Analogia: Ecclesial Dialogues: East and West I

A Spectre Is Haunting Intercommunion

Sotiris Mitralexis

Teaching Fellow, University of Athens & Visiting Research Fellow,

University of Winchester

As an introduction to the current issue, this paper looks at certain details of the current state of the ecclesial dialogue between East and West, in light of Edward Siecienski’s two important contributions, The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate (Oxford University Press, 2017) and The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford University Press, 2010) and of other sources. The core question of the paper is, which Church is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church that we confess to during each liturgy and mass? Is it one of two divided Churches, or the one Church in schism?

1

Allow me to start with my personal incentives for embarking upon this enquiry. Reading Edward Siecienski’s treatises on the history of the divide, the recent The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate¹ and his earlier The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy,² I saw with considerable clarity that the actual historical trajectories of the Orthodox and the Catholic Church, in all the vertiginous complexity of these trajectories in all their details, look quite different from the simplified, retroactively formulated historical narratives concerning purported clear-cut divisions.

Of course, there is much to be said about which differences are indeed seemingly or currently irreconcilable doctrinal and ecclesiological divisions and which differences are merely legitimate local liturgical, ecclesiological and theological traditions, from the vast pool of theologoumena, of apostolic churches comprised of different peoples and at different points and circumstances in history. It must be remarked that this diversity of legitimate traditions of apostolic churches has also been largely lost within both the Roman and the Byzantine Church, in view of the homogenisation that emerged during the reign of the empires within which each of these churches flourished.

Later I proceeded in the study of works exploring, either directly or indirectly, cognate issues from different angles—for example, Adam DeVille’s Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy³ and his recent Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed,⁴ the 2018 paper Serving Communion: Re-Thinking the Relationship between Primacy and Synodality by the Saint Irenaeus Joint Orthodox-Catholic Working Group,⁵ or Cyril Hovorun’s books including his recent Scaffolds of the Church, with particularly valuable insights on re-thinking primacy, ecclesiology and synodality: ‘the Church is not hierarchical in its nature. The hierarchical principle is not even its natural property. It was borrowed from outside the Church and remains there as its scaffolding’;⁶ hierarchy ‘is useful, but not sacred’.⁷

What, however, truly remains a scandal for me is that we seem to be taking for granted the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches’ claim to being the ‘One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’, the Una Sancta, even though their participation in bilateral and ecumenical dialogue attests to their conviction that ‘something is missing’, as it were.⁸ My problem is a historical one rather than a question of being ‘open’ or ‘not open’ to ecumenical relations. When exactly and how, did the Church define that only the Orthodox or the Catholics—that is, the aggregate of all Orthodox or, respectively, Catholic dioceses and parishes—are the Una Sancta in the only way the Church knows in order to confidently proclaim truth—i.e., synodically, in a conciliar manner? In the case of the Catholic Church, we know that she continued to convene councils it proclaimed as ecumenical—and the historical and theological soundness of this decision will, I hope, be part of the discussions of this conference—and we know the normative proclamations and statements she has issued on the matter, as she increasingly often has done since the nineteenth century, not only on doctrine but indeed on most matters, from moral⁹ and sexual to ecological and political ones.¹⁰ It has been demonstrated exhaustively that the ‘Great Schism’ of 1054 was not that great at the time, with various local churches acknowledging both Rome and Constantinople for centuries, and with intercommunion and other contacts continuing their course even well after the eleventh century. We also know that the true Schism came with the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the Fourth Crusade, after which the Roman Church forced itself on the Orthodox, installing for example its bishops and its liturgical rite in dioceses. This, however, is a historical matter, not a theological one, and I find this distinction immensely crucial.

However, the Orthodox Church has never synodically proclaimed herself (and herself exclusively) as the Una Sancta. Before returning to this, allow me to underscore the scandalous nature of this ambiguity concerning the Una Sancta. The precise nature of the ‘One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’ that we confess during each liturgy and mass (this witnessing being the cornerstone of the Eucharistic assembly, particularly given that both the Catholics and the Orthodox insist that the Una Sancta is a visible Church, one we see and know) cannot be an object to individual, free theorizing, in the same way that basic Christology cannot be treated as if it were a theologoumenon. The definition of the visible Una Sancta cannot hang in mid-air, even if this entails the acknowledgement that she indeed finds herself in Schism. If the question whether this Una Sancta is one of two divided Churches, or the one Church in schism (until either the conclusive healing of this schism or the permanence and consolidation thereof that would be declared by a joint council, similar to the councils on the Christological controversies of the first millennium), cannot remain open, as it undermines the witness upon which the Eucharistic assembly, every Eucharistic assembly, materialises. Despite the obvious cheesiness of the title, it is indeed true that a spectre is haunting intercommunion: the spectre of mapping the Una Sancta.

