Theological Ecumenism

I shouldn't be grumpy in Holy Week. (Or rather I should be grumpy about other things.) But since no-one's going to read this at such a time, perhaps I can justify getting it off my chest.

Getting a little tired of hearing that the "Church" exists only at the local level. The claim is peppered all through online discussions of the various disputes over authority in the Orthodox Church on this continent. Adherence to this belief is supposed to be a sovereign remedy against the charmingly named "papist heresy." There was an egregious example in an uncharacteristically silly podcast by Dr. Clark Carlton. Apart from denying the existence of "America" as a basis for a united Orthodox Church (an argument which, if implemented universally would certainly see the end of every autocephalous Church in the world, with the possible exception of Jerusalem!), Dr. Carlton also claimed as heresy the idea that the Church exists in any way except as a local eucharistic assembly under the presidency of the Bishop. He, naturally, gave the usual misquotation from St. Ignatius, "where the Bishop is, there is the Catholic Church."

What St. Ignatius actually says to the Smyrneans is "wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." It's not the presence of the Bishop that makes the Church, but the presence of Christ, the "Bishop of all" (Magnesians 2:3). Christ is present in many ways. Certainly He is pre-eminently present in His Mysteries, to which every priesthood is ordered and for which reason no-one is ordained to any ministry higher than that of Bishop. But the notion that Christ is somehow absent from the Church in other ways is, well, strange.

Part of the problem lies with convert Protestants (and here I'm not really thinking of any individual in particular) for whom sacred history used to end with Acts and is permitted to extend now as far as Ignatius to the Romans. The history of the Church demonstrates over and again the tendency of local churches to grope toward primatial structures like plants for the light. The Godbearer Ignatius himself called Rome the church that "presides over love" using a word for presidency (prokathemai) with distinct liturgical overtones. The popes of Alexandria always (as far as we know) managed the local nilotic episcopacies under their jurisdiction. St. Chrysostom was notorious, or renowned if you prefer, in his time for appointing and removing bishops on his own patriarchal authority.

And let's not even get into the second millenium, which, to put it as mildly as I can, is hardly testimony to an unbroken dogmatic tradition of the inviolable integrity of the local Church and the merely vestigial, temporal and easily dispensible authority of structures of wider ecclesial governance.

I'm not talking here about a lack of knowledge of historical facts. I'm talking about a lack of appreciation for the way the Spirit works within history, even very recent history, to form and sanctify. I'm talking about history as synergy. Where that is not understood, what emerges instead is some version of the golden age fallacy.

None of this proves the papal claims, far from it, and that's not what I'm trying to do anyway. I'd just like people to stop assuming Afanasiev's eucharistic theology that they read about in seminary somewhere constitutes the last dogmatic word on the question of where the Church "is".

At least stop throwing that word heresy around so much!

H.B. Metropolitan Jonah's latest paper on ways to reform his own Church's governance provides much interesting reading. Much of it deals with practical matters of relevance mostly to the OCA. But the first part deals with a theme to which His Beatitude returns frequently: hierarchy as the mechanism for distributing accountability and mutual responsibility. "Hierarchy is about the facilitation of conciliarity." This is fundamentally different from the way most people understand hierarchy as a method of control.

Question: why should this model of hierarchy not apply also at the universal level of the Church??

Archimandrite Elpidophoros was hammered by people claiming that you could replace "ecumenical patriarch" with "pope" and not change his argument. Even a mischievous Metropolitan Jonah took his shot in this direction, "if we wanted a pope we'd be under the real one."

But honestly, if you look at this latest paper, transposed it to an international level, and replaced "Metropolitan" with "Pope" .....

Ok, I realize we're talking about a massive re-thinking and re-working of the papal office and its relationship with local churches. But didn't John Paul II open that door, in theory at least, in Ut unum sint?

The Ochlophobist's recent post is very thoughtful and thought-provoking. This seems to sum up the dilemma, which is so often not even noticed as such:

I have heard many Orthodox in America speak in a manner that suggests that a conversion to Orthodoxy provides a means of escaping the enlightenment, at least with regard to religion. I have been explicitly told this by a few. I disagree. In America there is no way to escape the Enlightenment.

This is a problem for all apostolic, ie. hierarchical, Churches in the Anglo-American world.

The magnificently named Archimandrite Dr. Elpidophoros Lambriniadis delivered a speech on March 16 in the chapel of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary in Brooklyn, MA. If you haven't heard about it yet, you soon will. It's a scorcher.

Take these passages, for example on Hellenism and Christianity:

Our cultural heritage and our national conscience is not, by any means, an obstacle for our progress and for the successful witness to our faith, especially insofar as ecumenicity is the heart of Hellenism and by definition alien to any form of nationalism or cultural chauvinism.

Examining, then, ourselves, I believe that we ought to be more careful towards the easiness with which we are ready to abandon our Hellenism, both as language and as tradition. As we have already said, it is nothing but a myth the opinion that Hellenism is an obstacle to the creative and successful incorporation in the American reality. Hellenism is identified with its ecumenical character and for that reason it can never be nationalistic for both of its manifestations, its culture and its Orthodox faith are concepts that transcend the boundaries of the national.

