Posted on 09/22/2004 11:38:26 AM PDT by Vicomte13
Christ prayed for the unity of His Church. Collectively, we have made quite a hash of it. What divides us? How far are we apart, really? Is reconciliation and reunification really impossible? I don't think so.
Doctrinally, there is more that separates the liberal and conservative wings of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches than separates Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Many of the doctrinal differences that there are date back to the early centuries, but were not a bar to us all being One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church for more than half of the history of Christianity.
Historical missteps, and more than a little stubbornness, divide us, but this division is unnatural and indeed unholy. We cannot simply ACCEPT it as a given. It is not what Jesus wanted of us, and we have a duty to try and put back together what He made whole but what we have sundered.
But how?
For starters, look at how very much unites us still. The Orthodox Church is Holy. The Catholic Church is Holy. Both are apostolic, in unbroken lineage back to the apostles. We share the same sacraments. We believe the same things about those sacraments. In extremis, we can give confession too and take extreme unction or viaticum from one another's priests. Because somewhere, at the bottom of it, we each really do know that it's the Latin, Russian, Greek, Syrian and Coptic rites of the same Holy catholic Church.
Indeed, within the Catholic Church proper, in union with Rome, are Byzantine and other Eastern Rite churches that are for all appearances Orthodox. That the Orthodox Liturgy of St. John Chysostom is beautiful, and sonorous, and long, should be no barrier. There is no reason that the Orthodox rite should not remain exactly as it is. Indeed, there is a very good reason to revive, in the West, the old Latin Rite of the Catholic Church: many people want it back. Why should they be denied it? The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the Liturgy of the Tridentine Mass were Holy and are Holy. There is no reason at all they they cannot all be practiced within a reunited Church. There is no reason for Russian Orthodoxy to cease using Slavonic, and Greek Orthodoxy to cease using Greek, just as there is no reason that Latin Rite Churches should not be able to reassume Latin if their parishoners desire it. For over a thousand years the different parts of the Church used different languages, and yet we were all one Church. Today, with the vernacular, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches use many, many, many languages. None of this diminishes their Holiness. Latin, Greek and Slavonic are not holy, they are old. And there is nothing wrong with old.
So again I ask: what really divides us? There is nothing of the liturgy of either Latin or Greek or Russian rite that would need to change were the Churches to come back into unity.
All that divides us, really, is the question of authority. It is a political question, about the office of the Pope. Cut through it all, and that is what is at the heart of it.
And this can be resolved. Indeed, the tension ALWAYS existed, and flared up at different times during the long millennium of Church unity. Our spiritual ancestors had the wisdom to settle for an arrangement of metropolitans and patriarchs, with the Bishop of Rome considered one of them, but primus inter pares at the "round table". Like the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, he sets the agenda and "assigns cases", but each preserves his dignity as a co-equal justice. In order to maintain Christian unity, it was necessary for the Pope to exercise discretion in this role. And most handled it well. It also required discretion on the part of the Eastern Patriarchs. And most handled it well. It is the contrivance of the Devil that the time arose whereby stubborn (and corrupt) Pope encountered stubborn (and beleaguered, by the Muslim invasion) eastern Patriarch, and the Schism erupted.
Surely we can repair this wound in the visible Body of Christ on Earth. Indeed, it is not really optional. It is our DUTY to attempt it.
What is it that the East wants? Surely it is not to compel the Cathedral of Notre Dame to start conducting masses in Slavonic! No. It is to be recognized in its liturgy and in its territorial area. Should Latin Rite missionaries be attempting to sieze Russia for Catholicism? No. Russia should be under the Russian Rite, subject to the Metropolitan of Moscow, sovereign in his sphere, who is in union with the Bishop of Rome. I should be able to give confession and take absolution in a seamless Church from Gibraltar to Vladivostok.
What is it that the West wants? Too much, probably. At the Council of Florence, the last moment of unity in the Church, the West acknowledged the customs of the East, and the East acknowledged "the traditional privileges of the Bishop of Rome", which is to say, primus inter pares.
