Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology

Andrew Louth

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830895359
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

With an estimated 250 million adherents, the Orthodox Church is the second largest Christian body in the world. This absorbing account of the essential elements of Eastern Orthodox thought deals with the Trinity, Christ, sin, humanity, and creation as well as praying, icons, the sacraments and liturgy.

1

Thinking and doing, being and praying: where do we start?

Well, where do we start? In Alice in Wonderland, the White Rabbit is advised by the King of Hearts: ‘Begin at the beginning . . . and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ That sounds like good advice, but how are we to apply it? Many accounts of the Christian faith adopt the order of the creed, beginning with God the Father and continuing through the Son, and then the Spirit, to the Church and eternal life. That makes some sort of sense, but it seems to me to beg a question, one that we need to face up to. For if there is one thing we know about God the Father, it is that he is unknowable. ‘No one has ever seen God’ (John 1.18). ‘You cannot see my face’, God says to Moses, ‘for man shall not see me and live’ (Exod. 33.22): this warning is repeated throughout the Old Testament, though usually in contexts where God actually is ‘seen’ or apprehended in some way (as with Moses). How can we start with God the Father, if we cannot know him?

This is a question we can pursue in various ways. Perhaps this means that we start with God, not as knowing him, but as standing before a mystery that is, and will remain, beyond our understand­ing. In the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, at the beginning of the anaphora, we justify our attempts to worship God by saying: ‘for you are God, ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, inconceivable, ever existing, eternally the same’.[1] Our worship is a response to an unfathomable mystery. In a sense, if we start there we shall never proceed: for once we glimpse the unfathomable mystery of God, we shall never drag ourselves away. Or maybe we shall proceed, but constantly find ourselves drawn back to the inexhaustibility of this mystery that God is.

But if we do proceed, there is another problem. If we posit God and then consider him as Creator, source of all values, especially moral, and continue, as we consider the creed, to think of the Incarnation of God the Son, all that led up to that, all that has followed from it, the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ, the outpouring of the Spirit, the birth of the Church, then what is it that we are doing? It looks like an objective list of persons and events that we simply relate.

But how can that be, how do we know that it is like that? The creed, we need to remind ourselves, is not a list of things to believe, it is itself a liturgical text, belonging, first of all, to the baptismal liturgy. It summarizes the faith that the newly baptized Christian is embracing; it is the culmination of a process of learning about the faith, and beginning to practise what it requires, in a doubtless stumbling way; it opens up to the new life of the baptized, a life that draws its sustenance from the Eucharist, which in Orthodox practice is immediately celebrated after the bapti­smal liturgy, or rather as the final part of the rite of initiation. Both the paths we have just sketched converge: if to acknowledge God is to acknowledge his unknowa­bility and stand before him in awe; if the creed is part of our initiation into a life, not a summary of things to be believed, then in both cases we do not stand over against God; rather, we are finding ourselves caught up in the divine presence and the divine activity, and trying to make sense of it. It is something of what is involved in that, how that presence and that activity are felt by us, that I want to explore in this chapter.

When I gave the course of lectures from which this book is derived, I called it a ‘personal introduction’. There were two reasons for that. First, I claim no authority for what I am saying. I am keen to stand in the tradition of the Church, and hope that I do. But I am not a bishop, I do not have the grace ‘rightly to discern the word of the truth’.[2] Second, my presentation is personal; it is how I see it. Furthermore, what I see is personal: it is the result of a personal engagement (doubtless flawed), and demands personal engagement. I am not presenting something to you that is independent of either what I see or what you see; I am suggesting that you look with me at something and I hope that you will see something of what it is that engages me.

If that is so, then various conclusions follow. To change the metaphor, I am inviting you on a journey. I can point out various things that we encounter on the way, perhaps even warn you against some paths that I fear will simply mislead you; but the journey is yours – it will involve your commitment, your struggle. This is why I called this first chapter ‘Thinking and doing, being and praying’. An introduction to Eastern Orthodox theology, as I understand it, may well involve learning various facts and dates, terminology and concepts, but at its heart it is an introduction to a way of life.

I am a priest, and I am used to preaching, but I hope that you will not find this book too much like a sequence of homilies. How­ever, there is no complete break between what I do as I try to lead my congregation deeper into their discipleship of Christ and what I am doing in this book, as I try to sketch out what Eastern Orthodox theology involves. There will be a difference of emphasis, a difference of balance, but not a complete difference, because I do not think one can present theology in the Orthodox tradition without making clear that at its heart there is an engagement, ultimately an engagement with God. ‘Thinking and doing, being and praying’: these are fundamental human activities. It is the case, I would suggest, that we do not exactly learn to do these things – we engage in these simply by being human – what happens is that we learn what is involved in doing these things.

