Orthodox Tradition Magazine No. 1/2003

Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies

orthodox tradition

ORYODOJOS PARADOSIS

Volume XX Number 1 2003

ORTHODOX TRADITION Published with the blessing of His Eminence, Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili _____________________________________________________________ Editor: Bishop Auxentios Volume XX (2003) Managing Editor: Archimandrite Akakios Number 1 Art and Design: Chrestos Spontylides ISSN 0742-4019 _____________________________________________________________

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2002 Nativity Encyclical of Metropolitan Cyprian An Orthodox Auto-da-Fé The Restoration of Human Nature Homily on Priscilla and Aquila The Resurrection of our Savior Book Reviews Synod News Annual Clergy Conference 2003 Publications

2 5 21 24 33 35 37 43 44

“The Old Calendar movement is neither a heresy nor a schism, and those who follow it are neither heretics nor schismatics, but are Orthodox Christians.” Archbishop Dorotheos of Athens (1956-57) State (New Calendar) Church of Greece _____________________________________

Orthodox Tradition is published three times yearly (winter, spring, and summer) by the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies. Postage paid at Etna, CA. Subscription is by voluntary donation. Suggested donations, to defer publication costs and postage, are as follows: $12 U.S., $15 Canada, and $25 foreign [via Air Mail]. Subscriptions are for one year, beginning in January. Subscriptions are accepted after January for the entire year only. Back issues are available solely by subscription and for the current year. Office of publication: St. Gregory Palamas Monastery, 1307 Sawyers Bar Rd., Etna, California. Address all inquiries to: C.T.O.S., P.O. Box 398, Etna, CA 96027 U.S.A.

Nativity Encyclical THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD AND THE DIVINE GARMENT OF MAN: ADOPTION TO SONSHIP AND BECOMING CHRIST Beloved Brethren in Christ and Children in the Lord: A. Holy Baptism and our Adoption to Sonship Blessed be God, Who has found us worthy once again, today, to celebrate radiantly, Divinely, and thankfully the great Mystery of the Dispensation of the Incarnation, by which the Son and Word of God, through the Good Will of the Father and the coöperation of the Holy Spirit, becomes man, that man might by Grace become God. Our Orthodox worship reveals Divine mysteries to us. The Divinely inspired hymns and overshadowing of the All-Pure Mother of God, who became “a heavenly ladder by which God descended”1 and who has proved to be the “bridge conducting those on earth to Heaven,”1 have already initiated us into the “Divine darkness”2 of Orthodox theology. Yet, for edification and spiritual consolation, let us attempt to enter a little further into the lofty dimensions of this great Feast, with the Disciple of Love, the Holy Apostle John the Theologian, as our guide: “The Word was made flesh and dwelt in us”; “but as many as received Him, to them He gave power to become the sons of God.”3 With holy Baptism, every Christian is born anew in Christ. He receives the divine gift of Adoption to Sonship in Christ. He becomes a child of God. This great gift of Adoption to Sonship has very striking results: It makes us temples of the Holy Trinity, since holy Baptism is accomplished not only “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,”4 but it is made effective by the three Divine Persons, “the anointing God, the anointed Son, and the anointment of the Spirit.”5 Beyond this, we should take note that this Adoption to Sonship, through holy Baptism, holy Chrismation, and holy Communion, means that we receive a kinship and likeness to our Saviour Christ, so that we are literally “clothed” in Him; that is, we become by Grace what He is by nature: “For as many as have been Baptized into Christ,” says the Holy Apostle Paul, “have put on Christ.”6 Children in the Lord: B. We are Clothed in and Become Christ And thus, our clothing and garment of Light is the God of Lights Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has given us the “Spirit of Adoption to Sonship”;7 that is, He has given us abundant Divine Grace, that we

Volume XX, Number 1

3

might become and be called “sons of light,”8 of noble birth, and free in Christ our Saviour. The direct response, on our part, to the gift of Adoption to Sonship is a continuous effort to become Christ, that is, an effort to preserve this “ineffable and incorruptible and spiritual garment”;9 to remain continuously clothed in “the garment of salvation, in our Lord Jesus Christ, the ineffable light,” “in power and truth”;9 to be transfigured radically and entirely into a new being, that “Christ be formed in us.”10 The Divine Paul instructs us that all that are truly “sons of God,” are governed and directed by the Holy Spirit: “...for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”11 It is a common teaching of the Holy Fathers of the Church that all who are clothed in Christ are clothed, likewise, in the Holy Spirit, for the Divine Comforter is also called the “clothing of the faithful.”12 Now, our putting-on of Christ and the Holy Spirit is not, of course, something external, but is rather an internal transfiguration: “Christ and the Holy Spirit,” says St. Photios the Great, “we do not put on like a garment cast over us from outside, but as the heart and thoughts are filled with light and the face with Grace.”13 St. Basil the Great describes the consequences of our being clothed with Grace in this image:14 iron, the Saint tells us, when it is immersed in the furnace and is clothed in fire, is changed and transformed; it is purified of corrosion; instead of being hard, it becomes pliable; while it used to be black, it now is fiery and glows. The same sort of thing happens to the Christian when he is Baptized in the fire15 of the Holy Trinity and clothed in the fire of Divine Grace: he acquires spiritual purity, he casts off the hardness of wickedness, he is enlightened and enlightens, and he is warmed and gives off warmth. “For the true God Himself,” says the St. Athanasios the Great, “wears us all, so that all of us might wear God. As many as are bearers of the Spirit bear light; those who bear light are clothed in Christ; and those who are clothed in Christ are clothed in the Father.”16 Indeed, only those who remain faithful to the Adoption to Sonship of holy Baptism have truly been clothed in the Holy Trinity and will be found worthy of the perfect Adoption to Sonship after the general Resurrection; for the former Adoption to Sonship is “like a seed and a root and a beginning,” whereas the latter is the “fruit and result of the former.”17 Beloved children in the Lord: C. Love and our Becoming Divine The indescribable Condescension of the Word which we celebrate was the outcome of Divine Love: “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”18 Therefore, it is Love, as I constantly remind you, that must be the chief characteristic of the sons of God in power and truth. A reliable criterion for our progress in becoming Christ and Divine is Love, since it is through Love that we become like

4

Orthodox Tradition

unto God and are clothed in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. “When a person acquires love,” Abba Isaac the Syrian instructs us, “together with it he clothes himself in God.”19 Therefore, let us always have before us this Love of God for man; let us maintain continuous communion with the source of Love through the precious Mysteries; and let us cleanse our hearts from dark passions with constant repentance and the watchful, prayerful, and ascetic life of our Church. Then we will abide in Love; then we will abide in God; then we will be, in power and truth, living temples of the Holy Trinity. The Saints assure us with amazement—“Oh, what a great and inexplicable gift of Grace!”—that “a person that dwells in love, this person dwells in the Holy Trinity. And likewise, the Holy Spirit dwells in him. Do you see the great gift of Grace, my brother Christian? Do you see the dignity that is gained by a person who has love for God and his brother? For he is a temple and dwelling-place and abode of the super-essential and most royal Trinity, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,”20 the one true God, to Whom is due all glory and worship and thanksgiving unto the ages. Amen! Your Intercessor Before the Incarnate Lord, † Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili President of the Holy Synod in Resistance Notes 1. Akathist Hymn, Oikos 3. 2. See St. Dionysios the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, chapter 1: “What is Divine darkness?” 3. St. John 1:14, 22. 4. St. Matthew 20:19. 5. Cf. St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, chapter 12, § 28. 6. Galatians 3:27. 7. Romans 8:15. 8. St. John 12:36; I Thessalonians 5:5; cf. Ephesians 5:8. 9. St. Makarios of Egypt, “Homily 20,” §§ 1-3. 10. Galatians 4:19. 11. Romans 8:14. 12. St. Photios the Great, in St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, “Commentary on Galatians 3:27.” See also the expression of St. Makarios of Egypt in the homily cited above: “the garment of the Spirit,” “which is the power of the Spirit.” 13. St. Photios, ibid. 14. St. Basil the Great, On Baptism, “Homily 2,” § 10. 15. Cf. St. Matthew 3:11: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” 16. St. Athanasios, in St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, “Commentary on Romans 13:14.” 17. St. Photios, in St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, “Commentary on Rom. 8:23.” 18. St. John 3:16. 19. Abba Isaac the Syrian, “Homily 81” [Greek text]. 20. St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, “Commentary on I John 4:16.”

An Orthodox Auto-da-Fé Critical Comments on a Recent Book on Sects by Archbishop Chrysostomos I HAVE BEFORE ME a very troubling book, perhaps ill-advised in its very conception and without doubt stridently disputatious. It is the second volume of a work entitled Invazia Sectelor (Invasion of the Sects), by Deacon P.I. David, who teaches at the Patriarchal School of Theology at the University of Bucharest. I am both disquieted and somewhat perplexed that, rather than earn its author non placets galore from his academic colleagues, this work even bears the imprimatur of the Patriarch of Bucharest; and, though produced under the imprint of “Editura ‘Europolis’” in Constanta (1999), that it is an official publication of the Patriarchate’s “Centru Cultural.” One can only lament that his academic and ecclesiastical colleagues did not discourage Father David from publishing these volumes, which lack a good scholarly base and stray from the loftiness of Orthodox theology and the level of comportment and sobriety that seems appropriate to that loftiness. In the first place, I have grave reservations about books of this kind, which sometimes rather imprudently take a polemical view of any religion which differs in its creed from the beliefs and theological presuppositions of the Orthodox Church. I say this, not because I have anything but absolute commitment to the doctrines, teaching, and ethos of Orthodoxy as the “kriterion tes aletheias” (“criterion of truth”), as one Church Father calls it, but because among civilized people, disagreements about what are often the most cherished of truths must be handled in an objective, responsible, and irenic manner. One cannot simply throw around the word “sect,” whenever an established ecclesiastical body is threatened by those who hold differing views, any more than the Fathers of the Church used terms like “heretic” or “schismatic” in any but the most extreme circumstances, and this in a doleful spirit and with reluctance. The violation of this sense of Patristic sobriety simply opens one up to the accusation of sinecurism and corresponding charges that a preoccupation with selfserving positions of authority, rather than doctrinal fidelity, underlies the unrestrained hostility and pejorative epithets that typically adorn writings of this overtly polemical kind. In his introductory comments to this volume, Dr. Adrian Nastase makes some very important observations about the danger of sectarian activities in Romania, correctly pointing out, in my opinion, that proselytism by various foreign sects throughout Europe is a definite

6

Orthodox Tradition

menace, posing a threat to the continent’s traditional moral, religious, social, and cultural legacy. This threat was especially acute for countries behind the Iron Curtain (most of them overwhelmingly Orthodox by confession) in the years immediately following the collapse of Communism, when religions and cults of every kind literally “invaded” societies newly tasting of the freedom of thought and conscience so long denied to them under their former ideological and political systems. Proselytization under these circumstances was reprehensible, when one realizes that it was carried out with wealth from the coffers of religious believers from the West (and the Far East, for that matter), who saw in the impoverished people of Eastern Europe fruit ripe for the picking. So-called “rice Christians” were often the result of this wholesale and repulsive form of proselytism. Sadly, this postCommunist onslaught of proselytization can still be seen, though now somewhat limited in scope, in many Eastern European—and especially Orthodox—countries. However, while affirming the correctness and necessity of Dr. Nastase’s observations, I must at the same time say that one of the prices of a pluralistic society, and of democracy, is a spirit of toleration with regard to diversity in belief. Like it or not, another cost of freedom is also a certain submissiveness in the face of tactics and methods of religious conversion which are not always palatable to those of us who prefer a more refined approach to religion, in general, and evangelization, in particular. Moreover, one must, in evaluating these new waves of proselytization, clearly distinguish established religions from mere sects or cults, since the intentions, tactics, and social impact of the former are quite distinct from those of the latter. Simply calling a religion a sect does not automatically make it such; nor, again, does it fairly characterize a religion that is not, in fact, sectarian in its teachings and practices. For example, in the present volume, Father David includes the Methodist Church, Quakers, and the Salvation Army in his list of sects (pp. 342-348). In point of fact, there are many respected and renowned adepts of these religious creeds and philosophies who hold, or have held, important and responsible positions in American society and in various Western European countries. They could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called sectarians or cultists. The Methodist Church (which was first organized in England) operates some of the most prestigious institutes of higher education in the United States. The Salvation Army, in turn, is widely respected and honored for its social work and altruistic outreach to the poor and downtrodden. And President Nixon, Father David should be reminded, was a Quaker. Whatever infractions may have taken him from his seat of power, he was most assuredly never called a sectarian by even the most vitriolic of his detractors or accusers. Indeed, one man’s sect is often another man’s religion.

