Apoteichisis and the Fifteenth Canon

THE STAIRCASE OF 861

In the year 861 a great council gathered in Constantinople, in the church of the Holy Apostles, under Saint Photios the Great: the First and Second Council, as it came to be called. Its canons deal with the order of the Church; and three of them, the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, form a single staircase, built to guard one treasure from two thieves.

The thirteenth and fourteenth forbid a deacon, priest, or bishop to break communion with his own head, before a synodal verdict, on the pretext of the head's crimes. Whoever separates over accusations, however grave, judging his superior privately before the Church has judged him, is deposed; for he has usurped the tribunal and torn the order of the Body. The first half of the fifteenth canon climbs the same rule to the top of the ladder, applying it to patriarchs.

And then, at the summit, the canon turns, and cuts in the other direction, and gives the Church's charter for everything this book teaches. It must be read whole, and slowly:

THE TWO HALVES

See first the two halves together, for the canon is a coin and both faces are law. The same council that deposes the man who separates over a personal charge honours the man who separates over condemned heresy. The act looks identical from the outside, the ceasing of commemoration, the standing apart. The cause makes one act a schism and the other a rescue.

Whoever quotes the second half without the first turns the canon into a licence for every grievance. Whoever quotes the first without the second turns it into a muzzle for every conscience. The Church wrote them together, and this book will always read them together.

THE THREE CONDITIONS

Now weigh the conditions of the second half one by one, for they are a lock with three tumblers, and all three must turn.

First, the cause must be heresy: not sin, not scandal, not mismanagement, not a rite or a calendar or a quarrel, but false teaching concerning the faith itself, as the third chapter defined it.

Second, the heresy must be already condemned by holy Synods or Fathers. The separating believer applies a judgment the Church has already given; he invents nothing. This is why, as the fifth chapter showed from Saint Vincent, his act is recognition and not private judgment. The everywhere-always-and-by-all of the ages has spoken, and he is only refusing to contradict it, keeping the proverb of the fathers: Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.

Saint John of Damascus, resisting the first iconoclast emperor from beyond his reach, turned that very proverb into the Church's standing answer to every innovating power:

Third, the preaching must be public and bareheaded, that is, openly and without concealment, in the church itself. Not a rumour. Not a suspicion. Not a private slip once repented. Not an ambiguous phrase capable of an Orthodox reading. The false doctrine must be proclaimed without covering.

Where any tumbler fails to turn, the lock stays shut; and the man who forces it stands in the canon's first half, not its second.

BEFORE ANY SYNODAL VERDICT

Weigh next the canon's boldest provision: the words before any synodal verdict. The Church knew that heresy on a throne does not wait politely for a council. It uses the throne, ordains its own, and poisons the flock daily through the very channels of communion. So she armed the faithful for the interval: the moment the poison is public, the faithful may stop drinking it, without waiting for the physicians to assemble.

But the same words measure the provision's limits. Before the verdict, the wall; the verdict itself belongs to the synod alone. The one who walls off does not depose the pseudo teacher. He does not strip him of office. He does not declare his Mysteries void. He does not pronounce his damnation. All of that is the council's, and God's.

The canon's own careful word is pseudo bishop: a man still holding the office and the name, whose teaching has falsified his claim on the flock's obedience, but whose formal judgment awaits the Church. The walled off believer treats him as one treats a doctor caught prescribing poison. He stops taking the prescriptions at once; he testifies; and he waits for the medical court. He does not seize the man's licence with his own hands, for it was never his to give or take.

And lest anyone suspect that this restraint is a modern softening of the canons, let him hear the keeper of the canons himself. Saint Nicodemos the Hagiorite, in the Pedalion, the very book from which this treatise cites them, set near the head of the sacred canons a famous note explaining why they say let him be deposed, and never he is deposed:

Let him be deposed: a command addressed to the synod, and not a sentence that executes itself. The saint even supplies the parable: a king commands his servant to whip an offender; until the servant strikes, the man stands unwhipped, though the guilt, and the trial to come, remain. And Nicodemos presses the point against the zealots of his own day without mercy: those men commit a great error, he writes, who say that clergy in violation of the canons are already actually deposed; it is a priest accusing tongue that speaks so, not understanding that the command of the canons, without the practical activity of the second person, that is, of the synod, remains without any effect.

Here, from the very hand that gave the Church her book of canons, is the whole grammar of the wall. The believer who walls off treats the guilt as public, for the heresy is preached bareheaded, and leaves the sentence to the tribunal, exactly as the canon's own verbs require. Whoever goes further, and declares from a private mouth that the pseudo teacher is already deposed and stripped of grace, is not applying the Pedalion but contradicting its opening pages.

THE PRECEDENT OF THE SAINTS

The Church did not wait until 861 to act this way. The canon wrote down what the saints had always done, and had been praised for doing. Thirty years before the Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius, when the archbishop of the capital was preaching against the title Theotokos, many of his clergy and people had already withdrawn from his communion. And Saint Cyril of Alexandria, the pillar of that whole struggle, wrote to them not to rebuke but to strengthen them:

COMMAND OR PERMISSION?

One honest question remains, and because learned and even confessing men have pressed it, it must be met here and not hidden: does the canon command the wall, or only permit it? Its grammar, as anyone can see, protects and honours; it does not say, in so many words, thou shalt withdraw.

We concede the grammar freely, and we concede more. This book anathematizes no one for hesitating. The timid, the confused, the priest bound by a hundred dependents, the layman who cannot yet see, these are to be strengthened, not cursed; and those who in good conscience still stand within, grieving and protesting, are not thereby heretics. The moment and manner of each soul's step call for counsel, not for a stopwatch held by zealots.

But when all that is conceded, the merely permissive reading still fails as a rule of life, for two reasons the reader now possesses.

First, the canon does not stand alone. It presupposes the standing law of Scripture which the last chapter set out; and that law, reject, avoid, receive not, come out, is not permissive. What the canon adds is not the duty, which already existed, but the shield: it strips the name of schismatic from those who do the duty before the verdict. And a shield is forged for men who must go where blows fall, not as proof that no one need go.

Second, follow the permissive reading to its end, and it devours itself. If the faithful may always simply wait for the synod, then when the synod comes and is a robber council that approves the heresy, as synods did at Ariminum, at Hiereia, at Florence, the faithful must submit, for the verdict they were told to await has been given. A reading that delivers the flock to the wolf at the wolf's strongest hour cannot be the mind of the Church, whose saints in every such hour did the opposite.

Therefore the sober conclusion is this: the defence of the faith binds every Orthodox conscience; only the hour and manner of each one's part in it admit of counsel.

So the canon stands, the Church's own charter of the wall: heresy, condemned, preached bareheaded; then withdrawal without usurpation, honour without penalty, waiting without despair. A word attributed to Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem, the great confessor against the Monothelites, has been handed down as its summary; and though its exact source cannot now be verified, and we say so plainly, it says nothing the canon does not say: