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To: Petrosius

Kudos to you for recognizing the sanctity of St. Mark of Ephesus. Had his teaching not been 100% Orthodox, he would never have been glorified as a saint. It is on account of his courageous defense of Orthodoxy at the Council of Florence and his forthright condemnation of the Pope of Rome and all his followers(you included), as heretics that he has been glorified and is venerated by all orthodox Christians.

Councils do not meet to decide doctrine. As to doctrine, it is what the Church received once (Jude3). There is nothing to add to it, nothing to subtract. When a doctrinal issue comes up, i.e. a heresy, councils meet to affirm Orthodoxy and condemn the heresy. As the Latin heresies do not threaten the Church (they being not a part of it anymore anyway), there is no need for a council to confront them. To the extent they ever did threaten the Church centuries ago, they have already been condemned by the appropriate regional and/or ecumenical councils. The Orthodox teaching as to the procession of the Holy Spirit, for example, was affirmed for all time by the First Council of Constantinople in A.D. 380.

In short Petrosius, there is nothing to discuss. There is no reason to meet with you Latins, other than to welcome you back into the Church by receiving your repentances.


144 posted on 07/03/2005 3:57:53 PM PDT by Graves ("Orthodoxy or death!")
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To: Graves
I had hope to proceed in this discussion on the question of authority and the possibility of rash judgment on the part or the Orthodox toward Catholics and not get into the actual theological debate over filioque but since you insist on your mistaken idea that the question of the filioque is cut and dry, the Orthodox position being self-evedently true, I direct your attention to the statement of St. Maximus the Confessor, Patriarch of Constantinople in the 7th cent.:

Those of the Queen of cities (Constantinople) have attacked the synodic letter of the present very holy Pope, not in the case of all the chapters that he has written in it, but only in the case of two of them. One relates to the theology (of the Trinity) and, according to them, says: 'The Holy Spirit also has his ekporeusis (ekporeuesthai) from the Son'. The other deals with the divine incarnation. With regard to the first matter, they (the Romans) have produced unanimous evidence of the Latin Fathers, and also of Cyril of Alexandria, from the study he made of the gospel of St. John. On the basis of these texts, they have shown that they have not made the Son the cause (aitian) of the Spirit - they know in fact that the Father is the only cause of the Son and the Spirit, the one by begetting and the other by ekporeusis (procession) - but that they have manifested the procession through him (to dia autou proienai) and have thus shown the unity and identity of the essence... They (the Romans) have therefore been accused of precisely those things which it would be wrong to accuse them, whereas the former (the Byzantines) have been accused of those things of which it has been quite correct to accuse them (Monothelitism). They have up till now produced no defence, although they have not yet rejected the things that they have themselves so wrongly introduced. In accordance with your request, I have asked the Romans to translate what is peculiar to them [the 'also from the son'] in such a way that any obscurities that may result from it will be avoided. But since the practice of writing and sending [the synodic letter] has been observed, I wonder whether they will possibly agree to do this. It is true, of course, that they cannot reproduce their idea in a language and in words that are foreign to them as they can in their mother-tongue, just as we too cannot. In any case, having been accused, they will certainly take some care about this.

"unanimous evidence of the Latin Fathers, and also of Cyril of Alexandria"

Even without the defense of St. Maximus it is clear that the teaching of the early Church was not unanimous and unambiguous. If we were to take the same hard line that you do, could we not claim that it is the Greeks who have departed from the teaching of the Church?

I also recommend the statement by Metropolitan John of Pergamen. Although he has not completely accept the Vatican clarification of the issue it is clear that he recognizes that a major cause of the dispute is the difference between the Latin and Greek languages. If we admit that we do not completely understand each other because of language problems, is it not then rash judgment to jump to the claim of heresy?

147 posted on 07/03/2005 6:09:58 PM PDT by Petrosius
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