Volume XX, Number 1

7

It behooves us, then, to be very careful to establish objective criteria by which to separate clearly dangerous and exploitative sects from religions with an established history and a record of positive social benefit. These criteria cannot be formulated haphazardly or in an ad hominem manner. They must be absolutely objective and of scholarly provenance; otherwise, we fall to unfair, inaccurate, and vacuous invective that rightly invites others to label us as religious bigots or sectarian in our confessional outlook. I dare say that, if Father David’s book were translated into English, he would immediately find himself labelled—fairly or not—a misanthropic bigot or sectarian, on account of the shrill language of his book and his indiscriminate inclusion of well-respected religious groups among what he calls sects. Unfortunately, his general portrayals of various religious groups are also often superficial and banally encyclopedic; and, lacking clear and objective criteria by which to distinguish religious belief from sectarian manipulation or cultism, his observations are at odds with established methodology in comparative religion. They evidence a complete lack of understanding of prevailing scholarship in the study of sects and cults. Indeed, he follows the style of the sectarians and cultists themselves, who—and particularly among the more militant Protestant fundamentalists in America—call any religious group that deviates from their doctrinal or dogmatic principles “sectarian” or “cult-like.” It is worthy of note that Father David juxtaposes Methodists and Quakers with such sects as the “Church of Satan” (pp. 323-326), Moon’s Unification Church (pp. 260-268), the Ku Klux Klan (pp. 316-318), wrongly identified as the “Ku Klus Klan” in the “Contents” (p. vii), and, for some curious reason that he never explains, acupuncturists (p. 260), with the same aplomb with which the aforementioned fundamentalists frequently dismiss Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy as mere cults.1 The author also relegates almost every major Far Eastern religion to the level of a sect, casually discussing the ancient Lamaist religion of Tibet and Mongolia (p. 273) in the same chapter in which he describes the Unification Church (op. cit.) and Falun Gong (pp. 271-272), describing the latter, in keeping with the pronouncements of Chinese Communist propaganda, as a cult dedicated to sexual liberation, or “libertatea sexy (sic),” operating under the mask of “anti-Communism” and having its source in the U.S.! Such an indiscriminate association of historical religions, politico-religious movements, and sectarian groups is, as I have said, inconsistent with the prevailing scholarly standards for the study of religion and religious beliefs and does little more than create an eccentric categorization of religious groups which is, to reiterate what I said above, more in the style of backwater American fundamentalist writers than that of serious religious scholars. I leave it to someone more facile in the vagaries of religious polemicists to explain how Father David suffered

8

Orthodox Tradition

no discomfort in including Opus Dei (though long tied to certain fascist figures, an organization approved by the Vatican and also closely tied to some of Spain’s more important intellectual traditions and centers of learning) and apartheid (notwithstanding the contemptible racial theories of apartheid and the violence which such theories can engender, essentially a political ideology and not a sect) under religious sects tainted by terrorism (see “Contents,” p. vii), or citing (p. 271) the practitioners of the Japanese tea ceremony—while, oddly enough, admitting the positive effects of this relic of ancient Oriental cultural refinement on Japanese youth—in his section on “Occultism and Asiatic Fanaticism under the Guise of Religion” (Section C, pp. 260-273). Serious, scholarly investigations of sects and cults do not always, of course, agree on what constitutes a valid religion or a sect; first, because the criteria established by various scholars may differ and, secondly, because the standards which they in fact apply are often subjective in nature and can lead even a perfectly well-intentioned researcher to unfounded conclusions. However, such divergences arise from nothing more than the imperfections of methodology, the ultimate limitations of any scholarly pursuit, and honest dissimilarities in how one approaches religion phenomenologically, socially, and conceptually. They are inevitable foibles that scholars of comparative religion must acknowledge and confront, with varying success. But simply setting up one’s own religion as the standard against which all other religions are measured is, as I have strongly argued, not a scholarly pursuit. It involves a weakness that lies outside the domain of the academic study of religion. This strategy may enjoy some repute as a commendable confessional approach—and then, I would think, only if it avoids all passionate personal opinion, bigotry, and sectarianism within a given confessional context—, but it is not the stuff of genuine scholarship or a useful or valid research strategy. Again, to reiterate an important caveat about such an approach, Father David is himself open to the accusation of sectarianism, in view of his sometimes vexatious prepossessions about various religions and sects and his uncareful, uncritical, and desultory approach to his subject matter. This is regrettable, since one does not like to see such a lapsus in someone whose work could have implications both for the academic and the ecclesiastical worlds and whose obvious skills could be so much more positively and effectively applied. In the context of these general introductory remarks, I would like to turn to and examine one of the sections in the volume in question, entitled “The Anti-Calendarist Movement (Old Stylists).”2 A friend recently called my attention to a striking quote from Thucydides, which very much applies to this section: “Amathia men thrasos, logismos de oknon pherei” (Historion, II, 40). Herein, the reputedly

Volume XX, Number 1

9

greatest historian of antiquity tells us, in essence, that, while studious thought prompts caution in our observations, careless scholarship engenders a certain insolence. Father David’s comments on the Old Calendarist movement vividly demonstrate the perspicacity of this aphorism. At a rudimentary level, one wonders, of course, how a portion of the indigenous faithful of the Orthodox Church of Romania—albeit a faction which calculates its Festal Calendar according to a formula abandoned by the New Calendar Church of Romania in the 1920s— can be characterized as “invaders,” and especially since, fixed since time immemorial on the land of their ancestors, these believers maintain religious rites and customs that have remained unchanged for centuries. But beyond this point, I cannot but be astonished at the multitudinous and endless historical and conceptual errors contained in this section of Father David’s book, adorned as they are by contemptuous portrayals of the leaders and followers of the Old Calendar movement so inappropriate and insolent as to defy credulity. We read in this essay on the Old Calendarists that monks without “cultura teologica si cultura generala” (p. 11), refusing to accept the calendar reform instituted in 1923 by an inter-Orthodox conference in Constantinople, eventually created, under the influence of Athonite monks with pretensions to enlightenment and sobriety and “Stylist agitators,” “o perturbare” (“a disturbance”) in Romania’s “viata religioasa si sufleteasca” (“religious and spiritual life”) (p. 13). We are told of the “partisan stylists”—obdurate (“indaratnici”) priests and monks primarily located in the province of Moldavia—and their incitement of the faithful to reject the calendar reform. Gathered in monastic communities marked by “ignorance and fanaticism” under the “cloak of humility,” we further learn, the Old Calendarists fomented disobedience to the Church, accusing it, “vai!” (“alas!”), of having instituted “a change in dogma, tradition, and the canons” (p. 12). Despite its adoption of the New Calendar for reasons of astronomical accuracy (p. 11),3 the Church was besieged by these apparent “native” invaders, who in time created their own “uncanonical and schismatic” hierarchy (p. 13), realizing certain “political” aims, as perhaps evidenced by the fact that they first gained recognition from the Bolsheviks, as we are also gratuitously informed by Father David in a title note to this section: “Stilistii au fost recunoscuti la noi de catre bolsevici inainte de 1949...” (p. 11). The supposedly insignificant, scattered communities of peasants and fanatics that make up the present-day Old Calendar Church of Romania are a mere legacy of the political chicanery of exploitative opportunists, we are left to believe. Like characters in an elaborate Orthodox auto-da-fé parade, the “uncanonical” Old Calendarist “schismatics” are marched before us amidst the most shocking claims and accusations, most of them at-

10

Orthodox Tradition

tested by footnotes and references that are inadequate, inaccurate, biased, and frequently outrageous. Burned at the stake of Father David’s unfortunate inquisition are such figures as Metropolitan Galaction Cordun (whom he mistakenly identifies as Galaction “Gordun”) (p. 13), who Consecrated the first Bishops for the Old Calendar movement and who, we are blithely informed, was excommunicated in 1955 (p. 14). The Bishops Consecrated by Metropolitan Galaction (i.e., Bishops Meftodie, Evloghie, and Glicherie) are also presented by the author in less than flattering language. In addition to taking glee at pointing out the dates of their excommunications as Old Calendarists by the Romanian Patriarchate (ibid.), he describes them with such unpleasant terms as these: “un om simplu si bigot” (“a simple and bigoted man”), referring to Bishop Evloghie, or, in describing Metropolitan Glicherie, “un om limitat si fara carte” (“an unlettered and limited man”) (p. 14, notes 25 and 26, respectively). Naturally, the ecclesiastical titles of the Old Calendarists are invariably placed in quotation marks, a convention, oddly enough, seldom employed in portraying non-Orthodox clergy who come under the author’s disfavor. He correctly traces the succession of the Metropolitans of the Old Calendar Church of Romania from Metropolitan Galaction to Metropolitan Glicherie (whose Glorification as a Saint by the Old Calendarists in 1999 he ridicules with expressions too distasteful to repeat here, in our text proper) to Metropolitans Silvestru and Vlasie. Given the other deficiencies in his historical account, one is surprised by this accuracy, albeit in an account which is marred by Father David’s contention that Bishop Cozma was proclaimed a schismatic, in order to accommodate the election of Metropolitan Vlasie as the present Metropolitan (ibid.). This fatuous accusation is wholly false and without veridical substance. I will dismiss as whimsical, and thus not consider at length, the author’s prattle about the Old Calendarist monasteries having stores of meat, cheese, and olives during the days of Communist domination,4 while monastics under the Patriarchate were, at this very time, being persecuted (p. 14). But his comments ex maleficio about Archimandrite Flavian, Abbot of the Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God in the military district of Bucharest, are so extravagant that they cannot be ignored. In his parade of Old Calendarist figures, for some reason Staret Flavian becomes an obsessive object of Father David’s attention. The ad hominem invective heaped on the former is simply abhorrent. Among several astonishingly invidious references to Archimandrite Flavian, we see the following, in the context of a snide and vile charge that, among those diverse individuals posing as clergymen in the Old Calendar movement, are “former prisoners” (p. 15): “Insusi staretul Flavian, ca multi altii, a avut condamnari. Pentruce? ramanc de vazut” (“The aforementioned Staret Flavian, like many

