The Counterfeit Wall

Separations the Church Condemned

THE TWO TEMPTATIONS OF EVERY STORM

Honesty has a debt to pay before this part can close. Everything the last chapter said of the confessors is true, and it is not the whole record. The same centuries produced the counterfeits: men and movements who separated from the Church, believed themselves the faithful remnant, wore nearly every outward mark the confessors wore, and were condemned.

For every storm carries two temptations, not one, and they drown men on opposite shores. The first temptation says: separation is always betrayal, whoever stands apart from his bishop, for any cause, has torn the Body; therefore keep communion at any price. The last chapter answered that temptation with the confessors, whom the Church crowned for standing apart. The second temptation says the reverse: separation is always heroism, whoever stands apart has, by that very act, proved himself the faithful remnant; therefore honour every wall. This chapter answers the second temptation, and must answer it with equal force; for a book that showed only the saints would teach its reader to think every separation holy, and in a time of zeal that is as fatal as thinking every separation damned. The Apostle's cry, Is Christ divided?, falls upon the schismatic no less than upon the heresiarch.

The Fathers spent their sternest words on this second shore, and they must be heard at full weight. Saint John Chrysostom, preaching on the unity of the Body, went as far as human words can go:

Not even the blood of martyrdom: there is no heavier sentence in the Fathers. And yet the same homily carries, within its own reasoning, the distinction this book has kept from its first chapters; for Chrysostom is condemning those who divide while holding the same faith, whose disease, he says in the same breath, is the lust of authority, and of teachers with doctrines contrary to ours he says plainly that one must not mix with them. Even the thunder against schism keeps the exception for heresy inside its own sentence.

And Saint Cyprian, writing against the first great counterfeit this chapter will meet, set the seal upon the matter for all time:

Outside the ark is the flood: which is why everything turns on identifying the ark, and why the canon's whole labour is to establish that, in a time of open heresy, it is the resister who remains within her, and the pseudo teacher who has stepped over her side. Both edges of Cyprian's sentence cut. The counterfeits of this chapter fell upon the one; the false peacemakers of the next fall upon the other.

The counterfeit does not disprove the true coin; it proves the coin worth counterfeiting, and lays on every man who handles coin the duty of telling them apart. The way to learn is to lay the false beside the true and turn both in the light. That is this chapter's work; and at its end, four plain questions will hold everything the light shows.

THE NOVATIANS

The Novatians first. When the persecution of Decius (250) had passed, multitudes who had lapsed under torture stood weeping at the church doors; and the Church answered as the father answered the prodigal: there is a way home, the hard, honest way of penance and restoration. Against this rose Novatian, a learned presbyter of Rome, teaching that the Church has no power to restore those who denied Christ. And when Cornelius was lawfully elected bishop of Rome in 251, Novatian had himself consecrated as a rival bishop of the same city. His followers called themselves the katharoi, the pure.

Weigh the cause on this book's scales: not one article of the faith was at issue. Saint Basil, as we heard, ranks the Novatians among the schismatics, not the heretics, separated over a question capable of solution. Here already is the anatomy that will repeat in every schism below: a real problem, for some hierarchs truly were lax; a zeal that begins by loving purity; a discipline hardened into a dogma; and then the fatal step, the rival altar.

And mark the Church's medicine, for it reveals her diagnosis. The First Ecumenical Council received the returning Novatian clergy gently, in their orders, on one written condition: that they communicate with the lapsed who had repented. The one thing they had to renounce was precisely their refusal of mercy. Basil adds the grave sequel: their schism, persisted in, hardened at last into false doctrine about the Church's very power to loose. For the road of schism runs downhill. The separation demands a justification; the justification grows into a doctrine; and the doctrine, in the end, is an error in the confession itself.⁵⁸

THE MELETIANS

The Meletians of Egypt, from the same persecutions, teach the second lesson in a single line. Meletius of Lycopolis, while the lawful archbishop was in hiding, ordained clergy in dioceses not his own and stood for the harsher line against the lapsed. A parallel clergy grew up, calling itself the church of the martyrs, as though rigour were the proof of faithfulness. Nicaea healed the fracture like a physician, allowing the Meletian clergy a shadow of rank in strict subordination, while Meletius kept a bare title without the power to ordain.

