Dr Peter Gilbert, of De unione ecclesiarum (one of a few blogs by an Orthodox Christian I can bear to read) has just posted the text of a lecture he recently gave to the Youngstown, Ohio chapter of the Society of St John Chrysostom. Please leave any comments you have at Dr Gilbert’s blog.

I will only reproduce here a quote of St Gregory the Theologian, which seems to sum up so well the history of theological wrangling between Greek and Latin Christianity:

Others, mutually divided, drive East and West
into confusion, and God has abandoned them to their flesh,
for which they make war, giving their name and their allegiance to others:
my god’s Paul, yours is Peter, his is Apollos.
But Christ is pierced with nails to no purpose.
For it’s not from Christ that we’re called, but from men,
we who possess his honor by hands and by blood.
So much have our eyes been clouded over by a love
of vain glory, or gain, or by bitter envy,
pining away, rejoicing in evil: these have a well-earned misery.
And the pretext is the Trinity, but the reality is faithless hate.
Each is two-faced, a wolf concealed against the sheep,
and a brass pot hiding a nasty food for the children.

[Poem 2.1.13, To the Bishops, vv. 151-163; PG 37, 1239-1240]

Via Dr William Tighe and John (of Ad Orientem), an essay by Raymond A. Bucko SJ of Creighton University, on St Peter the Aleut – a saint canonized by the OCA in 1980, who (along with Father Alexis Toth, canonized also by the OCA in 1994) for many American Orthodox, has become a sort of “icon” of anti-Catholic sentiment. A summary of Peter’s vita and his hymnography may be found here.

Father Bucko’s conclusion:

The icons of Peter the Aleut both reveal and conceal a series of often violent interrelationships generated on the colonial frontiers of Russia’s eastern colonial expansion. Ironically, the focus of the Icon, Peter himself, is the least credible instance of violence in the amazing nexus of relations, often violent, generated by the encounters among European and Native groups. This story of violence creates its own terror – that the account of even a single act of violence has the potential to epitomize, solidify, and perpetuate complex divisions and oppositions. Violence and terror – or rumors thereof – transform social realities. The question, a topic for another paper, is whether icons of violence can also heal, reconcile, and unite those wounded and separated.

From my favorite Orthodox blog, Prof. Peter Gilbert’s De Unione Ecclesiarum –

I finally have some good news to report. Today I received an e-mail from the Managing Editor of the journal Communio, informing me that the Summer 2009 issue is now, at last, in print, and that they have decided to feature my article on “John Bekkos as a Reader of the Fathers” on their website. A link to the website, showing the contents of their current issue, is http://www.communio-icr.com/latest.htm; a permanent link to the article, in PDF format, is http://www.communio-icr.com/articles/PDF/gilbert36-2.pdf

A few choice bits from the article, emphasis mine (but please read the whole thing before commenting) –

John Bekkos, who served as Patriarch of Constantinople during the years of the Union of Lyons (1275–1282) and who not merely accepted that union as a practical political necessity but defended it on the grounds of its theological truth, is not a popular man in much of the Christian East; many people view him as a traitor to Orthodoxy. He earns this reputation by virtue of having defended the view that the Latin doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit, the teaching that the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son as from a single principle, is reconcilable and compatible with Greek patristic tradition.

… How far John Bekkos did or did not convert to Catholicism is a legitimate question; but it is not the question I chiefly wish to ask in this paper. I mention it here merely to give one specimen of new thinking about John Bekkos, thinking that presents some hope that long-entrenched views about him—the automatic assumption of his estrangement from the mind and heart of Orthodoxy—might be due for reassessment. Bekkos is increasingly being recognized as an early practitioner of what is now called “ecumenism.” The word “ecumenism” did not exist in Bekkos’s day, and it may be doubted whether he would have looked favorably on all modern varieties of it—whatever people may say about him, John Bekkos was not a doctrinal relativist—but that Bekkos was, in some sense, a thirteenth-century Orthodox ecumenist can hardly be denied. What is vital to note is that Bekkos consciously modeled his “ecumenism” upon the practice of the fathers of the Church. He saw the effort to move beyond verbal differences to a recognition of fundamental doctrinal agreement, where such agreement in truth existed, as an essential part of the fathers’ theological work. Christian faith is, in the final analysis, a faith not in words, but in things—and intellectual effort is sometimes needed to get beyond mere words to the realities that words signify. The fathers were willing to engage in that intellectual effort in order to preserve the unity of the Church; Bekkos saw himself as following in their footsteps.

… I would contend that his reading of the fathers of the Church provides real insight into what the fathers, or some of them at least, were saying. To dismiss John Bekkos as an “anthologist,” a man who “juggles texts” or collects them mechanically without any genuine insight into their meaning, is to perpetrate a gross misrepresentation. Bekkos was a theologian; and his continuing ecumenical significance has to be based on the very real possibility that some of his readings of the patristic evidence are true.

The central part of the present article attempts to substantiate the claim that Bekkos’s patristic interpretation is an insightful one, that is, that he sees important aspects of the fathers’ teaching that others have missed. In particular, I shall argue (a) that Bekkos rediscovers something that may be called “Old Nicene” theology, (b) that, in line with this theology, Bekkos identifies a certain “logic” to the way the fathers speak about divine substance, (c) that crucial to Bekkos’s understanding of the trinitarian doctrine of the fathers is a recognition of what I would call “referential causality,” and (d) that, contrary to the claims of some, the reliability of most of Bekkos’s patristic citations is not in doubt, and that, for those texts whose genuineness is in doubt, there is reason to think that at least some of them are authentic.

… Whether or not one calls John Bekkos’s change of mind regarding the orthodoxy of the Latin Church a “conversion,” it seems undeniable that John Bekkos did, in fact, change his mind about the orthodoxy of the Latin Church as a result of the things he read while in prison in 1273 and immediately after his release from jail—basically, as a result of an intense study of the Greek Church fathers and of the interpretations of the fathers given by men like Niketas of Maroneia and Nikephoros Blemmydes. After publicly stating that the Latins were heretics, he came to see them as orthodox Christians, differing from Christians of the Greek Church, not in the essentials of their belief, but in the manner in which the one, common faith was expressed.