Volume XX, Number 1

11

others, was condemned [by the courts]. Why? It remains to be seen”) (ibid., note 27). This offensive remark is followed by charges that the Old Calendarists have wrongly accused the “official” Church of Romania (the Patriarchate) of collaboration with the Communists, when in fact the Old Calendarist monastics supposedly enjoyed favored status under the Communists. Father David does not go on to tell us “what remains to be seen,” with regard to the reasons for Archimandrite Flavian’s imprisonment under the Communists, nor does he offer any evidence for a special status afforded the Old Calendarists under their rule. In addition to my comments in footnote 4, supra, I will have more to say, below, about this oversight by our author. Suffice it to say, here, that a professor and scholar would do well, at the very least, to avoid tabloid-type gossip in his academic endeavors and published works. I believe that I have adequately captured the spirit and general content of the auto-da-fé parade that is Father David’s purported exposé of the principals and spectacles of the Old Calendar Church of Romania. There are endless foibles, errors, astonishing absurdities, and outrages that I could include in my critical comments on this exposé; yet, I think it unnecessary to belabor the point or to embarrass the author further for what I can only hope he sees, as I said at the outset of this short review, as both an ill-conceived and an ill-advised work. What I must do, however, is offer some corrective responses to all that I have cited in my examination of Father David’s book: not to the end of defending the Old Calendarists—which is neither my task nor of prime importance, given the vacuousness of the many manifestly inane claims and often perfidious accusations that I have recounted—, but for the purpose of giving some balance to the study of a disenfranchised group that, often being unable to speak for itself, is known more through the mouth of its detractors than the voice of its own soul. About this disenfranchisement and its sad effects on the very psychology of people who are persecuted for following their consciences, and misused by those who would exploit them, I have written a great deal in other places.5 Vis-à-vis my present comments, I will simply say that fairness, justice, and the principles of democratic pluralism empower me to affirm that attacks against any minority religion are ultimately inconsistent with the values which we Orthodox hold dear and which the Romanian state, now breathing freely the sweet air of an open and progressive society, strongly upholds and champions. But I will forego that empowerment for the sole right to set the record straight with regard to the Romanian Old Calendarist community, which is a significant and important part of the overall landscape of Romanian Orthodoxy and Romanian life. When I first visited Romania in 1980 (see note 4, supra), I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Metropolitan Glicherie and the Hierar-

12

Orthodox Tradition

chy of the Old Calendar Church of Romania at their main monastery in Slatioara, the Monastery of the Transfiguration. We were greeted by a crowd of some 20,000 believers, which overwhelmed us, and later we visited a number of large and thriving parishes and monastic institutions. I was deeply impressed by the orderliness of the monastic life, the piety of the faithful, and the hospitality and kindness shown to us everywhere. I also had the opportunity to meet a number of clergy, a few of whom had embraced the Old Calendar despite having been reared in the New Calendar Church of Romania.6 In all of my dealings with these Old Calendarists, I would be hard-pressed to describe anyone I met as lacking “theological” or “general” culture. I found the theological training available to the clergy—of necessity confined to Old Calendarist monasteries, since Old Calendarists are not allowed to study in the theological faculties sponsored by the New Calendarist Patriarchate7—to be of first quality. I found the clergy and monks to be well-read in the Church Fathers, the Canons, and Church history. Their services showed a broad knowledge of liturgics. In fact, after the fall of Communism and the installation of Metropolitan Vlasie as President of the Synod of Bishops of the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Romania, the advisors and faculty of the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, in Etna, California, which I then served as Academic Director, granted the degree of Licentiate in Orthodox Theological Studies to His Eminence on examination and evaluation of his monastic training and broad knowledge of Orthodox theology. I should note that among the examiners who issued the degree were some very distinguished scholars and theologians,8 most of whom were not, in fact, Old Calendarists. My experience may, of course, be anecdotal, but it is based on personal knowledge of people about whom Father David has only scarce, if any, knowledge. This all stands aside, of course, from the issue of whether scholars should call people “unlettered,” “bigoted,” and “uncultured.” First, we should have firsthand evidence of such traits before using them in an accusatory way; secondly, we might, as scholars and as Christians, find more cultivated ways of making such observations, if we must, and then without the added dimension of ad hominem denunciations. I should also emphasize that Metropolitan Galaction and the first Bishops whom he Consecrated for the Old Calendar movement were not shadowy figures. Metropolitan Galaction had been Confessor to the former royal family of Romania, and, indeed, the late Mother Alexandra (the former Princess Ileana), to whom I was close during my formative years as a monastic (like her, years that came rather late in life),9 spoke of the positive regard in which he was held by her family. Bishop Evloghie I have never heard described as a simple man or a bigot; rather, he is revered by many very well-educated and cultured Old Calendarists for his theological wisdom and spiritual insight.

Volume XX, Number 1

13

Metropolitan Glicherie was not a simple monk at Neamt at the time of the calendar reform, as Father David wrongly claims, but the Superior of one of the monastery’s sketes. Nor was he an unlearned or unlettered man. When I met him, advanced as he was in age and very infirm, I was astounded by his very presence.10 As for the particular target of Father David’s ire, Archimandrite Flavian, Abbot of the Dormition Monastery, I met Father Flavian during my first visit to Romania. I now serve regularly with him at his monastery in the military district of Bucharest, and I know him as an upright, brilliant, and incredibly active individual. He has built almost a dozen monastic institutions throughout Romania, drawing monastics, both monks and nuns, from among young and educated Romanians who, discovering in the angelic life the roots of Romania’s rich cultural and religious life, represent the best that their country has to offer. Inspired by a man of singular charism, they have discovered within themselves the richness of Orthodoxy lived in its fullness and in the arena of monastic struggle. They adorn not only the Old Calendar movement, but the whole Orthodox Church and their homeland. They also stand as tributes to a man whom Father David has wrongly maligned as a “former prisoner” and about whose “infractions” we are warned but never informed. This issue of the “former prisoners” who putatively make up the body of Old Calendarist clergy is one that brings up the whole matter of calumny against the Old Calendarists—calumny which was directed at them by the fascist regime, at the inception of the movement, and later by the Communists, and the legacy of which persists in unjustified accusations in our own day. For almost two years, both during my Fulbright teaching assignments in Romania and now as Executive Director of the U.S. Fulbright Commission in Romania, I have been collecting personal accounts of religious persecution under the Communists from Old Calendarists, as well as other Orthodox believers and clergy. Among the many stories which I have heard is that of Archimandrite Flavian, a student in Physics at the University of Bucharest and a monk under Bishop Evloghie (vide supra) when he was arrested by the Securitate and threatened with imprisonment unless he disavowed his religious activities and agreed to act as an informant. Just before his arrest, seeing that it was imminent, together with Bishop Evloghie Father Flavian visited the Romanian Patriarch, predecessor to the current Patriarch Teoctist. Despite assurances from the Patriarch that he would intercede on their behalf, their monastery was almost immediately bulldozed, the monks scattered, and Father Flavian arrested. (Their monastery was of necessity under construction illegally, since, despite Father David’s suggestion that they received special treatment under the Communists, the Old Calendarists did not have the status of a recognized religious body and thus could

14

Orthodox Tradition

not acquire permission to build churches and monastic communities.) Two of the present Old Calendarist Bishops, Demosten and Pahomie, like Father Flavian, also spent many years in prison for refusing to abandon the Old Calendar, when specifically offered their freedom for doing so, as they have both testified to me personally. It is their conviction that the New Calendar Church was able to escape further persecution itself by leaving the Old Calendarists to take the brunt of the anti-religious policies of the Communist government. I take no stand on this matter, since I have no evidence to confirm or deny it, beyond the testimony of former religious prisoners. I do, however, find reprehensible Father David’s reference to various Old Calendarist clergy as “former prisoners,” and especially in view of the fact that he does not bother to answer his own question with regard to the reason for their imprisonment. I would hope that his silence was simply a matter of negligent scholarship. With regard to the depositions of the Old Calendarists by the New Calendarists, I should simply say that constant references to this fact are neither edifying nor productive. These depositions were unjustified and an unwise mistake, as were other instances of the mistreatment of the Old Calendarists by New Calendarist Church authorities (and a few of the more charitable and honorable among the latter will readily admit this fact). If the “official” Churches in those places where Old Calendarists have not abandoned the Church Calendar argue that words like “schismatic” and “heretic” should not be used in describing Roman Catholics and Protestants, one wonders precisely how they justify using these same terms against their Orthodox brethren who follow the Church (“Old”) Calendar. And since the majority of the Orthodox world still follows the Church Calendar, how is it that this issue is of such moment? More to the point, if anathemas can be lifted against the Papists, who still believe firmly that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, whereas we Orthodox dogmatically and everywhere affirm that Christ alone—and no human being—is the Head of the Church, how is it that excommunications of a purely procedural kind (for alleged disobedience to Church authorities) are somehow firmly binding when applied to the Old Calendarists—and to the point that freedom of conscience has little or no significance and their very status as Orthodox Christians has been challenged by some extremist voices? Is the argument really one of sectarianism versus Church order, or is the genuine issue one of submission to authority? If there are errors and mistakes, perhaps, on all sides, are these errors effectively addressed by a constant retreat into canonical and procedural technicalities, or are they better addressed by avoiding epithets and personal resentments? If, indeed, in providing a hierarchy for the Old Calendarists under circumstances that were severe, extraordinary, and, in his mind, singular, can we now just offhandedly re-

Volume XX, Number 1

15

proach Metropolitan Galaction for his establishment of an Old Calendarist hierarchy in legalistic terms, without objectively examining his motivations and actions and without an appeal to dialogue and mutual understanding? Is this how we approach a matter which, in the case of certain parallels in Church history, were resolved by mere concelebration or informal reconciliation? Or is the matter, again, simply one of authority and power? With regard to Communist collaboration, Father David, on the one hand, chastises the Old Calendarists for having enjoyed a special status under the Communists (citing a proclamation made in an historically peculiar situation that had no general application) and, on the other hand, uses their imprisonment under the Communists as a mark against their personal integrity. One cannot have it both ways. In fact, as Father David knows and as I saw with my own eyes and in my own personal experience, the Old Calendarists suffered miserably under the Communists. Metropolitan Glicherie’s imprisonments were frequent and brutal, and they occurred, in many instances, during periods when the New Calendarist Church was itself officially recognized by hostile authorities. It is no secret, as Father David also knows, that collaboration between the Communists and the Patriarchate took place, and this at a time when the Old Calendarists undertook all of their activities illegally and at the cost of their hierarchy serving long prison sentences in the most horrible of circumstances. In saying this, I am not commenting on the compromises and accommodations that marked the actions of many Church leaders in Eastern Europe during the Communist yoke. I question them neither ecclesiologically nor personally, since I was not in their shoes. I am also acutely aware of the fact that members of the “official” Churches likewise suffered horribly in prisons and were persecuted for their beliefs. In circumstances of the kind posed by the Communist yoke, one must allow for great latitude in evaluating personal actions and motivations. What may appear to be betrayal can actually be heroism for the sake of the Church, and, indeed, vice versa. The matter is not an easy one. I do, however, challenge anyone who would accuse the Old Calendarists of collaboration, given the price that they have paid for their witness, and would call the “official” Churches in Eastern Europe (that is, Churches that enjoyed at least the public approbation of Communist authorities) to show the same generosity to resisters and dissidents that I do to them. From their prison cells, the Old Calendarists (and others who were imprisoned for their Faith) paid a far greater price for their acts of conscience than those who were able to work “within the system,” and this should not be denied. Time and patience will bring to light the truth about all things. Idle accusations, name-calling, and retributive attacks will not. Let me, at this point, say something about the Old Calendar itself.

