive and equally dangerous temptation: that of

a mere surrender to the world, acceptance of the world as the
only content of the Church's life and action, setting - to use
an expression popular today- "the agenda for the Church."
That "success," to the extent to which it was "success," reveals
that the function of the Church in the world is to make present
within it the eschaton, to manifest the Kingdom of God as
the ultimate term of reference, and thus to relate to it the
whole life of man and of his world. The Church is not an
agency for solving the innumerable "problems" inherent in
the world, or rather, she may help solving them only inasmuch
as she herself remains faithful to her nature and to her essen-
tial vocation: to reveal in "this world" that which by being
"not of this world" is therefore the only absolute context for
seeing, understanding and solving all human "problems."
As to the "fundamental failure" of the Christian world, it
should make us fully aware that there is but one essential sin,
one essential danger: that of idolatry, the ever-present and
ever-acting temptation to absolutize and thus to idolize "this
world" itself, its passing values, ideas and ideologies, to
forget that as the people of God '«we have here no lasting city,
but we seek the city which is to come" (Heb. 13: 14). It is the
"failure" of the '«Christian world" that should make it possible
for us to see through the "modern world" and the spiritual
reality shaping it, to discern in it what is positive: the cry that
comes frem its Christian subconscious, and also what is nega-
tive: its truly demonic rebellion against God.
There is, however, one precondition for all this, which is
both "necessary and sufficient": it is that the Church herself
return to the "one thing needed," to the essentially eschato-
logical nature of her faith and of her life. No theological re-
flection on the world will be of any help, no theological
reflection on the world will be possible unless we rediscover,
make truly ours again, that reality which alone constitutes the
Church and is the source of her faith, of her life and therefore
of her theology: the reality of the Kingdom of God. The
Church is in statu viae, in pilgrimage through "this world,"
sent to it as its salvation. But the meaning of that pilgrimage,
as indeed the meaning of the world itself, is given and revealed
84 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

to us only when the Church fulfills herself as being in statu

patriae, truly at home at Christ's table, in His Kingdom.
This precondition requires, of course, a radical rethinking
of our theological enterprise, of its very structure and method-
ology, of its ultimate roots, of that which makes it possible.
It is not enough simply to quote the Fathers, to make them into
"authorities" certifying our every theological proposition, for
it is not quotations, be they scriptural or patristic, that consti-
tute the ground of theology, but the experience of the Church.
And since, in the ultimate analysis, she has no other experience
but that of the Kingdom, since her whole life is rooted in that
unique experience, there can be no other source, no · other
ground and no other criterion for theology, if it is truly to be
the expression of the Church's faith and the reflection on that
faith.
All this means a return to a very old, indeed eternal truth:
The Church is never more present to the world and more
"useful" to it than when she is totally free from it, free from
it not only "externally," i.e. independent from its structures
and powers, but also and primarily internally, i.e. free from
her own spiritual surrender to its values and treasures. To
accomplish such liberation, however, is not easy, for it· pre-
supposes that our hearts find the only true treasure, the ex-
perience of the Kingdom of God, which alone can restore to
us the fulness of the Church and the fulness of the world,
which alone makes us capable of truly fulfilling our 'calling.
 IV
A MEANINGFUL STORM
t(Wherefore putting away lying,
speak every man truth with his
neighbor: for we are members one
of another." Eph. 4:25

1.

. The storm provoked by the "autocephaly" of the Orthodox

Church in America is probably one of the most meaningful
crises in several centuries of Orthodox ecclesiastical history.
Or rather it could become meaningful if those who are in-
volved in it were to accept it as an unique opportunity for
facing and solving an ecclesiastical confusion which for too
long was simply ignored by the Orthodox. For if America
has suddenly become the focus of Orthodox attention and
passions, it is because the situation of Orthodoxy here, being
the most obvious result of that confusion, was bound to
reveal sooner or later the true nature and scope of what is
indeed a "pan-Orthodox" crisis.
Not many words are needed to describe the American
"situation." By 1970, Orthodoxy in America existed in the
form of: one Greek jurisdiction, three Russian, two Serbian,
two Antiochian, two Romanian, two Bulgarian, two Albanian,
three Ukrainian, one Carpatho-Russian and some smaller
groups which we omit here for the sake of simplicity. Within
every national subdivision each group claimed to be the only
"canonical" one and denied recognition to others. As to

* Originally published in St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 15. 1/2

( 1971), pp. 3-27.

85
86 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

criteria of this "canonicity," they were also quite diverse. Some

groups saw it in their jurisdictional dependence on their
"Mother Churches," some, which-like the Carpatho-Russian
diocese-could not claim any identifiable Mother Church, on
their "recognition" by the Ecumenical Patriarch, some on
other kinds of "continuity" and "validity." Several of these
"jurisdictions" did-while others did not-belong to the
"Standing Conference of Orthodox Bishops," an unofficial,
voluntary association established to promote the unification
of Orthodoxy in the New Wodd but which in ten years of its
existence could not agree even· on general principles of such
a unification. This unique and quite unprecedented situation
existed for many decades. But what makes it even more ap-
palling is the fact that at no time did it provoke any noticeable
alarm in the Church at large, at least in her "officialdom."
Indeed, no one seemed either to see or to admit that American
Orthodoxy had in fact become a blatant denial of all that
learned Orthodox delegates to ecumenical gatherings were
at the same time proclaiming to be the "essence" of Orthodoxy
as the True Church and the Una Sancta. I an1 convinced that
to future historians this "American situation," made up of
progressive fragmentation, court trials, passionate polemics
and mutual suspicion, will be a source of endless amazement.
The storm began early in 1970 when one of the largest
and oldest "jurisdictions" brought to an end its long quarrel
with its Mother Church by asking for and receiving a
status of total administrative independence (ttautocephaly',),
dropped from her name a qualification ("Russian'') which
after 175 years of unbroken continuity on this continent was
obviously obsolete, and adopted a geographical definition ("in
America") corresponding both to its location and vocation.
Yet if some fifty years of chaos and divisions, confusion and
progressive deterioration, left the Church at large perfectly
indifferent, this simple fact-the emergence of an Orthodox
Church in America based on equally simple and empirical
presuppositions, that the Church here, after almost two cen-
turies of existence, might be independent and could be Amer-
ican-raised a storm which keeps gaining momentum and
has by now involved the entire Orthodox Church.
A Meaningful Storm 87

Our purpose here is not to defend the "autocephaly."

It is rather to investigate the nature and the causes of the
storm it ignited, the deep and probably almost unconscious
motivations behind these passionate reactions. That auto- Ct

cephal r" was met at first with insults, innuendos and inter-
pretations ad malem partem was probably to be expected.
But insults never prove or solve anything. And I am convinced
that beneath them there is an immense and truly tragic
misunderstanding. My only goal now is to try to locate and to
assess it. Above all we need today a clarification. Only then
may a more constructive and meaningful discussion, a search
for common solutions, become possible.

2.

The natural and essential "term of reference" in Orthodoxy

is always Tradition. That the present controversy takes the
form of "appeals" to Tradition, of argumentation ex tra-
ditione, is therefore perfectly normal. What is less normal
but deeply revealing of the present state of Orthodoxy is the
fact that these "appeals" and arguments seem to result in
openly contradictory and mutually exclusive claims and
affirmations. It is as if we were either "reading" different Tradi-
tions or the same one differently. It certainly would be unfair
to explain these contradictions merely by ill-will, ignorance or
emotions. If to some the coming into existence of an "Ortho-
dox Church in America" is a first step towards genuine Tra-
dition, while to some others it is the beginning of a canonical
collapse, the reason for this must be a deeper one; not only,
indeed, do we differently read the same Tradition, but we also
appeal to different traditions. And it is this fact that we have
to understand and to explain.
Let us remember first of all that the Orthodox concept of
Tradition cannot be reduced to that of texts and regulations
which any one who wants to prove something has merely to
quote. Thus the "Holy Canons," i.e. that collection of canoni-
cal texts which is common to all Orthodox churches, does not
exhaust the canonical tradition. This observation is especially
88 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

important in view of the fact that the key words of our present
debates - "autocephaly," "jurisdiction," etc.- are virtually
absent from the Holy Canons, and current "appeals" and
references are made almost exclusively to various "prece-
dents" of the past. Now, such appeals to the past and to
"precedents" have always been considered as perfectly legiti-
mate from the Orthodox point of view, for Tradition most
certainly includes facts as well as texts. It is also clear, how-
ever, that not all "past," simply by virtue of being "past," is
to be identified with Tradition. In the eighteenth century the
Ecumenical Throne "abolished" the Serbian "autocephaly."
More recently it "recognized" the heretical "Living Church"
in Russia. Muscovite bishops used to reconsecrate the bishop
elected to the patriarchal office. At some time or another
virtually all Orthodox churches established their "jurisdiction"
in America. Are all these facts "canonical precedents" simply
because they occurred in the past and were "institutionalized"?
Is it not obvious, therefore, that "past" itself always needs
evaluation, and that the criterion of such an evaluation is
not "factual" ("it happened") but ecclesiological, that, in
other words, it consists in a reference to the permanent and
unchanging doctrine of the Church, to her "essence" ? If the
forms of the Church's life and organization change, it is in
order precisely to preserve unchanged the "essence" of the
Church; for otherwise the Church would cease to be a divine
institution and become a mere product of historical forces
and developments. And the function of Tradition is always
to assure and to reveal this essential and unchanging "identity"
of the Church, her "sameness" in space and time. To "read"
Tradition is therefore not to cc quote" but to ref er all facts,
texts, institutions and forms to the ultimate essence of the
Church, to understand their meaning and value in the light
of the Church's unchanging esse. But then the question is:
What is the basic principle and the inner criterion of such
a "reading," of our appeals to Tradition?
A Meaningful Storm 89

3.
Orthodox canonists and theologians have always agreed
that for the canonical tradition such an inner criterion is to be
found in the Holy Canons, i.e., that corpus which includes the
Apostolic Canons, the decisions of ecumenical and some local
councils, and rules extracted from various patristic writings.
This corpus has been always and everywhere considered as
normative, not only because it constitutes the earliest "layer"
of our canonical tradition, but because its primary content
and term of reference is precisely the "essence" of the Church,
her basic structure and constitution rather than the_ historically
contingent forms of her existence. This layer is thus the norm
of any subsequent canonical development, the inner measure
of its "canonicity," the very context within which everything
else in the history of the Church, be it past, present or future,
is to be evaluated.
If this is true, and until now it has always been held as
true by the consensus of Orthodox canonists and theologians,
we have a first methodological "clue" to our present contro-
versy, one principle by which to evaluate the various "ap-
peals" to Tradition. It is indeed quite significant then that
references to this "essential" canonical tradition are very
scarce, not to say non-existent, in the storm originated by
"autocephaly." The reason for this is simple, and I have
already mentioned it. The Holy Canons virtually ignore the
terms which are at the heart of the debate: "autocephaly,"
"jurisdiction," etc. One is naturally tempted then to refer
directly to those "layers" of the past and to those "traditions"
which seem to be of greater help in providing "proofs" and
"precedents." But it is here precisely that we must "locate"
the initial weakness and the fundamental deficiency of this
entire method of arguing. For on the one hand, it is probably
possible with some know-how to find a "precedent" and a
canonical "justification" for almost anything. Yet on the other
hand, the whole point is that no "precedent" as such con-
stitutes a sufficient canonical justification. If the notion of
"autocephaly" came into existence after the fixation of the
 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

normative tradition, this does not mean that the former does
not need to be "referred" to the latter, understood and evalu-
ated in its ecclesiological context. One cannot meaningfully
debate the question of who has the "right to grant auto-
cephaly" unless one first agrees on the basic ecclesiological
meaning of that "right" and of "autocephaly." One cannot
speak of "autocephaly" as "canonical" or "uncanonical" unless
one first sees and understands it in the light of the canons,
i.e. the essential and universal canonical tradition. If "auto-
cephaly" - and here everyone will agree - is one particular
mode or expression of the churches' relationships to one an-
other, where, if not in the essential tradition, is the fundamen-
tal nature of that relationship to be found?

4.

My first conclusion is a simple one. If notions such as

"autocephaly" or "jurisdiction" are absent from the canonical
tradition which everyone accepts as normative, this very
absence is a tremendously important factor for the proper
understanding and evaluation of these notions. In the first
place this absence cannot be termed "accidental"; if it were
accidental, we would of necessity have been able to find an
equivalent notion. It cannot furthermore be ascribed to, let
us say, the "underdeveloped" character of earlier ecclesiology,
for it would mean that for several centuries the Church existed
without something essential for her very life. But then this
absence can be explained by only one fact: a significant
difference in the very approach to the Church between the
essential tradition and the one which appeared at a later
date. It is this difference that we must understand if we are
to grasp the true ecclesiological meaning of "autocephaly."
Even a superficial reading of the canons shows that the
Church they depict is not, as it is today for us, a network of
"sovereign" and "independent" entities called patriarchates
or autocephalous or autonomous churches, each having
"under" itself ( in its "jurisdiction") smaller and subordinated
units such as "dioceses," "exarchates," "parishes," etc. This
A Meaningful Storm 91
"jurisdictional" or "subordinationist" dimension is absent
here because, when dealing with the Church, the early ecclesi-
ological tradition has its starting point and its basic term
of reference in the local church. This early tradition has been
analysed and studied so many times in recent years that no
detailed elaboration is needed here. What is important for
us is that this local church, i.e. a community gathered around
its bishop and clerus, is a full church. It is the manifestation
and the presence in a given place of the Church of Christ.
And thus the main aim and purpose of the canonical tradition
is precisely to "protect" this fulness, to "guarantee," so to
speak, that this local church fully manifests the oneness,
holiness, apostolicity and catholicity of the Church of Christ.
It is in function of this fulness, therefore, that the canonical
tradition regulates the relation of each church with other
churches, their unity and interdependence. The fulness of
the local church, its very nature as the Church of Christ in
a particular place, depends primarily on her unity in faith,
tradition and life with the Church everywhere; on her being
ultimately the same Church. This unity is assured essentially
by the bishop whose office or leitourgia is to maintain and to
preserve, in constant union with other bishops, the continuity
and the identity in space and time of the universal and catholic
faith and life of the one Church of Christ. For us the main
point, however, is that although dependent on all other
churches, the local church is not "subordinate" to any of
them. No church is "under" any other church and no bishop
is "under" any other bishop. The very nature of this depen-
dence and, therefore, of unity among churches, is not "juris-
dictional." It is the unity of faith and life, the unbroken
continuity of Tradition, of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that
is expressed, fulfilled and preserved in the consecration of
one bishop by other bishops, in their regular synods, and,
in brief, in the organic unity of the episcopate which all bishops
hold in solidum ( St. Cyprian).
The absence of "jurisdictional" subordination of one
church to another, of one bishop to another, does not mean
absence of hierarchy and order. This order in the early
canonical tradition is maintained by the various levels of
92 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

primacies, i.e. episcopal and ecclesiastical centers or focuses of

unity. But primacy is not a "jurisdictional" principle. If,
according to the famous Apostolic Canon 34, the bishops
everywhere must know the first among them, the same canon
"refers" this primacy to the Holy Trinity which has "order"
but certainly no "subordination." The function of primacy
is to express the unity of all, to be its organ and mouthpiece.
The first level of primacy is usually that of a "province,"
i.e. a region in which all bishops, together with the metro-
politan, take part in the consecration of the bishops of that
region, and meet twice a year as synod. If we had to apply
the notion of "autocephaly" to the early Church it should
be properly applied to this provincial level, for the main mark
of "autocephaly" is precisely the right to elect and to con-
secrate bishops within a given region. The second level of
primacy is that of a wider geographical area: "Orient" with
Antioch, Asia with Ephesus, Gaul with Lyons, etc. The
"content" of this primacy is primarily · doctrinal and moral.
The churches of any given area usually "look up" to the church
from which they received their tradition and in times of crisis
and uncertainty gather around her in order to find under her
leadership a common solution to their problems. Finally,
there is also from the very beginning a universal "center of
unity," a universal primacy: that of the Church of Jerusalem
at first, then that of the Church of Rome, a primacy which
even modern Roman theologians define, at least in that early
period, in terms of "sollicitude" rather than in those of any
formal "power" or "jurisdiction."
Such is the essential canonical tradition of the Church.
And it is only in its light that we can understand the real
significance of those subsequent- "layers" which were added
to it and complicated it during the long earthly pilgrimage
of the Church.

5.

The early structure of the Church was substantially changed

and "complicated," as everyone knows, by the event which
A Meaningful Storm 93

still remains the most important single event in the history

of the Church: the Church's reconciliation with the empire,
and an alliance between them within the framework of a
Christian oikoumene, a Christian .. universe." Ecclesiologically
this event meant, above all, a progressive organizational in-
tegration of the Church's structures into the administrative
system of the empire.
Let me stress immediately that this integration, and the
entire second "layer" of our canonical tradition which is
derived from it and which can be termed .. imperial," cannot
be considered from an Orthodox point of view as a passing
"accident," or, as some Western historians think, a result of
a .. surrender" of the Church to the empire. No, it is an integral
part of our tradition and the Orthodox Church cannot reject
Byzantium without rejecting something belonging to her very
substance. But it must be understood that this layer is a
different one, based on different presuppositions and having
therefore different implications for Orthodox ecclesiology.
For if the first layer is both the expression and the norm of
the unchanging essence of the Church, the fundamental
meaning of this second, .. imperial" level is that it expresses
and regulates the historicity of the Church, i.e. her equally
essential relation to the world in which she is called to fulfill
her vocation and mission. It belongs indeed to the very nature
of the Church that .she is always and everywhere not of this
world and receives her· being and life from above, not from
beneath; and that; at the same time, she always accepts the
world to which she is sent and adjusts herself to its forms,
needsandstructures, If the first layer of our canonical tradition
refers to the Church in herself, to those structures which, ex-
pressing her essence, do not depend on the "world," the second
one has as its very object her "acceptance" of the world, the
norms by which she is related to it. The first deals with the
"unchanging," the second with the "changing." Thus, for
example, the Church is a permanent reality of the Christian
faith and experience whereas the Christian Empire is not.
But inasmuch and as long as this empire, this "Christian
world," is a reality, the Church not only accepts it de facto
but enters into a positive and in. a sense even an organic re-
94 CHURCH; WORLD, MISSION

lationship with it. The essential aspect, the "canonical"

meaning of that relationship, however, is that it does not
bestow on anything in this world the same essential value as
the one the Church possesses. For the Church the "image of
the world always fades away" (I Cor. 7: 31), and this applies
to all forms and institutions of the world. Within the frame-
work of the Christian oikoumene the Church may easily
accept the right of the Christian basile«: to convoke ecumenical
councils or to nominate bishops or even to change the terri-
torial boundaries and privileges of the churches. All this does
not make the emperor an essential category of the Church's
life. In this sense the second canonical layer is essentially
relative, for its very object is precisely the Church's life within
relative realities of "this world." Its function is to relate the
unchanging essence of the Church to an ever-changing
world.
Now it is obvious that the jttrisdictional dimension of the
Church and of her life has its roots precisely in this
second, "imperial" layer of our tradition. But it must
be stressed immediate!y that this jurisdictional level did
neither replace the earlier, "essential" one, nor merely
develop it. Even today, after centuries of an almost com-
plete triumph of "jurisdictional" ecclesiology, �e say, for
example, that all bishops are "equal in grace," denying thus
that distinctions in rank ( e.g. patriarch, archbishop, bishop)
have any "ontological" ·content. It is absolutely important to
understand that this "jurisdictional" layer, although perfectly
justified· and even necessary in its own sphere of application,
is a different layer, not to be confused with the "essential" one.
The source of that difference lies in the fact that the juris-
dictional "power" comes to the Church not from her essence,
which is not "of this world," and is, therefore, beyond any
jus, but from her being "in the world" and thus in a mutual
relationship with it. Essentially the Church is the Body of
Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the Bride of Christ;
but empirically she is also a society and as such a part of "this
world" and in "relation" with it. And if any attempt to
separate and to oppose to one another those two realities
leads to a heretical disincarnation of the Church, her reduction
A Meaningful Storm · 95

to a human, all too human "institution,"· a confusion between

the two is equally heretical, for it ultimately subordinates
grace to jus, making Christ, in the words of St. Paul, "die in
vain." The heart of the matter is that the "essence" of the
Church-which is not "jurisdictional"-can and even must
have "in this world" an inevitable "jurisdictional" projection
and expression. Thus, for example, when the canon says that
a bishop is to be consecrated by "two or three" bishops, this
in itself is not a "juridical" norm but the expression of the
very essence of the Church as an organic unity of faith and
life. The full "reading" and understanding of this canon
implies, therefore, of necessity its reference to the "essential"
ecclesiology. Yet at the same time this canon is obviously a
rule, a practical and objective norm, a first and essential
criterion for discerning a "canonical" from a "non-canonical"
consecration. As "rule," as jus, it is neither self-sufficient nor
self-explanatory, and the essence of the episcopate cannot
evidently be reduced to it. Yet it is that rule which-properly
understood within the context of ecclesiology-maintains
precisely the identity of the Church's "essence" in space and
in time.
During the first centuries of her existence the Church was
denied any "legal" status and "jurisdiction" by "this world"
which persecuted her. But within the new situation-that of
a "Christian oikeumene" -it was normal and inevitable for
the Church to receive and to acquire such a status. Remaining
"essentially" what she was, what she always is and always
will be in any "situation," "society" and "culture," the Church
received within a given situation a "jurisdiction" which she
did not possess before and which is not "essential," although
beneficial, for her to possess. The state, even a Christian
state, is entirely "of this world," i.e. of the order of jus,
and it cannot express its relationship with the Church in any
but a "jurisdictional" manner. In the world's categories the
Church is also primarily a "jurisdiction" -a society, a structure,
an institution with rights and obligations, privileges and rules,
etc. All that the Church can require from the state is that this
"jurisdictional" understanding not mutilate and reform her
"essential" being, that it be not contrary to her essential ec-
96 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

clesiology. It is therefore within this new "situation" and, in

fact, [rom the Christian empire that the Church received in
addition, so to speak, to her "essential" structure a juris-
dictional one, meant to express primarily her place and func-
tion within the Byzantine "symphony": the organic alliance
in one oikoumene of the state and Church. The most important
feature of that jurisdictional aspect is that organizationally
and institutionally the Church "followed" the state, i.e. in-
tegrated itself into its own organizational structure.
The best example, indeed the "focus" of that integration
and of the new "jurisdictional" order is, without any doubt,
the place and function of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
within the Byzantine oikoumene. No historian would .deny
today that the quick rise of the see of Constantinople was due
exclusively to the new "imperial" situation of the Church.
The ideal of "symphony" between the imperium and the
sacerdotium-the very basis of Byzantine "ideology't=required
an ecclesiastical "counterpart" to the emperor, a personal
"focus" of the Church corresponding to the personal "focus"
of the empire. In this sense the "jurisdiction" of the bishop
of Constantinople as the Ecumenical ( i.e. "imperial") Patriarch
is an imperial jurisdiction, whose true context and term of
reference is, above all, the Byzantine theocratic ideology. And
it is very interesting to note that there is an obvious difference
between the imperial legislation concerning the role and the
function of the patriarch and the canonical tradition of the
same period. Canonically, i.e. in reference to "essential" ec-
clesiology, the patriarch of Constantinople, in spite of his
unique "imperial" position, remained· the primate of. the
Eastern Church, although even this primacy was given · him
because his city was that of the "emperor and the - senate" (
Chalcedon canon 28) , and also the primate of his own dio- (C

cese." "Imperially," however, he became the head of the

Church, her "spokesman" to the empire and her link to it, the
"focus" not only of the Church's unity and agreement, but also
of her "jurisdictional" government.
We know also that this "imperial" logic was not accepted
easily and without resistance by the Church: the fight against
Constantinople of the old "centers of unity" or "primacies" -
A Meaningful Storm 97
those of Alexandria and Antioch-is here to witness it. The
historical tragedy which transformed these once flourishing
churches into mere remnants put an end to that resistance;
and for several centuries the New Rome became the center,
the heart and the head of one "Imperial" Church-the reli-
gious projection of the one universal Christian empire. The
"jurisdictional" principle, although in theory still distinct
from the essential ecclesiology, occupied the center of the
stage. Local bishops like civil governors became more and
more the representatives and even the "delegates" of a
"central power": the patriarch and his by now permanent
synod. Psychologically, in virtue of the same imperial and
"jurisdictional" logic, they became even his "subordinates,"
as well as the subordinates of the emperor. What was primarily
a mode of the Church's relationship to a particular "world"
began to permeate the Church's mentality itself and to be
confused with the Church's "essence." And this, as we shall
see later, is the main source of our present confusion and
disagreements.

6.

We are coming now to the third historical "layer" of

our tradition, a layer whose formative principle and content
is neither the local church, as in the early tradition, nor the
empire, as in the "imperial" tradition, but a new reality which
emerged from the progressive dislocation of Byzantium: the
Christian nation. Accordingly we shall define this third layer
as national. Its appearance added a new dimension, but also
a new complexity, to Orthodox ecclesiology.
Byzantium thought of itself, at least in theory, in universal
and not national terms. Even on the eve of its final collapse a
Byzantine patriarch wrote to a Russian prince a long letter
explaining to him that there can be but one emperor and one
empire under heaven, just as there is but one God in heaven.
Ideologically and ideally the empire was universal ( inci-
dentaly "Roman" and not "Greek" according to official im-
perial language), and it was this universality that was the
98 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

main "basis" for its acceptance by and alliance with the

Church.
But we know today that this Byzantine universalism
began, and this at a relatively early date, to dissolve itself into a
rather narrow "nationalism" and exclusivism which were naturally
fed by the tragic events of Byzantine history: the Arab
conquest of its provinces, the unceasing advance of the Turks,
the Latin invasion of 1204, the appearance of the Slavic
challenge in the North, etc. In theory nothing changed; in
practice Byzantium was becoming a relatively small and weak
Greek state whose universal claims were less and less
comprehensible to the nations brought into her political,
religious and cultural orbit: Bulgars, Serbs and later, Russians.
Or rather these very claims, this very Byzantine ideology was
to become, in a truly paradoxical fashion, the main source
of a new Orthodox nationalism ( the second source being
the later transformation of this nationalism under the in-
fluence of the "secular nationalism" of 1789). Less and less
impressed by the ailing empire, more and more impatient
with its religio-political claims, these "nations" which were
born of Byzantine ideology began to apply this very ideology
to themselves. From that complex process there emerged the
idea of a Christian nation-with a national vocation, a kind
of corporate "identity" before God. What is important for
us here is that only at this stage in the history of the Eastern
Church there appeared the notion of "autocephaly't=-which,
if not in its origin ( it was used in various senses before but
always "occasionally"), at least in its application, is a product
not of ecclesiology, but of a national phenomenon. Its funda-
mental historical connotation is thus neither purely ecclesi-
ological, nor "jurisdictional," but national. To a universal
empire corresponds an "imperial" church with its center in
Constantinople: such is the axiom of the Byzantine "imperial"
ideology. There can therefore be no political independence
from the empire without its ecclesiastical counterpart or
"autocephaly": such becomes the axiom of the new Orthodox
"theocracies." "Autocephaly," i.e. ecclesiastical independence,
becomes thus the very basis of national and political indepen-
dence, the status-symbol of a new "Christian nation." And
A Meaningful Storm 99
it is very significant that all negotiations concerning the various
"autocephalies" were conducted not by churches, but by states:
the most typical example here being the process of negotiating
the autocephaly of the Russian Church in the sixteenth century,
a process in which the Russian Church herself took virtually
no part.
We must stress once more that this new « 'autocephalous"
church, as it appears in Bulgaria and later in Russia and in
Serbia, is not a mere "jurisdictional" entity. Its main implica-
tion is not so much "independence" ( for in fact it is usually
totally dependent on the state) but precisely the national
church, or, in other words, the church as the religious ex-
pression and projection of a nation, as indeed the bearer of
a national identity. And again there is no need to think of
this as a (( deviation" -in merely negative and disparaging
terms. In the history of the Orthodox East, the "Orthodox
nation" is not only a reality, but in many ways a "success";
for in spite of all their deficiencies, tragedies and betrayals,
there indeed were such "realities" as "Holy Serbia" or "Holy
Russia," there truly took place a national birth in Christ, there
appeared a national Christian vocation-and, historically, the
emergence of the national church, at a time when the ideal
and the reality of the universal Christian empire and its
counterpart, the "imperial" church, were wearing thin, was
perfectly justified. What is not justified, however, is to confuse
this historical development with the essential ecclesiology and,
in fact, to subordinate the latter to the former. It is when the
very essence of the Church began to be viewed in terms of this
nationalism and reduced to it, that something which in itself
was quite compatible with that "essence" became the be-
ginning of an alarming ecclesiological deterioration.

7.

It may be clearer now what I meant when, at the beginning

of this essay, I stated that in our present canonical and ec-
clesiastical controversies we appeal in fact to different "tra-
ditions." It is an obvious fact indeed that these appeals are
100 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

made to one of the three "layers" briefly analysed above as if

each one of them were a self-sufficient embodiment of the
entire canonical tradition. And it is another obvious fact that
at no time was an effort made within the Orthodox theological
and canonical consciousness to give these three layers, and
especially their interrelation inside Tradition, a serious ec-
clesiological evaluation. It is this strange fact that constitutes
the main source of our present tragic misunderstandings. Now,
'the historical reason for that total lack of ecclesiological
"reflection" and clarification is again a rather simple one.
Virtually until our very time and in spite of the progressive
disappearance of the various "Orthodox worlds," the Orthodox
churches lived within the spiritual, structural and psycho-
logical context of these organic "worlds"-and this means
by the logic of either the "imperial" or the "national" tradi-
tions, or else a combination of both. And the plain fact is
that for several centuries there was in Orthodoxy an almost
total atrophy of ecclesiological thinking, of any real interest
in ecclesiology.
The collapse of Byzantium in 1453 provoked no such
ecclesiological reaction and we know why: the Islamic con-
cept of a "religion-nation" (1nilet) assured for the entire
Byzantine world, now under Turkish domination, the con-
tinuity of the "imperial" tradition. In virtue of this principle
the Ecumenical Patriarch assumed not only de facto, but even
de [ure, the function of the head of all Christians; he became,
so to speak, their "emperor." This even led at one time to
the liquidation of former "autocephalies" (Serbian, Bul-
garian), which had never really become an integral part of
the Byzantine system ( the Greeks even today rarely use the
term "autocephaly" as a clearly defined ecclesiastical concept)
and were always granted "reluctantly" and under political
pressure. One can say that this Byzantine "imperial" system
was indeed reinforced by the Turkish religious system, for
it made the Greek "im perio-ethnic" self-consciousness even
'greater. As to the "church-nations" born before the down-
£ all of the empire, they were either absorbed by the monarchy
of the Ecumenical Throne or, as in the case of Russia, made
this very down£all the basis of a new national and religious
A Meaningful Storm 101

ideology with messianic overtones C'the Third Rome"). Both

developments clearly excluded any serious ecclesiological
reflection, a common reevaluation of the universal structures
in the light of the radically new situation. Finally the impact
on post-patristic Orthodox theology of Western thought
forms and categories shifted ecclesiological attention from
the Church as the Body of Christ to the Church as "means of
sanctification," from the canonical tradition to the various
systems of "canon law," or, more sharply, from the Church
to ecclesiastical government.
All this explains why for many centuries the Orthodox
churches lived in a variety of status quos without even trying
to relate these to one another or to evaluate them within a
consistent ecclesiological tradition. One must add that these
centuries were also the time of an almost total lack of com-
munications between the churches, of their mutual alienation
from one another and of growth, consequently, of mutual
mistrust, suspicion-and let us admit it-sometimes even
hatred! The Greeks, weakened and humiliated by the Turkish
dominion, became accustomed-and not always without rea-
son-to see in every Russian move a threat to their ecclesiastical
independence, a "Slavic" threat to "Hellenism"; the various
Slavic groups, while antagonistic to one another, developed
a common hatred for the Greek ecclesiastical "dominion."
The fate of Orthodoxy became an integral part of the famous
"oriental question" in which, as everyone knows, the Western
"powers" and their Christian "establishments" took a great
and by no means disinterested part. Where, in all this, was
any place left for ecclesiological reflection, for a serious and
common search for canonical clarification? There are not many
darker pages in "pan-Orthodox" history than the ones dealing
with the "modern age," the age which for Orthodoxy was-
with a few remarkable exceptions-that of divisions, provin-
cialism, theological sclerosis, and last but not least: a nation-
alism which by then was almost completely secularized and
therefore paganized. It is not surprising then that any chal-
lenge to status quo, to the tragically unnoticed and normalized
fragmentation, was inescapably to take the form of an ex-
plosion.
102 CHURCH, WORLD, �ISSION

8.

