Posted on 05/29/2005 7:55:52 AM PDT by kosta50
BARI, Italy (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI visited the eastern port of Bari on his first papal trip Sunday and pledged to make healing the 1,000-year-old rift with the Orthodox church a "fundamental" commitment of his papacy.
Benedict made the pledge in a city closely tied to the Orthodox church. Bari, on Italy's Adriatic coast, is considered a "bridge" between East and West and is home to the relics of St. Nicholas of Myra, a 4th-Century saint who is one of the most popular in both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.
Benedict referred to Bari as a "land of meeting and dialogue" with the Orthodox in his homily at a Mass that closed a national religious conference. It was his first pilgrimage outside Rome since being elected the 265th leader of the Roman Catholic Church on April 19.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
But the father said to his servants, 'Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.' And they began to make merry.
OCA website explanation presented for interest
"This, according to this line of reasoning, reduces, or, in the case of a "plenary" indulgence, completely eliminates the amount of time one would have to spend in purgatory, during which his or her sins are "purged" in preparation for entrance into heaven."
The prodigal son story is about forgiveness, not consequences. That is why it is a story about a father and a son as God the Father and the sinner, but with no role played by Christ.
Indulgences only deal with the consequences of sin. They do not remove our faults or venial sins. One could gain every indulgence ever given, yet if you die still attached to venial sins, you'd still need to be purified before coming to see God. That is what is ridiculous about the notion of indulgences eliminating time in purgatory.
The ideal behind them is that to gain indulgences, one should be detached from sin and contrite for it, and thus one is free of mortal and venial sins. Additionally, the indulgence reduces ones need to complete the canonical penance, both from the acts performed to gain it, and from the gaining of it. If one actually lived the spirit induglences are supposed to inculcate, there is no reason for such a person to not move immediately to their heavenly home upon death - they would be a saint.
Indulgences are a means to spiritual perfection in this life. The application of them to the faithful departed is an act of supernatural charity, and so would necessarily follow upon our own spiritual growth as we move away from thinking about our own salvation to thinking about the necessities of our brothers, both living and deceased.
I read +Cyprian from a different pov and what I saw was a sort of early discussion of the ongoing "tension" in the Church between akrivia and economia. In many senses, and in more modern parlance, it is like the martyrs wished as spiritual fathers to lessen the penance for the sins of their spiritual children but were applying to the bishop for a grant of economia from what may have been some locally prescribed penance periods.
Hermann wrote:
What you describe in bold above is precisely what we call an indulgence.
What K wrote is pretty much how I read the letters you posted, as I noted in my points 1,2,5 and 6 in my post #412. As an Orthodox Chrsitian, this all struck me as the activities of spiritual fathers and bishops, and was pretty unremarkable. I can see these kinds of discussions going on between an Orthodox bishop and a monastic spiritual father even today, in discussing what should be done on the spectrum of akrivia and economia for a given individual or in dealing with a particular situation.
For instance, priests in parishes with a lot of recent former Soviet emigres have to deal with many, many cases of women who have had abortions in the past. We all know what the canons say, and a given priest will know what kind of restriction from Holy Communion for a time that he might have given to one of his "home-grown" parishioners, but will often seek guidance from his bishop when faced with a new phenomenon and the presence of unusual circumstances. A monastic spiritual father might intervene in a given case with the bishop to lessen what the latter had "prescribed" as a general rule.
Now this may very well be encompassed in what Catholics would call an indulgence. We would call it simple pastoral common sense.
To extrapolate from this in St. Cyprian to an overarching system of appropriating and dealing out "extra grace" from Christ and the saints to remit temporal punishments owed because of sins, in this life or the next -- which is what the full Catholic doctrine of indulgences entails -- is quite a stretch.
What Catholics seem to be doing with these letters of St. Cyprian is to go back retrospectively and try to find evidence for the "seeds" of later practices that involve a complex ledger system of sins and payments. What an Orthodox Christian encounters in these letters is a pretty familiar scenario and mindset of spiritual fathers, witnessed to by modern experiences and an unbroken spiritual tradition in our spiritual writings.
The individual person reading St. Cyprian's letters will have to decide for himself which phronema these letters more closely approximates.
Actually, patristic witnesses to this parable do indicate the presence of Christ, with the killing of the fatted calf -- a symbol of sacrifice, FWIW.
Indulgences are not doling out grace but merit. Grace cannot be communicated in such a way, since it is the life of God. By merit "is understood that property of a good work which entitles the doer to receive a reward from him in whose service the work is done." (Catholic Encyclopedia)
If I do something good and gain a reward, I can always give away my claim to my reward to another for their benefit.
What Catholics seem to be doing with these letters of St. Cyprian is to go back retrospectively and try to find evidence for the "seeds" of later practices that involve a complex ledger system of sins and payments.
It is not seeds of anything. It is exactly what you describe, and it is exactly how indulgences work. I don't know why you keep insisting on telling me they are something else than this. An indulgence is a lessening of the penance due for a sin. If you want to call this "akrivia and economia" instead of "indulgence" you are free to do so.
The modern indulgence is a formalization and uniformization of the discussion you describe between a Bishop and a Monastic confessor to apply in every situation.
Okay, interesting point. But Christ in the parable then is sacrificed to feast upon, and not as an offering for sin. The identity is clearly not exact, which is why it is a parable. It is also why the parable speaks of the son only injuring himself through his folly, and not his offending his father.