16

Orthodox Tradition

If one reads with sedulous study the proclamations of the Old Calendarist resisters, whether in Romania, Greece, or Bulgaria, and not the polemical works of this-or-that individual, he will see that the Old Calendarists have never claimed that the calendar is a dogmatic matter. Rather, they have tied the calendar to a diminution in the clarity with which the Church speaks, in recent times, of its ecclesiological identity, partly because of political ends posed by an ecumenical movement not so much aimed at mutual theological understanding and a tolerant agreement to disagree as at compromise for the sake of political and social coöperation among religions—coöperation which, while desirable and attainable at one level, must not come at the cost of ignoring the doctrinal and ecclesiological purity and primacy of Orthodoxy. They have also expressed, under the banner of the Old Calendar, their concern about a neo-Papal trend in Orthodox theology, which, mimicking the Papal theories of the Latin Church, tends to see the Orthodox Patriarchs, not as Bishops equal in authority and drawing their indispensability in the Church from the conscience and primacy of the People of God, but as virtual counterparts of the Pope. Indeed, a spokesman for the Œcumenical Patriarchate recently equated the “primacy of equality” of Constantinople with the “sole primacy” of the Pope of Rome (something which would certainly prompt another missile against Papal-like primacy from Saint Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome, were he writing in our day). And finally, many Old Calendarists, seeing that theology is not written or studied, but lived, have expressed through their traditionalist movement growing concern that the “externals” of Orthodox life, inextricably bound up with the internal mysteries of the Faith in the way that an Icon is tied to its Archetype, are fading from consciousness. We are losing sight of an Orthodoxy expressed in the way that we eat, talk, move, and act; an Orthodoxy inexorably fixed on fasting, prayer, the Mysteriological life, and humility and love. There are undeniably, of course, some who have misused the Old Calendar movement, who misinterpret it, who distort it, and who have led it into strange vagaries of an unhealthy kind. But this is true of New Calendarist Orthodoxy, too, and is not, and should not be, the substance of our discussion. As for the astronomical “correction” that the New or “Revised Julian” Calendar (to use a cute euphemism that one sometimes sees in written defenses of this innovation) presumably represents, this should be more a cause of embarrassment to the New Calendarist formulators than anything else. In the first place, Old Calendarists are not “Old” Calendarists, since they maintain the Church Calendar, which is not the Julian Calendar. The Church Calendar is a calendar unto itself and, unlike the Julian Calendar, of purely Patristic origin. The Prelates who met in 1923 in Constantinople to reform the calendar were frightfully ignorant of astronomy and the Church Calendar and,

Volume XX, Number 1

17

thinking themselves equal to the Fathers who met in Œcumenical Synods to establish the Church’s Festal cycle, undertook the calendar change for reasons wholly unrelated to astronomical exactitude. Contemporary babbling about the “equinox” and astronomical issues derives from the most banal of reflections on the calendar issue and should be set aside for its silliness. The Church Calendar is, in fact, an invention of the Church Fathers and a unique combination of solar and lunar calendars, fixing the solar Julian Calendar to the formulation of the date of Pascha, which is based on a lunar event and which forms the base-point of the festal cycle of the Church year. Anyone with rudimentary training in the astronomical sciences (and this, unfortunately, was not the case with the Bishops who reformed the Church Calendar in 1923) knows that the Julian Calendar is still used by scientists, because of its precision, for certain astronomical calculations. Furthermore, the lunisolar Church Calendar is so elegant that Gauss, the famous mathematician, struck by its amazing intricacies, took the time to devise a formula for the calculation of Orthodox Pascha. This fact is almost wholly unknown to the dilettantes who today argue the virtues of the supposedly astronomically “exact” Gregorian Calendar, which such giants in the history of science as Copernicus refused to endorse, on account of its clumsy inadequacy. Let us once and for all dispense, then, with the endless astronomical nescience that Father David cites in his comments on the Old Calendarists (see footnote 3, supra).11 Finally, I would advise anyone who wishes to study the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Romania in an objective, critical, and irenic spirit to begin with an essay by Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili, a Greek Old Calendarist Hierarch. His work, which appeared in The Orthodox Word in 1982,12 is still probably the best summary of the movement available. I would also remind the reader that, since the fall of Communism, despite Father David’s attempts to minimalize the Old Calendarist witness, many new and magnificent Old Calendarist Churches have been built in Romania. At present, the Old Calendarists have 110 parishes—not a few with as many as a thousand members—and scores of monasteries, convents, and sketes, and this not just in Moldavia, but throughout Romania. They cannot be simply dismissed as a redundant religious community, as fanatics and illiterates, or as a sect. They must be seen as individuals who are integral members of the Romanian Orthodox Church, with their roots in the very soil of Romanian religious culture. The time has come when a new generation of Old Calendarists will not idly endure slander, succumbing, as some weaker believers have, to various concocted notions of “officialdom” that negate and neutralize the important and sacred witness of believers who have sacrificed their all, suffering imprisonment and violent persecution, for their principles. Insult and co-

18

Orthodox Tradition

ercion cannot replace patience, slow and cautious dialogue, structured and careful contacts, and mutual respect. Essays like that of Father David, whose motivations and intentions are not mine to judge or impugn, will no longer silence a generation of Old Calendarists who, enjoying the privileges of religious freedom and conscience that are part of the true Romanian intellectual and cultural heritage, are not sectarians, schismatics, heretics, or troglodytes, but advocates of an Orthodox purity which is faithful to the finest traditions of Patristic Orthodoxy. Today’s Old Calendarists will undoubtedly one day play an important role in the establishment of true Orthodox unity and participate in the triumph of reason over the spirit of antagonism which currently wounds the Church and renders her every action, and especially those in the realm of ecumenism and religious toleration, subject to severe criticism. By the presentation of a truthful, objective assessment of the Old Calendar Church of Romania in my response to Father David’s unfortunate study, I hope to have made a small contribution to the spirit of peace and brotherhood that ultimately unites—or at least should unite—all Orthodox. Notes 1) See my article, “Orthodoxy and the Cults,” which appeared in The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, XXV (1980), pp. 37-48. 2) The reference here is to the Julian Calendar and those Orthodox who adhere to the traditional Orthodox Festal Calendar, which is, as we shall see subsequently, derived from (but not the same thing as) the Julian Calendar. The eccentric epithet “Anti-Calendarists” is rather frivolous, if not absurd, as is the pejorative term “Stylists,” which is derived from the fact that dates according to the Julian Calendar are often designated by scholars and scientists as dates according to the “Old Style.” 3) See, as well, footnotes 21 through 24 (pp. 12-13), which touch primarily on historical matters that add little to our understanding of the substantial issues pertinent to the calendar reform. See, as well, Father David’s historically and scientifically cursory and somewhat shallow discussion of the adoption of the New Calendar by the 1923 inter-Orthodox conference in Constantinople (pp. 17-36). In comments marked by non sequiturs and basic scientific errors, his virtual twisting of the canonical, Patristic, and scientific witness is yet another example of the faulty conclusions to which one can come on the basis of scholarship formed in carelessness and by an insufficient examination of the complex factors that must be taken into consideration by anyone wishing to study the intricacies of the calendar reform. In addition, his assertion (p. 16) that the Old Calendarists consider the Church Calendar a dogma is simply ludicrous. 4) In addition to preserving the traditional Church Calendar, the Old Calendarist monks in Romania also refrain from eating meat, an ancient monastic tradition that is, in our days, not universally followed. Therefore, the author’s charge takes on an especially bizarre character. As a matter of fact, when I visited the Old Calendarists in Moldavia in 1980 with a delega-

Volume XX, Number 1

19

tion of Churchmen from the Old Calendar Church of Greece, I was astonished by the utter poverty of the Romanian Old Calendarist communities, which were deprived of what we in the West would consider the basic necessities of life. Moreover, while travelling with several Old Calendarist Hierarchs, I was detained and held, along with my fellow clergy, by the Communist authorities, who, in fact, mistreated some of the members of our entourage. And this, despite the fact that I and several others were travelling on American passports and had both valid visas and permission for our visit. I saw no evidence whatsoever that the Old Calendarists enjoyed special status under the Communists. In fact, as subsequent observations will aver, quite the opposite was true. It was not until the overthrow of Communism that the Old Calendarist Church finally enjoyed relatively full religious freedom. 5) While teaching as a Visiting Professor at the Theological Institute of Uppsala University in Sweden, I published an article on discrimination against the Old Calendarists, “Social psychological dynamics and the powerless minority group” (in Swedish) (see The Scandinavian and Ethnic Minority Review, XV [April 1988], pp. 28-32 ), which may be of interest to the reader. Also see my essay, “The Old Calendarists: a social psychological profile of a Greek Orthodox minority,” in the American journal Pastoral Psychology, XL (1991), pp. 83-91. 6) This point is perhaps worthy of mention, since Father David cites, among other things which I have not specifically mentioned, several former Old Calendarist clergymen who have embraced the New Calendar Church, as though this were a pertinent argument against the Old Calendar movement. As we see, New Calendarists have also embraced the Old Calendar movement (which Father David tries to present, not as acts prompted by the freedom of conscience which the Orthodox Church so values, but as “intense proselytism” by the Old Calendarists, evidence of which I have seen nowhere); as a matter of fact, the entire Hierarchy of the Greek Old Calendarist movement was originally made up of New Calendarist Bishops, all in good standing at the time of their return to the Old Calendar. Included among them was the “father” of the Greek Old Calendarist movement, Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina, a highly refined and sensitive man and an accomplished theologian, whose Deacon subsequently became Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople. 7) It is a matter of some sadness that Old Calendarists are even now routinely denied admission to the theological faculties of Romanian universities, though this policy is unjustifiable and not officially upheld by educational authorities. It is a matter of some hope and joy, however, that Patriarch Teoctist has been instrumental in challenging this policy de facto. In the autumn of 2001, I was the first Old Calendarist ever to lecture the students at the Patriarchal Faculty of Theology in Bucharest, and this with the blessing and approval of the Patriarch himself. If, indeed, the Old Calendarists can be painted as illiterate or uncultured (and I deny this charge categorically), allowing them to attend theological schools would obviously be a far more effective way to treat this alleged deficit than denying them admission to those faculties. 8) Among these, Dr. Constantine Cavarnos, the Harvard-educated Byzantinist and theological writer; the late Dr. John Rexine, Dean of Humanities and Professor of Classics at Colgate University; and Father Gregory

20

Orthodox Tradition

Telepneff, a Yale-educated theologian then at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. 9) Mother Alexandra wrote the introduction, shortly before her death, to the English text of my book Smerenie, which was recently published (2002) in Romanian translation by the Bucharest publishing house Editura Vremea. 10) Indeed, so impressed was I by his life and example, that I authorized the translation and publication of his life in English by the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies. I was also present at his Glorification in 1999, presided over by what Father David crudely calls a Synod of “PharisaicalSadducean Stylists” (p. 38). See Metropolitan Vlasie, The Life of the Holy Hierarch and Confessor Glicherie of Romania, trans. Sorin Comanescu and Protodeacon Gheorghe Balaban (Etna, CA: 1999). 11) On the calendar issue from a theological standpoint, see the brilliant essay by Constantine Cavarnos, “Orthodox Ecumenism as a Divisive Force,” in Orthodox Tradition, XVIII (2001), pp. 22-26. Regarding the scientific merit of the Julian Calendar, as opposed to the Gregorian Calendar, see Hieromonk Cassian, A Scientific Examination of the Orthodox Church Calendar: or The Old Calendar and Science, eds. Archbishop Chrysostomos and Hieromonk Gregory (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1998). 12) Bishop (now Metropolitan) Cyprian, “The True Orthodox Christians of Romania,” The Orthodox Word, XVIII (1982), pp. 5-15. Trans. from the Greek by Archimandrite (now Archbishop) Chrysostomos.

