“Bless the Lord, O my soul!” The Prophet bestirs himself to praise God. To bless the Lord, that is, to praise the Lord, brings, moreover, a blessing upon oneself. O Lord, my God, You are great indeed! You, who are God of all, are especially my God, for I am not the slave of sin; I have merited to be called Your servant. “thou hast been magnified exceedingly.” When I behold the sky, the earth, the birds, quadrupeds, serpents, and all of Your creation, I marvel, and I magnify the Creator [. . .]

The Psalm verses of the First Antiphon describe the blessings of the Lord for which we should give thanks; in so doing, they also anticipate the mercies of Christ and the Mystery of His Incarnation, the ultimate expression of which is the Communion of the Gifts that will occur later during the Divine Liturgy. Therefore, it is fitting to remember this supreme act of mercy and compassion at the beginning of Liturgy.

Bless the Lord, O my soul! Blessed art Thou, O Lord! Bless the Lord, O my soul! And all that is within me, bless His Holy Name! St. Jerome asks, “What name of the Lord is the Psalmist thinking of here? If the Lord is called by name Lord, what does ‘and all that is within me, bless His Holy Name’ mean? Simply this, the advent of the Son implies the name of Father. Before the coming of Christ, God was known, but the Father unknown. Furthermore, He says Himself in the Gospel: ‘Father I have manifested Thy name to men’ (Jn. 17:6)” (Homily 29). So, just as the antiphons and beatitudes divided by the small litanies create a three-part structure that honors the Holy Trinity during this early part of Divine Liturgy, here we sing a psalm that anticipates the understanding of two Persons of the Holy Trinity: the Father and the Son.

Bless the Lord, O my soul! And forget not all that He hath done for thee! Who is gracious unto all thine iniquities, Who healeth all thine infirmities! Who redeemeth Thy life from corruption, Who crowneth thee with mercy and compassion! Here, at the beginning of Divine Liturgy, we call to mind “all that He hath done for thee.” The Lord made all the Heavens and the Earth for His creation, for “One does not build a house except for the sake of its occupant” (St. Jerome). But the Lord, through His Incarnation and Resurrection, has healed the infirmities that we inherited as a consequence of our Ancestor’s First Sin; not, importantly, as inherited guilt, but rather due to the change in our nature that occurred after that sin: the introduction of death, decay, sickness, and disease into a world that was originally made to be free of these debilities. The Mystery of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection redeems us from such corruptions through “an amending of our nature, and pardon, not of debt, but given through mercy and grace” (St. John Chrysostom, Homily XIV). The Lord’s mercy and compassion is, indeed, the crown of our soul.

Who fulfilleth thy desire with good things! Each time we pray “O Heavenly King,” either at home or at Church, we identify the Holy Spirit as the “treasury of good things.” The Lord knows our needs and desires even before we ask: He sees to our needs, foremost of which is our attainment of the Heavenly Kingdom, with a greater compassion and concern than that of any father.

Thy youth shall be renewed as the eagle’s! The Psalmist here, after promising that the Lord saves us from our infirmities and from corruption itself (here understood to be the corruption of the mortal body), promises that the Lord will restore our youthful vitality. This is possible in this life through the the revifiying power of the Holy Spirit witnessed in the healings wrought by the Apostles in Acts and the Holy Spirit’s activity in the lives of the saints. But, this Psalm, and all of the Divine Liturgy, points to the ultimate renewal that will take place when the present world passes away (Mt. 5:18, Mk. 13:31, I Cor. 7:31, 2 Pt. 3:10-13, 1 Jn. 2:17). This passing, in which “the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4) does not mean that all of creation will be irrevocably destroyed. Rather, its form and condition in the present age will pass away and it will then be renewed (Is. 65:17-25, Rom. 8:19-22, 2 Cor. 5:17, 2 Pt. 3:13): “He who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’” (Rev. 21:5); also: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Rev. 21:1). To the extent that the Divine Liturgy is eschatological, that is pointing toward the establishment of the Lord’s Kingdom, we experience this future Kingdom within the Liturgy, which begins with the Kingdom’s invocation, continues with its representation, and concludes with our participation in the Heavenly Banquet of the Kingdom. In this Kingdom, both body and soul are renewed, as is all of creation. In the Kingdom, all of renewed creation praises God; therefore, our worship in the Divine Liturgy also consists of praise:

God meant Man to lead the creation in its praise of Him. Sin has deprived us of our place at the head of the chorus; it has driven us out and sealed the lips created to praise our Maker. Christ, the Lamb whose death takes away the sin of the world, ends this fathal isolation and opens our lips that our mouth may show forth God’s praise. In Christ we return to join the rest of creation, taking our rightful place as leaders in the choir. The Liturgy begins with this antiphonal praise because our salvation consists of praise. (Fr. Lawrence Farley, Let Us Attned: A Journey Through the Orthodox Liturgy 25)

King David compares our renewed youth to that of an eagle because the vigor and majesty of the eagle, whom the Ancients believed could renew itself like the mythical Phoenix.

Compassionate and merciful is the Lord, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy! What gloss is necessary here for a Christian? We who are about to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ, who hung on a Tree and endured mocking for our sake, even betrayal by those closest to Him, must consider the limitless reaches of compassion, mercy, long-suffering endurance of trials!

The people then glorify (doxologize) the correct understanding of God: the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The first verse of the Psalm is repeated to emphasize our praise of the Lord. The deacon then raises his orarion and begins the Little Litany…

Next: Part Five, “The Little Litany”

“For the President of our country, for all civil authorities, and for the armed forces, let us pray to the Lord.” Following the instruction of the Apostle, we pray for those entrusted with the responsibility to lead and defend our nation: “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (I Tim. 2:1-2). Naturally, petitions for our secular leaders come after those for our spiritual shepherds.

“For this city, for every city and country, and the faithful dwelling therein, let us pray to the Lord.” Having just prayed for our secular leaders, we then ask for mercy upon our city, for all cities, and for the faithful Christians who live in it; in this way we join Moses who petitions: “destroy not Thy people and thine inheritance” (Deut. 9:26).

“For favorable weather, abundance of the fruits of the earth, and peaceful times, let us pray to the Lord.” Up until this point in the Litany, we have been praying for people, the Church, and the cities wherein we live, not asking for anything other than peace and mercy. Now our petitions become supplications for good things from above. The Apostle and Brother-to-the-Lord, James, reminds us of the power of prayer when he wrote about the Prophet Elias (Elijah), who “prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit” (James 5:18). That prayer for rain and a bountiful yield from our crops continues to this day in the Orthodox Church, as does the prayer for peace, which the Apostle Paul suggests we should make to “follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another” (Rom. 14:19).

“For travelers by land, sea, and air; for the sick and the suffering; for captives and their salvation, let us pray to the Lord.” Once we have asked for the edifying things that make peace, we pray for the salvation of our brothers and sisters who are not present in this Divine Liturgy: those who are traveling, those who are too sick to attend Divine Liturgy, those who are incapacitated in some other way, and those who are imprisoned or held captive by foreign powers, bandits, or some other authority holding them against their will. In this way, we fulfill the Apostle James’s injunction for the faithful to pray for those who are sick (James 5:14-16).

“For our deliverance from all affliction, wrath, danger, and necessity, let us pray to the Lord:.” The template for the Church’s prayers are the Psalms of King David, the principal theme of which is turning to the Lord in times of affliction: “Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and afflicted. The troubles of my heart are enlarged: O bring thou me out of my distresses. Look upon mine affliction and my pain; and forgive all my sins” (Ps. 24 [25]: 16-18). We pray that the Lord may bring us out of affliction, but we must be mindful that the patient endurance of all troubles and pains is the path of Christ that leads to a Heavenly reward: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (II Cor. 4:17). Therefore, St. Paul instructs us to be “patient in tribulation” (“tribulation” here is from the same Greek word that is often rendered as “affliction,” thlipsis) because of the promise that Christ gives us: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John: 16:33). So, knowing that affliction produces patience (Rom. 5:3), we pray that we may be delivered from it on account of our weakness, knowing full well that as long as we suffer, we are not separated from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:35). The emphasis in this petition is deliverance from suffering inflicted on us by others: the wrath of tyrants, the danger that accompanies persecution and the necessity that occurs when one is acted on by force. The Greek word rendered here as “necessity” is anagke, which means ‘to be subject to authorities,’ ‘compulsion,’ or even ‘violence,’ ‘torture,’ or ‘bodily pain.’

“Help us, save us, have mercy on us, and protect us, O God, by Thy grace.” This is the single most-common petition, occurring eight times in the Divine Liturgy; therefore, we should carefully examine for what we are asking. First, we ask for God’s help. At the end of the second chapter of his epistle to the Hebrews, St. Paul specifies that Christ is able to succor us because He assumed our nature (Heb. 2:18). Not only having made and fashioned us as our Creator, but having lived as one of us, Christ knows what we suffer, but He also knows how to assuage it in a way conducive to our salvation. Second, we pray that the Lord save us, remembering His role as the Savior of humankind. Third, we ask for mercy from the Lord. This is the most basic prayer in the Christian lexicon: “Lord have mercy.” Fourth, we ask that the Lord protect us. The Greek word, diaphulasso, is literally rendered, ‘through-guard,’ for the Lord guards us and protects us, often through the intercession of our guardian angel. Finally, we ask that the Lord do all of this through the miraculous action of His Divine energies, His grace, which is the gift of God, freely given. God is under no compulsion to assist us, but rather chooses to act out of His love for us: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8); further, that Grace comes to us through our only intercessor to the Father, Christ: “grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).

