The Fathers Who Resisted

THE PATTERN OF THE STORMS

The canon of 861 did not invent the wall. It wrote down what the saints had already done in every great storm, and what the Church, storm after storm, had crowned. This chapter walks through those storms in order; and the reader should watch for the pattern, for it repeats with the fidelity of a law.

A condemned error captures thrones. The majority bends. A few withdraw from the false communion without leaving the Church. They are called dividers, punished, exiled. And the council that at last condemns the heresy vindicates them, not as rebels forgiven, but as confessors honoured. The council does not create the true confession out of nothing; it ratifies the confession that the walled off kept alive through the interval. That is the whole shape of Church history in a time of heresy, and each story below is one turn of the same wheel.

The Apostles themselves foretold the pattern, and foretold, with terrible precision, where the wolves would come from:

Of your own selves: not from outside, but from among the shepherds themselves. Every history in this chapter is that prophecy keeping its appointment. And the same Scriptures that foretold the wolves fixed the flock's anchor against them: Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines.⁴⁰

THE ARIAN NOON

Begin at the darkest noon. After Nicaea had confessed the Son of God to be of one essence with the Father, the Arian party captured the emperors and, through them, the thrones. Councils multiplied against the faith. Bishops subscribed by the hundreds. In Jerome's undying phrase, the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian.

Saint Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria, stood against it and was driven into exile five times. The faithful of whole cities, refusing the Arian assemblies, worshipped in the open country, in rain and snow, their churches occupied, their shepherds banished. Saint Basil the Great, writing to the West for help, did not say that these scattered flocks had left the Church. He said they were the Church, suffering. And of the hierarchy of that hour, Saint Gregory the Theologian, who bore its wounds himself, left a sigh that has been handed down the centuries: that he feared no one so much as the bishops, except a few. The word is bitter, and we give it as tradition gives it; but the history it summarizes is beyond dispute. The buildings were with the heresy, and the Church was with Athanasius.⁴¹

Hear the voices of that noon themselves, for they have been preserved. Saint Hilary of Poitiers, exiled again and again in the West for the same confession, blessed the homelessness of the faithful in words that still burn:

And Athanasius, writing to the monks who held the wilderness with him, compressed the discipline of the age into one line:

Saint Basil kept the same measure from the other side, defending the communions he maintained: I should certainly not have admitted them to communion even for a moment, if I had found them a stumbling block to the Faith.⁴⁴

One rule, facing both ways: communion follows the confession, extended wherever the faith is whole, withheld wherever it is not. The Arian noon did not invent the wall; it uncovered the masonry that had lain in the Church's foundations from the beginning.

THE RULE OF THE GOLDEN MOUTH

From the next generation the Church received not only an example but a rule, from the golden mouth itself. Saint John Chrysostom, preaching on obedience to rulers, asked the question every troubled conscience asks, and answered it for all time:

Hold that distinction like a lamp, for it lights every page that follows. The life of the shepherd, however faulty, is no ground for separation; the man who pries into it and departs over it stands condemned by the canon's first half. The faith is the one ground; and when the faith is betrayed, flight is commanded, though the betrayer were an angel. Everything the counterfeits of the next chapter got wrong, and everything the confessors of this one got right, is already sorted by that one sentence.

MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR

Two centuries later the storm was Monothelitism, the teaching that Christ has no human will, and it held every throne of the East. The patriarchs subscribed; the emperor enforced; and one monk stood.

Saint Maximus the Confessor was pressed with the argument of numbers: all the Churches had communed, and he alone refused. He gave the answer this book set on its opening page: if the whole universe should begin to commune with the Patriarch, I will not commune with him. For the Apostle's anathema falls even on an angel preaching another gospel, and numbers do not amend it.

And when they pressed the argument to its cruellest point, then you alone will be saved, and all the rest will perish?, the confessor answered with a meekness that has never been improved upon:

Mark the shape of the answer, for it is the shape of every true wall. He condemns no soul to perdition; he minds his own fidelity; and he prefers death to the transgression of conscience. The confessor's refusal faces inward before it faces outward, a guard set upon his own faith, not a sentence passed upon his neighbour's, and by that mark the reader may forever tell the confessor from the zealot.

They cut out his tongue that had confessed, and cut off his hand that had written, and sent him to die in exile. And the Sixth Ecumenical Council, gathering after his death, confessed the two wills of Christ exactly as the mutilated monk had confessed them; and the Church numbers him among her greatest saints. Whoever asks where the Church was in the year 655 must answer: visibly, in a prisoner without tongue or hand. And the thrones that condemned him were, in the canon's exact word, pseudo teachers, whatever their titles.⁴⁷

THEODORE THE STUDITE

Then came the century of the broken icons, and with it the teacher this book has quoted so often: Saint Theodore the Studite. When iconoclasm sat on the throne and in the patriarchate, Theodore led his monks in refusing the communion of the innovators. He was scourged, imprisoned, and exiled; and from prison he wrote the letters that remain the confessor's handbook.

