Walling Off Without Becoming Schismatic

THE BOUNDARY STONES

The road this book commends is narrow, and it runs between two ditches, each of which borrows the name of a virtue. On the one side lies the ditch of false peace, where the faith is surrendered a phrase at a time for the sake of quiet, and the surrender is called love. On the other lies the ditch of false zeal, where the Church is torn over less than the faith, or torn rightly begun and wrongly finished, and the tearing is called confession. The last chapters have mapped the first ditch. This chapter must map the second with equal severity, for it is the special danger of exactly the reader who has agreed with everything so far.

Begin, then, with the boundary stones, what walling off is not, and let them be planted deep.

It is not leaving the Church, but refusing to leave her when a false shepherd walks out of the faith.

It is not the founding of anything. The walled off consecrate no bishops, erect no rival synod, take no new name; for the canon that shields them is a shield, and not a throne.

It is not a judgment upon grace. They declare no Mystery void and pronounce upon no man's soul; for that belonged to the Donatists, and belongs to them still.

And it is not a court. Deposition and anathema are the synod's, and God's.

Whoever crosses any of these stones has not walled off more thoroughly. He has changed sides in the canon, from its second half to its first.

THE CALENDAR OF 1924

These stones are not planted against imaginary dangers; and here this book must set down plainly the clearest warning of our age, naming it, as truth and love together require: the history of the calendar, and of the movement that calls itself the Genuine Orthodox Christians.

In 1924 the Church of Greece, following the congress held the year before at Constantinople, exchanged the old calendar for a revised one, moving the fixed feasts thirteen days. Some Churches followed, while Russia, Serbia, Jerusalem, and the Holy Mountain kept the ancient count. The change was made by parts of the Church, not the whole; and its warrant lay in that same encyclical of 1920 whose programme the last chapter weighed. The grief of the pious was not foolish.

But the calendar, whatever else be said of it, was not a heresy; and the reason is the only reason that ever decides such a question: it touched no article of the Faith, neither Creed, nor Mysteries, nor even the reckoning of Pascha, which kept the rule of Nicaea. As for the appeal to the councils of 1583, 1587, and 1593, which the separated make their foundation: those councils confronted the Gregorian reform as Rome pressed it on the East, papal in authority, and a change of the Paschalion, and what they defended beyond dispute was that Paschalion and the Church's freedom from the pope's decree. The change of 1924 was made by Orthodox synods, however unwisely; it was submitted to no pope; and it left the Paschalion untouched. And the famous Sigillion of 1583, a document circulated among the zealots as a patriarchal decree laying all who follow the new calendar under anathema, is, in the form they circulate, of contested authenticity, and a dogma cannot hang on a disputed paper.

Yet the other half of the honesty must be paid at once. To alter the common rhythm of the Church's feasts by parts and in haste, under the shadow of 1920, was a real sin against unity and love, tearing the one festal voice of Orthodoxy in two to this day, under the prophet's standing woe: Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep. An ordinance wrongly changed is a wound. It is not a heresy. And the whole tragedy flowed from men on both sides who would not hold those two sentences together.⁸⁵

HOW A RIGHT PROTEST GOES WRONG

The grief of 1924 did not have to end in schism; for some it did, and for some it did not. Before that sequel is told, the inner mechanism must be laid bare; for schism is not an accident that befalls a man all at once, like a falling stone. It is a road, walked step by step. Each step feels small; several of the early steps are not sins at all, but duties; and that is exactly what makes the road so dangerous, it begins on holy ground. Walk the steps in order, then, and mark precisely where the ground changes.

First, a man sees an error, real, or suspected. Nothing wrong has happened yet. The seeing may be the very beginning of confession, for the watchman who sees nothing guards nothing.

Second, he protests. Still nothing wrong: protest against real error is commanded by the Scriptures and honoured by the canon. Every confessor of the ninth chapter began exactly here, and some of them never needed to go a step further.

Third, and here the ground begins, invisibly, to change, he separates in his heart before anything requires it. Grief hardens into distance. He no longer laments the error of his fathers as a son; he catalogues it as a prosecutor. The Church begins to be "they."

Fourth, the distrust spreads. Having found one shepherd false, he now suspects all of them; having caught the institution failing once, he rereads its whole life as failure. Vigilance, which is a virtue, quietly becomes suspicion, which is a state of soul; and he begins to feel that nothing can be trusted which he has not verified himself.