The fact remains that there was no universal council in the case of the Orthodox—up until Crete, ironically, whose reception by the people is at best lukewarm, if not inexistent—proclaiming a particular Orthodox body, an Orthodox sum of actual dioceses and parishes, as the exclusive One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church. Thus, we see that certain ‘traditional’ utterances that are taken for granted, such as the Orthodox proclamation that ‘the Una Sancta IS the Orthodox Church’, are rather quite modern innovations, historically speaking.¹¹ While I believe that a similar problem should be (re)thought of in the case of the Catholic Church, I can speak in this paper only about my Church, the Orthodox Church.

Let us take the 2016 Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church in Crete in order to elaborate on this. A controversy surrounding it mainly centred on anti-ecumenists harshly criticizing it as an ‘ecumenist’ council. This was due to the Council resolutions employing a terminology of ‘churches’ vis-à-vis, for example, the Catholic Church; critics saw in this an undermining of the certainty that the Orthodox Church is the creed’s ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ and an indirect adoption of the branch theory and/or the ‘invisible church’ theory in ecclesiology, which mainly emanate from Anglican and protestant communities respectively.

Interestingly, this ostensibly ‘traditional’ criticism presupposes a radical innovation by the anti-ecumenist wing, for example, the notion that the employment of the term ‘church’—ἐκκλησία—always and necessarily refers to the technical content of the term ‘church’ as in the creedal Una Sancta, the one church. Seeing that, historically, this is simply and plainly not the case, given that a plethora of Orthodox documents during the second millennium refer to the Catholics and not exclusively the Catholics by employing the term ‘church’ in a variety of contexts, it has to be identified as an innovation on the part of the ‘anti-ecumenists’ (i.e., as the introduction of a wholly un-traditional use of vocabulary as normative). It is not the first time that notions and ideas presented as the quintessence of tradition turn out to be wholly modern and new;¹² however, this is a digression from my main point.

What I would like to demonstrate is that, perhaps counter-intuitively and certainly in spite of all the positive and constructive elements of that historic council, the Holy and Great Council of Crete has to be considered an anti-ecumenist council in an unprecedented way. This is the case because, for the first time in Orthodox history, a council of such proportions declared that the particular sum of local churches (Patriarchates, Archdioceses, dioceses, etc.) that we term ‘the Orthodox Church’ claims to be ‘the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’. It did not proclaim that Orthodox theology is on the right side of doctrinal disputes, but that the Orthodox Church is the Una Sancta. There is nuance in this distinction: through its terminology, the Council of Crete did not declare that particular theological doctrines were Orthodox, correct, and ecclesial (and that the ones rejecting them are to be condemned), which would not be uncommon in Orthodox history (this was the case, for example, in the Hesychast councils of 1341–1351). Rather than that, it explicitly declared that the Orthodox Church, that particular body which was represented in this council, was ‘the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’: ‘The Orthodox Church, as the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, in her profound ecclesiastical self-consciousness, believes unflinchingly that she occupies a central place in the matter of the promotion of Christian unity in the world today’.¹³ This is, as it were, an organizational rather than doctrinal exclamation; it defines ecclesial bodies, not doctrines and theology. Again, such a conciliar claim is unprecedented in Orthodox history.

Let us start by the admission that the Orthodox Church understands itself as speaking its truth in councils, provided that these are subsequently accepted by the faithful and that they acquire an exalted status in the Church’s consciousness in the long run. Neither an elder, nor the monastic communities,¹⁴ nor a saint, nor tradition in itself as the mere passage of time, nor any local or not-well-received synod may raise a claim at uttering the truth. During the first millennium and its major Christological heresies, the Church has manifested itself conciliarly on numerous occasions, defining herself and her boundaries. Thus, the Church and Arians external to her emerged out of the First Ecumenical Council (in which Arians participated); the Church and Nestorians external to her emerged out of the Third Ecumenical Council (in which Nestorians participated), and so on. After 325 AD when this was conclusively settled, it was clear to ‘the Church’s consciousness’ that Arians are external to the One Church; after 431, it was clear that Nestorians lie beyond the Una Sancta; and so on.

