Orthodox Church

V

History

After the early centuries of Christianity the Orthodox patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem kept only a shadow of their former glory for several reasons. First, a majority of non-Greek-speaking Christians of the Middle East rejected the Council of Chalcedon, which confirmed that Christ had a human as well as a divine nature (see Monophysitism), and thus were cut off from the major Christian centers, Constantinople and Rome. In addition, the rapid advance of Islam after the 8th century placed most of those areas, which had been the cradle of Christianity, under the rule of Muslim caliphs. During most of the Middle Ages Constantinople itself remained by far the most important center of Christendom and the undisputed center of Orthodoxy.

The famous Byzantine missionaries, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, translated Scripture and the liturgy into Old Church Slavonic, the first written Slavic language, in about 864. As a result many Slavic nations were converted to Byzantine Orthodox Christianity. The Bulgarians, a people of mixed Slavic and Turkic origin, embraced it in 864. The Russians, baptized in 988, remained in the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Constantinople until 1448.

A

The Schism of Eastern and Western Christianity

After the 4th century when Constantinople emerged as a great capital and church center, tensions periodically arose between its leaders and the bishop of Rome. After the fall of Rome to Germanic invaders in 476, the Roman pope was the only guardian of Christian universalism in the West. He began more explicitly to attribute his primacy to Rome’s being the burial place of Saint Peter, whom Jesus had called the “rock” on which the church was to be built (see Matthew 16:18). The Eastern Christians respected that tradition and attributed to the Roman patriarch a measure of moral and doctrinal authority. But they never believed that this authority allowed the papacy to overrule another church or that it made the pope into a universally authoritative figure within the larger church.

The Orthodox tradition asserted that the character and rights of the church were fully present in each local community of Orthodox believers with its own bishop. All bishops were equal, and patriarchs or synods of bishops exercised only an “oversight of care” among the body of coequal bishops. The precedence of honor of individual national churches depended on historical seniority. Thus, the patriarchate of Constantinople understood its own position to be determined exclusively by the fact that Constantinople, the “new Rome,” was the seat of the Roman emperor and the Senate in a world where church boundaries, for administrative reasons, reflected political boundaries.

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Apart from the different understandings of the nature of church governance, the most significant doctrinal difference between Eastern and Western Christians arose over the exact wording of the Nicene Creed. The Orthodox churches demanded that no words be added to or taken away from the ancient and fundamental statement of the faith, as issued by the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in the 4th century. During the early Middle Ages the Latin word filioque, meaning “and from the Son,” was added in the Latin Christian world, thus rendering the creed as “I believe … in the Holy Spirit … who proceeds from the Father and from the Son.” The interpolation, initially opposed by the popes, was promoted in Europe by Charlemagne (crowned emperor in 800) and his successors. Eventually, it was also accepted in Rome in about 1014. Western theologians believed that this teaching preserved the spirit of the original creed. But Orthodox teachers believed that it had not only contradicted the authority of an ecumenical council but also introduced an idea that disrupted the coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity. Soon both the Western church and Orthodox churches began to look upon one another as having deviated from Christian truth.

Other issues also became controversial. The ordination of married men to the priesthood, customary in the Orthodox world, was increasingly prohibited by the medieval Western church. The Orthodox also regarded the Western preference for unleavened bread in the Eucharist as an illegitimate custom. The two sides never reached any harmony because they followed different criteria of judgment: The papacy considered itself the ultimate judge in matters of faith and discipline, whereas the East invoked long-standing tradition and the authority of councils, where the local churches spoke as equals.

It is often assumed that the anathemas (excommunications) exchanged in Constantinople in 1054 between the patriarch Michael Cerularius and papal legates marked the final schism. The schism, however, actually took the form of a gradual estrangement, beginning well before 1054 and culminating in the sack of Constantinople by Western Crusaders in 1204. This action introduced a new element of political bitterness into East-West Christian relations.

In the late medieval period, several attempts were made at reunion between the Catholics and the Orthodox, particularly at the councils of Lyons (1274) and Florence (1438-1439). They ended in failure. The papal claims to ultimate supremacy could not be reconciled with the conciliar principle of Orthodoxy, and the religious differences were aggravated by other cultural and political misunderstandings.

After the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Islamic government recognized the ecumenical patriarch of that city as both the religious and the political spokesman for the entire Christian population of the empire. With the decline of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century, the patriarchate of Constantinople, although still retaining its honorary primacy in the Orthodox Church, lost its political power over the other Orthodox churches. With the liberation of the Orthodox peoples from Ottoman rule, a succession of autocephalous churches was then set up in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia.