Having read those last night, I confess to a mildly un-lenten chuckle at Orthros this morning, when the Triodion offered the following from the second canon of the 9th Ode:

Peter speaks, and Plato falls silent; Paul teaches, and Pythagoras is heard no more. The company of the apostles, preaching the mysteries of God, has buried the dead voice of the Greeks and called the world to the worship of Christ.

Gotcha? Not really. The fact is there was always something a little coy in the Church Fathers' denunciations of the Hellenic tradition, when they were up to their philosophers' beards in that vast intellectual and cultural heritage. Homoousion anyone?

Likewise, there may be something just a little precious in the idea among many American Orthodox that the only level of ecclesial authority that is pure and uncontaminated by papist heresy is that of the bishop. Other levels of ministry: Meropolitans, Archbishops, Patriarchs all whiff a bit of that Romish scent. Frankly Archimandite Elpidephoros is right to call them out on this:

Let me add that the refusal to recognize primacy within the Orthodox Church, a primacy that necessarily cannot but be embodied by a primus (that is by a bishop who has the prerogative of being the first among his fellow bishops) constitutes nothing less than heresy. It cannot be accepted, as often it is said, that the unity among the Orthodox Churches is safeguarded by either a common norm of faith and worship or by the Ecumenical Council as an institution. Both of these factors are impersonal while in our Orthodox theology the principle of unity is always a person. Indeed, in the level of the Holy Trinity the principle of unity is not the divine essence but the Person of the Father (“Monarchy” of the Father), at the ecclesiological level of the local Church the principle of unity is not the presbyterium or the common worship of the Christians but the person of the Bishop, so to in the Pan-Orthodox level the principle of unity cannot be an idea nor an institution but it needs to be, if we are to be consistent with our theology, a person.

Strong stuff. But just as the Fathers happily used Greek philosophical methods while just as happily condemning Greek philosophers, there are some contemporary Orthodox who blithely condemn current structures of primacy while trying hard to establish those same kinds of structures in an "American" form.

Wherever you go in the Orthodox world, local primates have much more prominence than simply being one bishop among others. Russia, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Cyprus: in all these places there are probably many ordinary believers who know far more about their patriarch or archbishop from their nightly news shows than they will ever know about their local bishop. And the fact is that by calling for a primate for an autocephalous church in the United States, local Orthodox are simply reinforcing the significance of a primatial office, even if they claim to be opposed to it as papism in Orthodox vestments.

I recently posted a reflection by Eamon Duffy on the historical realities of the papal office. Whether we like it or not, much of what is claimed as "tradition" is really simply the ways things have been done for a long time. I have no problem with that. I'll take a living tradition over a dead idea any time.

Well, almost any time. I've recently argued for the central importance of seeing the bishop as wedded to his diocese. However much people intuitively like a strong central authority, nothing can replace the importance of an equally strong, vibrant evangelical worshiping community centered on the local primacy of a holy father in Christ. Somehow both poles of primacy have to be kept in perfect balance. Show me the Church that's managed that!

But here's what is so exciting about this debate within American Orthodoxy. It's about stuff that really matters, that really needs to be debated. We're having the same debate in the Catholic Church, of course, but it's so complicated by the way in which attacks on authority are mixed up with all kinds of Christological and moral heresies. In Orthodoxy the problem is much clearer, because it's less cluttered. People don't want to slough off a Patriarch so they can paint themselves blue and worship a nature goddess. They want to do so because they honestly believe that's the best way to orient their own ecclesial community toward a serious appropriation of the Orthodox faith. And vice versa.

I've seen this lecture spoken of in military terms. It certainly seems to be intended as a shot across the bows of various other visions for Orthodox organization in America, especially those enunciated by the OCA and Antiochian leadership. My prayer is that, just as the holy Fathers hid their reliance on Greek thought behind their constant use of it, and thereby established a theological tradition radiant with divine Light, so too our Orthodox brothers and sisters might be building behind their rhetorical walls a new and enduring ecclesiology for today's time and place.

I began this meandering series by wondering aloud whether authoritarianism could be seen as the modern day equivalent of arianism. The more I think about it, the more I see it's really the other way around. Authoritarianism, or individualism, the drive to compete and dominate or whatever you want to call it, this is the perennial heresy. Arianism was simply a particularly successful expression of that error, projecting even into God's inner life a vision of separation of individuals according to rank, of dominance and submission.

Arianism in the fourth century, secularism in the twenty-first. In the end the antidote is the same: instead of dominance and submission, gift and reception; instead of pride,love; instead of competition, Trinity, "one in essence and undivided."

Again, this fight is perennial. There is no golden age where the Church had it all sorted out, and if we could just mimic the institutions and attitudes of that age we'd win the battle again. No golden age, except of course the Age to come revealed in Scripture and Tradition. That's where we're going to have to look for answers. It wasn't long into her history before Christians, imitating Israel in the days of Samuel, thought it a good bargain to exchange their fathers in Christ, the bishops, for kings. And how easily pagan warrior cultures subverted the ideal of Christian marriage, turning wives into slaves and husbands into masters. And how easily Christians fell into the trap of thinking of these blasphemous and demonic corruptions as authentic expressions of God's will!