Fifth, he refuses correction. Counsel from anyone still "inside" is dismissed as compromise before it is heard; counsel from his own side is not sought. The advisers he keeps are the ones who agree with him. At this step, note it well, the question who is right? has silently been replaced by the question who is loyal?

Sixth, and this is the watershed of the whole road, he makes his own judgment the measure of the Church. Until now, at his best, he was applying the Church's recorded judgments to a present error, which is the confessor's whole office. Now he begins to issue judgments of his own: upon grace, upon Mysteries, upon the standing before God of millions he has never met. He does not notice the change, because the vocabulary is the same; but he has moved from beneath the canon to a seat above it. The confessor recognizes; this man now legislates.

Seventh, he gathers the like minded. Fellowship is human, and in hard times needful; but this gathering is built upon the sixth step, and so it selects for agreement and for heat. The circle confirms itself daily, and calls the confirmation discernment.

Eighth, the protest becomes an identity. He is no longer an Orthodox Christian who resists an error; he is a Resister, and the resisting is now who he is. Watch the language for the sign of this step: the healing of the error, which he once prayed for, has quietly become a threat, for what would he be, if the thing he defines himself against were cured?

Ninth, the identity becomes a faction: a name, a party line, a border patrolled, spokesmen, and enemies within, "the lukewarm", as well as without. The faction needs the wall to be permanent; soon it needs the crisis to be permanent too.

Tenth, the faction becomes a schism: the rival altar, the rival synod, the consecrations, the verdicts upon grace, the anathemas from private mouths. The tenth step only makes visible what the sixth step decided. And the man who takes it will describe the whole descent, in perfect sincerity, as faithfulness, for at no single step did he feel himself change.

Not every protest ends here; let that be said with equal force. The ninth chapter of this book is a procession of protests that did not, saints who resisted false teaching, corrupt hierarchs, unlawful councils, and open heresy with all their strength, and who walked the first two steps for years, some for a lifetime, and no further. What kept them was not mildness of temperament, for many of them were men of fire. It was four anchors. Sobriety, which weighs the cause on the Church's scales and not on the heart's. Humility, which suspects itself first, and stands under the Fathers rather than over them. Ecclesiality, which does everything as an appeal to the Church and nothing as a substitute for her. And obedience to the truth, which is ready to be corrected by it, and ready to stop the moment the truth stops walking. Holy resistance is protest that never leaves the second step, though it stand on that step, suffering, for forty years.

FROM PROTEST INTO SCHISM

Now the history; and the reader will recognize every step as it passes. For some ten years after 1924, many who opposed the change did the very thing this book commends. They kept the old reckoning; they protested; some ceased to commemorate the bishops who had made the change; and they waited, raising no altar, still members of the one Church. A walling off and a waiting, within the bounds: the first and second steps, and no further.

But in 1935 the matter passed, for some, out of protest and into schism. Three metropolitans, Chrysostomos of Florina, Germanos of Demetrias, and Chrysostomos of Zakynthos, separated and did not merely wall off. They consecrated new bishops, among them Matthew of Bresthena; they constituted a rival synod; and they established a parallel church, over a matter that was not a heresy, and that no council had judged. Here the sixth step and the tenth were taken together: the private judgment enthroned, and the rival altar raised upon it. The movement took the name it bears, the Genuine Orthodox; and the reader of this chapter hears the old echo at once, for every counterfeit has taken the true name, the pure, the church of the martyrs, the old believers, the genuine. It is always the claim, and never the proof. The canons of the rival altar, Apostolic 31 and Antioch 5, fell on the deed with their whole weight. One of the three founders repented within the year and returned; but the thing was founded.⁸⁶

And then the inner logic of schism unfolded on schedule: act, then doctrine to justify the act, then broken canon to perpetuate it. Within two years the new synod split over the question every wrongly grounded separation is condemned to raise, the question of grace. Matthew of Bresthena taught that the official Church was graceless outright; Chrysostomos of Florina refused that sentence; and in 1937 the camps divided, the eighth and ninth steps in plain view, identity hardening into faction, and each faction requiring a stricter doctrine than the last to justify its own existence. The Matthewite party then followed its premise to the end. Having unchurched everyone outside itself, it found in 1948 that it had one bishop left and no lawful way to continue; and Matthew consecrated bishops alone, one man laying on hands by himself, against the first canon of the Apostles, which requires two or three. The wall in the wrong place had become a doctrine; the doctrine had become a solitude; and the solitude consecrated itself.

THE LINE BETWEEN CONFESSION AND SELF-WILL

Set down now, in four sentences, the line this history draws, the line between the confession this book teaches and the self will it condemns, and let each sentence be weighed exactly, for each closes a door through which sincere men have walked to their ruin.

