Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology
By Andrew Louth
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About this ebook
Andrew Louth
Andrew Louth is professor emeritus of Patristic and Byzantine studies at Durham University, England. He is also a priest of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh (Moscow Patriarchate), serving the parish in Durham. His recent publications include Greek East and Latin West, AD 681-1071 (St Vladimir's Seminary Press), Maximus the Confessor (Routledge) and The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (OUP).
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Reviews for Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology
14 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I think that as a westerner I was expecting more of a systematic theology book. Instead, what I found was a totally new way of thinking about humanity and our relationships with each other, the world, the church, and our creator. All of these relationships seem to be interconnected, putting much less emphasis on our selves, and more on those particular relationships. It's a very refreshing view, and instead of concentrating on my personal sin and how to deal with it, this new way of thinking helps me to concentrate more on Christ.
There were some parts of the book where I felt my mind wandering. I have never been a fan of philosophy, and it seems that Orthodox theology draws from philosophy. But even so, reading this book was a rewarding experience. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology by Andrew Louth is an excellent resource for those new to Eastern Orthodox theology like myself, or someone who has been part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church for many years. This book helped open my Protestant eyes to the beauty of Orthodoxy. While it's true that no book can, or should, replace the in-person experience of the Divine Liturgy, and a relationship with the parish priest, I can say that this book will at least serve as a guide to the Orthodox Church.
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Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology - Andrew Louth
Preface
This book originated as a series of monthly public lectures delivered in the academic year 2011–2012 at the Amsterdam Centre for Eastern Orthodox Theology (ACEOT) in the Faculty of Theology in the Free University of Amsterdam, of which I was (and still am) a visiting professor. The lectures were, from the beginning, intended to be turned into the chapters of a book. I am very grateful for all those who turned up on Thursday evenings to listen to me, and to the discussions that took place following each lecture. I am especially grateful to Dr Michael Bakker, for inviting me to take up the visiting chair on the inauguration of the Centre in 2010. Various people have helped me to effect the transition from the ephemeral form of a lecture series to the more enduring form of a book, especially Fr John Behr, Wendy Robinson and Anna Zaranko. It still retains some of the informal tone of the original lectures; I hope the reader will be indulgent.
Andrew Louth
Feast of the Apostle Philip
Introduction: who are the Eastern Orthodox?
Labels are sometimes a problem. Nobody wants to be labelled, and yet we use labels all the time, as a way of simplifying the world in which we live, a way of introducing some order and identity. Orthodox in the West have a particular problem with the labels others apply and they accept. ‘Orthodox’ by itself, in England and America, is usually taken to designate – outside a few, rather specialized contexts – Orthodox Judaism, as opposed to Conservative, Liberal or Reform Judaism. Some Orthodox use ‘Christian Orthodox’ to avoid that, or speak of themselves as belonging to the ‘Orthodox Church’. But there is no body called the ‘Christian Orthodox Church’, or even the ‘Orthodox Church’; it is well known that there is the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church and so on.
So who are the Orthodox? I have used what is probably still the most generally accepted term, ‘Eastern Orthodox’, though over the last century, the emigration of Orthodox from traditionally Orthodox countries to the West, their settlement here and the consequent attraction to their ranks of people with a cultural background that is entirely Western, means that there are now many members of the Orthodox Church who are uncomfortable with being thought ‘Eastern’, for there is nothing at all about them that is Oriental. So it seems to me that the best thing to do is to start by explaining whom I take the ‘Eastern Orthodox’ to be, rather than assuming that the label will not be misunderstood.
There seem to me to be three ways of approaching this question of identity and definition. The first is identifying those I am including under the title ‘Eastern Orthodox’, by providing a list – comprehensive, though not exhaustive. The second could be called historical: ‘Eastern Orthodox’ are who they are as the result of their history. Those of a Western background who have adopted Eastern Orthodoxy have, in some way, placed themselves in debt to that history. The third way might be to ask what is distinctive about Eastern Orthodoxy. I want to pursue each of these avenues one by one; in fact, I think, they will be found to lead one into another.
First of all, then, Eastern Orthodox means belonging to the family of Eastern Orthodox Churches, as opposed to the various families of Western Churches, and also to the Oriental Orthodox Churches. The Eastern Orthodox Churches, in this sense, are found to be various national groups. There are the Greek Orthodox: both in Greece itself, the Greek islands including Cyprus, but also the Greek diaspora, mostly to be found in Europe, the United States and Australia – the result of emigration from what is now Turkey, as well as Greece, and, especially in the case of Great Britain, from Cyprus – as well as Greek Orthodox under various ancient patriarchs (Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem). The leader of the Greek Orthodox is the Œcumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, now called Istanbul, in Turkey, where he still resides. (The title ‘œcumenical’ will be explained later.) There are also the Russian Orthodox, the Romanian Orthodox, the Bulgarian Orthodox, the Serbian Orthodox – all under patriarchs – as well as the Georgian Orthodox (under a Patriarch-Catholicos), and smaller churches in a variety of countries – for example, Albania, Estonia, Finland, Poland, the Czech lands and Slovakia. Many of these national groups also have significant numbers abroad, in the ‘diaspora’, mostly Western Europe and America, but elsewhere too.
