Heresies & confessions

The classical taxonomy is St Basil the Great's, in his First Canonical Epistle (Letter 188, canon 1). He distinguishes three separations of unequal gravity: heresies, where the difference concerns the faith in God itself; schisms, separations over ecclesiastical questions that admit of healing; and parasynagogues, unlawful gatherings of insubordinate clergy or unruly laity. Everything on this page presupposes his distinction: not every separation is heresy, not every irregularity is schism, and the remedies differ. It is also why this library insists that canonical walling off, expressly acquitted of schism by Canon 15, must never be confused with the founding of a rival church.

Roman Catholicism. The principal divergences as Orthodoxy states them: the Filioque added to the Creed (against the standing prohibition renewed in 879 to 880); the universal supremacy and, since 1870, the defined infallibility of the pope; created grace, against the uncreated energies confessed in 1341 to 1351; with the connected differences over azymes, purgatorial satisfaction, and the 1854 definition of the Immaculate Conception, which presupposes a doctrine of original guilt the East does not share. The mutual excommunications of 1054 mark the rupture's symbol; their “lifting” in 1965 is itself part of the modern dispute treated below.

The Protestant confessions. Born of the sixteenth century protest against Rome, they differ from Orthodoxy structurally: Scripture detached from the Tradition that canonized it; the priesthood, apostolic succession and the eucharistic sacrifice variously abandoned; the icon refused; the Church reconceived as invisible. Orthodoxy honours the seriousness of the protest while judging that it answered Rome's errors with new ones.

The Non-Chalcedonian communions (Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and their families) descend from the rejection of Chalcedon and stand under its condemnation of the one nature doctrine. Modern dialogues (the agreed statements of 1989 to 1990) claim the difference is verbal; that claim is contested and has not been received conciliarly, this library records it as an open dispute, not a settled reunion.

What is resisted. By “ecumenism” the resistance means a definable cluster: the branch theory, by which the one Church subsists in fragments; joint prayer and concelebration with the heterodox; organic membership in the World Council of Churches; the language of “sister churches” (Balamand, 1993); and the trajectory read into the Council of Crete (2016). Against joint prayer specifically the canons are not silent: Apostolic Canons 10, 11, 45, 46 and 65, and canons 6 and 33 of Laodicea, forbid it outright, the full texts and scaffolding are set out on the Canon 15 page. In 1983 the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad pronounced an anathema against ecumenism as it defined it, a synodal act of that body, variously received elsewhere. And the catalogued study of this library, Trikamenas (2012), argues that this cluster renews previously condemned errors and so triggers the duty of Canon 15.