Begin Here · Lesson 8 of 12

What is meant by spiritual pollution?

In plain language

Μολυσμός, defilement, is not a physical stain and not the emptying of the Mystery. It is complicity: the knowing communicant's becoming a partaker in the heresy of the one whose name seals the service. Scripture supplies the mechanism, “he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds” (2 John 11); “neither be partaker of other men's sins” (1 Tim. 5:22). Commemoration is the liturgical Godspeed.

Hence St Theodore's famous sentence: communion has defilement from the mere commemorating of the heresiarch, even if the one commemorating is Orthodox. The defilement rides the bond, not the bread; and it attaches to the one who knows. The tradition treats the unknowing and the coerced with economy, St Sophronius' answers receive back, with penance, those defiled through fear who repent, but knowledge changes everything: what the ignorant suffer, the knowing choose.

Key terms

μολυσμός, defilement, implication in another's heresy through the bond of communion.
κρῖμα καὶ κατάκριμα, judgment and condemnation, what the real Mystery becomes for the knowing participant (1 Cor. 11:29).

Primary sources

2 John 10 to 11; 1 Tim. 5:22; St Theodore the Studite, Letter 220 (PG 99, 1669B); St Sophronius' questions and answers on defiled churches; the Apostolic Constitutions, Book VIII.

A historical example

The Graptoi brothers refused even a single act of communion with the Iconoclasts, “only once,” the prefect begged, because a knowing once is a choosing.

A common misunderstanding

“Pollution means the heretic's Chalice is empty.” The sources say the opposite: the Chalice is real, and that is exactly why sharing it knowingly is dangerous. Lesson 9 draws the distinction out.