All these national groups are in communion with one another, share the same faith (expressed in the decrees of the Œcumenical Councils – seven of them from Nicaea I in 325 to Nicaea II in 787), are ruled by the same body of Holy Canons and use the same Byzantine liturgy (generally in the local national language, or some older form of this: Greeks use Byzantine Greek, most Slavs Slavonic). The reasons for all this are historical: essentially that they all stem from the Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire (this is also true of the Georgian Orthodox Church, though in their case it is a little more complicated, as the Georgians embraced Christianity before the Byzantine Empire, and so must have had independent traditions, especially liturgical; however, over the centuries, their faithfulness to Byzantine Orthodoxy has entailed assimilation).
As well as the Eastern Orthodox Churches, there are the Churches often called the Oriental Orthodox Churches: these are Churches that refuse to accept some of the Œcumenical Councils endorsed by the Eastern Orthodox. Most accept the first three (Nicaea I – 325, Constantinople I – 381 and Ephesus – 431), but not the fourth (Chalcedon – 451) or any later ones; they include the Coptic Orthodox Church (in Egypt), the Syrian Orthodox Church (Syria and India), the Armenian Orthodox Church (Armenia and Lebanon), the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Church – all have diasporas, some very widespread (especially in the cases of Armenia, Egypt and Syria): these are Churches that used to be called ‘monophysite’, because they were held to embrace the monophysite heresy, maintaining that in Christ divinity and humanity were fused into one. The Church of the East (mostly in Iran and the USA) accepts only the first two Œcumenical Councils (hence they used to be called ‘Nestorian’, after the patriarch of Constantinople who was condemned at the third Œcumenical Council, held in Ephesos in 431). The Oriental Churches – both the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Church of the East – worship according to different liturgical rites from the Eastern Orthodox and govern their lives according to different canonical traditions.
Nonetheless, despite the apparently greater number of differences between the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox – compared with differences between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics (who both, for instance, accept the first seven Œcumenical Councils, though the Roman Catholic Church accepts many more) – in many ways, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox feel much closer to each other than either do to the West, and it has been accepted, at least at conferences of theologians, that the doctrinal differences are largely matters of misunderstanding.¹
Why are these various Churches included in the ‘list’ of Eastern Orthodox Churches? The reasons for this are largely historical. So this leads us to the second, ‘historical’ avenue. Let us begin at the beginning with the band of disciples that followed the Lord Jesus Christ during his earthly ministry. They were, as far as we know, all Jews, and in the early decades after the death and resurrection of Christ the group that came to be called Christians (initially in Antioch: Acts 11.26) must have looked like a Jewish sect, who believed that in Jesus they had found the promised Messiah, or Christ (‘anointed one’).
However, Christians very soon came to realize that their ‘good news’, the ‘gospel’, was a worldwide message and they began to preach the gospel throughout the Mediterranean world (the Acts of the Apostles associates this realization with the apostles Peter and Paul). That worldwide missionary Church used Greek, the common language of the Mediterranean world (both in the East and in most of the West) – which is why, for example, the New Testament is in Greek. In fact, all the evidence for Christianity in the first two centuries outside the Semitic lands of its birth is of Greek Christianity, even in Rome; it is only in the third century that we find significant evidence of Latin Christianity, first in North Africa and Rome, and then in Spain and Gaul. One might think of Eastern Orthodox Christianity as the continuation of this worldwide missionary Church of the early centuries.
In the fourth century, the conversion of Constantine (312) led to the gradual adoption of Orthodox Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. As yet there was no split between East and West, only tensions. Constantine built a new capital for the newly Christian Empire, called Constantinople (‘Constantine’s city’) or New Rome; soon the bishop there became the hierarch closest to the imperial throne in influence as well as proximity. Eventually he came to call himself the Œcumenical Patriarch, which expressed a sense of the priority of this see – alongside that of Rome, the ancient capital of the Roman or Byzantine Empire: the word ‘œcumenical’ is derived from the Greek word, oikoumene, the ‘inhabited’ (earth), which was the word the Roman (or Byzantine) Empire used, somewhat hubristically, to refer to its own territory; it conveys a sense of the ‘worldwide’ significance of the leader of the Church of Constantinople, ‘New Rome’.
