Theology & Dogma
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EssentialTheology & DogmaNicene-Constantinopolitan CreedThe Symbol of Faith: the confession the whole Church says, written at the First Council in 325 and completed at the Second in 381, which added the articles on the Holy Spirit, the Church, baptism, the resurrection and the life of the age to come. Chalcedon received it as the creed of the hundred and fifty Fathers, and Ephesus forbade any other. It is said at every Divine Liturgy, after the deacon cries the doors, the doors, and by every candidate for baptism. The council wrote we believe; the Church at prayer says I believe, each person confessing for themselves the faith of all. The text the Orthodox Church says has no Filioque, because nothing was ever added to it here, and it is given below in the Greek of the councils.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Holy TrinityOne God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: not three gods, and not one person wearing three masks. The three share one essence, one will and one activity, and are distinguished only by how each has His being: the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding. The Father is the source and cause of the other two, and that is why the Church confesses one God: its unity is a Person, not an abstraction behind the three. The doctrine was not invented and then defended; it was forced into words by the Church’s own worship, which from the beginning baptised in the one name of the three, and it was fixed at Nicaea and Constantinople against those who would have made the Son or the Spirit a creature. Every group of psalms in the services ends in the doxology to the three, and every Orthodox prayer is addressed within it. The Church is meant to be its icon: many persons, one life.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe IncarnationThe Word who was with God and was God became flesh: the eternal Son took from the Virgin a complete human nature, body and rational soul, and lived a human life from conception to death without ceasing to be God. He did not merely look human, as the Docetists said, nor borrow a human body as a vehicle for a divine mind, as Apollinarius said, and the Fathers’ reason for insisting is St Gregory’s: what has not been assumed has not been healed. So it is one Person, the Son, who is born, weeps, hungers, dies and rises, which is why His mother is the Theotokos and why God can be painted. The feasts from the Annunciation to the Ascension keep it in order, and the whole of salvation rests on it: God came where we are, so that we might go where He is.EssentialTheology & DogmaTheosis (Deification)The purpose of a human life, in the Orthodox understanding: to become by grace what God is by nature. Scripture calls it becoming partakers of the divine nature, and Christ quotes the psalm that says you are gods; the Fathers put it in the sentence St Athanasius made famous, God became man so that man might become god. It is not absorption, and it is not a change of essence: a person stays a person and a creature, and is filled with God as iron in a fire is filled with fire without ceasing to be iron. It is participation in God’s uncreated energies, which are God Himself given, and not in His essence, which no creature shares. It begins in baptism and chrismation, is fed in the Eucharist, and is worked out in keeping the commandments, prayer and love; the Transfiguration is its picture. St Maximus says God and man are paradigms of each other.EssentialTheology & DogmaChristologyWho Christ is, as the councils defined it over four hundred years: one Person, the eternal Son, in two complete natures, divine and human, united without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. Every clause of that sentence answers someone. Nestorius divided Christ into God and a man joined to Him, and Ephesus in 431 answered that the one born of the Virgin is God, so she is Theotokos. Eutyches let the humanity dissolve into the divinity, and Chalcedon in 451 answered with the four adverbs. The monothelites gave Christ one will, and the Sixth Council in 681, following St Maximus, answered that each nature has its own will and activity, the human freely obeying the divine. Because the Person is one, what belongs to either nature can be said of Him: God was crucified, and a man is worshipped. The Oriental churches that did not receive Chalcedon remain apart, and the dialogue with them has not ended in reunion.EssentialTheology & DogmaEssence-Energies DistinctionGod is wholly unknowable in what He is, and wholly present in what He does. His essence no creature will ever grasp or share, in this life or the next; His energies - His life, grace, light, power and love - are God Himself acting and given, uncreated, and in them God is truly known and truly shared. St Basil had said we know God from His energies and do not claim to approach His essence. When Barlaam argued that the light the hesychasts saw must be created or else God had been divided, St Gregory Palamas answered that the energies are not a part of God but God, as the rays are the sun, and the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351 confirmed him. The distinction is what lets the Orthodox Church say both that God is beyond everything and that a human being can be deified, and it is why grace in Orthodox theology is