Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils

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1 Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils 5 th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST Tone 4. Commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils. Greatmartyr Marina (Margaret) of Antioch in Pisidia (4 th c.). Ven. Irenarchus, Abbot of Solovkétsky Monastery (1628). Translation of the Relics of Ven. Lazarus of Mt. Galerius near Ephesus. Ven. Andrei Rublev (14 th -15 th c.). Royal Passionbearers Tsar Nicholas (Nikolai), Tsaritsa Alexandra, Tsarevich Aleksy, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia (1918 July 4 th O.S.). Today is the commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the first six ecumenical Councils. It gives us an opportunity for reflecting a little as Eastern Christians on the role of Fathers and Councils, and consequently, on the role of Tradition in our Church consciousness, because Fathers and Councils represent and embody that sense of Tradition that we value so highly. Eastern Christianity, perhaps even more than its Western equivalent, has always seen itself as the Church of Tradition, the Church of the Fathers and Councils. So, it is worthwhile reflecting on what this actually means and does not mean. The debates of the 16 th century during the time of the Protestant Reformation about Scripture and Tradition, and their relationship to one another never really impacted Byzantine Christianity, at least directly. An so we Eastern Christians have always tended to see Tradition as simply that obvious heritage of the Church which somehow holds together all those things- scripture, liturgy, the theology of the Fathers and Councils, lives of the saints, canon law, ascetical disciplines- which are part and parcel of what it is to be the Christian community. Tradition for us Easterners is, in a sense, the water in which we swim, the environment in which we live and think and worship. If Western Catholicism has tended to see itself as the Church with authority, with 1

2 magisterium, at its center, and if Protestantism has tended to identify sacred scripture as its core, and if Anglicanism has accented the scriptures and ecumenical creeds and the historic episcopate as its defining characteristics, then we Eastern Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, have tended to identify Tradition, and our adherence to Tradition, as what gives us our identity. In fact, Western Christians, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant, often find their way into the Eastern Churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, because they are looking for what they think is the stability of Tradition, a church where nothing changes. Western Christianity in all of its forms has gone through tremendous upheavals during the past 50 or so years, and Eastern Christianity can appear, at least to some, as a kind of refuge, a shelter from what is experienced as the chaos and danger of change. And so some are quite willing to exchange the contemporary guitar Masses of our era for the solemnity of Byzantine ritual and music produced in a very different time and context. Maybe many of us are here today, at least in part, for reasons related to this. And certainly God can use all kinds of things, including our own weaknesses and fears and confusion, to lead us to a deeper relationship with him. Without a doubt, our Eastern Tradition, with its theology and spirituality and liturgy, has resources that can genuinely feed us and lead us to a deeper life in Christ. But we need to be careful. We can t stop at simply seeing Tradition as some kind of unchanging, frozen-in-time, world that serves as a buffer between us and our presentday context. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, before he was pope, has, I think, brilliantly and 2

3 absolutely accurately described tradition as something which needs careful consideration because it is ambiguous. On the one hand, Ratzinger says what we Eastern Christians sense so well- that Tradition is the very foundation of our humanness, that not only we Christians, but all human beings, live in and by and through tradition. It shapes us, and nurtures us, and makes us who we are. It enables the past to continue to live in the present, and it gives us the ability to anticipate the future, to shape the future even now. Tradition both preserves the past through memory and opens the way towards what is yet to come. Tradition is good. When we remember the Fathers of the first six ecumenical councils, who struggled to find words to express the deep mysteries of the one God as Father, Son and Spirit and the double humanity and divinity within the one person of Jesus Christ, we are celebrating all of these things- Tradition as the glue binding together the past, the present and the future. Yet, there is another side to tradition, according to Cardinal Ratzinger. Tradition is also mingled everywhere with those things that deprive us of our humanity. The very foundation of our humanness- tradition- is contaminated. It bears within itself the seeds of antihumanism. The reason for this is simple- what we customarily call original sin does exist, and this applies not only to us as individuals, but to us as communities. Every tradition, apart from the saving tradition of Jesus who lives His life from the Father and who continually gives Himself back to the Father, is infected with the forces of the antihuman, which hamper us from becoming ourselves in the deepest and truest sense. We must hold fast to the tradition, if we are to hold fast to what makes us human and gives us stability and direction. But in doing so, we inevitably also hold fast to the forces 3