Before the ninth century, Christianity had begun to spread outside the immediate environs of the Byzantine Empire, mostly to the East, but also to Ireland (the conversion of England was regarded as the recovery of a lost part of the Roman Empire). In the ninth century, the expansion of Christianity led to the emergence of tensions between Western Christianity, focused on Rome and the Carolingian Empire, and Eastern Christianity, focused on Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. This first manifested itself in Bulgaria. In the 860s Khan Boris decided to embrace Christianity and investigated the options of Greek East and Latin West. He opted for the East, and by the end of the century there was a branch of Byzantine Orthodoxy, worshipping and praying in Slavonic (had he opted for the Latin West, the Bulgarians would have worshipped and prayed in Latin, as in the rest of the West). This continued, and the Eastern Orthodox family of Churches uses (in principle) the vernacular.
The next important step was the conversion in the tenth century of Prince Vladimir of Kiev and the Rusʹ, over whom he ruled. This led to the emergence of what has been called the Byzantine Commonwealth,² a loose grouping of countries that owed their faith to Byzantium and shared to some extent, at any rate, its political ideals: Bulgaria, the Rusʹ of Kiev to begin with, Serbia – in short the Slav world, together with the ‘mother country’, the Byzantine Empire.
The first half of the second millennium saw the Byzantine Empire gradually diminished by the advance of Muslim Turks. The only hope for the Byzantines was some alliance with the Christian West. By now, however, Greek East and Latin West had drifted apart and become increasingly estranged. Support against the Turks was only to be secured by union with the West, interpreted as submission to the Roman papacy. In this period the divisions between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East hardened. No union was achieved that was acceptable in the East, and in 1453 Constantinople itself fell to the Turks and became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The Slavs of Rusʹ, by this time beginning to free themselves from subjection to Muslim invaders – the Tatars, the ‘Golden Horde’ – began to assume the leadership of the Orthodox. The political centre of the newly emergent Russia was Moscow and in the next century or so, something like the Byzantine political polity was reproduced in Russia, with the Tsar fulfilling the role of the Emperor and the Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias that of the Œcumenical Patriarch (though he never claimed that title). Meanwhile, the Œcumenical Patriarch became the leader of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, the ‘Rum millet’ (the people of [New] Rome). The Romanian Orthodox Church belongs to this later period of history as a Christian satellite of the Ottoman Empire under the Ottomans.
A final stage on the ‘Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy’ (to use the title of Fr Alexander Schmemann’s book)³ occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nineteenth century saw the gradual liberation of various peoples from the Ottoman Empire – Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria – and their establishment as ‘nations’, with their own king and patriarch. The twentieth century saw the emigrations that caused the Orthodox diasporas: groups displaced by the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of a secular state, Turkey, and those expelled from Russia as a result of the communist revolution and Lenin’s exile of those intellectuals who refused to support communism, as well as many others who fled their homeland as a result of war and revolution throughout Europe. The presence in the West of these diasporas also changed Orthodoxy, as Orthodox Christians encountered the West and sought to understand the differences they found among many Christians who were sympathetic and welcoming.
Which leads to my third avenue: if we know who counts among the Eastern Orthodox, and something of their history, how are Eastern Orthodox Christians different from Western Christians? What makes them distinctive? This is more difficult to answer, especially in a Western context, where indications of distinctiveness are sometimes part of the labels: for example, Lutheran, Calvinist, Wesleyan Methodist, labels all indicating a defining individual theologian (not necessarily thought of as a ‘founder’).
The label ‘orthodox’ does not work like that. In current parlance, it has two valencies: it either suggests correctness (orthodox being derived from two Greek roots, and meaning ‘correct opinion’) or – very commonly – what people used to think, or still think, with the suggestion that this opinion has had its day (as when one speaks of the [current] orthodoxy about some topic). That may give some clue to the meaning of Orthodoxy for the Orthodox themselves, for it suggests that correct opinion or belief is something to be valued. It suggests commitment to the importance of dogma: Orthodoxy involves acceptance of dogmatic truths, that is, truths that are important and have been defined, in the case of Eastern Orthodoxy, by the Seven Œcumenical Councils which are revered in the Orthodox Church. But, as we shall see in more detail in this book, while dogma is important, in the sense that there are matters about which it is important to be right (or perhaps better: matters about which it is dangerous to be wrong), what this really means is that there is truth – about God, his engagement with the world that he created, and especially the Incarnation in which he united himself with his creation – that is not simply a matter of opinion. It can be defined, though definition in such matters is less a question of delineating something exactly, than of preventing misunderstanding that is all too easy. Fundamentally that is the case, because such truth is not so much a matter of getting things right, as genuine encounter with the Person of Christ, witnessed in the Scriptures, safeguarded in the definitions of Church Councils, and experienced in the sacraments and the Church.