The Restoration of Human Nature in Christ* “We Shall Bear the Image of the Heavenly”1 OUR HOLY TRIUNE GOD created man out of His exceeding goodness, so that he might be in a communion of love with Him and so that man, as a unified psychosomatic entity—as a person—might participate in the Holiness and Glory of God; that is to say, that he might be in a state of union with God, as one called to Deification. The Biblical phrase, “And God said, Let Us make man according to Our image and likeness,”2 encapsulates the very profound mystery of humanity: God created us wholly noble and good, in order that we might become perfect; we were given by nature “that which is according to the image,” so that we might attain by choice to “that which is according to the likeness.” In the primordial state of blessedness in the “Paradise of delight,”3 the first-fashioned human beings existed in a state of illumination, “cultivating” and “keeping”4 the gift of Grace. That is, obeying the commandment that they had been given, they functioned according to nature, “in a natural way,”5 being elevated to that which is above nature; their minds were in a state of noetic prayer, of continuous and unceasing remembrance of God through the energy of the Holy Spirit, and they were in the process of being raised up to a state of theoria (spiritual grandeur), that is, of Deification. But man, having free will, as a creature endowed with freedom of choice, was also susceptible to the passions, “that his free will might be put to the test,”6 on account of which, moreover, he was given the commandment not to eat “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”7 Man’s upward journey towards perfection, towards “that which is according to the likeness” was interrupted—by way of the envy and deceit of the Devil—through disobedience. This most tragic happening was a precursor to death—namely, the termination of the relationship of love and communion between man and God—and man’s departure from Paradise. This departure was the consummation of a primordial drama, because it introduced man into the “world,” that is, into the realm of the cultivation of the passions and of sin. “‘World’ is an inclusive term,” “and when we want to name all of the passions in general, we call

22

Orthodox Tradition

them ‘the world.’”8 Disobedience transformed man’s senses into “what is contrary to nature,”9 and thus man could not remain in a state of glory; his senses were now distorted. His mind, deprived of Divine Light, now lusted after depravity and impurity. He became jealous and envious and lied against others; haughty and arrogant, he became angry and came to hate his neighbor. The passions were aroused and kindled. There was a rupture and dislocation between the internal or spiritual and the external or physical. Man became a slave of corruption, sin, and death. His struggle and toil appeared to be “in vain”; he came to be nourished physically and spiritually on the “bread of sorrow.”10 The Son and Word of God, “the second Man, the Lord from Heaven,”11 “was made flesh,”12 that is, made perfect Man in every respect “save sin.”13 He took pity on man and restored him to Paradise, bestowing the glory of His Kingdom upon all who follow in His footsteps and keep His commandments. Our Lord healed human nature, which He assumed and united to His Divine Nature in his Divine Person, freeing it from corruption, sin, the Devil, and death. He accomplished this “through His holy Body,”14 Which was filled with the Holy Spirit; a Body which was, after His saving Passion and glorious Resurrection, a “Heavenly” Body,15 in which He clothes His “earthly” servants, restoring them and transforming them from “natural” men to “spiritual” men.16 The “natural” man is he who lives a merely biological existence; the “spiritual” man participates in the Grace of the Holy Spirit, Which he receives as a gift in the Church of Christ, through the holy virtues and the holy Mysteries. To this end, our Lord appointed “holy worship” and a “pure law”17 for us in His new Paradise, the Holy Church. Man returns to his first, natural state and unifies his disrupted and dissipated senses; and, in worshipping God “in spirit and in truth”18 and in “cultivating and keeping” the holy law of the Divine commandments, he is nourished by the Life-giving Bread “unto the remission of sins and life eternal” and is illumined by the Grace of the Holy Spirit. This is achieved with great toil and struggle and constitutes precisely the self-denial which is required of a man if he is to take up his cross and be freed from the slavery of sin and the wickedness of the Devil. He who has a deep and living faith, and who believes with exactitude and consistency, can, according to our Holy Fathers, attain to union with God. This sacred, salvific path is beautifully summarized by St. Maximos the Confessor in the following words: He who believes fears, he who fears is humbled, and he who is humbled becomes meek, acquiring the habit of rendering inert those movements of insentience and desire which are contrary to nature; the meek man keeps the commandments, he who keeps the commandments is purified,

Volume XX, Number 1

23

he who is purified is illumined, and he who is illumined is vouchsafed to consort with the Bridegroom-Logos in the inner chamber of the mysteries.19

Transcending mind and understanding, this passionless union, with the Bridegroom-Logos in the present life, in the “inner chamber of the mysteries,” in a heart made contrite by tears of repentance, wounded by Divine love, and exhausted by crying out unceasingly for mercy day and night, signifies man’s birth “from above,”20 the advent of the Kingdom within him,21 and his union with the Holy Trinity.22 This ineffable union constitutes the unerring pledge of future glory and the assurance that, after the general Resurrection, we will bear the image—indeed, the likeness—of the “Heavenly,” that is, the incorruption and immortality of God; for, “there shall be no more death”!23 Notes 1. I Corinthians 15:49. 2. Genesis 1:26. 3. Genesis 2:15. 4. See note 3. 5. Abba Isaiah the Anchorite, Discourse 2: “Concerning Natural Law,” §2. 6. Abba Isaac the Syrian, “Homily 41,” p. 171. 7. Genesis 2:16-17. 8. Abba Isaac, “Homily 30,” p. 131. 9. See note 5. 10. Psalm 126:2, Septuaginta. 11. I Corinthians 15:47. 12. St. John 1:14. 13. Hebrews 4:15. 14. See note 5. 15. I Corinthians 15:48. 16. I Corinthians 2:14-15; St. Jude 19. 17. See note 5. 18. St. John 4:23. 19. Chapters on Theology, First Century, §16. 20. St. John 3:3, 7. 21. St. Luke 17:21. 22. St. John 14:23. 23. Revelation 21:4. * Translated from the Greek original in A Ü giow KuprianÒw, No. 298 (September-October 2000), pp. 337-338.

Homily on Priscilla and Aquila* by Saint John Chrysostomos Patriarch of Constantinople

1. I suppose that many of you are puzzled about this passage in the Epistle reading, or rather, consider this part of the Epistle to be irrelevant and superfluous, because it consists only of a succession of numerous salutations. For this very reason, I am setting off in a different direction today. I am prepared to digress from my main theme and turn my attention to this topic, so that you might learn that nothing in the Divine Scriptures is superfluous or irrelevant, be it one jot or one tittle, but that a mere salutation opens up a great ocean of meaning for us. Now, what do I mean by a “mere salutation”? Oftentimes, the addition of a single letter introduces an entire host of connotations, as can be seen in the case of the name “Abraham.”1 Now, how could it not be absurd, when one who receives a letter from a friend reads not only the body of the letter, but also the greeting placed at the end, and on that basis conjectures the attitude of the writer, for us to reckon, when Paul is the writer—or rather, not Paul, but the Grace of the Spirit, dictating the letter to the whole city and to so great an assemblage, and through them to the entire inhabited earth—, that any of the contents is superfluous and simply to pass over them and not to realize that all of these words have turned everything upside down? For it is this attitude—I repeat, it is this attitude— that has filled us with great laziness, that we do not read all of the Scriptures, but select those parts which we reckon to be clearer, taking no account of the rest. This mentality of not wanting to read the entire body of a text, in the belief that something in it is superfluous and irrelevant, has also introduced heresies. Hence, we are zealous about everything else, and not only about superfluous things, but also about unprofitable and harmful things, whereas knowledge of Scripture is disregarded and despised. Some people get excited about watching equestrian contests, and they can tell you, with complete accuracy, the names of the horses, from which herd each horse comes, what breed it is, its place of origin, how it was trained, how old it is, its track record, which team will carry off the victory, and which horse, released from which starting-gate, controlled by which charioteer, will win the race, and outrun its rivals. Others, who frequent theatres, display no less fanaticism than the former, but even more, about people who put on inde-

Volume XX, Number 1

25

cent performances in such places, I mean actors and dancing-girls, and they can recite their family background, what country they come from, what kind of training they received, and everything else of this kind. But when we are asked what and how many Epistles St. Paul wrote, we cannot even enumerate them; and should there be any who are able to list them, they are at a loss if asked which cities received these Epistles. Now, there was a foreign eunuch who was distracted by innumerable cares and countless items of business; and yet, he was so devoted to books that he did not take a break from them even when he was travelling, but, while sitting on his chariot, applied himself with great diligence to reading the Divine Scriptures; whereas we, who do not have even a fraction of the business to deal with that he did, are unfamiliar even with the names of the Epistles, despite the fact that we congregate here every Sunday and enjoy the advantage of hearing the Scriptures. However, so as not to use up our sermon solely in issuing reproofs, come; let us bring to the forefront this salutation which seems superfluous and irritating. For, when we explain it and show how much benefit it confers on those who pay careful attention to it, then greater will be the reproach for those who neglect so many treasures and cast such spiritual wealth from their hands. What, therefore, is this salutation? “Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in the Lord” (Romans 16:3). Surely this seems to be a mere greeting and not to indicate to us anything important or special. Well then, let us devote our entire discourse just to this phrase. Or rather, we will not be able to draw out for you all of the meanings contained in these few words even today, no matter how eager we might be, but must store up for you until the next day the abundance of ideas generated by this brief greeting. For, I am not prepared to discuss all of it, but only part of it, its beginning and exordium: “Greet Priscilla and Aquila.” 2. We must first admire Paul’s virtue, because, having been entrusted with care of the entire inhabited earth, both land and sea, and all the cities under the sky, both foreign and Greek, and encompassing so many peoples by himself, he showed so much concern for one man and one woman. Secondly, we must marvel at how vigilant and solicitous he was in soul, being mindful not only of all people in general, but also privately of every single worthy and noble individual. It is not at all amazing that leaders of Churches should do this now, since they have calmed disturbances and undertaken care for only one city; but back then, in Paul’s case, not only the magnitude of dangers, but also the distances of journeys, the multitude of cares, the successive waves of adversity, and the fact that he was not always assiduous in visiting everyone, and many other factors than these were sufficient to banish from his memory even those who were very close to him. But such cares did not banish Priscilla and Aquila from Paul’s mind.

