Between heresy and orthodoxy

In his latest blog post entitled “Thoughts on Bulgakov, Apollinarius, and Ourselves,” Fr. Gregory Wassen enters into a conversation with the late Fr. Sergius Bulgakov on the role of Apollinarius in the formulation of orthodox Christology in the early Church. Fr. Gregory writes:

Our lives are a mixture of sin and holiness but equally a mixture of truth and heresy. Both are a human condition which needs healing. Origen had already spoken of saving doctrines in his On First Principles (refering to scriptural doctrines concerning Jesus Christ) because he understood that, as sin is a result of a sickness in our soul, so is heresy—and we all of us have it.

Some bold statements here, I think—of the kind I’m afraid is true but am less willing to confess.

Fr. Gregory’s post got me wondering about the nature of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Is truth—the defining criterion, so to speak, of orthodoxy—something we “have” or “possess”? In both Orthodox and Catholic communions it is common to say that each Church believes itself to “possess” the fullness (pleroma) of that truth which has been revealed by God. I wonder, however, if this language of possession is not more a matter of polemics than of faith. After all, who among us “possesses”—even if only in part—the Truth who is God Himself? Do we really believe that the One who is Truth can be contained in the makeshift crib of the human mind?

I submit that it is more helpful to consider our relationship to truth as one of participation rather than possession—in other words, to think of truth as something in which we “participate” rather than something we “have”. This appears to be more consistent with the language of deification in which Scripture and the Fathers express the goal of the Christian life. Rather than speaking of our “possession” of God, they seem to prefer to speak of theosis as the deepening of our participation or sharing in the Trinitarian life:

The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (John 17.22-23)

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers [κοινωνοὶ] of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. (2 Peter 1.3-4)

To try to discover the meaning of the commandments through study and reading without actually living in accordance with them is like mistaking the shadow of something for its reality.  It is only by participating in the truth that you can share in the meaning of truth.  If you search for the meaning without participating in the truth and without having been initiated into it, you will find only a besotted kind of wisdom. (St. Gregory of Sinai, On Commandments and Doctrines 22, in The Philokalia, Vol. IV)

Through this hermeneutic of participation, it is easier to see how it is that, in the words of Fr. Gregory, “our lives are a mixture of sin and holiness but equally a mixture of truth and heresy.” It also becomes clearer why, according to him, Origen held that “as sin is a result of a sickness in our soul, so is heresy—and we all of us have it.”

Perhaps orthodoxy is not an either/or phenomenon—for then one is either orthodox or one is not—but rather something like a continuum. To the extent that we participate in the Truth who is God Himself, we are “more” orthodox; and to the extent that we move away from Him, we become “more” heterodox (i.e. tending toward some “other” [hetero-] kind of glory rather than the “right” [ortho-] glory). And so, the drama of heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the life of the Church becomes fundamentally bound to the drama of sin and grace which plays itself out in the soul of every man and every community in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. This being the case, the true remedy for heresy or heterodoxy in the Church is not polemics, polarization or politicization but the therapeutic regiment of grace. As Fr. Gregory writes:

What we need is a healer and a place of healing—the Church. What we don’t need is more temptation and more accusation. This is why Jesus Christ is both the Healer and the Medicine for sin and heresy alike…. The way we treat and look at heretics could almost be said to be a good indicator of our spiritual health. For the heretic and the orthodox both find a home in us as much as do the sinner and the saint.

Let me conclude with a strange fact that struck me in the case of the Council of Ephesus in 431. The “arch-heretic” at Ephesus, Nestorius the Patriarch of Constantinople, in mid-council asked to be released from his duties and returned to his monastery in Antioch. He had, in the words of Henry Chadwick, “had enough.” I wonder if his journey from Ephesus to Antioch might not hold symbolic value for us. Even if we grant that Nestorius did in fact hold the errant ideas attributed to him then and now, I don’t think we can deny the basic merit and the orthodox impulse in his response: to return once again to that place where the Divine Physician can be found in the mystery of worship and the flesh-and-bone of brotherhood.

Who needs Scripture?

I wrote this piece for another publication a little over a year ago. Since I’ve been struggling for some time now with carving out time to read the Bible regularly, I read it as an exercise in de-planking my own eye. Anything you all have to offer is, as always, much welcome.

*****

[Jesus] said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” (Luke 10.26)

Read assiduously and learn as much as you can. Let sleep find you holding your Bible, and when your head nods let it be resting on the sacred page. (St Jerome, Letter to Eustochius)

While working on a writing project yesterday I came across this text in Ezekiel:

Yet you say, “Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?”  When the son has done what is lawful and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live.  The soul that sins shall die.  The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, not the father suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.  (Ezekiel 18.19-21)

The word of the Lord given through the prophet appears to be addressing what we might call a theological opinion that had arisen among the exiles in Babylon, namely, that God punishes sons for the sins of their fathers.

I won’t go into further details about the meaning of this text because I’m not concerned here with an exegetical reflection of it.  What struck me, and what I want to write about, was that I’d never seen this text brought up in Orthodox-Catholic conversations about original sin and inherited guilt.  Having hung around some ecumenical circles in the blogosphere for a while, I’ve witnessed many a discussion (often polemical) about Orthodox and Catholic anthropologies, but strangely, I don’t remember one in which this passage was carted out and batted around. Instead, the conversations were often saturated with quotations both long and short from the Fathers and modern theologians, and centered on the implication or acquittal of St. Augustine.

