The Name in the Liturgy

Commemoration, Chrism, and Partaking

WHAT THE NAME DECLARES

The canon speaks of walling off from communion. But what, concretely, is walled off? Everything now depends on understanding one small moment in the services, so small that many stand through it without noticing.

At every Divine Liturgy, the celebrant names, aloud and before God, the bishop of the place. The bishop, when he serves, names his patriarch and his fellow bishops. And in the ancient diptychs, the folded tablets of names, church answered to church across the whole earth.

What is this naming? Not a courtesy. Not an announcement. Not merely a prayer that God help the man, though prayer for him is included. It is a declaration of identity in the faith: this is my shepherd; where he stands, I stand; what he confesses at his altar, I confess at mine. The names in the diptychs trace out, name by name, the visible network of the one altar which the second chapter described. To be in the diptychs is to be in that communion; to be struck from them has always meant to be out of it. The commemoration is the confession of the Church, spoken at her most solemn hour, in the middle of the Mystery itself.

Once this is seen, the whole logic of walling off follows as day follows dawn. If naming the bishop declared nothing, ceasing to name him would mean nothing, and the fifteenth canon would be a rule about trivia. But because the name is a confession, the name binds. To commemorate an Orthodox bishop is a joy, the sealing of a true unity. To commemorate, knowingly and at the altar, a man who is publicly preaching condemned heresy is to declare before God a unity of faith with the heresy. It is to tell a lie in the holiest place a lie can be told.

Saint Theodore the Studite, the great confessor of the iconoclast age whom we shall meet again, taught without softening that such commemoration defiles: the poison of the false confession touches even the Orthodox man who, knowing, seals it with the name. And the Fathers of the Holy Mountain, in the letter this book will quote among the confessors, drew the argument from the Apostle John himself: if a mere greeting on the road makes a man partaker of the false teacher's evil works, what shall be said of the solemn proclamation of his name at the dread Mysteries? The wall of the fifteenth canon is, at its core, simply this: the refusal to go on telling that lie.³⁵

WHERE THE BISHOP IS

Here someone will raise the word of Saint Ignatius, and it must be given its full force, for it is the foundation of Orthodox order:

Where the bishop is, there is the Church: yes, and this book bows to the word. The walled off soul who comes to despise the episcopate as such has fallen into the pit on the far side of the road.

But the objector quotes the martyr against the martyr. The same Ignatius, in the same journey to the beasts, commanded the faithful to abstain from heresy as from deadly poison mixed in sweet wine, and to flee the false teachers as wild beasts in the form of men. He bound the people to the bishop as the bishop stands in the faith of Jesus Christ; for it is that faith, and not the bare title, that makes his parallel true. Where the bishop is, there is the Church, because where the true confession is, there is Christ. A bishop preaching against the confession has broken the very bond in which the maxim lives. To follow him then is not to be where Ignatius said the Church is; it is to be led away from her by a man still wearing her vestments.

And remember who wrote the fifteenth canon: a great synod of bishops, under one of the greatest of patriarchs. The provision for walling off is the episcopate's own law, given to protect the flock from the false brother within its ranks. The man who uses it rightly does not defy the episcopate but obeys it. He honours the office precisely by refusing its counterfeiter; and he remains what he was, a man under the Orthodox bishops of all the world, awaiting the synod to which his whole posture is an appeal.

Nor is the flock's watchfulness an insolence invented by the zealous; it is the standing charge of the hierarchs themselves. The first patriarch of Constantinople after the fall of the City, Saint Gennadios Scholarios, the heir of Saint Mark in the resistance to the false union, instructed the faithful in so many words:

Keep an eye on your bishops: a patriarch says it, and says it of patriarchs. The watching is not suspicion but stewardship, the same guardianship of religion that the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848 located in the very body of the Church, the people itself; and the two marks he names, false doctrine and concelebration with the heterodox, are precisely the marks this book has been teaching the reader to weigh.

THE SEAL OF THE CHRISM

A second seal must be understood beside the name: the Holy Chrism. When a Christian is baptized, he is anointed with the sacred Myron, consecrated by the chief hierarchs of the Church, and the priest says at each anointing: the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem taught the catechumens what that ointment is:

The Chrism is the seal of belonging. By it the baptized is marked as Christ's and enrolled in the one Body; and by it, as we shall see in the chapter on return, the Church has often received back those coming home from schism and from certain heresies, renewing the seal where the confession had been broken. Hold the two seals together, the Chrism on the body and the name at the altar, and the shape of membership becomes visible. A Christian belongs to the Church by the Mysteries that seal him and by the confession that the altar he partakes of proclaims. Neither seal is private property; both bind him into the whole.

WHAT PARTAKING CONFESSES

Which brings us to the last and most searching question of this chapter: what does my own partaking confess, and where are its limits?

The Apostle answered the first half at the chalice, as we heard: the partaker of the altar is bound into all the altar confesses. And the Church answered after him, in her own liturgical voice. Every year, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, she reads the Synodikon aloud in her churches, and among its sentences stands this one:

Knowingly: the Church's own word, and it measures everything. The simple soul who partakes in ignorance is not under this sentence; God judges what a man knows. But the believer who knows that open, condemned heresy is being proclaimed at an altar, and who nevertheless seals it there with his amen and his communion, has made the confession his own. There is a ladder that runs from the public violation of the faith, down through knowing communion with it, to the final judgment; and the canon of the wall exists precisely so that the faithful may step off that ladder at its first rung. The Psalmist sang the same refusal long before: I have not sat with vain persons... I have hated the congregation of evil doers; and will not sit with the wicked.

And the limits are as fixed as the duty. The believer's weapons are refusal, absence, and testimony: to withhold the amen, to withdraw from the communion, and to say why, with grief. His weapons are never the altar and the sentence. He raises no rival table, ordains no clergy, declares no Mystery void, pronounces no anathema, for those belong to the synod and to God. The layman and the monk guard the faith with their feet and their voice and their tears. The guarding of it with thrones belongs to the Church gathered, and to her alone.