“Calling to remembrance our all-holy holy, most pure, most blessed, glorious Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary with all the saints, let us commend ourselves and each other, and all our life unto Christ our God.” Whereas we have but one intercessor before the Father, we have a host of intercessors⎯the saints⎯to Christ. Foremost among these is the Mother of God. As such, we orient ourselves to God by calling to mind (from Gr. mnemosyne, ‘remembrance’ or ‘giving heed to’) her supreme obedience to God, for the miracle of the Annunciation took place with her consent. In so doing, she gave her life, which she had previously dedicated to God in the Temple, to following the will of God. Remembering her example, and that of all the saints, we dedicate our lives to Christ. The Greek verb parathometha here literally means “attach” and its use suggests that we are to attach our life to Christ. Note here how we do not do this alone, but we all dedicate ourselves to Christ together. Just as we earlier prayed for the “union of all,” here we presume that union and attach ourselves to Christ. The Mother of God is here given her full title in the Church: All-holy (Panagia) because she is the foremost example of cooperation between God and man, most pure (ahrantos or ‘undefiled’) because she did not sin, most blessed and glorious because she is called by Gabriel “blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28) and the Prophet Isaiah calls her glorious: “his resting-place shall be glorious: (Is. 11:10), Lady because it is the traditional title for a queen, and as the Mother of the King of All and Bride of Christ, she is both Queen Mother and Queen, Theotokos because she was the birth giver of God, as recognized by Elizabeth when she called her “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43) and formally by the Church (over the title Christokos) at the Third Ecumenical Council in 431 A.D., Ever-Virgin because the Church has universally taught that she was always a virgin (her perpetual virginity was declared at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 A.D.), and Mary, the English rendition of her name, Mariam.

Having called to mind the Mother of God and all the saints, because we are “fellow citizens with the saints” (Eph. 2:19), and renewing our dedication to attach ourselves to Christ like our fellow citizens have done, the deacon concludes his portion of the Great Litany. The people respond, affirming the deacon’s petition that we unite ourselves to Christ, by saying “To Thee O Lord,” for it is to our Lord Christ that we direct and dedicate our spirit during this most sacred Divine Liturgy.

The priest then responds with his exclamation: For unto Thee are due all glory, honor, and worship: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. The priest is here proclaiming why we have dedicated ourselves to a life of union and attachment to Christ: because everything that is good, every blessing, every ephemeral moment of inspiration, and every lasting reward comes to us through the Holy Trinity: our Heavenly Father and Creator, Christ, the Son of God, our Redeemer and Savior, and the Holy Spirit our Comforter and Benefactor. If one accepts that “No man can serve two masters” (Matt. 6:24), and that every life represents service to someone or something (whether an ideal or material), even if the person being served is one’s self, then it is only reasonable that we would want to serve the Source of all goodness. Part of that service is to deny ourselves, to flee praise and honor and, instead, to ascribe all glory and honor to that Source of all. “Orthodox” can be translated alternately as “right belief” or “right worship.” It is fitting that both “belief” and “worship” come from the same root word, because, in the Christian understanding, one cannot worship correctly without believing correctly and, conversely, one cannot believe correctly without worshiping correctly. Therefore, as we stand in prayer in the Divine Liturgy⎯the Church’s ultimate manifestation of “right worship”⎯the priest, our shepherd and spiritual guide, proclaims that right worship must be directed to the Holy Trinity. Furthermore, as a representative of the Apostle to the Gentiles, St. Paul, the priest instructs that all glory, honor, and worship should be given to the Holy Trinity in the present moment and throughout all future ages: “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen” (I Tim. 1:17). As their response to the initial blessing by the priest, the people respond with “Amen” (“so let it be,” “verily,” or “truly” in Hebrew). By so responding, all consent in dedicating their lives to glorying, honoring, and worshiping the Holy Trinity.

During the Great Litany, the priest has a silent prayer that he reads in the Altar, called the “Prayer of the First Antiphon:” O Lord our God, Whose dominion is indescribable, and Whose glory is incomprehensible, Whose mercy is infinite, and Whose love for mankind is ineffable: Do Thou Thyself, O Master, according to Thy tender compassion, look upon us and upon this holy temple and deal with us, and them that pray with us, according to Thine abundant mercies and compassions. In this prayer, the priest, in his most import function, calls down the Lord’s mercy upon all those present and those who are absent with good cause (those remembered in the Litany: the sick, suffering, captives, and travelers by land, sea, and air). Recognizing that God’s power is incomparable, for He “hangeth the earth upon nothing” (Job 26:7), the priest appeals to the Lord’s infinite mercy and compassion, that He will deal with us, not according to our works, but according to His mercy. As we read in the eighth of the morning prayers in the Jordanville Prayer Book:
“For if Thou shouldst save me for my works, this would not be grace or a gift, but rather a duty; yea, Thou Who art great in compassion and ineffable in mercy.” God’s mercy is great; St. Paul describes God as “rich in mercy” (Eph. 2:4). Christ Himself testifies to the depth of God’s compassion: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:16-17).

Next: Part Four, “The First Antiphon”

This Liturgy of the Catechumens is the second of the three-part Divine Liturgy. Bishop Alexander (Mileant) of Buenos Aires and South America (=2005) describes it as the point where “the faithful are prepared for the Mystery.” This preparation takes place by emphasizing the teachings of Christ during His earthly ministry, which are available not only to the faithful but to those who are preparing to be received into the Church (Gr. katechoumenos ‘one being taught orally’), hence: “Liturgy of the Catechumens.” Although only the second of three parts, we begin our study with the Liturgy of the Catechumens because it is the first part most people experience, the proskomedia taking place exclusively within the Altar.

The service begins with the deacon asking the priest, who represents the Bishop’s authority, to bless. Note that in the Church, everything follows a correct order: just as nine ranks of angels serve the Lord, so too do the lower orders of clergy serve the bishop. Deacon literally means “servant” and his orarion (the distinctive stole he wears either on his shoulder or crossed about his chest) represents the wings of the angels. The priest responds not with his own blessing, but with the exclamation that the Heavenly Kingdom is blessed. In so doing, he follows in the footsteps of Christ, who proclaimed the Kingdom at hand (Mark 1:15) and St. Paul who expounded on the Kingdom (Acts 28:23). The priest’s exclamation signals that during the Liturgy, we experience the very same Kingdom Christ proclaimed. The Royal Doors are open, signaling that the veil separating the earthly from the spiritual has been pulled back and we now have access to the Kingdom of Heaven through our mediator, Christ. While exclaiming “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages,” the priest makes the sign of the cross with the Gospel over the Altar Table, signifying that this is the part of the Divine Liturgy where the Word will be proclaimed and, in the homily, expounded. For this reason, the Liturgy of the Catechumens is sometimes called the Liturgy of the Word. The people respond with “Amen,” which means “so let it be,” “verily,” and “truly” in Hebrew. By so responding, all consent to the unfolding of the Kingdom.

The deacon, standing before the Royal Doors, is outside the Altar with the faithful. He begins the petitions that we all pray, supplicating our Lord in Heaven to have mercy on us who have been, since the Fall, exiled from Paradise where Adam and Eve freely walked with God in spiritual concord. These petitions are called the “Great Litany” or “Great Ectenia.” Litany derives from the Greek litanos, which means ‘entreating’; ectenia means ‘extended’ or ‘protracted,’ meaning that these petitions are a protracted list of supplications. Because the Great Litany begins with petitions for peace (Gr. irini), this litany is also known as the irenicon, or ‘peace-making message’ or ‘proposition for peace.’ The deacon is leading the people in prayer, intoning the supplications that all are praying in the heart. It is important to emphasize here that the mystical action of prayer takes place silently within the hearts of all present. The deacon’s supplications are not meant to replace this necessary spiritual and interior movement, but rather to provide direction.

The first three supplications are for the peace that is necessary before we can enter the Kingdom: “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift” (Matt. 5:23-24). St. Paul begins most of his epistles by evoking this peace from above: “Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:2). It is for this reason the priest begs forgiveness from the clergy and people before beginning the service. In like manner should we ask forgiveness of our brother and sister before Liturgy begins.

In peace let us pray to the Lord: Always remembering that prayer is more than the words we speak – it is the internal action of our spirit inclining toward the Lord – we must be careful to cultivate an inner peace when we pray. To this purpose, St. John Cassian (=435) recommends that the faithful come to church services well before they begin, so that the layers of the world, its thoughts and its cares, can be shed and the proper spirit of peace may be the beginning, and not the end, of prayer.

For the peace from above and the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord: There is a greater peace than that achieved by shedding the cares of the world. There is the peace of the grace of God, bestowed on us by our Creator and Savior: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you” (John 14:27). In the second of the three litanies asking for peace, we ask for this peace and that our souls be saved.

For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy churches of God, and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord: Having asked for peace and salvation for our souls, we immediately supplicate the Lord for peace for all, the health (literally, the ‘good stability,’ eustatheias, from the stem stathmos, meaning ‘the weight-bearing pillar of a structure’) of Christ’s Church, and that all may be united in Christ, which is the purpose of His Body, the Church. Our salvation is not a solitary enterprise; it takes place in the context of our participation in the Church Militant (that of the faithful here on earth) and the Church Triumphant (that of the saints and bodiless powers). That the spiritual life is shared is the deep theological truth behind the supplicatory prayer to the Mother of God: “Most Holy Theotokos save us.” We ask that we be saved together because, in being united together through Christ, our salvation is bound up with one another; therefore, after asking for peace and salvation for one’s self, it is natural and right to immediately ask the same for the world. Of course, the chief means by which God provides for the salvation of the world is through participation in His Church. Therefore, we follow our prayer for the world with a prayer for His holy churches. It is important to understand this litany correctly. By “churches” we do not mean the many and varied confessions of faiths and doctrines that proliferate; neither do we mean the brick and mortar buildings. Rather, we mean the local churches of the One Church, the Orthodox Church. Within our One, Holy, Apostolic Church there are 15 autocephalous churches and another seven autonomous churches. In this supplication, we pray for their good keeping and welfare. We conclude this petition with the request that we all be united in the Lord, remembering that this is the purpose of the Church: to provide for our salvation and deliverance from the world by grafting us onto Christ, the Living and True Vine (John 15:1-8).

For this holy house, and for those who with faith, reverence, and fear of God enter herein, let us pray to the Lord: After praying for the self-governing Orthodox Churches, it is then natural that we pray for our home parish, consisting of the faithful who are uniting themselves to Christ. We pray for the temple, literally “holy house,” which is a consecrated place of worship – a sacred space set aside wherein people experience the Divine Mysteries. Once the Altar Table of a Church is consecrated, it is to be an Altar until the Second Coming of Christ. There is no “retiring” or “closing” an Orthodox temple, or “house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Tim. 3:15). We honor the holiness of God, experienced in the Divine Mysteries, by entering the church with faith and in reverence and fear of God: “let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear” (Heb. 12:28). We place our faith in God that He will compensate for our insufficiencies and weaknesses with His grace. We approach in reverence, never having idle conversation (remembering how Christ threw out the money changers from the Temple [Mark 11:15–33, Matt. 21:12–27, Luke 19:45-20:8, & John 2:12–25]) or inappropriate transactions in church, especially in the nave (or body) of the church. And we draw near in fear of God, ever mindful of the dread and awe-inspiring reality of God and the account we must make before His Throne during the Last Judgment.