No, we can't rest easily in history. We have to turn to Scripture and Tradition, to sacred history, to see our way out of this thicket of lies.

One of the questions people consistently ask about the Genesis account is, why did God put that damn tree there in the first place? Wasn't He just setting us up knowing we'd have to eat from it? This is by no means a question unique to modern people. St. John Chrysostom, for example, explicitly acknowledges it as a valid question in his commentaries. It is a valid question, but only from a certain point of view, that of authoritarianism. The question assumes that human free will must always be to some extent in competition with God's. If He says don't eat, it naturally follows that we'll be itching to chow down. There's that certain distance between God's will and ours and the only way to bridge it is by submission against our natural inclination.

But imagine the possibility that this distance could be bridged not by submission, but by joy; by delight in doing the will of the one who is known as Good and Loving and Just. This is St. Chrysostom's answer, the answer of a truly authentic Christian. God did not put the tree in the garden to tempt man, or set him up. He put it there to train him in obedience. The tree gave Adam and Eve something on which to focus their asceticism, a law, "eat this, not that." This law, if kept, would have opened enabled humanity to rediscover over and again the delight of doing what is good, and so by habitual ascetic training, move from joy to joy, glory to glory, being led ever upwards to the Good himself.

"If you eat of it you will not die, but become as gods." The serpent's lie is to introduce man to the notion of competition: God doesn't want you getting any of his stuff! God's will is not good, it is constraining! It does not lead you to fulfillment, but to frustration. Break it and see! The serpent's lie was the first utterance of the heresy of authoritarianism: there's winners and losers, chump! Fight to win!

I would argue that the whole point of hierarchy as it is understood in ecclesial Tradition, is that it--hierarchy itself--is for us the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in our own paradise, the Church. It is only with the serpent's lies in our heads that we begin to resent the constraints that hierarchy imposes. We chafe at having to stay within our appointed role. The monk wants to be his own abbot. The layman wants to be his own bishop. The wife wants to be her own head. And in every yearning to contravene the constraints of hierarchy an opportunity is lost, joy and peace forgone in favor of power and control. And it's just as bad the other way. When the abbot cedes authority to the monk, the bishop prefers manipulation and control to accountability in the Spirit, the husband does violence to his wife. In whatever way the law of hierarchy is contravened there is lost the capacity of that sacramental community to lead its members to Trinitarian life, in which there is order without contol, unity without violence, love without measure.

So if there's one practical conclusion I'd draw from all this, it would be an appeal for a rediscovery and reappropriation of authentic, sacramental hierarchy in our churches, our families and our religious communities.

I fear, however, that the tendency is to read hierarchy always through the filter of contemporary forms of authoritarianism. On the right this takes the form of an exaggerated notion of the rights of elites. On the left it lies in the determination to destroy every institution of authority. Either/or. You or me. Oligarchy or democracy, but someone has to be in charge.

I read an article recently lauding the American tendency to shop around for a church that suits each individual. The author says it's a good thing:

Knowing that churchgoers have so many options should keep pastors
and preachers on their toes. In that sense, church shopping transfers a
bit of power from the pulpit to the pews. And keeping a check on the
power of church leaders is never a bad idea.

No, it is a bad idea! For God's sake, join a church and stay there (make it the right one, of course, not the one that "feels" right!). Tithe. Sign up for coffee hour. If you can, teach the kids in CCD or Sunday school, or whatever your parish has. Help out however you can in your church's social program: soup kitchen, meals on wheels, prison ministry etc. If you believe you are called to marriage, find the right partner and make it work. If you feel you are called to monastic life, don't spend you life searching for the perfect community. Join and be stable.

In other words, boring and frightening as it may sound, be obedient. Lay, married, monastic, clerical, we're all called to obedience. The heresy of authoritarianism tells you that obedience is for the weak, or at best for the compromised, for parties to a social contract that finds its goal in keeping chaos at bay. At best obedience preserves social order, at worst it kills our freedom. Hierarchy is a necessary evil, but always an evil.

The truth is so much richer. Hierarchy is not evil, whether necessary or not. Authentic, sacramental hierarchy makes present in human lives God's own Trinitarian life, in which love is not an abstract benevolence, but a passionate, eternal delight in the Other as Other and not Self.

No attempts at reforming our institutions, whether ecclesial or familial, will ever succeed unless this fundamental truth is understood and lived. Power is not to be feared. It is to be made sacred.

And what of those who abuse their place in the hierarchy? What of authoritarians who will take obedience and give nothing back, or worse abuse the obedience by demanding more than it can give? Obviously this is as much blasphemy as any refusal to obey. But the answer is not "Voice of the Faithful" or "We are Church" and it is certainly not any ideology that seeks merely to re-distribute power, be it between men and women or rich and poor. Somehow the answer has to lie in rediscovering joy in obedience, the kind of joy that challenges authority to serve and not dominate, a challenge that rises as a wave and falls gratefully back into the ocean of peace when it's furious energy is given up and fulfilled.