That is the legalistic mindset of the west -- sin is something akin to breaking the law, rather than rejection of God. There is no love in it -- but simple (dis)obedience.
Along with that come the "canons" or laws and all the legalistic scholasticism of the west. And the more the Orthodox subtly succumb to it, the more they are drawn into the scholastic debates, where the focus is finidng the "correct" passage or quote rather than concentrating on how ungrateful we are to God.
It's not about our relationship with God, but about "pay, pray and obey."
"The aim of indulgences is primarily spiritual perfection here on earth, not in the next life"
You know, when I used the word "penance", I knew I was using a word that might lead in this direction. Your post points to yet another and probably rather basic difference between the Latin and Eastern Churches. For us, "penances" given by a spiritual child by a spiritual father are always pedagogical and never punitive. In Orthodoxy there is no concept of atoning for sins to somehow or other satisfy the wrath of God. If we miss the mark, we are to repent and through repentance put ourselves back on track to "become like God". It is simply inconceivable to us that we, or any other mortal for that matter, could gain "excess merit", whatever that is, unless we were to gain full theosis in which case "merit" is really neither here nor there. By repentance and ascesis and pedagogical penance we are brought closer to dying to the self and thus closer to that point where the eye of the soul focuses solely on God.
Thus, were a spiritual father to decide that what might usually be the pedagogical penance for any given sin (assuming there is such a usual penance) would lead the spiritual child away from progress in theosis rather than advance him, economia would be applied and an apparently less burdonsome penance applied. Orthodoxy doesn't have a one size fits all mentality when it comes to this.
"An indulgence is a payment of the penance required for sin, and the payment comes from Christ and the Saints in view of your own contrition and attempts to make up for what you have done."
Real basic difference here between the Latin Church and the Eastern Churches, HC.
" The indulgence pays what is necessary for the soul to come towards bliss "
Orthodoxy doesn't teach "payment" by individuals for coming to theosis, HC.
"Indulgences only deal with the consequences of sin. They do not remove our faults or venial sins. One could gain every indulgence ever given, yet if you die still attached to venial sins, you'd still need to be purified before coming to see God. That is what is ridiculous about the notion of indulgences eliminating time in purgatory."
But the consequences of sin, ultimately, is the death of the soul, and we do that to ourselves; it is no punishment from God. There is a line of theology in Orthodoxy, Prof. Kalomiros being a noted exponent of this school, which says that at the Final Judgment we are not judged by how many bad or good deeds we did, but rather how much like Christ we have become. And Saint Symeon the New Theologian says that "it is not what man does which counts in eternal life but what he is, whether he is like Jesus Christ our Lord, or whether he is different and unlike Him. He says, In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ's love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father."
"Now if anyone is perplexed and does not understand how it is possible for God's love to render anyone pitifully wretched and miserable and even burning as it were in flames, let him consider the elder brother of the prodigal son. Was he not in his father's estate? Did not everything in it belong to him? Did he not have his father's love? Did his father not come himself to entreat and beseech him to come and take part in the joyous banquet? What rendered him miserable and burned him with inner bitterness and hate? Who refused him anything? Why was he not joyous at his brother's return? Why did he not have love either toward his father or toward his brother? Was it not because of his wicked, inner disposition? Did he not remain in hell because of that? And what was this hell? Was it any separate place? Were there any instruments of torture? Did he not continue to live in his father's house? What separated him from all the joyous people in the house if not his own hate and his own bitterness? Did his father, or even his brother, stop loving him? Was it not precisely this very love which hardened his heart more and more? Was it not the joy that made him sad? Was not hatred burning in his heart, hatred for his father and his brother, hatred for the love of his father toward his brother and for the love of his brother toward his father? This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one's heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned. They are all dearly loved. They are all invited to the joyous banquet. They are all living in God's Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens. No one expels them. Even if they wanted to go away they could not flee from God's New Creation, nor hide from God's tenderly loving omnipresence. Their only alternative would be, perhaps, to go away from their brothers and search for a bitter isolation from them, but they could never depart from God and His love. And what is more terrible is that in this eternal life, in this New Creation, God is everything to His creatures. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa says, In the present life the things we have relations with are numerous, for instance time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God; that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all, and in the stead of all to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence. It is plain, too, from the Holy Scriptures that God becomes to those who deserve it, locality and home and clothing and food and drink and light and riches and kingdom, and everything that can be thought of and named that goes to make our life happy." +Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection
"What Catholics seem to be doing with these letters of St. Cyprian is to go back retrospectively and try to find evidence for the "seeds" of later practices that involve a complex ledger system of sins and payments. What an Orthodox Christian encounters in these letters is a pretty familiar scenario and mindset of spiritual fathers, witnessed to by modern experiences and an unbroken spiritual tradition in our spiritual writings."
Precisely.
"The table is full-laden; feast ye all sumptuously. The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away."
It is also a story about sin, which leads to isolation (exile) and hunger, and about God's great compassion, in which He is not concerned about a broken window being repaired, ie repayment of a debt.
The main part of the quote in post #435 is from Alexander Kalomiros, not =Gregory of Nyssa as my posting may have made it appear. Sorry!
I warned you that western theology is throughly legalistic in its language.
However, isn't a voluntary failure to obey the law nothing more than a rejection of the lawgiver? I don't see how this isn't two ways of describing the same thing.
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