For this reason, several movements in twentieth-century philosophy are at some level deeply sym­pathetic to what I am suggesting here. Both the hermeneutical tradition associated with Heidegger and the rather different tradition associated with Wittgenstein have in common a conviction that we do not start out ignorant, and then by means of ‘philosophy’ come to a knowledge of the world. Rather, we already know the world in some sense, simply by living in it, and what philosophy does is help us to reflect on what is involved in that knowledge of the world. So it is with theology: thinking and doing, being and praying, are activities we all engage in at some level or another. The questions about how we are to live, what it means to be, how we engage with the world, how we engage with what seems to transcend the world: we can hardly live without asking these questions. So we are already theologians. Orthodox theology takes us along a path, marked out by tradition, that helps us in our continuing grappling with these questions.

Standing before the mystery of God

I began by asking: where do we start? and reflected on the paradox that we seem to start from a place of unknowing, not in the sense of ignorance – as if we started off with little knowledge and found that it increased – but in a more fundamental sense – starting off with an awareness that the One we seek to know is beyond any capacity we might have for knowing.

I suggested that we find ourselves standing before the mystery of a God who is beyond knowledge. And it is from this point that I want to indicate our next steps. We stand before God. We are always standing before God, for there is no place where God is not, as opposed to a place where he is: wherever we are we are before God. But there are places where, from a human perspective, the presence of God is more apparent to us, places where it is less easy for us to forget that God is here.

These places are many and various, and our sensi­tivity to them is in part a matter of our own upbringing and history. There is, for example, a very strong tradition – in many geographical and histor­ical cultures – that mountains are places where God is encountered. The reason is partly because mountains are not easily amenable to human modification. Other places are more easily covered over with what humans have done to make themselves at home in them, but mountains – and rivers, and the sea – are resistant to human fashioning. One is already detached from what humans make of things; one is already open to the power that lies behind everything. We have a sense of the transcendent, as we put it, a sense of the divine. The poet, T. S. Eliot, put it well when he said of Little Gidding (the holiness of which has to do with historical events) that it is a place ‘[w]here prayer has been valid’.[3]

I want to suggest that the first step in the pursuit of Orthodox theology, in coming to know God in accordance with the Orthodox tradition, is the rediscovery of this sense of standing before God (standing is a more customary attitude for prayer in the Eastern Orthodox tradition than kneeling), and pre-eminently standing before God in church. This is the place where people pray, where the liturgical services are held, a place surrounded and defined by icons. It is filled with the evidence of human worship of God – the singing of sacred song, the sight of sacred architecture and garments, the smell of the incense, the touching of sacred things – icons and relics – and the sense of other people standing there before God. This is where we start.

Many who stand in such a place are already committed to the faith being celebrated. Yet you do not have to believe to go into a church; you can stand there alongside people who do believe, next to people you know, or even out of curiosity. But here is where theology begins, according to the Orthodox tradition, at least as I understand it: in a mysterious togetherness, mediated by silence (chattering during the services is not encouraged, even if it is sometimes difficult to prevent), full of sounds and smells that seem to interpret this silence rather than dissolve it. And here, too, it may end – caught up in the presence of God, open to his spirit, bearing before him in our hearts the concerns of those with whom we have to do. If we seek to understand it, we shall only ever understand in part. But there is something to understand, and such understanding is what we might well call theology.

Approaching theology

There are lots of things that further such understanding that we call theology, and in the rest of this book we shall explore some of them. What I want to do in this chapter is give some sense of orientation. What is it that furthers theological understanding and how are we to approach it?

What is involved in theological understanding in the Christian tradition, and especially the Orthodox tradition, is fairly familiar. There are the Scriptures. There is reflection on the Scriptures by those we often call the­ologians, but also by others to whom we rarely extend the title. There are controversies that have arisen over the interpretation of the tradition, and the attempts to solve these controversies that have become established in the Orthodox tradition, notably the synods or councils, especially those called ‘œcumenical’. There is a living voice in the Church, articulating the tradition in the dif­ferent historical circumstances in which the Church has found itself, a voice that is not merely human, but safeguarded and inspired by God’s help or grace – we hear this living voice in the bishops, who have the grace ‘rightly to discern the word of the truth’. There is also the prayer of the Church: the liturgical prayers of the divine liturgy and the offices of the Church, where what we believe is spelt out in the words we use as we turn to God. And there are lives of prayer – most pro­minently the lives of monks and ascetics, but just as validly the lives of those in whom we can see a living out of the life in Christ – and these lives have authority, even though it is not provided for in a formal way, as is the authority of bishops. Nevertheless, retrospectively, in the case of the saints, these lives have acquired a fundamental importance in the history of the Orthodox Church.