And so I come back to the ordinary, everyday, askesis of membership in these primordial sacramental communities: the monastery, the diocese, the family. Heresy tears them to shreds, seething against them, battering them. But for those who seek the law of the Lord, as a light to the feet, as honey to the throat, as joy and laughter, these three are the gateways to paradise. And if the gates seem shut, obedience--whether the passive acceptance of authentic authority, or the active demand for it where it is missing--obedience will always find and open them.

I came across this 1998 article by Eamon Duffy quoted at length at the Mere Catholic Miscellany. Really fine, especially in light of Fr. Justin's comments on my first post on authoritarianism.

Someone who is grappling head-on with the heresy of authoritarianism is the new primate of the Orthodox Church in America, Metropolitan Jonah--and grappling very well, as I think this February address shows. Take the following paragraphs, for example:

So where do we start? First, we have to look at basic Orthodox ecclesiology. The Apostles invested the bishops with the leadership of the Church, through sacramental ordination. This is the principle of authority in the Church: sacramental responsibility. This sacramental responsibility is not only over what is "spiritual," but the entire life of the whole Church, in every aspect, because even how we use our money is spiritual and sacramental. There can be no dualism between the spiritual and the material.

I believe that the starting place to understand all this is to understand authority and obedience as responsibility, rather than as "power." Any reduction to "power" is by definition, corruption. Accountability in relation to responsibility is a core element in obedience. Various areas of responsibility are given to the different offices and organs of the Church by the canons. The question is, how are they invested with responsibility and for what, and to whom they are accountable? Accountability is intimately linked with responsibility; the structures of accountability are built as structures of obedience. Then we have to look at the nature of the support of the whole structure: first, financially, with the flow of money and resources; then, the flow of responsibility and accountability in relation to the organs of advice and consensus.

It is interesting that not everyone in His Beatitude's flock is happy with these ideas, especially when they take on a practical shape like re-defining the role and responsibility of the Metropolitan Council, or devolving more and more from the central administration to the dioceses. I saw one poster to an Orthodox discussion list decry all this as tending both toward monasticisization of the OCA and also to making it more Roman Catholic. How she got there (the Roman Church is uber-monastic???) was to begin by interpreting Jonah's understanding of hierarchical responsibility as a call to "unquestioning obedience." She then tied this notion of obedience to monasticism and then, on the strength of Rome's controlling tendencies and its insistence on a celibate priesthood, concluded, q.e.d., that Jonah is really all about power a la Roma. Given that His Beatitude is really trying to de-centralize administration and reduce his own power this is, well, shall we say a surprising conclusion.

The fallacy in all this comes, of course, by hearing words like "hierarchy" and "authority" and "responsibility" and then immediately interpreting it as a competition with me for power. If I give the bishop/priest/council something, that's less for me. This ignores completely the care with which Jonah consistently links responsibility with accountability, and accountability with obedience.

Of course one should perhaps not be too hard on these critics. Although I do think there is a real danger of falling into this heresy I'm calling "authoritarianism" it's understandable after all the revelations of corruption and abuse in the OCA that many people are suspicious that their own leaders, even new ones not tainted by the past, need to prove that they themselves are not merely authoritarians in hypocritical clothing. Likewise all those Catholics betrayed over the past generation by a priestly caste that has so often fallen into the same heretical trap of thinking that power means more than service. As I said in my earlier post, this heresy is widespread and pervasive whether you look to the right or to the left.

This is one reason why the restoration of canonical order in the OCA is really more important than the size of that jurisdiction might suggest. The OCA is a complete Church in miniature, with all the moving parts of any autocephalous Church. This means it can really model for all of us a new way of restoring ancient scriptural and canonical traditions of authentic hierarchy, responsibility and accountability. And it can do this rather quickly, not only on account of its relatively small scale, but also because of the depth of its intellectual and spiritual heritage. I hope it does. Speaking from within the Catholic Church, I am convinced that this Communion is especially in need of models of leadership and service that are practical and authentically traditional. 

Is it going too far to suggest that the arianism of the 21st century is "authoritarianism?" I don't just mean that arianism and authoritarianism are alike in substance (although that seems to be true in interesting ways). More importantly, they are alike in the manner in which they seem to pervade life both within the churches and in how the churches relate to the world beyond. The fight against the one heresy defined generations of Christians in the fourth century. It seems to me that the battle against the other defines our struggle today.

I suppose I'd better say what I mean by authoritarianism. What I'm trying to describe is an attitude that sees the material basis of authority in the church as an impersonal force I'll wrap in quotes and call "power." "Power" can be exercised despotically; it can be shared; it can be resisted. But the main thing about "power" is that it operates between people, rather like currency. "Power" is something you either have or lack. It always involves winners and losers, however equitably it is shared. In the end this notion of "power" is a by-product of the cartesian myth of the autonomous individual: sovereign, impervious and irreducible. Authoritarianism is, then, the idea that authority and hierarchy are practical mechanisms for an equitable distribution of "power" within the church. There is a "progressive" form of the heresy, and a "conservative" form. But both are equally dangerous, for both, by buying into the cartesian myth, are equally anti-Trinitarian.