Holy resistance is not rebellion. The confessor refuses a false confession; he does not refuse the Church's order, her episcopate, her judgment-seat, or her right to judge even him. His whole posture is an appeal to the Church, made from inside her obedience, which is why he waits for her council instead of convening his own.

Apoteichisis is not self made authority. The canon shields the man who applies the Church's already-recorded judgment to an open, condemned heresy; it crowns no man's private certainty about anything else. The moment a man's warrant becomes I see it, therefore it is so, about grace, about Mysteries, about the standing of the whole visible Church, he has stopped citing the Fathers and started replacing them, whatever texts are on his lips.

Separation from heresy is not permission to invent a private church. The wall is a refusal, not a foundation. He who consecrates, constitutes, and names has not extended the wall but abandoned it; for the canon's protection covers those who rescue the Church from schism, not those who manufacture one in her name.

And refusing falsehood is not the same as refusing the Church. The confessor stands apart from a false shepherd precisely in order to stand with the Church of all places and all ages; the schismatic stands apart from the Church herself and calls the standing purity. The first is a separation for the Body's sake; the second is an amputation calling itself health.

The danger, then, has one name, and the Fathers gave it long ago: self will, the enthronement of one's own judgment in the seat that belongs to the Church. And the danger is subtle precisely because confession and self will can recite the same canons, quote the same Fathers, and grieve over the same real errors. The difference is not in the vocabulary; it is in the seat of judgment. The confessor's last word is always: let the Church judge, and let her judge me also. The self willed man's last word, however piously phrased, is: I have judged. Between those two sentences runs the whole difference between the wall and the pit that is dug beside it. And the man who cannot tell, in his own heart, which of the two sentences he is speaking should treat that very uncertainty as a command from the canon itself: to stop, to pray, and to ask, before he takes a step that his grandchildren may be unable to untake.

THE FRUIT, AND THE SAINT'S SORROW

The fruit was what the canons threaten. The two synods became many; and the movement stands today broken into a score and more of rival jurisdictions, many refusing communion with one another, anathematizing and defrocking one another, some receiving Orthodox Christians as though the Church had given them nothing, repeating the Mysteries over them: the completed mark of the Donatist error.

And the second half of the honesty, as at the Raskol: the official church answered the zealots not only with arguments but with force. Chapels were sealed; priests were seized and stripped; the aged Chrysostomos of Florina was sent into exile. That persecution was a sin of the mighty. It made the schism dearer to its children, and it stands written against the innovators of 1924 beside their innovation. But one sin does not justify another; and the faith of Christ, which the calendar had never touched, was wounded by both.

A holy elder of our own time, now numbered among the saints, loved these zealous souls, testified to their piety and their fighting spirit, and grieved over them. Let his words stand here in his own voice:

THE TRUE WALL OF THE SAME CENTURY

The saint's sorrow condemns the path and shelters the souls in one breath, and his double word governs this page. Among those folds are men and women of real piety, whose persons belong to God's mercy and to the love and prayer he commanded; and nothing here passes sentence on any soul. What is judged is the path, by the canon; and the path, so judged, is schism.

And that the fault lay in the path, and not in zeal itself, God demonstrated in the same century, on the same soil, when at last the cause was real. When Patriarch Athenagoras lifted the anathemas against Rome, declared that the age of dogma had passed, and proposed refounding one Church of East and West with the differences left standing, the condemned error was no longer suspicion but proclamation. And the Holy Mountain answered as the canon describes.

About half the monasteries of Athos, all the sketes, and most of the cells ceased to commemorate him. Metropolitans within the Church of Greece did likewise. And mark what these confessors did not do: they consecrated no one, founded nothing, took no new name, declared no Mystery void, and joined none of the rival synods that stood ready to receive them. When the next patriarch demanded the commemoration back under threat, monasteries answered in writing that they would resume it when the heretical line was abandoned, which is the very grammar of the canon: resistance framed as an appeal, a wall with its gate standing open toward repentance.

Set the two responses of that one century side by side, and they teach the fifteenth canon better than any commentary. The one, over a rite, judged by a contested paper and a private certainty, raised altars and a succession, and has ended in fragments that curse one another. The other, over open heresy, judged by the recorded faith of the ages, raised nothing and no one, and remains within the Church it laboured to defend. Same storm, same zeal; the cause, the standard, the manner, and the spirit made all the difference, exactly as the four questions said they would.

