I started reading Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church (Penguin, 1993) a year ago and only finished it last month. I feel as though this book has kept me company on a journey this past year, waking me up in stages to what I can best describe as the real Church.
The facts of history have a way of scattering illusions and smashing false absolutisms. I suppose one could say that my view of church history until recently resembled something of the Enlightenment hermeneutic of inevitable progress that’s charmed so many. I once saw the pilgrimage of the Church as a kind of steady, unbounded triumph of the Gospel over the many obstacles that were strewn along her path. Indeed, as I recall there is a popular work of church history that bears the title Triumph. I never read it and don’t intend to, but nevertheless the title was sufficient to sum up the views I once held.
It is not that I’ve lost hope in the Church. I’m not–at least I don’t think I am–a cynic by any stretch. It’s just that, the more I learn about church history, the more difficult it is for me to see the pilgrimage of the Church as an unstoppable victory march of any sort. There have simply been too many setbacks, lost battles and tragedies for any Christian to sum up the journey thus far with a word like “triumph”.
There is, for example, a thesis out there that the First Council of Nicea was a Constantinian machination to homogenize Christianity (or rather, “Christianities”) and thereby forge creedal unity that would safeguard the unity of the Empire. The (naive) counter-thesis, I suppose, would be that Council was nothing other than a genuinely spiritual event necessitated by the heresy of Arianism that threatened the very core of the Gospel.
The historical evidence, it seems to me, suggests that both theses hold some truth (perhaps one more than the other, though I don’t know enough to draw that conclusion just yet). I am not, by any means, suggesting a historical synthesis of the Hegelian kind. What seems to be the case is that the political and theological motivations for Nicea were fused, like two pieces of wax melted together. The outcome wasn’t so much a harmonious blend of two forces as much as it was an indelicate, indiscernible swirl.
But so what Nicea was in fact a political move of some sort? Does it invalidate the Creed? I don’t think so, though I used to fear that it would. I think the doctrine of the Incarnation stands on grounds more solid than the pure intentions of any emperor, bishop or deacon of Alexandria. I think it rests quite firmly on the witness of Scripture and the apostolic tradition. St. Athanasius, at least, seems to have thought the same.
I think the messes of history are many: the formation of the New Testament canon, the development of various liturgies, the controversy and aftermath of Chalcedon (nearer to my heart now than ever before), the condemnation of Origen, the Crusades, the Galileo incident (which, even after a more sober consideration of the facts, still shows Christians in pretty bad light)…. All these challenge the notion of church history as the record of a progressive triumph.
And what of absolutes? I’m not a relativist just yet, but many of things that I considered absolute, I no longer regard as such. The boundaries of the Old Testament canon, for example. Though my ecclesial affiliation is Syrian I find the the generosity of the Ethiopians quite intriguing, to say the least. The unchanging-ness of the liturgy is another. About time I gave up my idyllic notions about a “liturgy of the ages”, no? And if, I suppose, someone unearthed some strong evidence that Phoebe and Junia were more than deaconnesses then I’d say maybe it’s time we all re-thought a few certainties (but until then, I’m staying put)….
At times I wonder if I’m just slipping into a historicism of some sort—allowing history to absolutely shape, or rather reshape, my vision of the Church. (This, after all, has been suggested by some Catholic friends lately.) I’d like to think not. I’d like to think that I’m just learning to do what a teacher taught me to do some years ago—to read dogma historically rather than read history dogmatically. After all, the true Church must also be the real Church, no? Kyrie eleison.
From Athens
May 14, 2009
Sitting in the Athens airport, waiting for my flight to Berlin that’s been delayed. I’ve spent the last week in Greece (Nafplio, Delphi, Athens—in that order), seen dozens of Byzantine churches and kissed even more icons. If I had stayed here for a year it would change me for life, I’m quite sure.
