Orthodox Dogma and the Greek Spirit.

Adolf von Harnack, the celebrated Protestant historian of the Church, decided that dogma was a product of “Hellenization of Christianity on a grand scale.” By this he meant that the original message of Jesus and the apostles had been reinterpreted in the light of Greek philosophy. On the whole his attitude toward dogma was a negative one. That is to say, he regarded it as an aspect of the degeneration in Christianity. Transforming the gospel into doctrine was, to his mind, an intellectualistic distortion. Furthermore, he held that the spirit of Greek philosophy had introduced foreign, unevangelical elements into the religion.

There is no doubt that some “hellenization” took place. We need only look at the creeds of the ecumenical councils of the early Church to see this. Some elements of the Neoplatonic metaphysics of substance and the doctrine of hypostasis influenced the formulation of the Church's doctrine of the Trinity, Christology and anthropology. But this phenomenon should not be considered degeneracy.

Undoubtedly Harnack was committed to the Protestant idea that the Church should rest upon “pure doctrine.” The Orthodox theologian takes quite a different view of dogma. He would not deny the impress made by the Greek spirit upon the development of dogma. On the contrary, he tends to emphasize and extol it. He holds that the formation of the dogma was not a purely human process, whereas Harnack considered it to be an inevitable falsification of divine truths because of the inadequacy of human concepts. The Orthodox theologian sees the formation of dogma as a divine and human process modeled upon the incarnation of the divine Logos in the man Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit, proceeding from God, intervened in the history of human thought. Consequently the dogma has two aspects. In one respect its truths, having their origin in divine revelation, are divine, eternal, unassailable and immutable. In the historical respect, however, the human mind is continuously striving to achieve a deeper understanding and a closer grasp of these truths. The eternal and immutable nature of dogma derives from its source in divine revelation, but the human grasp of it is subject to historical progression. Man can never understand the transcendental abstractly; he can know it only in its concrete embodiment in language. The hellenization of Christianity, therefore, was a historical process; it was natural that dogmatic truth should be apprehended in the spirit of Greek thought, since this was the dominant mode of thought during the era of the early Church.

This conception of dogma is in keeping with the nature of belief itself. All genuine faith is ultimately founded upon direct transcendental experience. But genuine faith is also impelled to clarify intellectually its underlying ideas. The dogma of the Church, however, represents not the expression of an individual mind, but the expression of the mind of the Church as a whole meditating upon the facts of redemption; not the experience of isolated individuals, but the experience of the Church in its totality as a divine and human organism.

Harnack's thesis is faulty in other respects. He does not understand that Orthodox dogma does not occupy the same isolated position within the Church as do doctrine and creed in the Protestant churches. Rather, dogma is part and parcel of the liturgical life of the Church. The creeds of the Orthodox Church are not abstract formulations of a “pure doctrine.” They are hymns of adoration which have their place in the liturgy. There is a statement of dogma in the baptismal creed that the proselyte speaks in praise of God and in proclamation of the divine truth of salvation. Similarly, in the Eucharistic liturgy God is adored in the words of the credo before the priest invokes the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Eucharistic elements. Thus dogma has fully preserved its original liturgical function in the Orthodox Church.

Moreover, in the view of the Orthodox Church the liturgy is the proper place for dogma, not theological summas and textbooks. This is particularly true for the Eucharistic liturgy, this liturgy being a mystical unfolding of the full abundance of divine acts of redemption and divinely revealed truths. Liturgy and dogma, worship and creed, prayer and theological meditation and speculation are therefore inseparable. The dogma is a component of the living worship. Intellectual definition of the truths of the Christian faith is necessary, of course, and certainly that is one of the functions of dogma. But in the Orthodox Church dogma is not limited to differentiating Christian principles from false doctrines. It governs the Christian's religious and moral life; that is, it has a practical side. It promotes growth in the Christian's spiritual life by keeping the facts of redemption ever present in his mind.