So, in the Great Litany, the first three petitions are for peace and the fourth petition is for the temple wherein peace is to be acquired and for the faithful who are seeking it.

Next: Part Three, “The Great Litany Continued”

The catholic consciousness of the Church, where it concerns the teaching of faith, is also expressed in the Orthodox Divine Services which have been handed down to us by the Ecumenical Church. By entering deeply into the content of the Divine service books we make ourselves firmer in the dogmatic teaching of the Orthodox Church.
+Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology

The importance of attending Divine Services cannot be overstated. Protestants sometimes ask, “What would Jesus do?” as if it is possible to imitate the Lord through a mere act of will. The Orthodox spiritual life, on the other hand, allows the Lord to work through us; we grow into the likeness of Christ through the acquisition of grace. Whereas we use our will to obey the Lord’s commandments, we can only acquire grace through a synergistic communion with Him: by receiving His Precious Body and Blood and by participating in His Services so that the prayers of the Church become the voice of our spirit crying to the Lord. In this way, our spirit is oriented toward Christ. Although the Divine Services transmit the essence of our Faith, experiencing them can be so overwhelming that it imperils the correct understanding of their meaning.

Let us begin a study of the Divine Liturgy by considering the Holy Altar Table, the Throne of God, wherein the Divine Sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood occurs. The image of the Divine Liturgy is given to us in Revelation. Read chapters 4 & 5 of Revelation and you will see how the Hierarchal Divine Liturgy follows the vision of St. John, which depicts the Church Triumphant in Heaven. Those who claim that the Divine Liturgy is not Scriptural fail to see how St. John’s vision uncovers (apocalypse) the Mystical Supper instituted by the Lord. As an image of the New Jerusalem, the Holy Table’s “length and breadth and height are equal” (Rev. 21:16). Each consecrated Altar has sealed within it the relics of a martyr (our Altar contains the relics of Great Martyr Lazar), because St. John saw “under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God” (Rev. 6:9). The Table is covered with a white linen and, over that, an elaborate brocade; in this way it is vested like the priest who wears an elaborate brocade phelonion (cape) over a white linen sticharion (robe). On the Table is the antimins (‘instead of the Altar’): a linen cloth with relics sown into it (ours also has the relics of St. Lazar), the image of Christ’s descent from the Cross, and the signature of the Bishop who lends it to the Church. Originally, the antimins were only for temporary Altars that were not consecrated, but now all Altars have one: it represents the sacrificed Lamb: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain” (Rev. 5:12). On the Altar is a Gospel with an icon of the Resurrected Christ on the cover and the images of the four Evangelists: “And the first beast was like a lion [Mark who represents Christ as the King of all men], and the second beast like a calf [Luke who emphasizes Christ as the sacrifice offered for all men], and the third beast had a face as a man [Matthew who represents Christ as the Son of Man], and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle [John’s exalted theology]” (Rev. 4:7). Next to the Gospel is a cross, the universal symbol of Christ’s victory over death. Our Lord Himself revealed to His Apostles that, before His Second Coming in “power and great glory,” will “appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven” (Matt. 24:30). St. Constantine, before the pivotal Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 A.D., saw a vision of the cross above the sun and heard the words, “in this sign you shall conquer.” By resting on the Altar Table, the Table of Sacrifice, the cross represents the instrument by which Christ’s sacrifice for us was enacted. Through this sacrifice, He overcame death by death, so for us it represents victory and blessing. This cross that rests on the Altar is used by the bishop at the conclusion of the Divine Liturgy to bless the people as he distributes the antidoron. In Greek practice, the priest does not use the blessing cross, only the bishop; however, in Slavic practice, it is customary for the priest to also use this cross to bless the people. The seven-branched candelabrum represents the “seven golden candlesticks” (Rev. 1:12) amidst which Christ appears; it also hearkens back to the layout for the Tent of Meeting in Exodus 25:37. Behind the Altar are images of the seraphim, representing the two cherubim of gold that covered the mercy seat of the Ark (Exodus 25:18) and the elevated Crucifix, representing Christ hanging on the Tree, the Fruit of Eternal Life, the tasting of which can overcome the death that entered into the world through eating the forbidden fruit. Importantly, in a Tabernacle (small container shaped like a temple) either on the Table or suspended above it, is the Lamb Himself: a small particle of Christ’s Body & Blood for communing those sick or near death.

Next: Part Two, “Blessing & The Great Litany”

We live in times overwhelmed with images created by man, in a postmodern epoch where each person struggles to produce the most convincing image of himself and his idea, where people try to attract the most people they can through their self image in order to impress and to impose their “icon” (or artificial resemblance) or, better yet, their “idol,” on others (as St Andrew says : “αὐτείδωλον ἐγενόμην”, “I have become an idol to myself”; Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, Ode IV). It is an era which offers falsehood, delusion, and fantasy without transcending the antinomies and limitations of history.

Your Eminence, beloved brother in the Holy Spirit and co-celebrant, Your Graces, and dear pious assembly of the fullness of the Church, the living icons of God.

We live in such times; yet, this moment in time – The Sunday of Orthodoxy, the feast of the Icon – proposes an alternative image: one Divinely-revealed rather than human-made, one that is convicting rather than convincing, one that is iconic rather than idolatrous – the Icon of God.

This Icon represents humanity having received the opportunity to circumscribe and depict the Transcendent God, which only became possible once God became man, expressing his Divinity in human form, bringing the Kingdom of God into the Divine Liturgy, and demonstrating the reality of the Resurrection by asking one of His disciples to verify what he saw by touching Christ’s hands, feet, and side (Jn 20:26). Similarly, the language of the Fathers about Icons, especially that of the 7th Ecumenical Council, has to do with both seeing and beholding the vision of God. But this language introduces a significant problem, evident in these questions: What is the real image of God? What is the real image of man? What is the real image of this world? Does the Icon depict a Platonic ideal? Or does it represent Greco-Roman art? Or does the iconic image capture the corrupted world of Pieter Brueghel or Salvador Dali? Maybe, we Christians also offer an image which very often obscures the image of the Kingdom. Do we not, instead of iconizing the transfigured world of Paradise, most often represent the mere fallen world? This problem faces us in our present-day Church and it is necessary to ask ourselves: maybe our image of the world and the Church overshadows the true image of the Kingdom?

What is the difference between the Icon and the image, between the Divine Image and the image of this world? The two are altogether different.

The first, and significant, difference is that the Icon is not naturalistic; it does not represent something ephemeral, but rather it represents both a Person and a personal relationship. One of the most significant points to emerge from the 7th Ecumenical Council is that one Divine Person – the Son of God – became man, demonstrating that we cannot speak about God or imagine God without the Person who revealed God to us. An image which does not refer to the Person of Christ is an image which refers to the corrupted world and thus leads to death. The Icon is not of this world; it is eschatological both in origin and in content. Not being drawn from history, we can call the Icon meta-historical.

Nevertheless, the Kingdom can only be depicted by using created means. The Icon is distinct from the truth, not because it is false, delusional, or fantastic, but because it borrows its means of expression from still-corruptible nature.

Although its means of expression derive from fallen nature, the Icon refers to the inexpressible Truth by encouraging our personal relations with Truth; a proper Icon creates true personal relationships. That is why an Icon is indivisibly linked with Love: we cannot speak about Truth without Love, and we cannot speak about an Icon that does not lead us to Love.

For Orthodox Christians, this means that the Icon leads us to the Church. There we will meet the other in his or her true state. As Fr. Justin Popovich used to say, “in the Church we are taught to see (iconically) in every man our future brother/sister [as he or she is in]  Paradise.” There, in the Eucharistic synaxis, we will see and meet God through our communion with others. So the function of the Icon is to create a gathering (synaxis), the community we call the Church. The Icon, then, is not only an object that we kiss and venerate, but an eternal synaxis that exists in moments, movements, and actions during the Divine Liturgy. Outside the Church there is not the Kingdom of God; inside the Church, all is iconic.

Here we understand the next characteristic of the icon: it refers to another, not to itself; leading us, thereby, out of solipsism. It encourages us to go out and meet the other. The Icon is person-oriented! When we venerate an Icon of Christ or a Saint, we demonstrate our victory over individualism and show that we are not self-reliant. When the Icon traces this relationship between persons (God and man) and gathers the Church, then the Church becomes a real depiction of the Kingdom of God, leading us to the Divine Eucharist, which is the image or Icon of the Kingdom, as described by St Maximus the Confessor. In the primitive phase of the ancient Church, the Icon was linked closely with the mystery of the Church in her Eucharist. The Eucharist is the celebration that makes the earthly Church what it is, namely, an Icon of the Kingdom.

But, there is yet one more difference between the Icon and the image. The image « fixes » reality, as opposed to the Icon which does not fix but liberates it from natural laws. We celebrate today the Fathers of the 7th Ecumenical synod who gathered to testify that the Church could not exist without Icons, without iconizing the Person of God! When an image becomes an Icon, it no longer refers to itself anymore – to its ephemeral existence; rather, it refers beyond itself – to something beyond this corrupted world. When an image becomes an Icon, it redeems a person or landscape depicted in it and situates that person or landscape in relationship to the Kingdom. In the historical life of the Church, everything is an image of the future. The Icons which depict the Saints are not photographs of their historical faces, but the images of the future they portray.

That is why the Fathers of this Synod repeated what St Basil said in the fourth century: “the honor paid to the Icon passes on to the prototype”! Therefore, when we venerate an Icon, that relationship goes beyond the Icon and reaches the Original source of the image, which is a Person. That is why, in the Church the Word is an Icon, and an Icon is the Word! And this is something that our Church experiences throughout the ages! In our Churches, the Kingdom of God is depicted and represented through Icons, through chanting, through harmonious architecture, through all manner of aesthetic endeavors that are part of our Liturgical expression.  How did the Orthodox survive under the Ottoman rule without catechism or schools? Only through this Iconic approach to embodying Truth. The pious people spoke with God through Icons (iconographic depictions) and Hymns and not through human words or rational formulations; God, in turn, revealed Himself to His people through Icons and Hymns.

