Encountering the East

Introduction

I remember walking into the Dormition Cathedral in the town center of Vladimir, just east of Moscow, now almost twenty years ago. My first impression was how warm it was as I walked in through the door into the vestibule. As I was accustomed to the temperate winters of Southern California, the Russian cold was living up to its reputation. It was midday, and the church was silent. We were met by a docent, who agreed to give our small group a tour of the historic church, provided the young ladies borrow scarves for their heads—a bit of a shock to our mostly evangelical friends. As we quietly entered the nave, the horos, with its images of the saints, shed a gentle light from overhead to illuminate a space that was curiously empty of pews. Then, my eyes were forcefully drawn to the towering, gilded iconostasis that immediately sent my eyes to heaven. I remember feeling struck with wonder; the icons of the saints directed my vision upward until my neck craned, almost painfully, to see, directly above me, the face of the Lord looking peacefully at me. It would take me several years to begin unpacking that moment, but a longing had awakened that would direct my steps toward the Church in my homeland, where that longing finally took its rest.

The relationship between Anglicans and the Orthodox is one of shared spiritual sensibilities grounded in the local practice of asceticism. From the early days of the Church, the spiritual tradition of the desert monastics from the East migrated to the West through the writings of John Cassian and Martin of Tours, who established ascetical communities and monasteries in ancient Gaul, which in turn influenced the spirituality of the Celtic Christians in the British Isles. Apologists for the Roman Catholic Church are keen to observe that the early ecclesial jurisdictions of the Church in the North were Roman in character. Perhaps it was so, depending greatly on how you mark the beginning of ‘official’ Church presence in a place, which for Rome is often self-referential. But even if the question of jurisdiction supports their claim, the reliance on that fact still misses two key truths: 1) the early Church did not relate to itself primarily through the lens of jurisdiction, and 2) the settling of Celtic Christianity that proved so influential over the Anglican spiritual tradition was always a matter of how to pray, not who is in charge.

The East Apart From The West

As we discussed last week, the early organization of the Church quickly recognized five patriarchates, or relatively independent centers of Christian faith and practice, located around a Bishop who presided over the local colleges of bishops in their region. These patriarchates were at Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople. Owing to its fortunate centrality as the seat of political power in the Roman Empire and its having been the place where Ss. Peter and Paul had finished their ministries, the city of Rome held a primacy as the ancient See, with the others paying a deference to it as a first among equals. However, as the empire waned and Rome eventually fell, the center of political power and cultural influence shifted to favor the great city of Constantinople. There, the nucleus of the Byzantine Empire flourished for centuries, and with it, the Church that had been freed from the terror of persecution by its namesake, Emperor Constantine. Further, by the time of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, Constantinople had been declared “the new Rome.” It was accorded equal status and deference among the ancient patriarchates as a second See like Rome had been. Here, it is crucial to observe that the primacy of Constantinople was not derived from Rome—the See had developed independently of Rome—and instead reflected the synodality of the early Church, such that another of the ancient Sees was capable of bearing the role of primacy for a time, and that the colleges of bishops did not find it necessary to define how Rome was still sacramentally or jurisdictionally in charge, even if Constantinople had effectively replaced it.

Over the next four centuries, Rome slowly recovered from her collapse and was revived, owing in no small part to the consolidation of the Franks under the Merovingians and then through the rise of Charlemagne, who would be crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor. The West slowly gathered its sense of self again, and in doing so, the Roman See began to seek its prior primacy among the ancient patriarchates of the Church. In the centuries that ensued, a series of conflicts arose between the East and West over authority and primacy, which came to bear on the definition of doctrine. Eventually, things came to a sharp point when the Roman See acted in a stunning breach of synodality by inserting what was known as the ‘filioque’ clause into the Nicene Creed itself. The Creed had stood for centuries as a point of unity, professing the essential doctrine of Christianity. To alter it without the consent of the other patriarchs was a fraternal breach that drove East and West apart. Discussion between the two dissolved, having been heated slowly over the previous two hundred years. Then, in 1054, the Patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople formally anathematized one another, splitting the Church in the horror of the Great Schism. Those anathemas would endure until the 1960s, and we still witness the awkward reconciliation between East and West as they figure out how to relate to one another again.