… John Bekkos was not a juggler of texts or an anthologist, but a man who was concerned to state the logical coherence of traditional Christian belief in the Trinity, and to state it in such a way as to show that the insights of the Latin and Greek Christian traditions are ultimately harmonious. He saw, and I think saw correctly, that the Filioque debate had deep historical roots; this debate arose out of earlier misunderstandings concerning person and substance in God. Bekkos sees Photius and Gregory of Cyprus as teaching, not Cappadocian theology pure and simple, but a kind of neo-Cappadocianism that, by radicalizing the person/substance distinction through logical premises which the Cappadocians themselves do not state, draws from this distinction consequences which the Cappadocians themselves do not draw. They could not have drawn these consequences, because to do so would have disallowed much of their own stated thought; they would not have done so, because they recognized that those who spoke differently than they did nevertheless shared with them one faith.
The Cappadocians practiced a kind of ecumenism; John Bekkos, in his role as bishop and teacher, thinks that he is authorized and obliged to do the same in the circumstances of his own time. The Cappadocians, in their day, articulated the mystery of the Trinity in a way that differed, in some significant respects, from the way St. Athanasius or St. Epiphanius or Pope St. Damasus articulated it; yet the Cappadocians strove to maintain communion with St. Athanasius and St. Epiphanius and Pope St. Damasus. Similarly, St. Maximus, in his day, recognized that the Latin-speaking Church articulated the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s procession in a way that differed from the way most Greek-speaking Christians did; yet he strove to maintain the bonds of communion, and said that he had never known the fathers to disagree with each other in thought, even though, very often, they disagree with one another verbally. John Bekkos thinks that reasons of Christian truth and love oblige him to imitate these holy men.

… Trinitarian language becomes meaningless if it loses its concrete moorings in the revelation of God in Christ. John Bekkos understood that, as there is no approaching the Father except through the Son, so there is no knowing the Holy Spirit’s eternal relation to the Father except, implicitly or explicitly, through the Son. The Spirit does not lead to the Father except through the Son, nor does the Spirit come forth from the Father to us except through the Son. When theologians deny a mediation of divine being, when they confidently assert an ontology that makes the Son’s mediation of the Spirit’s ousia impossible, one must ask how they have acquired this mystical knowledge of the Father that shunts the Son off to the side.

John Bekkos did not shunt off the Son. He worshiped God the Logos, and logic played a role in how he worshiped him. He had no use for a “spirituality” that was not true rationality, just as he had no use for any new Spirit who is not through the Son. He was a diligent, painstaking researcher who cared about fact, because he cared about truth; but he did not worship the status quo. Pachymeres and others testify to Bekkos’s faith that, even if his own generation failed to appreciate what he had tried to do, future generations would understand. Time may yet prove him right.

By David J. Melling (1943-2004)

(Many thanks to De Unione Ecclesiarum for the text of this article.)

Early in his ministry as a Non-Juror Anglican priest, the saintly William Law published a sequence of “Letters to a Lady inclined to enter the Church of Rome.” (1732-3) His advice to the Lady was that she, like other laymembers and junior clergy of the Anglican Church, was in no way responsible for the schism separating her and her fellow Anglicans from the Greek and Roman Churches. There is, he argued, no way of escaping the reality of schism, since every history determines that each of us is “necessarily forced into one externally divided part, because there is no part free from external division.” The divisions cannot be escaped by simply changing one’s ecclesiastical allegiance, he tells her, since that action resolves the schism with the Church entered at the price of schism with the Church abandoned. He counsels her to stay where she is, but to love the Greek and Roman Churches with the same love she has for her own Church. Law attributes the schism that divides the Churches to “the unreasonable quarrels and unjust claims of the governors on both sides.” He sees schism as caused by the failings and shortcomings of hierarchs, and as something affecting only the external reality of the Church’s life. Law is not, of course, writing of all kinds of schism. His position flows from the belief that the Roman, Greek and English Churches, whatever their differences in theological tradition and styles of worship, are alike in being effective means of attaining “christian holiness.” He does not have the same positive view of any Christian bodies which are merely human institutions and lack the full means of sanctification.

In Eastern Christian tradition, schism between ecclesial communities is not always read as William Law reads it. Eastern theology has tended to stress the intimate unity of faith and sacrament and to see schism as a sign of heresy. Roman Catholic theology, on the other hand, has generally distinguished more sharply between schism, in which both the separated communities may be fully orthodox and retain a full sacramental life, and formal heresy which involves the rejection of the Church’s dogmatic teaching. Roman Catholic sacramental theology has tended to regard heretical sacraments as invalid by reason of heresy only in those cases when the heresy explicitly denied the Church’s dogmatic teaching about the sacraments. The consequence of such a denial is obvious: a heretical priest who does not believe in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Real Presence or the Apostolic Succession can hardly be the presiding minister at a Divine Liturgy, consecrating this bread and this wine to become the Body and Blood of Christ, since that is precisely what he does not believe he is authorised to do and what he believes does not come about even when a Catholic or Orthodox priest celebrates the Mass. Roman Catholic tradition differs from Eastern Orthodox in the relative status it accords the canons of the Ecumenical Councils. In Catholic theology, the infallibility attaching to the dogmatic definitions of the Councils is sharply distinguished from the relative degree of authority accorded their disciplinary and legal decisions. Orthodox Christians would not normally go so far as to claim the disciplinary canons of the Ecumenical Councils are absolutely immutable and irreformable, but tend to see them as reformable only by the authority of another Ecumenical Council.

This attitude to the legislation of the Ecumenical Councils explains in part the bitterness of the schism between Old Calendarists and New Calendarists in the Greek world. The Old Calendarists have consistently and vehemently denied the right of Patriarchs, Hierarchs and local synods to alter the calendrical arrangements laid down in the canons of the Council of Nicaea. Given the nature of what they see as a grave breach of Orthodox ecclesiastical discipline, some, but not all, Old Calendarists have gone further, and invoking the authority of St. Basil the Great, have seen New Calendarists not only as schismatics, but as a religious body whose sacraments are devoid of grace. Interestingly, this schism as the Old Calendarists see it does indeed conform in part at least to William Law’s characterisation of schism, since what the Old Calendarists object to is precisely what they see as high-handed, unlawful and unreasonable action by the Church’s hierarchs. This was equally an issue in the schism between the Old Believers and the Russian Orthodox Church. In both cases, what was judged by their opponents to be the illegitimate use of Hierarchical authority to alter the calendar in the one case, the service books in the other, was interpreted not merely as imposing on the Church untraditional and objectionable legislation, but also as signifying a drift into heresy that made schism both inevitable and a matter of inescapable duty. William Law, however, in speaking of the schism between the Roman and English Churches emphasises that the “unreasonable quarrels and unjust claims of the governors” were on both sides. An authoritarian and assertive Papacy had found its own claims reflected in the distorting mirror of Henry VIII’s assertion of his own divine right to rule as “Supreme Head” of the English Church. The Old Believers and Old Calendarists reflect the position not of the Vatican in relation to the Church of England, but of the Catholic Recusants, loyal to the religion they inherited from their fathers and mothers, and unable to accept the changes imposed by state authority. Conservative dissent is always an embarrassment to church authorities. It is not obvious exactly how one can become a heretic by standing fast on yesterday’s orthodoxy.