This myth is, of course, the whole basis of the liberal (in the old sense) democratic experiment in which civil society is completely invested. Is it any wonder, then, that it is making inroads into how Catholics and Orthodox are coming to see their own traditions? Everywhere I look I see the problem of authoritarianism. The OCA melt-down, the Antiochian melt-down, the bizarre attempt in Connecticut to re-distribute power in Catholic parishes, each of these problems can ultimately be explained by a fundamental clash of authoritarianism and an authentic Christian faith in the true nature of authority and hierarchy.

Today in the monastery we have reached the point in our annual lenten journey through the Ladder of the Divine Ascent where, in the long chapter on obedience, St. John Climacus introduces us to the story of Acacius. To modern Americans this is a scandalous tale, summing up everything that is wrong in "organized religion" in general and monasticism in particular. Acacius is a young novice who is basically beaten to death by his wicked elder, while around him the other monks can only encourage the abused Acacius to submit and bear his Cross courageously. The point is, of course, that in the end the obedience of Acacius saves him and also jolts his elder into real and final repentance.

Against the heresy of authoritarianism, in which "power" is simply a means of exchange between sovereign individuals, the story of Acacius holds up the possibility that "power" is an illusion, because the substructure of individuality does not really exist to support it. Against the myth of power, Acacius asserts the truth of obedience, not as a temporary surrender of lesser power in the face of greater, but as an acceptance that we exist only insofar as we live in and through one another. Hell is not other people, however hellish they may be, and paradise is only ever possible in company.

If ever there was a sign of contradiction, this is it. I could go in several different directions here. For example, could it be that the problem with "papism" as an expression of a particular form church governance is not that it concentrates rather than distributes "power"--an assumption made both by liberal critics and conservative ultra-montanists!--but that it should properly be understood as another form of obedience, an un-ironical and non-authoritarian belief in the truth of the papal title, servus servorum Dei? And what about monasticism? More on this over the course of the Fast!

...Or " Pseudo-Dionysius" if you want to be informal about it. I'm looking forward to reading the actual text of the talk, rather than this brief report. That St. Denis stands at the cross roads of Asian mysticism and Hellenistic rationalism certainly makes him an important authority in Pope Benedict's major theme of the compatibility of faith and reason.

Father Gregory over at Koinonia has written some very interesting things about St. Augustine. Well worth a read. It just so happens I've spent much of the recent festivities reading (for the first time, I'm ashamed to say) Peter Brown's classic biography of the great Latin Father.

OK, possum stirring was not the only motivation behind my posting about the way certain eminent Orthodox institutions dabbled in indulgences in the 17th and 18th centuries. I do actually have a point! It's not just that Orthodox hierarchs and monastics saw an opening in the indulgence market after the Latins were forced to withdraw after the Council of Trent. It's not just that the Phanariotes sorely needed additional revenue streams to support the confiscatory taxes and other impositions of the Ottoman state. These things are true, but they do not quite explain how it was that this practice came to be justified theologically by the Church.

I'm not really engaging here in an apology for indulgences, in the sense that I think they should be embraced today as completely unproblematic. For the reasons I gave yesterday, I worry about the spiritual psychology that too easily flows from a facile apologia, and I fear almost all apologetics on this subject tend to fall quickly into that category. All I'm about today is suggesting one way in which it might be possible to reconcile the theology behind the practice of issuing indulgences with the broader, richer and vastly more important apostolic teaching on sin, salvation, heaven and purification after death.

If indulgences were to be abolished tomorrow, I would not mourn. But I would be worried. I would be concerned because indulgences represent one of the few remaining aspects of that great ascetic enterprise which the patristic and, for the most part, the medieval Church (east and west) saw as essential to its life. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving were taken for granted. They were not extras to be added onto the "process" of salvation. They were essential to it. The human element in the divine/human exchange we call redemption was not simply assent of intellect or a sentiment; it was an assent that required the consecration of every element of one's experience, including the body and the extended communities within which one moved: family, village, city, empire. Put simply, redemption without asceticism was unthinkable. Or, if not unthinkable than at least any such idea was certainly eccentric. Only with the restoration of a new form of pagan idealism toward the end of the Middle Ages in the West (and to an extent also in the Byzantine intellectual world) did large numbers of Christians begin conceiving of their faith as a purely interior experience. Once this happened, asceticism ceased to be an essential element of faithful response to grace, but rather, depending on one's confessional alliegance, satisfaction of a canonical (legal) obligation, a lifestyle choice for the really holy, or to be shunned altogether as works-based attempt to earn one's righteousness.

