ORTHODOXY IN THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

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BORIS A. BOBRINSKOY

The Assembly of the World Council of Churches at New Delhi gave me a new and splendid opportunity not only to make and to renew personal friendships but also to reflect once more upon the meaning of the Orthodox presence in the ecumenical movement and upon the part it is called to play in years to come. Moreover, the presence of our brothers of the Roman Catholic Church at this service of prayer for unity1 provides an opportunity to express our satisfaction that the Church of Rome is taking an ever bigger part in ecumenical dialogue both with their Protestant brethren and with the Orthodox. Their participation, limited though it be, in the activities of the World Council of Churches, is no less fruitful or important on account of the intense effort of thought provided by the Catholic theologians who are specialists in ecumenical questions. Further, the Secretariat for Christian Unity provides directives and stimulation, and such initiatives as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity give Catholics many opportunities for meeting their separated brethren and getting to know them better.

* * * I propose to ask you to give your attention to a few reflections upon

the witness and service of the Orthodox Church in the cause of Christian Unity.

As a starting-point I shall recall the high-priestly prayer of our Saviour before his passion: “Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou has given me, that they may be one, even as we are one . . . Sanctify them in the truth ; thy word is truth . . . that they may all be one ; even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they all may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou has sent me.” (John 17. 11, 17, 21.)

See Notes on contributors and articles.

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1. That they may be one as we are one. That they all may be one, as thou, Father art in me, And I in thee.

The unity of Christians, the unity of the Church, is in the image of the unspeakable unity of the persons of the Holy Trinity. Unity is not one attribute of the Church, it is its very life, the manifestation of the real presence of its Head, the Christ who gives it life in the plenitude of the Holy Spirit. Christ cannot be divided, nor can the Spirit of God. Division is thus a profound contradiction which affects the very life of the Church and compromises the message which Christ entrusted to it that they may all be one, . . . that the world may believe that thou has sent me. Meditation upon these words reveals to us that the unity of Christians is not only a gijl which the Church possesses in an immovable and static way, but that it is the object of urgent inter- cession, of beseeching from the Son to his Father. If unity is the very life of the Church, we are not here called to create unity, but to take hold of it again in its total universal dimension. Our first attitude in the presence of the drama of division is to associate ourselves with our Saviour’sprayer: “That they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee.”

2. Sanctify them in the truth

Which truth ? God’s faithfulness to his Covenant, the constancy of his mercy and love. Christ is this personal truth, this living truth, always beyond the partial and subjective truths of human understanding. But this truth is revealed to us and is entrusted to the Church, and the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, himself guarantees us its presence and its plenitude until the end of the Age.

Unity and truth are inseparable; they are both the manifestation - in life and vision - of the love of God, the love which burns and purifies us. Not one of us can justify himself or esteem himself innocent of the sin of division in which all Christians are involved. There is no holiness without love, without the desire for unity and for truth.

Such is the trinitarian perspective of love, truth and unity which I would wish to establish as the setting for the Orthodox Church’s sense of its witness and service in the cause of the unity of Christians.

* * * In its confrontation with the churches of Rome and of the Reforma-

tion, contemporary Orthodoxy, torn out of its many-centuried isolation,

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is rediscovering its universal dimensions and is compelled to answer in new terns the question : what is the message of Orthodoxy ? It is in .terms of plenitude, of experience of trinitarian life, of the divine life radiant in Christians through eucharistic communion, that this answer must be built up. And it is in contact with our separated brethren that the Orthodox are rediscovering for themselves the full meaning of their own tradition. Before we even speak of the service of Ortho- doxy to divided Christians it is our duty to express our gratitude and our admiration to our Reformed and Roman brothers who discover and reveal to us, with such great love, our own riches, the splendour and significance of our icons, the writings of the Fathers and of the masters of the spiritual life in our tradition, the liturgical texts and the understanding of the structure of our worship and of our hymn- writing. The doctrinal, liturgical, artistic and mystical tradition of Orthodoxy is increasingly revealed as a common patrimony whose sole guardian and dispenser is the Holy Spirit.

Hence it follows that for us Orthodox ourselves, our answer to the question, What is the substance of the message of Orthodoxy? is inseparable from an attitude of humility and of penitence. “The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God” (1. Peter 4. 17). We Orthodox must still serve our apprenticeship in penitence for our insufficiency and for our vanities, for our historic sins and for our unfaithfulness to our vocation to witness, for our absence and thus for our silence in relation to the Word of Life and Truth which was entrusted to us; and again penitence for our profound ignorance of the best that Rome and the Reformation have produced in spirituality, in doctrine, in Biblical exegesis ; penitence finally for our inability to explicate and valorize the admirable spiritual experience of the gifted Orthodox saints, from the great doctors and mystics of the early church, through the golden chain of the enlightened ones of the Byzantine and Russian Middle Ages up to the “transfigured ones” and the modern sfarfsi such as for example the radiant St. Seraphim of Sarov (d. 1833) or Archpriest John of Kronstadt (d. 1908) whom some people today still remember. It is in proportion to our repentance that we shall be able to become transparent to the light of the Holy Spirit and that this light will be able to shine through us.

Nothing in the doctrinal, spiritual or liturgical tradition of Ortho- doxy belongs to the Orthodox exclusively, everything is the common patrimony of the children of God, and we can but rejoice to see a certain

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Reformed religious community return to Byzantine iconographic art in offering a copy of Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity for the veneration of the faithful, or another Benedictine community adorn its church with admirable modern Byzantine frescoes, or a Christian ashram rediscover the practice of the prayer of the heart or the “Jesus-prayer,” or the singing of liturgical hymns such as “Hail, gladdening Light.”