I think this points to problem that is neither uniquely Catholic nor Orthodox, but rather common to those of us who are students (or self-proclaimed experts) of the Patristic tradition.  We often go on and on about how the Fathers did not possess as “systematic theology” as we now understand it, and that their endeavor of theologia stood solidly on the grounds of prayer, asceticism and the assiduous reading of God’s Word rather than on philosophical systems or—*gasp*—the scholastic method.  But for all this, are we not merely honoring them with our lips while keeping our heart far away from them?

I’ve always been taught to see the Patristic tradition as a commentary on Scripture, full of diverse voices and theological subtleties, conditioned by the historical particularities of the life of the Church—liturgy, heresy, cultural questions and so forth.  To use the terminology of Cardinal Ratzinger, the Patristic tradition is the primitive and archetypal response of the Church to the Word of God—a response which is not just one among many, but rather one to which we must ascribe authority for its unparalleled and definitive influence on the shape of our faith.  This is true not only of the content of their theology, but also of their method (if I may make a distinction between the two)—namely, the rigorous searching and exposition of the Scriptures within the lived experience of the Church.  But in all this there is still a primacy that belongs to Scripture, for the Fathers saw themselves as servants, not masters, of that revelation.

To come back, then, to my gripe: if the Patristic tradition is like a finger which pointing to the moon, have we, their disciples, often focused exclusively on the finger and forgotten about the moon?

There is among students in many Biblical Studies departments today the vice of drowning oneself in the ocean of linguistic, historical and cultural studies—the so-called “historical-critical” methods, if you will—which leads to an actual neglect of the primary text of the Bible itself.  Even as an amateur student, my experience is that many of the alleged exegetical dead-knots can be untied or at least loosened by a closer and wider reading of the text (which, I should also say, the Fathers had often already done several centuries ago).

Have we, the disciples of the Fathers, fallen into a similar vice by focusing on the commentary of the Patristic tradition to the neglect of a direct encounter with God’s Word? For all our talk, have we turned their love for the Scriptures into something to be discussed and admired from afar, rather an example to be imitated?  I can almost hear St. Ephrem say to me, “Busted!”

I’m reminded, though, of the practice of our Jewish brothers and sisters, who until today show great devotion to both Scripture and tradition in their practice Torah study.  The practice instituted by the Talmud is to read the appointed Torah portion twice, and after that to read the interpretive translation (one could say “commentary”) from Targum Onkelos once.  By doing this, the student is directly engaging the biblical text while simultaneously entering into a conversation with the ancestors of faith who’ve gone before him.

Isn’t there a way Christians can practice something similar? Must we be necessarily torn between Scripture and the Fathers?  I’d like to think not.

By persuasion, and not by compulsion

And was [Christ's] coming, as a man might suppose, in power, in terror, and in dread? Not so; it was in gentleness and humility. As a king sending his royal son, so [the Father] sent him; He sent him as God; He sent him as Man to men; and that because He wanted to save us by persuasion, and not by compulsion–for there is no compulsion found with God. His mission was no pursuit or hounding of us; it was an invitation to us; it was in love, not in judgment that He sent him (though one day He will indeed send him to judge us, and then who shall abide the day of his coming?).

Letter to Diognetus, 7.3-4

Reactivation and Sisoes

My European adventure ended last week, and I apologize for having left this blog dormant without notice for so long. Don’t have much to say these days but perhaps soon I’ll post a little piece I’m submitting for a newsletter.

For today, since it is the feast of one of my favorite Desert Fathers, St. Sisoes the Great, I’ll share this word:

Abba Sisoes expressed himself freely one day, saying, ‘Have confidence: for thirty years I have not prayed to God about my faults, but I have made this prayer to him: “Lord Jesus, save me from my tongue,” and until now every day, I fall because of it, and commit sin.’ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, SLG, Sisoes §4)

And lastly, a picture I took one evening in Bad Dürkheim, where my aunt and her family generously hosted me for a total of 6 weeks:

Liturgy and memory

The liturgy, it seems to me, is a living organ of ecclesial memory holding within itself the legacy of the Fathers, those pioneers of the Way who shaped Christianity definitively by what Cardinal Ratzinger calls their “primordial response” to the Word of God. Not everyone has the ability, time or the means to read and study the writings of the Fathers, but every Christian who worships in and with the Church steps into and, in a very real way, lives in the spiritual home which they’ve built for us by their devotion to Living God.

Sunday after Sunday, season after season, year after year, one sings hymns and prays prayers broken in by use, stretched and worn to comfort by generations upon generations of holy men and women and not-so-holy men and women. In the liturgy one finds the familiar stories of Scripture, the broken heart of St. Ephrem, the textured (and verbose!) eloquence of St. Basil, the grandeur of the Jerusalem Temple, the songs carried on the lips of kings and peasants. The whole thing has the feel of a ragged prayer book, its tattered and dog-earred pages stained sometimes by sweat, sometimes by tears, sometimes by blood.

The liturgy, I think, is a house that is the way it is because it is “lived in”. If there are parts of the liturgy that seem outmoded, messy or awkward in their place, perhaps they reflect the outmodedness, messiness and awkwardness of a home that’s housed peoples of different times, shapes and sizes, who each in the course of discipleship thought to leave behind some furniture—or in some cases, entire rooms—for the heirs they knew would follow them. Any impulse toward its renovation and renewal, it seems to me, must always be nurtured with this in mind.

So I think.