True Communion and False

Heresy, Schism, and False Obedience

THE TWO COMMUNIONS

Because unity is good, men are tempted to call every unity good, and to treat the mere absence of separation as though it were the presence of love. But the Church has always known that there is a true communion and a false, and that the difference between them is the truth.

True communion is union in the one Faith, sealed in the one chalice, expressed in the one confession: the agreement of those who believe the same Christ and hold the same Faith handed down from the Apostles. It is a living thing, and like every living thing it has a definite shape; it cannot contain its own contradiction. Two who confess opposite things about Christ are not in communion merely because they stand in the same building. They are already divided in the only place where unity finally matters. The prophet asked the whole question in seven words:

False communion is the outward appearance of unity stretched over an inward division of faith: the handshake offered across the chasm of a contradiction, the common cup raised between those who do not share a common confession, the peace declared where there is no peace. The prophets knew this counterfeit. They have healed the hurt of My people slightly, said the Lord through Jeremiah, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace. A false peace does not heal the wound; it seals the infection within. And the Apostle Paul drew the line with his own hand, at the chalice itself, completing the teaching of the last chapter with its dread reverse side:

There is no neutral ground, because each cup incorporates the drinker into its own communion. To attempt unity while embracing contradiction is not charity but deception, the more dangerous because it wears the face of love. The men who promote it in every age call themselves the friends of peace, and call their opponents hard and quarrelsome. But the Apostle was neither hard nor cold when he commanded the Corinthians to choose one table. He was telling them the truth, which is the only real kindness. And the same Apostle gave the rule for daily walking: have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.

Saint Gregory the Theologian, who bore the wounds of the Arian peace in his own flesh, left the maxim by which the Church has weighed every peace offered to her since:

A commendable war: the words are hard, and they come from the gentlest of the Fathers, the very man who resigned a throne rather than be the occasion of a quarrel. He is not blessing strife; he is pricing peace. A peace purchased by the surrender of the faith is not peace with one another but war against God; and between those two wars, the saint chose the one that heaven commends.

WHO DIVIDES THE CHURCH?

Here a confusion must be removed that has misled many, and it can be removed in three sentences. It is commonly supposed that separation always tears the Body, so that whoever separates is guilty of dividing the Church. But it is not separation from falsehood that fractures the Body; it is the communion of falsehood within the Body that is the fracture. The poison in the blood is the division, not the surgery that would remove it.

Our Lord Himself gave the hard image: if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off. This is not cruelty, but decisive separation from what destroys; for a limb given over to gangrene no longer belongs to the life of the body, even while it hangs attached. Therefore the rule may be stated simply, and the reader should learn it by heart, for it is the hinge of the whole book: there is no schism where the one Faith is preserved, even if separation appears outwardly; there is schism wherever the confession is divided, even if outward peace is maintained.

THE THREE WOUNDS

To use that rule, one must be able to tell the wounds of the Church apart. Saint Basil the Great, physician of the Church if ever there was one, named them exactly:

Mark the difference exactly, for confusing these three wounds is the source of nearly every error this book will meet.

Heresy is a breaking in the matter of the faith itself: a false confession of God, of Christ, of the Church, of salvation. It is not bad behaviour but poisoned doctrine. The Church forgives every repented sin, however dark; she can never make room for a false confession, because the true confession is the one treasure she exists to guard. Sin is a wound in a member; heresy is poison in the blood. The Church endures the first with endless patience, and cannot endure the second at all.

A bishop of the last century, Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, weighed that poison on the scales of eternity:

A sin of the mind: which is why no holiness of life in the teacher, and no warmth of feeling in the taught, can render it safe. The other wounds injure the Body; this one blasphemes the Physician.

Schism is division over what is not the faith: a quarrel, a rite, a personal charge, an ambition. It is grave sin even when the separators believe all the right things, because it tears the one Body over what was never worth a tear. And Basil adds a warning this book will watch come true more than once: a schism persisted in hardens, with time, into something like a heresy.

The parasynagogue, the unlawful assembly gathered by the disorderly, without any difference of faith, is the mildest wound, healed by repentance and return to order.

Three wounds, three medicines; and the beginning of wisdom is never to treat the one as if it were the other.

FALSE OBEDIENCE

One more counterfeit must be named before this chapter closes, because it is the respectable one: false obedience.

Obedience is a great virtue, and the Church is built on order. But obedience is owed to shepherds in the truth, as soldiers owe obedience to officers under the king, not against him. When a command contradicts the faith, obedience to the man becomes disobedience to God; and the Apostles themselves set the rule for all time: we ought to obey God rather than men. The man who follows his bishop into a false confession has not practised humility. He has practised idolatry of office, and made the vestment greater than the faith the vestment exists to serve. The Fathers, as we shall hear from Chrysostom's own mouth, drew the line in one sentence: if the ruler errs in life, be not curious; if he errs in the faith, flee him though he were an angel. Everything the coming chapters teach about the wall is only that sentence, worked out with the Church's own exactness.

A CLOSING PICTURE FROM THE FIELD

Because a single word of the faith can seem a small thing to fight over, take two pictures before this chapter closes, one from history and one from the field, and let each explain the other.

First, history. At Nicaea the whole quarrel came down, famously, to a single letter. The Church confessed the Son to be homoousios, of one essence with the Father. The compromising party offered homoiousios, of like essence. One iota divides the two words, and the whole Gospel divides the two meanings: for a Son who is only like God is not God, and a Christ who is not God cannot make men partakers of God. The smallest visible difference carried the greatest possible difference, and the Fathers who refused the iota were not quibbling over spelling; they were guarding the divinity of Christ, and with it the reality of our salvation. Let no one say again that a word is a small thing. A word can be small the way a keystone is small.¹⁶

Second, the field, for nature is the work of the same God who orders the Church, and He has hidden the same lesson in it. Consider the bee. Of all the creatures of a farm it is nearly the least: small, unregarded, easily driven away. Remove it, and at first nothing seems to happen. The fields are still green; the orchards stand; the man who warns is mocked for making much of a small thing. But the blossoms are no longer visited, so the fruit is no longer set; the seed grows scarce; and within a few seasons a silence spreads across a whole countryside that looks, to a careless eye, exactly as it always did. The life of the field had depended on a lowly thing that seemed removable, until it was removed.

So it is with the truth in the Church. A single article of the faith, one word of the Creed, one "small" teaching surrendered for the sake of peace, can look, to the impatient, like a bee among cathedrals. But the whole harvest of the Church's life is quietly fertilized by the whole truth; and a corruption tolerated in one word will, in time, bring down everything that rested upon it. Truth does not defend itself with noise. When it is removed, all that stood upon it quietly begins to fall, and by the time the failure is visible to everyone, the season for preventing it has passed. That is why the Fathers fought over an iota, and why this book will not apologize for weighing words.