Christian Unity and the Renunciation of Autonomy

In yesterday’s post I wrote about sin as the quest for autonomy, and repentance as the surrender of that quest. It was a little bit autobiographical, to say the least.

One day, when I was dealing with that reality in my own life in Confession, my spiritual father asked me, “Do you realize that, in your own life, you are playing out the dynamic that has been at work in the Churches since the Schism?”

And you know, he was right.

There was a time when Catholics and Orthodox were one Church. In fact, that was the way it was in the beginning, before our wounds and mistakes drove us apart: the growing alienation leading up to 1054, the mutual excommunications, the Crusades, the sacking of Constantinople, the Unia, etc. I have no intention of downplaying the historical events that led to the Schism and entrenched it, but I think there’s more than that.

It was history that made the East and the West aware of the suffering each would have to endure to live in communion with the other. As the historical tensions grew, the cost of communion grew greater and greater. After all, humans can only take so much hurt, especially when it is dealt by a brother or a sister. As the Psalmist once said: “For it is not an enemy who taunts me—then I could bear it. It is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—then I could hide from him. But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend (Ps 55.12-13). This, historically, became how the Churches experienced each other. This is exemplified by the 12th-century Archbishop Nicetas of Nicomedia when he wrote:

And if he [the Pope] wishes to judge us and even to rule us and our churches, not by taking counsel with us but at his own arbitrary pleasure, what kind of brotherhood, or even what kind of parenthood can this be? We should be slaves, not the sons, of such a Church, and the Roman See would not be the pious mother of sons but a hard and imperious mistress of slaves.

At the core of the Archbishop’s grievance was not a mere theological or jurisdictional dispute, but his frustration of being excluded from the family. But what human being cannot identify with this feeling of sadness? Yet there are some who are content to treat the Schism as though it were merely about “issues” rather than real people with real wounds.

There was the historical rupture, the spread of that rupture, and its final canonization—each Church’s acceptance, over time, of that separation as “normal”. Today, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have learned to live without the other after 1,000 years of practice. Life together was too painful, filled with too many traumatic memories. Separation has its advantages: outsiders can’t hurt you the way a brother or sister can.

This is the only way I know how to comprehend all the energy that goes into lousy explanations as to why Orthodox and Catholic are different. (I’m not denying that there are in fact real difficulties. I am here speaking only of the lousy ones.) The other day I listened to an interview with a certain Professor Paraskeve Tibbs on Ancient Faith Radio entitled “Mystery and Sacramentality: East and West”. I didn’t know if I should be angry or amused by the explanations given by this professor of the “vast differences” between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The list of these contrasts was quite staple: the East is worship-oriented, the West worships rationalism; the East emphasizes love and healing, the West emphasizes punishment and law; etc. I’ve gotten used to that. The coup de grace, however, was her explanation of the Western understanding of “the deposit of faith”. My transcription follows:

So the Holy Mysteries should never be considered as anything like a contract or a bank account….[Interviewer asks for an explanation of the "bank account" reference.] I was thinking of the Roman Catholic view of sacraments, which is often spoken of as a huge bank account. There is this notion that Christ has contributed through His meritorious work into this “deposit of faith,” and people can receive from the deposit of faith in the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic tradition. They can also contribute to this deposit of faith—I’ll loosely call it “the bank account”—in the form of indulgences which are usually financial but not always. So all that to say that it is not too difficult to trace the idea of “contract” and “bank account” through the Latin tradition….

Now, that’s just the sort of confused and jumbled testimony that the false witnesses gave at Jesus’ trial. Rather embarrassing for a professor at a renowned seminary, is it not? Why this kind of gross distortion? If Dr. Tibbs didn’t know what the Roman understanding of “the deposit of faith” actually meant, or that depositum came from the Vulgate translation of 1 Timothy 6.20, then why was she speaking as an authority on the subject? Are we supposed to believe that Roman Catholics actually think they are making “withdrawals” when they go to church? Dr. Tibbs’ caricature of Catholicism exemplifies a kind of proliferated obsession with erecting a wall between the Churches, to create a great and fixed chasm between them. Behind efforts like this is a willfulness to remain separate, rather than a concerted effort to understand and love each other.

For the part of Rome, there is was the recent document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which stated that the Orthodox Churches (Eastern and Oriental) “lack something” as churches because of their non-communion with the See of Rome. All right. An Orthodox theologian like Bishop Hilarion of Vienna can understand that, as he demonstrated in a subsequent interview. But was this not a missed opportunity on the part of the Roman Church? Why did she not confess that she, too, lacks something, namely, communion with the Orthodox Churches? Why didn’t she say, “Since you’ve been gone, I haven’t been the same. In fact, I also am defective because I no longer have you”? Why the silence? Or are we Catholics to believe that, while communion with the See of Rome is a constitutive element of the Church, communion between the Sees is not? Is that why we haven’t lost anything since separation from the Orthodox? If not, why couldn’t bring ourselves to say it?

Back to the point that came up that day. The continued separation between the Churches is in part the furtherance of the quest for autonomy that began in Eden. History has wounded us, and we’ve numbed ourselves by writing the other out of every day life. Between East and West is the lie that we do not need each other, and this, perhaps, is the greatest chasm and the thickest wall. If it is true that we long for reunion and not simply discussions about it, then it seems to me that we must first repent by unmasking this. That way, when we actually sit down to talk about things that really do stand in the way of our living together, we can at least see each other face to face. If not, we’ll have to stand before the dread judgment seat of Christ and defend ourselves with that primordial lame duck of questions, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”