That America became both the cause and the focal point
of such an explosion is only too natural. Chances for an open
crisis were indeed very small as long as Orthodox churches
lived in their respective "worlds" in almost total isolation
from one another. What happened to one church hardly
mattered to the others. Thus the peculiar Greek "autocephaly"
of 1850 was viewed as an internal Greek affair, not as an
event with ecclesiological implications for all the churches.
The same attitude prevailed towards the complex ecclesiastical
developments within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the
"Bulgarian schism," the purely administrative "liquidation"
by the Russian government-not by the Church-of the vener-
able Georgian "autocephaly," etc. All this was politics, not
ecclesiology. And indeed the Russian foreign office, the
Western embassies in Istanbul and Athens, the imperial court
of Vienna, the obscure interests and intrigues of the Phana-
riot families, were at that time a greater factor in· the life of
the Orthodox Church than the lonely meditations on her nature
and essence by a Khomiakov.
In America, however, this situation was bound to reach
a "moment of truth." Here in the main center of Orthodox
diaspora, of Orthodox mission and witness to the \X! est, the
ecclesiological question-that of the nature and unity of the
Church, that of the relationship within her between her ca-
nonical order and her life, that ultimately of the true meaning
and true implications of the very term Orthodox-was finally
revealed as an existential, not academic, question. Here the
tragic discrepancy between the various "layers" of the Ortho-
dox past, the multisecular lack of any serious ecclesiological
reflection, the absence of a "common mind," were revealed
in their truly tragic dimension.
In the first place the American situation revealed the
hypertrophy of the national principle, its virtually total dis-
connection from the "essential" ecclesiology. The national
principle which, in a different ecclesiological context and in
continuity with the genuine canonical tradition, had been
A Meaningful Storm 103

indeed a principle of unity and thus a valid form of the

Church's self fulfillment ( (tone Church in one place"), became
in America exactly the opposite: a principle of division, the
very expression of the Church's subordination to the divisions
of "this world." If in the past the Church united and even
made a nation, here nationalism divided the Church and became
thus a real denial, a caricature of its own initial function.
This reductio ad absurdum of a formerly positive and accept-
able principle can best be shown by the example of churches
which in the "old world" were virtually free from "nation-
alism." Take, for instance, the Patriarchate of Antioch, which
never had any nationalistic "identity" comparable to that
of the Russian or Serbian churches. Paradoxically enough it
is this patriarchate's almost sporadic extension into "new
worlds" that created little by little a "nationalism" sui generis,
that at least of a "jurisdictional identity."
In America the national principle resulted in something
totally new and unprecedented: each "national" church now
claimed a de facto universal jurisdiction on the basis of na-
tional "belonging." In the "old world," even at the height of
ecclesiastical nationalism, the rich and powerful Russian
monasteries on Mount Athas never questioned the jurisdiction
of the Ecumenical Patriarch, or the very numerous Greek
parishes in southern Russia that of the Russian Church; and
as to the Russian parish in Athens, it is still in the jurisdiction
of the Church of Greece. Whatever their inner nationalism,
all the churches knew their boundaries. The idea that these
boundaries are exclusively national, that each Russian, Greek,
Serb or Romanian belongs to his church wherever he may live,
and that ipso facto each national church has canonical rights
everywhere is therefore a new idea, truly the result of a reductio
ad absurdura. There appeared even "churches-in-exile" with
"territorial" titles of their bishop and diocese; there appeared
national extensions of non-existent churches; there appeared
finally a hierarchy, a theology, even a spirituality defending
all this as something perfectly normal, positive and desirable.
If in the early and essential tradition the territorial princi-
ple of the Church's organization ( one church, one bishop in
one place) was so central and so important, it is because it
104 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

was indeed the essential condition for the Church's freedom

from "this world," from everything temporary, accidental
and non-essential. The Church knew herself to be simultane-
ous!y at home and in exile everywhere, she knew that she
was primarily and essentially a new people and that her very
structure was the expression of all this. The rejection of this
principle in the diaspora inescapably led to a progressive
enslavement of the Church to, and her identification with,
that which is precisely accidental-be it politics or nationalism.
The incompatibility between this mentality and the very
idea of an American "autocephaly" is so evident that it does
not need to be explained or elaborated. It is thus in the "na-
tional" layer of our tradition, a layer, however, almost com-
pletely detached from the essential tradition of the Church
and even "self-sufficient," that we find the first locus, cause
and expression of our present ecclesiastical crisis.

9.
The first but not the only one. If nearly all the Orthodox
churches are in various degrees victims of hypertrophied na-
tionalism and appeal almost exclusively to the national "pre-
cedent" in the Orthodox past, the moment of truth which
descended upon us concerns also the "layer" which we termed
imperial. It is here indeed that we find the deep root of the
syndrome which is at the very heart of the specifically Greek
reaction to the present storm.
It is not a mere "accident," of course, that the most vio-
lently negative reaction to "autocephaly" has been that of the
Ecumenical Patriarchate. This reaction, however, is at such
variance with the entire personal "image" of Patriarch
Athenagoras, an image made up of ecumenical generosity,
universal understanding and compassion, opposition to
narrow-mindedness in all its forms, openness to dialogues and
reevaluations, that it certainly cannot be explained by anything
petty and personal. Neither can this reaction be ascribed to a
lust for power, a desire to rule the Orthodox Church in the
"papist" fashion, to subjugate under Constantinople all
A Meaningful Storm · 105
Orthodox Christians in the diaspora. Indeed, during several
decades of jurisdictional and national pluralism in America
and elsewhere, the Ecumenical Patriarch neither condemned
it as "uncanonical" nor made any direct and consistent claims
on all these lands as belonging to his jurisdiction. Even in the
most recent documents issued by the patriarchate the main
theme is the defense of the status quo and not a direct juris-
dictional claim. The idea of charging the Ecumenical Throne
with the solution of the canonical problems of the diaspora
was in fact developed some twenty years ago by a group of
Russian theologians ( including this writer) but met, on the
part of the Greek and Phanariot circles, with total indifference.
All this means that the real motivations behind the Greek
ttreaction" must be sought elsewhere. But where?
The answer to this question lies, I am convinced, in the
developments analysed in the preceding pages. It is indeed
in the imperial layer of that development that we must seek
the explanation of something essential in the Greek religious
mentality: its almost total inability to understand and there-
fore to accept the post-Byzantine development of the Orthodox
world. If for virtually all other Orthodox the basic "term of
reference" of their ecclesiastical mentality is simply national,
the nationalism of the Greek mentality is precisely not simple.
The roots of this nationalism are not, as in the case of other
Orthodox, in the reality and experience of "Church-nation,"
but primarily in those of the Byzantine oikoumene, and this
means in that layer of the past which we termed imperial.
Thus, for example, the churches of Greece or of Cyprus or
even the patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem are, tech-
nically speaking, autocephalous churches; but to them this tt

autocephaly" has a meaning deeply different from the one

attached to it by Russians, Bulgarians or Romanians and, in
fact, the very seldom, if at all, use that term. For whatever
their jurisdictional status or arrangement, in their conscious-
ness-or shall we rather say subconsciousness ?-they are still
organic parts of a greater whole; and this "whole" is not
the Church Universal but precisely the Byzantine "world"
with Constantinople as its sacred center and focus.
Indeed the central and the decisive fact in the post-
106 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Byzantine religious history of the Greeks is this almost un-

conscious yet obvious transformation of the "imperial" layer
of the Orthodox tradition into an essential one, the trans-
formation of Byzantium into a permanent, essential and
normative dimension or nota of Orthodoxy itself. The reasons
for that paradoxical process are too numerous and too
complex to be enumerated here. Some have their roots in
Byzantium itself, some in the long Turkish captivity, some in
more recent layers of Greek history. But the fact is here:
the tradition which we described earlier as conditioned by
the fundamental historicity of the Church, i.e. the "acceptance"
of the contingent and relative "worlds" to which she is
"related" during her long earthly pilgrimage, resulted in its
very opposite: the equally fundamental anti-historical or
a-historical character of the Greek religious world-view.
Byzantium for the Greek is not a chapter, however central,
important and in many ways decisive, in the history of the
Church, in her unending "pilgrimage," but the fulfillment
of this history, its permanent terminus ad quem beyond which
nothing significant can "happen" and which therefore can
only be preserved. The reality of this unique and ultimate
"world" does not depend on history. The historical collapse
of the empire in 1453 not only did not destroy it but, on the
contrary, by depriving it of all that is merely "historical,"
i.e. temporary and contingent, transformed it into a truly supra-
historical reality, an "essence" no longer subject to historical
contingencies. "Historically" the imperial city may have been
called Istanbul for half a millenium. For the Greek it is
Constantinople, the New Rome, the heart, the center and the
symbol of a "reality" which is beyond all "history."
But the truly paradoxical character of that "reality" is
that it cannot be easily identified with either a "f orm" or a
"content." It is certainly not the Byzantine Empire as such,
not the "political" dream of its eventual restoration. Greeks
are too practical not to understand the illusory nature of such
a dream. In fact they expatriate themselves more easily than
many other Orthodox, their "adjustment" to any new situation
is usually more successful, and they certainly have not trans-
£ erred any Byzantine and "theocratic" mystique to the modern
A Meaningful Storm 107

Greek state. But it is not "content" either-in the sense, for

example, of a particular faithfulness to or interest in the
doctrinal, theological, spiritual and cultural traditions of
Byzantium, in that "Orthodox Byzantinism" which con-
stitutes indeed an essential part of the Orthodox tradition.
Greek academic theology has been not less, if not more,
"Westernized" than the theology of other Orthodox churches;
and the great patristic, liturgical and iconographic revival of
our time, the new and passionate rediscovery of the Byzantine
cc sources" of Orthodoxy, did not originate in Greece or among

Greeks. Thus the "Byzantine world" which consciously or

mainly unconsciously constitutes the essential "term of refer-
ence" for the Greek religious mentality is neither the historical
Byzantium nor the spiritual Byzantium. But then what is it?
The answer-of decisive importance for the understanding
of the Greek religious and ecclesiastical "world-view't=is:
Byzantium as both the foundation and the justification of
Greek religious nationalism. It is indeed this unique and truly
paradoxical amalgamation of two distinct, if not contradictory,
layers in the historical development of the Orthodox world
that is at the very heart of that immense and tragic misunder-
standing which, in turn, determines in many ways our present
ecclesiastical crisis.
I call it paradoxical because, as I have said already, the
very essence of the Byzantine "imperial" tradition was not
national, but universal. And it is only this universality, how-
ever theoretical and imperfect, that made it possible for the
Church to "accept" the empire itself and to make it her
earthly "habitation." The Byzantines called themselves Ro-
mans, not Greeks, because Rome, not Greece, was the symbol
of universality, and for this reason the new capital could only
be a "New Rome." Until the seventh century the official
language of the Byzantine chanceries was Latin, not Greek.
Finally, the Church Fathers would have been horrified if
someone were to call them "Greeks." It is here indeed that
lies the first and deepest misunderstanding. For when a Fr.
Florovsky speaks of "Christian Hellenism" as a permanent
and essential dimension of Christianity, when a Philaret of
Moscow puts in his Catechism the definition of the Orthodox
108 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Church as "Greek-Catholic," they obviously do not refer to

something "ethnic" or "national." For them this "Christian
Hellenism" - that of theology, liturgy, iconography - is not
only not identical with the "Greek" but, in fact, is in many
ways its very "antidote," the fruit of a long and sometimes
painful and critical transformation of the Greek categories.
The fight between the "Greek" and the "Christian" is indeed
the very content of the great and eternally normative patristic
age, its real "theme." And it is the "Greek" revival, the ap-
pearance of a Greek nationalism no longer "referred" to
Christian Hellenism, which, in the last years of Byzantium,
was one of the essential factors behind the tragedy of
Florence.
What happened in the Greek mentality was the result thus
not of an evolution or development but of a metamorphosis.
The tragic events in the history of the empire, the bitter ex-
perience of the Turkish domination, the fight for survival
and liberation transformed the Byzantine "imperial" tradition,
gave it a meaning exactly opposite to the one it had at the
beginning and which justified its acceptance by the Church.
The universal was replaced with the national, Christian· Hel-
lenism with Hellenism, Byzantium with Greece. The unique
and universal Christian value of Byzantium was transferred
to the Greeks themselves, to the Greek nation which, because
of its exclusive identification with "Hellenism," acquired now
a new and unique value. It is very characteristic, however,
that when even Greek hierarchs speak of "Hellenism" they
refer not so much to the "Christian Hellenism" of Byzantium,
but to "ancient Greek civilization," to Plato and Pythagoras,
to Homer and the "Athenian democracy" as if being "Greek"
makes one in an almost exclusive sense an "heir" and a "bearer"
of that "Hellenism."
But in reality this "Hellenism" is the Greek expression of
the secular nationalism common. to all modern nations and
;

whose roots are in the French Revolution of 1789 and in

European Romanticism. As every nationalism of that type
it is built upon a mythology partly "secular" and partly
"religious." On the secular level the myth is that of a unique
relationship between the Greeks and that "Hellenism" which
A Meaningful Storm · ·_··· 109

constitutes the common source and foundation of the entire

Western civilization. On the religious level the myth is that
of a unique relationship to Byzantium, the Christian oikou-
mene, which is the common foundation of all Orthodox
churches. And it is this double mythology, or rather its impact
on Greek ecclesiastical thinking, that makes ecclesiological
dialogue so difficult.

10.

The first difficulty lies in the different understanding of

the place and function within the Orthodox Church of the
Ecumenical Patriarch. All Orthodox churches without any
-exception assent to his primacy. There is, however, a sub-
stantial difference in the understanding of that primacy be-
tween the Greek churches and all others.
For the non-Greek churches the basic term of reference
for this primacy is the "essential" ecclesiology which has
always and from the very beginning known a universal center
of unity and agreement and therefore a taxis, an order of
seniority and honor among churches. This universal primacy
is thus both essential, in the sense that it always exists in· the
Church, and historical, in the sense that its "location" may
vary and indeed has varied; for it depends on the historical
situation of the Church at a given time. The primacy of Con-
stantinople was established by ecumenical councils, by the
"consensus" of all the churches; this makes it "essential" for
it is truly the expression of the churches' agreement, of their
unity. It is equally true, however, that it was established within
a particular historical context, as an ecclesiological response
to a particular situation: the emergence of a universal Christian
empire. And although no one today in the whole Orthodox
Church feels and expresses the need for any change in the
churches' taxis, such changes have taken place before and,
at least theoretically, may happen tomorrow. Thus, for ex-
ample, in the case of a "conversion" to Orthodoxy of the
Roman Catholic Church, the "universal primacy" may-or
may not-return to the first Rome. Such is in its simplest form
110 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

the ecclesiological stand of the non-Greek Orthodox churches.

The fully accepted primacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople
does not imply here either any "national" implication, nor that
of some divinely instituted and therefore eternal taxis of the
churches. The "consensus" of the churches expressed through
an ecumenical council may, if necessary, change this taxis, as
it did before-in the case of Antioch and Jerusalem, of Ephesus
and Cyprus, and of Constantinople itself.
This theory, however, is "anathema" to the Greeks, and
it is here that the fundamental ambiguity of contemporary
Orthodox ecclesiology becomes obvious. For the Greeks the
"term of reference" for the primacy of the Ecumenical Throne
lies not in any particular ecclesiological tradition, be it "es-
sential" or "imperial," but in the unique position held by the
Ecumenical Patriarch within that "Hellenism" which, as we
have just seen, constitutes the "essence" of their religious
"world-view." For if the "secular" center of that "Hellenism"
is Athens, its religious focus and symbol is most certainly
Constantinople. For long centuries of the Turkish dominion
the patriarch was the religiotts ethnarch of the Greek nation,
the focus and the symbol of its survival and identity. And thus
the Ecumenical Throne remains for the Greeks today a reality
not so much of an ecclesiological and canonical, but primarily
of a spiritual and psychological order. "Canonically" the
Greeks may or may not "belong" to the patriarchate. Thus
the Church of Greece is independent · from the patriarchate,
whereas every Greek in Australia or Latin America is in the
latter's "jurisdiction." But whatever their "jurisdictional"
status they are all under Constantinople. Here it is not Con-
stantinople as the universal center of unity and agreement that
is essential. It is Constantinople as such, the Ecumenical Throne
as the bearer and guardian of "Hellenism." The primacy of
Constantinople is ascribed now to the very esse of the Church,
becomes in itself a nota Ecclesiae. The ecclesiological formula:
"there is Constantinople, to which the Church has entrusted
the universal primacy" becomes: "there must be Constantino-
ple." But the tragic ambiguity of this situation is precisely
that the primate, whose function is to assure the universality
of the Church, to be guardian of that "Christian Hellenism"
A Meaningful Storm ·111

which preserves every Church from a total identification with

"nationalism," is at the same time for one particular nation
the bearer and the symbol of its very nationalism. The
ecumenical primacy becomes the primacy of the "Greek."
It is this ambiguity in the Greek religious and national
mentality that made it-and still makes it-so difficult for
Greeks to understand the true meaning of the post-Byzantine
Orthodox world, of its real problems, of its unity as well as
diversity. Essentially they failed to understand that the
collapse of the Byzantine Empire was not necessarily the end
of Orthodox unity based on the common acceptance of Or-
thodox Byzantium, i.e. "Christian Hellenism." For the whole
point is that the Slavs, for example, who sought their inde-
pendence from the empire were, in fact, not less "Byzantine"
than the Greeks, and were seeking independence from the
Greeks but not from "Christian Hellenism." The first Bul-
garian Empire-that of Boris and Symeon-was truly "By-
zantine" in its entire ethos, culture and, of course, religious
tradition. Fr. Florovsky in his Ways of Russian Theology
speaks of "early Russian Byzantinism." All these new nations
had no cultural tradition comparable to the one which the
Greeks had in Ancient Greece, and their initial and formative
tradition, the one that gave them their national "birth" and
made them into Orthodox nations, was the Christian Byzan-
tine tradition. And in spite of all conflicts, misunder-
standings and mutual isolation, this unity in the Byzantine
tradition has never been really broken or forgotten, but has
always constituted the common foundation, the very form of
unity, of the entire Orthodox East.
But for the Greeks, imprisoned as they progressively be-
came by the identification of the "Byzantine" with the
"Greek," by the national and even ethnic reduction of Byzan-
tinism, any attempt to establish political and ecclesiastical
independence from the empire-on the part of Slavs, or Arabs,
or Romanians-meant almost automatically a threat to "Hel-
lenism," an attempt to destroy the "Greeks" and their birth-
right within Orthodoxy. They never understood that the
essential unity of the Orthodox world is neither national, nor
political, nor even· jurisdictional,. but the unity precisely of
112 CHURCH,-WORLD, ·MISSION

"Christian Hellenism," the Orthodox embodiment of the

essential Christian Tradition. And they did not understand
it because they identified this "Christian Hellenism" with
"Hellenism," i.e. with the Greek national and ethnic "iden-
tity." The Slavs in this perspective were viewed as an alien
and essentially "barbarian" force aimed at the destruction of
"Hellenism." And since the Slavs were strong and the Greeks
weak, this view took sometimes almost paranoic forms. After
the liberation of Greece in the nineteenth century and the
emergence of a new ((Western" Greek nationalism, "Pan-
Slavism" became-not without the help of the Western
powers-a real catchword, the synonym of the Threat and the
Enemy. One must add here that Russian imperial policy in the
· "Oriental question" was not always of great help in alleviating
these fears, and was certainly guilty of many a tasteless tactic,
but it is equally true that at the very height of Russia's own
messianic and imperialistic nationalism, never did the Russian
Orthodox consciousness question the primacy of Constantino-
ple and of the venerable Eastern patriarchates or press for
a change in the taxis of the Orthodox churches. On the con-
trary, the nineteenth century in Russia was marked by a revival
of precisely "Byzantine" interests, by a return to "Christian
Hellenism" as the source of Orthodoxy, by a return to a truly
universal Orthodox ecclesiology, by progressive liberation
from the narrow, pseudo-messianic nationalism of the "Third
Rome." Whatever the various "diplomatic" difficulties, ec-
clesiologically the real obstacle to a recovery by the Orthodox
Church of her essential unity lay, at that time, not in any
mythological "Pan-Slavisrn" but in the narrowly nationalistic
reduction, by the Greeks,- of "Christian Hellenism" to "Hel-
lenism."
All this· explains why the· Greek ecclesiastical "official-
dom" ( we do not speak here of popular feelings, which have
always somehow preserved the intuition of Orthodox unity)
never really accepted post-Byzantine ecclesiological develop-
ment, never integrated it into its own "world-view." The
various autocephalies" granted during and after the Byzan-
tt

tine period were "concessions" and "accommodations," not

- the acknowledgement of something normal, of something as
A Meaningful Storm 113

"adequate" to the new situation as the acknowledgement of

the "Imperial Church" was "adequate" to the previous situa-
tion: that of a Christian empire. For that new situation really
had no room within the Greek religious mentality, and was
viewed indeed as accidental and temporary. For this reason
no "autocephaly" has ever been granted freely but has always'
been the result of fight and "negotiation." For this reason
also, even today the principle of "autocephaly," which con-
stitutes the basic principle of the Church's present organization,
is never quite understood by the Greek "officialdom," whether
in its "principium" ( the "right to grant autocephaly") or in
its "modality" ( its implications for "inter-church relations").
One thing is clear, however, and constitutes the ultimate
paradox of this entire development. Having reluctantly rec-
ognized this principle de facto, the Greek "officialdom"
seems to justify it by that very reasoning which in the past
made the Greeks reject and fight it: the idea of an essential
difference between the I-Iellenic and the various non-Hellenic
"Orthodoxies." If in the past they fought "autocephalies"
because they rejected the idea that "Christian Hellenism" -
as essence of Orthodoxy-may have any other ecclesiological
expression than that of one "Imperial Church" which is Greek,
today they accept them because, having in fact replaced
"Christian Hellenism" with "Hellenism," they believe that
the other "Orthodoxies" must necessarily be the expression
of some other "essences": "Russian Orthodoxy," "Serbian
Orthodoxy," etc. And just as the vocation of "Greek Ortho-
doxy" is to preserve Hellenism, the vocation of the other
churches is to preserve their own-ultimately "national" -
essences. Having thus completed its full circle, the "imperial"
mentality joined the "national" one. And this was inevitable
if one remembers that the real source of modern "nationalism"
lies not in Christianity but in the ideas of the French Revolu-
tion of 1789, the true "mother" of the petty, fanatical and
negativistic "nationalisms" of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. What makes, however, this new ( not Byzantine
but modern) Greek nationalism distinct from other Orthodox
nationalisms is the certitude, surviving in it from its "imperial"
antecedents, that within all these Orthodox "essences" the
114 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Greek "essence" has a primacy, occupies [ure divino the first

place. Having forgotten that it is not "Hellenism" as such
but "Christian Hellenism" that constitutes the real unity
of Orthodoxy and has a spiritual and eternal "primacy"
over all other "expressions," having identified this "Hellenism"
with themselves, the Greeks claim a "primacy" which indeed
might have been theirs but on entirely different presupposi-
tions. This is today the fundamental ambiguity of the "univer-
sal primacy" in the Orthodox Church. Does it belong to the
first among bishops, the one whom the "consensus" of all
the churches respects, loves and venerates in the person of
the Ecumenical Patriarch, or does it belong to the spiritual
head and bearer of "Hellenism" whose Christian value and
affiliation is as questionable as that of any modern and half
pagan nationalism?

11.

Here we can interrupt our reflections on the true nature

and causes of our present ecclesiastical storm. I am convinced
that as long as the questions raised in this article are not an-
swered, all our polemics and controversies about the new
"autocephaly" will remain superficial, non-essential, and ulti-
mate!y meaningless. To answer them, however, necessarily
means to achieve a deep and constructive clarification of
Orthodox ecclesiology itself.
What happened, or rather what happens, in America can
indeed be reduced to a simple formula: it is an almost forced
return to the "essential" Orthodox ecclesiology; to its very
roots, to those fundamental norms and presuppositions ·to
which the Church always returns when she finds herself in
a new situation in "this world" whose "fashion" is passing. I
use the term "forced" because this return is the fruit not of
abstract "academic" thinking but of life itself, of the circum-
.stances in which the Church discovers-painfully and not
without torments and sufferings-that the only way of survival
for her is precisely to be the Church, to be that which eternally
shines and illumines us in the primordial and essential ecclesio-
A Meaningful Storm 115

logy in which the unique and eternal experience, form and

consciousness - the very being - of the Church, have found
their expression.
That only one "part" of the Orthodox Church in America
has up to now been "forced'' into that return because its own
situation made it inevitable; that this has provoked passions,
fears, suspicions; that some of the external "factors" make
some of these fears understandable: all this is natural, all this
was probably inevitable. Fear, however, is a bad counsellor.
Only if we are able to raise our questions to that level which
alone cari make them answerable and which is that of "essen-
tial" ecclesiology, only if we are able to see and to evaluate
facts in this essential perspective, will the storm be revealed
as meaningful, will it lead to a common victory.
Sooner or later it will become clear to all that it is not by
concentrating on the preservation of "Hellenism," "Russian-
ism" or "Serbianism" that we will preserve Orthodoxy; but,
on the contrary, by preserving and fulfilling the demands of
the Church we will salvage all that is essential in all incarna-
tions of the Christian faith and life. If Fr. Florovsky,
a Russian theologian living and working "in exile," had the
courage in his TVays of Russian Theology to denounce and
to condemn the deviations of "Russianism" from "Christian
Hellenism" and thus to liberate an entire generation of Rus-
sian theologians from the last hangups of any pseudo-mes-
sianism and religious nationalism, is it not time for a Greek
to perform the same painful yet necessary and liberating
operation with the ambiguities of "Hellenism"?
Sooner or later it will become clear to all that the Ecu-
menical Patriarch, if he is to fulfill his "universal primacy,"
will achieve it not by defensive and negative reactions, not
by questionable "appeals" to equally questionable and in-
applicable "precedents" and "traditions," but by constructive
leadership towards the fulfillment by the Church of her essence
in every place of God's dominion. Personally I have spent
too much of my theological life "defending" the universal
primacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople to be accused of
any "anti-Constantinopolitanism." This primacy, its necessity
for the Church, its tremendous potential for Orthodoxy, I
116 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

once more solemnly confess and affirm here. This primacy,

however, to become again "what it is," must be purified of all
ambiguities, of all non-essential "contexts," of all nationalistic
connotations, of the dependence on anything-in the past,
present and future-which is not the Church and only the
Church. This is perhaps the most urgent task of the universal
primacy today: to liberate us from pagan and heretical na-
tionalisms which choke the universal and saving vocation of
the Orthodox Church. We should cease to speak of our
"glories." For glory in the essential Tradition of the Church
belongs to God alone, and it is for the glorification of God,
not of herself, that the Church was established. Once we have
realized this, things impossible with men become possible
with God.
 v
THE TASK OF ORTHODOX
THEOLOGY TODAY
"Do not quench the Spirit, do
not despise prophesying, but test
everything; hold fast to what is
,,
goo d ...
I Thess. 5: 19-21.

1.

What do we mean when we speak of the task of Orthodox

theology today? It is proper to begin with this question be-
cause this phrase may seem to suggest a theological orientation
of which Orthodoxy is suspicious, but which seems to predom-
inate in the West today. It is the reduction of theology to
a given "situation" or "age," a stress on "relevance" under-
stood almost exclusively as a dependence of theology, its task,
method and language on "modern man" and his specifically
modern "needs." From the beginning, therefore, we must em-
phasize that Orthodoxy rejects such a reduction of theology,
whose first and eternal task is to search for Truth, not for rele-
vance, for words "adequate to God" (theoprepeis logoi), not
to man. Theology is truly relevant-because truly Christian-
when it remains a scandal for the Jews, foolishness for the
Greeks and is at odds with this world and its passing "cultures"
and "modernities." This does not mean, however, that theology
operates in a cultural vacuum. For it is one thing to depend

* A paper read at the First Conference of Orthodox Theologians in Amer-

ica, September, 1966, and originally published in St. Vladimir's Theological
Quarterly 10.4 (1966), pp. 180-188.

117
118 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

on the world and quite another to be related to it. If the first

attitude, the acceptance of the world as the only criterion of
theology, is to be rejected, the second ( which, in the last
analysis, is but the basic Christian concern for the world and
its salvation) is the very raison d'etre of theology. In this
sense, all genuine theology has always been pastoral, mission-
ary and prophetic, and whenever it has lost these dimensions,
it has become a mere intellectual game justly ignored by the
"real" Church. The task of theology at any given moment
is necessarily determined by the needs of the Church, and the
first task of the theologian is always to discern and to accept
these needs, to become aware of what the Church expects
from him.
As a small group of Orthodox theologians living and
working in the West, far from the ancient and "organically"
Orthodox worlds and cultures, we are justified therefore in
asking this preliminary question: What are the needs of the
Church to which we must respond and around which we are
to organize and plan our theological work? How are we to
obey here in the West the eternal demands-pastoral, mission-
ary and prophetic-of Orthodox theology? This essay is a brief
attempt to inaugurate a common search for a common answer.