This, in the final analysis, means, dear brothers and sisters, that the Divine worship in its liturgical-iconical context has saved the Orthodox Church and not the verbal descriptions and rhetoric of the homilists…such as this present one.

There will be those who assert that an iconic image conveys the Platonic idea of a shadow empty of reality. This makes it difficult to speak of the Church as an Icon without falling into the realm of the imaginative or unreal. But the Iconic nature of the Orthodox Church does not imply a lack of reality, although it does imply a lack of objectified and autonomous reality. As Metropolitan John of Pergamon states, “by being iconic in her existence the Church is two things: (a) she is an image of something else that transcends her—hence, again, a relational entity; and (b) she is in her institutions and structure so transparent as to allow the eschatological realities to be reflected in them all the time. This can hardly be achieved outside the context of worship, for it is there that transcendence and transparency are experienced par excellence.”

My beloved, in this society permeated with the illusions of multimedia in which we live, where image-pollution of all sorts has blurred our vision, we are invited to promote the true Icon of the Kingdom, we are invited to liberate our everyday life from slavery to the natural world through this iconical ethos that our Tradition bequeaths to us; an iconological ethos that leads to an affirmation of the other, which leads very often to “silence” and to deference before the other, who we prefer over ourselves (“Honor one another above yourselves” – Rom 12:10).

Unfortunately, my beloved, Orthodoxy in our times tends to become an ideology, wherein slogans and accusations of betraying the faith and tradition –  understood ideologically – are hurled at one another. But, significantly enough, our Orthodox Church has chosen the commemoration of the Seventh Ecumenical Council to be the Sunday of Orthodoxy. As is well known, this Council dealt with the issue of Icons and did not put forth any propositional definition of the faith. In declaring, “This is the faith of the Fathers; this is the faith which has sustained the oecumene,” the Council pointed to a form of “theology,” the Icon, which was the liturgical experience of the community and required no subscription to conceptual or ideological statements.

This declaration of the 7th Council ended the Christological debate of words by testifying to the reality of the Mystery in the Icon of the Crucified and Risen Lord. This Icon removes our forgetfulness of the eschatological Coming of the Risen One, the eschatological Newness of the Living One (Apoc. 21, 5; 1, 17). So now “we call Christ’s image ‘Christ’. …The Icon of Christ is nothing other than Christ, apart, of course, from the difference in essence” (St. Theodore the Studite).

The identification of the selfsameness of Christ with His image leads us to my final point: Orthodoxy is the Church and not an ideology ! It is a gathering of the people and, particularly, a Eucharistic gathering of living icons. This is what we must emphasize today ! Not an Internet-online-virtual illusion of communication, but the Icon, a visible communication of Kingdom; such must be the future of Orthodoxy because such is the future Christ promises His Church. In the Eucharist, we are taught not only to venerate and greet icons, but also the other members of the synaxis, not passing the living icons – people –  by, but greeting and embracing them. So, the Icon is indeed the right method of looking at the world…Only the iconic approach will save Orthodoxy from becoming a secular organization in the image of the world. 

May this, our commemoration of the Sunday of Orthodoxy today in Los Angeles, serve as a source of sanctification, strength, and hope for the Orthodox faithful.

Finally, from this Holy Ambon we extend our wholehearted well-wishes to the beloved Hierarchs, to the devout clergy, and to the entire flock of the Orthodox Church of America, and we pray that God may bless our efforts and good works, to the glory of our Father Who is in Heaven and the honor of our Church and all the living icons within. 

[For more information on this homily, click here.]

    I read Jennifer Finney Boylan’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, “Is My Marriage Gay?” In “her” (Boylan was born a male and voluntarily underwent the procedure that changes a man into a woman) essay, she explains how transsexuals further complicate the question of gay marriage with considerations that stretch the law beyond what it can handle. She illustrates this point with a quotation from a lawyer in a 1999 case in San Antonio that ruled that marriage could only take place between people who have different chromosomes. If a gay marriage includes a transsexual, San Antonio law would permit it because the transgendered spouse still has the chromosomes of his or her original sex. The lawyer draws out the absurdity of these piecemeal solutions by positing how his client, a transsexual who recently lost a spouse, would experience dramatic changes to both her marriage status and legal gender if she moved from one location to another:
 

Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property,  she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut,  she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male. (qtd. in Boylan)
 

Boylan offers this quotation in her attempt to argue that it is not the “sometimes unanswerable questions of gender and identity” that matter, but “the love a family has.” By basing her conclusion on an ill-defined love, she hopes to reach out to The New York Times readers by touching their sympathies for a marriage based on love, an assumption that runs deep in our contemporary understanding of marriage.
    But what kind of love? Certainly, Orthodox Christians also believe in a marriage based on love, but it is foremost each spouse’s love for Christ that binds husband and wife together. Although Boylan’s lifestyle and marriage are far from Christian, her argument aims to reach anyone, Christian or otherwise, who accepts that marriage is defined by “the love a family has.” Christians, then, would do well to be able to understand the historical importance of marriage in the Church in order to both identify such appeals and be able to offer a response to them. A historical understanding of marriage as a sacramental mystery can also reveal the shortcomings of marriage solely regulated by the state. In a May 31, 2004 article in The New Yorker, American fiction writer Adam Haslett identified our historical moment as one in which “The state is being asked not only to distribute benefits equally but to legitimate gay people’s love and affection for their partners” (79). Understanding what marriage has been for Orthodox Christians of the past can help Orthodox Christians of the present articulate a coherent and detailed definition of marriage that draws from historical precedents, thereby allowing them to offer a concise and comprehensible apology for Orthodox marriage in the midst of a society that aspires to lead while simultaneously blindly following entrenched and unexamined assumptions rooted in heresy.
    It is first important to recognize that many Church heresies led to attacks against the mystery of marriage. Whereas the sacrament as we presently receive it developed over time, the Church, taking its cue from Christ’s first miracle at the wedding in Cana, always honored marriage. Christ’s presence and his miracle were a blessing bestowed not only on the married couple (The Holy Apostle Simon the Zealot and his bride) but also on marriage as a pathway to salvation. Christ demonstrated that when the bride and groom are married, He is present. The first extra-Biblical reference to Church weddings occurs in St. Ireneus of Lyon’s letter to St. Polycarp of Smyrna, dated to the early second century. Other Fathers  throughout the second, third, and fourth centuries reinforce what St. John Chrysostom, writing in the fourth century, emphasizes when he writes: “when Christ is present at a wedding, He brings cheerfulness, pleasure, moderation, modesty, sobriety, and health” (80). The Church has recognized His presence at weddings from its earliest days by bestowing His blessing on newlyweds through the local bishop or priest signing the couple and praying over them. Archimandrite Vassilios Bakoyannis, in Marriage: A Spiritual Arena, gives further testimony to the antiquity of this custom:

This is what was taking place in the first Christian Church. Couples would go to church and receive a “blessing” from the bishop or priest. Witnesses to this were St. Ignatius the God Bearer (107 A.D.) , Tertullian (240 A.D.) , St. Ambrose (397 A.D.) , and others. (28-29)

Bakoyannis later clarifies that this blessing took place within the Divine Liturgy. Later, the marriage was moved to immediately before the Liturgy:

The sacrifice of Christ was always at the center of the liturgy. However, from the fourth century on, although the wedding ceremony was linked to the Divine Liturgy, it did not take place during the Liturgy. First the wedding took place, and then the Divine Liturgy followed in order for the newly weds to receive Holy Communion.  (31)

The thought given to the placement of the wedding in relation to the sacrament of Communion in the ancient Church underscores how Christ’s Church has imitated its Creator by                 blessing marriage from its inception. St. Paul emphasizes Christ’s approval of marriage by identifying any who would make general statements “Forbidding to marry” as “seducing             spirits” teaching the “doctrines of devils” (I Tim. 4:1-3).
    The Church’s recognition of marriage, first in Christ’s presence in Cana and then through St. Paul’s endorsement of marriage, did not go unchallenged by heretics prone to zealotry. The first such attack came from some of the Gnostic sects who believed that only some men had the divine spark kindled within them. Marcion of Pontus (d. ~160) typifies this kind of attack because he subscribed to a strict dualism that regarded all matter as evil, created by the Old Testament god—the Demiurge—who is not the God of the New Testament. This view led to disgust with procreation and, therefore, marriage; we can see this in the Marcionites, who believed that marriage perpetuated the evil work of the Demiurge. It was against this abhorrence of marriage that St. Clement of Alexandria asserted the goodness of marriage. The fourth century Church supported the third-century assertions of Clement, both in the First Ecumenical Council, where St. Paphnutius declared “marriage and married intercourse are of themselves honorable and undefiled [Heb. 13:4]; that the Church ought not to be injured by an extreme severity, for all could not live in absolute continency” and in the Synod Gangra, whose first canon reads “Anathema to him who reproaches marriage” (qtd. in Bakoyannis 36). Bakoyannis recounts:

Whoever abhors relations between man and woman is subject to a heavy penance from the Church because this person disdains her blessing. If this person is a cleric, he is                     defrocked. If he is of the laity, he is excommunicated (according to 51st canon of the Holy Apostles).  (36)

The Church, then, universally affirmed the goodness of marriage.
    Some heretics accepted first marriages, but rejected second marriages. The Montanists were one such group. Their general attitude toward marriage was disproving, but they absolutely forbade second marriages, even though this was not consistent with the Church’s practice, as we can read in St. Paul’s counsel to widows: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I.  But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (I Cor. 7:8-9). The Montanists, instead, wanted to improve upon St. Paul’s teaching. Tertullian (~160-225), who eventually embraced the Montanist heresy, supports their inflexibility on this matter by presuming to interpret the Holy Spirit:
 

Christ abolished the commandment of Moses [. . .] why then should not the Paraclete have cancelled the indulgence granted by Paul? [. . .] let weakness of the flesh bring its reign to an     end with the coming of the Paraclete. The New Law abolished divorce [. . .] the New Prophecy abolished second marriage. (Bettenson 132)

Of course, like all heresies, in diverging from the standard of Christ’s Church, Tertullian’s opinion fails to provide a means by which the truth as revealed by the Holy Spirit can be discerned from the utterances of false prophets. No less authorities than Christ Himself, St. Paul, and St. John the Theologian, warn believers about such false prophets. Why stop with second marriage? Why not prohibit first marriages? If the New Prophecy abolishes what Tertullian terms “indulgences” granted by St. Paul, should Christians return to strict observance of the Mosaic law against which St. Paul strove with St. James and St. Peter as an “indulgence” to his Gentile flock? The degree to which Tertullian’s position is untenable becomes evident: if accepted, it would have actually weakened the Church by making it more susceptible to false prophets who contradict Scripture by claiming to speak the will of the Holy Spirit.
    But claiming to speak for the Holy Spirit is precisely what is at stake in many Gnostic heresies. The Montanists divided the Body of Christ into the pneumatikoi (the spiritual ones) and the psychikoi (the soulish, or worldly, ones). This distinction is perpetuated in later writers like St. Clement who wrote volumes aimed at members of each of these groups: Paedogogus for the psychikoi and Stromateis for the pneumatikoi. However, a familiarity with the present day mystery of marriage can quickly expose the falseness of this view. If some Christians are carnal and to be treated differently from the “spiritual ones” who understand the secret teaching of Christ, why does the marriage service itself, in a remarkable expression of faith and trust in the newly married couple, have the Church pray that the Lord will bless the married couple with the same blessing that He bestowed upon the most venerable and holy of the Old Testament Patriarchs?
 

Bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Isaac and Rebecca; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Jacob and all the patriarchs; bless them, O Lord our God, as     Thou didst bless Joseph and Asenanth; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Moses and Zipporah; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Joachim and Anna; bless them, O Lord our God, as Thou didst bless Zacharias and Elizabeth.  (Great Book of Needs 167)
 

The Church calls upon the betrothed the same blessing as that bestowed on the Patriarchs, even that of “Thy servant Abraham” and Sara, whom the Lord made “the father of many nations” (Great Book of Needs 165-66).  Abraham and Sarah: Abraham, the father of Hebrew nation and the very model of Christian faith for St. Paul. The Church calls upon the betrothed the same blessing as that of Zacharias and Elizabeth, who bore the child about whom Christ Himself would say “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist” (Matt. 11:11). Finally, the Church calls upon the betrothed the same blessing as Joachim and Anna, who gave birth to the Theotokos, the sole woman in all history found worthy to bear Christ the God Man. And this passage is not the only time in the marriage service that the Church situates the newlyweds within the context of the greatest spiritual figures of Scripture. In both the betrothal service and throughout the crowning, the Church invokes the Lord’s blessing upon the couple in a manner similar to those blessings received by the Patriarchs, Prophets, and devout faithful of both the Old and New Testament. These prayers acknowledge that the newly married couple is a part of God’s Divine plan as much as any of the saints. John Chryssavgis describes the matrimonial prayers as “a genealogical outline that aims at emphasizing the purpose of human life, which is the crowning in the kingdom of God and the realization of God’s presence among us. There is a constant leap from the historical to the eschatological, from the fallen creation to the New City of Jerusalem” (32-33). There is, however, no distinction between psychikoi and pneumatikoi. Neither is there a separate “spiritual” wedding service and a “soulish” one. The prayers of the wedding sacrament, by asserting that all are part of the Divine plan, are as strong a denunciation as possible of the Gnostic heresy that some have the divine spark of the Holy Spirit and some do not.
    The challenge to today’s Orthodox Christian understanding of marriage, however, is not coming from those who challenge marriage as a mystery. Rather, it comes from those who look to the state, rather than the Church, to define marriage. Those who would do so understand marriage exclusively in legal terms, recognizing the benefits of common ownership of property, the legal right to represent one’s spouse, and the ability to file taxes jointly. Those who would defend a strictly legal understanding of marriage risk losing the primacy of the sacramental understanding of marriage—marriage as a mystery in the Church. The Church, of course, is not threatened by such politics and it is tempting to say “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21). However, when making a defense of the mystery of marriage, it is useful for the Orthodox Christian to understand the historical developments that contributed to our contemporary shift away from the Christian understanding of marriage. Importantly, such a study can unearth heretical notions that not only contribute to the contemporary secular understanding of marriage but can infect the Orthodox understanding of marriage as mystery.
    As a Christian mystery, marriage has never been properly understood as a means of satisfying romantic love. St. John Chrysostom identifies two principal purposes for marriage:

These are the two purposes for which marriage was instituted: to make us chaste, and to make us parents. Of these two, the reason of chastity takes precedence. When desire began,  then marriage also began. It sets a limit to desire by teaching us to keep to one wife.  (85)
 

Haslett notes that the contemporary, romantic understanding of marriage developed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation:
 

It was during the Reformation, with the emergence of the early Protestant idea of ‘companionate marriage,’ that the emotional bond between husband and wife came to be seen as an end in itself [. . .]. Today, needlessly to say, the most respectable reason you can give for getting married is that you have fallen in love. We have managed to create an ideal of matrimony that combines both lifetime companionship and the less stable but more intoxicating pleasures of romantic ardor.  (76)
 

In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont probes deeper into this shift that has taken place in how marriage is understood. In romantic marriage, the only possible basis on which it can rest is individual choice. This means, actually, that the success of any given marriage depends upon an individual notion of the nature of happiness, which at best may be assumed to be identical in the minds of both parties. (290)
How this state of affairs can lead to our contemporary arguments for gay marriage is clear:
 

When you add the contraceptive and reproductive technologies that have separated sex from procreation, what you have is a model of heterosexual marriage that is grounded in and almost entirely sustained on individual preference. This is a historically peculiar state of affairs, one that would be alien to our ancestors and to most traditional cultures today. And it makes the push for gay marriage inevitable.  (Haslett 78)
 

This notion of romantic love for which homosexuals are now seeking legal sanction is the desire for an experience that transcends the dullness of daily routine: “passion is everywhere treated as an experience, something that will alter my life and enrich it with the unexpected, with thrilling chances, and with enjoyment ever more violent and gratifying” (de Rougemont 292). This passion derives from what de Rougemont calls “a capacity for boredom which is almost morbid” (291).

    Romantic love, then, can be properly regarded as an attempt to flee a terribly unexciting life. Whereas this may not be difficult for the twenty-first century reader to imagine, impregnated as he or she may be with images of daring do and passionate love conveyed to us through film, television, romantic ballads, the Internet, and pulp fiction, one must ask from whence the sixteenth-century Protestant inherited this notion of “companionate” marriage?
    Reaching back much farther than Haslett in his analysis of the development of marriage based on romantic love, de Rougemont connects the notion not so much with the Protestant Reformation but with the development of courtly love in the south of France in the twelfth century (de Rougemont 76). Reacting to the arranged marriages of the aristocracy, the troubadours sang ballads and wrote poems that celebrated romantic love outside of marriage. In fact, in the courtly romance genre, it was impossible for romantic love to flourish within marriage. Romantic love needed an obstacle—such as the double censure against infidelity from both society and Catholicism—for it to flourish. Romantic passion is born in the desire for the unattainable object. The presence of an obstacle to the consummation of romantic love is so essential that in the archetypal courtly romance of Tristan and Iseult, when Tristan and Iseult (who is married to Tristan’s lord, King Mark) finally flee to the wilderness for three years, they live together chastely: when the barrier is removed and the romance is finally attainable, the romance atrophies; later, the romance returns when the lovers are again separated. The fictions of courtly romances implanted expectations for an exhilarating, mystical, and passionate love in the courts of southern France; as the courtly romances migrated from court-to-court across Europe, so too did the expectations for romantic love. Beginning as an aristocratic indulgence in the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter, Marie de Champagne, the idea of romantic love was popularized and vulgarized until the Protestants about whom Haslett writes were able to combine it with the traditional Christian marriage.
    Except, of course, that the notion of courtly love is a mythology that is fundamentally incompatible with Christian marriage. Classically, Romantic love flourishes when the object of desire is unobtainable. St. Paul, on the other hand, instructs Christian spouses never to withhold marital relations from each other. The spouse is not to be unobtainable but to be readily available. St. John Chrysostom comments: “’The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband’ (I Cor 7:3). And what are conjugal rights? First, it means that the wife has no power over her own body, but she is her husband’s slave—and also his ruler” (26). In the Christian understanding, marriage is predicated on self-mastery. A Christian masters his appetites and then surrenders his body to his spouse out of this self-controlænot from the lack thereof; one cannot, after all, surrender to the spouse what one does not have. In the romantic understanding of marriage, one surrenders to passion. In surrendering to passion, a man becomes passive, willing himself to be defeated by the passion: “But really a man becomes free only when he has attained self-mastery, whereas a man of passion seeks instead to be defeated, to lose all self-control, to be beside himself and in ecstasy” (de Rougemont 293). There is a hint of this kind of ecstatic loss of self-control in the very phrase, “to fall in love.”
    When romantic love becomes the basis for the love between husband and wife, the seeds of divorce are sown. Any love that flourishes before obstacles but diminishes when satisfied will undermine a marriage, turning it into suffering in the midst of what will be perceived as complacency. Herein de Rougemont identifies the source of the divorce rate that soared in the twentieth century:

passion wrecks the very notion of marriage at a time when there is being attempted the feat of trying to ground marriage in values elaborated by the morals of passion [de Rougemont’s emphasis]. Of course it would be going too far to suggest that a majority of people today are prey to Tristan’s frenzy. Few are capable of the thirst that would cause them to drink the        love-potion, still fewer are being elected to succumb to the archetypal anguish. But they are all, or nearly all, dreaming about it.  (298)

If this is what the lovers in the world are dreaming about, about what are Orthodox Christian spouses dreaming?
    St. John Chrysostom clearly delineated two purposes for the Orthodox marriage: the preservation of chastity and the creation and rearing of children. There is, however, an additional purpose. We should understand that this purpose takes primacy above the preservation of chastity just as St. John declares that the preservation of chastity takes primacy over procreation. That purpose is the mutual accountability before God that comes through a shared spiritual life. We can presume that this purpose takes precedence over the others because just as some who marry cannot have children, thereby making the preservation of chastity the greater purpose for marriage (Chrysostom 86), a very few married couples voluntarily choose to live as brother and sister. Therefore, sharing the spiritual life, which is an indispensable part of marriage, would seem to be even more important than forestalling lust. We have St. John of Krondstadt and his matushka, Elisabeth, as twentieth-century examples in this regard. In “Marriage: The Great Sacrament,” Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra writes that “marriage can contribute to our spiritual life.” He elaborates on how this happens:
 

In marriage, it seems that two people come together. However it’s not two but three. The man marries the woman, and the woman marries the man, but the two together also marry Christ. So three take part in the mystery, and three remain together in life [. . .]. In Latin, the word "mystery" was rendered by the word sacramentum, which means an oath. And marriage is an oath, a pact, a joining together, a bond, as we have said. It is a permanent bond with Christ.
 