The last post discussed what happened in the West after the Schism. Meanwhile, the East was incredibly fruitful, especially in the growth of missions and monasticism. New patriarchates were raised to the level of the ancient patriarchates (as with the elevation of the Patriarchs in Bulgaria just before the Schism, followed by Sees in Georgia, Serbia, and Russia between 1050 AD and 1500 AD), which became new centers of Christian thought and spirituality. Unlike in the West, the patriarchates and archbishoprics (smaller, more local organizations of the Church) could be afforded by the synod of patriarchs the privilege of autocephaly, which granted them jurisdictional and pastoral autonomy over their Church. The See of Constantinople retained primacy as the ecumenical patriarchate, but the other patriarchs and their synods of bishops retained local oversight and direct spiritual authority. This commitment to synodality over the election of a single, central head would sometimes bring about conflict and temporary separations between the Orthodox churches. Yet the Orthodox would also embody a lasting example of the synodality on display in the Acts of the Apostles, which would germinate conversations in the conciliar debates of the West as it navigated through the Avignon Schism and the Protestant Reformation.

Unlike the spread of Roman Catholicism, which tended to impose a Roman character on the local culture, the spread of Eastern Orthodoxy from the other four ancient Sees tended to retain local distinctions in culture, infusing them with the life of the Church. While these tendencies had been the case long before the Schism, they were perhaps more noticeable afterward because of their relative isolation from their Western counterparts. Uniting the Orthodox through these differences in local language, culture, and ecclesial rule was their commitment to the unifying presence of bishops in synod with each other, to the declarations of the ancient councils of the undivided Church, the liturgical continuity (observable in the Divine Liturgy and the Liturgy of the Hours), and the principle of asceticism as the basis of Christian formation. While Roman Catholicism grew more pronounced in its tendency for uniformity, Orthodoxy provided a case study of differences among the members of the Church being a good thing. As the second millennium progressed, with East and West at odds with each other, liturgical and devotional tendencies in the two ancient Churches began to define themselves as much by what they were about and how they differed. Sadly, this differentiation (tending at times toward cut-off) would flavor the relationship between Orthodox hierarchs and Anglican bishops a few centuries later.

Renegotiating with Rome

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in the 15th Century, beyond the awful cultural destruction of a Christian civilization, represented a new question of authority for the Orthodox patriarchates. While the synod of patriarchs was still the seat of authority in Orthodoxy, the matter of primacy was unsettled, given the loss of the Byzantine See. In the West, as noted above, the Roman Catholic Church had returned to its former strength through the Carolingian Dynasty and the ascendance of the Holy Roman Empire. This coincided with the rise of the Islamic Empire from the Arabian Peninsula, which spread westward into southern Spain, where Charlemagne famously confronted it.

In the East, the spread of Islam threatened lands formerly ruled over by Christians, provoking from the Roman West a series of crusades, ostensibly to relieve their Eastern brethren from the oppression of the Caliphate, as well as the liberation of sacred sites like Jerusalem. These efforts had mixed results and were terribly costly in manpower and money. They also were occasions for great controversy, notably in the Third Crusade with a massacre of women and children in the city of Acre at the command of King Richard I of England, as well as the infamous sack of Constantinople itself at the end of the Fourth Crusade, after which the western crusaders robbed the population of much wealth and even attempted to install a new emperor. This drove a significant wedge between the Byzantines and the Latin West for two more centuries.

Depending on the historian, Rome’s posture during the decline of the Byzantine Empire ranges from a benevolent neighbor to an active antagonist. The precise accountability of the Roman Catholic Church for the actions by crusaders abroad remains hotly debated. What we can confidently say, I think, is that the Roman Church lingered as Byzantium was surrounded by a revived Islamic regime in the form of the Ottoman Empire. Rome offered aid in return for recognition as the primary See of the Church. Looked at one way, the Roman Church attempted a reunification effort as Constantinople fell, perhaps seeing an odd symmetry with how authority had shifted eastward when Rome had fallen a millennium earlier.

This offer of aid with its strings attached drove a final wedge between the rulers and the ruled of Constantinople, with the latter still begrudging the sack of the city. As the Ottomans closed in, the Pope sent a fleet of ships with soldiers to their aid, but they arrived too late to allay disaster. The effort at reunifying the East and West during this crisis of authority eventually failed, cementing the ongoing division of the Churches for five more centuries. Further, Rome’s interloping in the cataclysm of Byzantium’s fall soured the prospect of reunification itself, as some seemed to have viewed Rome’s role in the city's fall as a crass grab for primatial power when the East was at her weakest moment. Finally, reunification with Rome was ongoingly haunted by their historical commitment to papal supremacy, something the patriarchs of the East were not keen at all to accept.