The sequel is the warning. Within a generation, to spite the lawful successors, the Meletians made common cause with the Arians against Saint Athanasius. The schism that began by being stricter than the Church ended by leaguing with the deniers of the Son of God. For he who separates over less than the faith will find, soon enough, that his allies are those who left over the faith itself, since resentment, not confession, has become the bond of his party.⁵⁹

THE DONATISTS

The greatest counterfeit, from which the Church learned the most, was the Donatist schism of Africa. When Caecilian was consecrated bishop of Carthage about 311, the rigorist party rejected him on the ground that one of his consecrators, Felix of Aptunga, had surrendered the Scriptures in the last persecution. Therefore, they reasoned, the grace had not passed, and the man was no bishop. They consecrated Majorinus against him, and after him Donatus; and Africa woke to two hierarchies and two altars in every town.

Weigh the cause: not one article of the Creed was at issue. The whole ground was a charge against a person, the alleged sin of one consecrator, which is precisely the case the fifteenth canon's first half would later name and condemn. And the charge itself did not stand. The Council of Rome in 313 acquitted Caecilian; the great Council of Arles in 314 confirmed it; and the inquiry cleared Felix. The schism stood, at its foundation, on a personal accusation, disproven and persisted in. Every element of the canon's portrait of the schismatic is present: the personal charge in place of the faith, the refusal of the verdict, the rival altar.⁶⁰

What happened next must be studied by every generation, for it shows how schism manufactures its own theology: the act came first, and the doctrine was invented afterward to justify it. To defend their rejection of Caecilian, the Donatists taught that the Mysteries of unworthy ministers are void; they rebaptized those who came to them; and they confined the true Church of Christ to their own party in Africa. With this the schism, exactly as Basil warned of the Novatians, hardened into heresy. For to hang the grace of God on the hidden worthiness of the minister is to make God's gift the hostage of men; and to shut the catholic Church inside one province is to deny the Creed in deed.

Against this the Church gave the answer the reader must hold forever, because it divides the whole teaching of the confessors from the whole error of the Donatists: grace is Christ's, and not the minister's. Saint Gregory the Theologian forbade the faithful to weigh the baptizer: as two seals engraved with the same royal image stamp the one likeness, though one seal be of gold and the other of iron, so the priest's worthiness adds nothing to the gift, and his unworthiness takes nothing away. The canonical tradition teaches the same on every page: the unworthily ordained remain true priests until the Church herself deposes them, and the faithful are never to shun the Mysteries for the minister's sins. And the Seventh Ecumenical Council sealed it in practice, receiving in their orders the repentant bishops who had been ordained within the iconoclast heresy.

Whoever is tempted, in any age, to pronounce the Mysteries of others void by his own reckoning is tempted by the ghost of Donatus, and must answer him with Gregory's seals. Note well how this acquits the confessors of the last chapter from the charge, often heard, that they were Donatists reborn. The Donatists fled bishops on account of alleged life, and pronounced upon grace. The confessors fled bishops on account of public faith, and pronounced upon no one. Chrysostom's lamp divides them at a stroke; and the Church condemned the one and crowned the other by that very light.⁶¹

THE WHEAT AND THE TARES

Here also belongs the parable that both sides carried into that battle, the wheat and the tares, and it must be set in its place once, exactly. The Lord commanded that the tares be left to grow with the wheat until the harvest, lest the wheat be rooted up with them; and He Himself interpreted it: the field is the world. The Fathers drew from it, against the Donatists, the very lesson the Donatists refused: that sinners within the Church are borne with in patience unto the harvest, and that he who quits the threshing floor because of the chaff quits the grain also.

