One of the hidden treasures in the American theological scene is the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation. This group is meeting currently (and apparently for the first time) here on the West Coast, at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I was blessed to accompany Father Abbot Nicholas and Father Moses to a public symposium held on the first day of the most recent session. The symposium was sponsored by the new Huffington Ecumenical Institute there at LMU (from which we expect great things once it is fully funded!).
The two talks summarized two agreed statements of the Consultation, one on the Filioque and one on Baptism and "Sacramental Economy."Â Both were very interesting, but the one I found most compelling was the second, delivered by Hieromonk Alexander (Golitzin) of Marquette University. One of the reasons it was so interesting to me was that it highlighted just what solid work this Consultation is able to do.
Why do some ultra-traditionalist Orthodox re-baptize Catholic converts to Orthodoxy? Because, in the name of Holy Tradition, they are heirs to the innovative notions of St. Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain in the 18th century:
Nicodemus and the Pedalion: The Orthodox world owes an immense debt to this Athonite monk, who edited and published the Philokalia (1783), as well as numerous other works of a patristic, pastoral, and liturgical nature. In the Pedalion (1800), his enormously influential edition of - and commentary on - canonical texts, Nicodemus gave form and substance to the requirement of rebaptism decreed by Cyril V. Thoroughly in sympathy with the decree of 1755, and moved by his attachment to a perceived golden age in the patristic past, he underscored the antiquity and hence priority of the African Councils and Apostolic Canons, and argued strenuously, in fact, for the first-century provenance of the latter. Nicodemus held up these documents, with their essentially exclusivist ecclesiology, as the universal voice of the ancient Church. In so doing, he systematically reversed what had been the normative practice of the eastern church since at least the 4th century, while recognizing the authority of both Cyprian's conciliar legislation on baptism and the Apostolic Canons. Earlier Byzantine canonists had understood Cyprian's procedure as superseded by later practice, and had interpreted the Apostolic Canons in the light of the rulings of Basil the Great, the Synod in Trullo, and other ancient authoritative texts.
In trying to synthesize this exclusivist ecclesiology with the notion of "oikonomia" a la St. Basil, and which had guided Orthodox praxis for centuries, St. Nicodemus had to invent a whole new way of understanding that notion as it applied to the sacraments. In effect, he invested Orthodox bishops with the power to determine by an exercise of sheer authority whether a sacrament was valid or not. Thus the practice before 1755 of admitting Catholics to Orthodoxy without baptism could be explained as an "economic" exercise of episcopal authority, rather than (as it had been for centuries) as flowing from the actual validity of the Catholic baptism.
My own opinion it that this move by St. Nicodemus is, irony of ironies, really one in a westward direction. In the Latin Church canonical form determines sacramental validity; for Nicodemus it is ecclesiastical authority. In both cases, however, the sacrament itself seems to become reified by reduction to a mere effect of some external cause. What both approached miss is that the sacraments are not "things" that a church either "has" or "does not have." The sacraments make the Church, not the other way around. This is why the determining factor in St. Basil's more realistic theology is this: we know sacraments are valid because they produce the Church, not the other way around.
Thoughts?
