Begin Here · Lesson 10 of 12
What is economy (oikonomia)?
In plain language
The Church walks with two feet: akribeia, the strict application of the canons, and oikonomia, the pastoral relaxation of strictness for the sake of salvation. Economy receives converts without repeating rites, softens penances, tolerates irregularity for a time, always as a physician's concession, never as a change of doctrine.
Its limits are therefore built in. Economy is temporary, aimed at healing, and powerless over the faith itself: one may relax a discipline, never a dogma. That is why a catalogued study examines seven historical “economies” and finds that none legitimizes ongoing communion with unrepentant, openly taught heresy: the moment economy is invoked to make peace with the disease rather than to heal the patient, it has ceased to be economy. St Theodore's stand in the Moechian affair marks the boundary: a concession that tramples the Gospel's word is not oikonomia but transgression.
Key terms
- ἀκρίβεια, strictness, the canon applied in full.
- οἰκονομία, economy, the merciful, temporary relaxation of strictness toward salvation, never touching dogma.
Primary sources
St Basil, Letter 188, canon 1 (economy in receiving those from schism); St Theodore's letters on the Moechian affair.
A historical example
St Sophronius allows the repentant who were defiled through fear back to a common table, with penance, by arrangement, for their gain: economy in its exact shape, temporary, medicinal, bounded.
A common misunderstanding
“Economy can cover continued commemoration of open heresy indefinitely.” Then it would be an economy against salvation, a contradiction in terms. Economy bends discipline to rescue persons; it cannot bend the faith to accommodate error.
Further reading