All this the confessor affirms with his whole heart. It is the distinction of the third chapter: sin endured, poison refused. But mark what the parable does not say. It nowhere bids the field call the darnel wheat. It commands patience with persons; it commands nowhere peace with poison. And the same Lord who forbade the uprooting said also, Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up, speaking of teachings and their planters. The Donatist erred by refusing to tolerate sinners. The ecumenist errs by consenting to falsehood. The confessor is neither: bearing with every sinner, and refusing only the false confession, exactly as the parable, read whole, requires.⁶²

TWO FOOTNOTES OF HISTORY

Two footnotes of history complete the Donatist lesson.

First, God so ordered it that the Donatists refuted themselves. When their own party split, and a Donatist council condemned the Maximianists with fearful words, they afterward received the condemned bishops back in their orders, together with the baptisms performed in separation. By their own practice they confessed that separation does not void the Mysteries, excusing in themselves what they damned in the whole world; and the canons of Carthage wrote it down, so that no age could plead ignorance.

Second, from that long contest comes Augustine's proverb, the strongest weapon that can be aimed at this book, and it must be faced: the whole world judges securely, he wrote, meaning that the party which must unchurch the earth to remain the Church has answered its own question. The word is true, and it justly condemned the Donatists. But attend to what kind of cause it judges. Where the cause is a personal charge, a rite, a discipline, the consent of the whole Church rightly ends the matter, for such things are hers to order; the man against the world over them is convicted by his solitude. Where the cause is the faith once delivered, the judge was never the counting of heads in one hour, as the Arian decades proved, when the world groaned to find itself Arian, and one exiled bishop was right against it. There the judge is the confession of all the ages, Vincent's everywhere and always and by all, before which a momentary majority is only a moment.

Donatus was wrong against the world, because his cause was not the faith. Athanasius, in the same century, was right against the world, because his cause was nothing else. The same posture, the opposite verdicts; the cause decided everything, which is the entire teaching of the fifteenth canon, lived out five hundred years before it was written.⁶³

THE OLD BELIEVERS

Twelve centuries after the Donatists, the tragedy was played again, this time in Russia, and it is the fullest lesson history gives on defending tradition rightly and wrongly. It will be told in plain order: what happened, what they believed, how protest became schism, what the Church has judged. And with double honesty, for the guilt did not lie on one side.

First, what happened. By the middle of the seventeenth century, centuries of hand-copying had let the Russian service books drift, in small ways, from the Greek. In 1653 Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, a forceful man with the Tsar behind him, set out to correct the books and customs of Russia to the Greek models of his own day, so that the strongest Orthodox realm on earth might stand in visible uniformity with the whole Orthodox world.⁶⁴

What, exactly, was changed? The sign of the Cross was to be made with three fingers, confessing the Trinity, instead of the old Russian two, which had confessed the two natures of Christ. The spelling of the Saviour's name: Iisus for Isus. The Alleluia sung three times, not two. Processions moved against the sun instead of with it. And a word, true, was removed from the Slavonic Creed's article on the Holy Spirit, to match the Greek original, which had never contained it.⁶⁵ Mark the two facts on which the whole tragedy hangs. Every item on that list is rite and translation, not doctrine: both two fingers and three confess Orthodox dogma, and nothing was in truth being taken from the faith. And every item touched the daily, bodily piety of an entire people, the way a man had crossed himself since childhood. Doctrinally small; humanly enormous. Almost no one in power paused over the second fact.

The manner made everything worse, and must be judged as honestly as the matter. The corrections were pressed with speed, harshness, and open contempt for the old ways; the one bishop who defended them, Paul of Kolomna, was deposed at the outset, leaving the resistance without a single hierarch. Then, in 1666 and 1667, a great council in Moscow, with the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch presiding beside the Russians, confirmed the new books, laid the old rites and those who clung to them under anathema, and handed the resisters to the state for punishment. The leader of the resistance, the Archpriest Avvakum, was burned at the stake in 1682; the great monastery of Solovki, refusing the new books, was besieged for eight years and taken with slaughter.⁶⁶ The new books were fastened upon Russia by force: a lawful correction enforced by unlawful cruelty, a council making a dogma of what was not a dogma. Hold that sentence; the whole lesson grows from it.