Nor was the Greek soil the only witness of that century. In Russia, in 1922, when a Soviet-sponsored party of innovators, the self styled Living Church, seized the administration of the patriarchate, the confessor Mark Novoselov, whom the Church has since glorified among her New Martyrs, directed the faithful in the exact grammar of the canon:

Not allowing the commemoration of their names: apoteichisis in so many words, from the mouth of a martyr of our own age. He deposed no one, consecrated no one, and founded nothing; he named the wall, and in due time sealed it with his blood; and the Church that outlived the usurpers wrote his name in her calendar, while the Living Church, which had held the buildings and the certificates, is remembered only as the counterfeit it was.

Therefore let anyone who would raise a rival altar search the whole history of the Church, from the Novatians to the synods of 1935, and name the time when the saints consecrated bishops and set up a separate hierarchy over a thing that was not a heresy. There is no such time. It was never done. And this page is written, God is witness, not to wound the pious born within those folds, but so that no reader, fleeing the fire of ecumenism by the door the canon opens, should walk past it into the pit that was dug at its side.⁸⁹

TRUE ZEAL AND FALSE

Between the coward who will not confess and the schismatic who confesses falsely stands the true confessor; and since zeal is a fire that can warm a house or burn it down, learn to tell the true fire from the false.

True zeal is humble, knowing it stands under the judgment of the Fathers and not above them. It is sorrowful, grieving over the division it is forced to make. It is patient, willing to suffer and to wait. It is exact, separating only over what the Church has truly condemned. It is obedient to the canons, even in resisting the men who betrayed them. And it is joined to repentance, so that the confession is a trembling and never a boast.

False zeal wears the same words and bears the opposite marks: proud, harsh, delighting in condemnation, impatient, loose, separating over its own suspicions, lawless in the name of the law, loveless and unrepentant. The one weeps over the wall it must raise; the other rejoices to raise walls. The one waits for the Church; the other becomes its own church.

Exactness, moreover, cuts in both directions, and a saint of the eleventh century shows the reader its second edge. Blessed Theophylact of Ohrid, the great commentator, pressed by his own disciple to multiply the charges against the Latins, refused to inflate the count:

Lest our love grow cold: the scruple of a hierarch who did not deny the errors but weighed them, and who would not spend the dread word heresy on what did not touch the essence of the faith. His restraint is not the opposite of Mark's severity at Florence; it is the same exactness, applied to a different measure. True zeal counts neither too few errors nor too many, and the man who multiplies charges to thicken his wall has left exactness for appetite.

To the pastoral objection that even the true wall scandalizes the simple, this book answers with the Lord's own balance. The little ones are to be protected, never conscripted; and the confessor who frightens them, who makes the faith a quarrel before the children, has sinned against the love the truth exists to serve. But scandal cuts both ways. The Lord, told that the Pharisees were offended at His word, answered: Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And the deeper offence against the simple is the lie taught by silence, the generation catechized, by untroubled communion, into believing the faith negotiable. The truth is brought to the simple as medicine is brought to children: with gentleness, in small measures, by hands they trust. It is not withheld as though it were the disease.

And to the appeal that the Church heals by economia, the answer of the saints is the boundary of economia itself. Economy bends the application of a rule, for a season and for souls; it can never extend to the betrayal of the faith. The things of the Church, said Saint Mark before the greatest economy ever demanded, are never set right by compromises; for between the truth and falsehood concerning the Faith there is no middle thing. Toward persons, economy without stint; toward the confession, exactness without exception. The confessor who keeps both is the physician; and his one strictness is itself a mercy, for it refuses to confirm the sick man in the sickness.⁹¹

In plain words. You can do the right thing in the wrong way and lose everything. Schism is a road of small steps: seeing an error and protesting can both be right, but then come distance of heart, distrust of everyone, refusal of advice, trusting your own judgment above the Church, gathering only the like minded, turning the protest into your identity, the identity into a party, and the party into a rival church. Walling off never means starting a new church, judging whether other people's sacraments are real, or cursing anyone, those who did that over the calendar in Greece (the self named "Genuine Orthodox") split over something that was not the faith, then split again and again, just as Saint Paisios wept to see. But when the cause was real, a patriarch openly preaching the panheresy, the monks of Athos simply stopped saying his name, started nothing, and stayed in the Church: that is the true wall. Resisting falsehood is right; appointing yourself the judge of the Church is the fall. True zeal weeps, waits, and loves; false zeal is proud and eager to divide. And love never means hiding the truth, it means giving it gently, like medicine to a child.