Anglicans and the East

As I said at the beginning, voices from our Orthodox brethren have always influenced English spirituality. The initial life of our ascetical movement came directly from the monasteries of Egypt through the writings of John Cassian and Martin of Tours. The establishment of Celtic Monasticism, organized under spiritual fathers like St. Collumcille and St. Columba, established the disciplines of asceticism in a community, along with the production of a school of spiritual wisdom spread through the discipline of pilgrimage. As a personal note, I’ve always pondered the deep resonance between the tradition of illuminated manuscripts so rooted in Celtic symbolism and the emergent iconographic traditions of the East, though that intuition remains underdetermined.

The relative autocephaly of the English Church before the Synod of Whitby formally annexed it into the Roman Patriarchate is sometimes difficult to trace, because so many of its practices were suppressed by alignment with the Latin Rite. Many of its artifacts were known to have been destroyed by the Viking invasions (who sacked monasteries like the famous Iona). Yet what remained through these three centuries of cultural loss met its final adversary in the arrival of William the Conqueror, who, in 1066 AD, swept into England to secure its unequivocal submission to Rome, just twelve years after the East had parted ways with the West over that same authoritarian tendency. William’s conquest was as much a political as it was a religious work motivated by a brutal regime of conformism with Rome, an attempt to solidify the West as one imperial and ecclesial unit to bolster its negotiations with a waning Byzantium, and also to meet the threat of an ascendant Islam.

Again, in one of those remarkable coincidences of history, forty years after the debacle of Rome’s failed reconciliation with Constantinople and the Christian East, the Church in England formally renounced the doctrine of papal supremacy endemic in the Roman patriarchate. The Church in England entered a period called the English Reformation, during which it conducted a prolonged ressourcement with its ancient roots and connection to the undivided, conciliar Church. As many historians have noted, and as present experience bears witness, the Anglican Church’s departure from Roman supremacy was slow, mixed, and messy. As the broader Protestant Reformation raged on the European Continent, there were constant attempts to co-opt the Anglican Reformation into the more radical reformations of Germany and Switzerland. And while those tendencies are observable at various points in Anglican history after 1534 AD, it is implausible to conclude (as we noted in the previous post) that the Anglican Church departed from the ancient Faith as it disentangled itself from Rome. By the outset of the 17th Century, the fervor of the Reformation period had cooled, producing an English Church that was fully catholic and also autocephalous.

I say it is ‘implausible’ to consider Anglicanism as just another branch of the Reformation because the continuity of the Anglicans with the ancient Faith is the only way to account for the conversations that opened between English Catholics and the Orthodox that began at the outset of the 17th Century. Perhaps motivated by a similarly traumatic experience of an expansionist Roman Catholic Church, or perhaps by the increased necessity and curiosity of Anglicans to return to the patristic and conciliar roots of their faith and practice, the ensuing dialogue between the two Churches would prove to be a fruitful example of ecumenism in an age of increasingly insular and exclusionary church politics.

A Functional Unity

The direct dialogue between the Anglicans and Orthodox began slowly with the creation of a Greek College at the University of Oxford. Renewed interest in Greek as a language was a feature of the Renaissance era. Still, it also had a theological counterpart in the Protestant desire to retrieve and translate the Scriptures from earlier manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and the Greek Septuagint. With this came exposure to the writings of the Greek patristic writers and their forms of interpretation. These slowly began to dialogue with the writings of the Latin fathers and coalesced into a new hermeneutics. Further, dialogue opened between Archbishops Abbot and Laud and the Patriarch of Constantinople as early as 1607.

Conversations slowed as England endured the crisis of the English Civil War, in which the Puritan Parliamentarians waged a political and ecclesial war against the established Church, desecrating parishes and cathedrals, destroying monasteries, and imposing an iconoclastic spirituality that tended heavily toward Presbyterianism. The Long Parliament eventually fell, and with its fall came the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England. However, this restoration was soon shaken again by the Glorious Revolution under William and Mary of Orange. Their accession to the English throne provoked the rise of the non-juror movement among the Anglican bishops. While their history is complex, they were essentially a group of bishops and other clergy who did not deem it possible to swear allegiance to the sitting monarchs because they had deposed an anointed monarch. Rather than having them executed for sedition, however, these clergy were permitted to continue in their orders and live in exile. The Revolutions in England had diverted these conversations for several decades. Still, they began again in earnest between the non-juror bishops and representatives of the Patriarch of Constantinople leading into the 18th Century.