However, nothing of the sort has ever taken place as far as the Catholic Church is concerned. There was no council of ecumenical validity, where both the Orthodox and the Catholics would participate, and out of which—from an Orthodox perspective—the Church and Roman Catholics external to it would emerge. There was, of course, the Great Schism of 1054, which we now know was anything but a particular point in time in which the one Church conclusively split into an Eastern Orthodox Church and a Roman Catholic Church. There were numerous Orthodox councils, some of them of towering significance to the Church (e.g., 1341–1351), in which the ‘errors’ or even ‘heresies’ of the ‘Latins’ or of ‘the West’ were condemned.¹⁵ However, such condemnations do not and cannot automatically engender a different and new Una Sancta. Rather than that, they are doctrinal problems and schismatic conditions within the Church, such as the ones prior to the particular first millennium Christological councils that defined Orthodoxy and solidified schisms by situating the heterodox parties as external to the Una Sancta. What we do know is that there are important doctrinal and other differences between the Orthodox and the Catholics, and we Orthodox firmly believe that Orthodox doctrines reflect the witness of the Una Sancta whereas there is error in heterodox doctrines—take the filioque, for example.

There is, of course, the widespread conviction among the Orthodox that the Orthodox Church is the Una Sancta. However, there are nuances that are of critical importance here. It is one thing to understand the Orthodox side as, well, orthodox, while other sides within the Church are considered as being in error, errors to be resolved by correction or conclusive schism in a future council. And it is a very different thing to hypothesize a ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ which corresponds to the particular organisation of the local churches we term today ‘the Orthodox Church’, without any council of ecumenical significance for the Orthodox having explicitly stipulated this. The latter would be a potentially dangerous innovation rather than ‘tradition’, in the same way that the introduction of the exclusive use of the term ‘church’ as the technical Una Sancta is a glaring innovation rather than ‘tradition’. ‘The Latins’ being in error (however defined, whatever we are to make of this, and in whichever way this may be rethought today) and being external to the Church are not quite the same thing. In any case, the shift from an Orthodox self-understanding of being ‘at the right side of the schism’, as it were, of being the orthodox ones, to one according to which the Orthodox Church understands itself as the Church next to communities external to it is harder to locate than many would think. It is one thing to declare a certain teaching as unorthodox and another thing to re-define the borders of the Una Sancta, as first millennium councils did.

Interestingly, the problem here is not whether one is ecumenically open to Catholics or not. The problem is that, by identifying the Una Sancta with the Orthodox Church and excluding ‘Catholics-in-error’ from it, we have to identify when exactly the Una Sancta was engendered as such. As said above, we can pinpoint when exactly the Arians where excluded from the Una Sancta; we can pinpoint when the Nestorians were excluded from the Una Sancta. But the Catholics? Since every Orthodox liturgy depends on the recitation of the creed, the ‘Symbol of Faith’, it is of cardinal importance for us to know which is the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ we believe in. And, (excluding Crete for a second) if we claim that this is identified with the sum of the Orthodox ecclesial bodies, then we do not draw our creedal witness and definition of the One Church from the conciliarly articulated voice of the Church, but rather from our particular convictions formed by our interpretations of the sayings of particular elders or saints, or of (perhaps many) individual bishops or primates, our view on theologoumena, and from the innovation that being in an error not dealt with by an ecumenical council automatically re-traces the borders of the Una Sancta. This is ecclesiologically dangerous; it is the individual doxai appropriating the voice of the Holy Spirit; it opens the door to a legion of private ecclesiologies, with each faithful by him- or herself defining the Church in a different manner on this or that basis. For the Orthodox to be Orthodox rather than a modern invention, it is necessary to maintain an ecclesiology of the Schism, in which—until further notice and in view of a future council—the Una Sancta is where the last ecumenical council left it, in spite of the pending nature of potentially very serious errors of groups within it. Precisely due to their dire nature, these are to be resolved by a properly executed ecumenical council, not by you and me. ¹⁶

Again, it is not for me to say whether similar, symmetric problems are the case in the Catholic Church. However, as long as we claim that either one of our apostolic churches are the Una Sancta herself and exclusively, I would claim that we theorize not on the basis of history and, by extension, theology. According to this view, we have one Church in Schism (the Una Sancta in schism), not two churches, if history is to be taken seriously into account. Given the importance of witnessing the Una Sancta in each one of our Eucharistic celebrations, this, I believe, lies at the root of the whole discussion. Of course, we will continue to refer to the ‘two Churches’; but I hope we may do this for convenience rather than due to preciseness. Both a ‘two Churches’ ecclesiology and a ‘my Church is the Una Sancta’ ecclesiology seem to me modern inventions, innovations, retroactive readings of history: will we start from a ‘One Church in Schism’ ecclesiology instead? Concluding this part, allow me to remind you the words of Nicolas Afanassief:

For Eucharistic ecclesiology, the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church are both Churches, or to be more exact, each local church of both groups remains a Church