Law’s argument that schism as such is fundamentally a matter of the external reality of the Church is of particular significance if we attempt to interpret the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The mutual excommunications of 1054, while furnishing a fine example of the “unreasonable quarrels and unjust claims” which Law identifies as the fundamental cause of schism, were neither the origin nor the legal basis of the schism. Had they been so, the lifting of the excommunications by the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch would have brought the schism to an end. It continues. The schism between Catholics and Orthodox continues, yet the full ecclesial life of both Churches also continues. While the absence of external institutional unity may be a cause of suffering and something to deplore, it has not prevented either Church from producing a rich crop of saints, from engaging in Apostolic missionary work, from serving the needy, from finding within its own spiritual resources the means for renewal.

The notion that Western and Eastern Churches were ever identical in theology, ritual and social life, is pure fantasy. Theological differences existed in the days when the Church of the Roman Empire was a legal unity. The typically Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin as inherited guilt is to be found in the doctrinal canons of the early sixth century councils of Carthage and Orange, and the latter council even went so far as to condemn the typical Eastern view that what is inherited from Adam and Eve as a consequence of their sin is our mortality. The dogmatic canons of the latter council were confirmed by Pope Boniface II. Eastern and Western Churches had different rules concerning the bread to be used in the Eucharist, different rules for fasting, clerical celibacy, the ordination of eunuchs, and later, the legitimacy of fourth marriages and the permissibility of divorce even during the period when the Churches were in full communion.

The schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches did not begin, nor was it completed in 1054. Indeed, one wonders at exactly what point in history many communities realised they were in schism from the other church. The failed reunion councils, the intrusion of Latin bishops in the wake of the Crusades, the sack of Constantinople and the profanation of Hagia Sophia in 1208 and the consequences of the Fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks all helped crystallize out a pattern of relations that still managed to retain some fluidity even into the seventeenth century. The establishment of Eastern Catholic jurisdictions in the Patriarchate of Antioch and in the east of Poland helped considerably to confirm the external separation of the two Church institutions. The external separation spread and became firm. But what changed in the life of ordinary parishes? Some experienced a shift in hierarchical authority. Some experienced the arrival of new religious orders. In traditional Orthodox and Latin Catholic communities nothing took place. The life of the local Church carried on as before. Where things did change, it was not as a direct result of the schism, but as a result of the local changes taking place in the life of one Church or the other — e.g., the implementation of the reforms of the Council of Trent.

The heart of the life of every Catholic or Orthodox church, is the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. In the Liturgy we find ourselves called to communion with Our Lord, to eat mystically His Body and Blood in the form of bread and wine, to become one with Him, to be incorporated in Him. Our communion with Christ draws us into the life of the Holy Trinity. It is by the Power of the Holy Spirit He became a human being; it is by the Power of the Holy Spirit that the mystery of the Eucharist incorporates us in Christ. The Liturgy we celebrate here in our churches is an image of the Eternal Liturgy of the Court of Heaven. The barriers between Heaven and Earth are broken as the power of the Holy Spirit makes this holy table the Throne where the Son of God becomes present amongst us. Christ is “a priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek” [Heb.5, 6] the one true High Priest of all humanity. He is the Son and Word of God, Who has put on our humanity so that we may share His Divinity. He is the one perfect Sacrificial Victim who “has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” [Heb.9, 26] He offers Himself once and for all, not in the sanctuary of the earthly Temple, but entering “into Heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.” [Heb.9, 24] His death on Calvary is the visible historical realisation of Christ’s sacrifice for us. In the Eucharistic Liturgy, the same High Priest is present offering Himself to the Father for us, and inviting us to the Mystic Feast where He Himself becomes our food and drink so that we become one with Him, becoming by His grace what He is by nature. The Son of God offers Himself to us to make us too children of God. But we stand in separate churches, hear different priests recite the ancient words of the anaphora, communicate from separate chalices. To that extent, precisely to that extent, the schism between Catholics and Orthodox is real. But we communicate together in the Body and Blood of the one Anointed, we put on the one Christ in Baptism and are incorporated in the one Anointed in the Mystical Supper. It is our communion with Him, and in Him with one another that is the fundamental basis of our relation to each other. In the most basic and the most important sense, we are in communion with one another and always have been. In Him we are in communion with each other in a sense far more important than that in which, because of the schism between the churches, we are separated. We are united in Christ by His Holy Spirit, and divided outwardly by the inherited habit of schism.

Understandably in this century of ecumenical politics and ecclesiastical bureaucracy, there is a broad pattern of exploratory discussions and negotiations underway aimed at the removal of the scandal of schism. Whatever may be agreed by such a path, for the Orthodox it will be necessary to find the consent of the Church in a way other than by Patriarchal or Synodical decree, unless the decree be that of what is recognised as an Ecumenical Council. The immediate response of the Monks of Mount Athos to the recent agreement between representatives of the Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox makes clear exactly what problems such negotiations will face. The theologians and hierarchs involved in the Orthodox-Oriental Orthodox discussions have published a report that shows a true spirit of conciliation and mutual acceptance. Unfortunately, it proceeds from and addresses the mind-set of those who are prepared to see the proceedings of Ecumenical Councils in their historical and political relativity, and are ready to renegotiate relations amongst Churches without demanding formal acceptance of the dogmatic definitions of the Seven Councils. There may be many Orthodox who share such an outlook: they do not include the Holy Epistasia of Mount Athos or the many thousands who will stand in solidarity with the Athonite Community in seeing the definitions of the Ecumenical Councils as infallible and irreformable, as divinely inspired, and as the only possible basis for unity.

A process of growing together based on mutual trust and respect offers a much more realistic model for future developments than the repetition of ancient errors by the construction of eirenic but ambiguous documents and the validation of proposals for reunion by Patriarchal fiat or Synodical decree. Face to face, local communities can experience for themselves the reality of their oneness in Christ — or they can discover precisely the opposite. The zeal for full union will come from mutual knowledge, shared experience and profoundly respectful love: it can also come from the vivid awareness of the reality of our present communion with each other in Christ. That is not to say the hierarchs have no role in promoting the removal of schism. Pope John Paul II has made a major personal contribution in the last few months with the two letters Orientale Lumen and Ut Unum Sint. Sadly, the publicity given the second of these encyclicals has almost totally overshadowed the first, a document of immense importance for Catholic-Orthodox relations, emphasising, as it does, the need for Western clergy and theologians to become far better acquainted with the Eastern tradition of theology and Christian worship. Indeed, the Encyclical shows a warm sympathy for and a profound awareness of Eastern theology. It also offers an unusual opportunity for Orthodox and Eastern Catholics to co-operate in responding to the Pope in creating opportunities for Western brethren to learn more of our shared Eastern tradition. Co-operation between Orthodox and Eastern Catholics may seem an odd thing to recommend. For many Orthodox “Uniatism” remains an offensive and illegitimate method of Vatican proselytism. Whatever the truth of such a charge, there is a need for Orthodox Christians to face the challenge of the deep loyalty to Rome shown by many Eastern Catholic communities, even in the face of contemptuous treatment by Latins, even of appalling humiliations, the ultimate being that revealed by the late Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV when he disclosed, that in the aftermath of the then patriarch’s opposition to the definition of Papal infallibility at the first Vatican council, His Beatitude had been forced to the ground before the Papal throne while Pius IX placed his foot on his head. Loyalty in the face of such provocation merits at least astonished respect.