Of course, these new ways of thinking about asceticism did not entirely displace the ancient apostolic and patristic idea. But this had to limp along, sometimes clothed with ill-fitting rags stolen from the intellectual wardrobe of the revolution. Let's evesdrop on an indulgence marketing seminar circa 1515. "Modern spiritual consumers aren't interested in old fashioned ideas like prayer, fasting and almsgiving for their own sake. People today want results! Holiness on tap! 'What's in it for me? they ask.' If you want them to work, and especially if you want them to pay up, better give them a reason. Tell them how it'll help gramps out of Purgatory. Better still, tell them how it will get them out of the fire!" And so prayer, fasting and almsgiving were re-packaged for the new capitalism, Catholic version, and, as we have seen, even in an Orthodox version.

Now these marketeers did not invent the product they were selling. They exploited it. That is they took something that had a place where it belonged, ripped it out, and turned it into something unrecognizable. The indulgence without askesis has been a sad relic, spinning slowly in space, ever since.

I know I'm simplifying inexcusably, so I hope you'll excuse me We all know that this revolution did not happen overnight. Luther represents, if not the final triumph of the privatization of faith, then an important stage toward that tragedy. But it was a stage that could not, I think, have been reached without the very indulgence hawkers he so rightly loathed. The indulgence industry, as opposed to the indulgence itself, was made possible by the first stirrings of that impulse towards regarding faith as a purely private, and therefore marketable, commodity. When asceticism was a shared consecration of the communal self, the idea of an "indulgence" was itself part of the dynamic pulse of that interchange of rigor and economy on the energy of which authentic asceticism is propelled. Indulgence was just that, an expression of mercy answering the sweated and tearful cry for mercy. It was the cup of water, offered to the fasting pilgrims in token of the joy that awaited them in the longed-for shrine.

This, IMHO, provides us with a clue of how best to return the notion of an indulgence to its proper context. Pope Paul VI seems to have begun the long trek back toward the tradition by emphasizing the communal and ascetic dimension in his Apostolic Constitution, Indulgentiarum Doctrina:

The aim pursued by ecclesiastical authority in granting indulgences is not only that of helping the faithful to expiate the punishment due sin but also that of urging them to perform works of piety, penitence and charity—particularly those which lead to growth in faith and which favor the common good (para. 8.)

I suppose what I am arguing is that if indulgences seem like leftover crumbs from a party long ended, something mouldy and unsightly in the manicured clearing of the modern church, perhaps the answer is not to bring out the broom and sweep them all away. Better, I think, to start following the trail. If you follow where they lead the crumbs may well take you to a whole new vista, a clearing more beautiful, a space alive with the dance of the saints before the Lamb.

I would not mourn the abolition of indulgences as long as the act of abolition coincided with the arrival in this clearing, as long as our disengagement from indulgences represented a re-engagement with the ascetical culture of which they were themselves simply one, rather minor, product.

Indulgences just a Catholic problem? Not so much.

What we call in Australia, "stirring the possum."

18th century Orthodox indulgence granted by the patriarch Abraham
("Avramie") of Jerusalem, sold by Greek monks. The original is located at the History Museum of Bucharest.

More about death

A couple of days ago I referred you to an excellent post by Father Alvin Kimel on the question of Purgatory. Among Father Kimmel's well-argued points is that Rome has taken on itself the task, not of repudiating the teachings defined by the Councils of Florence and Trent, but of clarifying them. I agree with what I read in Father's post, and would like to take the reflection a little further in order to explain why I think this clarification must also involve a degree of repudiation. Not repudiation of the core truths enunciated by the Councils and in the Catechism, I hasten to add, but of a certain spirituality or spiritual psychology that forms the context within which those truths have historically been understood.

Exhibit 1, your honor:

A few months ago I was listening to a Catholic apologist, a Protestant convert, who was interrogated concerning whether Catholics "know" they are "saved." His answer was to say, of himself, something like the following (as I am re-constructing his words from memory it would not be fair to name the gentleman).

"Of course we Catholics don't believe that our salvation is automatically assured just because we make a single act of faith in 'Jesus my personal Lord and Savior.' But that doesn't mean we are left in complete and utter anxiety about our future. Right now I am not conscious that I have committed any mortal sins since I went to Confession last week. That means I'm in a state of grace, which means I can be morally certain that if I died right now I'd go to heaven. Of course, I may have a few venial sins or some other imperfections that need to be purified. I can't rule out some time in Purgatory! But even that could be eliminated if God gives me the extra grace of receiving the Sacrament of Anointing before I die, or of receiving a Plenary Indulgence. So yes, I don't think my assurance of salvation is any less real than any Protestant's."

I hope I have been fair in reproducing this monologue. At any rate it contains nothing that is not strictly in accord with what I understand to be Roman Catholic teaching.

Yet it's horrifying.

Such self-assurance must surely be close to, if not an actual fall into, what the Eastern spiritual tradition calls plane (or, if you prefer the Slavonic, prelest), "delusion." But it is not only my "Orthodox" sensibilities that are offended by this attitude. I am a life-long member of the Catholic Church. I cannot believe that old Monsignor ("the mons.") Purcell, nor Sister Leo nor Sister Fidelis back at St. Michael's Convent School, would have been happy to hear me say such things. Perhaps they would not have indicted me under the category of "delusion" but they would certainly have had available a perfectly good western statute with which to bring me to book: "presumption."