2.

Probably everyone will agree that our theological task is

determined primarily by the fact that, as theologians, v..re work
within and for an Orthodox community which, for the first
time in the long history of our Church, has to live in a non-
Orthodox world, Western in its religious traditions, secular-
istic in its culture, and pluralistic in its "world-view." This
for Orthodoxy is an unprecedented situation, and it challenges
the whole Church and consequently us, her theologians, with
a set of problems unknown to the Orthodox communities of
the "old world."
First of all, this new situation substantially affects the
pastoral responsibilities of theology. I venture to affirm that for
several centuries theology was not needed as vitally-and on
The Task of Orthodox Theology Today 119

virtually every level of the Church's life-as it is today. The

reason for this is simple. In Greece or Russia or any other
Orthodox country, culture itself, i.e. the complex of values,
norms and ideas by which man evaluates his life, was related
in some deep sense to the Orthodox faith, was in continuation
with the Church's "world-view." One can and must criticize
the obvious shortcomings and sins of those Orthodox "worlds,"
but one cannot deny that, in spite of many betrayals, they
remained for a long time organically shaped by Orthodoxy.
But this is not so in the West. Here the rupture between the
Orthodox world-view and secularistic culture is so radical
that the former finds virtually no "point of application," and
the language by which it is transmitted, that of the liturgy,
spirituality and ethics, remains "alien," even if it is English
or any other western language. As the integration of Western
"way of life" progresses, there develops a truly schizophrenic
situation in which deep attachment to Orthodox symbols and
"externals" ( e.g. worship, music, architecture) easily coexists
with an almost totally secularistic philosophy of life. Needless
to say, such a situation cannot last long, and a mere faithful-
ness to Orthodox externals will not save Orthodoxy from
being dissolved sooner or later into that peculiar blend of
secularism and vague religiosity which seems to emerge as the
new pattern of Western religion. To those who have ears to
hear and eyes to see, it is already abundantly clear that in
the West one cannot be Orthodox by "osmosis." A spiritually
alien culture makes Orthodoxy here a challenge, and the
faith, if it is to be true to itself, must be consciously accepted,
clearly understood in its implications for life, and constantly
defended against the pressures of secularism. It is here, there-
fore, that theology is called to recover the pastoral dimension,
to supply, or rather to be, that understanding, that essential
link between the Tradition of the Church and real life, to
assure the acceptance of the faith by the faithful.
It would be a mistake to think, however, that what is
meant here is a kind of theological "digest" for quick con-
sumption by the laity, a mere descent of theology to a "popular
level." It is exactly the opposite that I have in mind: the
· uplifting of the whole life of the Church into theological
120 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

consciousness, a vital relation to theological reflection of every

aspect and every level of the Church's life. But to achieve this,
we must give some thought to that which, at least in my
opinion, constitutes the basic defect of our theology: its almost
total divorce from the real life of the Church and from her
practical needs. By his very upbringing and training, the
theologian is accustomed to looking at everything "practical"
as virtually opposed to theology and its lofty pursuits, and
this attitude has been adopted for so many centuries that it
is almost taken for granted. Since the breakdown of the pat-
ristic age, our theology ( and not without Western influence)
has become exclusively "academic," "scholastic" in the literal
sense of the word. It is confined to a narrow circle of profes-
sional intellectuals, writing and working, in fact, for each
other ( who else reads theology, or, even if he wished to, is
capable of reading its highly professional and esoteric lan-
guage?) and, as time goes by, more and more anxious to
satisfy and please their peers in other academic disciplines
rather than the less and less theologically-minded Church.
They are reconciled to the supreme indifference of the Church
at large to their work because, in their unshakable self-right-
eousness, they put the blame on the anti-intellectualism of
the clergy and laity. \Vhat they do not seem to realize, how-
ever, is that this "anti-intellectualism" is in a way a direct
result of their own exclusive "intellectualism," of their quasi-
Manichean contempt for the "practical" needs of the Church,
of their reduction of theology to a harmless intellectual game
of "interesting points of view" and scientifically impeccable
footnotes. And the sad irony of the situation is that, ignored
by the Church, they are not truly accepted by the so-called
"intellectual community" either, for which, in spite of all
their efforts ad captatianz benevolentiae, they remain non-
scientific "mystics." And as long as such is the state and the
inner orientation of our theology, the hope that it will fulfill
its pastoral function and respond to the crying needs of our
situation is, of course, vain.
But it is at this point, perhaps, that we can turn our eyes
to those whom we always claim to be our examples and
teachers, the Holy Fathers of the Church, and look a little
·The Task of Orthodox Theology Today 121
deeper into their understanding of the theological task. Most
certainly they were not less intellectual. And yet, there is one
decisive difference between them and modern theological
scholars. To all of them, that which we call "practical" and
virtually exclude from our academic concerns meant nothing
else but the unique and indeed very practical concern of
Christianity: the eternal salvation of man. Words and ideas
were for them directly related not simply to Truth and Error,
but to the Truth that saves and to the error that brings with
it death and damnation. And it is their constant, truly "ex-
istential" preoccupation with, and their total commitment
to, salvation of real, concrete men that makes every line they
wrote so ultimately serious and their theology so vital and
precisely pastoral. Intellectual as it is, their theology is always
addressed not to "intellectuals" but to the whole Church, in
the firm belief that everyone in the Church has received the
Spirit of Truth and was made a "theologian"-i.e. a man
concerned with God. And the lasting truth of their theology
is that in it ideas are always referred to the "practical" needs
of the Church, revealed in their soteriological significance,
whereas the most "practical" aspects of the Church are rooted
in their ultimate theological implications.
For us in the \X! est, to recover the pastoral dimension of
theology means then not a change of level ("write on a more
popular level") , but above everything else a change in the
inner orientation of the theological mind, of the basic theolog-
ical concern itself. First of all, we must aim our theological
effort at the real Church and at real man in the Church. We
must care about the situation of that man and not only about
his becoming "more educated" and "proud of Orthodoxy."
For as long as we ourselves are not convinced that many ideas
and philosophies by which he lives today lead him to spiritual
death, and that the knowledge of Truth is to save him and
not merely to adorn our Church with a respectable intellectual
elite, we certainly will not find the words which can reach
him. As luxury and status symbol, theology is not needed in
a religion which challenges man with the choice between life
and death, salvation and damnation.
This means also that the "pastoral" revitalization of
122 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

theology must begin with a deep evaluation and critique of

the culture in which the Orthodox man is immersed today
and which indeed makes Christianity irrelevant. It is not ac-
cidental, of course, that patristic theology is rooted in a healthy
apologetical purpose, in the defense of the faith against its
external and internal enemies. As for us, we fight with great
wit the battles which the Fathers have already won, but politely
smile at the truly demonic implications of some of the modern
philosophies and theories. We are unaware of the obvious
fact that under the influences of these philosophies even some
of the basic Christian terms are used in a meaning almost
opposite to the ones which they had in the past. Salvation
means self-fulfillment, faith-security, sin-a personal problem
of adjustment, etc. Our culture, which recently has been de-
scribed as a "triumph of therapeutics," has deeply changed
the quest of even a religious man, and this makes it almost
impossible for him to hear and to understand the true teaching
of the Church. And finally, we do not seem to notice that this
metamorphosis of religion takes place not in some mythical
Western man, but in our own parishes, in the preaching of
our priests. We must begin, therefore, with what patristic
theology performed in its own time: an exorcism of culture, a
liberating reconstruction of the words, concepts and sym-
bols, of the theological language itself. And we must do it in
order not to make our theology more "acceptable" to the
modern man and his culture, but, on the contrary, to make
him aware of the ultimately serious, truly soteriological nature
and demands of his faith.
Only theology can accomplish this, and that is why it is
so badly needed today. But it will succeed only when it again
becomes pastoral, i.e. identified with the Church and her life,
attentive to the real needs of man, when, putting aside the
academic "straining at a gnat" which has never prevented
anyone from "swallowing a camel," it accepts, in humility
and with courage, its proper function in the Church.
The Task of Orthodox Theology Today 123

...,
:, .

I defined the second task of our theology as mtsstonary,

To keep with the spirit of the time, I should have probably
called it "ecumenical." But the word "ecumenical" has of
late become so general and so ambiguous that it itself needs
to be investigated and redefined. I prefer the slightly outmoded
term "missionary" for several reasons. It indicates that Orth-
odox theology has a mission in the West. It has always been
the consensus of Orthodox theologians that their participation
in the ecumenical movement has as its goal to bring an Orth-
odox witness to the non-Orthodox, and there is no reason to
deny that this implies the idea of conversion to Orthodoxy.
I know very well that in current ecumenical thinking the term
"conversion" has a bad reputation. But the Orthodox would
simply betray both their Orthodoxy and the ecumenical move-
ment if now, under the impact of a superficial ecumenical
euphoria, they concealed the fact that in their approach con-
version is one of the basic components of a genuine ecumenical
perspective. More than ever, and precisely for deep ecumen-
ical reasons, we must uphold our conviction that only a
deep and genuinely Christian idea of conversion, i.e. of a
decisive crisis, choice, and commitment to Truth, can give
meaning and ultimate seriousness to all "dialogues," "rap-
prochements," and "convergences." That this term and the
reality behind it are regarded today by many as "un-ecurneni-
cal" reveals, in fact, an alarming trend, a shift of the ecumeni-
cal movement from its original goal: organic unity in Christ,
to a different one: the smooth fnnctioning of pluralistic so-
ciety. Excellent and useful as it n1ay be, this second goal has
very little to do with the fundamental Christian values of
unity, faith and truth. Our "mission" then remains the same:
to make Orthodoxy known, understood and, with God's help,
accepted in the West. This mission stems naturally and, so
to speak, inescapably from our truly awesome claim that we
are Orthodox and that ours is the true Church. This claim is
incompatible with any provincialism of thought and vision,
ethnic self-consciousness, and self-centeredness.
124 CHURCH, WORLD, MlSSION

For several decades the ecumenical mission" has been, in

(t

fact, a monopoly of a small group of theologians, and it

remained virtually unknown to and ignored by the Orthodox
Church at large. I think that the time has come to put an end
to this rather abnormal situation which, in addition to many
other dangers, simply misleads the non-Orthodox by giving
them the impression of an "ecumenical" Orthodoxy that does
not exist in reality. A missionary orientation must be added to
the whole theological structure of the Church and become
an organic part of our theological "curriculum." This brings
me to the second meaning of the term "missionary," to the
"modality" of our approach to the West.
"Mission" has always meant, at least in the Christian
connotations of that term, not only the effort to convert some-
one to true faith, but also the spiritual disposition of the mis-
sionary: his active charity and his self-giving to the "object"
of his missionary task. From St. Paul to St. Nicholas of Japan
there has been no mission without self-identification of the
missionary with those to whom God has sent him, without
a sacrifice of his personal attachments and his natural values.
Mutatis mutandis the same must be said, it seems to me, about
the Orthodox mission in the West, and more particularly,
about the mission of Orthodox theology. This mission is im-
possible without some degree of love for the West and for
the many authentically Christian values of its culture. Yet
we often confuse the Universal Truth of the Church with a
naive "superiority complex," with arrogance and self-righteous-
ness, with a childish certitude that everyone ought to share
our own enthusiasm for the splendors of Byzantium," for
our "ancient and colorful rites," and the forms of our church
architecture. It is sad and shocking to hear the West globally
condemned and to see a condescending attitude towards the
"poor Westerners" on the part of young people who, more
often than not, have not read Shakespeare and Cervantes,
have never heard about St. Francis of Assisi or listened to
Bach. It is sad to realize that there is no greater obstacle to
the understanding and acceptance of Orthodoxy than the
provincialism, the human pride and the self-righteousness of
the Orthodox themselves, their almost cornplete lack of
The Task of Orthodox Theology Today 125

humility and self-criticism. Yet Truth always makes humble,

and pride in all its forms and expressions is always alien to
Truth and is always a sin. It is obviously inconceivable to
say that we are "proud of Christ," but we constantly preach
and teach "pride of Orthodoxy." It is time to understand that
if the Orthodox mission is to progress, we must not only
transcend and. overcome this spirit of self-righteousness, but
we must, without denying any genuine value of our Eastern
cultural and spiritual heritage, open ourselves towards West-
ern culture and make our own whatever in it "is true, whatever
is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is
lovely, whatever is gracious" (Phil. 4:8).
The missionary task of Orthodox theology must thus be
guided by two equally important and interdependent impera-
tives: the emphasis on Truth as the only genuine ground of
all "ecumenical" concern, and a real openness to Wes tern
Christian values. At a time when a serious temptation appears
to sacrifice Truth for a very sophisticated, very qualified and,
because of this, only more dangerous relativism, to replace
the search for unity with a search for a religious "peaceful
coexistence," when the very possibility of error and heresy is
virtually ruled out by a pseudo-ecumenical doctrine of "con-
vergence," the Orthodox theologian must stand, alone if
necessary, in defense of the very concept of Truth, without
which Christianity, for all its "relevance," denies in fact its
own absolute claim. To do this, however, he must himself
be open and obedient to all Truth, wherever he finds it.

4.

The third task of Orthodox theology today must be defined

as prophetic, even if the word sounds presumptuous. The
prophets were sent to the people of God not only to announce
future events, but also to remind the people of their true
mission and to denounce their betrayals of the divine will.
And if, with the coming of Christ, who is "the fulfillment of
all law and the prophets," their first function has become
obsolete, the second remains as needed as ever. And properly
126 . CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

understood, theology must always share in this prophetic

function. For the eternal task of theology is to refer the life
of the Church to the absolute Truth of the Church's own Tra-
dition, to keep alive and operative a criterion by which the
Church judges herself. Immersed in human history, the
Church is always full of temptations and sins and, what is
even more serious, of compromises and accommodations with
the spirit of "this world." The temptation is always to prefer
peace to truth, efficiency to rectitude, human success to the
will of God. And since, in the Orthodox Church, there exists
no visible center of infallible authority like the papacy, since
her ultimate criterion and recourse is always the Truth abiding
in her, it certainly belongs to those whose specific ministry is
the study of and search for that Truth to make it known and
manifest in all its purity and clarity. There is no arrogance,
no pride in that claim. The theologian has no rights, no power
to govern and to administer, this being the function of the
hierarchy. But it is his sacred duty to supply the hierarchy and,
indeed, the whole Church with the pure teaching of the Church
and to stand by that truth even when it is not considered
"opportune." It must be admitted that much too often our
official "academic" theology has failed to accept this "obe-
dience" and preferred quiet complacency. It has thus become
accomplice to many deviations and distortions from which
the whole Orthodox Church suffers today. But again, it was
not so with the Fathers. Almost to the one, they suffered at
the hands of ·the various "power structures" of their day for
their refusal to opt for compromise or to accept silent obedience
to evil. And the fact is that ultimately the Church followed
them and not those who, then as today, have a thousand ex-
cellent reasons for avoiding the "abstract principles" and
preferring the "demands of reality."
Today this prophetic function of theology is needed more
than ever. For, whether we want it or not, the entire Orthodox
Church is going through a deep crisis. I ts causes are many.
On the one hand, the world which for centuries framed and
shaped her historical existence is crumbling and has all but
vanished. The ancient and traditional centers of authority
are threatened in their very existence and most of them are
The Task of Orthodox Theology Today 127

deprived of even elementary freedom· of action. An overwhelm-

ing majority of Orthodox people live under the pressures
and persecution of openly and militantly atheistic regimes, in
situations where mere survival and not progress is the only
preoccupation. A minority living surrounded by an alien sea
seems to have become the rule rather than the exception for
Orthodoxy almost everywhere. Everywhere, and not only in
the West, it is challenged by a secularistic, technological,
and spiritually antagonistic culture. On the other hand,
a large Orthodox diaspora has appeared, putting an end
to the multi-secular isolation of Orthodoxy in the East, chal-
lenging Orthodoxy with problems of ecclesiastical organization
and spiritual "adjustments" unprecedented in the whole
history of the Church. Only the blind would deny the existence
of the crisis, yet not too many seem to realize its depth and
scope, least of all-let us face it-the bishops who continue
in their routine work as "if nothing happened." At no time
in the past has there existed such an abyss between the hier-
archy and the "real" Church, never before has the power
structure so little corresponded to the crying spiritual needs of
the faithful. And here the American Orthodox "microcosm"
seems an excellent example. How long are we to live in a
multiplicity of jurisdictions either quarreling with each other
or simply ignoring each other? How long shall we leave un-
noticed the rapid decay of liturgy, spirituality and monasti-
cism-the traditional sources of Orthodox piety and conti-
nuity? How long, in short, shall we accept and respectfully
endorse as normal and almost traditional a situation which,
if we are honest, must be described as a scandal and a tragedy?
In spite of what too many Orthodox people think today,
this is the hour of theology. Only a deep, fearless and con-
structive evaluation of this situation in the light of the genuine
Tradition of the Church, only a creative return to the very
springs of our dogma, canons and worship, only a total com-
mitment to the Truth of the Church can help us overcome
the crisis and transform it into a revival of Orthodoxy. I know
that this task is difficult and that a long tradition has taught
theologians to avoid hot issues and not to "get involved."
I know also that a certain traditionalism which has nothing
128 CHURCHj WORLD, MISSION

to do with Tradition has made self-criticism and spiritual

freedom a crime against the Church in the eyes of many.
I know that too many power structures have a vested interest
in not allowing any question, any search, any encounter with
Truth. The forces of inertia, pseudo-conservatism and plain
cynicism are formidable. But the same was true of the time
of St. Athanasius the Great, St. John Chrysostom and St. Maxi-
mus the Confessor. As for the issues we face today, they are
not less important than those which they had to deal with.
And it depends on us to choose between the pleasant prestige
attached to mere academic scholarship and the response to
the will of God.
 VI
THEOLOGY AND LITURGY
1.

The time has come for a deep re-evaluation of the relation-

ship between theology and liturgy. My purpose here is to ex-
plain the reasons for that affirmation, and to indicate, be it
only tentatively, its meaning for the Orthodox theological
enterprise as a whole, and also for the liturgical problems whose
existence and urgency are acknowledged today by nearly
everyone.
Very few people, I am sure, would deny that the Orthodox
Church is in a state of crisis; yet very few also are those, it
seems to me, who realize that at the bottom of this crisis, as
one of its main sources, lies the double crisis of theology and
liturgy.
A crisis of theology! Is it not obvious indeed that the con-
fusion and the divisions we witness today on virtually every
level of the Church's life-the canonical, the administrative,
the educational, the "ecumenical't=are rooted, first of all, in
the absence of commonly accepted and acknowledged terms
of reference or criteria which normally are to be supplied
precisely by theology? Contemporary Orthodox theology is
unable to supply such norms because it is itself "broken."
It is characterized, on the one hand, by an unhealthy pluralism
and, on the other hand, by a peculiar inability to communicate
with the "real" Church. I call this pluralism unhealthy because
there can exist and there has existed in the past a healthy

*A paper presented at the First International Conference of Orthodox

Theologians, at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Brookline,
Mass., in 1970, and originally published in The Greek Orthodox Theological
Review 17.1 (1972), pp 86-100.

129
130 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

theological pluralism perfectly compatible with a fundamental

unity. For example, there certainly were substantial differences
among the Fathers, but they did not break the basic unity of
a common experience and vision. Today, however, it is pre-
cisely such common vision that seems to be lacking. To put it
somewhat sharply, Orthodox theologians do not seem to
understand one another, so different are the respective "keys"
in which they approach the same problems, so opposed to
one another their basic presuppositions and thought forms.
This leads either to meaningless polemics-for to be meaning-
ful polemics would require a minimum of agreement as to
the basic terms of reference=polemics in which the awesome
word "heresy" is used more and more of ten without any
discrimination, or to a kind of "peaceful coexistence" of
theological orientations mutually ignoring one another.
Whatever its "key" or orientation, Orthodox theology
moreover seems deeply alienated from the Church, from her
real life and needs. Although taught in official ecclesiastical
schools, its impact on students usually evaporates on the day
of graduation. It is viewed as an intellectual abstraction no-
where to be really applied; as an intellectual game which the
people of God-clergy and laity-simply ignore. In our Church
today, professional theologians constitute a kind of Lum pen-
proletariat and, what is even more tragic, seem to be reconciled
to this status. Theology is no longer the conscience and the
consciousness of the Church, her reflection on herself and on
her problems. It has ceased to be pastoral in the sense of pro·
viding the Church with essential and saving norms; and it
has also ceased to be mystical in the sense of communicating
to the people of God the knowledge of God which is the very
content of life eternal. A theology alienated from the Church,
and a Church alienated from theology: such is the first di-
mension of today's crisis.

2.

The situation of the liturgy is not much better. It has, to

be sure, remained the focus, the "holy of holies" of the
Theology and Liturgy 131

Church's life; it is still the main-one almost could say the

exclusive='toccuparion" of the Church. Yet a deeper analysis
would reveal here also a very serious crisis which cannot be
resolved by the hasty and superficial liturgical reforms advo-
cated by many today. A first aspect of this crisis is the growing
nominalisrn of liturgical life and practice. In spite of its ap-
parent conservatism and even archaism, this practice is hardly
expressive of the genuine lex orandi of the Church. Entire and
essential strata of the liturgical tradition, while faithfully
preserved in liturgical books, are little by little disappearing
from practice or else preserved symbolically and transformed
beyond recognition. Eucharist and the sacraments, liturgical
seasons and the celebration of feasts, rites of blessing and
sanctification of life-everywhere one finds the same pattern:
a "selection" of certain elements, a rejection of others; a selec-
tion, however, based not on the principles of the lex orandi
itself but on considerations totally alien to it. If the average
church-goer may not notice this rapid erosion of Orthodox
worship, the specialist cannot help being worried by the dis-
crepancy between the demands of Tradition on the one hand,
and the nominalism and minimalism of the liturgical piety
and practice on the other hand.
What is more serious, however, is the fact that the liturgy-
central as it may be among the activities of the Church-has
ceased to be connected with virtually all the other aspects of
the Church's life; to inform, shape and guide the ecclesiastical
consciousness as well as the "world-view" of the Christian
community. One may be deeply attached to the "ancient and
colorful rites" of Byzantium or Russia, see in them precious
relics of a cherished past, be a liturgical "conservative," and
at the same time completely fail to see in them, in the totality
of the Church's leitourgia, an all-embracing vision of life, a
power meant to judge, inform and transform the whole of
existence, a "philosophy of life" shaping and challenging all
our ideas, attitudes and actions. As in the case of theology,
one can speak of an alienation of liturgy from life, be it from
the life of the Church or the life of the Christian individual.
Liturgy is confined to the temple, but beyond its sacred enclave
it has no impact, no power. All other ecclesiastical activities-
132 CHURCH, WORLD, ·MiSSION

in a parish, a diocese, a local church-are based more and more

on purely secular presuppositions and logics, as are also the
various "philosophies of life" adopted by professed Chris-
tians. Liturgy is neither explained nor understood as having
anything to do with "life"; as, above all, an icon of that new
life which is to challenge and renew the "old life" in us and
around us. A liturgical pietism fed by sentimental and pseudo-
symbolical explanations of liturgical rites results, in fact, in
a growing and all-pervading secularism. Having become in
the mind of the faithful something "sacred" per se, liturgy
makes even more «profane" the real life which begins beyond
the sacred doors of the temple.
This double crisis-of theology and of liturgy-is, I sub-
mit, the real source of the general crisis which faces our Church
today, and which must shape our agenda, if theology is for
us more than a quiet "academic" activity, if we understand it
as our specific charism and ministry within the Body of Christ.
A crisis is always a divorce, a discrepancy, between the foun-
dations and the life which is supposed to be based on these
foundations; it is life drifting away from its own foundations.
The Church's life has always been rooted in the lex credendi,
the rule of faith, theology in the deepest sense of that word;
and in the lex orandi, her rule of worship, the leitourgia which
always "makes her what she is": the Body of Christ and the
Temple of the Holy Spirit. Today, however, there rapidly
develops a dangerous alienation of the "real" Church 'from
these two sources of her life. Such is our situation. Such is the
crisis whose challenge is upon us- whether we acknowledge
it or not. To understand it in its deep causes is, therefore,
the first and necessary step. Our question thus must be: why
and how did it occur?

3.

I have no doubts as to the answer. If today both theology

and liturgy have ceased, at least to a substantial degree, to
perform within the Church the function which is theirs, thus
provoking a deep crisis, it is because first of �11 they have
Theology and Liturgy 133

been divorced from one another; because the lex credendi

has been alienated from the lex orandi. When did this happen?
During that post-patristic "Western captivity" of Orthodox
theology, which in my opinion constitutes one of the main
tragedies on the historical path of Eastern Orthodoxy. This
"Western captivity" consisted primarily in what Fr. Florovsky
so aptly termed the "pseudomorphosis" of the Eastern theo-
logical mind-the adoption by it of Western thought forms and
categories, of the Western understanding of the very nature,
structure and method of theology. And the first and indeed
the most fateful result of that "pseudomorphosis" was pre-
cisely a mutual alienation from one another of the lex credendi
and the lex orandi.
The purpose of theology is the orderly and consistent pre-
sentation, explication and defense of the Church's faith. This
faith is thus both its source and its "object," and the entire
structure and method of theology depend therefore on how
one understands the nature of its relationship to that "source,"
i.e. to the faith of the Church. It is at this point that a radical
difference exists or, better to say, existed between the East
and the West - a difference later obscured, if not entirely
removed, by the "Western captivity" of Eastern theology.
It was in the West at first, and for reasons inherent to the
Western religious and intellectual development, that the
"source" of theology, i.e. the Church's faith, began to be iden-
tified with a specific number of "data," mainly texts-scriptural,
patristic, conciliar-which as loci theolo gici were to supply
theological speculation with its subject matter and criteria.
With the entire theological enterprise in the West being aimed
primarily at constructing an objective or scientific theology,
it was both natural and essential for it to establish itself on an
equally objective and clearly defined foundation. Hence, the
identification of faith, in theological terms, with "proposi-
tions"; hence also the rejection from the theological process of
any reference to or dependence upon experience.
Yet it is precisely faith as experience, the total and living
experience of the Church, that constitutes the source and the
context of theology in the East, of that theology at least which
characterized the patristic age. It is "description" more than
134 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

"definition" for it is, above all, a search for words and con-
cepts adequate to and expressive of the living experience of
the Church - for reality and not "propositions." It is itself a
part and a fruit of that experience, and it is in this sense that
Vladimir Lossky calls it "mystical theology." Its criteria lie
not in formal and, therefore, autonomous "authorities," but
in its adequacy to and consistency with the inner life and ex-
perience of the Church. This understanding of theology stems
from the very nature of its "source," i.e. the faith of the
Church. For the faith which founds the Church and by which
she lives is not a mere assent to a "doctrine," but her living
relationship to certain events: the life, death, resurrection and
glorification of Jesus Christ, His ascension to heaven, the
descent of the Holy Spirit on the "last and great day of Pente-
cost"-a relationship which makes her a constant "witness"
and "participant" of these events, of their saving, redeeming,
life-giving and life-transfiguring reality. She has indeed no
other experience but the experience of these events, no other
life but the "new life" which they always generate and com-
municate. Her faith thus is not only not detachable from her
experience, but is indeed that experience itself-the experi-
ence of that "which we have heard, which we have seen with
our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our
hands" ( I John 1: 1). For none of these events can be known,
in the rational meaning of that word, nor even believed in
outside the experience which reveals their reality and makes
us "witness to these things." But then theology cannot be
anything else but the "description" of that experience, its
revelation in human words and concepts. The Church is not
an institution that keeps certain divinely revealed "doctrines"
and "teachings" about this or that event of the past, but the
very epiphany of these events themselves. And she can teach
about them because, first of all, she knows them, because she
is the experience of their reality. Her faith as teaching and
theology is rooted in her faith as experience. Her lex credendi
is revealed in her life.
Theology and Liturgy 135

4.
I can now come to the main thesis of this paper: this ex-
perience of the Church is primarily the experience given and
received in the Church's leitourgia-in her lex orandi. That
today we must defend and prove this thesis is indeed the most
bitter result of the "pseudornorphosis" of our theology men-
tioned above. What centuries of "Western captivity" did was
not only alter the theological "mind" but, by the same token,
tragically narrow and obscure the very concept and experience
of liturgy, of its place and function within the life of the
Church. To put it abruptly: the liturgy ceased to be viewed
and experienced as the epiphany of the Church's faith, as
the reality of her experience as Church and, therefore, as the
source of her theology.
If indeed liturgy has remained at the center of the Church's
life and activity, if it has changed very little as to its form
and content, it has acquired a "coefficient," has begun to be
comprehended and experienced in a "key" substantially dif-
ferent from that of the earlier patristic age. It suffices to con-
sult any post-patristic manual of dogmatics to find the sacra-
ments, for example, treated in the chapters devoted to "means
of grace" and nowhere else, as if they had nothing to do with
the faith itself, the structure of the Church or knowledge
of God. As to the liturgical tradition in its totality, it has in
the same manuals no place whatsoever, the implication being
obviously that it belongs to the area of cult or piety, essentially
different from that of dogma and theology. It is precisely this
reduction of the liturgy, or the lex orandi, to "cult," its under-
standing exclusively in cultic categories, that reveals the new
coefficient, is the new key of both liturgical practice and
liturgical piety, and a major obstacle to its theological under-
standing, to a living communication between liturgy and
theology.
In the early Church, however, even the term leitour gia
was not, as it is today, a mere synonym of cult. It was applied
indeed to all those ministries and offices within the Church
in which she manifested and fulfilled her nature and vocation;
 . '

136 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

it had primarily ecclesiological and not cultic connotations.

And the very fact that subsequently it was identified especially
with "Divine Liturgy," the central act of Christian cult, reveals
above all the peculiar character, the uniqueness of that cult
itself, of its place and function within the Church. From the
very beginning, this unique function was precisely to "make
the Church what she is": the witness and the participant of
the saving event of Christ, of the new life in the Holy Spirit,
of the presence in "this world" of the Kingdom to come.
To baptize by water and spirit in the likeness of Christ's
death and resurrection; to "come together as Church" on the
Lord's Day, to hear His Word and "to eat and drink at His
table in His Kingdom"; to relate, through the "liturgy of
time," all time, all cosmos-its time, matter and life-to Christ
who is to "fill all things with Himself": all this was not
understood as mere "cultic acts" but, above all, as the ful-
fillment by the Church of her very nature, of her cosmical
and eschatological calling.
Here is the essential point: in the early patristic Church,
ecclesiology is cosmical and eschatological. The Church is the
mystery of the new creation and she is the mystery of the King-
dom. It has often been said that there is no ecclesiology, in the
modern sense of this word, in the writings of the Fathers. The
reason for this, however, is not a lack of interest in the Church,
but the Fathers' understanding and experience of the Church
as the new life of the new creation and the presence, the
parousia, of the Kingdom. Their attention is not focused on
the "institution" because the very nature and purpose of that
institution is not to exist "in itself' but to be the "sacrament,"
the epiphany, of the new creation. In this sense, their whole
theology is ecclesiological, for it has the Church, the ex-
perience of the new life, the communion of the Holy Spirit,
as its source and context. From this point of view the post-
Tridentine treatise De ecclesia, mother and pattern of all
modern ecclesiology both Western and Eastern, is indeed the
downfall of patristic ecclesiology, for by focusing attention
almost exclusively on the "institution," it obscures the cosmical
and eschatological nature of the Church. It makes "institution"
an end in itself, and in doing this, in apparently exalting the
Theology and Liturgy 137
Church, it in fact tragically mutilates her, making her as we
see it today more and more "irrelevant" for the world, less
and less "expressive" of the Kingdom of God.
What is important for us at this point is the relationship
between this cosmical and eschatological nature of the Church
and her leitourgia. For it is precisely in and through her
liturgy-this being the latter's specific and unique "function" -
that the Church is inf ormed of her cosmical and eschatological
vocation, receives the power to fufill it and thus truly becomes
"what she is": the sacrament, in Christ, of the new creation;
the sacrament, in Christ, of the Kingdom. In this sense the
liturgy is indeed "means of grace," not in the narrow and
individualistic meaning given this term in post-patristic the-
ology, but in the all-embracing sense of always making the
Church what she is, a realm of grace, of communion with God,
of new knowledge and new life. The liturgy of the Church
is cosmical and eschatological because the Church is cosmical
and eschatological. But the Church would not have been cos-
mical and eschatological had she not been given, as the very
source and constitution of her life and faith, the experience
of the new creation, the experience and vision of the Kingdom
which is to come. And this is precisely the leitourgia of the
Church, s cult, the function which makes it the source and in-
deed the very possibility of theology.

5.

The theological and liturgical tragedy of the post-patristic

age is that the Church's cult was deprived of its liturgical
function, reduced to cultic categories alone. More precisely
this means that the theological mind as well as piety ceased
to see in it, to experience it, as the very epiphany of the cosmi-
cal and eschatological "content" of the Church's faith and
thus of the Church herself. Yet once detached from this, its
essential cosmical and eschatological content, the liturgy of
the Church, her lex orandi, simply cannot be properly "heard"
and understood. Then inevitably a deterioration of theology
and piety begins, their own "pseudornorphosis" takes place-
138 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

the more dangerous because it takes place not in the forms

of the liturgy, but in their inner comprehension and usage by
the faithful. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is very of ten the
liturgical "conservative," the passionate lover of rubrics and
externals, the amateur of "ancient and colorful" rites, that is
most hopelessly blind to the true meaning of these very rites,
to the "Truth and Spirit" which gave them birth and of which
they are both manifestation and gift.
Signs and symptoms of that deterioration are too many
to be enumerated here. A few, however, ought to be men-
tioned. Take Baptism, for example. If today so many priests,
not to speak of laymen, see no need whatsoever for the bap-
tismal blessing of water and are perfectly satisfied with pouring
some holy water into the baptismal font, it is because they do
not experience this blessing as the sacramental re-creation of
the cosmos so that it 1nay become that which it was intended
to be, a gift of God to man, a means of man's knowledge of
God and communion with Him. Yet when deprived of this
cosmical connotation, the understanding of Baptism itself
begins to be altered, and this is exactly what we see in post-
patristic theology as well as in post-patristic piety. From regen-
eration and re-creation, new birth and new life, attention
shifts to original sin and justification, and thus to an altogether
different theological and spiritual content. If the initial and
organic connection of Baptism with Pascha and Eucharist
has been all but forgotten, if Baptism has ceased to be a
paschal sacrament and Pascha a baptismal celebration, it is
because Baptism is not experienced as a fundamental act of
passage from "this world" into the Kingdom of God-an act
which, making us die here "in the likeness of Christ's death,"
makes our life to be hidden with Christ in God. But again,
deprived of this eschatological connotation, Baptism is less
and less connected-in theology and piety-with Christ's death
and resurrection, and indeed post-patristic manuals hardly
even mention that connection, as well as the connection of
Chrismation with the pentecostal inauguration of the "new
aeon. "
Take Eucharist as another example. If it has become one
"means of grace" among many, if its aim has been reduced,
Theology and Liturgy 139
in theology and piety, to individual edification and sanctifi-
cation to the virtually total exclusion of any other aspect, it
is because its ecclesiological-and this means cosmical and
eschatological-dimensions have been simply ignored within
the new and "Westernized" theological perspective. It is
amazing how the sacramental theology which developed within
that perspective neglected - to say the least - such essential
aspects of the eucharistic ordo as the Synaxis, the proclamation
of the Gospel, the Offering, the Eucharist itself, the inter-
dependence of all these aspects and their organic connection
with consecration and communion, as well as the relationship
of Eucharist to time, as manifested in the uniquely Christian
institution of the Lord's Day. All this is simply absent from
theology; but then the Eucharist ceases to be experienced as
the sacrament of the Church, of her very nature as passage
and ascension into the Kingdom of God. Theology exhausts
itself in purely formal and truly irrelevant definitions of
sacrifice and transubstantiation, while piety little by little
subordinates Eucharist to its individualistic and pietistic de-
mands.
To that kind of theology and that kind of piety, meaning-
less indeed would appear the affirmation that the Eucharist
and all sacraments and the entire leitourgia of the Church
always place us at the beginning and at the end of all things,
revealing thus their true meaning and destiny in Christ; that
it is the very function or leitourgia of the Church's cult-
in its structure and rhythm, in its ineffable and celestial beauty,
in its words as well as its rites-to be the true epiphany of
the new creation redeemed by Christ, the presence and power
in "this world" of joy and peace in the Holy Spirit, of the
new aeon of the Kingdom, and being all this, to be the source
and the focus par excellence of the Church's faith and theology.
All this is neither "heard" nor understood today, be it by
theology or by liturgical piety. The former is imprisoned in
its own "data" arid "propositions," and having eyes does not
see and having ears does not hear. The latter is entangled in
all kinds of liturgical experiences save the one expressed in
the lex orandi itself. And if today the Christian community
is being alienated more and more from both, if in theology
140 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION
.
it sees nothing but intellectual speculations interesting to
professionals alone, if liturgy is for it, at best, "inspiration"
and, at worst, a meaningless "obligation" to be reduced, if
possible, to a valid minimum, the reason for all this is the
mutual alienation from one another of theology and liturgy,
their surrender to Wes tern categories and dichotomies. My
last question is: Can this alienation be overcome ?

6.

Enough has been said above, I think, to enable us to

give this question a positive answer: Yes, it can. But only if
the theological mind recovers its "wholeness" broken by cen-
turies of Western captivity, if it returns to the old yet always
valid expression of that wholeness: lex orandi lex est credendi.
And this implies, as its first condition, a double task: a liturgi-
cal critique of theology and a theological critique of the
liturgy. In this paper I can only briefly outline my under-
standing of this double task.
To affirm that liturgy is the source par excellence of the-
ology does not mean, as some seem to think, a reduction of
theology to liturgy, its transformation into "liturgical the-
ology." The latter appeared only as a result of the unhealthy
mutual alienation between theology and liturgy, and is there-
fore an illegitimate child of an illegitimate situation. All
theology, indeed, ought to be "liturgical," yet not in the sense
of having liturgy as its unique "object" of study, but in that
of having its ultimate term of reference in the faith of the
Church, as manifested and communicated in the liturgy, in
that catholic vision and experience which now, in its alienation
from liturgy, it lacks.
The Western influence upon our theology expressed itself,
first of all, in the organization of theological work. Theology,
in fact, was broken into a multiplicity of virtually "autono-
mous" disciplines each depending on its own set of "data"
and on its own method, without any clear principle of coordi-
nation and theological "integration" into a common vision-
indeed, without any common goal. While in the Roman Church
Theology and Liturgy 141

such a principle lies in the hierarchical magisterium, under-

stood as an authority extrinsic to theology itself, while Prot-
estants do not even claim to have, beyond sufficiently vague
"confessions," any consistent theology as theology of the
Church, Orthodox theology found itself in a peculiar and
unhealthy situation. It adopted, on the one hand and quite
uncritically, the Western "scientific" organization of theologi-
cal work, which meant in fact its progressive atomization into
a number of uncoordinated and independent "disciplines."
Yet, on the other hand, it failed to seek and to determine the
criteria and methods that would integrate these disciplines
not only into a consistent whole but also into an adequate and
living expression of the Church's faith itself. While adopting
methods hitherto alien to it, Orthodox theology did not ask
the preliminary question: How are they to express the ex-
perience of the Church? Thus we have dogmatic theology
built more or less after the pattern of scholastic theology with
its dependence upon "data" and "propositions"; scriptural
theology split between a surrender to and a violent rejection
of Western "criticism," leading either to a mere rejection of
Western critical theories or to an equally Western fundamen-
talism; and, finally, a host of "historical" and "practical"
disciplines whose relationship to theology as such remains
chronically ambiguous and problematic. Not only is there
virtually no communication between these disciplines, but their
very structure and. self-definition prevents each one of them
and all of them together from being the catholic, i.e. whole
and adequate, expression of the Church's faith and experience.
If, -however,· as I. tried to indicate above, it is the very
function of the leitourgia to be the "epiphany" of the Church's
faith, to "make the Church what she is," then theology must
find its way back to that source, and rediscover in it precisely
that common ground, that initial wholeness and vision which
it so obviously lacks now in its topical and methodological
fragmentation. If a certain degree of specialization is obviously
necessary because it is beneficial to theology's scientific pro-
gress, this specialization not only does not exclude, but indeed
. requires as the very condition of its success and as its. inner
justification the convergence and interdependence of all dis-
142 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

ciplines as to their common source and their common goal.

This common source is the experience of the Church; this
common goal is the adequate, consistent and "credible" pre-
sentation, explication and, if necessary, defense of that ex-
perience. If theology stems from the Church and her ex-
perience, it must also lead to the Church and into that experi-
ence. In this sense it is never autonomous, never self-contained
and self-sufficient. Its credibility lies not in its rational con-
sistency, but in the fact that it points beyond itself - to that
experience and reality which alone gave birth to these words
and alone can "authenticate" them.
What then does all this mean in practical terms? In refer-
ence to the leitourgia as a common source of all theological
disciplines, it means that whatever the object of theological
scrutiny and investigation, the first and most important
"datum" is its liturgical experience, its place and connotations
within the liturgy. To take but one example, the liturgy of
the Paschal triduum-Holy Friday, Great and Holy Saturday
and Sunday-reveals more about the "doctrines" of creation,
fall, redemption, death and resurrection than all other loci
theolo gici together; and, let me stress it, not merely in the
texts, in the magnificent Byzantine hymnography, but pre-
cisely in the very experience" -ineffable yet illuminating-
tt

given during these days, in their inner interdependence, in

their nature indeed as epiphany and revelation. Truly if the
word mystery can still have any meaning today, be experienced
and not merely "explained," it is here, in this unique cele-
bration which reveals and communicates before it "explains,"
which makes us witnesses and participants of the· one all-em-
bracing Event from which stems everything else: understanding
and power, knowledge and joy, contemplation and communion.
It is this experience which then illuminates the theological
work proper, be it the exegesis of scriptural or patristic texts,
or the elaboration of sacred doctrine and of its application to
the life and the problems of man. It is in the Eucharist, in its
ordo and movement, in its connection with all other sacraments
and cycles of worship, that one discovers the only true and
catholic source of ecclesiology in its cosmical as well as
eschatological, institutional as well as sacramental, dimen-
Theology and Liturgy 143

sions. It is finally in the "liturgy of time," in the cycles aimed

at the sanctification of life, that one first experiences the true
content of the Christian doctrine of the world and the true
meaning of Christian eschatology, before one begins to ex-
plain and to elaborate them.
It is obviously impossible for us to give here anything but
the most superficial analysis of this initial and organic con-
nection between theology and the liturgical experience of the
Church as the primary spring and «ignition" of theology. The
liturgical critique of theology is precisely to supply us with
such analysis, to rediscover the once living and efficient inter-
dependence ·of=these two essential leitourgias of the Church.
As to the liturgy as the common goal of the various the-
ological disciplines, the affirmation lex orandi lex est credendi
means that it is again in the mystery of the Church that the-
ology finds its inner fulfillment both as theological synthesis
and as experience, which-although it itself is beyond theology
proper, beyond its words and formulations-not only makes
them "credible" but indeed essential and authentic. Theology
is always an invitation "to taste and see," an announcement
and a promise to be fulfilled in communion, vision and life.
Biblical exegesis, historical analysis, doctrinal elaboration
ultimately converge in and prepare the celebration: the act
of witnessing to and participating in the mystery itself, in
that epiphany of life, light and knowledge without which all
words remain inescapably "human," all too human.
.All this, however, requires not only a "conversion" of
theology itself, of its structure and methods, but, first of all,
of the theologian. He has mastered to perfection the necessary
akribeia of intellectual discipline and integrity, the humility
proper to ·au genuine rational effort. He now has to learn how
to immerse himself in the joy of the Church, that great joy
with which the disciples returned to Jerusalem to be "conti-
nually in the temple blessing God" (Luke 23: 52-53). He
has to rediscover the oldest of all languages of the Church-
that of her rites, the rhythm and the ordo of her leitourgia
in which she concealed fram the eyes of "this world" her most
precious treasure: the knowledge of that which "no eye has
seen, nor ear heard, nor .the heart of man conceived, what
144 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

God has prepared for those who love Him" (I Cor. 2:9).
He has to become again not only the student of the Church's
faith but, above all, its witness.
More than that, if theology needs a liturgical critique,
liturgy-to be again the leitourgia of the Church in the full
meaning of that term-needs a theological critique. During the
long centuries of its divorce from theology, this meaning, as
was said already, has been obscured by several strata of
pseudo-theological and pseudo-pious explanations and inter-
pretations, by a superficial pseudo-symbolism, by individualism
and legalism. And it is not easy today-when so much of all
this has been identified by so many with the very essence of
Orthodoxy, has almost become the touchstone of "true" piety
and "conservatism'l=to rediscover and to communicate the
real "key" of the Orthodox liturgical tradition, to connect
it again to the lex credendi.
Here the task of theology is needed. Here its tradition of
intellectual integrity, historical criticism and akribeia can make
its greatest contribution. To do so, however, theology must
turn its attention to the lex orandi, consider it not only as a
source but also as an object of its research and study. It is a
paradox that the universally admired liturgical tradition of
the Eastern Church has been virtually ignored in both its
history and its theological "content." Not only has theology
been divorced from liturgy as "source," but it has paid very
little attention to it even as to one of -its "objects." We still
· have not so much as a complete and critical history of Byz-
antine worship in all its aspects. Even here the only interest
shown so far has come from the West, so that Orthodox
liturgiology remains determined by Western scholarship. Yet it
is precisely the task of Orthodox theologians to show in their
study of our liturgical tradition its overall significance within
the Tradition of the Church, to reveal its true place within
the Orthodox theological enterprise.
To achieve this, however, the study of the liturgy must,
on the one hand, break through the typically Western "fix-
ation" on certain themes and problems to the exclusion of
many others, and, on the other hand, overcome the dead-ends
of self-sufficient "historicism." It so happened, for example,
Theology and Liturgy 145

that under the influence of Western theological options, the

approach to the Eucharist was reduced to two or three aspects,
those of sacrifice, validity, and communion-while all that
which constitutes the only context for the proper formulation
of these aspects, i.e. the liturgical ordo of the eucharistic
celebration, the interdependence within it of the Synaxis, the
liturgy of the Word, the Offertory, the Eucharist, etc., has
been virtually ignored. But perhaps the most important
omission was that of the essentially eschatological nature of
the leitour gia-its relation to and dependence upon the central
object of Christian faith, i.e. the Kingdom of God; its anti-
nomical relation to time, relation constituting virtually the
very content of the Typikon and all its "rubrics"; its expression
in beauty: singing, hymnography, iconography, ritual, solem-
nity, which indicates that its organic link with matter is not
"accidental," but indeed essential-so that the epiphany of
"heaven on earth," the icon and fragrance, the beauty and
the ruah of the Kingdom of God, was concealed, so to speak,
from theology and reduced, as it were, to the legalistic and
rational categories of the Western approach to liturgy.
The same can be said of the historical reduction of more
recent liturgiology, its fixation on the historical interest and
attention. Absolutely indispensable as it is, this historical
aspect not only can never be an end in itself, but, in the last
analysis, it is only from a theological perspective that it can
receive its most important and proper questions. Very good
and knowledgeable historians, because of their theological
ignorance, have produced monuments of nonsense compar-
able to those produced by the theologians of liturgy ignorant
of its history.
At this point, therefore, it is the liturgiologist that must
again become a theologian and adopt a theological context
and depth for his work. It is indeed the entire Church-clergy
and faithful alike-who, in spite of all "pseudomorphoses,"
still continue to live by the liturgy, who must in the lex orandi
rediscover the lex credendi, must make their liturgical piety
a way of theological knowledge and understanding.
Ultimately, the liturgical problem of our time is thus a
problem of restoring to liturgy its theological meaning, and
146 CHURCH, WORLD., MISSION

to theology its liturgical dimension. Just as theology cannot

recover its central place and function within the Church
without being rooted again in the very experience of the
Church, liturgy cannot be rescued from its present decay by
hasty, superficial and purely external reforms aimed at meeting
vague and doubtful "needs" of a mythological "modern man."
For what this "modern man," his culture and his society ulti-
mately seek is not a Church that would serve them by adopting
their "image," but the Church that would fulfill the divine
mission by being always and everywhere the epiphany, the
gift and communication of the eternal mystery of salvation;
and by being this, would reveal to man his true nature and
destiny. Theology must rediscover as its own "rule of faith"
the Church's lex orandi, and the liturgy reveal itself again as
the lex credendi.
 VII
RENEWAL
1.
Reading the enormous and ever-growing renewal literature
of our time, one cannot help coming to the conclusion that
its main, if not exclusive, term of reference is the world. To
make Christianity relevant to the world, aware of its coming
of age, responsive to its needs, problems and anxieties, ade-
quate to its thought forms-such is the basic content and the
orientation of the idea of renewal, whether we follow it on
the level of theology ( where its aim has been formulated as
"recasting traditional Christian doctrine in the light of modern
man's new self-understanding"), of apostolate or even of
spirituality. Whatever the difference between the various
concrete programs of renewal ( and they range from a radical
rethinking of nearly everything in traditional Christianity,
including the concept of God, to a moderate adjustment to the
needs of our time), the consensus, the common denominator
and the working principle here is not only a new and acute
sensitivity to the world, but its acceptance as virtually the only
criterion of the Church's faith, life and action. If in the past
the world was evaluated by Christians in terms of the Church,
today the opposite is true: to many Christians, it is the world
that must validate the Church. And even if one does not accept
the idea of secularization as it is understood by some radical
theologians, it is this term that is probably coupled more often
than any other with the term "renewal."
*A paper read under the title "Prayer, Liturgy, and Renewal," at the
Congress on the Theology of Renewal, Toronto, 1967, and originally pub-
lished in Theology of Renewal, Vol. II: "Renewal of Religious Structures,"
by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto (Palm Publishers,
Dorval, P.Q., Canada, 1968}, pp. 77-88.
147
148 CHURCH) WORLD) MISSION

My purpose in this paper is to question not the new aware-

ness of the world in Christian consciousness, but that which,
to me at least, appears as a dangerous one-sidedness in that
awareness. I have no doubts about the urgent need for the
Church to remember that she exists not for herself but for
the world and its salvation. I am not sure, however, that all
aspects of this necessary renewal in the Church-world relation-
ship have been given equal attention. I even wonder whether
one really begins at the beginning. Speaking of liturgy and
prayer, I am not trying simply to add a touch of piety to an
otherwise heal thy process but to raise what I am convinced is
the fundamental question of all renewal. This paper is written
by an Eastern Orthodox, and, therefore, in a perspective which
may differ from that of the Christian West. It is hoped, how-
ever, that here as elsewhere, the Orthodox point of view may
contribute to the clarification of the basic issues.

2.

The first question is: What is the world which is spoken

of so much today? It is strange, indeed, that in our present
preoccupation with the world we seem to ignore the funda-
mental antinomy traditionally implied in the Christian usage
of that term. We seem to forget that in the New Testament
and in the whole Christian tradition the world is the object
of two apparently 'contradictory attitudes: an emphatic ac-
ceptance, a yes, but also an equally emphatic rejection, a no.
"God so loved the world that he gave His only Son ... God
sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but
that the world might be saved through Him" (John 3: 16-17)
and then-e'Do not love the world or the things in the world.
If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him"
(John 2: 15). Texts like these could be multiplied ad libitum,
and rooted in them is the whole· history of the Church with
its polarization between the affirmation of and the care for
a "Christian world," and its rejection and negation for the
sake of "one thing needed." The question is, therefore, whether
this polarization gives us a simple choice, that is, whether it
Renewal 149

permits us to opt for one of the two positions, the yes or the
no, to the exclusion of the other. Such a reduction is always
tempting. If in the past a certain tradition considered every
opening towards the world as sign of betrayal and apostasy,
today we hear voices denouncing any withdrawal from the
world ( monasticism, contemplation, even liturgy) as irrele-
vant and harmful, and calling us to a kind of unconditional
surrender to the world and its values. But the whole point
precisely is that the New Testament and the Christian tradi-
tion allow no choice and no reduction. They accept and reject
the world simultaneously, they present the yes and the no as
one, and not two, positions, and it is this paradox that of
necessity constitutes the starting point of all Christian ap-
proaches to the world and thus to all renewal.
But is there really a paradox? Have we not forgotten that
the ultimate term of reference in Christianity is not the world
but the Kingdom of God, and that the two apparently con-
tradictory attitudes towards the world are reconciled theologi-
cally and existentially when we refer their object-the world-
to the central Christian notion of the Kingdom of God? The
yes and the no appear then as two aspects, both essential and
necessary, of one and the same attitude. For, on the one hand,
the world created by God and made good by Him is revealed
to us as the "matter" of the Kingdom of God, called to be
fulfilled and transfigured so that ultimately God may be "all
in all things." As such, the world is accepted as a gift of God,
as the object of man's love and care, for it belongs to man,
the .king of creation, the representative of God in the cosmos,
to fulfill the world. Thus the world is the "sacrament of the
Kingdom"; it is oriented towards the Kingdom, and for this
reason dualism and Manicheism have consistently been con-
demned by the Church as heresy. Yet, on the other hand,
the same world, once it becomes - again through man -
self-sufficient and self-centered, an end in itself and not
in God, once it rejects its ontological subordination to the
Kingdom of God, or in other words, its transcendent vocation
and destiny, is revealed as not only the enemy of God but as
a demonic and meaningless realm of self-destruction and
death-s'tthe lust of the flesh and the lust of eyes and the pride
150 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

of life ... " (I John 2: 16). And thus the acceptance of the true
world as the "passage into the Kingdom" implies as its very
condition the negation and rejection of that which in the New
Testament is called "this world" and the love of which is the
sin par excellence and the source of all sin.
All this, of course, is commonplace. Unless, however, one
returns to that commonplace, one cannot overcome the in-
credible confusion in which we find ourselves today and which,
in spite of the best intentions, deprives the world-be it modern,
technological, "come-of-age" or anything else-of any clear
Christian meaning, so that although we are called to sacrifice
for the sake of the world all that we cherish, we still do not
know for the sake of what it itself exists and what is its ulti-
mate destiny.
It is here, however, that we encounter our major difficulty.
To refer the world to the Kingdom of God and to look for the
meaning of our action in the world in the light of the King-
dom is tantamount to asking: What is the Kingdom of God?
Are we not trying to find the meaning of one unknown simply
by replacing it with another unknown? If the notion of the
world is to be clarified by that of the Kingdom, how is the
Kingdom to be comprehended and accepted as the ultima
ratio of all our thought and action, the moving power of our
renewal. "Thy Kingdom come ... ": Since the foundation of
the Church there has been no day, indeed no hour, when this
prayer has not been repeated thousands of times. But has its
meaning remained clear and identical to itself throughout all
that time? Are we still praying for the same reality? Or, more
simply, for what are we praying? These questions are not
rhetorical. To anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear,
it must be obvious that in the course of history something
strange happened to the central concept of the "Kingdom of
God"; little by little it simply lost its central position and
ceased to be the ultimate term of reference. It was Dom
Gregory Dix, I think, who put his finger on this development
when--with some exaggeration-he spoke of the "collapse" of
the early Christian eschatology. It is not an accident indeed
that the treatises De nouissimis are among the vaguest and
the least developed in Christian dogmatics and that eschato-
Renewal 151

logy achieved a bad reputation by taking refuge in all kinds

of apocalyptic sects? Whatever the reasons for all this ( and
we cannot analyze them here) the fact remains that the idea,
or let us say, the experience of the Kingdom of God, so
overwhelmingly central in the early Church, was progressively
replaced by a doctrine of the "last things," of "another
world"-centered almost entirely on the salvation of individual
souls. But this, in turn, led to a shift and also to a "split" in
Christian piety. There were, on the one hand, those who for
the sake of the soul and its salvation not only rejected but also
ignored the world, refused to see in it anything but the lust
of the flesh; and, on the other hand, there were those who for
the sake of the world began to ignore more and more, if
not to reject, the "other world." The crisis of Christianity, I
am convinced, is not that it has become irrelevant to the
world-for in a way it always remains "scandal to the Jews
and foolishness to the Greeks" - but that the Kingdom of
God, as value of all values, the object of its faith, hope and
love, the content of its prayer: "Thy Kingdom come!" has
become irrelevant to Christians themselves. And thus, before
one can speak of any renewal, one must return to the question:
What is the Kingdom of God, and where and how does one
experience it so that it may be the power of our preaching and
action?

...,
).

To this question the early Church, at least, had an answer:

to her the Kingdom of God was revealed and made known
every time she gathered on the eighth day-the day of the
Kyrios-"to eat and drink at Christ's table in His Kingdom"
(Luke 22: 29-30), to proclaim His death and confess His res-
urrection, to immerse herself in the new aeon of the Spirit.
One can say that the uniqueness, the radical novelty of the
new Christian leitourgia was here, in this entrance into the
Kingdom which for this world is still to come, but of which
the Church is truly the sacrament: the beginning, the antici-
pation and the parousia. And the liturgy, especially the
152 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Eucharist, was precisely the passage of the Church from this

world into heaven, the act by which and in which she fulfilled
herself, becoming that which she is: entrance, ascension, com-
munion. But-and this is the most important point-it was
precisely this eschatological, that is, this Kingdom-centered
and Kingdom-oriented character of the liturgy that made it
( in the experience and the understanding of the early Church)
the source of the Church's evaluation of the world, the root
and the motivation of her mission to the world. It is because
Christians-in their passage and ascension to heaven-knew
the Kingdom and partook of its "joy and peace in the Holy
Spirit" that they could truly be its witness in and to the world.
In my opinion, one of the greatest tragedies of Church
history, a tragedy not mentioned in manuals, is that this
eschatological character of the Christian leitourgia was little
by little obscured in both theology and piety, which squeezed
it into categories alien to its primitive spirit. It is here indeed
that one must look for the major cause of the process mentioned
above: the progressive weakening of the idea of the Kingdom
of God, its replacement with an individualistic and exclusively
futuristic doctrine of the last things. In the history of post-
patristic theology, nothing I am sure was more one-sided and
simply deficient than its treatment of sacraments and liturgy
in general, of the Eucharist in particular. And the deficiency
lay precisely in a double dissociation: of the liturgy from
ecclesiology, and of the liturgy from eschatology. First from
ecclesiology, that is, from the doctrine and the experience of
the Church. Within the purely rational and juridical categories
of the theology, which at first developed in the West but
later had a deep impact in the East also, liturgy ceased to be
understood and presented as the means of the Church's ful-
fillment, as the locus Ecclesiae par excellence. The sacraments
now came to be seen as means of grace, as acts performed in
and by the Church, to be sure, but aimed at individual sanctifi-
cation rather than the edification and the fulfillment of the
Church. But this also and of necessity meant their disconnection
from eschatology. The initial understanding and experience
of the liturgy as passage from the old into the new, from this
world into the world to come, as procession and ascension to
Renewal 153
the Kingdom, was obscured and replaced by its understanding
in terms of a cult (public and private) whose main aim is to
satisfy our religious needs. The leitourgia-a corporate pro-
cession and passage of the Church towards her fulfillment,
the sacrament of the Kingdom of God-was thus reduced to
cultic dimensions and categories among which those of obliga-
tion,. efficacy and validity acquired a central, if not exclusive,
position. Finally, to this orientation of sacramental and litur-
gical theology there corresponded an equally non-ecclesiologi-
cal and non-eschatological orientation of liturgical piety. If the
liturgy remained very much the heart and the center of the
Church's life, if in some ways it became its almost unique ex-
pression, it was no longer comprehended as the act which
existentially refers us to the three inseparable realities of the
Christian faith: the world, the Church, the Kingdom.

4.