26

Orthodox Tradition

How is it, then, that they were not banished? On account of Paul’s magnanimity and his fervent and genuine love. He kept them so much in mind that he frequently mentioned them in his Epistles. But let us see who they were and what kind of people they were who bound Paul to themselves with such affection and elicited such love from him. Were they consuls, or generals, or prefects, or did they possess some other eminent office, or were they invested with great wealth, or were they governors of the city? We cannot say any such thing; quite the contrary, they were poor and needy people, who lived from the work of their own hands. They were, Paul tells us, tentmakers by occupation (Acts 18:3); and Paul was not ashamed of them, nor did he consider it a disgrace for an imperial city and a people who had a high opinion of themselves if he bade them greet those artisans, and he did not think that he was insulting the Christians of Rome by his friendship with Priscilla and Aquila. This is how he taught everyone in those days to behave. And yet, if we have relatives who are a little poorer than ourselves, we avoid familiarity with them and we reckon it a reproach if we are ever caught associating with them. Such was not the case with Paul, who even took pride in this state of affairs and made it clear, not only to his contemporaries, but also to all of posterity, that those tentmakers were among his closest friends. Let no one say to me: “And how is it great and admirable that he, being involved in the same occupation, should not be ashamed of his fellow-artisans?” What do you mean? This is, in fact, the greatest and most admirable thing about him. For, those who can speak about illustrious ancestors are not as ashamed of their inferiors as those who were once in the same low estate, but have suddenly risen to distinction and eminence. It is clear to all that there was no one more distinguished or eminent than Paul; indeed, he was more illustrious even than royalty. For he who gave orders to demons, raised the dead, and was able, by a mere command, both to make people blind and to heal the blind, whose clothing and shadow dispelled every kind of disease, was plainly no longer regarded as a man, but as an Angel descended from Heaven. Nonetheless, although he enjoyed such great glory and was admired everywhere, and converted everyone wherever he appeared, he was not ashamed of the tentmaker, nor did he think that the honor belonging to those who held high office was thereby diminished. For it is likely that there were many prominent individuals in the Church of the Romans whom he compelled to greet those poor people. For, he knew—he knew clearly—that it is not splendor of wealth or financial affluence that is wont to create nobility, but rather virtuous conduct; since those who are deprived of the latter, but pride themselves on the glory of their progenitors, are adorned merely by the name of nobility, not by nobility itself; or rather, the very name is often withdrawn,

Volume XX, Number 1

27

if one goes back to the more remote ancestors of these noble persons. For, if you examine carefully the eminent and illustrious man who can claim that his father and grandfather were distinguished men, you will often find that he had a great-grandfather of humble origins and of no repute—just as, when we investigate in detail the entire families of those who appear to be lowborn, we will often find that their more remote ancestors were prefects and generals, whose descendants eventually became horse-keepers and swineherds. Knowing all of this, therefore, Paul did not set much store by such accidents of birth, but looked for nobility of soul and taught others to admire this quality. In the meantime, then, we reap the not insignificant fruits of not being ashamed of anyone of lower birth, of seeking after virtue of soul, and of reckoning all our external attributes to be superfluous and vain. 3. It is possible for us to derive another gain no less significant than this, which, if we are successful in acquiring it, is particularly conducive to sustaining our life. And what is this? Not to censure marriage and not to think that having a wife, bringing up children, presiding over a household, and plying a trade are impediments and obstacles on the path that leads to virtue. Look, here were a man and a woman who were in charge of workshops, engaged in a craft; yet, they displayed a much more perfect way of life than those living in monasteries. How do we know this? From the words that Paul addressed to them, or, rather, not from the words that he addressed to them, but from the testimony that he offered after these words. For, having said, “Greet Priscilla and Aquila,” he added their station in life. Now, what station was this? He did not say that they were wealthy, eminent, or of noble birth. Well, what? “My helpers in the Lord.” There could be nothing equal to this as an commendation of their virtue; and their virtue can be discerned not from this alone, but also from the fact that he stayed with them, not for one, two, or three days, but for two whole years. For, just as secular rulers would never choose to lodge with simple and lowly people, but seek out magnificent houses of grandees, lest the magnitude of their dignity be tainted by the lowliness of their hosts, so also did the Apostles: they did not lodge with just anyone, but, even as rulers seek out magnificent houses, so they sought after virtuous souls and, inquiring diligently into those who were suitable for them, they lodged with such people. And this was, in fact, enjoined in a law laid down by Christ: “Whatsoever city or house ye enter into, enquire who in it is worthy, and there abide” (St. Luke 9:4; St. Matthew 10:11). Hence, Aquila and Priscilla were fit for Paul; and if they were fit for Paul, they were fit for Angels. I would confidently call that little house of theirs both a Heaven and a Church. For, wherever Paul was, there Christ was also: “Seek ye a proof of Christ Who speaketh in me?” (II Corinthians 13:3). Wherever Christ is, there also Angels constantly visit.

28

Orthodox Tradition

As for those who had previously made themselves worthy of ministering to Paul, consider what they became while living with him for two years, observing his outward appearance, his gait, his glance, how he dressed, his comings and goings, and everything else. For, in the case of the Saints, not only their words, or their teachings and exhortations, but also every other aspect of their behavior suffices to teach those who are attentive how they ought to live. Consider what Paul looked like when dining, when chiding, when exhorting, when praying, when weeping, when going out and coming in. For if we, having only his fourteen Epistles, carry them everywhere throughout the world, what would Priscilla and Aquila, who had access to the source of the Epistles, the tongue of the inhabited earth, the light of the Churches, the foundation of the Faith, the pillar and bulwark of the Truth, not have become through living with such an Angel? For, if his clothing was fearful to demons and possessed such great power, what great gift of the Spirit would dwelling with him not have attracted? Would not seeing Paul’s bed, bedding, and shoes have been sufficient to arouse his hosts to unceasing compunction? For, if demons trembled at seeing his clothing, much more would the Faithful who lived with him have been moved to compunction by the sight of it. It is also worth inquiring why, when addressing them, he put Priscilla’s name before that of her husband. For, he did not say, “Greet Aquila and Priscilla,” but “Greet Priscilla and Aquila.” He did not do this without reason; rather, it seems to me that he knew that she was endowed with greater piety than her husband. And we can ascertain from the Acts of the Apostles that what I have said is not a conjecture. For, it was Priscilla who took aside Apollos, “a learned man and mighty in the Scriptures,” but who knew “only the Baptism of John” (Acts 18:24-25), and who expounded the way of God to him and made him a perfect teacher. For the women who lived in Apostolic times were not concerned about the things that prepossess the women of today, such as wearing splendid clothing and adorning their faces with cosmetics; today’s women pester their husbands, forcing them to buy them dresses that are more expensive than those of their neighbors and peers, white mules, bridles sprinkled with gold, eunuchs to serve them, a large flock of maidservants, and every other kind of ridiculous frippery. No, shaking off these vanities and rejecting worldly affectation, women in Apostolic times sought only one thing: to become colleagues of the Apostles and to share in the same pursuit as they. Hence, Priscilla was not the only such woman, but all of the others were like her. For, Paul speaks about a certain Persis, who “labored much for us” (Romans 16:12), and he marvels at Mary and Tryphena (Romans 16:6, 12) for their labors, because they toiled along with the Apostles and girded themselves for the same contests. And yet, how is it that, in writing to Timothy, he says: “I suffer not a

Volume XX, Number 1

29

woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man” (I St. Timothy 2:12)? He allows a woman to teach when the husband is pious, professes the same faith, and partakes of the same wisdom; but also when he is an unbeliever and in error, the Apostle does not deprive her of the authority of teaching. In one of his Epistles to the Corinthians, he says: “And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not..., let her not leave him”; “For how knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband?” (1 Corinthians 7:13, 16). Now, how can a faithful wife save her unbelieving husband? By catechizing and teaching him, and leading him to the Faith, just as Priscilla did with Apollos. In any case, when Paul says, “I suffer not a woman to teach,” he is talking about teaching from the ambon, about speaking in public, and about the kind of speaking that is incumbent on Priests by virtue of their office; he did not forbid women from exhorting and counselling in private. For, were this prohibited, he would not have praised Priscilla for so doing. 4. Let men hearken to these points, and let women also hearken to them: women, so that they might imitate one who is of the same sex and nature as themselves; men, so that they might not give the appearance of being weaker than this woman. For, what defense will we have, what forgiveness will we obtain, when women display such eagerness and love of wisdom, whereas we are constantly preoccupied with the things of this world? Let rulers and those subject to them learn these lessons, and let Priests and lay people learn them: rulers and Priests, so that they might not admire the rich or frequent the homes of grandees, but might seek after virtue through poverty and not be ashamed of their poorer brethren, and so that they might not, in passing over the tentmaker, the tanner, the seller of purple, and the coppersmith, pay court to those in positions of power; and those who are ruled, so that they might not suppose that there is any impediment to their welcoming the saints, but, reflecting on the widow who received Elias, having only a handful of meal, and on those who gave hospitality to Paul for two years, might open their homes to the needy, sharing everything with those who are strangers. And do not tell me that you do not have servants to take care of guests. For, even if you have innumerable servants, God orders you to reap the fruit of hospitality yourself. For this reason, in talking about a widow and bidding her offer hospitality, Paul enjoined her to do this, not through the agency of others, but herself. For, after saying, “if she have lodged strangers,” he added, “if she have washed the saints’ feet” (I St. Timothy 5:10). He did not say, “if she have spent money” or “if she have ordered her servants to do this,” but “if she have done this herself.” For this reason, Abraham,who had three hundred eighteen home-born servants, himself ran to the flock and carried back a calf, ministered to all of the other needs of his guests, and made his wife a sharer in

30

Orthodox Tradition

the fruits of hospitality (Genesis 17:23-18:8). For this reason, our Lord Jesus Christ was born in a manger and from infancy was brought up in a house, yet after He had grown up had nowhere to lay His head, so as to teach you, by all of these means, not to gape with awe at the splendid things of this life, but everywhere to be a devotee of lowliness, to pursue poverty, to shun affluence, and to adorn yourself inwardly. For, it is written, “All the glory of the daughter of the King is within” (Psalm 44:13, Septuaginta). If you are inclined towards hospitality, you have all the resources for hospitality, even if you possess only a single obol [an ancient coin; a “penny”]; but if you are misanthropic and detest strangers, even though you are surrounded by all manner of possessions, your house is too cramped to receive guests. Priscilla’s house did not have beds overlaid with silver, but she did have great chastity; her house did not possess bedding, but she had a kind and hospitable disposition; her house did not have gleaming columns, but she had a radiantly beautiful soul; her house did not have walls covered with marble, or a floor decorated with mosaics, but she was a temple of the Spirit. It was the latter qualities that Paul praised; it was these that he loved; it was on account of these that he stayed in her house for two years without departing thence. It was on account of these that he constantly mentions her and Aquila and composes a great and wondrous laudation, not in order to make them more illustrious, but in order to lead others to the same zeal and to persuade them to bless, not the rich or officeholders, but the hospitable, the merciful, the philanthropic, and those who show great kindness towards the saints. 5. Having learned such lessons from this greeting, let us display what we have learned through our very deeds: let us neither witlessly call the rich blessed, nor denigrate the poor, nor be ashamed of trades; and let us not consider manual labor a disgrace, but rather idleness, having nothing to do with it. For, if it were a disgrace to work, Paul would not have undertaken it, nor would he have gloried in it, as when he said: “For though I preach the Gospel, I have nothing to glory in.... What is my reward, then? That, when I preach the Gospel, I may set forth the Gospel of Christ without charge” (I Corinthians 9:16, 18). If handiwork were a disgrace, he would not have ordered those who do not work not to eat (II Thessalonians 3:10). The only disgrace is sin; idleness is wont to engender sin, and not only one sin or two or three, but every kind of wickedness. Hence, after showing that idleness teaches all manner of evil, a certain sage said: “Send him to work, lest he be idle” (Ecclesiasticus 30:27). For, what a bridle is to a horse, work is to our own nature. If idleness were a good thing, the earth would bring forth everything without sowing or ploughing; but it produces no such result. In times of old, God commanded the earth to yield everything without plowing; now, however, He does not do so,

Volume XX, Number 1

31

but has ordained that men should yoke oxen, pull plows, cleave furrows and sow seeds, and should cultivate many other things—vines, trees, and spores—, so that the work itself might distract the minds of those engaged therein from all wickedness. In the beginning, to be sure, in order to manifest His power, He brought it about that all things should be produced without our labors. For, God said, “Let the earth bring forth the herb of grass” (Genesis 1:11), and at once all things flourished. Thereafter, it was not so, but He commanded them to be produced from the earth through our labors, so that you might learn that He introduced toil because it is useful and advantageous for us. When one hears the phrase, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread” (Genesis 3:20), it sounds like a punishment; in reality, however, it is an admonition and a reproof and a remedy for the wounds deriving from sin. This is why Paul worked unceasingly, not only during the day, but also at night, as he exclaims: “For we labored night and day, so as not to be a burden on any of you” (I Thessalonians 2:9). And it was not merely for the sake of pleasure and recreation that he undertook work, as did many of his brethren, but he put forth so much effort in this regard so that he could be of help to others. For “these hands,” he says, “have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me” (Acts 20:34). A man who commanded demons, who was the teacher of the inhabited earth, to whom were entrusted all those who dwelt on earth and all the Churches under the sun, and who looked after peoples, nations, and cities with great diligence, the same worked night and day and had not even a slight respite from those labors. But we, who do not have even a fraction of his cares to cope with, or, rather, cannot so much as conceive of such cares, lead lives of constant idleness. And tell me, what excuse will we have, what pardon will we obtain? It is precisely because many people consider it the greatest dignity not to ply their own craft, and deem it the ultimate reproach to appear to have any such knowledge, that every kind of evil has swept into our lives. Paul, for his part, was not ashamed at wielding a knife and stitching hides together, and at the same time he was not abashed at conversing with those in positions of authority, but took pride in this very fact, since thereby innumerable brilliant and distinguished men had recourse to him. And not only was he not ashamed at doing these things, but he even divulged his occupation in his Epistles, as on a bronze plaque. What he had learned from the beginning, therefore, this he also practiced subsequently, even after being caught up into the third heaven and translated to Paradise, and even after God had communicated ineffable words to him. Whereas we, who are not worthy so much as to step into his shoes, are ashamed at those things in which he gloried. Sinning each day, we do not turn back in repentance, nor do we consider this a dis-