WHAT THE OLD BELIEVERS BELIEVED

Now the other side, stated plainly, as they themselves would state it, for no schism can be guarded against until its inner logic has been honestly heard. Those who refused the reforms, the Old Believers, held four convictions, and each looked like piety itself. They believed that rite and faith are one seamless garment: the two fingered Cross was a confession of Christ's two natures, made upon the body ten thousand times in a lifetime. They believed that the old books could not be corrupt, for the saints of Russia had prayed in them and been made holy by them. They believed that keeping the old ways was obedience to the Church, for a Russian council, the Stoglav of 1551, had bound those very usages under sanction. And they believed the correctors' modern Greek books, some printed in Latin Venice, from a Greece that had signed the false union of Florence and then fallen to the Turks, carried infection, not purity.

Follow that logic one step further and the abyss opens. If the old ways are holy, what does it mean that the hierarchy now anathematizes them, and us, and our fathers, and our saints with us? Many drew the terrified conclusion: the reform is not a correction but a change of faith; the hierarchy is apostate; Antichrist reigns; the official church is no church at all; and we, the persecuted keepers of the old ways, are the last Christians on earth.⁶⁷ Some sealed that despair by giving themselves, with their children, to the flames rather than be touched by the new books, a horror that shows, once for all, where the sentence the Church has perished finally leads those who pronounce it.

Now weigh both sides on the canon's scales, and hold both verdicts at once. The reformers were right about the rites: nothing of the faith was touched, and the Greek usages were as Orthodox as the Russian. The Old Believers were right about the manner: the reform was needless in its haste, brutal in its enforcement, and gravely wrong to anathematize venerable rites as though they were heresies. But being right about the manner did not make the separators right about the matter. Two fingers or three touch no article of the Creed; and a Christian may not unchurch the Church over the garments of the faith, however roughly the garments have been handled.

FROM RESISTANCE TO SECT

What, then, was the lawful path for those whose consciences were bound to the old ways? Exactly the path this whole book describes. Grieve. Protest. Keep the old rites where conscience required, as the Church herself, in the end, agreed they lawfully could. Refuse every demand to call the old ways heretical. Bear the unjust penalties as confessors bear them. And through all of it, remain within the one Church, awaiting the council that would set right what a council had set wrong. Those who suffered within those bounds stand outside every censure this chapter pronounces.

Many chose otherwise, and their road is the road of every schism in this chapter. They made the garment into the body, declaring the rite itself the faith. They answered the false anathema with a false verdict of their own: the reformed Church graceless, her Mysteries void, the sentence of Donatus, passed this time over the number of a man's fingers. Then the logic of separation ran its course. They had no bishop, and their own premise split them at once over the question it created: where shall we find priests? One wing, the priested, lived for two centuries on a contradiction, drawing its clergy from the very church it called graceless. The other, the priestless, followed the premise to its end: if grace had departed, the priesthood had ceased, and they organized a Christianity without the Mysteries, generations born, married, and buried without the chalice.⁶⁸ Mark the sectarian's exact reward: the men who separated to keep the fullness of the old piety bequeathed their children a piety without priesthood and without Eucharist.

Then came the sequel, which proves what the quarrel had truly been about. In 1800 the Church established parishes celebrating the old rites in full within her own communion, a standing confession that the rites had never been the disease. And in 1971 the Local Council of the Russian Church did solemnly what should have been done three centuries earlier: it lifted the anathemas of 1667 and declared the old rites Orthodox and salvific. The cause of the schism was demolished by the very Church against which the schism had been made, and the schism did not end.⁶⁹ The wall stood after its foundation was removed, and it stands to this day; for separation had become the identity, dearer than the cause that once excused it. Here is the precise reason the canon guards its gate so narrowly, admitting no cause but open, condemned heresy: heresy, once repented, releases its captives, but a schism that has become an identity does not let go.

