In the course of my duties as a pastor, I often find that there just isn’t enough time to preach, teach, and share commentary on where I am coming from as a teacher of the Christian faith.  The Orthodox Church has a 2000 year old spiritual heritage, and the practices and thoughts of some of the earliest Christians constitute what we Orthodox call Holy Tradition, which is the way we must interact with the world. 

This Holy Tradition does not, and cannot trump Holy Scripture, but is inexorably linked with it, as it is Holy Tradition that tells us which of the many ancient Christian and Hebrew writings are actually in the scriptural Canons.

This space will periodically offer my thoughts on various issues relating to the Orthodox Church that are not covered in Sermons or Fellowship discussions.

Fr Simeon

Orthodox Christian thought is a vast and complex study.  With over two thousand years of tradition, there is enough writing that one could study Orthodox Christian thought for a lifetime, either as an intellectual historian or a scholar of patristic theology, and barely scratch the surface of all the materials that are out there.  With this in mind, and with so much non-Orthodox thinking and writing about the Orthodox Church, and early Christianity, what is average Orthodox Christian to do?  How do we navigate our faith, and how do we understand our place within the world?  To begin, we need to understand that Orthodoxy is different from the Christian world around us.  Of course, that statement alone can be problematic, leading us into a prideful, arrogant, obnoxious triumphalism that leads us to believe that we are inherently better than others simply because we are different.  If we are truly missionaries and a missionary church, such a noxious attitude will poison our relations with other Christians and turn away many potential converts.  But, Orthodox thought is indeed different, and we need to explore why this is so.

The first place where we can clearly see that Orthodox thought was taking a different track is around the Photian Schism of 863-867 A.D.  Older historiography generally held that there was a second break between Rome and Constantinople after Photios’ restoration to the patriarchal throne and his death in 893.  In his seminal work on the Photian Schism, however, Francis Dvornik spends an entire chapter eradicating this assertion.[1]   This schism, precipitated by the Byzantine emperor Michael III appointing the layman and scholar Photios[2] as Patriarch of Constantinople, exposed several fault lines between the emerging Latin Church and the Greek speaking Eastern Church that had been growing for years.  The Eastern and Western churches had been on increasingly divergent paths since at least 400 A.D.  These paths began to diverge ever more expansively around the year 800.[3]  At this time, the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne had grown quite powerful in the West, so much so that the Roman Pope crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day in 800.  This was the accelerator that eventually would lead to the split between the East and the West.  The Byzantines, most of whom would have bristled at the very term Byzantine,[4] felt that the capital of the empire was in Constantinople.  Emperor Constantine the Great had uprooted the capital from Old Rome and replanted it in the New Rome, Constantinople.  The city on the Bosphorous was henceforth home to the Senate and to many of the remaining patrician families; the West had none of these imperial institutions.  For these barbarian Franks to attempt to usurp the title of emperor was outrageous to the citizenry of Constantinople.

It was also during this time that the filioque, which had been in existence since 477, came into wide use in the Frankish Church.[5]  The filioque is the addition of one word to the Nicene Creed.  This word is, of course, filioque, and it is translated “from the Son.”  So, instead of the Creed reading “and of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father,” the Latin version of the Creed now read ““and of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, and the son.”

This innovation, as it is called by the East, is our primary concern.  The term filioque, changed the essence of the ancient creed of the first two Great Councils in Nicaea and Constantinople.  In the eyes of the Eastern Patriarchates, these councils were ecumenical and therefore infallible.[6]  To add to the Creed formulated at these councils implied that the Fathers of these councils were somehow mistaken, something that was, and is, anathema to the Orthodox Churches.  The Frankish church’s unilateral insertion of the filioque into the Creed definitively set the Eastern and Western churches onto divergent theological paths.  These divergent paths would eventually tear the Church asunder in the late ninth century and again in the year 1054.

