Priests, Bishops, and the Hidden Faithful

THE WEB OF COMMUNION

Communion in the Church runs through a web, and the crisis is best understood, and best survived, by seeing the web clearly.

The layman is joined to his priest at the altar. The priest is joined to his bishop, whose name he proclaims and whose antimension lies beneath the Gifts. The bishop is joined to his synod, and, through the diptychs, to the episcopate of the world. A false confession entering at any knot travels along the threads; that is why the poison of one throne can sicken whole provinces. And it is also why the wall works. To cease the commemoration is to tie off the thread at your own knot, so that the poison stops there, while every other thread of the web, the whole Orthodox episcopate in the truth, the whole Church of the ages, remains yours. The wall is not an exit from the web. It is a tourniquet on one thread of it.

THE PRIEST AT THE WALL

For the priest, the crisis is sharpest, for his knot is tied at the altar itself; and this book, written by laymen, speaks here with restraint and points to the practice of the confessors.

The priest who can no longer, in conscience, proclaim the name of a hierarch openly preaching the condemned error, ceases the proclamation, and does not replace it with a fiction. He commemorates, as the old formularies allow, every episcopate of the Orthodox, awaiting the restoration of order, that is, in place of the one name he can no longer say, he uses the Church's general commemoration of all the Orthodox episcopate, so that his altar remains visibly joined to the whole Church while it refuses the single false confession. He does not submit himself to some rival synod, for then he has not walled off but emigrated. He does not conceal his step, for the wall is a testimony or it is nothing. And he prepares, with open eyes, to suffer for it, suspension and slander and the loss of his living, as the priests of every confessing generation suffered before him.

He remains a priest of the Orthodox Church, ordained by her, serving her Mysteries, awaiting her synod; and the faithful who gather to his altar remain what they were, the parish of the one Church in a hard hour. Let both priest and people hold the boundary stones of the twelfth chapter as their rule of life, and the wall will keep them. Let either begin to enjoy the wall, and it will bury them.

THE SEVEN THOUSAND

And for all, priest and layman alike, the deepest sustenance in such an hour is to see who else stands behind the wall, for the company is greater than the eye reports. When Elijah cried that he alone was left, God answered that He had reserved to Himself seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal. The prophet's arithmetic was wrong by seven thousand, because despair always counts only what it can see.

So it has been in every crisis. Beside the famous confessors stood multitudes of hidden faithful: priests serving in barns, grandmothers teaching the Creed in kitchens, whole villages that quietly never accepted the innovation, souls whose names no history records, and every one of whom is written in the Book of Life.

Saint Athanasius wrote it to the scattered of his own day, when the confessors were being torn from their churches one by one, and each feared that he now stood alone:

More with each of them than soldiers with the emperor: it is the arithmetic of Dothan, where the servant of Elisha saw only the besieging army until his eyes were opened, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about. The believer behind the wall counts his company with those eyes, or he counts it wrongly; for the emperor's soldiers can surround a city, but they cannot outnumber heaven.

The walled off believer who feels alone in his town is not alone even on earth; and he is never alone in the Church, for the Church is not shut up in the present tense. His communion, as the second chapter taught, is with the one altar of all places and all ages: with Athanasius and Maximus and Theodore and Mark, with the martyrs of Zographou, with the seven thousand of every century, with the Theotokos and all the saints, and with the angels who stand at the same dread table. This is no figure of speech. It is the literal confession of the Liturgy, which is celebrated, every time, by heaven and earth together.

The man who guards the true faith at a poor country altar, or who waits, for a season, with no altar within reach, stands in that communion whole and entire. And the man who keeps the gilded cathedral by confessing the lie has, in the one thing needful, stepped out of it. Heavenly communion is not the consolation prize of the walled off; it is the treasure the wall was built to guard, and it is already theirs. Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with patience the race that is set before us.