The draft agreement between Catholic and Orthodox theologians reached at Balamand in 1993 proposes a helpful way forward here, in proposing a formal rejection by the Catholic Church, Latin as well as Eastern, of “proselytizing among the Orthodox.” Once it becomes clear to the Orthodox that this commitment is serious, (and at the moment that is very far from clear) the possibility will grow of precisely the open and co-operative dialogue between Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox that the Balamand agreement envisages. It has, however, to be recognised that in both Catholic and Orthodox Churches there remain zealots and integrists who will defend forever a maximalist ecclesiology which leaves no room for any ecumenical activity whatsoever, since it sees schism as defining the boundaries of the Church of Christ, outside of which there exist heretical conventicles devoid of sacramental grace. In the Orthodox Church such interests still have a powerful voice, as Patriarch Bartholomaeos has discovered to his cost, facing demonstrations protesting against his brotherly relationship with the Pope, and denunciation of him as trying to drag the Orthodox Church into union with Rome.

There are, indeed, specific problems in the relation of Catholic and Orthodox Churches that the present Ecumenical Patriarch’s very public role has made vividly evident to many Orthodox. The Ecumenical Patriarch’s role as senior hierarch of the Orthodox communion is far more fragile than his public image sometimes suggests. In Rome he may look like the Eastern counterpart of the Pope, and the vigour with which he has exercised and even developed his role in the Orthodox Church may give plausibility to that image, but the fact remains that he is not the linear superior of the chief hierarchs of other autocephalous Churches, but only the first among equals among them, and that is something very different. Orthodox tradition, moreover, has never recognised any hierarchical role above that of the local bishop as of divine authority. Any higher layer of authority and responsibility derives from Synodical or sometimes even state decision. There is nothing inevitable or immutable in the Primacy of Constantinople. Nor can the Ecumenical Patriarch assert his authority to guarantee the Orthodox Church’s acceptance of the policy he espouses. The same arguments that establish the ecclesiastical and human origin of the patriarchates are deployed by Orthodox to reject Catholic claims of divine institution for the Roman Papacy, and of course to reject any claims to Papal supremacy. (Not, of course, to the Primacy of Rome, that is a quite different and relatively uncontroversial matter.) It is, then, very helpful to see the Pope is clearly aware that his own office as interpreted by Vatican theologians and canonists is experienced by Christians of other traditions as a major obstacle to unity. In his encyclical Ut Unum Sint he calls for a “patient and fraternal dialogue” on the nature and exercise of his primacy. This is a welcome and helpful development.

Progress in extricating ourselves from the bad habit of schism involves a reappraisal of what is central to our Christian heritage and what is transitory and peripheral, what is essential and what is merely a matter of cultural tradition. When we return to the heart and centre of our faith, we find ourselves together in Christ. If we lose the living awareness of our oneness in Christ and identify ourselves simply in terms of a particular community’s history and interests, we find a chasm yawning at our feet. The full flourishing of the spirit of schism is not merely external separation and institutional rivalry, its fruit can be tasted at the point where religious identity becomes a means of justifying political and ethnic conflict.

“Rejoice, much-sorrowing Mother of God, turn our sorrows into joy and soften the hearts of evil men!”

Recent Meeting Could Mark Turning Point

By Robert Moynihan

WASHINGTON, D.C., SEPT. 21, 2009 (Zenit.org)- Sometimes there are no fireworks. Turning points can pass in silence, almost unobserved.

It may be that way with the “Great Schism,” the most serious division in the history of the Church. The end of the schism may come more quickly and more unexpectedly than most imagine.

On Sept. 18, inside Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace about 30 miles outside Rome, a Russian Orthodox Archbishop named Hilarion Alfeyev, 43 (a scholar, theologian, expert on the liturgy, composer and lover of music), met with Benedict XVI, 82 (also a scholar, theologian, expert on the liturgy and lover of music), for almost two hours, according to informed sources. (There are as yet no “official” sources about this meeting — the Holy See has still not released an official communiqué about the meeting.)

The silence suggests that what transpired was important — perhaps so important that the Holy See thinks it isn’t yet prudent to reveal publicly what was discussed.

But there are numerous “signs” that the meeting was remarkably harmonious.

If so, this Sept. 18 meeting may have marked a turning point in relations between the “Third Rome” (Moscow) and the “First Rome” (Rome) — divided since 1054.

Archbishop Hilarion was in Rome for five days last week as the representative of the new Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.

One key person Archbishop Hilarion met with was Cardinal Walter Kasper. On Sept. 17, the cardinal told Vatican Radio that he and Archbishop Hilarion had a “very calm conversation.”

Cardinal Kasper also revealed something astonishing: that he had suggested to the archbishop that the Orthodox Churches form some kind of “bishops’ conference at the European level” that would constitute a “direct partner of cooperation” in future meetings.

This would be a revolutionary step in the organization of the Orthodox Churches.

Papal-Patriarch encounter?

Cardinal Kasper said a Pope-Patriarch meeting was not on the immediate agenda, and would probably not take place in Moscow or Rome, but in some “neutral” place (Hungary, Austria and Belarus are possibilities).

Archbishop Hilarion himself revealed much about how his Rome visit was proceeding when he met on the evening of Sept. 17 (before his meeting with the Pope) with the Community of Sant’Egidio, an Italian Catholic group known for its work with the poor in Rome.

“We live in a de-Christianized world, in a time that some define — mistakenly — as post-Christian,” Archbishop Hilarion said. “Contemporary society, with its practical materialism and moral relativism, is a challenge to us all. The future of humanity depends on our response… More than ever before, we Christians must stand together.”

A report from Interfax, the news service of the Moscow Patriarchate, on Sept. 18 revealed that Archbishop Hilarion spoke to the Pope about “cooperation between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches in the area of moral values and of culture” — in particular during the “Days of Russian Spiritual Culture,” a type of exhibit with lectures scheduled for spring 2010 in Rome. (One might imagine that the Pope himself could attend such an exhibition).

In memory of the visit, Archbishop Hilarion gave the Pope a pectoral cross, made in workshops of Russian Orthodox Church, the report said, Interfax reported.