This can become a list: scriptural exegesis, patristic theology, the theology of the councils (and alongside this the tradition of the Holy Canons, spelling out aspects of the Christian life), Church history and rebuttal of heresy, the role of the hierarchy, the place of the monastic order and the role of prayer (which includes the way in which liturgy defines meaning – in the case of both sacraments and the great feasts of the Church – as well as the role of those whose ‘prayer has been valid’, the saints and martyrs, and the way in which devotion to the saints has been expressed through the cult of relics and the development of iconography). This list, however, can become something quite different, more like labelling the limbs and organs of a body, so that there is an organic relationship between all the elements thus labelled. It is this that I want to explore briefly now.

Encountering Christ

There seem to me to be two elements in seeing how all these dif­ferent factors come to form a single organic whole. On the one hand, and fundamentally, there is the realization that all this relates to Christ. The Scriptures are not primarily sources of reliable – still less infallible – information about religious matters; rather, Christ stands at their centre; they bear witness to him. The books of the Old Testament tell of God’s ways with the world and humans, at the centre of which there is the history of the people of Israel, among whom the Son of God became incarnate as the fulfilment of the promises to Israel and the hopes of all humanity. The New Testament contains the apostolic witness to Christ, to his birth, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the Church and the whole human race. But all this is more than record: it is through the Scriptures that Christ con­tinues to encounter human kind; to read the Bible as Scripture is to be open to encounter with Christ. The same applies mutatis mutandis to the writings of the Fathers, the history of the Church and its councils, the lives of the saints: all these are ways of encountering Christ, or of understanding the lineaments of such an encounter. And what makes this a possibility is prayer; it is prayer that creates beings capable of hearing the voice of Christ.

These lead us to the other element involved, for prayer to Christ and openness to his voice takes us back to the point we started with – the mystery of God. For that mystery is not simply an intellectual mystery; it is something much deeper. As we shall see again and again in the course of this book, encounter with Christ entails opening ourselves to an inner transformation, to a fundamental repentance.

Mother Thekla, a Russian nun who died at a great age in summer 2011, once wrote about what her monastery was engaged in as it sought (through publishing: the immediate context of this quotation) to express the Orthodox tradition in its English environment, and spoke of ‘the one innermost battle-cry of the monastery, the austere demand of refusing to discuss what is not lived, and the impossi­bility of living this ourselves: back into the revolving wheel of repentance: Face God, not man’.[4] This sense of theology as rooted in experience, and yet the idea that this experience is beyond us, so that we are constantly pushed back to repent, to turn again to God: this seems to me absolutely central to the Orthodox experience of theology, of coming to know God.

There are two elements? – dimensions? – here: we stand before God and listen and we stand before God and we speak, or try to. These two dimensions are held together in various ways. We stand before God, as part of the body of Christ, the Church: we hear the voice of Christ, and we respond with the voice of Christ. This is very evident in the Christian use of the psalms: these are words that we hear, they are also words that we use. Many of the Fathers suggest that in both cases it is in union with Christ that we hear and pray the psalms: we both pray with Christ and we pray to Christ; we both hear Christ and we speak with his voice. It seems to me that this applies more generally in the Christian use of the Scriptures: we hear the Scriptures, addressed to us, but at the same time, the Scriptures provide us with words, images, feelings, even concepts and ideas, that we use when, in Christ, we address God.

The Scriptures

Let me try and develop this more specifically: How do we interpret Scripture in the Orthodox tradition?[5] How does the Orthodox interpretation of Scripture differ from the way Scripture is interpreted by other Christians, by scholars? What is the role of the Fathers, of Church Councils, of the prayers of the Church in her various offices?

It is sometimes said that Orthodox Christians kiss the Gospel Book, but they don’t read it. I hope that is not true, but it is certainly true that we do not only read the Gospel, the Gospel Book is an object of veneration: it is carried in pro­cession at the Little Entrance, its binding is usually decorated with icons, of the resurrection and of the cross – there are examples of Gospel Books with marvellous illuminations throughout. This is not irrelevant, or superfluous, for the Gospel Book is seen as an icon of Christ. St Theodore the Studite, in the second stage of the Iconoclast controversy, spoke of icons as ‘written in gold’, compared with the Gospel that was ‘written in ink’. The comparison works both ways: just as an icon is venerated, because it images forth the one depicted and so provides access to the one depicted, so the Gospel, through what is written in it, provides us with access to the one who is the Gospel: Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us. It is still ‘writing in ink’, which needs to be interpreted, but it ...