Preface

This book answers one question: how does a Christian keep his communion with God when the shepherds themselves begin to preach against the Faith?

The question is old. It was asked under the Arians, under the iconoclasts, and at Florence. It is asked again in our own day. And the Church has an answer, written in her canons and lived out in her saints. The answer is called in Greek apoteichisis, which means walling off. This book exists to explain that answer whole, exactly, and plainly; for the charge laid upon every generation is the Apostle's own: earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints (Jude 3).

We have tried to write so that two readers can walk together through these pages. The first reader wants every canon weighed and every Father cited. For him, the sources stand in the footnotes and the quotations stand in the text, so that nothing rests on our own authority. The second reader wants, before anything else, simply to understand. For him, the whole teaching is given in plain words immediately after the Introduction, and every chapter closes with a few plain sentences marked In plain words, which gather up the chapter so simply that a child could carry them. Nothing in the plain sentences differs from the body of the book. They are the same teaching, in the same faith, said in a smaller cup. And because this is the Comprehension Edition, a figure stands beside each major teaching, gathering it into a single image; the reader who forgets a chapter may often recover it by remembering its picture.

Above all, we have tried to be honest. A book on this subject that hides the difficulties flatters its reader, and then abandons him in the first real storm. So we have set down not only the saints who walled off and were crowned, but also the men who separated wrongly and were condemned; not only the failures of hierarchs, but the sins of zealots; not only what the canon protects, but where its protection stops. Where a matter is genuinely disputed among the Orthodox, we say so. Where a source is uncertain, we mark it. The truth has never needed our exaggerations, and the reader deserves none.

Read slowly, and read to the end, for the parts guard each other. The chapters on the Church guard the chapters on the wall from pride; the chapters on the wall guard the chapters on the Church from cowardice; and the last chapter, which is about a banquet, is the reason for all the others. May the Lord, whose Body the Church is, keep every reader in the one Faith, at the one altar, unto the day when every wall comes down because every wound is healed.