I can now make my chief point, which is very simple and

which will, no doubt, appear naive to many a sophisticated
ideologue of renewal. If renewal is to have a consistent orien-
tation, and this means precisely a theology, this theology must
be rooted, first of all, in the recovered Christian eschatology.
For eschatology is not what people have come to think of it:
an escape from the world. On the contrary, it is the very source
and foundation of the Christian doctrine of the world and of
the Church's action in the world. By referring the world,
every moment of its time, every ounce of its matter, and
all human thought, energy and creativity to the eschaton,
to the ultimate reality of the Kingdom of God, it gives them
their only real meaning, their proper entelechy. Thus, it makes
possible Christian action as well as the judgment and evaluation
of that action. Yet the locus of that recovery is the liturgy of
the Church. For eschatology is not a doctrine, not an intellec-
tual construction, not a chapter ( De novissimis) simply added
and juxtaposed to other chapters of dogmatics, but a dimen-
sion of all faith and of all theology, a spirit which permeates
and inspires from inside the whole thought and life of the
154 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Church. And the proper function of the Christian leitourgia,

as I tried to show, is precisely to generate that spirit, to reveal
and to communicate that eschaton without which the Church
is but an institution among other human institutions, an in-
stitution, however, with strange and indeed irrelevant claims,
and the Christian faith a helpless, if not ridiculous, attempt
to force an elusive respect on the part of Pascal's savants et
pbiloso phes.
At this point one may ask: But is this possible? Have you
not admitted yourself that the eschatological power of the
liturgy has been obscured and, for all practical reasons, lost
in the course of history? Can we simply return to an experience
which seems to have been the particular grace of the Church's
childhood? To these questions two answers can be given:
In the first place, no changes in theological interpretation
or in liturgical piety have been able radically to alter the
nature of Christian liturgy and its original inspiration. We
would not have been able to speak about the real spirit of the
liturgy, and no liturgical renewal would have been possible,
if there did not exist a self-evident discrepancy between certain
theological thought forms and a certain liturgical piety, on
the one hand, and the liturgy itself as it was preserved in spite
of all developments and metamorphoses, on the other hand.
The unique and truly exciting meaning of the liturgical move-
ment as it began and developed during the last fifty years lies
precisely in its breaking through the theological and pietistic
superstructure to the genuine spirit of the liturgy. As one of
the pioneers of the movement wrote: "I was a priest for sever-
al years and yet I did not know the meaning of Pascha."
Pascha was there all the time, but it was impossible to ex-
perience its existential meaning within the framework of a
theology alienated from Pascha. The most important aspect
of the movement, however, is that this rediscovery of Pascha
was not a simple return to the past, not archeology and anti-
quity, but the spring of a truly new vision of the Church and
of her mission in the world. The whole record of the liturgical
movement bears witness to this fact. What is true of Pascha
is true, in fact, of the whole liturgical tradition of the Church.
I mention Pascha, however, because it is precisely this paschal
Renewal 155
dimension and root of the liturgy, its fundamental nature as
passage and passover, that constitutes the most valuable achieve-
ment of the liturgical movement. Whatever aspect of Chris-
tian worship we study today-the liturgy of initiation, the
Eucharist, or the liturgy of time-we discover more and more
that the basic shape or ordo of each of them, the principle
which permits the understanding of both their origin and
their development, lies in their nature as acts of passage, as
mysteries of the Kingdom of God. Thus, liturgical renewal
is possible and it makes possible a renewal of the theology
of the world as source and condition of a new vision of the
Church-world relationship. Let me stress once more that it is
not a mere interest in liturgy, its forms and spirit, that I have
in mind here, but in liturgy as the source of a new vision and
experience of the Church and of the relation to the world.
As I have written elsewhere: " ... the lex orandi must be re-
covered as lex credendi. The rediscovery of the Eucharist ( and I
will add here-of the whole liturgy) as the sacrament of the
Church is, in other words, the rediscovery of the Church in
actu, the Church as the Sacrament of Christ, of His "parou-
sia'-the comin g and presence of the Kingdom which is to
come ... It means that in the life of the Church, the Eucharist
is the moment of truth which makes it possible to see the real
'objects' of theology: God, man and the world." 1

5.

My second answer brings me to another reality: prayer.

It will not be disputed that prayer is to the individual Chris-
tian what the liturgy is to the Church in corpore, and that
there is no Christian life without prayer. What needs to be
stressed, however, is that Christian prayer, just like the Chris-
tian leitourgia, and for the same reasons, is in its essence
eschatological; it is an effort towards and an experience of the
Kingdom of God. If by "prayer" we mean here not only an
external rule and practice, but, above all, a total inner orienta-
1 "Eucharist and Theology," in St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 5.4
( 1961), p. 22.
156 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

tion of man towards God-and such is, of course, the content

of the entire world of Christian spirituality-there can be no
doubt that its object and experience is precisely the "peace
and joy in the Holy Spirit" which according to St. Paul is the
very essence of the Kingdom of God. When St. Seraphim of
Sarov, one of the last and greatest Orthodox saints and teachers
of spirituality, defines Christian life as the "acquisition of the
Holy Spirit," he merely sums up a tremendously rich spiritual
tradition which transcends the category of historical develop-
ment, the division between East and West, the accidents of
theological fashions, for it is one consistent, unchanging and
radiant testimony to the reality of the Kingdom of God, to
its transcendent immanence and immanent transcendence.
But is it not strange that in the present discussions of re-
newal so little place is given to this testimony or, more exactly,
that its inescapable relation to the very idea of renewal seems
so often to be ignored? Is it not the result again of a particular
theological deformation, of another dissociation, this time of
theology and spirituality? Is it not clear that the same theology
which, in its triumphant intellectualism ignored liturgy as the
locus theologicus par excellence, had to ignore ipso facto spir-
ituality? The latter was thus isolated in a particular com-
partment, that of mysticism, and ruled out as a source of
theology. What we discover today, however, is that theology,
when reduced completely to a self-sufficient rational structure,
becomes, in fact, defenseless before secular philosophies and
finishes by accepting them as its own criterion and foundation.
It literally cuts itself off from its sources, from that reality
which alone makes words about God theoprepeis, i.e. adequate
to God. At this point, renewal risks becoming surrender.
My point here is thus again a simple one. There can be no
renewal in any area of Church life or, simply, of the Church
herself, without first a spiritual renewal. But this emphatically
is not a mere pietistic statement, a call for more· prayer. It
means, above everything else, the overcoming of the tragic
divorce between the thought of the Church and the experience
of the Kingdom of God which is the only source, guide and
fulfillment of that thought, and the only ultimate motivation
of all Christian action. At the risk of shocking many a ·-Chris-
Renewal 157

tian, one can say that the Church as institution, as doctrine

and as action has no ultimate meaning in itself. For all these
point beyond themselves to a reality which they represent and
describe and seek, which is fulfilled, however, only in the new
life, in the koinonia of the Holy Spirit.
And this experience is not to be "rediscovered" in books
and at the conferences. It has always been, it is still here in the
midst of us, independent of the fluctuations of theology and
of collective piety. It is indeed the only real continuity of the
Church, the one that must be stressed above everything else
in our age obsessed with history. Just as the liturgy, in spite
of all reinterpretation and all reductions, has remained that
which it has always been: the passage of the Church from the
status viae to the status patriae, and as such the source of all
real life of the Church, prayer, i.e. the thirst and hunger of
man for the living God and a living encounter with Him, is
that which kept that life alive.
In themselves, lit'urgy and prayer are not renewal for they
are above and beyond the category of renewal. But if, as we
all feel and believe today, we need a renewal, then we must
rediscover them as its source and condition.
 VIII
TOWARDS A THEOLOGY
OF COUNCILS
"There are diversities of gifts,
but the same Spirit, and there are
diversities of administrations, but
the same Lord, and there are di-
versities of operations, but it is the
same God, who worketh all in all."
-I Corinthians 12 :4-6.

1.

A clarification of the idea of "council" ( synod, sobor),

of its place and function in the life of the Church, is on the
theological agenda of our time. There is, on the one hand,
the challenge from outside: Rome and her council, the ecu-
menical movement and its progressive embodiment in the form
of "councils." There is, on the other hand, the internal situ-
ation of the Orthodox Church herself. On all levels of her life
a growing tendency towards a more "conciliar" form of church
government can be detected. For the first time in many cen-
turies the various autocephalous churches seem to be over-
coming their national isolation and self-sufficiency and to
acknowledge the need for coming together, as they have at
recent pan-Orthodox conferences. On the diocesan and parish
levels, councils, committees and commissions have become so
self-evident that a young Orthodox would probably not believe
that only fifty years ago they virtually did not exist. And yet,

* Originally published in St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 6.4 (.1962),

pp. 170-184.

159
160 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

although there seems to exist a basic agreement that "con-

ciliarity" ( sobornost') belongs to the very essence of the Or-
thodox concept of the Church, an obvious uneasiness appears
when it comes to applying this general principle to life. Ten-
sions, conflicts, controversies indicate a fundamental confu-
sion as to the real meaning and practice of "conciliarity," a
clash between opposing conceptions of councils, their consti-
tution, rights and functions. We see this confusion in the
constant tension between priests and parish councils, in the
rising tide of various laymen's organizations, youth move-
ments, etc., all claiming · the right to take an active part in
church government and to limit what seems to them an un-
justified clerical monopoly. This confusion calls for a con-
structive rethinking of the very principle of conciliarity, for
its truly Orthodox definition and interpretation. We need a
theology of councils as a general foundation and framework
for the practice of conciliarity. And although it will take much
time and effort to elaborate it in all its details, the task cannot
be postponed any longer. Distortions and heresies �re creeping
into the life of the Church, and silence means 'betrayal.' We
must begin-this essay being no more than a beginning-by
an attempt to clarify some basic presuppositions, to indicate
some possible directions for a constructive discussion.

2.

The Orthodox Church claims to be the church of councils.

This claim is clear enough in its negative· connotations when
directed against Roman papalism 'or Protestant individualism.
But what does it mean as a positive affirmation? To realize
the difficulties implied in answering this question, we must
remember, first, that no theological definition of a "council"
has so far been commonly accepted,' and, second, that in her
history the Orthodox Church has had not one, but several pat-
terns of councils, which in many respects differed rather sub-
stantially one from another. Thus, for example, there is no
1
Cf. Nicholas Afanassiev, •. Le Concile dans la theologie orthodoxe russe,"
inlrenikon 35 (1952), pp. 316-339.
Towards a Theology of Councils 161

evidence of any "councils" in the modern meaning of this

term for the hundred years between the so-called Apostolic
Council in Jerusalem ( Acts 15) and the "gatherings of the
faithful" in Asia mentioned by Eusebius in connection with
Montanism. 2 Does this mean, to quote a Russian historian of
the early councils, that the "conciliar institution did not func-
tion for a whole century"? 3 But then how can this institution
be an essential element of the Church's life? All early councils
known to us are exclusively episcopal in their membership.
But they differ considerably one from another as to their form
and functions. The ecumenical councils cannot be isolated
from the imperial context within which they operated. The
provincial councils described in the various canonical collec-
tions of the fourth and fifth centuries are short conventions
of bishops of all the churches, whereas the later patriarchal
synods became a permanent organ of church government.
I have analyzed elsewhere the ecclesiological implications of
these differences,' and there is no need to repeat this analysis
here. But there remains the significant fact that in Russia,
for example, during the whole "synodal period" ( eighteenth-
nineteenth centuries) there were no councils of bishops, and
the Russian episcopate as a whole met for the first time at the
memorable Moscow Sobor of 1917-18; yet this time not as
a bishops' council, but as a council of bishops, clergy and laity.
This meant a radically new idea of church government and of
the council itself, an idea which has provoked and still provokes
controversies within the Church.
It is evident, therefore, that a purely external study of the
councils, their constitution, membership and procedures cannot
give us a clear-cut definition of what councils must be in
our own time and situation. The "conciliar principle" firmly
proclaimed by our whole Tradition cannot be simply identified
with any of its multiple historical and empirical expressions.
And thus, from the "phenomenology" of councils, we must
I
Eusebius, Eccles. Hist., V, 16, 10.
I A. I. Pokrovsky, The Synods of the First Three Centuries (Sergeiev Posad,
1914-in Russian), p. 14.
' Cf. my essay "The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology," in The
Primacy of Peter (The Faith Press, London, 1963), pp. 30-56.
162 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

go to their "ontology," i.e., to their relation to the totality of

the Church's life, to their ecclesiological roots and foundations.

3.

To achieve this we must, first of all, overcome the one-

sided, yet usual, tendency to approach the problem of councils
exclusively from the point of view of church government. In
our "westernizing" theological systems, ecclesiology was in-
deed reduced to the question of "church order," to the
institutional aspect of the Church. It is as if theologians
had tacitly admitted that "institution" has priority over
"life," or, in other terms, that the Church as the new
life of grace and communion with God, as the reality
of redemption, is "generated" by the Church as insti-
tution. Within this approach the Church was studied
as a set of "valid" institutions, and the whole ecclesiological
interest was focused on the formal conditions of "validity"
and not on the reality of the Church herself. In the Orthodox
perspective, however, this reality-the Church as the new life
in Christ and participation in the new aeon of the Kingdom,
has priority over "institution." This does not mean that the
institutional aspect of the Church is secondary, contingent and
non-essential - such an assumption would lead us to a protes-
tantizing deviation in ecclesiology. It means only that insti-
tution is not the "cause" of the Church, but the means of her
expression and actualization in "this world," of her identity
with, and participation in, the reality of the New Being. Else-
where I proposed to define as sacramental the relationship
between the Church as institution and the Church as the reality
of the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit.
Sacrament, in this connotation, primarily means the passage
from the old into the new, for this passage constitutes the very
essence of the Church's life.5 There exists, therefore, an or-
ganic and essential link between "institution" and "reality"
(grace, new life, new creation) but its definition in terms of
5
Cf. my essay "Theology and Eucharist," in St. Vladimir's Theological
Quarterly 5.4 ( 1961), p. 10 and following.
Towards a Theology of Councils 163

cause and effect is misleading because it replaces an ecclesiology

of contents with an ecclesiology of form, centered almost ex-
clusively on the question of validity; and validity is a purely
juridical and formal concept which in itself and by itself
neither reveals nor communicates any living content. To debate
whether three drops of water are "sufficient" to make a bap-
tism valid, or whether it requires "immersion," is perfectly
meaningless as long as the institutional form of a sacrament
is understood merely as a causa efficiens of a result, whose
real meaning and "content" are not revealed in this form
itself. Any form agreed upon as "necessary and sufficient,"
i.e. given a juridical sanction, can guarantee "validity." In
the Orthodox perspective, however, the "validity" of the in-
stitution or "form" comes to it from its ontological adequacy
to the reality which it truly "represents," makes present, and
therefore can communicate and fulfill. The institution is sacra-
mental because its whole purpose is constantly to transcend
itself as institution, to fulfill and actualize itself as New Being;
and it can be sacramental because as institution it corresponds
to the reality it fulfills, is its real image.
These general remarks must now be applied to the problem
of councils. As long as they are considered only in terms of
"power" and "governn1ent,, their understanding will remain
hopelessly one-sided. The first question is not: tt\Vhat is a
valid council?" or: "Who are the members of a council?" or
even: "How much power has a council?" The first question
is: "What is a council and how does it reflect the conciliar
nature of the Church herself?" Before we understand the place
and the function of the council in the Church, we must, there-
fore, see the Church herself as a council. For she is indeed a
council in the deepest meaning of this word because she is
primarily the revelation of the Blessed Trinity, of God and
of divine life as essentially a perfect council. The Trinitarian
foundations of the Church have been badly neglected in the
modern ecclesiological revival, which has been dominated
heavily by the idea of organism and organic unity on the one
hand, that of "institutionalism" on the other hand." But the
idea of organism isolated from a Trinitarian context (i.e.
e Ibidem, p. 14.
164 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

unity as unity of persons) may lead to a dangerously imper-

sonal and almost "biological" concept of the Church. The
Church is Trinitarian in both "form" and "content" because
she is the restoration of man and his life as an image of God,
who is Trinity. She is an image of the Trinity and the gift
of Trinitarian life because life is redeemed and restored in her
as essentially conciliar. The new life given in Christ is unity
and oneness: "that they may be one as we are"· (John 17: 11).
Being council in "content," the divine gift of life, the Church
is, therefore, council in "form," as institution, for the purpose
of all her institutional aspects is to fulfill the Church as perfect
council, to grow into the fulness of "conciliar life." All her life,
and not only a "council" in the technical sense of this term, is
conciliar because "conciliarity" is her essential quality. Each
act of her self-edification-worship, prayer, teaching, preaching,
heaing-is conciliar for it is both founded in the sobornost'
of. her new life in Christ and its fulfillment or actualization.
And it is this conciliar ontology of the Church in the totality
of her essence and life that constitutes the framework for the
function of the council in church government.

4.

The Church is conciliar and the Church is hierarchical.

There exists today a tendency to oppose these two qualifications
of the Church, or at least to emphasize one over the other,
On the "clerical" side, conciliarity is viewed as contained
within the hierarchical principle, as limited to hierarchy. A
council here is primarily a council of the hierarchy itself and,
ideally, the laity ought to be excluded from it. Many a priest
considers the participation of laity in various church councils
as a regrettable compromise with the spirit of our time, a
compromise to be disposed of when the clergy recovers suf-
ficient "control" of the Church. On the "lay" side, we see the
opposite trend. Here it is the '(hierarchy" that must ultimately
submit itself to "conciliarism," to become the executors of
decisions taken by councils of which the laity are an integral,
if not the leading, part.
Towards a Theology of Councils 165
It is indeed tragic that these two tendencies are accepted
today as the only alternatives, for both are wrong. They are
the result of a deviation from the truly Orthodox concept of
conciliarity, which excludes the "clerical" as well as the purely
"democratic" interpretations and which is neither opposed
to the hierarchical principle nor diluted in it. The truth is that
the hierarchical principle belongs to the very essence of the
council, as the latter is revealed and understood in the Church.
The perfect "council," the Blessed Trinity, is a hierarchy and
not an impersonal equality of interchangeable "members."
Orthodox theology has always stressed this hierarchical con-
cept of Trinitarian life, so that the very oneness of God is
ascribed precisely to the unique type of relationship between
the persons of the Trinity. The Trinity is the perfect council
because the Trinity is the perfect hierarchy. And the Church,
since she is the gift and the manifestation of the true life,
which is Trinitarian and conciliar, is hierarchical because she
is conciliar, hierarchy being the essential quality of con-
ciliarity. To oppose these two principles is to deviate from the
Orthodox understanding of both hierarchy and council. For
sobornost'; as revealed in the Church, is not a dissolution of
persons in an impersonal unity which would then be unity only
inasmuch as it rejects and ignores the distinction of persons,
their unique and personal being. Sobornost' is unity of persons,
who fulfill their personal being in "conciliarity" with other
persons, who are council inasmuch as they are persons, so that
1nany are one ( and not merely "united") without ceasing to
be meny, And this true conciliarity, the oneness of many, is
by its very nature hierarchical, for hierarchy is, above every-
thing else, the total mutual recognition of persons in their
unique, personal qualifications, of their unique place and
function in relation to other persons, of their objective and
unique vocation within the conciliar life. The principle of
hierarchy implies the idea of obedience but not that of sub-
ordination, for obedience is based on a personal relationship
whereas subordination is, in its very essence, an impersonal
one. The Son is fully obedient to the Father, but He is not
subordinated to Him. He is perfectly obedient because He
perfectly and fully knows the Father as Father. But He is not
166 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

subordinated to Him because subordination implies imperfect

knowledge and relationship and, therefore, the necessity of
"enforcement" . . . Hierarchy, thus, is not a relationship of
"power" and "submission" but of a perfect obedience of all
to all in Christ, obedience being the recognition and the knowl-
edge of the personal gifts and charisms of each by all.
Whatever is truly conciliar is truly personal and, therefore,
truly hierarchical. And the Church is hierarchical simply be-
cause she is the restored life, the perfect society, the true
council. To ordain someone to a hierarchical function does
not mean his elevation above the others, his opposition to them
as "power" to "submission." It means the recognition by the
Church of his personal vocation within the Ecclesia, of his
appointment by God, who knows the hearts of men and is,
therefore, the source of all vocations and gifts. It is, thus, a
truly conciliar act, for it reveals the obedience of all: the
obedience of the one who is ordained, the obedience of those
who ordain him, i.e. recognize in him the divine call to the
ministry of government, the obedience of the whole Church
to the will of God.
For this reason, all contemporary attempts to limit the
"power" of the clergy or to give the laity a share in this power
are based on an incredible confusion. "Clergy" are, by defini-
tion, those whose special ministry and "obedience" is to
govern the Church and whom the Church has recognized as
called to this ministry. This confusion can be explained only
by a complete secularization of the very idea of church gov-
ernment and of the Church herself. The partisans of lay
participation in church government do not seem to understand
that the "spiritual power" which they acknowledge in the
clergy-the power to perform the sacraments, to preach, to
confess, etc. - not only is not different from the power to
administer the Church, but that it is the same power. Those
who edify the Church through Word and Sacrament are those
who govern it, and vice versa, those who govern it are those
whose ministry is to build it by Word and Sacrament. The real
question concerning church government, and more specifically,
its conciliar nature, is not whether laity should or should not
be given a share in the power of the clergy. In this form the
Towards a Theology of Councils 167

question is a nonsensical one, for it implies a confusion between

clergy and laity, alien to the whole tradition of the Church,
to the very foundations of Orthodox ecclesiology. The real
question concerns the relation between the ministry of govern-
ment and the conciliar nature of the Church. How does the
hierarchical principle f ttlfill the Church as council? The un-
fortunate reduction of the whole problem of church govern-
ment to a competition between clergy and laity obscures this
real question, which, if it is properly understood and answered,
solves at the same time the "clergy-laity" problem.

5.

The government of the Church operates on three distinct

levels: the parish, the diocese, and supra-diocesan entities such
as the metropolitan district, the autocephalous church and,
ultimately, the Church Universal. But before we analyze each
one of them from the «conciliar" point of view, we must
briefly acknowledge a very important difference which exists
between our present situation and the early Church, a difference
which, although it is obvious to every one who has studied
the canonical tradition of the Church, has nevertheless been
the object of no serious ecclesiological study. In the early
Church every «parish" was in fact a "diocese," if by parish
we mean a local ecclesia-a concrete, visible community-and
by "diocese" a church governed by one bishop. As is well
known, there existed at the beginning no "parish priests," and
each local community was normally headed by a bishop. All
definitions and descriptions of church government in classical
canonical collections are given, therefore, in reference to the
normal bearer of ecclesiastical power, i.e., the bishop. This
means that in order to elucidate the basic structure of church
government, one must begin with the "local church" in its
early and classical expression.
Several recent studies in early ecclesiology stress - and
rightly so - the central and unique position of the bishop in
the ecclesia. The trend is still to def end the "monarchical"
episcopate, and to the old arguments several new ones have
168 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

been added, especially since the rediscovery of the "eucharis-

tic," sacramental ecclesiology of the early Church. And yet
brought to its extreme this trend may lead to a distorted
picture. In fact, the term "monarchical" is scarcely a happy
one when applied to the early episcopate. All available
evidence points to the very real importance of the presbyterium
in the local church, the college of presbyters or elders being
precisely the council of the bishop and an essential organ of
church government. Long before their trans£ormation into
heads of separate communities the members of the "second
order" existed as a necessary collective complement of the
bishop's power, and early rites of ordination point to the «gift
of government" as the principal charisrn of the presbyters.
From the very beginning the government of the Church was
truly conciliar, and it is precisely the relationship between the
unique function and ministry of the bishop, on the one hand,
and the government of the presbyters, on the other hand, that
reveals to us the basic contents of what we described above as
"hierarchical conciliarism" or "conciliar hierarchy," as the
organic unity of the conciliar and the hierarchical principles
within the Church.
This relationship reveals, first, the true nature of church
government. Here again, the term "sacramental" may be used.
On the one hand, the presbyters really govern the Church, i.e.
take care of all the immediate needs of the community, both
material and spiritual. But, on the other hand, it is the function
of the bishop, his own and unique ministry or leitourgia, to
refer all these acts of church life to the ultimate purpose of
the Church, to transform them into acts of the Church's self-
edification and self-fulfillment as the Body of Christ. And he
does it primarily through his functions of proistamenos, the
president of the eucharistic assembly, which is the sacrament
of the Church in which all gifts, all ministries, all vocations
are indeed united and sealed as acts of the "same God, who
worketh all in all" (I Cor. 12:6). "Government," "administra-
tion" are thus revealed to be not just autonomous areas within
the Church, but an integral part of the Church as the sacra-
ment of the Kingdom. The gift of government is a charism,
and the presbyters are not simple advisors" of the bishop,
C(
Towards a Theology of Councils 169
but in ordination they truly receive this charism, as their
charism. Their government is real, and yet they can do nothing
without the bishop, i.e. without his recognition of all their
acts as acts of the Church, for he alone has the "power" to
unify and to express the life of the community as the "new
life" of the Church of God. The government of the Church
is thus truly hierarchical and truly conciliar. The presbyters,
or "elders," are the leading members of the ecclesi«, those in
whom the whole Church has recognized the gifts of wisdom,
justice, teaching, administration. They are not opposed to laity,
but are ·its true representatives, for they express and manage
all the real needs of the people, and this is why they are pres-
byters. Their government is conciliar because in their plurality
they can express the whole reality of the concrete community,
the variety of its needs and aspirations. But this plurality is
transformed into, and sealed as, oneness by the bishop, whose
specific charism is to "fulfill" the Church as one, holy, catholic
and apostolic. If the presbyters were mere "subordinates" of
the bishop, delegates of his power, executives of his orders,
with no initiative, no "life," of their own, the bishop would
have nothing to "transform," nothing to express, nothing to
fulfill. The Church would cease to be a council, a body, a
hierarchy and would become '(power" and "subordination."
She would no longer be the sacrament of the new life in Christ.
But it is the real life of the Church as council, as family, as
oneness that the bishop fulfills, and he does this because it is
his very charism to have nothing of his own but rather to
belong-truly and absolutely-to all, to have no other life, no
other power, no other end than to unite all in Christ.
It is impossible to analyze here even briefly the process
which transformed the original "episcopal" structure of the
local church into what we know today as parish. This process,
although it represents one of the most radical changes that
ever took place in the Church, remained, strange as it may
seem, virtually unnoticed by ecclesiologists and canonists. And
this lack of ecclesiological reaction explains why it is on the
parish level that the crisis of church government seems to have
its focus today. It has not been sufficiently understood that the
transformation of the presbyter-member of the bishop's coun-
170 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

cil into the hierarchical head of a separate community trans-

formed in fact the very idea of church government and power.
The bishop, on the one hand, was deprived of his "council,"
and his power became indeed «monarchical." The priest, on
the other hand, became a simple subordinate of this monarch-
ical power, and from "conciliar" the bishop-priest relationship
became a relationship of subordination and "delegation of
power." All this meant a deep transformation of the original
conciliar understanding of both hierarchy and ecclesia. The
concept of hierarchy was identified with that of subordination,
of greater and lesser degrees of power. As for the parish,
deprived of the conciliar government which the "episcopal"
Church had in the presbyterium, it lost for several centuries
even the rudimentary forms of conciliar life, ceased to be
«council" in any real meaning of this word. It was thus forced,
first, into a purely passive understanding of the laos as com-
pletely subordinated to the hierarchy, and then, the progress
of democratic ideas helping, into a lay rebellion against the
hierarchy. The "clericalization" of the Church was to provoke
inevitably its logical counterpart-a rebellion. And yet, this
rebellion should not be explained entirely by ignorance, evil
influences of the «modern world," etc. From the Orthodox
point of view, "clericalism" is also a deviation, an error. And
the attempts of today's laity to have a greater "share" in church
life, obscured and deficient as they are, are nourished by a
confused yet justified desire to recover the sobornost', the true
conciliarity of the Church. To crush them by an excess of
clericalism would be as bad as to accept them in their secu-
laristic, legalistic, democratic forms. What we must seek is the
restoration of the eternal truth of the Church.

6.

First of all, we must simply acknowledge the fact that

today the immediate, concrete expression of the Church is no
longer the visible gathering of the faithful under the bishop,
but the parish. A Christian knows the Church and lives in the
Church as a member of his parish, which to him is the only
Towards a Theology of Councils 171

visible ecclesia. The diocese is for him a more or less abstract

administrative echelon, not a living reality. The parishioners
see the bishop on certain solemn occasions or appeal to him
when a crisis arises in their parish. Because of this real situation,
all attempts simply to return to the "episcopal" experience of
the Church in its second- or third-century forms ( episcopus
in ecclesia et ecclesia in episoco po) will remain the domain of
academic wishful thinking as long as we ignore the reality
of the parish and the position of the priest in it. We must
admit that many of the characteristics of the early "episcopal"
community have been assumed by the parish, just as the priest
has been given many of the bishop's functions. Today, the
priest is the normal celebrant, pastor and teacher of the
Church, all functions which in the early Church were fulfilled
by the bishop.
This transformation raises two important questions. A
first one, which we cannot analyze here in all its applications,
concerns the bishop-priest relationship. To explain the change
in the priest's status only in terms of "delegated power,"
as is done by the supporters of "episcopalisrn" a outrance, to
reduce, in other words, the priest to the position of a bishop's
delegate, is simply impossible. The priest is ordained to the
priesthood, and not to be a '' delegate," and this means that
he has the priesthood of the Church in his own right.
One cannot be priest, teacher and pastor by "delegation,"
and there can be no delegated charism." The very transfor-
ee

mation of his status was possible because from the beginning

the presbyter was a priest, shared in the priestly functions.
But then if he is, in a real sense, the head of a community,
if his ministry is to fulfill it as "Church," the second question,
that of the conciliar aspects of his power, must of necessity be
raised. It must be admitted that for a long time, the parish
as community, as ecclesia, simply did not exist outside a com-
mon attendance at worship; and the absence of "conciliarity"
transformed the very piety of the faithful into an individual-
istic and liturgical piety from which the very idea of "com-
munity" and oneness of life were excluded. From this point
of view, the ideas of parish council and parish meeting emerge,
not from a source alien to tradition, but, in spite of all possible
172 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

and actual deviations, from the deep instinct of the Church.

The only tragedy is that on both sides, the "clerical" and the
«lay," this conciliarity is understood and formulated within
a narrow juridical framework, is expressed in terms of "rights"
and «duties," "voting" and "decision-making" and other
purely secular categories. There exists the deeply un-Orthodox
opposition of "spiritual" matters to «material" ones, an op-
position which contradicts and destroys the sacramental nature
of the Church, where all that is "material" is transformed and
spiritualized, and all that is spiritual possesses a power of
transformation.
The conciliar principle which has been "forced" on the
parish need not be either rejected or «limited" by reinforce-
ment of "clericalism." It must be churched. This means, on the
one hand, the acceptance by the clergy of the true hierarchical
principle, which is not naked «power" but a deeply spiritual
and pastoral concern for the Church as family, as oneness of
life and manifestation of spiritual gifts. Not only must the
priest not be afraid of "conciliarity," he must encourage and
seek it, he must help every member of the Church to discover
his particular "gift" and «vocation" within the life of the Body
and unite all these gifts in the unity of life and "edification"
of the Church. This means, on the other hand, a slow process
of lay education, the overcoming by the laity of their defensive
reflexes and attitudes. And this will take place only when the
laity understand that the priest really needs them, that he
needs not their «votes," but their talents, their advice, their
real "council" or, in other terms, their real participation in
the life of the Church. True conciliarity is neither expressed
nor achieved in the purely formal and abstract «right to vote."
One must realize that there is in fact nothing to vote upon in
the Church, for all the issues that may arise in the life of the
Church are ultimately related to Truth itself, and Truth can-
not be a matter of voting. Yet to reach this Truth, to "apply
it to life," requires an effort of mind and heart, of conscience
and will, and in this effort all can and must participate and
help, all can have a «voice": this is true conciliarity. If indeed
the "power of decision," the final responsibility, belongs to
the priest, in the process of reaching that decision as truly
Towards a Theology of Councils 173

ecclesial, he needs the help of all, for his power is to express

the "mind of the Church." The mind of the Church is Christ's
mind in us, our mind in Christ, it is the obedience of free
children and not that of slaves, an obedience based on knowl-
edge, understanding, participation and not on blind sub-
ordination. It is knowledge of Truth that makes us truly free
and truly obedient. All this means that the parish council
properly understood is not a committee of practical and busi-
ness-minded men elected to "manage" the "material interests"
of the parish, but the council of the priest in all aspects of
church life. There should exist indeed a special rite of ap-
pointing the parish elders to the council, which would express
and emphasize the spiritual dimensions of their ministry; and
there is a real need for retreats and sessions at which active
laypersons would be guided to understand the mystery of the
Church . . . All this, however, will remain wishful thinking
as long as clergy themselves contribute to the secularization
of the laity by limiting their initiative in the life of the Church
to "finances" and "fund-raising" and by ignoring the Orthodox
concept of the laos tou Theou, the People of God. And if the
conciliar principle is not restored on the parish level, its other
expressions will remain meaningless and inoperative.