The proper meaning of Archimandrite Aimilianos’s words becomes clear when one has an understanding of the theological deliberations of the fifth-century Church: Christ is of one nature (homoousios) with the Father in His divinity and, at the same time, of one nature (homoousios) with humanity. St. John Chrysostom himself acknowledges this when he writes:

Christ was born from our matter, just as Eve was fashioned from Adam’s flesh. Paul [. . .] speak[s] of flesh and bones, for the Lord has exalted our material substance by partaking of it Himself [. . .] We are truly members of Christ because through Him we were created, and we are truly members of His flesh because we are recreated by partaking His mysteries.  (50-51)

When we partake of the mysteries, we unite with Christ’s energies. Since husband and wife become one through marriage, when one grows closer to Christ, both grow closer to Christ. Fr. Aimilianos says as much when he defines the sacrament of marriage as “a bridge leading us from earth to heaven:”
 

And so marriage is a road: its starts out from the earth and ends in heaven. It is a joining together, a bond with Christ, who assures us that he will lead us to heaven, to be with him always. Marriage is a bridge leading us from earth to heaven. It is as if the sacrament is saying: Above and beyond love, above and beyond your husband, your wife, above the everyday events, remember that you are destined for heaven, that you have set out on a road which will take you there without fail.
 

    The dogma of the Holy Trinity, then, complements the theology of marriage. Conversely, the doctrine of romantic love as born in the courts of southern France in the twelfth century –
 within a few decades of the Great Schism of 1054 A.D. that removed Roman Catholics from the protective grace of Christ’s Church – is associated with a complement heresy: The Docetist heresy of the French Cathars of the twelfth century. de Rougemont associates the troubadours with the Cathars. Whereas such an association might appear contradictory at first because the Cathars practiced chastity whereas the troubadours celebrated the surrender to passion, de Rougemont argues that the courtly romances were originally “highly elaborate” symbolic allegories for the chaste life (87). Relatively quickly, however, they became appreciated for their denotative rather their connotative meaning. Thus a rhetoric of surrendering to the passions develops from a heresy that was, essentially, a Neoplatonic denial of matter as evil, not unlike that of the Marcionites:
 

The Dualist Christ, like that of the Gnostics and of Manes, was not really incarnated; but he took the appearance of a man. Such is the great Docetist heresy (‘Docetist’, from the Greek [.     . .] [for] apparition) which, from Marcion to our own day, expresses our quite ‘natural’ refusal to countenance the scandal of a Man-God. The Cathars therefore rejected the dogma of the     Incarnation, and a fortiori its Roman translation in the sacrament of the mass. They replaced it with a supper of brotherhood which symbolized purely spiritual events. They also                 rejected baptism by water, and recognized only baptism by the consolatory Spirit.  (de Rougemont 73)
 

Like the Montanist heretics, the Cathars divided their church into two groups: the perfecti and the imperfecti (de Rougemont 75). The perfecti alone received the full Cathar doctrine but were not permitted to marry. The imperfecti “were allowed to marry and to go on living in a world which the Pure condemned” (75).
    It is not surprising that a heresy that rejected the Incarnation of Christ and, as a logical consequence of this denial, rejected the sacramental life of the Church (for the sacrament of Communion represents anew the Incarnation of Christ in matter every time the Divine Liturgy is performed) would reject the sacrament marriage. Furthermore, it would only stand to reason that a body of literature such as that of courtly romance, however distantly removed from Docetism in its popular form, produced an image of love that is non-sacramental in character: love waxes precisely because it is not fulfilled and when fulfilled, wanes. Compare this to the Church’s teaching about Its mysteries: we grow closer to Christ by partaking of Communion, not being denied It. Similarly, we grow closer to Christ through the shared spiritual life of the mystery of matrimony, not living liminally, forever in anticipation but never fulfilled.
    Our fulfillment comes through the sacramental experience of union with Christ through marriage wherein “both humanity and God act. This cooperation (of synergy) is the underlying significance of the great ‘mysterion’ of marriage” (Chryssavgis 35). This is not a legal understanding of marriage any more than it is a sexual, romantic, or moral understanding of marriage. This is a sacramental understanding of marriage: marriage as mystery that unites us to Christ. As such, it is entirely foreign to the world’s understanding of marriage, about which we hear so much debate and strife. Haslett notes that “A state-sponsored, lifelong, intimate relationship—or the prospect of it—now carries a heavy and often unbearable responsibility for personal happiness” (80). When the goal of marriage becomes “the goal of self-fulfillment,” the prospect of fulfilling that goal can become almost as terrifying as failing to do so (80). For that fulfillment, inevitably, will settle into boredom that itself must be transcended through passion. As long as the root cause of discontent remains undiagnosed, the same treatment will be applied again and again. We can see this phenomenon in the multiple divorcee who treats spouses as stepping stones on the path to some indefinite bliss. However, and this is crucial, we must recognize this temptation within ourselves, pluck the beam from our own eye, and embrace a historical, Orthodox vision of the mystery of marriage as a bridge from earth to heaven.
 

Works Cited

Aimilianos. “Marriage: The Great Sacrament.” The Church at Prayer: The Mystical Liturgy of the Heart. Ormylia, Greece: The Holy Convent of the Annunciation, 2005. 111-125. Orthodox Christian Information Center. 25 May 2009. < http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/
praxis/marriage.aspx >.

Bakoyannis, Archimandrite Vassilios. Marriage: A Spiritual Arena. Trans. Konstantine D. Papathanides. Athens: Orthodox Book Centre, 2005.

Bettenson, Henry, trans. and ed. The Early Christian Fathers. London: Oxford UP, 1956.

Boylan, Jennifer Finney. “Is My Marriage Gay?” The New York Times 12 May 2009: A23.

Chrysostom, St. John. On Marriage and Family Life. Trans. Catharine P. Roth and David Anderson. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary P, 1997.

Chryssavgis, John. Love, Sexuality and the Sacrament of Marriage. Brookline, Massachusetts: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998.

de Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957.

The Great Book of Needs, Volume I: The Holy Mysteries.  Trans. St. Tikhon’s Monastery.  South Canaan, Pennsylvania: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1998.

Haslett, Adam. “Love Supreme: Gay Nuptials and the Making of Modern Marriage.” The New Yorker 31 May 2004: 76-80.

For more information on the Diocesan Days 2009 in Jackson, CA, click here.

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His Grace, Bishop Justin, Bishop of Timok, Serbia
Diocesan Days – 2009

Your Eminence and honorable priests:

At the loving invitation of my brother and concelebrant in Christ, the Bishop and Shepherd of the Western American Diocese, His Grace, Maxim, I was given the opportunity to participate in the joyous celebration of these Diocesan Days. Such an event reminds us of our existence as Orthodox Christians, and testifies to the enduring presence of Christ’s Church. Today we rejoice at gathering on such a wonderful Sunday, the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, after having celebrated the Divine Liturgy and partaken of the Most Pure and Holy Mysteries—the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ—which is both our foundation and our hope.

Living amongst you these few days, I have learned about both your needs and struggles, just as I have done for those in my own Diocese in Eastern Serbia from which I come. I have grown to understand that you have many virtues, but that you also have weakness, which is an indication of the “whole man”—because the Lord came to save sinners, which we are.

But we have hope because we find ourselves in a boat. This place that we find ourselves is, yes, a boat, which slowly but surely moves towards its destination. Its goal is to arrive at a peaceful and blessed harbor, the Lord Himself. But, because we know that great danger is found out at sea—tumultuous waters, pirates, and rocks on which a vessel can run aground—we know that we are also in danger. We are like Peter who came out of the ship when the Lord called him to Himself. He walked for the first few steps as if on dry land, but then beginning to sink, crying out: “Lord save me!” The Lord said to him, “Why did you doubt, O you of little faith?”

And the Lord God asks the same of us. Why is it that we who have received the grace of the Holy Spirit and the Power of Heaven, and have been baptized in the Name of the Holy Trinity, are often frightened in these stormy seas and seek help elsewhere? We often forget the Lord Who is our Creator and Saviour.

These words are of a spiritual nature; let us now move to things that are a bit more personal. As is our custom in the Serbian household tradition with which you are all familiar back home, when an unexpected guest comes to our house, we ask him: “Who are you and to what house do you belong?” so that he can briefly represent himself.

You probably see me as a man of the Church, isn’t that right? As such, I do not seem to be much different than other hierarchs or celebrants. But, what if I were to tell you that from the age of five I really loved to fish, because while fishing I saw the secret and invisible world: the fish emerges from the “hidden world” that we cannot see beneath the living water. I fished all the way up to my twenty-fourth year, fishing in almost every river and participating in every competition, until the Lord caught me in a miraculous way! Through fishing, the Lord fished for me for His own purpose. I heard that holy and blessed calling which He had given to His disciples and apostles, “Leave your fishing and come, fish for the souls of men.” That preparation which I had for this new type of fishing was of great benefit to me, because I knew which bait to use depending on for whom I was fishing. Not every fish will bite every bait and there is no universal method to catch a fish. But through fishing I thought about the essence of life. I was far from God and not all that close to the Church at one point earlier in life, but I was at least close to this hobby. When I was young, I didn’t go to the disco clubs and such where the youth of my age went at those times. But, within nature, I found the creation of God. And, little by little, the Lord prepared my soul and heart so that, through the creation of God, I could open up my heart to the Creator Himself.

And that is why I now attempt to cast out my bait for all of you, so that you also might enter into the wondrous Providence of God and, when the Lord catches you, you will never be free to live in the water again without your Creator. Beneath the water—and by “water” I mean life in this world—life has its own interesting ways wherein everyone finds his own reason to distract himself from the things of real value. But today I tell you that the greatest joy and the greatest happiness is being under the wings of the true Church. There is no room there for fear; There is no room there for doubts—because the Lord who has called us all will also redeem us.

May the Lord God grant that we who have gathered around Him, our one Saviour, beneath the guidance of our Bishop who is the head of the Church here in Western America, may confess as one: “Holy is the Lord God of Sabbaoth, the Creator of Heaven and Earth; Heaven and Earth are full of Thy glory!”