Now, if there were deep and abiding spiritual and doctrinal divides, such as there are between the Catholic Church and, say, the Anglican Communion or the various Protestant Churches, reunification would be out of sight. Primus inter pares would lead directly to Papal interference. But the Orthodox and the Catholic are each so doctrinally close that there need not be ANY real interference in the West by the East, or the East by the West. Indeed, it would immeasurably help the post-Vatican II Western Church to have a Vatican III at which the Metropolitan of Moscow and the Patriarch of Constatinople and their affiliated Bishops, and the Eastern Cardinals, sat, spoke, voted. The Church needs the counterweight of Orthodox Tradition to offset some of the less propitious "modernizing" elements that have run unchecked in parts of the West.
For its part, much of Eastern Orthodoxy is subject to, and under the thumb of, Islam. And abused. We see this right now even in secular Turkey. There is no religious voice on earth more powerful than Rome. And no other religion has its own seat in the United Nations. The lot of Eastern Christians would be bettered by having the full weight of Western Christianity brought to bear within the Church.
I do not believe that this is a pipe dream. Reuniting the Pentecostals and Rome might be, but bringing Moscow, Constantinople and Rome together again at the same round table should not be. It is what Jesus intended from the beginning. What God has joined, let no man sunder. With God, everything is possible. There is nothing that goes on in Orthodox Churches that would not be able to continue in unity with the West, and nothing that goes on in Latin Churches that would have to stop to be in Union with the East.
Perhaps the fears of the East would be quelled if the Patriarchs were favored for election to the Papacy.
Just a thought.
"I would think that what we would be looking for in the pre-schismatic Orthodox Western saints would be models and standards that we as Orthodox Christians in the West can use to ensure that we are seeing mere differences in cultural manifestations for what they are -- acknowledging that these saints' place in history means that by necessity, their theology will be less developed, and we will read modern issues into them with great care. On the other hand, what we would, as Orthodox and Catholics in dialogue, be looking for in post-schismatic western spiritual writers would be the persisting threads of continuity of spiritual language that can help us better to express to Catholics what we as Orthodox Christians experience."
Exactly! Perhaps with the help of Tantumergo, this could be fleshed out a bit.
By the way, I can't lift my head from my desk at the office without looking directly at my icon of St. Patrick. Dad was a good Irishman!
What a coincidence! He's also my patron... And yes, the cause of his martydom/passion-bearing (depending on how you classify these things) does seem to have been intimately tied up with his support for St. Dunstan and the monastic communities of England.
The most recent baptism for which I chanted the service was for a convert who took the name of Patrick. What a great saint. There are so many great western Orthodox saints that are being re-discovered by the Orthodox Church, primarily (but not only) under the instigation of converts. And there are more and more services being composed to them.
One of the greatest monastic Orthodox Western Saints is St. Aiden of Lindisfarne. An Irishman, of course! He has parishes in the British Isles named after him to this day. I have always felt close to him. Here's a link:
http://www.roca.org/OA/57/57e.htm
Thanks for the link. My wife and I have already decided that our first pilgrimage overseas (our first domestic pilgrimage was to venerate the relics of St. John the Wonderworker in San Francisco - who was himself a fervent devotee of Western saints) will be to Ireland and Great Britain. We will try to plan it around the annual pilgrimage at the Russian monastery that safeguards and venerates the relics of St. Edward the Martyr.
But do you see....THAT is the point. The filioque is NOT correct. It is a SERIOUS doctrinal situation, that needs correcting. And that is just the drop in the barrel.
TexConfederate 1861: "But do you see....THAT is the point. The filioque is NOT correct. It is a SERIOUS doctrinal situation, that needs correcting. And that is just the drop in the barrel."
I see that Jesus, who was God, prayed for Christian unity. Also, I see that Jesus, who was God, prevented his disciples from stopping those who were not in their party from preaching in His name. I see that unity is more important than resolving every point of difference.
Further, I see that the Filioque IS correct, and that doing away with it would be to introduce error. But I note that both the original Nicene Creed and the Filioque were devised by men three hundred years after God himself told us to be unified. Therefore, I see that our disunity over points of doctrine in prayers that we ourselves devised for our use, which cause us to disobey God's desire that we be unified, is defiance of God, and - if principled - is not based on a blameless principle. There is human stubbornness about a prayer that is the product human tradition being used here to override the command of God. That is wrong, no matter who is doing it.