The lesson cuts with two edges, and both cut today. To the mighty: never make a dogma of what is not a dogma, and never enforce even a right correction with contempt, authority that does so begets the very schism it punishes, and the council of 1971 is the Church's own confession of that guilt. To the zealous: never make the garment into the body; never answer an unjust anathema with a private one; and never pronounce the Church graceless, that sentence imprisons the speaker, and his children, long after every cause is healed. And let the modern reader look in this mirror without flinching, for the same tragedy was replayed in our own age over a calendar, as the next chapter shows: order handled harshly, protest hardened into rival altars, gracelessness pronounced by private mouths. The rule, once seen here, is seen everywhere. A righteous protest against real error suffers, testifies, and stays, it appeals to the Church and waits for her. A protest that hardens into identity leaves, and calls the leaving faithfulness. The first is the way of the confessors; the second, whatever its courage, is the counterfeit.

THE COUNTERFEIT OF BLOOD

One counterfeit remains, and it is the subtlest of all; for it imitates neither the Church's strictness, like the Novatians, nor her purity, like the Donatists, but her very warmth. It is the counterfeit of blood.

First the true blood, in plain words. The life of the flesh is in the blood, says the Law:⁷⁰ blood is life itself, and to share blood is to share life, which is why kinship is called blood, and why the Gospel gathers our whole salvation into it. The Church is the flock purchased with His own blood; the cup of the Supper is the new testament in My blood.⁷¹ The true blood of the Church, then, is the life of Christ Himself, and her members are kin by one Father, one Baptism, and one cup, born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God. The Lord set the two kinships in their order when His mother and brethren stood outside the door: whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother.⁷² Natural blood is honoured in the Church, the commandment to honour father and mother stands forever, but it is not her bond. Faith is; and her brotherhood is the kinship of the font, wider than every nation and older than every family, in which there is neither Greek nor Jew \... but Christ is all, and in all.⁷³

Now the counterfeit, as plainly. Counterfeit blood is any natural bond, family, tribe, nation, race, party, faction, the loyalty of a group that has suffered together, put in the place of the blood of Christ as what binds a "church" together and marks who truly belongs. The bonds themselves are good: family and homeland are gifts of God. The counterfeit begins at the exchange, when the natural bond quietly takes the seat of the supernatural one, and the faith becomes the badge of the group instead of its foundation. From that moment, every sacred thing acquires a double; and the doubles feel identical from inside.

Watch the doubles. The warmth of the tribe feels like the communion of the saints, but the bond is sameness, not truth. Persecution feels like proof, but suffering, by itself, proves only that one suffers: it is the cause, not the punishment, that makes the martyr, says Saint Augustine; and of him who dies confessing the Name outside the Church's unity, Saint Cyprian wrote: such a one may be killed; crowned he cannot be.⁷⁴ Group loyalty feels like holy obedience, stand by your own; do not break your mother's heart, the very accent of conscience, able to bind a man to a heresy more tightly than any argument. The Lord's hard sayings were given for exactly these hours: he that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and, a man's foes shall be they of his own household.⁷⁵ Not because family is evil, but because family, nation, and brotherhood are precisely the loves strong enough to be laid, by the enemy, across the narrow road.

The Church met this counterfeit in its most organized form and gave it a name. When rival national hierarchies were being erected in one and the same city, altar answering to bloodline, a council at Constantinople in 1872 condemned the error as phyletism: the organizing and dividing of Christ's Church according to race and nation.⁷⁶ And the condemnation reaches every later form of the same exchange, for the tribe does not have to be a nation. Test the forms of our own day against it. The parish that is in truth an ethnic club, where a convert of another blood remains a permanent guest. The jurisdiction that is a nation abroad at prayer, its real communion its homeland. The circle of the like minded, not least the zealot brotherhood of the internet age, whose real bond is shared anger, and whose real communion is the enemy it opposes. A faction, even a persecuted remnant that has come to love its own persecution, can become a bloodline as surely as a race can.