7.

Of all the levels of. church government, the diocese is

probably the most "nominal" today. It is somehow squeezed
between the. reality of the parish and that of the. supra-dio-
cesan power-the patriarch, the synod, etc. And yet it is on
the diocesan level that the essential "power" in the Church-
the bishop-is to be expressed and fulfilled. There exists,
therefore, a double problem: that of the relationship between
the diocese and the parish, and that of its place within a
wider grouping of churches.
We have stated already that the "parish" has acquired
many characteristics of the early "episcopal" church and is, in
£act, the actual form of the local church. Yet it is highly
significant that during the Christianization of the Roman
174 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Empire, as Christian communities increased in number, the

office of the bishop, which we know to have been the essential
office of the local church, was not multiplied accordingly but
remained attached only to principal churches. The attempt
to introduce into the Church the so-called chorepisco poi, or
rural bishops, failed. This radical departure from the early
structure of the local Church is usually explained as an ac-
ceptance by the Church of secular principles of government,
i.e, as a certain "collapse" of the early ecclesiology. But this
explanation is, to say the least, one-sided. The office of the
bishop and his place in the whole life of the Church were
too central, too essential to have been so easily "adjusted"
to a non-ecclesial pattern of government. There must have
been a reason within the Church herself, within her own
"logic," which made her prefer the dislocation of the local
church into parishes to the multiplication of bishops. To find
this reason is essential for the proper understanding of the
diocese-parish relationship in our own situation. It seems to
us that virtually all historians who have dealt with the changes
in ecclesiastical structure following the conversion of Con-
stantine have overlooked one very important "sociological"
factor. It is well known that during the first three centuries
the Church remained almost exclusively an urban phenomenon,
and the expansion of Christianity began with the great metro-
politan centers of the Graeco-Roman world. This means that
the local church, in its earliest form, did not correspond to,
or express, a natural community as an organic and pre-existing
society, but was the ecclesia, the gathering of people belonging
to a great variety of backgrounds, social positions, etc. All
early evidence, beginning with St. Paul's epistles, supports
this affirmation. The Church was in Rome but it was not yet
the Church of Rome. This means also that, not being identi-
fied with any class, group, district or cc way of life," the early
"local church" had a natural "catholicity," an all-embracing
quality, so that being absolutely free from any "organic"
connections with "this world," she could truly represent the
whole of it, be open to all. The conversion of the empire
meant, from this point of view, a progressive identification
of each local church with a natural community, with an
Towards a Theology of Councils 175

organic local "society" finding in the Church the religious ex-

pression and sanction of its existence. But a natural local
community is never truly "catholic," for it is, by its very es-
sence, self-centered and limited in its own interests and needs.
It is ontologically "selfish," this being especially true of the
rural communities, and it was this danger of "naturalization,"
i.e. of a complete identification with the natural community,
that the Church faced beginning with the fourth century -
the danger, in other terms, of loosing the catholicity of her
life. The only way to counteract this danger was to keep the
"local churches" within a wider ecclesiastical framework, thus
preventing them from being completely identified with "local
life" with all its inescapable limitations and self-centeredness.
The acceptance by the Church of the diocesan structure -the
bishop remaining in the "metropolis" and the priests becoming
heads of parishes - was thus not a compromise with the im-
perial administrative structure, but, on the contrary, a re-
action of the ecclesiastical organism to the danger of being
"absorbed" by natural society.
What was true centuries ago remains true - mutatis
mutandis - today. Sociological conditions and structures have
changed, but a parish is still essentially conditioned by its
environment and, therefore, naturally limited in its "catho-
licity." Its life, the very scope of its possibilities and resources
depends, of necessity, on a given "situation" which the parish,
if left to itself, cannot and probably must not fully trans-
cend. It may be a "middle-class" or a "worker" or a "mission-
ary" or a "suburban" parish, and although ideally none of
these qualifications ought simply to determine its life, none
of them can be ignored. Therefore, it is from the diocese
that a parish receives its catholicity, i.e. the constant challenge
to transcend itself as a self-centered and self-sufficient com-
munity, to identify itself not only with its own "people" and
their "religious needs," but with the Church and her eternal
"needs." Catholicity is the identity of each church with the
one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, and for each com-
munity to be "catholic" means to be "accorded with the
whole," to live not only together with all other communities,
but also towards an ultimate goal, which transcends all local
176 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

needs, all local "situations" and limitations, for it is nothing

else but the Kingdom of God. And the bearer, the organ and
the minister of catholicity is the bishop. It is his charism and
duty to give the Church direction and purpose, to call each
parish and all of them together to fulfill themselves as move-
ment, as pilgrimage towards the Kingdom, to edify the
Church. The diocese, thus, is parishes together, united in the
bishop, who by his "episcopacy" - supervision, guidance,
teaching, organizing - transforms their separate existences
into one life which is indeed the life of the Church. A parish
has neither the resources nor the inner impetus for a full
catholicity. It can have it only together with other similar
communities, which all together transcend their natural limi-
tations, and they have it within a "catholic structure" which
transcends each one of them separately and yet is their life
as oneness, communion and unity of purpose.
But here again the very nature of the diocese requires the
full restoration of the conciliar principle. Just as the parish
because of its lack of conciliarity was for a long time a mere
"cultic" institution, the diocese, if understood only in terms
of "central administration," becomes a mere bureaucracy with
the bishop as head not so much of the Church but of various
administrative organs. To be a living center for all parishes,
the real organ of their unity and common life, the bishop
must be in a conciliar relationship with all of them, and this
must be achieved through the bishop's council, i.e. the pres-
byterium.
The priest is the organic link between the bishop and the
parish, yet not only in terms of "subordination" · and "dele-
gation of powers" but precisely in those of "conciliar unity."
The priests together with the bishop are the living image of
the diocese as Cburcb, for in each priest his whole parish is
truly "re-presented," made present, just as in the unity of the
bishop with his priests the catholicity of the Church is made
present to all parishes. The presbyterium, i.e. a corporate
unity of priests with a bishop, must be restored, comple-
menting the actual individual relationship between the bishop
and each priest. This is the only organic diocesan council,
organic because rooted in the very nature of the Church. Here
Towards a Theology of Councils 177

not only are all affairs of the diocese discussed but the very
direction of the Church's life is shaped and acknowledged.
The decisions of the bishop are then no longer "executive
orders" but organic decisions of the Church herself. Modern
means of communication, the whole modern "way of life"
would make it indeed easy for the "presbyteriurn" to meet with
the bishop regularly - three or four times a year. It would
give the diocese a reality which it lacks today. The conciliarity
of the parish would find its organic fulfillment in the concili-
arity of the diocese.

8.

Finally, the conciliarity of the Church on any supra-

diocesan level - the metropolitan district or province, the
autocephalous church and, ultimately, the Church Universal -
is expressed and fulfilled in the council of bishops. The
churches come together and fulfill themselves as One Church
in and through the unity of bishops. Episcopatus unus est, and
the supreme power in the Church belongs to the bishops. This
truth needs no elaboration for the whole Tradition supports it,
We have discussed elsewhere 1 the structure and the meaning
of episcopal conciliarism, and there is· no need to repeat this
discussion· here. The only point which indeed needs elucida-
tion is the modern trend to include priests and laity in the
"supreme authority" of the Church, to make not bishops'
councils but the councils of bishops, priests and laity the organ
of that authority. The fundamental danger of this trend is
that, by undermining and confusing the hierarchial principle, it
undermines at the same time the genuine conciliarity of the
Church. If, as we tried to show, hierarchy is the very form and
condition of conciliarity, it really belongs to the bishops to
express the whole life of the Church, to be the true representa-
tives of her fulness. The actual structure of our clergy-laity
councils, however, creates the impression that each "order"
of the Church has its specific "interests," so that the laity,
for example, has needs and interests different from, if not
7
Cf. "The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology" quoted above.
178 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

opposed to, those of the clergy. Clergy become representatives

of clergy, and laity those of the laity. But then the "concili-
arity" of the Church simply ceases to exist and is replaced by
a "balance of power" which results too often in constant
frustration for both clergy and laity. In fact, however, it is the
very essence and purpose of the clergy to express and to fulfill
the real "interests" and needs not of "laity" as opposed to
clergy, but of the laos - the People of God, the Church of
Christ. No one in the Church has interests or needs different
from those of the Church herself, for it is the very life of the
Church to unite all of us in grace and truth. If the true concili-
arity of which we speak here is restored on each level of the
Church, if every member of the Church fully participates in
her life according to his calling, gifts and position, if, in
other words, the Church is fully and truly council in all her
manifestations, there is simply no need for anything else
as the ultimate expression of this council but the council of
bishops - the very image and fulness of the one, holy, catholic
and apostolic Church. This does not mean that the council
of bishops has to be a secret, closed meeting of "executives."
It can and must be open to the participation, advice, interest
and comments of the whole Church. "Public opinion" in its
truly Christian form - as concern for the Church, as an active
interest in her life, as free discussion of her problems, as
initiative - is another and most welcome form of "concili-
arity," and the fear of it, the tendency of our hierarchy to
act by means of faits accomplis, without any previous discus-
sion of ecclesiastical matters with the body of the Church, is
indeed a dangerous tendency, a misunderstanding of the true
nature of power in the Church.
The Church is hierarchical because it is conciliar. It fulfills
itself as "council" by being hierarchical. This fundamental
truth is the starting point for a truly Orthodox theology of
councils.
 IX
FREEDOM IN THE CHURCH
1.

When the invitation was extended to me to prepare a paper

on "Freedom in the Church," my first reaction was that of all
possible subjects this particular one ought to be treated not
by an Eastern Orthodox but by a Westerner. For the great
debate on freedom and authority has been indeed a specifically
Western debate, one can even say the very crux of Western
spiritual and intellectual development. The Orthodox East
took no active part in it, partly because at the time of its
theological climax, during the Reformation and the Counter-
Reformation, the separation between the East and the West
was already complete, partly because, as we shall see, the very
essence of this debate was alien to the whole spiritual and
intellectual tradition of Orthodoxy. Why then, such was my
thought, should I interfere with the discussion of a problem
which is truly a Western "specialty"? On second thought,
however, I decided to accept the invitation, and this precisely
for the reason which at first seemed to justify my abstention.
For perhaps it is the very freedom from certain Western
thought-forms and positions that could help an Orthodox, if
not to solve the problem, then at least to ask whether other ap-
proaches to it are open to the Christian mind. And it is the
result of this questioning, of this attempt to look at the prob-
lem of freedom in the Church from a standpoint different from
that moulded in the West, that I dare in all humility to sum-
marize in this paper.

* A paper read at the St. Xavier

Symposium, at St. Xavier College, Chicago,
in 1966, and published in The Word in History, ed. T. Patrick Burke (New
York, Sheed & Ward, 1966) pp. 120-132.

179
180 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

My first question concerns precisely the formulation of

the problem, as it is reflected even in the title given to this
paper: "Freedom in the Church." One is immediately struck
by the dichotomy implied in this formulation which the pre-
position in indicates, suggesting that freedom and Church
are two different concepts, which are, if possible, to be brought
together, but which even when coordinated and reconciled
remain distinct from one another. The ways and methods of
this "coordination" may, in turn, differ, depending on whether
one puts the emphasis on freedom or on Church. One may,
while asking for more freed om, still subordinate it to the
Church, and one may, while accepting the Church, still sub-
ordinate it to freedom. In both cases, however, freedom. and
Church are thought of and remain two distinct concepts, and
the problem consists in finding the best mode of their "cor-
relation" and "interplay." And such has been, up to now at
least, the Western formulation of the problem in its two
main religious expressions: the Catholic ( emphasis on the
Church) and the Protestant ( emphasis on freed om). But
perhaps the first task of a theological investigation of freedom
in the Church is precisely to challenge and to revise the very
presuppositions on which this formulation is based.
Are they not the result of a development - spiritual,
theological and ecclesiastical - in which freedom has come to
be understood and defined mainly, if not exclusively, in terms
of authority, in which, in other terms, freedom and authority
appear to (Cground" each other as two necessary poles of an
essential dichotomy? Freedom here is the relation to an au-
thority, and its definition and even experience depend ulti-
mately on the definition of a corresponding authority, for
without this authority freed om becomes a meaningless vac-
uum. Given a specific "authority," how much "freedom" does
it allocate to those who are under it? - such, in an oversimpli-
fied form, seems to be the ultimate question. And whether this
freedom is defined as freedom from (power, control, guidance,
authoritative pronouncements) or as freedom to ( express one-
self, theologize, act, etc.) it still remains dependent on, and
ultimately subordinated to, the concept and the definition of
authority.
Freedom in the Church 181

But it is this very subordination, this very dichotomy, that,

in my opinion, must be questioned and rejected if we are to
see the real problem of freedom and Church. And it must be
rejected because in fact it is a self-destructive dichotomy.
Pushed to its logical conclusions, it simply annihilates the two
concepts which it claims to "ground" and to define. And if the
institutional Church is slow to realize it, and is still dreaming
of an optimistic compromise in which some reasonable freedom
will not threaten and undermine some reasonable authority,
provided the spheres of each are authoritatively defined, the
tragic dialectic of freedom, which constitutes the real spirit-
ual itinerary of the so-called Christian world and which is
inescapably rooted in the tragedy of freedom within the
Church, is here to denounce this dream and to doom it in.
advance. From Saint-Just with his theory of necessary regicide,
through Nietzsche and Dostoievsky, to Berdiaev, Camus,
Sartre and the "death of God" theologians, one and the same
fundamental truth reveals itself: if freedom as concept and
experience is posited and determined by the concept and ex-
perience of authority, such freedom can be satisfied and can
fulfill itself with nothing short of the "murder," of the an-.
nihilation of that authority itself. "This man must either reign
or die," claims Saint-Just pointing at the King, and Nietzsche
with his followers, when they proclaim that God is to die if
man is to be free, are only taking the next logical and final
step. Once poisoned with freedom, man cannot stop halfway,
as Joseph de Maistre saw every clearly; and as long as au-
thority remains, there is no freedom. In absolute terms, the
formula "more freedom, less authority" is not different from
"more authority, less freedom." For it is the very principle of
authority, and not the amount of it, that freedom negates,
for whatever 'the amount of the authority, it ultimately negates
and destroys freedom. And thus the benevolent king dies, and
Nietzsche prefers the "night and more night coming" of a
Godless world to this source and sanction of all authority.
And yet the inescapable logic of the whole "freedom-
authority" dichotomy is that when freed om, in order to fulfill
itself, annihilates authority, it also annihilates itself. For not
only does it become meaningless, an empty form, without its
182 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

opposition to and its revolt against authority but also, in fact,

it is not fulfilled as long as the last "authority" remains, which
is death. It is the eternal merit of Dostoievsky to have shown
us in Kirillov of The Possessed this inescapable interdepend-
ence between supreme freedom and suicide: "He who dares
kill himself is God." Yet in order to become God one must
kill himself! And it seems to me rather significant that Thomas
Altizer, one of the deeper and more consistent representatives
of the "death of God" movement, enthusiastically accepts
Kirillov as a positive hero and credits Dostoievsky with having
created in him the "modern image of Christ." 1 "What a
marvelous coincidence," he writes "that Dostoievsky ...
should have anticipated in his portrayal of Kirillov a radically
modern understanding of Jesus Himself." 2 And it is with the
same sympathy, almost enthusiasm, that the same Altizer
quotes a writer for whom the ultimate victory of life will be
manifested in its "willingness to die."
Such is, I repeat, the inescapable logic of freedom as long
and inasmuch as it is defined in reference to authority, i.e.,
in terms of a limit. It would not be real freedom if it did not
negate and ultimately annihilate that limit. Yet, because
precisely of its ontological dependence on authority, by an-
nihilating the latter, it annihilates itself. Is there a way out
of this dead end? What are the presuppositions of a Christian
theology of freedom?

2.

It is at this point, it seems to me, that the Eastern Orthodox

tradition may be of some help. I do not pretend, of course,
that the Orthodox East has been always and consistently free
from a surrender to the freedom-authority dichotomy. Those
who have glanced through the few things I have written about
my Church know that I am not guilty of any romantic ideal-
ization of her past. But I speak here, not of historical sins
1
T. Altizer, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (Philadelphia,
Westminster Press, 1963), p. 112.
I
Ibid., p. 111.
Freedom in the Church 183

and deviations, but of the Orthodox Principle ( in the way in

which Paul Tillich spoke of the Protestant Principle), and it
cannot be denied that one of its basic elements is precisely
the rejection of freedom understood and defined in terms of
authority. This rejection constitutes the very center of the
Orthodox critique of the West, both Roman Catholic and Prot-
estant, and if I mention this critique here it is not for reasons
of confessional polemics, but because it may help us to under-
stand the positive contents of the Orthodox doctrine of free-
dom in the Church.
In his essay "On the Western Confessions of Faith" the
great Russian lay theologian A. S. Khomiakov wrote: "The
Church is an authority, said Guizot in one of his remarkable
works, while one of his adversaries, attacking him, simply
repeated these words. Speaking in this way, neither one sus-
pected how much untruth and blasphemy lay in the state-
ment . . . No - the Church is not an authority, just as God
is not an authority and Christ is not an authority, since au-
thority is something external to us." 3 For Khomiakov the
initial tragedy of the West, transcending its internal schism,
or rather provoking it, was the identification of the Church
with something alien to her nature - an external and objective
authority. It made inevitable a revolt against this authority,
but the revolt remains necessarily within the framework of
that which it negates - and resulted therefore in a simple
replacement of one external authority with another. 4CThe
Church inspired by God," he writes, "became, for the Western
Christian, something external, a kind of negative authority,
a kind of material authority. It turned man into its slave, and
as a result acquired, in him, a judge." " Once more, I quote
these harsh words only because they can lead us into the real
dialectic of freedom, and I am fully aware that the temptation
of an external or material authority is indeed a universal
temptation. The important point here is that, in the thought
of Khomiakov ( and it could be shown that he truly reflects
3
In Ultimate Questions: An Anthology of Modern Russian Religious
Thought, ed. by Alexander Schmemann (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Win-
ston, 1965), p. 50.
"Ibid., p. 50.
184 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

and formulates a position common to the whole Orthodox

East), this kind of authority is derived not from the Church,
not from her theandric nature, not from her God-inspired life,
but from that which in the New Testament and in Church
Tradition is described as «this world," i.e. the fallen state of
man. The very principle of authority as something external
to man is thus the result of the fall, the fruit of man's aliena-
tion from true life. But then the freed om which that au-
thority posits as its own point of application, as its necessary
counterpart, is also a "fall en freedom," a negative freedom, a
freed om of opposition and revolt and not the ontological
freedom in which man was created and from which he alien-
ated himself in his fall. It is in fact a pseudo-jreedom, for in
its fight against one external authority it is motivated and
dominated by another authority to which it is sooner or later
enslaved. And it cannot be otherwise, because it is a negative
freedom, made up of revolt and protest and having no positive
contents of its. own. Whatever "contents" it may find in its
revolt will again and inescapably become "authority" and
provoke the same endless processs.
According to Khomiakov the central tragedy of Western
Christianity consisted in this, that it accepted as its basis, as
its formative principle, the principle of authority - which is
the very principle of the fall en world; and this acceptance,
of necessity, led to the opposite principle of «fallen freedom."
A principle not only alien to the nature of the Church but
radically opposed to it was introduced into the very texture
of her life. The whole problem of freedom in the Church
was thus vitiated in its very foundation, and became incapable
of a right solution. For the Church is not a combination of
authority and freedom, of limited authority and limited
freedom, a combination which, if it is kept, preserves from
abuses on both sides. The Church is not authority, and there-
fore there is no freedom in the Church, but the Church herself
is freedom, and only the Church is freedom. There can be
no continuity between the fall en freed om of man and the
Church as freedom, because there is no real freed om outside
the Church but only the meaningless fight of mutually an-
nihilating "authorities." Therefore it is not by applying to the
Freedom in the Church 185

Church the abstract and natural concept of "freedom" that

one understands freedom in the Church. Rather it is by
entering the mysterion of the Church that one understands it
as the mystery of freed om. Ecclesiology is indeed the starting
point of a theology of freedom.

3.

If ecclesiology, as a theological discipline, as a systematic

treatise, has failed so far to reveal the life of the Church
as the mystery and gift of freedom, it has been due to one of
its greatest deficiencies: the neglect of the Holy Spirit in His
relation to the Church. For reasons which it is impossible even
briefly to analyze here (but of which some, at least, are directly
connected with what we have said about the acceptance of
«authority" into the concept of the Church), the doctrine of
the Holy Spirit was in many ways cut off from the doctrine
of the Church.
«And in the Holy Spirit, the Church," such is the earliest
form of the third article of the Creed, and it unites-one could
almost say it identifies - the Holy Spirit with the Church.
But in the course of centuries this article was dislocated. If
within systematic theology the Holy Spirit was given all honor
and attention in the De Deo uno et trino, in the De Ecclesia
He retained what could be termed without exaggeration a
subordinate position. From being understood as the very life
of the Church, He came to be seen as a sanction and a
guarantee. Where authority was stressed as the formative
principle of the Church, He was presented as the guarantee
of that authority. Where individual freedom was stressed
against authority, He became the guarantee of surh freedom.
And finally having acquired a clearly de.fined "function" in
the Church, He began to be measured. "It is not by measure
that God gives the Spirit" (John 3: 34). Theology, however,
spent its time measuring the Spirit. The wind of Pentecost
was duly deposited as a capital of grace to be used with
caution. No wonder that the Holy Spirit, not only as the
source but indeed as the very content of that freedom which
186 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

is the Church, as both the gift and the fulfillment of freedom,

or better to say as Freedom itself, was forgotten.
The purpose of this essay is only to define, if possible,
the future task of theology. And it is obviously impossible
even to outline adequately in this short paper the various steps
that would lead us from a fresh investigation of the doctrine
of the Holy Spirit to a new vision of the Church as freedom.
I can only state that in my opinion the first step here must be
greater attention to the very Person of the Holy Spirit as has
been revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures and in the spiritual
tradition of the Church. We must recover the vision and the
experience of the Holy Spirit. The biblical vision of Him,
first of all, as the ruah, the wind "which blows where it wills,
and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence
it comes or whither it goes" (John 3: 8), and also as the
hypostatic Life of the Father and, thus, of the Blessed Trinity
itself. Writes Professor Verhovskoy:

To be the Spirit of something means to be the living

expression of its content, its dynamic power. The Holy
Spirit is often described in Scripture as Power, and the
manifestations of the Spirit are always manifestations
of a divine, living, creative power. We find the same
idea in many names of the Holy Spirit. He is Light -
as the living and creative manifestations of the Divine
Wisdom. If the Son is Wisdom and Truth, the Spirit
of that Wisdom is the Holy Spirit; in Him, or better -
by Him, the whole Wisdom and the whole Truth of
the Son is revealed as Life."

Here is the fundamental intuition, common to the entire

Eastern Orthodox tradition concerning the Holy Spirit: He is
the Life of God, and this means, in terms of this paper-the
hypostatic Freedom of God.
In the context of the problem which interests us here, this
intuition can be formulated in the following way: without
the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, without our communion
5
S. Verhovskoy, God and Man (in Russian-New York, Chekhov, 1956),
p. 367.
Freedom in the Church 187

with Him, God would indeed be authority, the authority of

all authorities, and there would be, therefore, no other free-
dom but that of revolt, the freedom of Kirillov. And without
the Holy Spirit not only God but, in fact, the whole of reality,
all being, would also be "authority" - an external, objective,
compulsory order, Berdiaev' s repulsive "world of objectivity."
Truth would be Authority, as well as Justice, Order, Equality,
etc., and, in fact, all these "values" are authorities in the fallen
world, including ultimately freedom itself: an empty and
meaningless principle of choice and dissent, a "right" leading
nowhere. But it is the very "function" of the Holy Spirit to
abolish authority, or rather to transcend it, and He does this
by abolishing the externality which is the essence of authority
and the essence of "this world" as the fallen world. The
proper role of the Holy Spirit is to connect and to unite, not
by a form of "objective" link, but by revealing and mani-
festing the interiority of all that exists, by restoring and trans-
forming the "object" into the "subject" ( the it into the thou,
in the terms of Martin Buber). And He does it not from outside
as "sanction" or ((guarantee," not as "authority," but from
"inside," for I-Ie Himself is the "inferiority" of all that exists,
the life of life, the gift of Being. He is the uniqueness, the
"fragrance" of everyone and everything, the light of eternity
in each moment of time, the reflection of divine beauty on
the ugliest human face. He is both Freedom itself and the
"content" of freedom, or rather in Him the tragic contra-
diction between freedom as an eternal possibility of an eternal
choice and thus as an eternal, self-annihilating vacuum, and
freedom as fullness of possession, as fulfillment of life -
the contradiction which inescapably makes one freedom negate
the other - is resolved. Freedom is free. It is free not only
from enslavement to authority but also from enslavement
to itself. And it is free because it is neither a negation nor an
affirmation of something external, which both are inescapably
"authority." It is the Presence, not of an abstract or formal
principle, but of a Person who is the very meaning, the very
joy, the very beauty, the very fullness, the very truth, the very
/ife of all life - a Person whom we possess in knowledge,
love and communion, who is not "external" to us, but is in
188 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

us, as light, love and truth, as our communion with every-

thing.
This vision of the Holy Spirit is also the experience of the
Church. A certain approach to theology, although of course
it does not negate that experience, denies it the status of a
"source" of theology, that of a locus theologicus. It draws a
line between theology as a rational structure, as a science, and
"mysticism," and it relegates the latter to a special reli- gious
category or phenomenon, distinct from theology. But in the
Eastern Tradition all genuine theology is, of necessity and by
definition, mystical. This means not that theology is at the
mercy of individual and irrational "visions" and "ex-
periences," but that it is rooted in, made indeed possible, by
the Church's experience of herself as communion of the Holy
Spirit. The famous Palamite controversy about the "created"
or "uncreated" nature of the light seen in the mystical ex-
perience of the "hesychasts" was, among other things, a con-
troversy about the nature of theology, or rather of the object
of theology, which is Truth. Is the truth of theology a rational
deduction from the "data" and "propositions" of the sources?
Is it, in other terms, based on an external "authority,"
a priori proclaimed as such, made an "authority"? Or is it,
primarily, the description of an experience, of the experience
of the Church without which all these "data" and "proposi-
tions," although they may be "objectively" true and consistent,
are not yet the Truth. For the Truth, whose knowledge,
according to the Gospel, makes us free, is certainly not an
"objective truth," certainly not an "authority" - for in this
case the whole dialectic of freedom would again and ines-
capably be set in its hopeless motion. It is the presence of the
Holy Spirit, for it is this presence alone which creates the
"organ" of Truth in us and thus transforms the Truth as "ob-
ject" into "subject." The one who has no Spirit knows no
Truth and is condemned to replace it with authority and
guarantee. "Where will we find a guarantee against error,"
asks Khomiakov, and he answers: CtWhoever seeks beyond
hope and faith for any guarantee of the Spirit is already a
rationalist. For him the Church, too is unthinkable, since he
Freedom in the Church 189

is already, in his whole spirit, plunged in doubt."' And here,

therefore, the experience of the saints, of the "seers of the
Spirit," to quote a beautiful liturgical expression, is decisive.
St. Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian saint of the nineteenth
century and one of the last great representatives of the Eastern
spiritual tradition, says: 'When the Spirit of God descends
t

to man and overshadows him with the fullness of His out-

pouring, then the human soul overflows with unspeakable joy,
because the Spirit of God turns to joy all that He may touch." 7
We have here a perfect, yet existential and not rational, sum-
mary of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, of His relation to
the Church, and of His very nature as freedom. And it is
this doctrine which alone may free us from all false dichoto-
mies and lead us into the proper understanding of the Church
as freedom.

4.

We can come now to practical conclusions. "And I believe

in the Holy Spirit, the Church." The Church is the presence
and the action of the Holy Spirit. And this means that the
Church is freedom. 'Freedom, in other words, is not a "part,"
an element within the Church coexisting with and related to
another element - authority. The Church, being the presence,
the Temple of the Holy Spirit, is that reality in which the very
dichotomy of authority and freedom is abolished, or rather,
is constantly transcended and overcome, and this· constant
victory is the very life of the Church, the victory of commun-
ion over alienation and externality. But - and this is· very
important - the Church is freedom precisely because she is
total obedience to God. This obedience, however, is not the
fruit of a surrender of freedom to an ultimate and ultimately
"objective" Authority, acknowledged finally as invincible and
unshakable, as indeed the "end" of freedom. It is, paradox-
ically as it may sound, the fulfillment of freedom. For the
I Ultimate Questions, p. 54.
7
Quoted in A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, ed. G. Fedotov (New York,
Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 275.
190 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

ultimate gift of the Holy Spirit is not a "state," not a "joy"

or "peace" in itself. It is again a Person: Jesus Christ. It is
the possession of Christ and my being possessed by Christ,
it is my love for Christ and His love for me, it is my faith in
Christ and His faith in me, it is "Christ in me" and "I in
Christ." And Christ is obedience: "obedient unto death, even
death on a Cross" (Phil. 2:8). His obedience is the expression
not of any subordination, of any surrender of freedom to
Authority, but precisely of His total unity with His Father, of
His divinity itself! For not only is His obedience free ( for any
freedom can freely surrender itself), but it is the very mani-
festation, the very essence of His freedom. And if Christ is
the gift of the Holy Spirit, if Christ is the life of the Church,
then the essence of this life is obedience, not to Christ but
Christ's obedience. It is truly a divine obedience because it is
an obedience beyond the dichotomy of freedom and authority,
because it comes not from imperfection but from the perfec-
tion of life revealed in Christ.
All this means that in the Church freedom is manifested
as obedience of all to all in Christ, for Christ is the one who,
by the Holy Spirit, lives in all in communion with God. No
one is above and no one is beneath. The one who teaches has
no "authority," but a gift of the Holy Spirit. And the one
who receives the teaching receives it only if he has the gift of
the Holy Spirit, which reveals to him the teaching not as
"authority" but as Truth. And the prayer of the Church is
not for "sanctions" and "guarantees," but for the Spirit Him-
self - that He may come and abide in us, transforming us into
that living unity in which the obedience of all to all is un-
ceasingly revealing itself as the only freedom.
It is here, of course, that the study of the "phenomeno-
logy" of freedom in the Church could and should begin. My
task was only to outline - and even this in a very preliminary
way - a kind of "prolegomena" to such a study, to show, in
words obviously inadequate, that the mystery of the Church
as freedom is hidden in the mystery of God as the Blessed
Trinity - in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of
God the Father, in the communion of the Holy Spirit. And
this mystery begins to be revealed and communicated to us
Freedom in the Church 191

when the same man says of himself "doulos Iesou Christou" -

"The slave of Jesus Christ" - and then, to each one and to
all of us, cc Stand fast in the freedom in which Christ has set
us free" (Gal. 5:1).
 x
THE ECUMENICAL AGONY
PRELIMINARY NOTE: THE HARTFORD APPEAL

In January 1975 some seventeen American theologians belonging

to, but not officially representing, a wide range of American churches
met at the Hartford Seminary Foundation in Hartford, Connecticut,
to discuss a common reaction to "Pervasive, false and debilitating
notions" which, in the words of one of them, "they believed were
undermining contemporary Christianity and its influence in society."
A preliminary formulation of thirteen such "notions" or "themes"
was prepared by Professor Peter L� Berger and Pastor Richard John
Neuhaus, the two initiators and conveners of the meeting. After three
days of discussions, during which the original draft was substantially
altered and each of the denounced "notions" given an examination,
the group agreed on the text of an "appeal for Theological Affirma-
tion," better known as "The Hartford Appeal," "The response to the
Appeal," writes Peter Berger, "far exceeded the expectations of the
participants. Both here and elsewhere, notably in Europe, the Appeal
has been greeted by acclaim, ridicule, anger, and, especially among lay-
people, an enormous sense of relief that 'somebody finally said what
needed to be said.' Whatever may or may not be the merits of the
Appeal, the response to it unquestionably says something important
about the current state of religion" ( Against the World for the World,
p. 9). .
The group met once more in September 1975, to analyse and to
'evaluate response to the Appeal, and to clarify. and elaborate its in-
tentions. The essays prepared for and discussed at that meeting were
published in 197 6 in the book Against the World for the World,
edited by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (New York, The Seabury
Press, 1976).
Three Orthodox signed the appeal - Dr. Ileana Marculescu, then
Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Union Theological

* Originally published under the title "That East and West May Yet
Meet;" in Against the World for the World: The Hartford Appeal and the
Future of American Religion, ed. by Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neu-
haus (New York, The Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 126-137.