Very often, however, these borrowings seem only partial and peri- pheral, and to lack the cement which might join the fragments of a homogenous tradition into a harmonious and organic Christian life. In fact, everything is contained within Orthodoxy : asceticism, spiritual- ity, the doctrine of the Trinity, the mystery of man, ecclesiology, liturgical forms and artistic expression,- all these form an indivisible and organ- ized whole. The veneration of icons reveals essentially and organically a whole symbolic vision of the mystery of the Incarnation and of Sanctification in the Church, the Jesus-prayer reveals the unsuspected riches of inner experience, of deep knowledge of the complex nature of man and of his deiform structure.

The great number of books published in Western languages on the subject of icons, of Orthodox spirituality, or on particular points of its doctrine, its anthropology or its ascetic experience, can only give us cause to rejoice. Orthodoxy has no exclusive rights in the riches of her centuries-old tradition. The labourers of the eleventh hour have the same claim to their wages as those of the first hour, and the latter claim their priorities in vain. All creative manifestations of human art, all theological determinations of truth in the teaching of the Ortho- dox tradition, are so many seeds dispersed by the breath of the Spirit of God over the fields of Christendom. There is a profound mystery about the germination of truth itself whose time of flowering and ripen- ing God alone knows. May we Orthodox feel ourselves small in the presence of the growth of the fullness of Christ in individual hearts and in communities, and humbly repeat the words of John the Fore-runner : He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3, 30.)

Such is the way of humiliation, of total giving without expecting anything in return, without seeking to impose one’s truth or to attract souls, but in an attitude of submission and of disponibility in relation to God’s Spirit, of beseeching in the wake of Christ’s prayer. This submission and this expectancy, this patience and this effacement of persons before the reality of God and before the beauty of his house, such is the way of Calvary, of death in Christ, of the narrow way which

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is being shown to the Orthodox today in the ecumenical dialogue. It is in proportion as the Orthodox accept this effacement of persons before the spiritual realities of Orthodoxy that Orthodoxy will be able to proclaim its witness to the truth.

* * * This witness to the truth is inseparable from the service to unity

which Orthodoxy is called to render. The Orthodox conception of unity is sacramental and eucharistic and not administrative and personal. “Our Church” proclaimed the Orthodox bishops assembled at Rhodes “is not made of walls and roofs, but of faith and of life.” The unity of the Orthodox churches is itself a standing miracle, unity as the presence of Christ in the fullness of the Holy Spirit, unity in faith and sacraments. “We believe” said the Bishops at Rhodes again, ‘‘that the sister Orthodox churches, in maintaining the saving faith of our Fathers, are preserved in this unity whose divine archetype is the mystical and supernatural unity of the Holy Trinity . . . an inner unity which cannot fundamentally be troubled.”

This unity - like truth and holiness indeed - is not owned by the Orthodox church like a possession; it opens itself to the unity and holiness which are the presence and the action of the Holy Trinity in the life of the world. The Church does not possess unity, but is possessed by, is held in this unity, she knows herself to be sustained by this unity which is that of the Holy Trinity itself revealed by Christ and restored by him in the Church, the new Creation. There is no ownership of unity, no convenient installation in unity. It is always necessary ceaselessly to invoke the regenerating intervention of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of unity. As an Orthodox priest speaking of eucharistic intercession said, “Let all who partake of this one Bread and of this one Cup, be united one with the other in the Communion of the same Holy Spirit.” It is in the inward man that this unity is first of all accom- plished ; and through man reconciled with himself and with God, trans- pierced by the Light of the Holy Spirit, this unity is realized in the human community. * * *

Two temptations must be overcome by the Orthodox in the true service of unity:

1) The temptation of sterile polemics on which I shall not dwell. “My legitimate respect for the Eastern Church” said the Metropolitan

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Philaret of Moscow (d. 1867), “is no condemnation of the Western Church. I obey the spirit of my church which prays for the union of all. ”

2) The temptation to call the separated brethren to “return” -to “return to the first eight centuries.” The time of history is irreversible and the life of the Church is no exception. Orthodoxy does not invite Christians simply to return to the stage of the formulations of the ecu- menical councils, but much more than that, she calls upon them humbly to unfold their convictions and their experience in the fullness of Truth and Light. As Professor Nissiotis reminded us at New Delhi, the true form of Orthodoxy is to say : “The presence and witness of the Eastern Orthodox Churches and their witness to the unbroken Orthodox tradition can help all the other historical churches to recover their own true life.” Thus, in a common advance beyond their limitations, Christians who appear to be outside Orthodoxy discover fraternally in freedom and in diversity, communion with an Orthodoxy which is itself renewed.

* * *

Orthodoxy is aware of the reconciling influence of its witness, for it unites a keen sense of the sacramental ministry of the Church with a no less keen sense of personal liberty in the Holy Spirit , the sacramental institution with the prophetic event, the notion of a hierarchical and sacramental community with the illumination of the individual con- science and the inalienable responsibility of every lay member, con- celebrating in the eucharistic liturgy and sealing with the amen of the epiclesis the miracle of God’s presence in the Eucharist.

May schism become for divided Christians an opportunity for striving and for emulation in charity and in respect, an incessant search for the Word of God and for the Will of God in other Christian confes- sions, no longer as strangers and hostile, but from within, in their own roots of unity, in their own faces and in all the diversity of the children of the same Father !

It is in this spirit that in the words of the Bishops at Rhodes, “We greet in love all our brothers of the West, with whom we work together without ceasing, that the command of the Lord may be accomplished : ‘that they all may be one,’ a command for the fulfilment of which our Church has never ceased to pray.”