Hear two of them. To the abbot Theophilos, when the error of the hour had been decreed synodally, he wrote:

And to the monk Methodios, defending the makeshift arrangements of the resistance, he wrote the sentence that keeps every wall honest:

Owing to pressing needs: the resistance is an economy of the storm, provisional, half-apologizing for its own irregularities, and awaiting the council that will end them. It is a field-hospital, not a rival city; and the Studite, its very general, refuses to call its expedients a new normal.

Their teaching, gathered, is this: that the commemoration of heresy defiles even the Orthodox man who, knowing, pronounces it; that the faithful must neither commune with the false teachers nor receive their blessing, while judging no man's soul and awaiting the council; and that economy may bend many things, but never the confession itself. And when the icons were restored, the Church wrote the vindication into her yearly Synodikon, as the last chapter heard: anathema on knowing communion with the condemned error; eternal memory to the champions of Orthodoxy. The wall of the Studite became the confession of the Church.

ATHOS, AND LYONS

The pattern held when the pressure came from the West. After the false union of Lyons in 1274, the emperor Michael and his patriarch pressed the empire to commemorate the pope, and the pressure fell hardest on the Holy Mountain. The Athonite fathers answered with a letter that is a whole theology of commemoration in one argument, reasoning from the Apostle John exactly as this book has reasoned:

The same letter presses the warning of the Fathers that not only heretics, but those who knowingly commune with them, are enemies of God; and the fathers paid for their words. At the monastery of Zographou, monks and laymen who refused the union were burned alive in their tower rather than commemorate the pope, and the Mountain honours these martyrs to this day. Among them were laymen, a witness that the defence of the Faith belongs to the whole people of God, and not to the clergy alone. The union of Lyons collapsed; the emperor died outside the Church he had betrayed; and the confessors' refusal became the Church's memory.

THE LIGHT DEFENDED

In the century that followed, the storm turned upon the very heart of the faith: whether man can truly be united to God. Saint Gregory Palamas, defending the hesychast monks, taught what the Church had always lived, that God is truly partaken in His uncreated grace and light, so that salvation is real union with the living God and not a mere improvement of the mind. For this he was opposed by learned men; and when the throne of Constantinople itself turned against him, Patriarch John Kalekas held him imprisoned and under censure. The councils of Constantinople then vindicated his teaching, above all the great council of 1351; the Synodikon of Orthodoxy proclaims that vindication every year; and within a decade of his death the Church glorified him among her saints. Once again the wheel had turned: the confessor censured by a patriarch, and the confession written into the Church's yearly memory.⁵¹

And the saint himself left the flock the counsel of that whole struggle, in the image the confessors after him would take up:

More than from a snake: the serpent kills for a time; the false teacher, for ever. The proportion of the flight is set by the proportion of the venom, and it is love itself that does the arithmetic, for it is precisely the man who believes that souls can die eternally who runs, and who carries with him whom he can.

MARK AT FLORENCE

Last, Florence. In 1439, worn down by fear and need, the emperor, the patriarch, and nearly all the Orthodox bishops subscribed the decree of union with Rome. Every throne yielded; one bishop would not. Saint Mark of Ephesus held that the Latin teachings were real corruptions of the Faith, and set his stand in words that have become the conscience of the Church:

He stood almost alone, as Maximus had stood; and he was not alone, for he stood with the Fathers of all the ages. When Pope Eugenius the Fourth learned that Mark had not signed, he understood that his victory was empty:

And when the unionists came home with their decree, Mark's encyclical to the faithful took up the very image of Palamas, and pressed it with the Apostle's own question:

By every outward measure, the union of Florence was the act of the Church, ratified by her highest authorities in a great council. And it was false; and the one bishop who stood against them all was right; and the Church glorifies him as a pillar of Orthodoxy, while the decree he refused is dust. The throne is not the Faith. The majority is not the Church. The signatures of frightened hierarchs do not bind the conscience of the faithful when the signatures betray the truth.

And in every one of these histories, mark what the vindicated did and did not do. They withdrew from the false communion, and they raised no altar. They refused the pseudo teachers, and they deposed no one. They suffered, and they waited; and the Church came, as she always comes, and crowned them. That, and nothing else, is the inheritance this book is trying to hand on.