Let's be clear. What I find repellant in this account of the man's soul is not the doctrine which he cites, but the way he so blithely applies it to himself. It is in the translation of theory into application that something seems to go so very badly wrong. How can this man claim so confidently that he so truly understands and knows himself that he can avoid that most necessary and prayer, "Lord, have mercy," that cry on which all our hopes are grounded and made firm?

In other words, IMHO, what we have here is a defective spiritual psychology formed by reception of a perfectly true set of doctrinal principles, that is a set of principles that are, in fact, capable of a proper reception.

(That abstract truths can lead to practical error should not be controversial. Orthodox Christians have been taught so long the truth that monastic life is the "angelic life" that many simply assume they can leave the real work of spiritual conversion and liturgical prayer to the men and women in black robes. Besides, there is nothing defective in Lucifer's doctrine; the demons too confess Christ to be Son of God! (Lk 4:41).)

In a nutshell: our apologist friend knows Catholic doctrine well. What he does not know so well is himself. Perhaps he should be reminded of the verse from Psalm 19/20 that Pope Benedict cites in Spe Salvi by way of introduction to his section on purgatorial suffering: "Cleanse me of my hidden faults."

The problem, then, as Father Kimel so aptly puts it, is "the distorting dominance of forensic language in the Western tradition." How does this language form an idea of sin? Sin = crime. Sins are primarily moments of illegality interspersed with moments of legality. This punctiliar notion of human acts in time tends to treat the moral life as a kind of rap sheet.

But note: this model is not in itself untrue. If it were, vast quantities of Scripture would need to be thrown out, including anything where the Lord refers to Himself as a "judge." Time can be experienced in a punctiliar mode, as a series of moments or states. The West is not wrong to note this fact. The problem lies in an undue concentration on this model, or this mode of experience giving rise to this kind of scriptural metaphor, to the exclusion of all others.

The "hidden faults" of which the Psalmist speaks are not simply forgotten sinful moments. They are processes and passions at work within a life seen not just as a series of moments, not just life as made up of "particles" in the physical sense, but of "waves." Life can also be experienced as a whole, not as a state but as a movement. This is why Scripture provides other metaphors to explain the phenomenon of sin: wandering (plane), missing the mark (hamartia), disease and death.

When we understand sin in this sense, not simply criminal acts of the will ("voluntary" sins) but also as irruptions of death in the process of life ("involuntary" sins), this must surely force us to reconsider the usefulness of understanding purification from sin in terms of "remission" of "punishment", or of "satisfaction" of a debt.

Let me offer a hypothetical example. A young woman suffers from deep and chronic depression. This cause of this depression is primarily an organic brain disorder, although it clearly has psychological and spiritual effects. There is no joy in her life, and no possibility of peace. She cannot pray. The weight of life is unbearable, and eventually she seeks relief in the one thing that seems to offer freedom. She takes an overdose of pills and dies.

Catholic moral theology, even in its most conservative articulation, is well passed the point of simply assuming the woman has died in a state of mortal sin. It is understood that her mental disorder greatly mitigates the sinfulness of the suicide, perhaps even to the point of rendering her, in a forensic sense, guiltless. Guiltless yes, but is she really ready for heaven? How can someone close their eyes in such pain and open them at once to Glory? Surely there must be some spiritual interval through which she must be prepared, separated from the lingering effects of her diseased mind and heart, detached from her old way of seeing reality. Surely there remains some purification, some testing of her "work" through fire? Surely she needs to be taken by the hand and trained for the work of receiving and reflecting Light?

If we all of us look with sobriety on our spiritual state, I think we must admit the presence within us of much that separates us from Glory. Some of this is in the realm of the voluntary, and can certainly be repented of by an act of will and by reparation. But what of the rest? What of the deep and "hidden faults"? These, it seems to me, are the facts that Catholic theology is reaching out to understand and accomodate in her doctrine of sin, salvation, purgatory and even, yes, indulgences. It's time some Catholic apologists caught up with these legitimate and much needed developments. For their own sakes!

Interesting article. Bird's eye view of the state of ecumenical play (well, a Roman bird). I am grateful for the continued emphasis on the need for "purification" of memory.

The document from Ravenna, entitled "The ecclesiological and canonical consequences of the sacramental nature of the Church," marked an important breakthrough. For the first time, our Orthodox counterparts recognized a universal level of the Church, and admitted that at this level, too, there exists a protos, a primate, who can only be the bishop of Rome, according to the taxis [hierarchy] of the ancient Church. All of the participants are aware that this is only a first step, and that the journey to full ecclesial communion will still be long and difficult; nevertheless, with this document, we have laid a foundation for future dialogue. The theme that will be addressed in the next plenary session will be: "The role of the bishop of Rome in the communion of the Church in the first millennium."