32

Orthodox Tradition

grace; and yet, we avoid living from honest work as if it were something shameful and ridiculous. Tell me, therefore, what hope of salvation shall we have? One who has a sense of shame ought to be ashamed at sin, at offending God, and at doing anything that he should not do; but he also ought to take pride in crafts and occupations. For in this way, by keeping busy, we shall easily banish evil thoughts from our minds, we shall assist the needy and shall not be a nuisance to others, and we shall fulfill the law of Christ, Who said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). This is why we have hands, that we might help ourselves and offer everything we possibly can from our own resources to those who are physically incapacitated. But if anyone persists in idleness, though he be healthy, he is more wretched than those who have fevers, for the latter have some excuse on account of their illness and will easily find someone to take pity on them; but the former, who despise bodily health, are deservedly loathed by everyone as transgressors of God’s laws, who ruin the table of the infirm2 and degrade their own souls. And the frightful thing is that, whereas they should be feeding themselves at their own expense, they go to other people’s houses and pester them, and on top of this they become worse than everyone else. For there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is not destroyed by idleness. Stagnant water becomes putrid, but water that runs and meanders everywhere preserves its own vitality. Iron that remains idle softens and deteriorates, eaten away by rust; but when it is employed in manufacturing, it is more useful and better-looking, and shines no less brightly than any silver. One can see that fallow earth produces nothing healthy, but only weeds, thistles, thorns, and unfruitful trees, whereas, when it benefits from tillage, it abounds in cultivated fruits. To put it simply, everything that exists is corrupted by idleness but is rendered more useful when it functions in accordance with its own nature. Knowing all this, therefore, both how much harm results from idleness and how much gain from activity, let us eschew the former and pursue the latter, so that we might live the present life in a fitting manner and help the needy, as far as we are able, and, by improving our own souls, might attain to the good things of eternity. May we all attain thereto, by the Grace and love for mankind of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom be the glory and the dominion, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. Notes 1. “And thy name shall no more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham, for I have made thee a father of many nations” (Genesis 17:5). 2. This is probably an allusion to ancient soup kitchens, designed to provide relief for those unable to look after themselves. * Greek text from the Patrologia Græca, Vol. LI, cols. 187-196.

The Resurrection of Our Savior and the Completion of the New Creation* Our Life as a Process of Continuous Renewal. On Great and Holy Saturday, the Orthodox Church chants with a loud voice: This is the day of rest, whereon the Only-Begotten Son of God rested from all of His works. Suffering death in accordance with the œconomy of salvation, He kept the Sabbath in the flesh; and, returning again through the Resurrection to what He was, He hath granted us life eternal, for He alone is good and loveth mankind.1

Now, what are “all of the works” from which our Lord rested in the body? They are all of His works that pertain to our salvation: the Son of God, moved by exceeding love for sinful mankind, became incarnate. Throughout His life, He acted with such great condescension and humility that it seemed, in a certain way, that “He came out of Himself, though remaining inseparable from Himself,” “[came] forth from the dignity of His natural Divinity,” “and thus suffered, died, and was buried.” But when “He arose, He returned again to Himself and was restored to the former dignity of His Own Divinity.”2 After the Resurrection, the Body of our Lord became “suitable” for the manifestation, through It and in It, of the glory of His Divinity. It was, of course, Divinized from His very Conception through the hypostatic union of His two natures; but, for the sake of the œconomy of salvation, it was passible, corruptible, and without glory. That is to say, after the Resurrection of our Savior, His formerly passible Body became impassible; the corruptible became incorruptible; the inglorious was made radiant, beautiful, and glorious with the same glory of Divinity with which it was hypostatically united from the beginning, without confusion or division. And it was when our Lord’s humanity became impassible, incorruptible, glorious, radiant, and beautiful, that our nature was glorified and “He granted us life eternal.”1 A new Creation was therefore accomplished through the lifebearing Resurrection of Christ, since what had previously been corrupted and degraded by the Fall was created anew. The Incarnation of the Logos inaugurated a new Creation; the Resurrection brought it to completion amid the uncreated Light of the Godhead. It is noteworthy that this is precisely the reason why, on the Great

34

Orthodox Tradition

Sunday of Pascha, at the Divine Liturgy of the Resurrection, we begin to read the Gospel according to St. John, in which the Divinity of God the Logos is proclaimed most brilliantly. The intensely theological preface to this sacred Gospel introduces us immediately into the realm of Creation, with the well-known phrase: “In the beginning was...[the Logos].” 3 He Who brought about the first Creation was the Logos; and He Who renewed it, thereby inaugurating a new Creation, is the Incarnate Logos. Mankind now participates in the new creation in Christ, in that through the Church it participates in the resurrected and glorious Body of Christ. It is blessed repentance, centered on the Divine Eucharist, that renews us. And since repentance must be continuous, our whole life is a process of continuous renewal. ‘Have you sinned today?’ asks St. John Chrysostomos; ‘Have you made your soul decrepit? Do not despair, and do not be disheartened, but renew it by repentance, tears, and confession, and by doing good deeds. And never cease from doing this.’4

Through repentance, we are freed from the decrepitude of sin and the passions and we are perfected and Deified through Divine Communion. The Saints portray our Lord as speaking to us and as saying, with a realism that is truly astonishing: For your sake I left My Father and came to you.... I united and joined you to Myself. ‘Eat Me, drink Me....’ I am not simply mingled with you, but I am entwined with you, masticated, and refined into small particles, so that the blending, commixture, and union may be more complete.... I am interwoven with you.... It is My will that we both be one.5

Let us live in unceasing repentance, so that we might participate continuously in the new Creation and that our life might thus be an unending Resurrection! Notes 1. Orthros of Great Saturday, Doxastikon at the Praises. 2. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, SumbouleutikÚn ÉEgxeir¤dion [Handbook of Spiritual Counsel] (Volos: 1969), pp. 173-175. 3. St. John 1:1. 4. St. John Chrysostomos, “Homily 20 on Romans,” §2, Patrologia Græca, Vol. LX, col. 598. 5. Idem, “Homily 15 on I St. Timothy,” §4, Patrologia Græca, Vol. LXII, col. 586. * Translated from the Greek original in A Ü giow KuprianÒw, No. 307 (March-April 2002), pp. 122-123.

T

Book Reviews __________________________________________

NICHOLAS FENNELL, The Russians on Athos. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2001. Pp. 348. An engaging historical study, The Russians on Athos examines the causes and the consequences of a latter-day manifestation of the phenomenon of “the desert a city.” Familiar to any student of Early Church history, this image refers to the stupendous flowering of monastic life in the fourth and fifth centuries under the spiritual direction of the great Desert Fathers, when thousands—indeed, tens of thousands—of men and women flowed to the ascetic arena of the deserts—a time when monasticism literally became a mass movement. In our own days, when Orthodox monastic life appears to be at its nadir, it is perhaps tempting to think that these numbers have been piously exaggerated or that they remain an unrepeatable feature of the distant past. However, such doubts are quickly dispelled by reading the work at hand. From about 1840 to roughly 1910, the “200 Russians on Athos...grew to about 5,000” (p. 48), swelling the population of the Holy Mountain to “over ten thousand monks..., probably more than at any time in its history” (p. 39). This tremendous population explosion and the influx of Russians on Mount Athos was not without its problems, as is the case with any such sudden increase in a population. The chief and most persistent of these problems was a spiritually artificial and destructive division of the Athonite Fathers into ethnic “Greek” and “Russian” factions. This phyletistic split both reflected and reinforced a pre-existent friction found in the Orthodox world at large; but this split was made more intense by the very demographic make-up of the Holy Mountain, “a microcosm of the Balkan Christian people” (p. 21). The explicit intention of Dr. Fennell’s study is to present an objective and impartial account of the tensions between Russians and Greeks during this seminal period of Athonite history. His commitment to this goal is immediately apparent in the opening glossary, which contains both Greek and Russian terms used equitably throughout the text (although his transliterations are more than a bit eccentric and needlessly exotic at times; e.g., “ekliziarkh” for “ecclesiarch” and “isihastirion” for “hesychasterion” [pp.10-11]). He convincingly avers the genuine need for a fresh, detached, and fair treatment of this conflict in his “Introduction,” where he justifiably bemoans the inadequacies of his Greek and Russian source materials. Not surprisingly, because of “the obfuscation and passion surrounding...[this]...subject,” the Greek texts are “extremely one-sided,” while the Russian texts are “no less biased...and present a diametrically opposite view” (pp. 24-25). Despite the paucity of his primary sources, Dr. Fennell admirably and successfully sifts these texts, dismisses the falsehoods, and distills the truths. This study is divided into two parts. “Part I: The Russians on Athos” details the historical impetus for the flood of Russian pilgrims and monastics to Mount Athos; how the overcrowding caused by this inundation led to compe-

36

Orthodox Tradition

tition for wealth and power; how the behavior of the Russians was often marked by crudity, haughtiness, and ostentation, while that of the Greeks by xenophobia, rancor, and jealousy; and how these psychological foibles hardened into mutually antagonistic mentalities. “Part II: The Prophet Elijah [Elias] Skete” is a case study of one representative Athonite foundation, of “its complete history and day-to-day running at its apogee,” and of “how well..[it]...fits into the more general historical scheme” (p. 22). Looking at the Skete of St. Elias in the general scheme of the conflict which is the subject of his research, the author points out that, at its height in 1914, the skete “was a tolerant, happy community” where “Christian charity triumphed over human weakness” (p. 284). He observes sadly that, in 1992, the Skete’s Fathers—members of the traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church Abroad—were arbitrarily expelled from their skete—and replaced with Greek monks—by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who despicably exploited local anti-Russian sentiments in order to further his own neo-Papal ambitions. Indeed, he observes that even Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, himself a clergyman of the Œcumenical Patriarchate, forcefully criticized this action as deplorable, barbaric, and a violation of conscience (pp. 311-312). Noting that “the expelled brethren were given shelter at the Old Calendarist Monastery of SS Kyprianos and Iustina [Sts. Cyprian and Justina] near Fili, Athens,” and received legal assistance from “Metropolitan Kyprianos [Cyprian] of Oropos and Fili” (p. 310), the author provides us with evidence that the minor differences between Greeks and Russians can be easily surmounted—at least for those embracing proper spiritual priorities. The Russians on Athos is an excellent and indispensable contribution to the study of modern Athos. But it must be remembered that it is an historical work, not a hagiographical one; as such, it of necessity focuses on the prosaic and mundane rather than the elevated and sublime: “...on political, worldly and therefore sensational events” (p. 234). In recognizing this, Dr. Fennell writes: ...[T]he potential for ethnic discord has always existed on Mount Athos. Monks are, of course, humans and prey to temptations; they cannot be expected to live in Christian peace and harmony in a small space for over a thousand years, particularly when different nationalities rub shoulders in physically and mentally demanding conditions. However, as a[n] historian I have to focus on the exceptional—on clashes and disunity; I pass over the majority of Athonites who have spent most of the time getting on with the business of being monks in prayer, toil and self-denial [p. 70].