Now, since I think filioque is accurate, and you don't, and God tells us to be unified, what are the choices? I can submit to you. You can submit to me. Or we can both realize that neither one of us is right to defy God's command for unity over a point of stubbornness concerning words that we formulated, not God. And we can seek for a way to be in unity while tolerating the difference in view. "And the Son" CAN be interpreted in a way that means "Through the Son", it need not be, but it can be. Jesus did not specifically lay out the full doctrine of the Trinity at all - never used the word. But he most certainly DID demand our unity. To obey God, we'd better drop our belligerence towards each other about prayers we made up four centuries after he died if we are using differences in language in a prayer we made up and God never spoke out loud to override a command that he did speak out loud several times. To Jesus, Christian unity was more important than the Nicene Creed. Why? Because Jesus told us to be unified over and over and over again, and he never spoke so much as a sentence of the Nicene Creed. Therefore, we had better start loving Him more than we love our traditions. Our intransigence is itself unChristian.
Bottom line: is God present in the sacraments of the Roman and Eastern Churches? Yes. Do obedient Catholic souls and obedient Orthodox souls go to heaven? Yes. Our differences, then, do not bar the path of one or the other TO GOD, so who do we think we are when we allow our differences with each other to bar the path to God on the altar in each other's Churches? We have the authority to do so, yes, but it is an abuse of the authority God gave our bishops when we do so. God loves us both and is fully present on both of our altars. We have to get over our antagonism for each other, because God certainly does not share it, and HE told us to.
Okay...then if the West believes it is "through the Son" then maybe they should SAY the creed that way. Unity achieved at the expense of the truth, is not true Unity at all. The "Council" of Florence was an example of just that.
And I might add that the Patriarches of Rome until around 100 years before the Schism agreed that the filioque was wrong as well. Look on the doors of St. Peters. The truth is there for the entire world to see, placed there by Gregory The Great.
What you are saying means, simply put, that the Latin Church has to die in order to come into union with the Orthodox Church. In other words, there can be no unity.
I doubt Christ is impressed with us for being so unforgiving and intolerant of each other.
Here is a real simple solution: the Latin rite maintains its form of the creed, because that is the way Latins see it. The Eastern rites maintain their form of the creed, because that is the way that Easterners see it, and when the two halves are in ecumenical services, they use the Apostle's Creed, which is older than both and all agree to it.
And the rule that attempts to geographically limit rites to certain areas can be abolished. Americans, for example, can choose Greek or Russian or Old Latin or Novus Ordo or Maronite Rites, etc. All of them are different in their liturgies and emphases, yet all are affiliated with each other in two great wings of the One True Church.
This does not have to be a source of perpetual division, unless we choose to make it so. And when we do so, we are choosing confections of our own made centuries after the fact as an excuse to not admit to the Lord's Table (and tolerate the differences of) people whom God Jesus prayed would remain united in His Gospels.
There is no virtue in seeking out ways to remain divided, when it is possible to see clear to ways that could leave us together.
I'd have to agree. Also, you said Olaf was your national saint. Well, I'm 1/4 Scandinavian (Danish). :)
My Friend:
You miss my point entirely. I am not intolerant. Nor unforgiving. Our faith cannot simply be defined as a how someone "sees it" Christ said that you cannot be "lukewarm". Either what you believe is the Truth, or it is NOT. Simple. Christ didn't waver. Neither will I. Not even for the sake of Christian unity. I don't believe Orthodoxy will either. NOW....the solution is to sit down and admit a mistake was made. The Roman Church has already admitted to the error of "filioque", and leading Roman Catholic theologians have already said that it could be omitted, with no problem with the Papal approval. Once that is done, it would be a great step forward, to the discussion of other innovations since the Schism. Many of these would probably be acceptable from an Orthodox point of view. Example: Transubstantiation: Orthodox believe it, but we do not define things as readily as Latins......
A Catholic theologian such as Tantumergo (or perhaps Cronos?) needs to step forward and confirm what I suspect: which is that the Roman church has ever admitted that "and from the Son" in the Creed is an error.