Today, an Interfax report supplied details of Hilarion’s remarks this morning in the catacombs of St. Callixtus.

“Denied by the world, far from human eyes, deep under ground in caves, the first Roman Christians performed the feat of prayer,” Hilarion said. “Their life brought the fruit of holiness and martyr heroism. The Holy Church was built on their blood shed for Christ.”

Then the Church came out of the catacombs, but Christian unity was lost, the archbishop said.

Archbishop Hilarion said that human sin is the cause of all divisions, while Christian unity can be restored only in the way of sanctity.

“Each of us, conscientiously fulfilling a task the Church has given him or her, is called to personally contribute to the treasury of Christian sanctity and work to achieve God-commanded Christian unity,” the archbishop said.

A second Interfax report today added further information about the meeting with the Pope.

Growing influence

“During a talk with Pope Benedict XVI, Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk pointed out the status of Orthodox believers in Western Ukraine where three Orthodox dioceses had been almost eliminated as a result of coercive actions of Greek Catholics in late 1980s and early 1990s,” Interfax reported.

Archbishop Hilarion “stated the need to take practical steps to improve the situation in Western Ukraine,” within the territories of Lvov, Ternopol and Invano-Frankovsk Dioceses, the report said.

Meanwhile, in Russia itself, the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by Patriarch Kirill, seems to be growing, though not without opposition.

The rise in Russia of Kirill and his increasing influence in legislative matters seems to be arousing opposition from the “siloviki,” forces connected with the old KGB.

In an article in the current issue of Argumenty Nedeli, Andrey Uglanov says that Kirill’s extraordinary activity has attracted attention from some who do not like to have their positions questioned, let alone challenged. And that has become Kirill’s “big problem.”

These “siloviki,” Uglanov says, have been offended by Kirill’s “anti-Stalinist and anti-Bolshevik actions,” including his appearance at the Solovetsky stone in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square on the very Day of the Memory of the Victims of Political Repression.

In this context, Hilarion’s visit to Rome takes on even more importance.

The Russian Orthodox Church is a power in Russia, but it faces opposition and needs allies.

What is occurring in Hilarion’s visit to Rome, then, may have ramifications not only for the overcoming of the “Great Schism,” but also for the cultural, religious and political future of Russia, and of Europe as a whole.

It is especially significant, in this context, that Hilarion, Kirill’s “Foreign Minister,” has some of the same deep interests as Benedict XVI: the liturgy, and music.

“As a 15-year-old boy I first entered the sanctuary of the Lord, the Holy of Holies of the Orthodox Church,” Hilarion once wrote about the Orthodox liturgy. “But it was only after my entrance into the altar that the ‘theourgia,’ the mystery, and ‘feast of faith’ began, which continues to this very day.

“After my ordination, I saw my destiny and main calling in serving the Divine Liturgy. Indeed, everything else, such as sermons, pastoral care and theological scholarship were centered around the main focal point of my life — the liturgy.”

Liturgy

These words seem to echo the feelings and experiences of Benedict XVI, who has written that the liturgies of Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday in Bavaria when he was a child were formative for his entire being, and that his writing on the liturgy (one of his books is entitled “Feast of Faith”) is the most important to him of all his scholarly endeavors.

“Orthodox divine services are a priceless treasure that we must carefully guard,” Hilarion has written. “I have had the opportunity to be present at both Protestant and Catholic services, which were, with rare exceptions, quite disappointing… Since the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, services in some Catholic churches have become little different from Protestant ones.”

Again, these words of Hilarion seem to echo Benedict XVI’s own concerns. The Pope has made it clear that he wishes to reform the Catholic Church’s liturgy, and preserve what was contained in the old liturgy and now risks being lost.

Hilarion has cited the Orthodox St. John of Kronstadt approvingly. St. John of Kronstadt wrote: “The Church and its divine services are an embodiment and realization of everything in Christianity… It is the divine wisdom, accessible to simple, loving hearts.”

These words echo words written by Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, who often said that the liturgy is a “school” for the simple Christian, imparting the deep truths of the faith even to the unlearned through its prayers, gestures and hymns.

Hilarion in recent years has become known for his musical compositions, especially for Christmas and for Good Friday, celebrating the birth and the Passion of Jesus Christ. These works have been performed in Moscow and in the West, in Rome in March 2007 and in Washington DC in December 2007.

Closer relations between Rome and Moscow, then, could have profound implications also for the cultural and liturgical life of the Church in the West. There could be a renewal of Christian art and culture, as well as of faith.

All of this was at stake in the quiet meeting between Archbishop Hilarion and Benedict XVI on Friday afternoon, in the castle overlooking Lake Albano.

Pope Encourages Orthodox Conference
Annual Event Takes Up Theme of Spiritual Struggle

VATICAN CITY, SEPT. 4, 2009 (Zenit.org). – Benedict XVI is encouraging an “opportune initiative” being organized to consider the “spiritual struggle” as understood in the Orthodox tradition.

The Pope, through his secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, sent a message to the 17th annual International Ecumenical Conference on Orthodox Spirituality.

He expressed his hopes that the “fraternal gathering” would bring about a renewed awareness of the value of the spiritual struggle as a consequence of the love of Christ, and generous efforts in the ascetic formation of young generations.

The papal message is addressed to Prior Enzo Bianchi of the Monastery of Bose in Italy, which is where the Wednesday through Saturday conference will be held.

“Organized in collaboration with the Orthodox Churches, the conference is an important occasion of discussion on fundamental themes of the spiritual life,” organizers explain.

This year’s theme “touches the very center of a problem that is extremely relevant today. [...] This is the art of the struggle against ‘evil thoughts,’ as tradition defines those negative images, impulses, inclinations that disturb the ‘mind’ by distracting it from the memory of God and pushing it into sin,” they added.

This issue will be at the center of dialogue among theologians, scholars, and representatives of the Orthodox Churches, the Catholic Church, and the Churches of the Reform.

The Catholic Church will be represented by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, vice dean of the College of Cardinals; Archbishop Antonio Mennini, apostolic nuncio in Russia; Monsignor Brian Farrell, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; and Jesuit Father Milan Zust, of that same dicastery.

Pontiff Praises Ecumenical Study of St. Augustine
Urges Symposium to Find Points of Convergence

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy, SEPT. 3, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI has urged a symposium bringing together Orthodox and Catholic theologians to study St. Augustine to discover points of convergence between the two traditions.

The Pope said this in a letter he sent today to Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, on the occasion of the 11th Inter-Christian Symposium, which began today in Rome.

The three-day meeting was organized by the Franciscan Institute of Spirituality of the Pontifical University Antonianum and the Aristotle Orthodox Theological Faculty of Thessalonica.