uncreated.EssentialTheology & DogmaHoly TraditionWhat has been handed on: the faith received from the Apostles and kept alive in the Church by the Holy Spirit. St Paul tells the Thessalonians to hold the traditions they were taught, whether by word or by letter, and the Orthodox Church has never set Scripture against Tradition: Scripture is the heart of Tradition, written down within it, and read rightly within it. Around it stand the Creed, the definitions of the councils, the writings of the Fathers, the liturgy, the icons, the canons and the lives of the saints. St Basil lists things nobody doubts that are written nowhere: the sign of the cross, facing east to pray, the words of the epiclesis. Tradition is not the same as custom. A custom can be old and wrong; Tradition is the life of the Spirit in the Church, and the test of it is the Church’s common mind over time, not antiquity alone.EssentialTheology & DogmaPneumatology (Holy Spirit)The Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. The Creed says this in the words of 381, and St Basil’s treatise had prepared them. The Spirit is sent into the world through the Son, which is His mission in time; He proceeds from the Father alone, which is His eternal origin, and the Filioque confused the two. He spoke by the prophets, overshadowed the Virgin, descended at the Jordan and at Pentecost, and is given to each Christian in chrismation as the seal of the gift. He changes the gifts at the epiclesis. St Seraphim of Sarov said the acquisition of the Spirit is the whole aim of the Christian life, and almost every Orthodox service begins by asking Him to come.EssentialTheology & DogmaSoteriology (Salvation)Salvation in the Orthodox understanding is healing and deliverance before it is acquittal. Sin is a sickness and death a captivity, and Christ is the physician who takes on the disease and the victor who breaks the prison: by death He trampled down death, as the Paschal hymn says every day for forty days. The cross is the fullest act of love and the defeat of the devil, and the Resurrection is its meaning. The Fathers use the language of ransom and sacrifice freely, but St Gregory the Theologian asks to whom the ransom was paid and answers: not to the devil, and not to a Father who demanded it. The Orthodox tradition has never made the satisfaction of divine justice the centre of the account, as the Latin West did after Anselm. The end of salvation is not a changed verdict but a changed person: theosis.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Cross & CrucifixionThe Cross is the central symbol of Orthodoxy: not merely an instrument of death but the means of victory over death, sin, and the devil. Christ's death was voluntary, an act of supreme love. On the Cross, Christ descended into the depths of human suffering, and in His death into Hades itself, destroying death 'by death.' The Cross is venerated, signed on oneself, and placed in every Orthodox home and church.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Descent into HadesBetween the cross and the rising, Christ goes down to the dead. The Orthodox icon of the Resurrection does not show Him stepping out of a tomb: it shows Him in Hades, standing on its broken gates, pulling Adam and Eve up by the wrist so that the grip is His and not theirs. This is why the Paschal troparion says He trampled down death by death, and why the Paschal homily of St John Chrysostom, read at Paschal Matins, addresses Hades directly and mocks it. Holy Saturday keeps the day itself, and its hymns are the strangest in the year: the tomb is called the source of life, and the Church sings a funeral service over God.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Monarchy of the FatherThe Father alone is the source. The Son is begotten of Him and the Spirit proceeds from Him, and neither is begotten or proceeds from the divine essence as such, or from the Son. This is what the Greek Fathers mean by saying the Church confesses one God because it confesses one Father: the unity of the Trinity is secured by a Person, not by a shared substance standing behind the three. St Gregory the Theologian says the three are one in nature and that the union is the Father, from whom and to whom the others are referred. Without this the argument against the Filioque is only half made, because the objection is not that the Spirit has too many sources but that giving Him two destroys the one He has.EssentialTheology & DogmaTheotokos (Mother of God)The Mother of God, the title the Third Ecumenical Council confirmed at Ephesus in 431: the One she bore is God, and to call her less is to divide her Son. The Church calls her ever-virgin, and in the litanies of almost every service our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, and asks her prayers more often than those of anyone else. The Fathers from Justin and Irenaeus on called her the new Eve, whose obedience undid the first Eve’s disobedience, and St Nicholas Cabasilas wrote that the Incarnation was the work not only of the Father, the Son and the Spirit but of the will and faith of the Virgin. The Church keeps her Dormition as a true death followed by her translation into heaven, body and soul, sung in the hymns of the feast without being defined as a dogma; it does not receive the Latin dogma of her Immaculate Conception, because it never taught the inherited guilt from which that dogma