Specifically in regard to the Moscow patriarchate of the Russian
Orthodox Church, relations have been noticeably smoothed over in recent years. We could say that there is no longer a freeze, but a thaw. From our point of view, a meeting between the Holy Father and the patriarch of Moscow would be helpful. The Patriarchate of Moscow has never excluded such a meeting categorically, but maintains that before this it is opportune to resolve the problems that exist, in its view, in Russia, and above all in Ukraine. It must in any case be remembered that many meetings take place on other levels. Among these, we mention the recent visit of Patriarch Alexius to Paris, considered by both sides as an important step.

To sum up, we can affirm that there is still be the need for a continual purification of historical memory and for many prayers so that, on the common foundation of the first millennium, we may succeed in healing the fracture between East and West, and in restoring full ecclesial communion. In spite of the difficulties that remain, there is the strong and legitimate hope that, with the help of God and thanks to the prayer of so many of the faithful, the Church, after the division of the second millennium, will return in the third to breathing with both its lungs.

Father Alvin asked me to check out his postings on Purgatory here. They are so good, and so relevant to the Catholic-Orthodox debate as well, that I am taking the liberty of copying some here. I will add my own tuppence in a separate post.

[T]he key to understanding the Catholic teaching on "temporal punishments" is to realize that these punishments are not external acts of divine vengeance but are the existential consequences of our sins to ourselves and to others. Since God has willed that we suffer these consequences, they are and must be an expression of divine justice.

Catholics and Protestants alike must acknowledge that a clarification of doctrine is now taking place in the Catholic Church with regards to the notion of "the temporal punishments of sin." This clarification has been authoritatively expressed in the CCC:

To understand this doctrine and practice of the Church, it is necessary to understand that sin has a double consequence. Grave sin deprives us of communion with God and therefore makes us incapable of eternal life, the privation of which is called the "eternal punishment" of sin. On the other hand every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory. This purification frees one from what is called the "temporal punishment" of sin. These two punishments must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin. A conversion which proceeds from a fervent charity can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain. (1472)

The language of punishment is retained, yet note the insistence that this "must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin." It is sin that brings with it, by divine ordination, its own punishment.

Note also that the temporal punishment of sin is explicitly connected with that "unhealthy attachment to creatures" that sin causes within us and from which we must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory."

Note also the possibility that perfect contrition, i.e., conversion that flows from charity, can "attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain." When the individual has been healed, when he has been delivered from his personal attachment to sin through love of God, the temporal punishment is ended. There is no further penalty to be imposed, precisely because the temporal penalty of sin is identical to our bondage to sin. Once we have been liberated from sin, there can be no more "punishment."

I believe it is accurate to say that according to the CCC, sinful attachment to evil and creaturely goods is the temporal penalty and punishment of sin. To speak of pardoning or remitting this temporal punishment is simply a juridical way of speaking of that existential liberation from the power of sin which God achieves in our lives, either before death or afterwards. John Paul II also appears to have identified temporal punishment with that attachment to sin from which we must be purified:

Temporal punishment expresses the condition of suffering of those who, although reconciled with God, are still marked by those "remains" of sin which
do not leave them totally open to grace. Precisely for the sake of complete healing, the sinner is called to undertake a journey of conversion towards the fullness of love. In this process God's mercy comes to his aid in special ways. The temporal punishment itself serves as "medicine" to the extent that the person allows it to challenge him to undertake his own profound conversion. This is the meaning of the "satisfaction" required in the sacrament of Penance.

The problem is the distorting dominance of forensic language in the Western tradition. We are all struggling to move beyond this dominance, not only in our articulation of the sacrament of penance and purgatory but also in our articulation of the sacrificial atonement of Jesus Christ. Rather than jettisoning the language, which would be an un-Catholic way of doing things, the Catholic Church has chosen to supplement and correct this language with terminology and images that better express the absolute love and mercy of God and his transforming power, thus achieving a reinterpretation of the forensic. I cite Pope Benedict's latest encyclical, esp. the remarkable section on the last judgment (par 41-48), in support of my position. I believe that the present teaching of the Catholic Church on purification and penance is now more firmly grounded in Scripture and the wider catholic tradition. It is certainly less vulnerable to Reformation objections.

Is this "clarification" of "temporal punishment" contrary to the Council of Trent? That is a decision only the Magisterium can make, and since it is the Magisterium itself that is stating this clarification, the Catholic, at least, must assume continuity of teaching, not discontinuity. The Protestant critic is of course free to assert that the Catholic Church has simply changed her teaching, but I hope that he will at least acknowledge this "change" by altering his polemic.

Let's not get lost in secondary matters. The Catholic Church teaches that the infinite Creator is a triune community of absolute love. The Catholic Church teaches that in his love for humanity, God himself has assumed our human nature to reconcile sinners to himself. The Catholic Church teaches that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ God himself has offered to himself a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the world. The Catholic Church teaches that when God speaks to the sinner, through his ordained minister, the words "I absolve you for your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," the sins of the penitent are utterly and completely forgiven and the penitent is reborn in the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church teaches that God justifies sinners by Christ alone, by grace alone, and that by his act of justification he incorporates the individual into the divine life of the Holy Trinity. All of this is very, very good news!