Because dogma has this practical function within the spiritual organism of the Orthodox Church, it has not undergone so much theoretical elaboration as the dogma of Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. The various elements of the Creed have not been defined with precision. Hence there is much greater freedom in the interpretation of the dogma. Even the formulation of a dogma by an ecumenical council is not eo ipso necessarily binding under canon law. To be binding, a dogma must also be accepted by the general consensus of the Church, what the theologians call the “ecumenical conscience.”

It is obvious from all this that the development and content of Orthodox dogma cannot be simply equated with analogous phenomena in the Roman Catholic Church. Comparisons with Roman Catholic and Protestant ideas can, however, be illuminating. By studying certain parallel tenets we can more readily understand the special character of Orthodox belief.

[a] Religion as a legal relationship. From the beginning the West has understood the fundamental relationship between God and man primarily as a legal relationship. This emerges, for example, in the interpretation of redemption given by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans. Paul's approach reflects the fact that in Rome he was dealing with a largely Jewish-Christian congregation whose members knew the Law. They were men fervently concerned with the question of God's justice and men's obligation to meet the demands of a just God. This legalistic way of thinking, which so dominated the Judeo-Christian groups in the Roman community, was quite in harmony with the fundamental Roman attitude toward religion. To the pagan Romans, too, the relationship between the gods and man was primarily legalistic. For the pagan Roman the political aspect of this legalistic relationship remained in the foreground; in Rome, worship was state worship, the priest functioned as a government official and combined his office with high posts in the state, and the main emphasis of the religion was upon the public weal. The legalistic character of the religion was further manifested in the strict regulation of all ceremonies of public worship. Words, gestures, clothing, rites, time and place — all were prescribed in detail. In attention to minutiae the pagan Romans were no whit less exacting than the Jews. When, therefore, Paul repeatedly spoke of “justification before the law,” he was in fact being a “Roman unto the Romans.”

[b] The legalistic attitude of the church. Roman Catholicism continued to develop in this direction. Rome elaborated the specifically Western view of the sacrament of penance which depends completely on the idea of “justification.” God has established certain laws for man. By sinful conduct man violates these laws. Justice requires him to make amends to God. The Church supervises this legal relationship. The bishop is the agent of the Church; he determines the degree of sinfulness and decides in which cases and under what conditions penance is possible. The priest, a subagent of the Church ordained by the bishop, also decides what payment the sinner owes to God. Just as jurisprudence has drawn up scales of crime and punishment, so also the Church has drawn up a scale of sins and the necessary penances. The business of the Church's “legal agents” is to apply this scale to particular cases.

Latent in this legalistic view of the sacrament of penance were the potentialities for subsequent degeneration of the sacrament — as, for example, the idea of the indulgence. The indulgence sprang from a merging of Roman and Germanic legal ideas; its basis is the assumption that penances can be reduced, and above all that amends can be made by contributions of money. Once the principle was established, the ecclesiastical authorities could set up a fixed tariff; a given amount of money could be substituted for a given act of penance.

The same legalism also governed the development of the concept of the Church and the role of the priesthood. The Church regards itself as a spiritual legal institution which Christ founded by virtue of divine law. The priest is the legitimate representative of divine law and order. Only within the framework of such legalistic thinking could the papacy and the idea of papal primacy have come into existence. In the Roman Church the political ideas of antiquity and Catholic legal thinking merged to create a new form. This new form was able to arise in the political vacuum of the period of the great migrations, in a Rome no longer dominated by an emperor. Under the political conditions of the Middle Ages the Roman bishop acquired by default many of the legal and political functions that had hitherto belonged to the imperial power. His claim was that Christ himself had founded the papacy when he transferred his spiritual powers to Peter. As papal doctrine was developed, the idea of jurisdictional supremacy played a major part in it. The popes added the powers of a sovereign to those they already possessed as priests, and donned the imperial crown in addition to the episcopal tiara. At the height of this development a Pope would proclaim himself supreme ruler of the world. He would have it that Christ had handed him the two swords of spiritual and secular power, and would regard kings and emperors as his feudal vassals on whom he conferred crown and scepter by his right as successor of Peter.

