Schmemann on the inversion of Christian love
November 30, 2009
Already for centuries, and apparently with a pure conscience, not only individual Christians but also whole churches have affirmed that in reality Christian love must be directed toward one’s own—that to love essentially and self-evidently means to love neighbors and family, one’s own people, one’s own country—all those persons and things that we would usually love anyway, without Christ and the gospel. We no longer notice that in Orthodoxy, for example, religiously colored and justified nationalism long ago became a genuine heresy, crippling church consciousness, hopelessly dividing the Orthodox East and making all of our profuse tatlk about the ecumenical truth of Orthodoxy a hypocritical lie. We have forgotten the other, no less strange and frightening words that the gospel contains about this merely “natural love”: “He who loves father or mother…son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Mt 10:37), and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers…he cannot be my disciple (Lk 14:26). If coming to Christ signifies the fulfilment of his commandment, then, obviously, Christian love not only is not a simple increase, “crowning” and religious sanction of natural love, but is radically distinguished from it and even contraposed to it. It is really a new love, of which our fallen nature and fallen world are incapable and which is therefore impossible in it.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (New York: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2003), 135-136.
Between heresy and orthodoxy
November 27, 2009
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.
A variation on the “Fool for Christ” theme
September 19, 2009
WordPress informs me that someone found this blog using the search terms “malankara orthodox church crazy”.
Whether you’re yurodivyi or just the normal kind of crazy, welcome.
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.