The author is thus able, even while recounting various scandalous and even violent episodes, motivated by greed, politics, and the desire to fulfill unhealthy ethnic agenda, to separate the personal failures of certain monks from the high standards of their monastic calling, for which he has obvious respect. Let us hope that the efforts of those Athonites who “[get] on with their daily monastic business” (pp. 234-235) may overturn the fanaticism currently rampant on Mount Athos, returning it to its ideal as a pan-Orthodox bastion of Holy Tradition. HIEROMONK GREGORY

Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies

Synod News Publications In the summer of 2002, the book Paths and Means to Holiness, by the distinguished Harvard-educated Byzantinist, philosopher, and Orthodox religious writer Constantine Cavarnos, appeared in Romanian translation under the imprint of the publishing house of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate in Bucharest. The Romanian version of this popular volume was based on the English translation, by Archbishop Chrysostomos and Bishop Auxentios, of the original Greek text. The English text was published by the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies (C.T.O.S.) and is now in its third printing. Professor Cavarnos, who has served on the Board of Advisors of the C.T.O.S. since its inception, is President of the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies in Belmont, MA. The Romanian Patriarchate plans to publish a series of Dr. Cavarnos’ books in Romanian. Teaching Appointment With the blessing of Bishop Kyrill of San Francisco and Western America, in the fall of 2001, Father Gregory Telepneff, a clergyman of the American Exarchate of our Church, was appointed an instructor at the St. John of San Francisco Orthodox Academy, a co-educational day school operated by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Attached to the Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco, the St. John of San Francisco Orthodox Academy offers a full curriculum from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Using prayer and fasting as focal points, “the goal of the school is to direct its pupils toward an active church life, to develop their Christian consciousness, to maintain healthy and obedient relationships with their parents, relatives and teachers, and to strive for excellence in intellectual pursuits.” Father Gregory, a married clergyman Ordained to the Priesthood by Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna, holds a B.A. degree from Yale University, an M.A. degree in theology from the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, a Licentiate in Theology from the Saint Sophia Orthodox Theological Seminary, and a doctoral degree in Patristics from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Adjunct Faculty Appointment Archbishop Chrysostomos, who is currently Executive Director of the U.S. Fulbright Commission in Romania, was appointed an Adjunct Professor, this last autumn, at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, Romania’s foremost school of

38

Orthodox Tradition

architectural studies. His Eminence, who is also a Guest Lecturer for the 2002-2003 academic year at the University of Bucharest’s Center for American Studies, teaches in the graduate program in ecclesiastical architecture at the Ion Mincu University. Church of the Dormition In early autumn 2002, Archimandrite Akakios, Abbot of the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery, and a small crew of Fathers from the monastery completed basic work on the interior of the new parish Church of the Dormition in Port Townsend, WA, which is served by two married Priests, the Reverend Father Gabriel Lee and the Reverend Dr. Joseph Miller. The Icons on the Templon and Beautiful Gates were donated to the parish by the Convent of St. Elizabeth the Grand Duchess in Etna, CA. The Church will eventually be frescoed.

Volume XX, Number 1

39

Feast of St. Paraskeva On Sunday, October 14 (Old Style), Metropolitan Vlasie, President of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Romania (at center in the photograph below), invited Bishop Auxentios and Archbishop Chrysostomos (first and third from right) to concelebrate the Divine Liturgy in Iaéi, Romania, on

the occasion of the Feast Day of the city’s beautiful Old Calendarist parish (see below), dedicated to St. Paraskeva. Also participating in the Feast Day celebrations were three other Romanian Hierarchs, Their Graces, Bishops Demosten, Ghenadie, and Pahomie (second, fifth, and, though only partially visible, sixth from the right). Bishop Auxentios and Archbishop Chrysostomos were joined by Hieromonk Patapios, from the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery in Etna, CA, who, with the blessing of Archimandrite Akakios, made a short pilgrimage to Romania, following a visit to his native Great Britain. Father Patapios is Academic Director of the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies at the monastery in Etna.

40

Orthodox Tradition

Church of the Dormition On the weekend of November 3 and 4, 2002 (Old Style), Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili, President of the Holy Synod in Resistance, along with some sixty pilgrims, made an official visit to our Sister Church in Bulgaria, headed by His Eminence, Bishop Photii of Triaditza. Metropolitan Cyprian was also accompanied by Archimandrite Glykerios and Hierodeacon Joseph from the Holy Monastery of Sts. Cyprian and Justina and a married clergyman from one of our Church’s parishes in Northern Greece. On Sunday, November 4 (Old Style), Metropolitan Cyprian and Bishop Photii were joined by Archbishop Chrysostomos and Bishop Auxentios, who travelled to Sofia for the Divine Liturgy at the magnificent new Cathedral of the Dormition. The services, sung in Church Slavonic and Greek, were attended by a large number of Priests and Deacons and an immense crowd of Faithful, some of whom had travelled from distant parishes in the Bulgarian countryside. (See below the Bishops and clergy during the Great Entrance.) The accomplished cathedral choir added greatly to the beautiful service, which was marked by perfect liturgical order and a feeling of contrition and piety that left all of the visitors deeply moved. Shortly after the Liturgy and the agape meal and before returning to Greece, Metropolitan Cyprian and the clergy and pilgrims with him visited the historical Convent of the Protection of the Mother of God in Sofia, which was for many years the seat of the Old Calendarist resistance during the years of the Communist yoke and persecution.

Volume XX, Number 1

41

Feast Day of Sts. Cyprian and Justina On October 2, 2002 (Old Style) the Holy Monastery of Sts. Cyprian and Justina in Fili (Athens), Greece, celebrated its annual Feast Day. The services, attended by a large crowd of Greek Faithful and visiting Bishops, clergymen, and Faithful from Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Australia, and the United States, were celebrated in the temporary Chapel in the basement of the immense new Cathedral under construction at the monastery. On the Sunday following the Feast, a Nameday tribute to Metropolitan Cyprian was held at the Novotel Convention Center in downtown Athens. The festivities, which featured lectures and presentations by the monastery’s superb Byzantine choir and traditional Greek folk music, were attended by Faithful from all over Greece, who filled the huge facility to capacity. During the week of activities, the Holy Synod in Resistance met at the Holy Monastery of Sts. Cyprian and Justina. The Bishops posed for an official photograph, which appears below.

Left to right, top row: Bishop Chrysostomos of Christianoupolis, Bishop John of Makarioupolis, Bishop Symeon of Lakedaimonia, Bishop Auxentios of Photiki, Bishop Ambrose of Methoni, Archimandrite Cyprian (Secretary of the Holy Synod); left to right, bottom row: Bishop Michael of Nora, Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna, Metropolitan Cyprian (President of the Holy Synod), Bishop Chrysostomos of Sydney and New South Wales.

42

Orthodox Tradition

Ordination to the Diaconate With the blessing of Metropolitan Cyprian, Reader George Chee was Ordained to the Diaconate on December 23, 2002 (Old Style), the Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity and the Feast Day of the Ten Martyrs of Crete, at the parish Church of Sts. Cyprian and Justina in Etna, CA. The Liturgy was served by Bishop Auxentios of Photiki and Archbishop Chrysostomos, who was visiting from Romania for the Christmas holidays. Deacon Father George is a native of Hong Kong and both he and his wife, Diakonissa Catherine, are retired high school teachers and the parents of ten grown children. Father George, a former stockbroker, received his Bachelor of Science degree from Southern Oregon University and the Licentiate in Orthodox Theological Studies from the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies. Following the Ordination, the parish community sponsored a fasting banquet in a restaurant in nearby Yreka, at which Archbishop Chrysostomos, Bishop Auxentios, Archimandrite Akakios (Abbot of the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery), and Mother Elizabeth (Abbess of the Convent of St. Elizabeth the Grand Duchess of Russia) praised the newly-ordained Deacon and his Diakonissa for their faithful service to the parish and the two monastic institutions in Etna. Father George will be assigned to the Etna parish and will, from time to time, serve at the Dormition Church in Port Townsend, WA, near which he and Diakonissa Catherine have family. (Below, serving clergy with Deacon Father George, his wife, and one of his daughters.)

Exarchate Clergy Conference Saturday, June 7, and Sunday, June 8, 2003 (New Style)

With the blessing of Metropolitan Cyprian, the American Exarchate of our Church will convene a clergy conference on June 7 and 8 at the St. John the Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. • Participants are asked to arrive on Friday evening or Saturday morning. The conference program, with talks and a discussion period, will begin at 12:00 noon on Saturday, June 7, and end at 4:30 p.m. (We suggest that participants have a late breakfast.) There will be a break in the program at 2:00 p.m. for complimentary refreshments. Vespers will follow these sessions at 5:00 p.m. Participants may then return to the hotel for dinner. On Sunday morning, following Matins and the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy (the Liturgy proper will begin promptly at 9:00 a.m.), an agape meal (a full buffet lunch) will be served in the atrium of the Collins Plaza Hotel, 1200 Collins Rd., Cedar Rapids, IA. Reservations for lunch must be made at least one month in advance through Father John Abraham (see below). • Lay people and interested clergy and Faithful from other jurisdictions are also invited to attend. There is no charge for the conference, though attendees will be responsible for the cost of their accommodations, meals, and the post-Liturgy buffet. Note. As indicated above, those in attendance will be responsible for their own accommodations and meals. However, we have arranged for a limited number of rooms at an excellent discount price of $37.00 per night, single or double, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel (AAA three diamond-rated), located at 350 First Ave. N.E., Cedar Rapids, IA. Phone (888) 363-3550 (toll free) or (319) 363-8161 for reservations, which should be made at least one month in advance of the conference. State that you are part of the “St. John’s Church group reservation.” The cost per person for the post-Liturgy agape meal is $15.95, plus tax and tip. Cedar Rapids is accessible by air and bus. The hotel provides a free shuttle to and from the Cedar Rapids airport, for those arriving by air. The same free shuttle service is available for transportation between the Church and the hotel. For lunch reservation confirmations or questions, e-mail Father John Abraham at or call (319) 362-8601. You may also find conference details on the Internet at .

Publications The Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies has published more than than forty-five books, thirty-four monographs, and numerous booklets on themes in Orthodox theology, Patristics, Byzantine history, pastoral psychology, and Orthodox spirituality, as well as various original translations of classical Patristic texts and the lives of the Saints. A catalogue of publications is available from: C.T.O.S. Publications Post Office Box 398 Etna, CA 96027-0398 U.S.A. For online orders, see our website at: www.sisqtel.net/~sgpm/ctos

CENTER FOR TRADITIONALIST ORTHODOX STUDIES Replacement copies and back issues of Orthodox Tradition are not available. Subscribers who plan to move or to change address should arrange with the postal authorities to have standard mail forwarded to the new address. A change of address notice should also be sent immediately to the C.T.O.S.

St.-Gregory-Palamas-Monastery Post-Office-Box-398 Etna,-CA-96027-0398 U.S.A.

NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION U.S. POSTAGE PAID PERMIT NO. 14 ETNA, CA 96027

www.sisqtel.net/~sgpm/ctos

CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED

Orthodox Tradition