The Catholic-Orthodox symposiums, aimed at promoting unity, have taken place alternatively in locations with Catholic or Orthodox majorities since 1992.

The symposium chose for its current theme of study: “St. Augustine in the Western and Eastern Tradition.”

Benedict XVI noted the topic to be apt for mutual reflection. He explained: “The saint of Hippo, a great Father of the Latin Church, is, in fact, of fundamental importance for theology and for the West’s very culture, whereas the reception of his thought in Orthodox theology has revealed itself to be rather problematic.”

“Hence, to know with historical objectivity and fraternal cordiality the doctrinal and spiritual riches that make up the patrimony of the Christian East and West,” he continued, “it is indispensable not only to appreciate them, but also to promote better reciprocal appreciation among all Christians.”

The Holy Father said he hoped the symposium would be a success, and that “it discovers doctrinal and spiritual convergences that are useful to build together the City of God, where his children can live in peace and in fraternal charity, based on the truth of the common faith.”

The Benedictine Monastery of St Mary on Mount Athos

Dom Leo Bonsall

Eastern Churches Review 2:3 (1969), pp. 262-7 (footnotes omitted)

BENEDICTINE contacts with the Church of the East have been many and varied, but the foundation of the abbey of St Mary on Mount Athos and its continuing existence during a period when official relations between Rome and Constantinople were at a very low ebb is perhaps the outstanding example of monastic co-operation transcending the estrangement of East and West. The full history of the monastery has never been written, for much of it is shrouded in mystery. There are very few documents and the dating of some of these is difficult; all that visibly remains of the buildings is a tower and a few walls on the eastern side of the Athonite peninsula. It is hardly surprising that one of the first Benedictine foundations in the East should have been made by monks from the maritime city republic of Amalfi: Amalfitan merchant ships were trading throughout the area, and monks from that city continued their founding work with the monastery of St Mary the Latin in Jerusalem, and another monastery in Constantinople itself.

The first mention of the followers of St Benedict coming to the Holy Mountain is contained in the lives of the Georgian saints John and Euthymius who founded, round aboout 980, the lavra of Iviron (that is, Iberon, the monastery of the Iberians or Georgians). The following account is given in a Greek akolouthia from Athos:

Before the foundation of the lavra of Iviron, the monk Beneventus, the brother of an Italian prince, arrived on Athos with six of his disciples, wanting to live there. He became an intimate friend of John and his son Euthymius and all three decided to leave the lavra of Saint Athanasius, where they lived, and found an independent lavra. The [Amalfitans] returned home to obtain the things needed for the construction of a new monastery. Being held up, however, on their journey, they found when they returned that the lavra of Iviron had been established and was being governed by Euthymius, to the displeasure of his father, John. Then Beneventus bought a piece of land and built a new monastery which had many monks, the greater part coming from Amalfi; in fact the monastery took the name of the Amalfitans, and was consecrated to the memory of the Most Holy Mother of God.

The official life of the two Georgian saints was originally written by another monk of Iviron, George the Hagiorite, about 1045, or thirty years after the death of Euthymius. The Bollandist Paul Peeters, SJ, published in 1922 a definitive Latin translation of this work, in which there is a passage telling how the founders of Iviron reacted to the arrival of the Latin monks:

Further, while Father John was alive, a certain monk arrived from the land of the Romans, a man famous for his virtue, to whose worth the lands of both the Romans and the Greeks bore witness, the brother of the duke of Benevento, of a most noble family. This man arrived with six disciples on this Holy Mountain in order to pray. When our fathers saw that he was outstanding in the gifts of grace they received him as a friend and one of themselves. They treated him with the greatest kindness and invited him to make his home among them, saying ‘Both you and we are alike pilgrims’. They persuaded him with great difficulty, for he desired to live in a separate monastery . . . . And so he built a pleasant monastery in which he gathered many brothers. With the help of our fathers the whole work was completed . . . and to this day there exists on the Holy Mountain this monastery of the Romans, who live a regular and edifying life [probe ac rite] according to the Rule of Holy Benedict whose life is described in the Book of Dialogues.

One of the great figures on Athos at this period was St Athanasius: monks flocked to hear and speak with him from all over the world and the Benedictine founders were no exception. Athanasius’ biographer tells how the western monks brought the saint a jar of caviar, which, of course, the saint did not eat, though he accepted it so as not to offend them. It is very interesting to note the friendship of the Benedictines with St Athanasius, for one finds in the rules of his followers many signs of the influence of the Rule of St Benedict.

Modern commentators are unanimous that the account of the arrival of the western monks given by George the Hagiorite is to be preferred to the first one cited above. Peeters holds that it is to be regarded as a document ‘of great importance not only for the religious history of Athos, but also for the political and religious history of the period.’ So the arrival of the Latin monks has to be placed not only during the lifetime of St John but also during that of St Athanasius. St John and St Euthymius arrived on Athos about the year 970 and began building Iviron about 980, so the foundation of St Mary’s took place some time between 980 and 1000. A. Pertusi narrows this down further to 985-90, and quotes a document of the Great Lavra dated 984, signed by two of the Latin monks, John and Arsenius.

The monastery of Iviron was famous for its learning, and the extant works of the Latin monks lead us to believe that they were of comparable intellectual standing. This could explain the continuing friendship between the two monasteries. As examples of literary activity in the Amalfitan monastery, we have Latin versions of several hagiographical works, certainly including the ‘Account of the miracle of St Michael in Chonae’ translated by one Leo, who calls himself a monk of the Latin monastery on Athos; other similar manuscripts may well be from the same source, and it has been suggested that the transmission to the West of the legend of Barlaam and Joasaph links Iveron and the Amalfitan monastery.

The Benedictine historians of the 11th century do not mention the Amalfitan foundation: in fact, they rather confuse matters. The chronicler of Monte Cassino, Leo of Ostia, tells of the election of Manso, twenty-eighth abbot of Monte Cassino, in 986: ‘He became abbot through the influence of the princes of his family and not through the vote of the monks.’ He goes on to tell bow after Manso had taken up his office several of the best monks decided that they could not live under him and left the monastery; among them was one Joannes Beneventanus who went to the East, to Jerusalem, Sinai, and then to Mount Athos. Leo is quoted in the Dialogues of Pope Victor III:

. . . He went to Jerusalem, and then spent six years on Mount Sinai in the service of God. Then he went to Greece, where he remained some time on the mountain which is called the Holy Mountain (in monte qui Hagionoros dicitur).