TELLING THE TWO BLOODS APART

How, then, does a man test his own bonds, since the counterfeit is warm, and feels from inside exactly like devotion? Saint Isidore of Pelusium laid bare the mechanism fifteen centuries ago:

Cover them with pietism: the bait is warmth, reverence, the very feel of holiness. So the tests that follow examine the hook and never the bait, what the fellowship is actually fastened to, not how devout the swallowing feels. Four questions, put honestly before God.

Of any unity: does the truth confessed at the altar hold us together, or our sameness, our grievance, our fear of the outside? Would this brotherhood survive one of us being shown wrong and repenting publicly, or does belonging here depend on never admitting error? Of any suffering: is it borne for the true faith, in love, without hatred of the persecutor, or has being opposed become our credential for being right? Of any obedience: do I follow the shepherd because, and only so far as, he stands in the faith, or because he is ours? And of any kinship: could a stranger of another blood, holding the true faith, enter this fellowship tomorrow as a full brother, and could a kinsman of my own blood, denying the faith, be refused its communion? If the stranger could not enter, and the apostate kinsman could not be refused, then the bond of that fellowship is not the blood of Christ, whatever is painted upon its walls.

In plain words, then. True blood is the life of Christ: received in the cup, confessed in the truth, proved in repentance and love, binding the baptized of every nation into one kindred. Counterfeit blood is any other bond the moment it is set in the true blood's place; and it betrays itself by its instruments, emotion instead of truth, pressure instead of persuasion, fear instead of faith, the closed circle instead of the open gate. The one is given from the altar; the other is manufactured by the group. And so the rule of this whole chapter stands complete: neither the rigour of the pure, nor the charge against a person, nor the rite, nor the blood, is the faith; and a separation, or a communion, whose true cause is any of these wears the confession as a costume.

THE FOUR QUESTIONS

Now gather the chapter into the discipline it was written to teach. Of any separation, in any age, ask four questions in order.

First, over what? A heresy already condemned by the Synods or the Fathers, openly preached, or a person, a charge, a rite, a discipline, a nation, a suspicion?

Second, by what standard? The recorded judgment of the Church of the ages, merely recognized and obeyed, or a private certainty enthroned in the Church's place?

Third, in what manner? Withdrawal of commemoration in patience, awaiting the council, or the rival altar, the rival hierarchy, the repeated baptisms, the anathemas from private mouths?

Fourth, in what spirit, and unto what end? Grief, fear, and love, unto the healing of the Church, or pride, contempt, and haste, unto the founding of a party?

Every counterfeit in this chapter fails the first question before the others are reached; and nearly every one fails the third also, for the mark of them all is the second altar. The confessors of the last chapter pass all four. The two kinds of separation resemble each other as a surgeon's incision resembles a wound, which is to say, only until one asks why it was made, by what rule, with what instrument, and to what end. And the abuse of the knife does not abolish surgery; but it does mean the knife is never taken up lightly, and that the man most eager to wield it is commonly the man least fit to hold it.

In plain words. Not everyone who breaks away is a hero. The Novatians split because the Church forgave repentant sinners; the Donatists split over an accusation against one man that turned out to be false, then invented a false teaching to excuse the split. The Old Believers of Russia split over rites and old books, holy things, handled cruelly by the authorities, but still not the faith, and then declared the whole Church graceless, which was the real fall; and when the Church later lifted the old anathemas and blessed the old rites, the schism still did not come home, because separation had become its identity. Others made race or nation the bond of the church, which the Church condemned as phyletism. And beware the counterfeit of blood in every form: the warmth of family, nation, party, or a suffering group can feel exactly like the communion of the Church, but not every bond that feels sacred is from God, not every suffering is martyrdom, and not every loyal group is the Church. Every one of these separators believed they were the faithful few, and every one was condemned, because their cause was not the faith, and because they built rival altars. Four questions expose any separation: over what? by what standard? in what manner? in what spirit? The saints pass all four; the counterfeits fail the very first.