The Orthodox Church in Russia, seeing the advancing tide of Islamic power in the East, declared its independence from Constantinople in 1448, five years before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. In 1589 the patriarchate of Moscow was established and formally recognized by Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople. For the Russian people and their tsars, Moscow had become the so-called third Rome, direct heir to the imperial and ecclesiastical supremacy of ancient Rome and Constantinople. The patriarchs of Moscow never enjoyed anything like the relative freedom of the Byzantine patriarchs, where church laws regulated the interference of the emperor and were generally respected. In Russia the tsars exercised complete domination over church affairs, except for the brief reign of Patriarch Nikon in the mid-17th century. In 1721 Tsar Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate altogether, and thereafter the church was governed through the imperial administration. The patriarchate was reestablished in 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution, but soon afterward the Russian church was violently persecuted by the Communist government. As the Soviet regime became less repressive and, in 1991, broke up, the church started to regain its vitality. The Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe also faced persecution by oppressive Communist governments after World War II ended in 1945, but they too regained their authority in the 1990s and are slowly reestablishing their place in the moral, religious, and cultural life of their people.

B

Orthodox Relations with Other Churches

The Orthodox Church has always seen itself as the organic continuation of the original apostolic community and as holding a faith fully consistent with the apostolic message. Orthodoxy in the simplest sense sees itself as the Church of Christ complete and entire. It is often ambivalent about other Christian bodies that do not have communion with it, such as the Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Protestant bodies. It knows that they are Christians but it does not recognize that they are therefore necessarily the Church, since Orthodoxy’s definition of authenticity in this matter is based on strict tradition in doctrine and practice. In recent centuries the historic division and the separation between the Orthodox and other Christians has been eroded by many large movements of people. As a result Eastern and Western Christianity now exist close by one another, allowing the two to gain a deeper knowledge of one another. In certain areas of confrontation, such as the Greek islands or the Ukraine in the 17th century, Orthodox synods reacted against active proselytism (efforts at conversion) by Catholic missionaries, declaring Western sacraments invalid and demanding rebaptism of converts from the Roman or Protestant communities.

During the latter part of the 20th century the mainstream of Orthodox thought adopted a more positive attitude toward the modern ecumenical movement. It cautiously entered into dialogue in the World Council of Churches (WCC), and several Orthodox churches joined the WCC after 1948. The Orthodox theologians who spoke before the WCC rejected any policy of doctrinal relativism and consistently argued that the goal of ecumenism should be the full unity of the faith, synonymous with complete reconciliation with Orthodoxy in fundamental matters of faith and practice. Along with the WCC’s international moral authority, funding for the Orthodox churches, as administered by the WCC, was very important to the Orthodox churches that were emerging from decades of Communist persecution in the late 20th century.

The Orthodox mainstream recognize that, before the establishment of Christian unity, a theological dialogue leading in that direction is necessary and that divided Christian communities can cooperate and provide each other with mutual help and experience, even if sacramental intercommunion, requiring unity in faith, appears to be distant. However, the Protestant majority in the WCC occasionally made Orthodox churches feel uneasy about their participation in that body. The broader ecumenical attitude adopted during the reign of Pope John XXIII by the Roman Catholic Church (which does not officially belong to the WCC) was welcomed by many Orthodox Church leaders, especially the patriarch of Constantinople, and it led to new and friendlier relations between the churches. Orthodox observers were present at sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and several meetings took place between popes Paul VI and John Paul II on the one side and patriarchs Athenagoras I and Demetrios on the other.

In a symbolic gesture of peace, the mutual anathemas of 1054 were lifted by both sides in 1965. The two churches established a joint commission for dialogue, and representatives have met on a number of occasions from 1966 on to discuss differences in doctrine and practice. The papacy’s claim to authority and infallibility is generally seen as the primary obstacle to reconciliation. At the end of the year 2000, 14 of the 15 Orthodox leaders formally called for an end to the schism. Only Patriarch Alexey II of Russia withheld his signature from the resolution, indicating the discontent felt by the Russian church at what it regarded as Western proselytism in its church.

In another symbolic effort to heal divisions, the leaders of the 15 autocephalous Orthodox churches assembled in Jerusalem early in 2000 for the first Orthodox synod in 60 years. There was little immediate outcome, however, although the overtures toward Catholicism provoked concern in some Orthodox circles who felt that the modern ecumenical movement was endangering the integrity of Orthodox faith.

After the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, many of the former eastern-rite Catholic churches, which had been forcibly merged with the Orthodox Church during the Communist period, demanded restitution of their property. The ownership of churches has engendered much conflict, as has the question of whether restoration of an active Roman Catholic Byzantine rite in Eastern Europe constitutes a form of proselytism by the West. The appearance of numerous Protestant evangelical missionaries in Russia and other Eastern European countries also alarmed many Orthodox leaders, who viewed the missionaries as proselytizing interlopers with little regard for the existing Christian cultures of these lands. A visit by Pope John Paul II in 2001 to Ukraine, which has a large Catholic population, provoked violent Orthodox protests.

Orthodox relations with the Protestant world experienced a significant setback when the Anglican and Episcopalian churches began ordaining women priests in the late 20th century, a move that the Orthodox regarded as a sign of their lack of attachment to church traditions. Serious theological dialogue between Protestantism and Orthodoxy remains to be undertaken. Divisions between them also exist over fundamental matters of doctrine, including the understanding of Christ and the Trinity, veneration of the Virgin Mary, the use of icons in worship, and the meaning and significance of the sacraments.

See also Byzantine Art and Architecture; Byzantine Empire.

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