The Anglican-Orthodox dialogue between Constantinople and the non-jurors illuminated some intractable barriers to full intercommunion between the two Churches. For one, the initial envoy from the Orthodox seemed to assume the readiness of Anglicans to fall under the primacy of the patriarch. This was understandable, given the readiness of the Orthodox to reconstitute their sense of authority after the city's fall. While the patriarchate continued under the rule of the Ottomans, it was uncertain whether their once-assumed primacy would endure. Its enduring influence is partially explained by the fact that the Islamic Empire had destroyed or subjugated the other ancient patriarchal cities (Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria). When the non-jurors resisted the assumption that they would fall in with the patriarch, a tense theological conversation ensued in which some points were agreed while others remained divisive. In particular, the modes of honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary, invoking the saints, and the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation continued to cause suspicion between the two groups. Looking at it another way, the Anglicans and Orthodox were negotiating with each other while negotiating their very tense relationships with the Roman Catholic Church. Doctrinal proximity over issues of prayer, sacraments, or especially authority tended to amplify the tensions. This dialogue concluded both through the discomfort of the Orthodox to negotiate with a marginal group from the Anglican Church, as well as the deaths of the non-juror bishops themselves.

The Orthodox dialogue shifted to address the Church of England’s mainline (who had been involved in torpedoing the non-juror dialogue to assert their authority, labeling the non-jurors as schismatics). Within that mainline dialogue, there were fruitful exchanges of thought as clergy from the East visited the West and from the West to the East. It is worthy to note that just as the dialogue between the Orthodox and the non-jurors waned, a conversation waxed between the Anglican bishops and the clergy of the newly independent United States, who also suddenly found it difficult to swear fealty to the sitting monarch of England, by that time George III. The non-jurors eventually bestowed episcopal orders on the first American bishop, Samuel Seabury, thus ensuring the life of the Anglican Church in the United States, which came to be known as the Episcopal Church.

Through the 19th Century, the Church of England took pains to ensure the Orthodox patriarchs that they would not proselytize in those places where their imperial expansion brought Anglican clergy into places where Orthodoxy was established. This attempt to allay fears that Anglicanism would be a second kind of Western imperium seemed to engender good favor between the Churches. In the late 18th Century, the Russian Metropolitan Philaret had stressed that while there were apparent divergences in doctrine, that the Anglican liturgy was intact. In the 19th Century, Patriarch Gregory VI of Constantinople agreed to permit Orthodox priests to bury Anglicans if they died abroad. Then, in 1870, Archbishop Alexander of Syros and Tenos visited England and characterized the Anglicanism he found to be “a sound Catholic church like our very own.” In 1873, the Patriarch of Constantinople officially suppressed the proselytizing of Anglicans. Only fifteen years later, the Anglican hierarchs at the Lambeth Conference did the same. Finally, in 1925, as Orthodox and Anglican bishops gathered to celebrate the 1600th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the Patriarch of Constantinople assented to the validity of Anglican Holy Orders, noting that clergy who might transfer from one Church to the other might do so without being re-ordained. In the United States, the Orthodox hierarchs often encouraged immigrants from Orthodox lands to attend and receive sacraments at Episcopal parishes if an Orthodox church was inaccessible. By the start of World War II, there was a functional union between the Churches; both Churches agreed that they were swiftly heading for a full agreement on dogma and saw the real possibility of intercommunion.

The Great Backward Leap

The second half of the 20th Century brought with it a series of regressions to this ecclesial momentum. As the Anglican world contended with the social revolutions of the post-war era, both the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States began to adopt a radical regimen of reforms, not the least of which concerned the doctrine of Holy Orders and the possibility of pluriform liturgies in the Prayer Book. These moves shattered the integrity of the Anglican world, prompting some to celebrate the unmooring of the Church from what they saw as a retrograde traditionalism, while others sought increasingly desperate means to retain their sense of continuity with the ancient Faith. Among the latter were the signers of the Affirmation of St. Louis, who affirmed unequivocally their ongoing commitment to the Scriptures, the fathers, the councils, the sacraments, and the moral teaching of the ancient Church. These became the Continuing Anglicans of which the Anglican Catholics were a part.