May you all live many years and may the Lord God grant you to have more virtues than weakness. In the words of the Apostle Paul, may the grace and love of God be with you always. Amen.

Chalcedon’s Christology:
Theological, Historical and Cultural Significance

Who do people say I AM?
True God and True Man:
Chalcedon’s Christology in a Postmodern World

Preface

Chalcedonian Christology is a quintessential ingredient of the continuing liturgical-dogmatic-ethical life of the Church. Ever since then, the Church has constantly re-received and transmitted this Christological truth—“one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ”.   In fact one can go even further and make the point that the Chalcedonian definition of Christ entailed not only a vertical perspective (consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead), but also a horizontal perspective of the people of Israel to which Jesus belonged as Man (consubstantial with us according to Manhood).  Without any doubt, Chalcedon brought about a helpful integration of ‘theology’ and ‘economy’, of transcendence and immanence.  Being God, and belonging to a certain historical era and generation, Christ accepted what was the de facto human context as his own context .  Thus Christology inevitably implies Ecclesiology and even Sociology.

For these reasons I propose to deal with my subject in the following way: First, I will try to point out Chalcedon’s major theological issues in the historical life of the Church.  Second, we will look at the present day situation and see what opportunities these issues provide for the Churches and society.  Finally, we will also try to identify ways in which the Chalcedonian Christology can operate today with its theological, historical and cultural dimensions.  Without going into the subtle, nuanced formulations of Chalcedon’s Definition—for this is the most beautiful dogmatic/doctrinal text of all Ecumenical Councils—we will attempt to present the significance of Chalcedon in a way that is accessible to a wider audience.  

I A Quick Look at History

It is not possible for this presentation to offer a detailed historical analysis of the Concilium universale Chalcedonense (=Fourth Ecumenical Council), which, given its importance, deserves a separate monograph.  That Council, held in the city of Chalcedon, near Constantinople, in 451, is one of the seven ecumenical councils accepted by the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and many Protestant Christian churches.  However, it is the first Council not recognized by any of the Oriental Orthodox churches, in spite of the fact that it was designed to heal the growing Christological division.  The Chalcedonian creed was written amid controversy between the western, eastern and oriental churches over the meaning of the Incarnation.  We must, however, know a few historical facts.

1. The Council of Chalcedon was a courageous and quick response to the “Robber Synod” of 449, and was aimed at overturning its decisions.  That gathering, dubbed the “Robber Synod” by Pope Leo of Rome, had articulated an extreme Alexandrian Christology.  The bishops at Chalcedon disclaimed the council of 449 and deposed Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria for his role in that gathering.
2. It is commonly held that the Council of Chalcedon was more or less a ‘Cyrillian’ Council; it followed his theology and thus continues the Third Ecumenical Council.
   The Chalcedonian Definition includes the main expressions from the Formula of concordance in 433.  It also uses Flavian’s homologia, and the Tomos of Pope Leo.  So it is a synthesis of Alexandrine, Antiochean and western Christological elements in the Definition, but this synthesis was produced completely within the framework of Cyril’s Christology.
3. However, we must not forget that Chalcedon’s principal aim was to condemn monophysitism and to exclude the possibility of an asymmetrical  monophysite interpretation of Cyrillian Christology.  
   The Fathers of the Council could have chosen either the formula ‘out of two natures’ (ἐκ δύο φύσεων) or the formula ‘in two natures’ (ἐν δύο φύσεσιν), and they chose the latter.  The reason for this was that the Cyrillian formula ἐκ δύο φύσεων did not clearly indicate the existence of a full humanity after the union.
   In addition, Dioscorus had used this formula at the Council of 449, which had rehabilitated the monophysite Eutyches.  Thus, when the Fathers of Chalcedon had to choose between ‘Dioscorus, who denied the two natures in Christ, [and] Leo, who argued that there are two natures’, they unanimously chose the latter, and this led them to adopt the expression ἐν δύο φύσεσιν.
4. But the latter developments have also made the entire matter even more complicated for the following reason:
   The distinction between φύσις and ὑπόστασις, affirmed at the Council, was too new and revolutionary in the theology of incarnation to not provoke different interpretations and misunderstandings. The Council’s definition thus gave rise to a couple of persistent questions, which have bedeviled theologians up to the present day. One of the problems lied in the fact that Eastern Mesopotamia did not posses Greek conceptual tools. They could not understand what the Council’s distinction was between nature and person/hypostasis.

Those who rejected Chalcedon—namely, the anti-Chalcedonian ‘monophysites’— thought that the Christologies of Cyril and Chalcedon were incompatible.  According to them, there was no distinction between nature and person/hypostasis, at least on the level of economy, hence their dismay at the Council, which had ostensibly restored the heresy of Nestorius by attributing two natures to Christ.  

We cannot now investigate their reasons for opposing the Council in details.  We know that when the Definition was to be signed, unfortunately the bishops from Alexandria—although they accepted the faith—did not put their signatures.  They simply stated “we don’t have our patriarch”.  He should sign it first and then us.  When we come back to Alexandria we will elect one and let him sign it first.  There were those who were disingenuously hiding behind this in order to avoid signing the definitions of Chalcedon.  When they got back to Alexandria, the schism occurred because the Orthodox elected their own bishop Proterius, while the other party elected another.  That’s how the schism took place, and how the monophysite Church emerged.  It happened initially in Alexandria, then in Antioch, Jerusalem and Ethiopia.  These are the four Churches: the Coptic in Egypt, the Ethiopian, the Syrian in Syria and India and the Armenian Church with its roots in Lebanon. 

The creed became standard orthodox doctrine, while the Coptic church of Alexandria dissented, holding to Cyril’s formula of the oneness of Christ’s nature as the incarnation of God the Word (μια φυσις του Θεου Λογου σεσαρκωμενη) .  This church felt that this understanding required that the creed should have stated that Christ be acknowledged ‘from two natures’ rather than ‘in two natures’.  This miaphysite position, often known as "Monophysitism", formed the basis for the distinction of what we call the Oriental Orthodox churches – the Coptic church of Egypt and Ethiopia and the "Jacobite" churches of Syria and Armenia. Over the last 30 years, however, the miaphysite position has been accepted as a mere restatement of orthodox belief by the Eastern Orthodox Church and by the Roman Catholic Church.  

II Theological significance

So to the question: what is the existential meaning of its Christology—related to the problem of the overcoming of death—we can answer by analyzing the four adverbs of the Definition: ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως. 

Fr John Meyendorff holds that these “four negative adverbs, while they condemned the two contrary heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches, excluded any pretention to explain fully in human terms the very mystery of the incarnation”. It is true that this Creed, being an extraordinary theological and philosophical achievement, does not exhaust the whole truth; neither does it detract from the personal character of this revelation.  These verbal confessions refer to the living Person of Christ, and the Church through them ‘receives’ above all a Person and not ideas.  However, beyond this apophatical aspect, they offer a solid basis for further theological meaning. Metropolitan John Zizioulas, in his lucid study, “’Created’ and ‘Uncreated’: The Existential Significance of Chalcedonian Christology” elaborated the meaning of two of these words: ἀσυγχύτως (without confusion) and ἀδιαιρέτως (without division). 

Let us try here to see the significance of ἀτρέπτως, unchangeably and ἀχωρίστως, inseparably.  The first of these adverbs ἀτρέπτως means that, in Christ—theologically, anthropologically, cosmologically and ecclesiologically—there was no change between the two natures, per se.  The essence of the natures (so to speak) did not change.  Their otherness is completely respected and preserved.  So, anthropologically, man remains completely man, and not god, and vice versa; cosmologically, the created nature remains created, and not uncreated, and vice versa.  On the other hand, ἀδιαιρέτως refers to such a union, being perfect and absolute, where nothing can separate them because of the hypostatic union (as opposed to “union of natures”).  By preserving the two natures after the Incarnation, Chalcedon safeguarded the precious concept of otherness! We shall see below how important this aspect is for us today.  Speaking existentially in terms of person and nature, Chalcedon affirmed both unitatis and alteritas, communion and otherness.  This is the accomplishment of these apophatic formulations.  

Chalcedon provided the Church with a terminology capable of protecting the faith from both Nestorian and monophysite aberrations.  By stating that the one person of Christ is one hypostasis, it demonstrated its determined opposition to Nestorianism.  
On the other hand, by saying that this hypostasis is known in two natures, not only in a divine but also in a human nature, it showed that it is unacceptable to confuse Christ’s natures, to jeopardize his consubstantiality with the Father and with us, or to undermine the fullness and integrity of his humanity after the union. The Theanthropic “bogocovecanska” reality of Christ does not represent a mere episode of human history but the ontological basis of its salvation.

III Postmodern Cultural and Existential Significance

Chalcedonian Oros [Definition] presents Christ as the Savior of the world, as a cosmic Christ.  However, it is not because Jesus Christ brought a model of morality or a teaching for humanity; it is because He himself incarnates the overcoming of death, because, in his own Person, the created from now on lives eternally.  This was a profoundly eucharistic approach to the Chalcedonian Christology, since the reception of Christ by the people of God always takes place in the event of communion.  Eucharist was not of course the focus of Chalcedon.  But it is widely admitted that the Eucharist occupies the central place in Christology .

1. So, we deal here with the existential meaning of Chalcedon: Who is Christ? What is Christ for me (per me).  It is critical for the theology to regain its existential meaning and purpose, and to cease from being alien to the agonizing questions of contemporary man.

   The problem lies in the fact that, because of alien theological terms that we have adopted without much discernment, contemporary man’s answer to the Lord’s question: “what do men say about who I am?”, is either, A) that Christ is of no interest to him because He cannot help him out of his miseries, or, B) that Christ has placed upon him an unbearable burden which has completely weighed him down.  Very few are those who recognize Christ today as “meek and of a humble heart”, or as the good Samaritan—being “consubstantial with us according to Manhood”—who “pours oil and wine over man’s wounds”.  Maybe Christ loved sinners ‘more’ than others.  

   Our ecclesial communities should expand Christ’s prayer at Gethsemane to the whole world, offering themselves to the world instead of imposing themselves on it .

   We live in an age of individualism.   In our so-called civilization, everyone thinks only of himself; this attitude is not limited to the “secular” world, but is also present among Christians.  Individualism has crept in and each one of us tries to be reconciled with God by himself, on his own.  He forgets his brother or looks at him as an object of his criticism and blame and forgets that the meaning of the spiritual life, the fulfillment of our salvation, exists in this receiving of our brother. 