exempts her. Her icon stands to the left of the royal doors, and in the apse above the altar she is often painted as the Platytera, wider than the heavens, holding Christ.ImportantTheology & DogmaEcclesiology (Doctrine of the Church)The Orthodox teaching on the Church, which is less a doctrine about an institution than a confession of what the Church is: the Body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, as the Creed says. It is found whole in each Eucharist gathered around its bishop. Wherever the bishop appears, wrote St Ignatius, let the people be, as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church. The local Churches are not branches of a larger organisation but the one Church in each place, held together by one faith, one Eucharist and the councils, with no bishop above the council. The Orthodox Church confesses itself to be that one Church, not one part of it. How to speak of Christians outside it is debated among Orthodox theologians themselves: some, following Fr Georges Florovsky, have said the Church’s canonical boundaries are not the limit of the Spirit’s work, and others hold to a stricter reading. The Church itself has not settled the question by council.ImportantTheology & DogmaFilioque ControversyThe words and the Son, added in the Latin West to the Creed’s statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. They appear first in Spain, at Toledo in 589, and spread through the Frankish church; Charlemagne’s theologians pressed for them, and Pope Leo III refused and had the Creed engraved without them on silver shields in St Peter’s. Rome itself began singing them only around 1014. The Orthodox objection is double. On the canonical side, the Creed of an Ecumenical Council was changed by one part of the Church alone, when Ephesus had forbidden any other creed. On the theological side, making the Son a second source of the Spirit undoes the monarchy of the Father and blurs the Persons into their shared essence. St Photius, the council of 879-880 and St Mark of Ephesus each held the line, and it remains one of the questions between the churches.ImportantTheology & DogmaGrace Is UncreatedIn Orthodoxy grace is not a created gift that God makes and hands over. It is God Himself, in His uncreated energies, given to His creatures: the light on Tabor, the fire at Pentecost and the grace of the Mysteries are God communicating Himself, not a substance produced for the purpose. This follows from the essence-energies distinction, and it is the point on which Orthodox and scholastic theology divide most sharply, since a created grace can only ever be a thing between God and the soul. Theosis depends on it entirely: a creature cannot be made a partaker of the divine nature by receiving something created.ImportantTheology & DogmaHomoousios (Consubstantial)Of one essence: the word the First Ecumenical Council put into the Creed to say that the Son is God in exactly the sense the Father is, not a lesser god and not the first of creatures. It was a hard word to choose. It is not in Scripture, and it had been used in a sense condemned at Antioch in 268, and for half a century after Nicaea bishops who were not Arians preferred homoiousios, of like essence, a single letter away. St Athanasius held that nothing less would do, and the Cappadocians won over those who had hesitated by showing that one essence need not mean one person. The Second Council confirmed it in 381. Chalcedon then used the same word twice: Christ is of one essence with the Father in His divinity and of one essence with us in His humanity.ImportantTheology & DogmaHypostasis (Person)A Person: one of the three in the Trinity, or the one Person of the incarnate Son. Until the fourth century the word was nearly a synonym of ousia, essence, and the Nicene anathemas themselves use the two together, which is why the East suspected the West of making the three one person and the West suspected the East of making them three gods. The Cappadocian Fathers fixed the distinction the Church has kept: ousia is what is common, hypostasis what is particular, as humanity is common to Peter and Paul and each is someone. Father, Son and Spirit are one ousia and three hypostases, distinct only by origin. Chalcedon then applied the word to Christ: one hypostasis in two natures. Much modern Orthodox thought about what a person is starts here.ImportantTheology & DogmaImage & Likeness of GodLet us make man in our image, after our likeness, says Genesis, and the Fathers made much of the two words. From St Irenaeus on, many read the image as what every human being has by creation, reason, freedom, the capacity for communion with God, and the likeness as what the image is for, becoming like God, which is theosis. We possess the one by creation, one of them wrote, and acquire the other by free choice. Not all the Fathers divided the words so, but all taught that the image is darkened by sin and never destroyed, and that Christ, the true Image of the Father, came to restore it. The image is not a part of the person but the whole person, body and soul, and the Church acts on it: at the Liturgy the deacon censes the icons and then the people, because they are icons too.ImportantTheology & DogmaKenosis (The Self-Emptying)He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. The Orthodox reading of that verse is careful about what the emptying is: the Son does not