Despite these continuity efforts inside and outside the Episcopal Church and the Church of England, however, a viral heterogeneity spread through the Anglican world. It was not easily possible to identify the authentic Anglicans with whom to negotiate. While doctrinally and traditionally, the Continuers had the greatest claim, they were not considered the ‘mainline Anglican Church’; the Orthodox proved still wary of the non-juror debacle two centuries earlier. Further, the flux within the Anglican world produced a rabid reassessment of what it meant to be Anglican at all, with charismatic, evangelical, reformed, catholic, and mainline strands all vying for supremacy. That sad splintering continues to this day, even though there have been meaningful steps toward reunification within our Church. As the Orthodox and Roman Catholics might observe in a charitable moment of reflecting on their own seasons of doctrinal and administrative crisis from the past, these seasons usually last between 75-100 years before things settle down. If that’s the case with us, then we’re still only halfway there. Even so, we are in a real crisis. As a result, the continuing dialogues between our Churches have become, in the words of Archbishop Athenagoras in 1978: “more of an exercise of academic interest than an ecclesial endeavor aimed at the union of the two Churches.”

Meanwhile, there continues to be a native divergence of opinions among the Orthodox about ecumenical relationships with others. Some patriarchs and archbishops favor reunion with the Anglicans and still remember the pre-war times when we were heading toward intercommunion. Others see the crisis within the Anglican Church as a sign of our inherent schismatic disorder, or worse, using it as the basis of shutting down ecumenical dialogues and reemphasizing the sole validity of Orthodoxy as the one true Church. While nothing has substantially changed about the validity of Holy Orders for a priest or bishop in the Anglican Catholic Church from a century ago when that intercommunion seemed so likely, now Orthodox are warned against entering our parishes. The same unfortunate tendency we might observe with Roman Catholic apologists obtains among the Orthodox in America. Relative competition of the Churches in the United States has further eroded their fraternal relationships. Many Orthodox clergy now actively proselytize Anglicans, behaving as though we are no longer a Church, and certainly not a Church with which they very recently in history nearly united. One Orthodox priest in a nearby town wrote a book in which Anglicans are characterized as sectarians seeking divorces. Some lay people have even been told that if they wish to transfer to the Orthodox Church, they would need to be re-baptized. Reactively, Anglicans overplay the differences in doctrinal expression and have been known to cast aspersions on the ethnic situations of many Orthodox communities, looking suspiciously at them because of their countries of origin. We have taken a giant leap backward.

Still Reasons For Hope

Despite all this, there are good reasons to hope for our future relationship with our Orthodox brethren. First, the crisis of authority and doctrine in the Anglican Church will eventually abate if even a small remnant remains faithful. There are still living strands of union with the Faith of the Apostles: still valid orders are bestowed, and still valid sacraments are being administered. There are no anathemas that would prevent an Orthodox Christian from receiving the ministry of an Anglican or vice versa. However, pastoral cautions are understandably in place while the dust settles on our end. We must never forget that the movement will always tend toward a common point for those who continue in the Faith once delivered to the Apostles. As Anglican Catholics, we continue to share a commitment to asceticism and the rigorous call to ordinary devotion with our Orthodox brethren. We, like them, remain committed to the traditional Eucharistic liturgy and the Daily Offices of Prayer. We, like them, remain committed to the conciliar view of the Church, locating her authority in the synod of Bishops within autocephalous Churches in union with each other. We, like them, resist the error of papal supremacy and the tyranny of individuality. These are potent sources of unity. Even if the vine of our communion with one another has been cut down to the roots, those roots still have life in them.

By sharing this history, I hope we can observe together how the current spirit of division between our churches is an exception rather than the rule. The marks of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church are observable in both Orthodoxy and Anglicanism. The Spirit is clearly at work to make and form many disciples in both Churches. Yet as the light of Christ dawns on both of our communions, there are things that He calls us to remedy, be it a return to a first love or a departure from our lukewarm compromises. As the Spirit refines both the Orthodox and Anglicans, especially in this country, I believe we will see more opportunities to perceive in each other the sister Churches we are. In the meantime, we do well to observe with Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch when he said in 2003: “Our divisions make Christ unrecognizable. We have an urgent need for prophetic initiatives to bring ecumenism out of the twists and turns in which I fear it is getting stuck. We have an urgent need for prophets and saints to help our Churches to be converted by mutual forgiveness." We do not need to be defined by the most scandalous or exclusionary in either of our Churches (who, sadly, also often are the loudest and most terminally online).

It was fifteen years after that day in the cathedral in Vladimir when I met for dinner with a friend who had begun to walk the Orthodox path around the same time that I entered the Anglican Church. Like me, he had been called to the priesthood and had been serving in a parish that looked a lot like mine, and mine like his. As he walked through the door to the restaurant, we greeted each other with an embrace, and in the full knowledge of our differences and all the politics and polemics, we regarded the other and said, almost simultaneously, “Father, bless.”