by Dr. Andrew Louth
It seems to me of paramount importance that the Synod, as His
All-Holiness asserts, should show that the Orthodox Church wants
genuinely to communicate with the world.
We have treasures to share, in
the Gospel, and the wisdom acquired through many centuries of believers
following in our Lord’s footsteps and living in the grace of the
Resurrection. It is also true that many in the West want to hear our
voice, what we have to tell them of Christ. It will be a betrayal of
everything we hold dear if the result of the Synod is that the world
perceives the Orthodox apparently concerned solely with themselves in a
fearful and introspective way.
Nevertheless, like many people, I have some reservations about the synod.
First, eleven days seems minuscule in comparison with the 1200 and more
years we have to make up. Secondly, the preparatory documents have
been unavailable until very recently, and seem to have been prepared by a
small circle of people, mostly (or exclusively?) associated with the
Ecumenical Patriarchate, whereas one would have expected widespread
consultation beforehand. Thirdly, the ecclesiology of voting by
patriarchates is unprecedented and unsustainable, apparently overriding
the duty laid on each bishop ‘rightly to discern the word of your
truth’, as we pray in the anaphora of the Divine Liturgy, citing 2 Tim
2:15. Nevertheless, we need to recognize that the only voice that
counts at the synod is that of the Holy Spirit, so, despite all the
fumbling of human preparation, it is important that we should earnestly
pray that the fathers of the synod will hear and attend to the voice of
the Holy Spirit.
Although the preparatory statements tend too much towards blandness,
they seem to be on the right lines, with some reservations mentioned
below. The emphasis on the Church’s concern for the world in which we
live today is vital, and the presentation of the life of the Church as
springing from the Eucharist is expressed well. So too the emphasis on
ecumenism and a readiness to work and pray together with our fellow
Christians, especially those whose baptism we recognize: all that is
important. Although I can well understand the logic of the position of
those who deny that there are other Christians than the Orthodox—since
we, as Orthodox, hold that the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church
that we confess in the Symbol of Faith is identical with the Orthodox
Church—it seems to me that it is a logic isolated from life. We must
(and in practice do) recognize that there are Christians who find their
ecclesial identity in other communions than the Orthodox Church. Do any
of us really believe, for example, that Catholics are not Christians,
and that the see of Rome is vacant, Pope Francis being no more than an
unbaptized pagan? It makes nonsense of our behaviour: one Sunday
recently I worshipped in San Teodoro in Rome, a church given to the
Greeks by the pope some years ago. Should we have refused this gift?
When we look at the history of the Church, we are deceiving ourselves if
we think that there is one community completely innocent, namely the
Orthodox Church, and that division is simply the result of the sins of
others: Catholics, Protestants, or whoever. The principle of ecumenism
lies in repentance, expressed clearly in the words of his elder brother,
recalled by the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov: ‘each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all’.
Some of the preparatory statements could have been more radical. The
statement on fasting is banal; it would have been useful in the context
of understanding fasting in a non-Mediterranean world—the point raised
by the statement—to have been reminded of the way fasting is justified
by the Fathers: commitment to greater simplicity in our eating, an
exercise in detachment, an opportunity to greater commitment to
almsgiving. The statement on marriage fails to address any of the
burning pastoral issues: what later commitment to marriage demands of
young people; how marriage is to cope with a society in which men and
women are much more equal; the challenges of the capacity to control
pregnancy for the practice of sexuality. The section on War and Peace is
all right as far as it goes, but makes no mention of conscientious
objection to participation in war.
Finally, the statements on the diaspora and autonomy seem to me to
ignore the changes in political society between the world of the
Mediterranean in late antiquity and the world in which we live today.
The ideal of one bishop leading the Eucharistic community in a city
reflected the world of the early Christian centuries. The world today is
very different, but the statements simply see the diaspora as a passing
phase, leading to a worldwide network of autonomous/autocephalous
‘local’ churches. That, on the one hand, ignores the way in which the
experience of diaspora enabled many to realize the Pauline sense of
Christians as essentially aliens in this world, ‘every foreign country
is theirs and every country foreign’, as the epistle to Diognetos put
it, and, on the other hands, ignores the way in which many people, not
least Christians, move from country to country, as well as the way in
which ‘cities’ nowadays are vast amalgams of communities, so that the
Christian community in a modern city is really, at best, an imagined
community, made up of real communities without necessarily any
territorial base. We need an ecclesiology to measure up to that, not an
attempt to restore an ancient ecclesiology that no longer corresponds to
the social reality in which we live.
Andrew Louth is Emeritus Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at Durham University.public orthodoxy