193
194 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Seminary, Fr. Thomas Hopko, Professor of Dogmatics at St. Vladi-

mir's Seminary, and myself. As the only Orthodox who attended both
meetings (Fr. Hopko signed but did not attend and Dr. Marculescu
was present only at the first meeting), I was asked to prepare an essay.
It is this essay that is reprinted here, following the complete text of
the Appeal itself.

AN APPEAL FOR THEOLOGICAL AFFIRMATION

The renewal of Christian witness and mission requires constant

examination of the assumptions shaping the Church's life. Today an
apparent loss of a sense of the transcendent is undermining the
Church's ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks
to which God calls it in the world. This loss is manifest in a number
of pervasive themes. Many are superficially attractive, but upon closer
examination we find these themes false and debilitating to the Church's
life and work. Among such themes are:

THEME 1: Modern thought is superior to all past forms of under-

standing reality, and is therefore normative for Christian
faith and life.

In repudiating this theme we are protesting the captivity to the

prevailing thought structures not only of the twentieth century but
of any historical period. We favor using any helpful means of under-
standing, ancient or modern, and insist that the Christian proclamation
must be related to the idiom of the culture. At the same time, we affirm
the need for Christian thought to confront and be confronted by
other world views, all of which are necessarily provisional.

THEME 2: Religious statements are totally independent of reason-

able discourse.

The capitulation to the alleged primacy of modern thought takes

two forms: one is the subordination of religious statements to the
canons of scientific rationality; the other, equating reason with
scientific rationality, would remove religious statements from the
realm of reasonable discourse altogether. A religion of pure subjectivity
and nonrationality results in treating faith statements as being, at
best, statements about the believer. We repudiate both forms of
capitulation.

THEME 3: Religious language refers to human experience and noth-

ing else, God being humanity's noblest creation.
The Ecumenical Agony 195

Religion is also a set of symbols and even of human projections.

We repudiate the assumption that it is nothing but that. What is
here at stake is nothing less than the reality of God: We did not in-
vent God; God invented us.

THEME 4: Jesus can only be understood in terms of contemporary

models of humanity.

This theme suggests a reversal of "the imitation of Christ"; that

is, the image of Jesus is made to reflect cultural and countercultural
notions of human excellence. We do not deny that all aspects of
humanity are illumined by Jesus. Indeed, it is necessary to the univer-
sality of the Christ that he be perceived in relation to the particular-
ities of the believers' world. We do repudiate the captivity to such
metaphors, which are necessarily inadequate, relative, transitory, and
frequently idolatrous. Jesus, together with the Scriptures and the whole
of the Christian tradition, cannot be arbitrarily interpreted without
reference to the history of which they are part. The danger is in the
attempt to exploit the tradition without taking the tradition seriously.

THEME 5: All religions are equally valid; the choice among them is
not a matter of conviction about truth but only of personal
preference or !ife style.

We affirm our common humanity. We affirm the importance of

exploring and confronting all manifestations of the religious quest
and of learning from the riches of other religions. But we repudiate
this theme because it flattens diversities and ignores contradictions.
In doing so, it not only obscures the meaning of Christian faith, but
also fails to respect the integrity of other faiths. Truth matters; there-
fore differences among religions are deeply significant.

THEME 6: To realize one's potential and to be true to oneself is the

whole meaning of salvation.

Salvation contains a promise of human fulfillment, but to identify

salvation with human fulfillment can trivialize the promise. We
affirm that salvation cannot be found apart from God.

THEME 7: Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be

understood as failure to realize potential.

This theme invites false understanding of the ambivalence of

human existence and underestimates the pervasiveness of sin. Para-
doxically, by minimizing the enormity of evil, it undermines serious
and sustained attacks on particular social or individual evils.
196 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

THEME 8: The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual

self-realization and human community.

Worship promotes individual and communal values, but it is

above all a response to the reality of God and arises out of the funda-
mental need and desire to know, love, and adore God. We worship
God because God is to be worshiped.

THEME 9: Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and

inimical to our being truly human,' liberation from them
is required for authentic existence and authentic religion.

Institutions and traditions are often oppressive. For this reason

they must be subjected to relentless criticism. But human community
inescapably requires institutions and traditions. Without them life
would degenerate into chaos and new forms of bondage. The modern
pursuit of liberation fram all social and historical restraints is finally
dehumanizing.

THEME 10: The world must set the agenda for the Church. Social,
political, and economic programs to improve the quality
of life are ultimately normative for the Church's mission
in the world.

This theme cuts across the political and ideological spectrum. Its
farm remains the same, no matter whether the content is defined as
upholding the values of the American way of life, promoting social-
ism, or raising human consciousness. The Church must denounce op-
pressors, help liberate the oppressed, and seek to heal human misery.
Sometimes the Church's mission coincides with the world's programs.
But the norms for the Church's activity derive from its own percep-
tion of God's will for the world.

THEME 11: An emphasis on God's transcendence is at least a hind-

rance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social
concern and action.

This supposition leads some to denigrate God's transcendence.

Others, holding to a false transcendence, withdraw into religious
privatism or individualism and neglect the personal and communal
responsibility of Christians for the earthly city. From a biblical per-
spective, it is precisely because of confidence in God's reign over all
aspects of life that Christians must participate fully in the struggle
against oppressive and dehumanizing structures and their manifesta-
tions in racism, war, and economic exploitation.
The Ecumenical Agony 197
THEME 12: The struggle for a better humanity will bring about the
Kingdom of God.

The struggle for a better humanity is essential to Christian faith

and can be infarmed and inspired by the biblical promise of the King-
dom of God. But imperfect human beings cannot create a perfect
society. The Kingdom of God surpasses any conceivable utopia. God
has his own designs which confrant ours, surprising us with judgment
and redemption.

THEME 13: The question of hope beyond death is irrelevant or at

best marginal to the Christian understanding of human
fulfillment.

This is the final capitulation to modern thought. If death is the

last word, then Christianity has nothing to say to the final questions
of life. We believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and are
" ... convinced that there is nothing in death or life, in the realm
of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or in the world
as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths -
nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38 f.).

[Against the World for the World, pp. 3-5; a complete list of the
signatories follows, pp. 5- 7.]

When the editors of this volume of reflections on Hartford

asked me to write a chapter on Orthodoxy, I was tempted to
decline the assignment, and for a very simple reason. It was
clear to me that the Hartford Appeal would not generate
among the Orthodox any significant reaction comparable to
the one it has already provoked among the Roman Catholics
and the Protestants. This proved to be true. Here and there
a few "triumphalist" remarks were made in which the docu-
ment was greeted as a welcome and timely sign of their
(Westerners') recovery and return: recovery from what the
Orthodox always knew to be wrong, return to what they always
knew to be right.
But, on the whole, the statement itself, as well as the con-
troversy which it inaugurated within the American theological
community, remained and is likely to remain extrinsic to the
Orthodox Church. The reason for this is clear: convinced that
198 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

the trends, ideas and thought-forms denounced at Hartford

as "false and debilitating" have had no impact on Orthodox
theology, the Orthodox see in the Hartford phenomenon a
purely Western development. While sincerely applauding it,
they are not involved with it and they bear no responsibility
for the outcome. Hence, my first reaction was that whatever
the future of Orthodoxy here or elsewhere might be, I did not
see how I could relate it to Hart£ord or write an article about
a nonexistent relationship.
On second thought, however, I realized I was wrong. I saw
that this absence of reaction - or rather the reason for it -
is in itself a very significant fact with implications not only for
Orthodoxy and its future but also for the Hartford event and
its own ultimate future. I realized finally that as one of only
two Orthodox participants in the Hartford meeting I have a
double duty: to try to explain to my Western brothers the true
meaning of the Orthodox "silence," and to my fellow Ortho-
dox why, in spite of its Western character and context, the
Hartford Appeal concerns them, not less but perhaps even
more than other American Christians. Such then is the double
purpose of this essay, rooted in my own double and somewhat
ambiguous experience: that of an Orthodox within the Hart-
ford group, that of a "Hartford man" within the Orthodox
Church.

1.

I said that the Orthodox reaction to Hartford - that is, its

absence of reaction - is to be explained primarily by the
Western origin and orientation of the Appeal. Because of this,
the Orthodox do not consider that they have anything to do
with it. It seems to me quite important to acknowledge the
truth of at least the first of these affirmations - its Western
origin. It is absolutely true that the Hartford Appeal is indeed
a Western document, the term "Western'' referring here not
only to that particular - and clearly Western - religious
situation from which the Appeal stems and at which it is
aimed, but also to its basic theological presuppositions, con-
The Eoumemcal Agony 199

ceptuallanguage, -�nd, in general, the entire spiritual tradition

to which: it unmistakably belongs.
While participating in the Hartford meeting, I could not
help feeling within myself a certain inner dedoublement. On
the one hand, n!;,ftlg spent all my life in the west and having '
lived a quarter of a century in America, I had no difficulty in
understanding what it was all about, in identifying myself
with the concerns of the group, and, finally, in signing, in full
conscience and conviction, the Appeal. Yet, on the other hand,
as an Orthodox, I also very strongly felt a certain malaise,
a kind of «inner distance" separating me from my non-Ortho-
dox colleagues. Clearly there was nothing personal in it, for
seldom have I attended friendlier meetings. It was not a formal
disagreement either, for, as I have said, I wholeheartedly
shared the group's «negations" as well as its "affirmations."
It was the experience, familiar to me since my first contacts
with the ecumenical movement, of the Orthodox transplanted
as it were into a spiritual and mental world radically different
from his own; forced to use a theological language which,
although he understands it, is not his language; and who,
therefore, while agreeing on one level, experiences and realizes
on another level the frustrating discrepancy between that
formal agreement and the totality of the Orthodox vision.
If I begin by referring to that experience, it is because I am
convinced that it would be useless to discuss the problem of
Hartford and Orthodoxy without at first understanding the
real meaning and the true scope of that discrepancy, and with-
out realizing that it constitutes the main cause of that
"failure" which characterizes the ecumenical encounter be-
tween Orthodoxy and the West - a failure which cannot be
concealed by the massive presence of Orthodox officials at all
ecumenical gatherings, and which is not less real and profound
even if the majority of the Orthodox are unaware of it.
Thus, a few words about that failure are in order, and
here again a personal recollection may be of some help. My
own "ecumenical baptism" took place in 1948 at the first
assembly of the World Council of Churches, which was held
in Amsterdam. And I remember very vividly how, upon my
arrival and while going through the registration routine, I
200 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

met a high ecumenical dignitary who in a very friendly fash-

ion, obviously with the intention to please me, informed me
that the Orthodox delegates would be seated at the extreme
right of the assembly hall together with the representatives
of the Western "high churches" - such as the Swedish Lu-
therans ( "who, as you may know, do have the apostolic suc-
cession ... "), the Old Catholics and the Polish Nationals.
From sheer curiosity - for certainly I had nothing against
sitting with those excellent people - I asked him who made
that decision? His answer was that it simply reflected the
"ecclesiological" makeup of the conference, one of whose
main themes would be precisely the dichotomy of the "hori-
zontal" and "vertical" ideas of the Church. And obviously the
Orthodox belong ( don't they?) to the "horizontal" type. To
this I half jokingly remarked that in my studies of Orthodox
theology I had never heard of such distinctions, and that
without this information, had the choice been left to me,
I might have selected a seat at the extreme "left" with the
Quakers, whose emphasis on the Holy Spirit we Orthodox
certainly share.
I hope that the point of this reminiscence is clear. The
important fact of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical
movement and in the encounter - after so many centuries of
almost total separation - between the Orthodox and the
West is precisely that the Orthodox uiere not given a choice;
that from the very beginning they were assigned, not only
seats but a certain place, role and function within the ecu-
menical movement. These "assignments" were based on West-
ern theological and ecclesiological presuppositions and cate-
gories, and they reflected the purely Western origin of the
ecumenical idea itself. We joined a movement, entered a
debate, took part in a search whose basic terms of reference
were already defined and taken for granted. Thus, even before
we could realize it, we were caught in the essentially Western
dichotomies - Catholic versus Protestant, horizontal versus
vertical, authority versus freedom, hierarchical versus con-
gregational - and were made into representatives and bearers
of attitudes and positions which we hardly recognized as ours
and which were deeply alien to our tradition. All this, however,
The Ecumenical Agan) 101
was due not to any Machiavellian conspiracy or ill will, but
precisely to the main and all-embracing Western presupposi-
tion that the Western experience, theological categories and
thought forms are universal and therefore constitute the self-
evident framework and terms of reference for the entire ecu-
menical endeavor.
Hence the initial misunderstanding that has never been
fully cleared, and hence the ultimate failure of that encounter
in spite of the presence and efforts of many brilliant Orthodox
theologians and spokesmen, and, in the last years, of the
massive participation by virtually all Orthodox churches.1
What the Western architects of the ecumenical movement
never fully understood is that for the Orthodox the ecu-
menical encounter, first of all and above all, means the first
free and therefore truly meaningful encounter with the West
as a totality, the West as the other "half" of the initially one
Christian world, separated from Orthodoxy not by a limited
number of doctrinal disagreements but primarily by a deep
difference in the fundamental Christian vision itself. It is this
\V/ estern vision and experience, inasmuch as the Orthodox saw
in them a deviation from and a mutilation of the once common
faith and tradition, that they were anxious to discuss, believing
such discussion to be the self-evident and essential condition
for any further step.
Such, however, was not at all the Western presupposition.
First of all, the West had long ago lost almost complete! y any
awareness of being just the half of the initial Christianitas.
Its own historical and theological "blooming" began at the
time when the Christian East, which dominated the first Chris-
tian millennium, was entering its prolonged "dark age," was
becoming voiceless and silent. Quite rapidly the West identi-
fied itself with Christianitas, the East slipping into a corner
of its memory, mainly, alas, as the object of conversion to
Rome or to Protestantism. Existentially, the West remembered
not its separation from the East but its own tragic fragmen-
tation into Catholic and Protestant camps and the dialectics of
1
Cf. my essay ••Moment of Truth for Orthodoxy" in Unity in Mid-Career:
An Ecumenical Critique, eds. Keith R. Bridston and Walter D. Wagoner (New
York, Macmillan, 1963), pp. 47-56.
202 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

Reformation and Counterreformation. And it was then that,

at first negatively and then. positively, the ecumenical catego-
ries began to be elaborated and that the Western mind was
shaped. Thus, shortly after World War I when Orthodoxy
emerged on the ecumenical horizon, the shape of the Western
mind was already there, clearly determined by Western self-
sufficiency.
This does not mean that the Orthodox were not greeted
with sincere joy and genuine Christian love. One can say that
for a certain period they were even quite popular. On the one
hand, their very presence - especially in the absence of Roman
Catholicism in those early days - made the movement truly
ecumenical and not merely pan-Protestant. On the other hand,
these representatives of "ancient" and "venerable" churches
were welcomed as suppliers of that "mysticism" and "spiritu-
ality," of those "rich" liturgical traditions which the West
periodically requires as useful spiritual vitamins. There was,
by all means, a «honeymoon." But to every serious student of
the ecumenical movement it must be clear that at no time has
the Orthodox "witness" (presented mainly, if not exclusively,
in separate Orthodox statements attached to the minutes of
all major ecumenical conferences) had any significant impact
on the orientations and theological development of the move-
ment itself.

2.

But how and why is all this related to Hartford in general,

and to its eventual meaning for Orthodoxy in particular? My
answer is that sooner or later, in a new way and in a different
context, the Hartford debate is bound to face the same ques-
tion that Orthodoxy tried unsuccessfully to raise within the
ecumenical movement: the question of the spiritual destiny
of the West, of that Western culture which has truly become
today the culture. And if that question is not raised and faced,
Hartford will, of necessity, lead to another spiritual dead end.
Indeed, the only consensus reached at Hart£ord concerns
the alarming surrender of religion to culture, to the pervasive
The Ecumenical Agony 203

secularism of the modern world, and, as a consequence of that

surrender, to the "loss of transcendence." But if that consensus
is to become the starting point of a reconstruction, a re-think-
ing of our situation, then the next question concerns that
culture itself or, more exactly, its own roots in the religion
which today deplores "cultural captivity." It is precisely this
question, however, that Orthodoxy addressed - although
perhaps not very claire et distincte - to the Christian West;
and it is this question that the West has neither heard nor
understood." It has not understood that beneath all divergences
and disagreements, theological and nontheological, between
the East and the West, there always existed the essential differ-
ence in the experience and understanding of transcendence
itself, or rather of the essentially and uniquely Christian
affirmation of both the absolute transcendence of God and of
His real presence - that is, His immanence to the world and
to man, to the totality of His creation. That which the Orthodox
East rejected in the West, rather than clearly denounced, was
ultimately the breakdown of that transcendence-immanence
antinomy, of the basic cosmological, ecclesiological intuition
of Christianity, an intuition which alone founds the Christian
approach toward world, history and culture.
This, and ultimately only this, stood at the heart of the
debates and controversies which seem so hopelessly archaic
and irrelevant to so many ecumenically minded people: created
versus uncreated grace, the Palamite distinction between the
divine essence and the divine energies, the essence of the
mystical experience ( the "nature" of the light seen and ex-
perienced by the saints), the essence of sanctification. None
of these themes can, for obvious reasons, be elaborated here,
and I can only declare and affirm that they are relevant and
essential because they ultimately concern not only religion and
theology but precisely culture, as man's self-understanding
2 The reader who wants to understand the difficulties of the East-West
encounter in the twentieth century should read the essays of Fr. Georges Flor-
ovsky, who was for three decades the main Orthodox spokesman in the
ecumenical movement. These essays have been collected in three volumes:
Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Nordland; 1972),
Christianity and Culture (Nordland, 1974), and Aspects of Church History
(Nordland, 1975).
204 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

and self-determination in relation to God, nature, history and

action.
What Orthodoxy implies is that virtually none of the
"errors" denounced in the Hartford Appeal would have been
possible without, first of all, a dislocation and a breakdown
of the transcendence-immanence antinomy itself, of the fun-
damental Christian theolo gia, just as all affirmations contained
in the Appeal, which before being accepted and implemented
must simply be heard, also imply and presuppose a radical
reconversion to that vision. In a way, the Appeal sounds as
if the cultural captivity and dissolution of religion, the loss by
the latter of transcendence, were almost accidental, and that
all it would take to improve the situation is a new balancing
of our man-centered culture by a God-centered religion. Then,
we are told, the Church will again be able to "address with
clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in
the world." The whole point of the Orthodox argument,
however, is that such balancing is impossible, would be
abortive, without a radical re-examination of the process
which, two thousand years after the incarnation and Pente-
cost, and after the call to deification addressed to man by
Christ and the Holy Spirit, resulted in the triumph of man-
centered culture and the secularistic rebellion against trans-
cendence.
It is at this point that the Orthodox question - aimed at
the West since the very beginning of the separation - acquires
its whole meaning. Thus, if the Orthodox are silent about the
Hartford Appeal, it is not because of indifference or ignorance
or some combination ( typical, alas, of many Orthodox reac-
tions to the West) of superiority and inferiority complexes.
It is because rebus sic standibus they have nothing to say as
long as the preliminary question, at which I tried to hint here,
is not raised. Only then will Orthodoxy find its proper place
in the debate on which ultimately depends the destinies of
"modern man." Only then will Orthodoxy cease to be what
it still is for the West today: a marginal supplier of valuable
but unessential "mystical" and "liturgical" contributions, but
which, when it comes to serious matters ("the task of the
Church in the world"}, is expected to express itself in a
The Ecumenical Agony 205

theological "idiom" whose very adequacy to that task Ortho-

doxy has always questioned.
In this sense Hartford may be a new beginning, may supply
us with a new opportunity and new possibilities - the possi-
bility, for example, of that genuine encounter which did not
take place within the by now aging ecumenical movement.
Such an encounter, as I hope I have shown, is needed for
Hartford and that which it represents. But it is also needed,
and badly, by Orthodoxy.

3.

I begari this essay by affirming that the Orthodox nonre-

action to the Hartford Appeal is rooted primarily in their
conviction that the Orthodox Church was neither touched nor
contaminated by the pervasive themes denounced at Hartford
as false and debilitating. And in a way this is true. Orthodox
theology, or better, the Orthodox confession of faith, remains
not only conservative but, on a deeper level, entirely shaped
by its essential dependence on the classical, patristic tradition.
Thus, formally, the Orthodox can justify their de facto non-
involvement in Western theological debate.
But only "formally." For the paradox of the Orthodox
situation is that it is precisely this theological conservatism,
this adamant faithfulness not only to the content but also to
the very form of their doctrinal tradition, that conceals from
the Orthodox their own, and I dare say tragic, surrender to
that very "culture" from which they claim their Orthodox
faith immunizes them. And the truly tragic aspect of that
surrender is that they are unaware of it, naively ignorant of
the evergrowing schizophrenia in which they live."
There is no need to prove that today Orthodoxy is no
longer confined to the East. The single most important fact
in the history of Orthodoxy in this twentieth century is the
8 Cf. my articles on "Problems of Orthodoxy in America": "The Canonical
Problem," SJ. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, vol. 8.2 (1964), pp. 67-85;
"The Liturgical Problem," vol. 8.4 ( 1964), pp. 164-85; "The Spiritual
Problem," vol. 9.4 ( 1965), pp. 171-93.
206 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

growth of the Orthodox diaspora, the implantation of Ortho-

dox communities in virtually all parts of the world. In Amer-
ica alone the Orthodox outnumber the Episcopalians and,
what is more significant, their churches progressively lose
their "immigrant" character and acquire those of the "native"
religion. One of the signs of the irreversibility of this trend
is the recent transformation of the former Russian Diocese,
whose origins go back to Russian Alaska, into the Orthodox
Church in America, an independent ( autocephalous) church
with no national or ethnic reference in its name (It is still
opposed, however, by many other Orthodox churches abroad.)
Clearly, Orthodoxy is here to stay and to become an organic
part of the Western religious landscape.
But - and it is here that what I termed schizophrenia
begins - the Orthodox seem totally unaware of the tremen-
dous spiritual implications and the challenge of that new
situation. They do not seem to be aware of the fact that cul-
turally the entire Orthodox Church ( and not only the Orthodox
diaspora) lives today in the West, exposed to the Western
way of life and to the Wes tern vision and experience of the
world. They are naively convinced that as long as they per-
form their Byzantine liturgical services, and on each first Sun-
day of Lent ( the "Triumph of Orthodoxy") solemnly pro-
claim their indefectible attachment to the "Faith of the
Fathers, the Faith that affirms the universe," they preserve
Orthodoxy. And if, in addition to this, they cover the whole
world with more or less successful replicas of Byzantine, Rus-
sian, Serbian and other Orthodox churches; if they fight · for
the recognition of Orthodoxy as the "fourth major faith",
and if they remain attached to a few of their "ancient" and
"colorful" customs, Orthodoxy is safe and they have fulfilled
their duty. What they are not aware of is that the Byzantine
liturgy - which they dutifully and in faithfulness to their
Orthodox heritage attend on Sunday - by its every word and
rite challenges the culture in which they live and which they
enthusiastically adopt as their "way of life" Monday through
Saturday; that the Orthodox faith which they so proudly
confess on the Sunday of Orthodoxy contains and posits a
vision of man, world, nature, matter, entirely different from
The Ecumenical Agony 207

the one which in fact shapes not only their lives but their
mental and psychological makeup as well.
Hence, the schizophrenia. The same priest who on Sunday
morning celebrates again and again the "epiphany" of that
Orthodox vision will later - in the hall downstairs, in his
counseling, in his leadership - apply in fact all the "pervasive
themes" of the American civil religion. For all practical pur-
poses the Orthodox have enthusiastically adopted the basic
principle of American religion: that it is very good to have
many religions ( each one "enriching" the other with its own
"contributions," usually in the form of culinary recipes and
colorful yet innocent customs) as long as deep down they are
in fact the same religion with the same basic hierarchy of
values. And since it is difficult to beat the Orthodox on the level
of customs and all kinds of exciting ancient ceremonies,
Orthodoxy enjoys a certain success and begins to attract more
and more those who, disenchanted or even disgusted with the
West, seek in things "oriental" the satisfaction of their reli-
gious emotions.
It is, then, this schizophrenia that, in my opinion at least,
makes or ought to make Hartford relevant for the Orthodox:
a question; a challenge addressed to them also; a mirror in
which, if they are honest, they should recognize themselves
and their own situation.
I know there are those Orthodox who affirm and preach
that the Orthodox can and must live in the West without any
"reference" to the Western culture except that of a total
negation, to live in fact as if the West did not exist, for it is
totally corrupt, heretical and sick beyond repair. To achieve
this, one must create artificial islands of Greek or Russian or
any other Orthodox culture, shut all doors and windows, and
cultivate the certitude of belonging to the sacred remnant.
What these "super-Orthodox" do not know, of course, is that
their attitude reflects precisely the ultimate surrender to that
West which they abhor: that in their ideology Orthodoxy is
being transformed for the first time into that which it has
never been - a sect, which is by definition the refusal. of the
catholic vocation of the Church.
And there are those who maintain, as I have tried to say,
208 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

a peaceful coexistence of Orthodoxy with a culture which, in

reality, claims the whole man: his soul, his life and his religion.
Both attitudes are ultimately self-destructive. Thus, what
I mean by the "relevance" of Hartford for the Orthodox is
contained in the question it addresses to us: if ours is, as we
always claim, the true faith, has not the time come to show -
to ourselves in the first place - how it works in life, in that
eternal tension between the total, absolute and truly apophatic
transcendence of God and His real and wonderful presence in
this created, fallen and redeemed world?
 XI
THE MISSIONARY
IMPERATIVE
1.

Until quite recently the Eastern Orthodox Church was

regarded in the West as a nonmissionary church. It was an
opinion commonly held that the great missionary movement
which marked so deeply the Christian West during the last
centuries somehow by-passed the "static" Christianity of the
East. Today this view seems to have lost some of its strength:
new historical research has made it quite clear that the Ortho-
dox achievements in the field of mission, although somewhat
different from those of the West, are nonetheless important
and impressive.' Our purpose in this brief essay, however, is
not to present a historical or statistical survey of the Orthodox
missionary expansion. It is much more important to try to
understand and to analyze, be it only tentatively and partially,
the missionary imperative in the Orthodox tradition, or, in
other terms, the relation in it between mission, on the one
hand, and the faith, the life and the whole spiritual "vision"
of Orthodoxy, on the other hand. A theology of mission is
always the fruit of the total "being" of the Church and not a
mere specialty for those who receive a particular missionary
calling. But for the Orthodox Church there is a special need to

* Originally published in The Theology of Christian Mission, ed. by

Gerald H. Anderson (McGraw Hill, New York, 1961), pp. 250-257.
1
Josef Glazik, Die Russiscb-Ortbodoxe Heidenmission seit Peter dem
Grossen: Bin mis sionsgescbicbtlicber Versucb nach russis cben Quellen und
Darst ellun gen (Munster, Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1954). By
the same author: Die Lslammission der Russiscb-Ortbodoxen Kircbe (Munster,
Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1959).

209
210 CHURCHJ WORLD, MISSION

reflect upon its basic missionary motivations, because its pre-

sumably nonmissionary character has been too often explained
by, and ascribed to, the very essence, the "holy of holies" of
Orthodoxy: its sacramental, liturgical, mystical ethos. Even
now, as the study of Orthodox missions seems to correct the
traditional view, there remains the temptation to explain these
missions as a marginal "epiphenomenon" in the history of
Orthodoxy, as something that happened in spite of its general
tendencies and trends. This is why a theological clarification
is necessary. Can a church whose life is centered almost ex-
clusively on the liturgy and the sacraments, whose spirituality
is primarily mystical and ascetical, be truly missionary? And
if it is, where in its faith are the deepest motivations of the
missionary zeal to be found? In somewhat simplified terms
this is the question addressed, explicitly or implicitly, to the
Orthodox Church by all those for whom "ecumenical" means
necessarily and unescapably "missionary."

2.

