Why Apoteichisis Is Heavenly Communion

Begin with the word that this whole book serves: communion. It is the most beautiful word in the vocabulary of the Church, and it carries two meanings that belong together.

Communion means, first, union with God. It is the life of the Holy Trinity given to man: sealed in Baptism, fed at the chalice, perfected in the age to come. And communion means, second, union with one another in the Church: one faith, one baptism, one altar, one visible fellowship of believers under their shepherds. In the healthy life of the Church these two are one thing, as a branch's union with the vine and its union with the other branches are one life. The second exists for the sake of the first, and the first flows through the second.

But what happens when a shepherd begins to preach, openly, a teaching the Church has already condemned as false? Then the two meanings of communion, which God joined, are forced apart by men, and the Christian is placed before a terrible choice. If he keeps the second communion, the visible fellowship, by naming and following the false teacher as his own in the Faith, he begins to lose the first; for no man is united to the Truth while confessing a lie at the altar. If, to keep the first, he simply flees the Church altogether, he loses both; for there is no communion with the Head apart from the Body.

The saints found the narrow way between. They kept the Faith and they kept the Church. They ceased to commemorate the false teacher, while remaining, in faith and love and Mysteries, exactly where they had always been. That narrow way is apoteichisis. It is not a departure from communion. It is the guarding of heavenly communion when earthly shepherds betray it. And that is why this book bears the name it bears.

The word itself teaches the manner. Teichos is a city wall; apoteichisis is the raising of a wall against a besieger. Consider what a wall is, and what it is not. A wall is not a sword: it attacks no one. A wall is not a road out of the city: the man who builds it stays inside. The wall is raised against the heresy, never against the Church. The builder remains a citizen, keeps the city's law, and waits upon the city's courts, which in the Church are her councils. Whoever turns the wall into a sword, or into a road out, has left the teaching of this book on one side or the other; and half our labour in these pages is to show, from the history of the saints and of the schisms, exactly where each side lies.

The book walks in five stages. First, the Church: what she is, how the one Eucharist makes her one Body at one altar, what heresy and schism each break, and why love is the foundation of everything. Second, the canon: the Scriptures' command to come out from false teaching, the fifteenth canon of the First and Second Council which gives that command its churchly form, and the meaning of the name spoken in the Liturgy. Third, the two walls: the saints whose walling off the Church has crowned, and the counterfeit separations, ancient and modern, that she has condemned, with the marks that tell them apart. Fourth, the life behind the wall: the Mysteries, the questions of conscience, and the hidden faithful. And fifth, the return and the banquet: how walls come down, and what all of this was for. Over the whole journey stands one proverb, the motto of every confessor: Buy the truth, and sell it not (Proverbs 23:23).