The individual priest's conception of his own office again reflects this legalistic idea. Ordination by the bishop gives the priest the legal right to administer the sacraments and to hold the “power of the keys.” When the priest says to a sinner after confession, “ Ego te absolvo ” (I absolve you), he is exercising this judicial right.

This legalistic outlook led the Western Church to develop its own canon law far more consistently and more exhaustively than the Eastern Church. From the very beginning Western canon law showed a tendency to extend its jurisdiction over everything in public or private life that had anything whatsoever to do with the Church. Thus canon law in the West penetrated, and indeed dominated, the whole life of society much more thoroughly than was the case in the realm of the Orthodox Church. Moreover, the creation of the autonomous Papal States was based upon the legalistic mentality. The Eastern Church did not aspire to such political independence.

[c] Legalistic thinking in Theology. The legalistic way of thinking took root early in the theology of the Occident. While Paul's doctrine of justification never had any decisive importance in the East, we have indicated that it had far-flung consequences for the West. Continuing the tradition of Paul, Tertullian introduced a number of fundamental juristic concepts into theology. Then Augustine (354-430) made the doctrine of justification the basis of his conception of man's relation to God, and of his view of sin, guilt and grace. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) viewed the legal relationship existing between God and man as the very cornerstone of all theological thinking, so much so that he believed he could logically deduce the truth of the Christian religion and the necessity for the incarnation of God from the idea of “satisfaction..” [3] The covenantal theology of scholasticism regarded the history of salvation in general as a history of ever-renewed legal covenants between God and man.

This legalistic mentality also put its special stamp upon Western monasticism, which tended to stress “good works” and “supererogatory works” — the latter being works that the saintly man performs over and above those required to balance out his own sins. The concept of sanctity itself was reshaped by this legalistic thinking. Alexander of Hales (†1245) went so far as to assert that through the satisfactions offered by Christ, the saints and the martyrs, a “hoard of good works” had been accumulated. This hoard, he said, was at the disposal of the Pope, who could use it for the benefit of believers in general.

Legalism even found its way into eschatology. In fact, when we examine Western notions of the “Last Days” we frequently have the impression that the idea of justice has completely triumphed over the idea of love. When that time comes mankind is to be strictly divided into a group of the saved, who will enter eternal bliss, and a group of the damned, who are condemned to eternal punishment. The Eastern Church has never accepted the concept of purgatory that is so integral a part of the Roman Catholic scheme of salvation. By positing an intermediary state between heaven and hell, the Church allows the sinner another chance to improve his score before he must appear at the Last Judgment. The Church asserts its jurisdictional authority over this domain as well. By indulgences, Masses for the dead, and so on, it exercises its powers of binding and loosing over the souls in purgatory.

The idea of predestination, too, was taken up by the West and given a strong juridical cast. St. Augustine taught that the kingdom of God consisted of a fixed group of the elect, their number decreed by God from the beginning and corresponding to the number of the fallen angels. The purpose of history, he contended, was to separate the elect from the great masses of humanity. Only the elect are born to be citizens of the City of God. The legal standards governing the kingdom of God were fixed before all time by the inscrutable will of God. Redemption is founded upon a divine system of jurisprudence; man lives under its laws and on Judgment Day will be judged by its principles.

[a] Basic Mysticism. The theology of the Eastern Church has quite another complexion. The differences may not be too precisely defined, since to do so would involve us in a series of generalities to which there will be numerous exceptions. We may, however, say that the striking feature of Eastern Christianity is its lack of those very features that depend on a conception of religion as a legal relationship. Instead, the mystical aspect of the New Testament message comes far more strongly to the fore. Both Pauline and Johannine mysticism are given equal weight. There is little emphasis upon justification. Instead, the major themes of the Orthodox faith are the apotheosis, sanctification, rebirth, re-creation, resurrection and transfiguration of man; and not only man, but also the whole universe — for the Eastern Church has a characteristically cosmic approach. The central theme is not God's justice but his love. For this reason the total development of religious life both within the Church and within the consciousness of each individual believer has taken a course radically different from that of the Western Church.