lay aside His divinity or suspend any of it, because a divinity that can be put down is not one. The emptying is the assuming. What He takes on is the whole of our condition, including hunger, weariness, ignorance as man, fear in the garden and death, and He takes it without ceasing for an instant to fill all things as God. The modern kenotic theories that have the Word divest Himself of omniscience or omnipotence to become man are therefore not a deeper humility but the old error of making the Incarnation a subtraction.ImportantTheology & DogmaOusia (Essence/Nature)Essence: what something is, and in God what is common to the Father, the Son and the Spirit, so that each is wholly God and there are not three gods. Eunomius claimed that the divine essence could be known and named - that God simply is unbegottenness - and so that the begotten Son could not be God. St Basil and St Gregory of Nyssa answered that we do not know the essence even of an ant, still less of God, and that every name we give God names something about Him, never what He is. That refusal is the root of the apophatic tradition and of the distinction between the unknowable essence and the energies in which God gives Himself. In the language of the councils about Christ, ousia and nature mean the same: He has two, divine and human.ImportantTheology & DogmaPerichoresis (Mutual Indwelling)Each Person of the Trinity dwells wholly in the others without mixture and without ceasing to be Himself. St John of Damascus gives the word its settled theological use: the three have their being in one another, so that where one is all three are, and the works of God outside Himself are never divided between them. The same word does a second job in Christology, where the two natures of Christ interpenetrate without confusion, which is how the Church can say that God was crucified and that a man is worshipped while refusing both the mixture of Eutyches and the division of Nestorius.ImportantTheology & DogmaRecapitulation (Anakephalaiosis)Christ gathers up the whole of human life in Himself and lives it again rightly. St Irenaeus works it out in detail against the Gnostics: where Adam was disobedient at a tree, Christ is obedient on a tree; where Eve believed a messenger and bound herself, the Virgin believed a messenger and loosed the knot; and He passed through every age of life, infancy and childhood and youth and manhood, sanctifying each by being in it. Salvation on this reading is not a transaction conducted over our heads but a second running of the whole human course, done correctly, by one who is ours.ImportantTheology & DogmaThe Logos and the logoiEvery created thing has a logos, a word or principle by which God intends it, and all of these are held together in the one Logos who became flesh. St Maximus works this out in the seventh Ambiguum: the logoi are not the things themselves and not a separate world of ideas, they are God’s wills concerning each thing, uncreated in Him and the reason each thing is the thing it is. To know a creature truly is therefore to read it back to its maker, and sin is refusing to. This is the Orthodox answer to the Platonic forms, and it is why contemplation of nature stands as a stage of the spiritual life between the keeping of the commandments and the knowledge of God.ImportantTheology & DogmaAncestral Sin (vs. Original Sin)What humanity inherits from Adam, in the Orthodox understanding, is a condition, not a guilt: mortality, corruption, the passions and a will bent toward sin, into which every person is born and in which each then sins for himself. The Greek of Romans 5:12 says death spread to all men because all sinned; the Latin read the same words as in whom all sinned, meaning in Adam, and St Augustine built on that reading a doctrine of guilt transmitted to every child. The East did not follow him. The image of God is obscured, not destroyed, and freedom remains. This is why the Orthodox Church does not need, and does not receive, the Latin dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which exists to exempt the Virgin from a guilt the East never taught. Baptism is for the remission of sins and for new birth into Christ’s life.ImportantTheology & DogmaApophatic TheologySpeaking of God by saying what He is not, because anything a human mind can grasp is less than God. Moses entered the thick darkness where God was, and St Gregory of Nyssa reads that darkness as the place where knowing stops and meeting begins. The Mystical Theology of the Areopagite climbs by denials until it denies even the denials. This is not agnosticism or silence for its own sake: it keeps the mind from making an idol out of its own concepts, and it is the way to union rather than a wall. The Liturgy prays it: Thou art God ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible. Positive, cataphatic theology is not abolished by it - God is truly good and truly Father - but it is always said knowing that the reality is more than the word.ImportantTheology & DogmaArianismThe teaching of Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, that the Son of God is the first and greatest of creatures, through whom God made the world, but a creature: there was when He was not. He set it to popular songs, and sailors and millers sang them. The First Council condemned it in 325 and wrote homoousios into the Creed, and for half a century afterwards it looked