I’ve been struck with a surprised sense of relief from being in an Orthodox country where the faith doesn’t have that anxious quality which it did in the United States. The earthiness of Orthodox faith and practice is tangible here, especially in the jam-packed church of Agioi Isidoroi. Fr. Paul (a frequent commenter here and my host in Athens) and I attended Hierarchical Vespers there after a semi-arduous hike up the hill on which was the small cave-church. As I watched people mill about kissing icons and lighting candles by the bunches—well-dressed old ladies and sloppily-clothed teenagers—, as I squeezed my way through the frenzied crowd for blessed bread, as I rubbed my myrrh-doused hands onto my face, it occurred to me that Orthodoxy here is something like an old, lived-in Malaysian house—warm, homey and poorly-lit rather than bright, tidy and sanitized.
I think Germany will be, let’s say, “different”.
In his autobiography, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, then-Cardinal Ratzinger identified Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism (the original French title of which is Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme) as one of books that has influenced him the most. In Principles of Catholic Theology, he sums up de Lubac’s thesis in Catholicism like this:
The concept of a Christianity concerned only with my soul, in which I seek only my justification before God, my saving grace, my entrance into heaven, is for de Lubac that caricature of Christianity that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made possible the rise of atheism. The concept of sacraments as the means of a grace that I receive like a supernatural medicine in order, as it were, to ensure only my own private eternal health is the supreme misunderstanding of what a sacrament truly is. De Lubac, for his part, is convinced that Christianity is, by its very nature, a mystery of union. The essence of original sin is the split into individuality, which knows only itself. The essence of redemption is the mending of the shattered image of God, the union of the human race through and in the One who stands for all and in whom, as Paul says (Gal 3:28), all are one: Jesus Christ. One this premise, the word Catholic became for de Lubac the main theme of all his theological speculation: to be a Christian means to be Catholic, means to be on one’s way to an all-embracing unity. Union is redemption, for it is the realization of our likeness to God, the Three-in-One. But union with him is, accordingly, inseparable from and a consequence of our own unity. (pp. 49-50; italics in original)
If Ratzinger is here reading de Lubac (with whom he no doubt agrees) correctly, then the privatization of the sacraments must be one of the most diabolical afflictions on church life because it spiritualizes and sanctions the very “split into individuality” which is a curse of original sin.
As I thought about these words I was reminded of an incident that made a deep impression on me several years ago, when I was serving as a Catholic campus missionary at the University of Illinois. In one of our team meetings, my colleague Mary Claire asked me in a gentle but direct tone: “Why do you and the other people here sit by yourselves when you go to a weekday Mass?” It had never occurred to me to be critical of my own preference to sit alone during the liturgy and I didn’t have an answer for Mary Claire that day (and brushed her question aside without much consideration) but the frank answer to the question would’ve been something like this: “Because for me, the Eucharist is where I, as an individual believer, encounter and receive Jesus Christ in the privacy of my own heart.”
At that point, the Eucharist held little communal significance in my mind, the “community” nonsense having become one of the signatures by which “the libs” were identified, along with their tell-tale omission of the definite article whenever they spoke of “Eucharist” (as in, “He gave me Eucharist”) and “Church” (as in, “We are Church”). Holy Communion was little more than the vehicle of grace by which I attained to my own sanctification and only indirectly allowed me to “bring Christ to others” by its fruits in my life. The liturgy was no “sacrament of the assembly” (again, that would’ve been classic “lib-talk” if you asked me then), and my own devotional practices made that clear. I went to Mass as an individual, received Communion as an individual, made my own thanksgiving prayer as an individual, and walked out of church as an individual. (I also recited the breviary as an individual, though it was good every and then to have company.)
This, it seems to me, is precisely “a Christianity concerned only with my soul, in which I seek only my justification before God, my saving grace, my entrance into heaven”. I might not have contributed to the rise of atheism but I was sure as heck propping it up.