Rather, I suspect that the Church has confirmed that the earlier form of the Creed, sans filioque, is still valid (for non-Roman Rite Catholics), and that the difference is not a barrier, from Rome's perspective, to reunification.
However, I don't believe that the Roman Church has ever admitted error on any matter of faith like that.
A theologian will need to confirm my impression.
Here is a recommendation from the North American Orthodox-Catholic Conference on the filioque question (October 2003)
" that the Catholic Church, as a consequence of the normative and irrevocable dogmatic value of the Creed of 381, use the original Greek text alone in making translations of that Creed for catechetical and liturgical use."
I don't know what happened to this and the other recommendations, but I do know that when the EP is in Rome and on the altar with the Pope, there's no filioque. It appears to me that the RC theologians and hierarchs with the Conference feel its important for "catechetical and liturgical use." that the filioque be dropped. Notice no mention of this applying only to non Latin Rite Catholics.
Thanks Brother!
That was the conference I was trying to refer to.....
This is the sort of sane and reasonable approach to things that can lead to reconciliation. The key points are that the thing that is offensive to the patriarchs is not used when they are together in a service, and ecumenical translations don't use the language of the Latin Rite, but there is no admission of error.
You are very welcome (Para Kalo)!
"Rather, I suspect that the Church has confirmed that the earlier form of the Creed, sans filioque, is still valid (for non-Roman Rite Catholics), and that the difference is not a barrier, from Rome's perspective, to reunification.
However, I don't believe that the Roman Church has ever admitted error on any matter of faith like that."
Please don't accuse me of being a theologian. I have as many theological degrees as the apostles did! ;)
The earlier form of the Creed will always be valid because it was validated by an Ecumenical Council of the Church - both East and West.
However, the filioque clause will not be branded as an error by Rome because quite simply, when it is understood as the Latins understand it, it is not an error. However, if it is backtranslated into Greek (the original language of the Creed) then it certainly admits of erroneous interpretations.
The disputed phrase is "Qui ex Patri Filioque procedit". The difficulties come when looking at the meaning of the word "procedit" or "proceeds" as we translate it in English. Procedit in Latin is a relatively unprecise term
with a range of meaning that can accomodate the hypostatic (personalist) procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father from eternity and also the procession of the Holy Spirit in time where we know from Scripture that He is sent by the Son. Those are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to procedit, but somewhere in the middle it can also accommodate the theology of St. Gregory Palamas who wrote:
"The Spirit of the Word from on high is like a mysterious love of the Father towards the Word mysteriously begotten: it is the same love as that possessed by the Word and well-beloved Son of the Father towards him who begat him; this he does insofar as he comes from the Father conjointly with this love and this love rests, naturally, on him."
The problem is that Greek is more precise than Latin and there are at least two words that could be used to translate procedit, but they have different meanings. These different meanings affect the orthodoxy of the use of the Filioque clause. It was always going to be a nightmare tacking a Latin phrase onto a Creed which had been written in Greek - it cannot be safely backtranslated.
Therefore, while using the Filioque in the Latin Creed, the Catholic Church has never attempted its use in the Greek Creed, and Greek Catholics have always retained the use of the older form. With hindsight, its use in the Latin could be questioned on the basis of poor prudential judgement and its unsuitability as a Universal symbol of faith. However,if it is understood as Latins intended it to be understood, then it is not erroneous per se.
Nevertheless, whether the Catholic Church chooses to revert to the older form of the Creed or not, we are still left with a theological problem which the Council of Florence largely side-stepped as a result of both Greek and Latin Fathers throwing patristic quotes at each other rather than exploring the theology of the question. Namely what is the role of the Son in the procession of the Holy Spirit?
If a future Council of both East and West could address this question, the issue of the Filioque could become quite redundant anyway.
I would suggest that the theology of St. Gregory Palamas would be a good place for any such future Council to begin their deliberations.
(Not that I expect it in my lifetime if it ever happens at all, but we can at least pray for it.)
St. John held that the West would only become Orthodox if the Orthodox began again honoring their saints from the West in the days before Rome's schism. For the same reason my patron is the Venerable David of Menevia.
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