This matter is particularly striking when we consider the sacrament of penance. In the Eastern Church, penance is not associated with the idea of justification but with the idea of the Christian's education to a life of sanctity. Penance was never conceived of in legal terms, with the result that the sacrament never became corrupted. No doctrine or practice of indulgences ever arose. Since penance was always viewed as a road to sanctity rather than as an act of compensation, there could be no thought of substituting money payments for performance of acts of atonement.

Similarly, in the absence of a judicial conception, the Western doctrine of purgatory and of posthumous salvation by acts of the Church could not spread through the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Eastern Church never pretended that its powers to bind and loosen extended to the realm of the dead. The Eastern Church considered that its only power to affect the dead lay in intercessory prayer. Underlying this was the premise that the union between believers and the Body of Christ of which they are a part is not destroyed by death. This union continues to exist within the Church. This mystical communion in the Body of Christ makes possible a continuation of intercession and of vicarious suffering. Under these circumstances the institution of the Mass for the Dead also retained its purity and escaped the degeneration that took place in the West.

[b] The Mystical Interpretation of the Church. The Orthodox view of the nature of the Church is likewise not based upon any legalistic system. To be sure, a legal element does enter into its conception of ecclesiastical office, above all of the office of the bishop and of apostolic succession. But the legalistic idea is nowhere dominant; it is simply embedded in the view of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit as the continuous stream of life within the Church. There was no room in the Eastern faith for the idea of a Church-state, or for a bishop's exceeding his spiritual prerogatives and intervening in secular affairs. Consequently, the Eastern Church remained unaffected by the rise of the feudalistic State. Conditions that were characteristic of the Christian Middle Ages in the West, where bishops turned into the feudal lords of their dioceses, the dioceses themselves becoming territories and the bishops neglecting the spiritual side of their offices in favor of their political duties and their recreations as members of the feudal aristocracy, were totally unknown in the East. The bishops of the Eastern Orthodox Church have always remained first and foremost ecclesiastical officials. Many Orthodox bishops, it is true, felt it necessary to oppose godless princes, to admonish them in the name of Christ, and to call upon them to do penance. But these bishops never felt that their spiritual powers entitled them to claim secular dominion, or to treat secular rulers as feudal vassals of the Church.

The legalistic principle is likewise absent from the way the ordinary Orthodox priest regards the nature of his priesthood. Nowhere in the Orthodox liturgy does the priest allude to his rightful title. Instead he repeatedly expresses his own sinfulness and unworthiness, emphasizing that he is no less a sinner than his parishioners. It is significant that in the Orthodox sacrament of penance the formula of absolution is not framed in declaratory terms. Instead of the Roman priest's “ Ego te absolvo,” the Orthodox priest says after confession: “My spiritual child, you have now confessed to my lowliness. I, miserable sinner, do not have the power to absolve a sin upon earth; only God can do that. But for the sake of those divine words which were spoken to the apostles after His resurrection, and which were: 'If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained,' for the sake of those words and trusting in them, we say this: 'What you have confessed to my extreme lowliness, and also those things which you did not say, either from ignorance or from forgetfulness, whatever they are: may God forgive you for them in this world and the next.'”

In the matter of sanctity, the Eastern Church venerates the saints as spiritually gifted persons who have succeeded in living on earth the “angelic” life of the celestial Church. But their achievements are nowhere booked to the accounts of the Church as “supererogatory works,” nor has the Church ever claimed a legal right from God to invest this “capital.”

[c] Apotheosis. The great theme of Orthodox theology has remained the incarnation of God and the apotheosis of man. Always the emphasis has been upon rebirth, the re-creation of man, his reshaping into a new creature, his being resurrected along with Christ and rising with Christ to God. Fulfillment of man's being and his transfiguration by grace are all-important to the Orthodox theologian. It is no wonder that the doctrine of justification has been given short shrift in Orthodox dogmatics. The most famous exposition of Orthodox dogma, that of John of Damascus (c. 700-50), does not even mention the idea of justification. So the Orthodox Church was never prompted to assert that the necessity for God's incarnation arose logically out of the doctrine of satisfaction: the very groundwork for such a doctrine was lacking. Not until Protestant ideas penetrated the East during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the Orthodox theologians compelled to take a position on the doctrine of justification.