The inherently communal—let’s say “ecclesial”—nature of the Eucharist is something I still struggle to appreciate and practice. Really, it was only when I started worshipping with the folks at Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Denver that I began to see that the Eucharist has something to do with “making” the Church.
What I think allowed that to happen was, first of all, the size of the congregation itself—basically made up of 25 people and often a few visitors. There was precious little anonymity or hiddenness at Ss. Cyril and Methodius (since one couldn’t really get away with sitting in the backmost pew without being publicly “invited” by Fr. Chrysostom to stand in front of the iconostasis). Everyone knew everyone.
Then there were the potluck lunches after each Sunday liturgy which, in many ways, was the highlight of my dining experience week after week. Not only was the food terrific—and it was pretty good even during the various fasts—, but the fellowship that took place during these meals was something that I’d never consistently experienced before in a parish context. (Going out to dinner with whoever of my friends happened to stick around after church on Sunday evenings paled in comparison.) The fellowship, like the meal, was an intentional commitment. We shared not only the food (which took some families all Sunday morning to make) but ideas, worries, funny stories and other “mundane” events from our week—you know, the stuff that “ordinary workaday life” is made of. Even more, we shared life during the week with phone calls, e-mails, and even a face-to-face meal or two sometimes. There were the bi-weekly lunches with Joel during which we talked about Chinese chess and Cyrillic Christology. One day, Fr. Chrysostom came by with some soy protein supplement because he thought I was unhealthily underweight. One of my favorite memories of summers in Denver is going to Vespers with the Ruckhauses followed by a cold beer (or two) on their front porch before dinner.
These were the small things that instilled in me, little by little, an understanding of the sacramental life as a life of reconciliation and communion for the divided children of Adam. I didn’t learn that from reading de Lubac or Ratzinger or The Didache but by experience—by being welcomed into a real, living, breathing community of real, living, breathing people. Only then did it seem strange—even repulsive—to me that I had so often practiced the “commune and scatter” approach to the Eucharist.
I wondered this morning if I would’ve ever understood what Ratzinger meant by these words had I never met the people at Ss. Cyril and Methodius.
…[T]he Church is is not merely an external society of believers; by her nature, she is a liturgical community; she is most truly Church when she celebrates the Eucharist and makes present the redemptive love of Jesus Christ, which, as love, frees men from their loneliness and leads them to one another by leading them to God. (Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 50)
I don’t see how I could have.
Schmemann on the heresy of religious nationalism
March 20, 2009
No one, I think, will deny that one of the fruits of Byzantine theocracy, which for a long time obscured the life of the Orthodox East, was the growth of those religious nationalisms which little by little identified the Church, her structure and organization, with the nation, making her the religious expression of national existence. This national existence, however natural and therefore legitimate it may be, is by its very essence a “partial” existence—the existence as a “part” of humanity which, though not necessarily inimical to its other “parts,” is nonethless opposed to them as “one’s own” to the “alien”. The early church knew herself to be the tertium genus, in which there is neither Greek nor Jew. This means that it proclaimed and conveyed a Life which, without rejecting the “partial” and natural life, could transform it into “wholeness” or catholicity. Hence it must be clear that religious nationalism is essentially a heresy about the Church, for it reduces grace and the new life to “nature” and makes the latter a formal principle of the Church’s structure. This does not mean that there can be no Christian people or any Christian vocation of a nation; it means only that a Christian nation (i.e. a nation which has acknowledged its Christian vocation) does not become the Church. Because the nature of the Church is the Body of Christ, she belongs to the Kingdom of the age to come and cannot identify herself with anything in “this world…”
Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology,” in The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 169.
This is no doubt the most beautiful formulation of the problem I’ve yet to come across—and for this same reason, the one that strikes in me the greatest sadness. May the Lord have mercy on us all.
“You have to suffer as much from the Church as for it”
March 10, 2009
I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
Flannery O’Connor, Letter to “A.”, July 20, 1955