as if Nicaea had lost: emperors favoured the Arian and half-Arian parties, St Athanasius was exiled five times, and after the councils of 359 St Jerome wrote that the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian. The Goths were converted by an Arian missionary, so the kingdoms that followed Rome in the West began Arian. The Second Council in 381 ended it within the empire.ImportantTheology & DogmaCreation & CosmologyGod created the world ex nihilo (from nothing) as a free act of love, not necessity. Creation is inherently good (Genesis 1:31) but not divine: it is distinct from God, yet sustained by His uncreated energies. The material world is not evil (contra Gnosticism). The whole cosmos is destined for transfiguration, not destruction.ImportantTheology & DogmaSynergy (Free Will & Grace)Orthodoxy teaches synergy, synergeia, the working together of divine grace and human freedom. Grace goes before, awakens and enables; the will must consent and keep consenting, and it remains free to refuse. This rules out Pelagianism, which makes salvation the work of human effort, and it rules out absolute predestination, the decree that saves or damns without regard to the will. Scripture does speak of those God foreknew and predestined, and the Fathers read that as foreknowledge, not as compulsion: God knows what a free creature will choose without choosing it for him.ImportantTheology & DogmaThe Theotokos and the Immaculate ConceptionOrthodoxy honours the Theotokos above every creature and does not hold the Immaculate Conception, the dogma defined at Rome in 1854 that she was preserved from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception. The Orthodox objection is not that she is less holy but that the dogma answers a question Orthodoxy does not ask: it presupposes inherited guilt, which the East has never taught, so there is no stain for her to be preserved from. She was mortal as we are mortal, she died, and her purity is the fruit of a free obedience rather than an exemption granted before she could consent. Making her an exception makes her less like us, and it is precisely as one of us that she gave the Word His flesh.Theology & DogmaAngelic & Demonic RealmAngels are bodiless spiritual beings created before the material world. Orthodox tradition follows Pseudo-Dionysius in describing nine angelic orders in three triads: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Powers, Authorities; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Satan (Lucifer) and the demons are fallen angels who rebelled through pride. Guardian angels are assigned to each person at baptism.Theology & DogmaMonophysitismThe teaching of Eutyches that after the union Christ has one nature only, His humanity absorbed into His divinity as a drop of wine into the sea. Condemned at Chalcedon in 451, which confessed one Person in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The condemnation stands and has never been revisited.Theology & DogmaMonothelitismThe teaching that the incarnate Christ has one will, put forward in the seventh century as a formula on which Chalcedonians and those who had refused Chalcedon might agree, and pressed by imperial decree in the Ekthesis of 638 and the Typos of 648. Its earlier form was monoenergism, one operation. Orthodoxy refused it because a will belongs to a nature: a Christ with no human will is not a man, and the will is the very faculty that fell, so what He did not assume He did not heal. St. Maximus the Confessor and Pope St. Martin I were tried and exiled for refusing it, and St. Maximus had his tongue and right hand cut off so that he could neither say it nor write it. The Sixth Ecumenical Council condemned it in 681, after both were dead.Theology & DogmaNestorianismThe teaching condemned at Ephesus in 431 in the person of Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, who would not call the Virgin Theotokos, Mother of God, but only Christotokos, mother of Christ. St Cyril of Alexandria saw in it a Christ divided into two subjects, a man and the Word who dwelt in him, and insisted that the one born of the Virgin, who suffered and died, is the Word of God Himself in the flesh. Nestorius was deposed and died in exile. Whether he held the doctrine that bears his name is still argued, and the Church of the East, which honours him, was never party to the council. The Orthodox Church keeps the council’s judgment, and every time it calls the Virgin Theotokos it confesses what Ephesus defended: one Christ, God made man, and not a man God came to live in.Theology & DogmaSophiologyA system developed by Vladimir Soloviev and worked out theologically by Fr Sergius Bulgakov, in which Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is treated as a principle standing between God and creation and in some sense personal. It was condemned in 1935 by the Moscow Patriarchate and, separately and in the same year, by the Russian Church Abroad, which rarely agreed with Moscow about anything in that decade. The objection is that it introduces a fourth something into the doctrine of God and blurs the line between the uncreated and the created, which is the one line Orthodox theology will not let go of. What Sophiology was reaching for, a real contact between God and the world that is God Himself and not a creature, the tradition already has in the distinction between the essence and the energies.