Being Orthodox

Faith and Practice in Eastern Orthodoxy

Martin Dudley

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780281082308
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

'Martin's book is the delighted exclamation of someone who has learnt - is learning - to swim in the ocean that is Orthodoxy: "Come on in; it is lovely here!"'Andrew LouthUntil now, there has been little in the way of an accessible guide for those who seek to become or live as Orthodox Christians. A new convert himself, Martin Dudley is familiar with the questions, feelings and challenges that arise.He explains that, to grasp Orthodoxy, we must think and act as the Orthodox do. This involves suspending the Western analytical tendency and allowing free rein to the synthetic tendency, which enables us to detect a unity and perceive, however dimly, the interaction between the parts and the whole in relation to God and the Church. The author draws on a wealth of material, from the Church Fathers to straight-talking Mother Thekla, to explore the essentials of belief. He provides guidance on participating in the Liturgy, the requirements for fasting, confession and Orthodox prayer. In celebrating the culture of Orthodoxy - shaped by many different ethnicities and languages, gloriously expressed in art, music and literature - this volume fully conveys the rigour and joy of becoming and being Orthodox.

1

Blessed is our God

‘I understand that you are on the way to becoming Orthodox,’ the nun Mother Thekla wrote to an intended convert. She continued:

I know nothing about you, beyond the fact that you are English. Before we go any further, there is one point I should make clear. I have not been told why you are about to convert, but I assure you there is no point whatsoever if it is for negative reasons. You will find as much ‘wrong’ (if not more) in Orthodoxy as in the Anglican or Roman Churches. So – the first point is, are you prepared to face lies, hypocrisy, evil and all the rest, just as much in Orthodoxy as in any other religion or denomination?

Deeply aware of the many misguided reasons people have for becoming Orthodox, she continued her questioning:

Are you expecting a kind of earthly paradise with plenty of incense and the right kind of music? Do you expect to go straight to heaven if you cross yourself slowly, pompously and in the correct form from the right side? Have you a cookery book with all the authentic Russian recipes for Easter festivities? Are you an expert in kissing three times on every possible or improper occasion? Can you prostrate elegantly without dropping a variety of stationery out of your pockets?

The straight-talking Mother Thekla is best known as the spiritual mother of the composer John Tavener, who had been prepared for reception into the Orthodox Church by another significant spiritual teacher, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, the bishop of the Russian Diocese of Sourozh, based in London. In his conversations, Bloom tried to ensure that Tavener was not simply attracted by icons and music, and the composer recalled that he suggested the Metropolitan was inclined to be a Quaker, preferring a bare meeting room and silence. Metropolitan Anthony protested that this was, of course, not the case but, for him, God was the meaning, the centre, the ultimately attractive force in the Orthodox Church and the rest lost its meaning if the centre was displaced.

There are three main areas that are likely to bring the non-Orthodox into sympathetic contact with Orthodoxy; these are icons, music and literature. For many they can be narrowed down to Rublev (The Trinity), Tchaikovsky (The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom) or Rachmaninov (the so-called ‘Vespers’) and Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov) with his fictional creation, Elder Zosima. All of these have a place in the large, rich experience of Orthodoxy, but they are not where the Orthodox faith begins. They are too narrow a base. Mother Thekla had more questions for the convert:

Are you prepared, in all humility, to understand that you will never, in this life, know beyond Faith; that Faith means accepting the Truth without proof. Faith and knowledge are the ultimate contradiction – and the ultimate absorption into each other. Living Orthodoxy is based on paradox, which is carried on into worship – private or public. We know because we believe and we believe because we know. Above all, are you prepared to accept all things as from God?

Orthodox Christians believe in one God. They do not do this in an abstract, intellectual, distracted way. They do it with conviction, with enthusiasm, with passion. With St John of Damascus, after his initial discussion, in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, of how it is that we might know God and even be able to say something about Him, Orthodox Christians declare, ‘therefore, we believe in one God’. The word ‘therefore’ embraces what the Damascene has said about the limits of knowledge, for not all things are unknowable, nor are they all knowable, as not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression. John pours out words: God is one principle, without beginning, uncreated, unbegotten, indestructible and immortal, eternal, unlimited, uncircumscribed, unbounded, infinite in power, simple, uncompounded, incorporeal, unchanging, unaffected, unchangeable, inalterate, invisible . . . He has not yet ended, but the long list concludes with a statement that moves us from philosophical theology to the believer’s engagement with God: ‘We believe in Father and Son and Holy Spirit in whom we have been baptized.’ Prayer, says St Gregory of Sinai (d. 1346), is the manifestation of baptism. In baptism, the image and likeness of God is restored and true prayer, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware teaches, signifies the rediscovery and manifestation of baptismal grace; the aim of the Christian life is the return to the perfect grace conferred by the Spirit at the beginning in the sacrament of baptism. There is no halfway house. The Russian theologian Pavel Florensky expressed it well:

The Orthodox taste, the Orthodox temper, is felt, but it is not subject to arithmetical calculation. Orthodoxy is shown, not proved. That is why there is only one way to understand Orthodoxy: through direct experience . . . To become Orthodox, it is necessary to immerse oneself all at once in the very element of Orthodoxy, to begin living in an Orthodox way. There is no other way.

The Orthodox Christian begins every day with God. Metropolitan Gregory Postnikov of St Petersburg taught in his book A Day of Holy Life, first published in 1854, that we should rise swiftly from bed and, without any delay, say, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’ while making the sign of the cross, followed by ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ Then we should wash immediately and dress in a way that befits a respectable person – that is to say, in a way that is appropriate to what we are going to do next, which is stand before God with our morning prayers. The opening instruction in a popular Russian prayer book makes it clear that, as we pray, we stand before God and so we should stand reverentially. Reverence, piety and fear of God are all ways of expressing a basic attitude towards God. The morning prayer continues:

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth . . .

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. (Thrice)

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

O Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us.

The Orthodox Christian adopts an open and forthright attitude to God, but without any informality. God is to be worshipped and glorified, but from God we can ask, and expect to receive, mercy. It will become apparent in due course why this is necessary, but here, at the beginning, we are concerned with God, understood as both One and Three, as Unity and Trinity. We are straight into theology in the proper sense. Nearly all the texts used here are liturgical, drawn from the annual and daily cycles of services. The Orthodox liturgy (by which I mean all the church services, the daily offices and vigils, as well as the Eucharistic Liturgy) has maintained continuity through time and is the principal vehicle for the transmission of the Orthodox Christian faith. As Abbot Gregorios of a monastery on Holy Mount Athos reminded his monks, ‘If you want to learn Orthodox theology, you will find it in the service books of the Church.’ You will find it, but you will have to look for it, as it is contained, in the words of liturgical scholar Alexander Schmemann, in 27 hefty volumes!

The Holy Trinity

In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, first used in 1549, there is a Confession of Christian faith, commonly but erroneously called the Creed of St Athanasius or, from its opening words in Latin, Quicunque vult (‘Whosoever will be saved’). It was probably written in Latin sometime after 428. It is not recognized as a creed in the Orthodox Church because it was never agreed by a Council, but, with the removal of the reference to Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son (the Filioque), it appeared in Russian service books from 1647 (having been favoured in Kiev by the Metropolitan, the Paris-educated Peter Mogila) and in the Greek office book, the Horologion, from the end of the eighteenth century. It declares the Catholic faith as being that:

We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.

For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.

The nature of God is revealed to us as Unity and Trinity. The word ‘revealed’ is important. The Trinity is not a clever philosophical or theological solution to a problem; rather, it is the divine nature as shown to us by Jesus the Christ. As we think about the Unity of God and about God as Father, Son and Spirit, we will constantly move between the Unity and the Trinity. Before the Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, writers avoided technical terms such as prosopon (person) and hypostasis and preferred instead to speak of ‘three’ and ‘one’. Hypostasis is a Greek word with a variety of meanings. The most basic is that of an objective reality as opposed to an illusion. In theology, it comes to mean ‘being’ or ‘substantial reality’. It develops quite naturally to mean ‘individual reality’. Each of the Holy Trinity is a hypostasis, meaning a ‘Person’. Western theologians translated hypostasis as ‘substance’ and thought that Eastern theologians found three substances in God, rather than three Persons, which would lead to tritheism – belief in three gods. The Western theologians were mistaken, but translation of technical terms has nearly always given rise to misunderstandings. From the Council of Constantinople in 381, the standard doctrine of the Holy Trinity was ‘Three Hypostases in one Ousia’, rendered in the English version of the liturgy as ‘three self-dependent Persons in one Nature’. Both terms – ‘Person’ and ‘hypostasis’ – were used without prejudice or partiality after that date, but ‘Person’ was generally preferred in English and the word ‘substance’ was generally used of the divine nature.

Some translations of liturgical texts have returned to the term ‘hypostasis’. We can read in a 2014 translation of the Pentecostarion – the book containing texts from Easter Day to Pentecost and the Sunday of All Saints – ‘O Father Almighty, the Word and the Spirit, one Nature in three Hypostases united, transcending essence and supremely Divine!’ This version, from the Greek Holy Transfiguration monastery in Boston, Massachusetts, seeks rather unsuccessfully to establish the original meanings of Greek words and uses, in addition to ‘hypostases’, a technical vocabulary that speaks of the ‘uncommingled Unity’ of the Trinity, the ‘Thearchy’ of God and the ‘consubstantial Effulgence’ of Christ. It also describes the Son and Spirit as ‘equipotent’ with the Father, and speaks of ‘the undivided Nature, which is undividely divided into three Persons’.

One of the things this certainly demonstrates is that the Trinity, being itself beyond understanding, can only be described by using a multiplicity of different terms, including the metaphorical and poetical, and such description strains the possibilities of human language. As Apollinarius wrote to Basil the Great in the second half of the fourth century, ‘each is interwoven and unitary; identical with difference; different in identity. One has to strain language, which is inadequate for an explanation of the reality.’ The theology that is found in the poetry of the liturgy is not a precisely formulated dogmatic theology made up of propositions. A favourite liturgical image of God, for example, is that of the sun. Using this analogy, the Trinity is described as consisting of three Suns with but one single Light, a Light that remains undivided though it shines in the three rays of the Persons. It is a threefold radiance, both Light and Lights. The Pentecostarion dramatically addresses the ‘God of Three Suns’, the ‘Three-Sun Godhead’, the ‘Triple-Sun’ and the ‘Unity of three suns’ and speaks of ‘Trinal Radiance’. The movement between Trinity and Unity is well expressed in a text from the Lenten Triodion, the volume containing the offices used in Great Lent, provided for Mattins on the Saturday of the Dead:

In my thought I distinguish three Persons within the simplicity of the divine Oneness, and at the same time I join them together; for shining forth in threefold radiance with the swiftn...

Table of contents

• 1 Blessed is our God
• 2 The Orthodox ethos
• 3 The wedding garment
• 4 Heaven on earth
• 5 The holy icons
• 6 The Holy Liturgy
• 7 Music and musicians
• 8 Orthodoxy and literature
• 9 Fasting, confession and prayer
• 10 The resurrection life
• Appendix 1: The Orthodox church year, the Paschalion and vestment colours
• Appendix 2: An Orthodox glossary
• Text sources
• Select bibliography
• Further reading
• Search terms