The basic Orthodox attitude is again reflected in the conception of sin. Whereas the Western mind defines sin as a violation of the divinely established legal relationship between God and man, the Eastern mind defines it as a diminution or a loss of spirituality, a wound or infection of the original image of God. Redemption, therefore, is not the restitution of a legal relationship that has been upset by sin. Rather, it is fulfillment, renewal, transfiguration, perfection, deification of man's being.

[d] The Primary of Love. We have already said that the idea of love rather than of justice dominates Eastern religiosity. A characteristic instance of this is St. John Chrysostom's catechetic sermon on the parable of the toilers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16). In the Eastern Church this sermon is to this day read from all pulpits. It is a triumphal hymn of the victory of love. Awareness of the overflowing fullness of divine love drives away all thought of any schemes of reckoning and satisfaction. Divine grace is bestowed as generously upon those who are called in the eleventh hour as upon those who were called in the eighth and ninth hours. “Ye who are first and ye who are last, receive your reward. Rich and poor, rejoice together. Ye who are dutiful and ye who are neglectful, honor the day. Ye who have fasted and ye who have not fasted, today is the day of your rejoicing. The table is laden; let all partake! The calf is fattened; let none depart hungry. All may partake in the feast of faith. All may partake of the wealth of goodness. Let none complain of poverty, for the kingdom for all is come. Let none mourn transgressions, for forgiveness has risen radiant from the grave. Let none fear death, for the Savior's death has freed us from death.”

Such a pattern clearly excludes the doctrine of predestination. Origen (†c. 254) developed the idea of universal salvation according to which at the end of our eon there will not be an ultimate judgment, and God will not forever set apart the saved and the damned. He will only assign men their place in a new age of the universe (eon) in which everyone will have a fresh chance to ascend to glory. According to Origen at the end of all eons everything evil will have been winnowed out: the fallen angels and even Satan himself will turn back to the divine Logos. The Church disavowed and condemned this doctrine; nevertheless this idea persists among some modern theologians.

The legalistic temper of Western Christianity has, characteristically, enlarged upon the idea of eternal damnation to a point quite alien to the Orthodox Church. Both Thomas Aquinas and Calvin in describing the bliss of the saved, suggest that one of the pleasures of heaven will consist in looking down upon the torments of the eternally damned, for do not these torments glorify divine justice? Such attitudes, following as they do from the legalistic thinking of the West, are not to be found in the work of Eastern religious thinkers. Similarly the Eastern Church has never thought of Judgment Day in the strictly juristic terms customary in the West. It does not haggle over anyone's right to salvation or insist upon an individual's achievements or the achievements of the Church's saints and martyrs. There is only confidence in grace and in the “love of man philanthropia,” which is an attribute of the divine Logos. Confidence and, in addition, prayer for divine mercy.

For all these reasons the Orthodox Church could scarcely comprehend the theological principles of the Occidental Reformation, springing as these did from the need felt in the West for a religious approach based on a new interpretation of the doctrine of justification. The Reformers, of course, were attacking specific Roman Catholic doctrines and customs that Orthodoxy too had always rejected and fought, for example, papal primacy and the celibacy of the clergy. Here the Eastern Church was in full sympathy. But the central issue of justification interested only a few Orthodox theologians who had been educated in the West, such as Cyril Lukaris. These tried to insert the problem into Orthodox theology, but the grafted shoot soon withered.

I n what way have the individual dogmas been elaborated? Here we must go back to our earlier observation that all genuine faith is ultimately founded upon direct transcendental experiences. At the same time genuine faith has a natural impulse to clarify intellectually its underlying ideas. St. Augustine enunciated this principle as Credo ut intellegam. The modern reader is apt to be a stranger to this process by which religious experience develops into doctrine; he contents himself with accepting the existence of dogma as a historical fact. For this reason we shall illustrate the process in the cases of three fundamental dogmas of the Orthodox Church.

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