However, Leo says that John was a hermit on Athos, and far from founding and ruling a monastery on his own, it seems that John was under an abbot on the Holy Mountain and that it was due to this man’s advice that he returned to Monte Cassino:

Not long afterwards the most holy Father Benedict appeared in a vision to that same John, giving him the pastoral staff which he was holding in his hand, and advising him to return as quickly as possible to Monte Cassino. At the first light of dawn he explained religiously to the abbot of the monastery the vision which he had seen. The abbot, being a man of foresight and discretion, seeing the will of God in this vision, looked at him and said: ‘Brother John, return with all speed to your monastery, lest you seem disobedient to the great father who has appeared to you in a vision. It seems to me that almighty God has decided to place you over his flock, and has chosen you, in his mercy, to watch over his sheep.’ In obedience, therefore, to this vision and advice he returned across the sea, with Christ as his guide, and returned to his monastery. He was made prior by the most holy John (who was then abbot, but through infirmity was unable to bear such a great burden). Not long afterwards, by the counsel and choice of the brethren, he was appointed abbot by the same venerable father.

So John of Benevento, though certainly on Athos during the period, would seem not to be the founder of St Mary’s.

There was on Athos at the same time a Georgian hermit called Gabriel, from whose life a little more information can be gained about the early Latin monks:

The venerable priest Gabriel had a great spiritual love for the holy old man, the great Leo the Roman, who, each time he came to visit our fathers, used to take a cell next to that of Gabriel and there spend the day.

From the eastern sources, therefore, the founder of the monastery was Leo the Roman, a brother of the duke of Benevento. There is, it must be noted, no other record of the duke of Benevento of the period, Pandulf II, having a brother called Leo who was a monk. The John of Benevento, it would seem, was a monk of Monte Cassino who came to the Holy Mountain at the same period, between 993 and 996-7, for spiritual advice (possibly from the abbot of St Mary’s) and then returned to Monte Cassino to become abbot.

This is the only information available on the founding of the monastery. It used to be thought, for example by Dom Rousseau, that much more information was probably to be found in the archives the Great Lavra. Pertusi, however, assures us that the documents published by himself, P. Lemerle, and A. Guillou are all that the Great Lavra possesses on St Mary’s.

The first documentary evidence we have of St Mary’s is the signature in Latin of John of Amalfi, presumably the successor of Leo, on a document dated 991. Perhaps it was still this same John who signed documents in 1012, 1016, and May 1017. As stated above, it was about 1045 that the Georgian monk George described the western monks as living ‘probe ac rite’ according to the Rule of St Benedict. At the same period a minute of imperial civil service notes and approves the decision of the Grand Council of Mount Athos to allow the monks of St Mary’s to possess a boat, not for any commercial usage but for the needs of the monastery.

In 1081, Benedict, abbot of the imperial monastery of the Amalfitans, signs a document, and the emperor of the period, Alexius I, confirms to the convent of the Amalfitans certain lands which are described in great detail. The words ‘imperial monastery’ should be noted; they indicate a very flourishing period for the Benedictines, as they now have the same title as the Great Lavra, Iviron and Vatopedi, the three most ancient lavras on the Holy Mountain. In 1083 another act of the Athonite Council, about the reconstruction of the monastery of Xenophon, has the signature of the monk Demetrios, abbot of the Amalfitan monastery. It is remarkable that, contemporary with the increasing tension typified by the quarrel between Cerularius and Rome, the Benedictines of Athos were not only living their lives peacefully, but taking a full part in the government of the Holy Mountain and enjoying imperial patronage.

Another collection of acts, of the council dated 1097, bears the signature of Vitus, abbot of the Amalfitan monastery. There is a further reference to the monastery in acts dated 1169, on the acquisition of the monastery of St Pantileimon of Thessalonika by the monastery of Rossikon on Athos. This carries among others the signature in Latin of the abbot of St Mary of the Amalfitans.

Agostino Pertusi published in 1958 three new documents on the Amalfitan monastery, [24] preserved in the Great Lavra of St Athanasius. It is very difficult to date the documents, but after extensive researches Pertusi formed the opinion that they date from about the year 1287. Their authenticity has been confirmed since his first publication. They tell of the donation of the monastery of the Amalfitans to the Great Lavra and the confirmation of that transfer by the patriarch and the emperor. At the time that the donation was made the convent was very poor, the house was in ruins, and the remaining monks had no one capable of taking responsibility for its upkeep. A lot of factors may have contributed to this sad situation: the source of vocations much have been drying up, the republic of Amalfi declined politically after 1137, religious tensions and conflicts between East and West were becoming more and more intense, and Andronicus II pursued an anti-Roman policy.

It is interesting to speculate what happened to the survivors, if there were any, at the time of donation. We do not know. The local tradition says that they all left, taking with them their belongings, but this tradition seems dubious in the light of the documents of donation. It seems more probable that they did not leave but were absorbed in the Great Lavra. So ended Benedictine life on Athos, after lasting about three hundred years.

As Dom Rousseau pointed out, the monks of the Holy Mountain have good reason since the demise of St Mary’s to be suspicious of the West: for example, the foundation of Propaganda, in 1636, of a school on Athos to educate the monks, and the attempts of the Jesuits in the 17th century to found a mission there to convert them! Other similar activities have not helped the relations between western and eastern monasticism. Consideration was given by the West to refounding a Benedictine monastery on Athos, but this idea was so displeasing to the monks of the Holy Mountain that in 1924 they incorporated a clause into the constitution by which they are governed, forbidding such a foundation. How different from the arrival of the Amalfitans, when the Athonites not only gave them one of the most beautiful sites on the mountain, but helped them to build their monastery! But now that the ecumenical patriarch himself, on whom the Holy Mountain directly depends, has done so much to change the old atmosphere of suspicion, may it be no longer a vain hope that co-operation between East and West might again become a reality here, in one of the most holy places in the world?

From Fr Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings, June 28, 2009:

Saint Anselm, as we have seen, begins his reflections on soteriology—the theology of salvation—by addressing the question: What is sin? This he identifies as the affront to the honor of God. He then goes on to inquire: What is required to satisfy the offended honor of God. This move from apologetics to theology is known as St. Anselm’s “theory of satisfaction.”

In the history of the theology of salvation, few developments have been more significant than the introduction of “satisfaction” as a category of study. Few likewise, I believe, have proved more troubling.

I concede that some notion of satisfaction was always implicit when Christians thought about “being saved.” That is to say, the very concept of salvation carries with it, at least tacitly, the question, “What was required for us to be saved?”

In fact, that question was raised explicitly in the great Christological controversies of the early Church. For example, a major premise of the orthodox faith affirmed, “Whatever was not assumed was not healed.” This thesis declared that God’s Son, in the Incarnation, took on our full humanity, not selected parts of it. In other words, only the Word’s full assumption of our human nature could satisfy what was needed for human beings to be saved.

This principle, enunciated explicitly at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was later applied to the question of Christ’s human will by the Third Council of Constantinople in 670. According to this latter council, the work of salvation required a complete agreement of the divine and human wills in Christ. Hence, said the council, a full human will in Christ was required for our salvation. Nothing less would satisfy.