You might say that there is nothing very distinctive about this; many Christians would embrace such an orthodoxy. I would respond that this is indeed so, that Orthodox Christians see themselves as committed to the truth of the Councils and the creeds, a truth that unites Christians, not one that divides them; Orthodoxy has an inclusive distinctiveness, it is not a peculiarity. That something like this is true is indicated, it seems to me, by the enormous popularity writings like C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity have found in traditionally Orthodox countries.⁴ Mere Christianity presents Christianity as the heart of what all Christians believe, and was itself the fruit of a movement among Western, mostly English-speaking, mostly lay, Christians, who sought to restore a sense of the value of traditional orthodoxy – the traditional faith of most Christians – in the face of a ‘liberalism’ that seemed to misunderstand and weaken traditional Christian teaching about God the Trinity, creation and Incarnation, sin and redemption.
If there is anything distinctive about Eastern Orthodoxy, it is not that it is an exotic belief, remote from what Western Christians believe Rather, its distinctiveness is to be found in the way in which the traditional faith of Christians is upheld among the Orthodox. For Orthodoxy sees its faith as expressed, and tested, in prayer and worship.
Many Christians would assent to that, but there have been influential movements within Western Christianity that have sought to express Christianity in some comprehensive philosophy – the scholasticism of the Western Middle Ages is a striking example – or make some particular doctrine the article by which the Church stands or falls – as Luther did with the doctrine of justification by faith. In reaction against that, in the West, other movements have sought to reduce Christianity to a non-dogmatic devotionalism – implicitly in certain strands of Western medieval mysticism, or explicitly in pietism. But for Eastern Orthodoxy it is in prayer and worship of God that our faith is defined and refined: a God who created the world and loves it, whose love is expressed in his identifying himself with his creation, and especially the human creation, made in his image, through the Incarnation and the cross, a love that is manifested in its transfiguring power through the resurrection. The centrality of prayer and worship prevent us from narrowing down our faith to some human construction, however magnificent.
If there is any reason why Eastern Orthodoxy has found this way of confessing the Faith, it could be because the way of Eastern Orthodoxy has led through persecution and martyrdom: in every century there have been Christians of the Orthodox communion who have faced persecution – throughout the whole Christian world in the first centuries, and then while living under the rule of Islam, and in the last century atheist communism. In all these centuries it has been faithfulness to the prayer and worship of the Church that has enabled the Church to survive. Often it was only in gathering together for prayer and worship that Orthodox Christians were able to express their faith, and frequently such gathering together was subject to harassment – a harassment sometimes as severe as any persecution. And they found that that was enough, that faithfulness in prayer and worship, in celebrating the divine liturgy, in belonging to the saints of all ages and joining our prayers with theirs, and then living out, as fully as they could, lives formed by that worship: all this proved to be in truth the touchstone of their faith. The experience of martyrdom and persecution has been the crucible in which Orthodox Christians have found their faith refined.
________
¹ This was agreed at the official dialogue between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox delegates held at Chambésy in 1990. This agreement has, however, never been officially received or acted on by the Churches involved.
² The title of a book by Dimitri Obolensky: The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).
³ Alexander Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy (London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963).
⁴ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Fontana Books, 1959).
1
Thinking and doing, being and praying: where do we start?
Well, where do we start? In Alice in Wonderland, the White Rabbit is advised by the King of Hearts: ‘Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ That sounds like good advice, but how are we to apply it? Many accounts of the Christian faith adopt the order of the creed, beginning with God the Father and continuing through the Son, and then the Spirit, to the Church and eternal life. That makes some sort of sense, but it seems to me to beg a question, one that we need to face up to. For if there is one thing we know about God the Father, it is that he is unknowable. ‘No one has ever seen God’ (John 1.18). ‘You cannot see my face’, God says to Moses, ‘for man shall not see me and live’ (Exod. 33.22): this warning is repeated throughout the Old Testament, though usually in contexts where God actually is ‘seen’ or apprehended in some way (as with Moses). How can we start with God the Father, if we cannot know him?
This is a question we can pursue in various ways. Perhaps this means that we start with God, not as knowing him, but as standing before a mystery that is, and will remain, beyond our understanding. In the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, at the beginning of the anaphora, we justify our attempts to worship God by saying: ‘for you are God, ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, inconceivable, ever existing, eternally the same’.¹ Our worship is a response to an unfathomable mystery. In a sense, if we start there we shall never proceed: for once we glimpse the unfathomable mystery of God, we shall never drag ourselves away. Or maybe we shall proceed, but constantly find ourselves drawn back to the inexhaustibility of this mystery that God is.
But if we do proceed, there is another problem. If we posit God and then consider him as Creator, source of all values, especially moral, and continue, as we consider the creed, to think of the Incarnation of God the Son, all that led up to that, all that has followed from it, the