2. CHALCEDON AND THE INCULTURATION OF THE GOSPEL. But in spite of this general wisdom of Chalcedon’s Christology—which we must always bear in mind—its theological content acquired, over the course of history, a very important sense.  This sense is mainly associated with the life of the Church as manifested in culture, in arts (iconography, architecture), and in parish life (cf. Yannaras on transformative power of this truth)… One can go even further and conclude that Chalcedonian (and of course Post-Chalcedonian) Christology influenced the whole process of the inculturation of the Gospel.  One can speak about the “cultural” epistemology proposed by Chalcedon which has an indisputably “incarnational” basis.
3. CONTEXTUAL MANIFESTATION.  So, what is the contextual manifestation of the eternal Christological/dogmatic content(s) of Chalcedon? History has offered various responses to it, and we note just a few: the Russian Christology of kenosis, so evident in iconography; the Theanthropic Christology of fr Justin Popovic, the “asymmetrical Christology” of George Florovsky, or the “Pneumatologically conditioned Christology” of John Zizioulas… On the basis of this Christology, for instance, St. Gregory Palamas develops an authentic and real hesychast anthropology. Only Christ is the key which enables us to come to God without losing ourselves—our otherness. He enables human self-realization without destroying the God in us and without abolishing the human. The Mystery of Christ is not just a dogma of our Faith but also a great gift of God—the Way in which God, as the Land of the Living (Psalm 26:15), gives Himself to man and accepts man in Himself, without abolishing either.
   As St Maximus stated, “for the Word of God (Christ) and God wants always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”  All the above mentioned Christological expressions are faithful to Chalcedon, because they are also grounded on the four adverbs (ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως).  Inculturation inevitably involves the Incarnation of Christ, be it in forms other than, and in addition to, the historical one.  “Always and in all things” (continuously and everywhere) indicates that there is no race and no culture to which the Word of God can be unrelated.  It is critical for the Logos (both the eternal Word and the theological word) to regain existential meaning and purpose.
4. LOGOS INSEPARABLY CONNECTED WITH PNEUMA.  Yet, what makes this “true God and True Man” (qeo\j a)lhqw½j kaiì aÃnqrwpoj a)lhqw½j) an inclusive corporate personality, that is, Someone who takes part in all human agonies and weaknesses.  It is another divine person, about which Chalcedon doesn’t speak—the Holy Spirit who works with Christ.  Christ relates to people’s culture by the Holy Spirit, because Logos is inseparably connected with Pneuma.  For now, we can say that “the Spirit allows Christ to enter again and again in every culture and assume it by purifying it, that is, by placing it in the light (or one might say under the judgment) of what is ultimately meaningful as it is revealed in Christ.”  Theology must not simply speak about God, but invite people to His Body, for Christ is not an individual, conceivable in isolation: He is “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom 8.29).  
   So, communion with the personal being of God through Christ in the Spirit is the primary service which the Church can render to every person and to all humanity in the modern world.
5. AN “EXISTENTIAL” CHRIST.  With the help of these theological principles, drawn from a study of Chalcedon’s Christology, we can make the following points in regard to the arts. We should emphasize that Orthodox iconography depicts Christ as a full man, as opposed to the monophysite depiction! This God-man realism was also applied in architecture, as Hagia Sophia  in Constantinople testifies. Within this broader theological and existential context, Christian art went beyond the dilemma of anthropological maximalism or minimalism or beyond any symmetry in Christology! This is expressed throughout Byzantine architecture and iconography (Hagia Sophia, Pantokrator, Hora ton zoonton etc.).
   So, a Byzantine icon of Jesus Christ always indicates Christ’s eternity (as the Pantocrator, “the Same through all Ages”), but, at the same time, the expression in Christ’s face (gaze, eyes…) reveals his participation in human agonies and weaknesses.  Gazing at Him we might say that this is an “existential” Christ Who, having become man, lives through the antinomies of human existence, through time and difficulties, through passions and suffering.  This is a Christ Who does not wish to be separated from human beings; He is descending to their level, taking upon Himself all human troubles and conditions (la condition humaine—the human condition) —everything except sin.  In the Orthodox iconographic depiction of Christ’s face (eyes), we can see a complete sympathy for us humans, which culminated in the Cross and in the Resurrection. 
6. TRUE SENSE OF BEING HUMAN.  Our postmodern time demands a respect for otherness (personal distinctiveness and identity)! However, this otherness remains in tragic isolation; nothing is as dreadful as the “other” without the inseparable union with somebody else.  How can the Chalcedonian dogma help in this situation?

   Respect for otherness is ‘covered’ with four Chalcedonian terms: ἀσυγχύτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀτρέπτως (unchangeably) and ἀχωρίστως (inseparably).  Being inseparably united with us, Christ of Chalcedon identifies Himself with all of us.  Not only does He simply bear man’s infirmities but also He takes on responsibility for all these.  He took this responsibility on the Cross exactly because He was the one who was paying for the sins of others.  He did not simply bear the infirmities of others but He paid for them.  And, what is valid for Christ is valid for all of us.
    
   This leads us to the next important aspect of this unchangeable and inseparable unity. We, too, are invited to ‘receive one another.’ What does it mean to receive our brother? Simply to tolerate him? Because this is the point where many times we stop.  This is not the meaning of ‘receiving.’ Receiving means I receive him within me and I become one with him–like receiving food. And what happens when we receive food? One element of its nature becomes part of our body.  It is assimilated by our body, transformed and becomes one body with us. I tried to make this section a bit more succinct.  A definition of ‘receiving’ and an example of human relations might help.
    

7. Chalcedon doesn’t address the ecclesiological dimension of the Mystery of Christ. However, Christ is inseparably connected with the Church, which is supposed to be the body of Christ, the very presence of the Divine gift to the world in each place. In our particular situation today, our divided Churches are called to receive from one another and indeed to simply receive one another.  This raises all sorts of fundamental ecclesiological questions, since the highest point of unity in this context is that of mutual ecclesial recognition and not simply agreement on doctrine.  
   It now seems only to be a matter of when, rather than of if, the restoration of full communion between our Churches, which has been sadly interrupted for centuries, will occur.

Concluding Remarks

In this presentation, we tried first to identify ways in which the Chalcedonian Christology could operate today. It is obvious that there are different Christological approaches among the Churches today concerning the application of this Chalcedonian model.  Yet, there are positive developments which allow us to hope that this model can be of use today.  In concluding, let me be more specific.  There are so many fields in which Christology can be realized, in order to curtail the prevailing individualism in society, to overcome Hindu-inspired spiritualism,to curb the growing psychologism, to transform the culture, and to answer questions of bioethics and modern biotechnology.

I believe that the Chalcedonian Christology is holistic and not totalitarian.  Christ appeared with his “parousia” (presence, visitation), and not with his ousia , by springing from an event of communion.  The consequences are really astonishing.  It is Triadic Grace in action: when we say Χριστός, we mean the “anointed one”, anointed of the Father by the Holy Spirit.  
Where can this Christology be helpful? Pluralism is a tremendous opportunity.  Instead of having one uniform Christology (e.g. patristic), we should cultivate a vision of the Christological transformation of the world in a Neopatristic way; that is what Neochalcedonianism offers in order to fulfill and clarify the Fourth Ecumenical Council.  The Chalcedonian view of Christ contains many elements that can be helpful for our situation, if we view them theologically and make proper use of them.  I believe these are the crucial points where this vision can help modern man:

1. Individualism.
2. Instead of Spiritualism we have a Theanthropic realism Богочовечански реализам; Christ as the Church, Hora ton zoonton: to see, hear, feel, touch, and know Him! (The first epistle of John, which contains this eschatological orientation, begins with the triumphant proclamation that "the life was made manifest, and we saw it…," "that which we have seen and heard," "that which we have looked upon and touched with our hands," etc.)
3. Psychologism.
4. Cult, ritual, Sacrus and sanctus = Liturgy.  Hagia Sophia as a master work of Chalcedonian Christology.  There are aspects of Church life that are so deeply bound to this Christological Definition that they cannot operate without reference to the Chalcedonian vision, such as hymnography, iconography, architecture…
5. Cosmic ecology: The central point of our Faith is Christ as the Land of the Living, as the Living Space, which God was well pleased to give us in order that we may live eternally in Him, with Him, around Him, before Him, together with Him, and with one another. In our times, humanity faces many problems, including greater and greater ecological problems, which threaten human living space. Thus, this topic of Christ as the Land of the Living is very pertinent for today.
6. Asceticism: self-denial (αυταπάρνησις). Nobody is as personal, nor as unique as Paul who said: ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2,20)
7. Prophesy: Christ’s presence is always a judgment, “krisis of this world” (Gospel of John).

The word of the Church ought to be the word of love, of the “kenosis” or “self-emptying” of the Cross, and of understanding.  It is a Christological message that should strike the existential “chord” of man, of which he has so much need in the tragic dead-ends of this life.  Beyond biochemistry, He existentially strikes our inner chord, our genes, the logoi of beings, as St Maximus says (beginning with Chalcedon, he developed an amazing Christology). Modern man, our neighbor, is fiercely tried and gripped by anxiety in the face of an uncertain future. He needs an outstretched hand; he needs to be opened toward communion and community. This opening of man to God—the opening of history to the Future, of earth to Heaven – is the message of Chalcedon. It should also be our message and our faith.
 

Here is the famous text of the Chalcedonian definition.

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body; consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

Interview with Bishop Atanasije (Yevtich) on the Liturgy and Liturgical Changes

His comments about being attached to books like Protestants reminded me of when I had the great blessing to visit him at his monastery in Tvrdos, Herzegovina. It was my first service as a deacon, and I was desperately clutching to my book, trying to figure out what was happening, since everything was in Serbian.

Every time he saw me, he would grab the book out of my hands and put it off to the side, telling me something to the effect that I should just be present and aware of the service and act from my heart. I remember thinking that that was a wonderful idea, and then sneaking off and finding my book.

With God’s help, I’m working toward his goal of liturgizing with the Spirit. But just what is the relationship between the letter (of the service books) and the Spirit? Comments?

– Fr. Gregory Edwards

religions.pewforum.org/affiliations

This has to be significant in some way, especially when most Orthodox trace their roots to countries that are overwhelmingly Orthodox. Does it make a difference? Should it? How?