It is without any doubt in Orthodox ecclesiology, i.e. in

the doctrine and experience of the Church, that we find the
basic elements of an answer. To formulate them, however, is
not an easy task. It must be kept in mind that the Orthodox
Church has never been challenged by an ecclesiological or
doctrinal crisis comparable to the Reformation or Counter-
Reformation. And because of this it had no compelling reason
to reflect upon itself, upon the traditional structures of its· life
and doctrine. There was no theological elaboration of the
doctrine of the Church, this doctrine never having been
questioned or opposed. It was in the ecumenical encounter
with the West, an encounter whose beginnings must be traced
back to the early 'twenties (Stockholm, 1925, and Lausanne,
1927), that for the first time the Orthodox were requested not
only to state their ecclesiological beliefs, but also to explain
them, i.e. to express them in consistent theological terms,
But at this point there appeared an additional difficulty which
has remained ever since as the major difficulty of Orthodox
The Missionary Imperative 211

participation in the ecumenical movement. A dialogue neces-

sarily presupposes an agreement on the terms that are being
used, a common language. Yet from the Orthodox point of
view, it was precisely the rupture in theological understanding,
the theological alienation of the West from the East, that first
made the "schism" so deep and then made all attempts to
heal it - from 1054 to the Council of Florence in 1438-1439 -
so hopelessly inadequate. Therefore, in the ecumenical en-
counter, the Orthodox Church had to face a Christian world
with several centuries of "autonomous" theological and spir-
itual development behind it, with a mind and thought-forms
radically different from those of the East. The questions it
asked of the Orthodox were formulated in Western terms,
were conditioned very often by specifically Western experience
and developments. The Orthodox answers were classified ac-
cording to Western patterns, "reduced" to categories familiar
to the West but hardly adequate to Orthodoxy. This situation,
although years of contacts and conversations have no doubt
improved it, is still far from being overcome completely. The
"catholic language" has not yet been recovered. All this, in
addition to basic dogmatical differences, explains the "agony"
of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement and
constitutes a very real obstacle not only to agreement, but to
simple understanding. One must remember this when trying
to grasp the Orthodox approach to missions.

3.
"Heaven on earth": this formula familiar to every Ortho-
dox expresses rather well the fundamental Orthodox experi-
ence of the Church. The Church is first of all and before
everything else a God-created and God-given reality, the
presence of Christ's new life, the manifestation of the new
"aeon" of the Holy Spirit. An Orthodox in his contemplation
of the Church sees it as the divine gift before he thinks of the
Church as human response to this gift. One can rightly describe
the Church as an eschatological reality, for its essential func-
tion is to manifest and to actualize in this world the escbaton,
212 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

the ultimate reality of salvation and redemption. In and

through the Church the Kingdom of God is made already
present, is communicated to men. And it is this eschatological,
God-given fullness of Church ( not any juridical theory of
mediation) that constitutes the root of the ecclesiological
e e absolutism" of Eastern Orthodoxy - an absolutism which is

so often misunderstood and misinterpreted by the Protestants.

The Church as a whole is means of grace, the sacrament of the
Kingdom. Therefore its structure - hierarchical, sacramental,
liturgical - has no other function than to make the Church
ever capable of fulfilling itself as the Body of Christ, as the
Temple of the Holy Spirit, to actualize its very nature as grace.
For the God-given fullness of the Church, or rather the Church
as fullness - and this is an essential aspect of Orthodox ec-
clesiology - cannot be manifested outside these ecclesiastical
structures. There is no separation, no division, between the
Church invisible (in statu patriae) and the visible Church
(in statu viae), the latter being the expression and the actuali-
zation of the former, the sacramental sign of its reality. Hence
the unique, the central, ecclesiological significance of the
Eucharist, which is the all-embracing sacrament of the Church;
In the Eucharist "the Church becomes what it is," fulfills itself
as the Body of Christ, as the divine parousia - the presence
and the communication of Christ and of His Kingdom. Ortho-
dox ecclesiology is indeed eucharistic ecclesiology. For in the
Eucharist the Church accomplishes the passage from this world
into the world to come, into the eschaton; participates in the
ascension of its Lord and in His messianic banquet, tastes of
the "joy and peace" of the Kingdom. "And Thou didst not
cease to do all things until Thou hadst brought us back to
heaven, and hadst endowed us with Thy kingdom .... "
( eucharistic prayer in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom).
Thus the whole life of the Church is rooted in the Eucharist,
is the fruition of this eucharistic fullness in the time of this
world whose "image passeth by .... " This is indeed the mis-
sion of the Church.
The Church is also human response to the divine gift, its
acceptance and appropriation by man and humanity. If the
order of the Church is shaped and conditioned by the eschato-
The Missionary Imperative 213

logical fullness of the gift, is its sacramental sign, it is the

acceptance of the gift and the growth into its fullness that
is the purpose of the Christian community. The Church is
fullness, and the Church is also increase and growth in faith
and love, knowledge and koinonia. This response has two
aspects, neither of which can be separated from the other, be-
cause they condition each other and together constitute the
dynamics of Christian life and action. The first one is God-
centered: it is the sanctification, the growth in holiness, of both
the Christian individual and the Christian community, the
"acquisition by them of the Holy Spirit," as the ultimate goal
of Christian life as defined by one of the last and greatest
of Orthodox saints, St. Seraphim of Sarov ( d. 1836). It is the
slow transformation of the old Adam in us into the new one,
the restoration of the pristine beauty which was lost in sin,
the illumination with the uncreated light of Mount Tabor.
It is also the slow victory over the demonic powers of the
cosmos, the "joy and peace" which hinc et nunc make us par-
takers of the Kingdom and of life eternal. The Orthodox spiri-
tual tradition has always stressed the mystical nature of Chris-
tian life, as life "hidden with Christ in God." And the great
monastic movement, which started in the fourth century after
the Church was officially recognized by the Roman Empire,
given a "status" in this world, was nothing else but a new
expression of the early Christian eschatologism, the affirmation
of Christianity as belonging ontologically to the life of the
"world to come," the negation of any permanent home and
identification in this world.
The second aspect of the Church as response is man- or
world-centered. It is the understanding of the Church as being
left in this world, in its time, space and history, with a specific
task or mission: "to walk in the same way in which He walked"
(I John 2 :6). The Church is fullness and its home is in
heaven. But this fullness is given to the world, sent into
the world as its salvation and redemption. The eschatological
nature of the Church is not the negation of the world, but, on
the contrary, its affirmation and acceptance as the object of
divine love. Or, in other terms, the entire "other-worldliness"
of the Church is nothing but the sign and the reality of the
214 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

love of God for this world, the very condition of the Church's
mission to the world. The Church thus is not a "self-centered"
community but precisely a missionary community, whose pur-
pose is salvation not from, but of, the world. In the Orthodox
experience and faith it is the Church-sacrament that makes
possible the Church-mission.

4.
We can try now to formulate with more prec1s1on the
various aspects of the "missionary imperative" as it is implied
in the Orthodox experience of the Church. This imperative is
the essential expression of the Church as gift and fullness, its
projection in the time and space of this world. For if, on the
one hand, nothing can be added to the Church - its fullness
is that of Christ Himself - the manifestation and the com-
munication of this fullness constitute, on the other hand, the
very life of the Church in this "aeon." On the day of Pente-
cost, when the fullness of the Church was realized once for
all, the time of the Church began, the last and the crucial
segment of the history of salvation. Ontologically the only
newness and, therefore, the only soteriolo gical content of this
segment is precisely mission: the proclamation and the com-
munication of the eschaton, which is already the being of the
Church and indeed its only being. It is the Church as mission
that gives to this time its real significance and to history its
meaning. And it is mission that gives to the human response
in the Church its validity, makes us real co-workers in the
work of Christ.
Nothing reveals better the relation between the Church
as fullness and the Church as mission than the Eucharist, the
central act of the Church's leitourgia, the sacrament of the
Church itself. There are two complementary movements in the
eucharistic rite: the movement of ascension and the movement
of return. The Eucharist begins as an ascension toward the
throne of God, toward the Kingdom. "Let us now lay aside
all earthly cares," says the offertory hymn, and we prepare
ourselves to ascend into heaven with Christ and in Christ, and
to offer in Him - His Eucharist. This first movement, which
The Missionary Imperative 215

finds its fulfillment in the consecration of the elements, the

sign of the acceptance by God of our Eucharist, is, to be sure,
already an act of mission. The Eucharist is offered "on behalf
of all and for all," it is the fulfillment by the Church of its
priestly function: the reconciliation of the whole creation with
God, the sacrifice of the whole world to God, the intercession
for the whole world before God. All this in Christ, the Ged-
man, the unique priest of the new creation, the "one who
offers and the one who is offered .... " But this is accomplished
by a total separation of the Church from the world C'The
doors, the doors ! '' proclaims the deacon as the eucharistic
prayer begins), by its ascension to heaven, its entrance into the
new "aeon." And then, precisely at the moment when this state
of fullness has been reached and consummated at the table of
the Lord in His Kingdom, when "we have seen the true light
and partaken of the heavenly Spirit," the second movement
begins - that of return into the world. "Let us depart in
peace," says the celebrant as he leaves the altar and leads the
congregation outside the temple - and this is the last, the
ultimate, commandment. The Eucharist is always the End,
the sacrament of the parousia, and yet it is always the begin-
ning, the starting point: now mission begins. t(We have seen
the true light, we have enjoyed life eternal," but this life, this
light, are given to us in order to "transform" us into Christ's
witnesses in this world. Without this ascension into the King-
dom »re would have had nothing to witness to. Now, having
once more become "His people and His inheritance," we can
do what Christ wants us to do: "You are witnesses of these
things" (Luke 24:48). The Eucharist, transforming "the
Church into what it is," transforms it into mission.

5.
What are the objects, the goals, of mission? The Orthodox
Church answers without hesitation: these objects are man and
world - not man alone, in an artificially "religious" isolation
from the world, and not "world" as an entity of which man
would be nothing but "part." Man not only comes first but is
indeed the essential object of mission. And yet the Orthodox
216 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

idea of evangelism is free from individualistic and spiritual-

istic connotations. The Church, the sacrament of Christ, is
not a "religious" society of converts, an organization to satisfy
the "religious" needs of man. It is new life and redeems there-
fore the whole life, the total being of man. And this whole
life of man is precisely the world in which and by which he
lives. Through man the Church saves and redeems the world.
One can say that "this world" is saved and redeemed every
time a man responds to the divine gift, accepts it and lives by
it. This does not transform the world into the Kingdom or
the society into the Church. The ontological abyss between
the old and the new remains unchanged and cannot be filled
in this "aeon.l'The Kingdom is yet to come, and the Church
is not of this world. And yet this Kingdom to come is already
present, and the Church is fulfilled in this world. They are
present not only as "proclamation" but in their very reality,
and through the divine agape, which is their fruit, they per-
form all the time the same sacramental transformation of the
old into the new, they make possible real action, real "doing"
in this world.
All this gives the mission of the Church a cosmical and a
historical dimension that in the Orthodox tradition and ex-
perience are essential. State, society, culture, nature itself,
are real objects of mission and not a neutral "milieu" in which
the only task of the Church is to preserve its own inner free-
dom, to maintain its "religious life." It would require a whole
volume to tell the story of the Orthodox Church from this
point of view: of its concrete participation in the societies
and cultures of which Orthodoxy became the total expression
of their whole existence; of its identification with nations
and peoples, yet without betrayal of its "other-worldliness,"
of the eschatological communion with the heavenly jerusalem.
It would require a long theological analysis to express ade-
quately the Orthodox idea of the sanctification of matter, or
precisely the cosmical aspect of its sacramental vision. Here
we can only state that all this is the object of Christian mis-
sion, because all this is assumed and offered to God in the
sacrament. In the world of the incarnation, nothing "neutral"
remains, nothing can be taken away from the Son of Man.
 XII
THE WORLD AS SACRAMENT
Let me insist, first of all, upon the tentative nature
of this essay. Our subject here is one that is only now begin-
ning to be studied, and I am in no position to offer any kind
of final thesis; rather, I see myself as taking part in our com-
rnon search for the light - a search that will one day, perhaps,
lead us to concrete and consistent conclusions, but not yet. I
am weary of those speeches and articles that propose to solve all
problems once and for all with neat ready-made answers: we
find them even in connection with the liturgical movement, even
when a subject like this comes up for discussion - "The World
as Sacrament" - a subject that surely ought to make us move
very cautiously and tentatively indeed. My own thoughts
have achieved neither certainty nor finality. I only feel sure
that this kind of subject has enormous importance for Christian
theology.
Although I use the word "theology," this is not going to
be a theological essay - at least not if by theology we imply
"definitions." It seems to me a great tragedy that in the past,
sacramental reality should so often have been made the object
of clear definitions after the juridical model - definitions so
lucid and thin that they tended to obscure and even to diminish
the things defined. We are concerned with that reality itself,
newly rediscovered. My own approach to it is by way of my
own tradition - the liturgical experience, the living tradition
of the Eastern Orthodox Church - and only in a secondary
way through the formal theology derived from that tradition.

* A paper read at the meeting of the Catholic Art Society, Georgetown

University, June 1964, and originally published in The Cosmic Piety: Modern
Man and the Meaning of the Universe, ed. by Christopher Derrick (P. J. Ken-
nedy and Sons, New York, 1965), pp. 119-130.

217
218 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

And I am raising questions, not proclaiming answers.

Let me begin with my title: a rich phrase, drawing together
the two great preoccupations of Christian thought and activity
today. ((World" and "sacrament": here we have two great
concerns, the two objects that outstandingly engage our think-
ing and acting as Christians in the world of today.
It hardly needs to be stressed that our time is marked by
a new degree of concern for the world; this is at the forefront
of our modern consciousness. I find it, for example, explicit
in Pope Paul VI' s encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, and in the very
idea of "dialogue" as well. This point of view has been gaining
ground for decades: the idea that the Church exists to save
the whole world, not merely to satisfy the religious needs of
the individual, narrowly conceived. This hardly needs saying
today.
On the other hand, and of equal importance, we are ex-
periencing something in the nature of a complete rediscovery
of the sacramental nature of Christian life. This is not merely
a renewed insistence upon the importance of particular sacra-
mental acts in the life of the individual. That is most neces-
sary, but we are going further, to reassert a sacramental
character in the whole of life.
Thus when we bring together the two words "world" and
e e sacrament," we can see in sharp focus two basic tendencies

of our time - two aspects, perhaps, of a single tendency; and

this is an exercise not wholly original, perhaps, but still worth
attempting. A perspective is needed, a frame of vision to help
the thought and work of the future. What is the relationship
between these two concepts, these two realities, world and
sacrament? If we gain some new insight into the sacramental
nature of Christian life, will that help us to understand the
world? If we develop a greater degree of concern for the
world, will that deepen our experience and understanding of
the sacraments?
But before attempting a synthesis along these lines, we
should perhaps focus our attention on each of the terms sep-
arately. In the long history of Christian theology and spiritu-
ality, people have spoken of "the world" in two ways, both
of them well rooted in the Gospel. On the one hand, we say
The World as Sacrameni 219

that "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten

Son"; that the eucharistic sacrifice is an act of giving for the
sake of the world; that the world is an object of divine love,
divine creation, divine care; that it is to be saved, transfigured,
transformed. But in another sense, and with equal authority in
Scriptures and church Tradition, we speak of the world nega-
tively: it is the thing we must leave, a prison from which we
must be free, God's rival, deceptively claiming our love with
its pride and its lust.
No doubt I am oversimplifying here, but it seems to me
that the true Christian experience involves some kind of syn-
thesis between these two visions of Uthe world." The negative
vision is very positive in a spiritual sense; that is to say, it is
genuinely necessary to leave the world, to cultivate detach-
ment and freedom from it. But this detachment develops too
easily into a kind of indifference, a lack of regard for God's
creation; gradually the Church becomes aware of this tendency
and corrects it by a renewed emphasis upon concern for the
world and its goodness.
Today, we are very plainly at the second stage of this cycle,
increasingly involved in the world and its affairs. Perhaps we
go too far; there is certainly this danger. We find it suggested
in certain quarters that we should drop the ideas of God and
religion completely, so as to devote ourselves more wholly
to the world and to others, living as men in the world of men.
In "honesty to God," we are asked to dismiss Him: so far has
the pendulum swung from self-centered pietism.
That is where we find ourselves today - and we must in-
sist again that both views of the matter are rooted in revela-
tion and the experience of the Church. If we chose one of
them and pushed it to its logical extreme, ignoring the other,
we would end up in heresy: the original Greek sense of that
word refers to error based on false choice, to mistaken selec-
tivity. If we insist upon choosing where we ought to effect a
synthesis or reconciliation, we shall tend toward heresy.
Here, then, we must reconcile and synthesize. Acceptance
of the world is more than justifiable, it is necessary. There can
be no Christianity where the world is not seen as an object
of divine love. On the other hand, there is every justification
220 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

for that detachment, that abandonment of the world so heavily

stressed in the ascetical tradition. To effect a living synthesis
between these two principles is, precisely, to define the Chris-
tian attitude to the world; and one of my chief purposes in
this essay is to suggest that we cannot effect this synthesis or
see this wholeness, we cannot do full justice to both Christian
visions of the world, unless we come to see the world as
sacrament, and ourselves and our whole created environment
in sacramental terms.
Where the sacramental itself is concerned, we can make
a similar approach, and we shall discover a similar need for
synthesis. In all our various Christian traditions, we are taught
to think of the sacramental as existing first and primarily in
the form of a particular and fixed number of sacraments,
these being conceived as more or less isolated acts of the
Church, and concerned principally with the personal needs of
the individual Christian. In some traditions there are seven
of these acts, in others two; but theology and piety alike have
always tended to concentrate upon one thing - the grace
which these acts offer to individuals.
Unfortunately, this kind of concern with the sacraments,
valid and indeed necessary though it has been, has tended to
be self-defeating. Theorizing about isolated sacramental acts,
we lost the sacramental sense in general. The number of
these acts, their institution, the conditions of their validity
and so on - we asked those questions in too narrow and con-
centrated a fashion, so that everything else became nonsacra-
mental in our minds.
Consider baptism, for example. We all agree that water is
necessary for ordinary baptism: but how often does one feel
that a classical theologian really likes water, has ever really
noticed what it is? There is a real question here. Why should
water be chosen as the matter for this sacrament? What is so
special about water? - or ( in the case of another sacrament)
about bread and wine? Such questions have been pushed to
· one side: in considering the matter of the sacraments, the
theologians have tended to display a minimizing and reluctant
frame of mind, concerning themselves too anxiously with the
minimal requirements of mere validity, with the smallest
The World as Sacrament 221

possible trickle of water, with wine measured in drops, with

the faintest possible smear of oil. We seem to have wandered
very far from the holy materialism C(God so loved the
world ... ") upon which Christian spirituality ought to be
based.
Certainly there has been concentration upon grace instead.
But in this situation, the idea of grace itself suffered loss. We
stopped thinking of the coming of the Spirit, of the huge wind
from heaven. We thought instead of something small, some-
thing attenuated and weak, something to be defined legally
and measured out in small doses. God gives His grace in a
great torrent, not to be measured by men; and yet, down the
centuries, theology seems to have concentrated upon measur-
ing it, and - inevitably - upon reducing it to something that
men might hope to measure. What kind of grace was it?
Was it preventing grace, sanctifying grace, efficacious grace?
Where was it to be found in the official, numbered list?
This frame of mind, this approach has had its day. It can
hardly survive in the new atmosphere generated by the liturgi-
cal movement and the recovered theological insights of our
time. A new vision of these matters is necessary. It may not
come immediately in any final form, but we must work toward
it, relating faith and theology once again to worship, claiming
the lex orandi back from the dry hands of the antiquarians
and reestablishing it as the fertile soil .in which ( and nowhere
else) the lex credendi can fruitfully grow.
Think of the eve of the Epiphany in some Orthodox church
in a Greek or Russian village, a simple, unsophisticated place.
After Vespers; water is blessed: this makes the climax of the
feast, and the people rush for that water, clamor for it. Why?
Not for any dry, theoretical reason. Surely they see here some
possibility of communion with the sacramental world, some
healing of man's estrangement from the good creation. An
experience of that kind lies close to the center of what I am
trying to say.
Let me try to come closer, by way of the greatest of the
sacraments, by asking how the world is related to the Eucha-
rist. This is a small particular part of a very large subject; if
in this context I ignore other aspects of eucharistic theology,
222 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

it is not because I am ignorant of them or consider them un-

important. Classical theology - scholastic theology in parti-
cular - has had much to say about the Eucharist, and very
fruitfully; but this question of the world in the Eucharist has
been neglected.
Under an impulse theological rather than liturgical, we
have tended to concentrate on the great moment of change:
when, how is the bread changed into Christ's body, the wine
into His blood? And our attention has been deflected, there-
fore, from what was there before that moment.
Only bread and wine: very ordinary things. And in all
liturgies, ancient and modern, a brief great moment comes
when those very ordinary things are being offered to God
while still retaining their ordinary and natural character. We
take two things out of our daily and secular world, and place
them apart on the altar.
Consider the bread and wine at that moment. What are
they there for? We can, of course, look on them as mere raw
material, mere instruments for the coming of grace. In that
case, their particular character and origin will be unimportant.
But we shall miss the point if we think along those lines.
The Church insists that the bread must be bread and the wine
must be wine. Why?
These things placed upJn the altar acquire thereby a
separate and sacred character. They stand close to the veil
that separates our world, our daily experience from God's
life, and soon they pass through that veil. But it is bread and
wine that make that transition, and they do so not merely as
fruits of this world - of this cornfield, that vineyard - but as
symbols and even as vehicles of the whole world itself in its
entirety.
One could quote widely from Christian sources to illus-
trate this point, that according to the mind of the Church our
initial offering in the Eucharist is not merely of two things
but also of our whole world, our whole life in all its dimen..
sions. A great Russian poet - not a church-goer - once said:
"Every time the priest celebrates the Eucharist, he holds in
his hands the whole world, like an apple."
This is not only symbolic, it is hard rational fact. Our
The World as Sacrament 223

world breeds life; by the chemistry of growth, bread is nour-

ished up out of dead minerals; our own life depends upon
that bread; the "dead" world becomes our body, our life. If
we are to consider the whole world as something sacramental,
it must be initially because of this transformation which is
happening all the time. When we offer bread and wine and
place them on the altar, not only is our act relevant to Christ's
offering two thousand years ago, but we are also relating that
offering to the facts, the physical basis of our human condition
as it has existed from the very beginning.
Any such thought of our first beginning takes us back at
once to Genesis, to Adam and Eve, to creation, to God. Let
us not be sidetracked into worries about historicity. The real
point here concerns the human condition as God has revealed
it. And here, in the first chapters of Genesis, we find a clear
statement of this sacramental character in the world. God
made the world, and then man; and he gave the world to man
to eat and drink. The world was God's gift to us, existing
not for its own sake but in order to be transformed, to become
life, and so to be offered back as man's gift to God.
In our ecclesiastical training, much stress is always laid
on the priest's difference from ordinary men, on the super-
natural character of his function. True; but in such matters,
we should perhaps understand the "supernatural" as being the
natural in an extraordinary degree. Man was created as a
priest: the world was created as the· matter of a sacrament.
But sin came, breaking this unity: this was no mere issue of
broken rules alone, but rather the loss of a vision, the aban-
donment of a sacrament. Falien man saw the world as one
thing, secular and profane, and religion as something entirely
separate, private, remote and "spiritual." The sacramental
sense of the world was lost. Man forgot the priesthood which
was the purpose and meaning of his life. He came to see him-
self as a dying organism in a cold, alien universe.
Turning again to the Eucharist with this picture in mind,
we see it as the simple original act, the human act which man
failed to perform, now restored however by the new Adam,
the perfect man. It is not simply an arbitrary means toward a
 ..
224 CHUR.CHJ WORLDJ MISSION

private and limited relationship with God. It is a new creation

in Christ of the whole world.
We are in a position now to see the duality in the Chris-
tian idea of sacrament, corresponding to the duality - dis-
cussed earlier - in the Christian idea of the world. On the one
hand, sacrament is rooted in the nature of the world as created
by God: it is always a restoration of the original pattern of
things. On the other hand, it is rooted in Christ personally.
Only through the perfect man can the broken priesthood of
humanity be restored. Only through Him can the dark, pri-
mordial ocean become the living waters of baptism. Only by
way of His cross can the dead world come to new life. Our
task remains, but He has gone before, doing the hard work
for us. If we kneel to pray, to adore, to offer our lives, ·we are
only attaching ourselves and assenting to His own similar but
all-embracing act.
Why can there be no new sacrifice in the Christian dispen-
sation? Not merely because Christ's sacrifice was ( as juridical
theologians say) perfect. Perfect, in many senses, it certainly
was - not least, in embracing all things. After that particular
act, there was simply nothing left in the universe that could
be offered to God in any first and original fashion. It had all
been done.
If, therefore, we remember our nature and our origins, we
shall see in that bread and wine placed upon the altar not
merely our individual. selves but the whole.world, and we shall
then see them - immediately - in their final point .and con-
summation. We place .ourselves and the world upotJ. the altar,
then take a second look at them, and se� there Christ: He
stands at the center and offers all to the Father.
That moment of change deserves a kind of attention that
it seldom gets. What happens at the consecration? Theology
has much to say here: I am not rejecting it or criticizing it, but
we sometimes overlook some implications of the Preface and
the Sanctus, even of the word "Eucharist" itself.
The Preface is always an act of thanksgiving, reaching its
climax in that old biblical doxology: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord
God of Sabaoth: heaven and earth are full of Thy glory."
There might appear to be some incongruity here. We are at
 The World as Sacrament 225

the moment of tragedy, of sacrifice: the moment of the broken

body and the spilt blood. And we choose that moment, of all
moments, to sing a happy song of triumph and delight and
gratitude - perhaps with a great choir to prolong and empha-
size the joy of the moment.
There is no incongruity here, nor inadvertence. Here again
there is a need for reconciliation and synthesis: only thus, and
only at that moment, do we rediscover and see the whole
truth about the world. It is a world of sin and suffering and
grief; Christian optimism cannot deny this, seeing rather the
bloodstained cross as its essential and characteristic represen-
tation. But it is also a holy and happy world, something freely
given to us by divine love, and the synthesis is effected in
Christ's offering, in his suffering and final victory.
And so the Eucharist is not simply a way of discharging
our duty of thanks to God, although it is that as well. It is
not merely one possible relationship to God. It is rather the
only possible holding together - in one moment, in one act -
of the whole truth about God and man. It is the sacrament of
the world sinful and suffering, the sky darkened, the tortured
Man dying: but it is also the sacrament of the change, His
transfiguration, His rising, His Kingdom. In one sense we
look back, giving thanks for the simple goodness of God's
original gift to us. In another sense we look forward, eschato-
logically, to the ultimate repair and transfiguration of that
gift, to its last consummation in Christ.
With such an exploration of the Eucharist in depth, litur-
gical theology is very emphatically concerned; and it does
involve a new kind of attention to the materials involved,
to water and bread and wine and the whole world, the whole
of created reality. God orders a kind of materialism, not as
a concession to our weakness, but in order to teach us some-
thing about the world given to us, and therefore about His
own love for us.
It may be a mistake for us to dwell too seriously upon
· nature and supernature in sharp distinction, as though our
natural life were something ignoble, apart from occasional
visitations from above. Christ never spoke of the natural and
the supernatural. He spoke rather of the old and the new,
226 CHURCH, WORLD, MISSION

and especially of the renovation of the old. Sacrament is move-

ment, transition, passage, Pasch a: Christ knows the way and
guides us, going before. The world, condemned in its old
nature, revealed as life eternal in its new nature, is still the
same world, God's good work. Christ came to save it, not to
allow us means of thankful escape before it was discarded as
rubbish. Thoughts of "the life to come" can be misleading.
In a sense, we have no other world to live in but this, although
the mode of our occupying it, our whole relationship to space
and time (tota ac simul possessio) will be very different when
we are risen again in Christ.
If, then, our attention is to be given more seriously -
and even, in a carefully defined sense, wholly - to this world,
that does not mean that we are committed to "worldliness"
in the other sense of that twofold idea. We are not to suppose
that when jets can fly faster, when doctors can save more lives,
Congress will be able to certify that the Kingdom of God has
begun. Rather the reverse. The more deeply we think in
eucharistic and therefore in eschatological terms, the more
acutely we shall be aware that the fashion of this world pas-
seth away, that things only acquire point and meaning and
reality in their relationship to Christ's coming in glory. In this
context, the unworldliness and detachment preached by so
many moralists return to their full importance.
Our lives are congested and noisy. It is easy to think of the
Church and the sacraments as competing for our attention
with the other world of daily life, leading us off into some
other life - secret, rarefied and remote. We might do better
to think of that practical daily world as something incompre-
hensible and unmanageable unless and until we can approach
it sacramentally through Christ. Nature and the world are
otherwise beyond our grasp; time also, time that carries all
things away in a meaningless flux, causing men to despair
unless they see in it the pattern of God's action, reflected in
the liturgical year, the necessary road to the New Jerusalem.
We have a simple task, and a happy one. Some say that
we should concentrate upon this world as though God did not
exist. We say rather that we should concentrate upon this
world lovingly because it is full of God, because by way of the
The World as Sacrament 227

Eucharist we find Him everywhere - in hideous disasters as

well as in little flowers. In a way, it is not supernatural at all;
we return to our original nature, to the garden where Adam
met God in the cool of the evening. No, we do not meet Him
wholly and consciously: we are still fallen, still estranged,
and our fallen nature could not at present survive that.
A sacramental correspondence is not an identification. It
always points beyond. But it creates also a present unity, mak-
ing us contemporary witnesses not only of Christ' s death but
also of His coming again, and of the fulfillment of all things in
Him. Thankfully we accept from God's hands His lovely
garden, the world. We eat its fruits, transform its substance
into life, offer that life to God on Christ's cross and our daily
altars, and look forward to the possession of it, as a risen body,
in the Kingdom.
But it will be the same world, the same life. "Behold, I
make all things new." These were God's last words to us, and
they only say at the end, and eternally, what was in His mind
at the very beginning, when He looked on the sacramental
world of His creation and saw that it was good.
 -
University of St. Francis
GEN 281.9 S347c
Schmemann, Alexander,
Church, world, mission :

CHURCH, WORLE II II II II00060843

1111 II I 6II I
3 0301
ALEXANDER SCHM_

The questions raised in this collection of essays

pertain to a wide range of subjects: history, theology,
liturgy, canonical order, the ecumenical movement, mis-
sion. One underlying question, from which they all stem
and to which they all ultimately refer, gives them an inner
unity and cohesion: What is the destiny of the Orthodox
Church in this second half of the twentieth century, in
a world and culture radically different from those that
shaped the Orthodox mentality, thought-forms and life-
styles of the past? Witty, provocative, Church, World,
Mission is essential reading for all interested in the role
of Orthodoxy in the world today.
The author, Father Alexander Schmemann, was edu-
cated in France, at the University of Paris and the Ortho-
dox Theological Institute of St. Sergius. In f951 he came
to the United States, where he quickly gained recognition
as a dynamic and articulate spokesman for Orthodoxy.
Through his lectures on college campuses, through his
regular radio broadcasts to Eastern Europe, through his
books, now translated into eleven languages, he has
brought the message of Orthodoxy to an ever-growing
audience. I-le is at present Dean and Professor of Liturgical
Theology at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Sem-
.
1nary.
Other books by Father Schmemann published by
St. Vladimir's Seminary Press include For the Li/ e of the
World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy; The Historical Road
of Eastern Orthodoxy; Great Lent; Introduction to Litur-
gical Theology; Of Water and the Spirit; and Ultimate
Questions: An Anthology of Modern Russian Religious
Thought. All six books provide further insights into the
life, thought and worship of the Orthodox Church.
" f:

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