The new component in St. Anselm’s soteriology seems to be this: He introduces the idea that some aspect of God required “satisfaction” by the work of Christ. Specifically, it was the offended honor of God. This was the “debt” that only God’s Son could pay.

I have long suspected that Anselm’s inspiration for this theory may have been a Resurrection chant entitled the Praeconium Paschale. Our earliest extant copy of this text, commonly called (from its first word) the Exultet, is contained in “The Bobbio Missal,” the seventh century manuscript of a Gallican sacramentary. This beautiful and venerable text, which may have been composed two centuries earlier, refers to the salvific work of Christ, “who for us remitted to the eternal Father the debt of Adam”—qui pro nobis aetero Patri Adae debitum solvit.

Although I am familiar with no earlier liturgical text in which the work of salvation was so described, another liturgical hymn, roughly contemporary to “The Bobbio Missal,” spoke of Christ’s work as the remission of a debt, This akathist of Sergius of Constantinople (a monothelite, alas) described Christ as “He that remits the debt of all men”—Ho panton chreolytes ton anthropon (Hymnus Acathistus 266).

This image of a “debt” owed to God is, of course, perfectly biblical. Jesus spoke of God as “a certain creditor who had two debtors” (Luke 7:41). He described the judgment of God as the summoning of the master’s debtors (16:1-12). In the Bible, however, and as understood by the Church Fathers (for instance, Hippolytus, Psalm Titles 4, and Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 110.3), these texts refer to the mercy of God and to man’s obligation to imitate that mercy. The image was not used in reference to the work of Christ.

It is generally conceded that St. Anselm was the first to think of the burden of sin as a “debt of honor”: Hunc honorem debitum qui Deo non reddit, aufert Deo quod suum est, et Deum exhonorat, et hoc est peccare—”He that does not render to God this honor that is His debt, takes away from God that which is His, and dishonors God, and this is to sin” (Cur Deus Homo 11). And nothing, he went on, “is less tolerable in the order of things than that the creature should take away this debt of honor [debitum honorem] to the Creator, and not render what he owes” (op. cit. 13).

Anselm does not, strictly speaking, find salvation’s “necessity” in God’s will, nor in man. He finds it, rather, in what he calls “the order of things”—in rerum ordine. His references to the Creator and the creature indicate that he means, by this, the order of Creation. Salvation must rectify a problem in the created order.

From Fr Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings, July 26, 2009:

St Nicholas Cabasilas, after elaborating the tripartite structure of soteriology in his comments on the Sacrament of Chrismation, comes to the third and supreme sacrament of Christian Initiation, the Holy Eucharist (The Life in Christ 4.1-2).

Unlike Baptism and Chrismation, Nicholas says, this third initiation rite is repeated for the faithful during the course of their Christian life: “It helps the initiate after their Initiation, when the ray of light derived from the Sacred Mysteries must be revived after being obscured by the darkness of sins. To revive those that fade away and die because of their sins is the work of the Sacred Table alone” (4.3). Our habits of sin make reception of the Holy Eucharist a lifelong necessity.

We all continue to fall, Nicholas explains, nor can we, solely by our own efforts, be reconciled to God. In this respect, he quotes Romans 2:23—”You who make your boast in the law, do you dishonor God through breaking the law?” Nicholas Cabasilas thus—and as though out of the blue—introduces the theme central to the soteriology of St. Anselm: God’s offended honor.

Indeed, Nicholas goes on to explain this point, in lines that are nearly Greek translations from Anselm’s Latin. He speaks of Christ, who “alone was able to render all honor [timen] due to the One who begot Him and make satisfaction [apologesthasthai] for that which was taken away, achieving the former by His life and the latter by His death. To outweigh the injury which we had committed, He introduced the death He died on the Cross unto the Father’s glory, thereby making abundant satisfaction for the debt of honor we owed [opheilometha timen] by reason of our sins” (4.4).

Nicholas is clearly reliant here on Anselm, and it seems important to remark on this reliance. In fact, throughout his treatise on the Incarnation—Cur Deus Homo? —Anselm treats many of the same soteriological themes as Cabasilas and the Church Fathers: The integrity of two natures in Christ (2.7) and the unity of His person (2.9), the freedom of Christ’s will in the Passion (1.8; 2.17), man’s destiny to beatitude (2.1), and the final grace of the bodily resurrection (2.3). Although the soteriology of Anselm seems rather thin beside that of Cabasilas, the latter theologian detects no heresy in it, and, when it suits his purpose, he does not hesitate to incorporate Anselm’s thought into his own reflections.

As we noted above, Nicholas uses Anselm’s “satisfaction theory” in his discussion of the Holy Eucharist. The body of Christ received in the Holy Communion, Nicholas affirms, is the same body in which the Savior “made satisfaction for our sins”: It sweat blood in the agony, received lashes upon the back, was pierced with nails. It is to this very body, which “became the treasury of the fullness of the Godhead,” that the believer is united in the Eucharist (The Life in Christ 4.5).

Although there is also the sacrament (mysterion) of confession which, “when men repent of their sins and confess them to the priests, delivers them from every punishment of God the Judge,” yet even this sacrament is inadequate without participation in the Lord’s table. This is why, says Nicholas, we are to approach that table “frequently,” inasmuch as “it is the only remedy against sin.”

All righteousness before God, Nicholas reminds us, comes through the immolated body of Christ. Human righteousness counts for nothing. “But once men are united to Christ’s flesh and blood by partaking of them, immediately the greatest benefits ensue: the forgiveness of sins and the inheritance of the Kingdom, which are the fruits of Christ’s righteousness.”

In the Holy Eucharist, he goes on, we receive the whole Christ, everything that was assumed in the Incarnation, “soul, mind, will, everything that is human.” These God’s Son took on “in order to be united to the whole of our nature in order to penetrate us and assimilate us into Himself by totally uniting what is proper to Him with what is proper to us.”

“Thus, it is clear,” says Nicholas, “that God infuses Himself into us and mingles Himself with us, changing and transforming us into Him,” as “when iron is united to fire and thereby takes on the properties of fire” (4.6). For Cabasilas the Eucharist extends to men the salvation effected in the Incarnation, on the Cross, and in the Resurrection.

Note: Father Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor of All Saints’ Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois.

Thanks to reader Sean for alerting us to Project Santa Maria Antiqua, concerning the study and restoration of a mid VI-century church in Rome, abandoned and sealed in the IX century, and rediscovered a millenia later. 

The mural above captures a theme dear to this blog, as it depicts Christ enthroned, flanked by Greek Saints (on his right) and Latin Saints (on his left). A nice reminder that, in the words of Metropolitan Platon of Kiev, “the walls of which divide us … do not reach up to heaven.”