We must remember, however, that the Photian Schism began with political issues, the groundwork of which had been laid in the generations leading up to the actual break.  Theology did not play much of a role in the break at all.  Once the break occurred, however, the political and theological issues would come to the fore.  Politically, Old Rome had been in the process of adopting a new ideology that placed the Pope at the head of Christianity and possibly the world.  The Frankish king would be subject to the Popes and provide the military might to enforce this new ideology.[7]  This thought was a clear break with the conciliar theory of the Christian East and was distinctly at odds with the Byzantine ideology of symphonia, in which the church and the state worked together for the benefit of the empire while remaining in their separate spheres.  The East was faced with a simple choice with this new ideology from the West: accept it, or not.  The East chose to reject this development, commonly called Papal Primacy; though the Photian Schism was resolved, both the filioque and a final resolution of Papal Primacy lingered on, waiting for another crack through which to burst.[8]  As the churches of the latter Middle Ages continued on their different intellectual courses, the dual issues of the filioque and Papal Primacy would eventually shatter the unity of the Christian churches in 1054.  The West continued on its scholastic course, losing contact with its classical Hellenic heritage.  The Byzantine East, largely due to the efforts of Photios, who had been a scholar at the University of Constantinople prior to his elevation to the patriarchal throne, experienced a Renaissance.[9]  The ancient classics of Greece were rediscovered and miniscule letters first appeared in Greek manuscripts.  The rediscovery of the classics led to a reevaluation of the classical world and its relationship to Christianity.  The result was a Christianized Hellenism that was distinct to the Byzantine period.  This distinctive Byzantine Hellenism was multiethnic and tolerant of different national traditions and liturgical practice, yet it was distinctly Greek in its theological language and culture.  Byzantine Hellenism’s relationship with her ancient classics was guided by a principle expressed by Photios himself that explains why the Byzantines were unwilling to broker any compromise on the filioque issue.  Photios taught that it was “truly necessary that we observe all things, but, above all, that which pertains to matters of faith, in which a small deviation represents a deadly sin.”[10]

In the East, these small deviations were prevented by constant appeals to the past.  Everything must fit neatly within what has always been.  If it did not fit, then it could not be a part of Orthodoxy.[11]  This attitude has given the Eastern Church a historical bent as well as a constant appeal to the ancient mysticism that characterizes her theology.  This historical and mystical attitude has set the Eastern Church on a footing that would be predisposed to resist random or unnecessary theological innovation.[12]  It would also place the Byzantines in a place where they would neither fully understand nor approve of the Renaissance Humanists from Italy as they strove to replace Scholasticism with their version of Humanism.  The Byzantines would especially disapprove of the Italian propensity to place the ancient pagan philosophers and human reason above the Church Fathers.  Since the Byzantines had never experienced Scholasticism and knew far more of the Christian Fathers than just St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and since the Byzantines also never completely lost their classical heritage, they could not understand the Italian enthusiasm for their pagan writers at the expense of the Christian Fathers.

The question of Western Scholastic vs. Classical modes of thought has never really left the Orthodox Church since the time of Photios.  The debate took different tracks at the foundering attempts at union at both Lyon and Ferrara-Florence, both of which were rejected by the Orthodox Church at large, and began to take a form that we now recognize in the intellectual circles of late Nineteenth century Russia.

To prevent this post from growing too long, I will merely summarize the development of the debate between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, a debate that is still with us and a debate that has, in many ways, transferred itself from the debates about 19^th century Russian society to the debates about the nature of Orthodoxy and its relation to the Western world.  The Westernizers in late Imperial Russia felt great consternation at Russia’s “backwardness.”  They felt that Peter the Great’s reforms were a good start, but that Russian society had not progressed far enough and needed to bring in western Enlightenment ideals faster.  Of course, among these ideals was the desire for a more constitutional monarchy and limits on the autocratic authority of the Tsars.  This naturally made the Imperial Government hostile on many levels towards the Westernizers.  The Slavophiles looked at Nineteenth century Russian society and came to a different conclusion.   They believed that Russia had always had her own way of doing things and that to reform and correct Russian society one didn’t need to mindlessly ape whatever the West was doing, but rather to look to the ways Russian society had functioned before Peter the Great’s reforms.  Of course, this also placed them in opposition to the Imperial party, who believed that Peter the Great’s reforms were the greatest thing ever to happen to Russia and the governmental structures he created were unassailable and not to be questioned.  Reading the current scholarship of Orthodoxy, one can see all of three of these trends in her thought.  There are some who are clearly Westernizers and rely heavily on non-Orthodox thought and modern paradigms for the church.  There are others, notably the Neo-patristic synthesis and her descendants, who have taken the Slavophile approach and applied it to Orthodox thought.  This perspective holds that the Orthodox Church has her own processes and modes of thought and does not need to mindlessly copy what the Western Churches are doing to be successful.  Finally, there is a party of “traditionalists” who believe that the Orthodox Church should not be changing at all, and the patterns of recent history are sufficient.  Our awareness of these groups, and our self-awareness of which group we identify with, will allow us to participate in debates about any aspect of Orthodoxy, be it translation style, ecclesiology, etc., without allowing our emotions and passions to influence our participation, jeopardizing both our attempts to convince others and our salvation.