4 that produce alienation within ourselves and among us. This is the ambiguity of tradition. So, what as Christians do we do with this ambiguity, this doubleness that seems to be an inescapable part of any lived tradition? You only need to pause for a moment, drop any defensive posture that we often unconsciously have, and you can begin to see this doubleness. On the one hand, the tradition presents us with the hard-earned fruits of Christians- of Fathers and Councils, for example, who struggled with the desire to maintain faith in the one God of Israel and yet to re-read, reinterpret, this received tradition through the lens of their experience of Jesus, the crucified and resurrected one, and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost. The Fathers of the first six ecumenical councils show us precisely tradition s creativity and innovativeness, its inherent openness, its ability to deal with new questions, and its willingness to find new forms of expression and new intellectual frameworks so that Christians could speak meaningfully to the world in which it found itself. This is tradition at its best. At the same time, that very same tradition, and those very same people, with a few exceptions, defended and transmitted ways of thinking and acting which endanger humanity. The tradition was contaminated. Just a cursory glance at the place of slavery within the Christian community and the attitudes of Christians towards slavery throughout much of Christian history can enable us to see this. Slavery as an institutional arrangement ran throughout the world- Hebrew, Greek and Roman- in which Christianity first appeared and lived for almost 2,000 years. Christians, with few 4

5 exceptions, did not challenge this inhuman and de-humanizing institution, either practically or even theoretically, but accepted it as the normal state of affairs. The scriptures were understood as establishing God s approval of slavery, so that even into the modern era, Catholic officials could still say that slavery is against neither natural law nor divine law. Thank God, that is now no longer the case. All that I m trying to do is to make concrete Cardinal Ratzinger s more theoretical pointliving traditions are ambiguous. This means that we must not idolize tradition. We must not idealize tradition. We must not treat it as something that is unchanging. So what then is a proper attitude towards tradition, if it is, as Ratzinger says, something which is essential to our life, yet something which also can endanger our humanity? I would suggest that what we need to do with tradition is to engage it, to engage it. Not to gaze on it as some kind of fetish or talisman or good-luck charm, or to invoke it on occasion to prove a theological point or win an argument. We need to engage it in order to enable its life-giving qualities to feed us and shape us, and at the same time to sift out what endangers our humanity. To truly engage tradition is an act of critical fidelity. Tradition is not a static thing. It is not an unchanging and unchangeable treasure which limits our thinking and our acting. Rather it is a treasury of human responses to God s activity in the past which can help us in our own day to respond to God s work here and now. In this sense, tradition is always living, always growing, always vibrant. 5

6 To be faithful Eastern Christians, we need to engage the tradition we have received. And this means, first of all, steeping ourselves in the rich treasury of the past- in the liturgy, in the scriptures, in the councils, in the Fathers, in iconography, in the spiritual and ascetical directors- so that we can enter into the deep meaning of previous generations s ways of experiencing and understanding the workings of God. We need to practice what they practiced, to try to see what they saw, to struggle to understand the principles that underlay what they did and how they thought, to recognize both the successes and the failures of the past. To what end? For what purpose? So that we are equipped to be God s people today. So that we are equipped to look at the current needs and issues and problems, to lean into the present-day reality with the resources and the experiences of the past at our backs, shaping our minds and feeding our hearts. God and truth are not held captive to the past. The God of the past, the God of tradition, of the Fathers, of the Councils is also the God of the present and the future. Engagement with the tradition- real engagement, not just mindless repetition- is hard work. And anyone who tells you otherwise is feeding you a line! But it guides us. It suggests possibilities to us. It describes what our ancestors in the faith how they have thought and what they have done. And it also frees us to pursue new and often uncharted territories of human existence as we struggle in our own day to respond to the Divine Presence. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (1982) Richard Valantasis, Centuries of Holiness. Ancient Spirituality Refracted for a Postmodern Age (2005) 6