Biblical & Theological Issues

by Donald Fairbairn –

What Is Eastern Orthodoxy?
For most of the last 500 years, Westerners have thought of the Christian world in terms of Protestants and Catholics, and we have paid little attention to the other branches of the Christian family tree. Recently, however, we have been coming into much greater contact with professing Christians around the world who do not belong to either Protestant or Roman Catholic communions, and we are slowly learning that we need to be able to place these other groups in our minds. One way to do this is to link the groups to the great historic streams of the Christian faith.¹ These streams include not only the Roman Catholic Church and the various Protestant Churches, but also the Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox Churches. The division of the professing Christian world into these groups began with the Ecumenical Councils of the Church from A.D. 325-787. The first two of these councils (at Nicaea in 325, and at Constantinople in 381) articulated the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and all five of these major groups affirm these councils. (There have been some small groups of Christians throughout history who have rejected the first two Ecumenical Councils.)

The third and fourth Ecumenical Councils (at Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451) articulated the Christian doctrine of Christ, but for reasons that were very complicated and had to do with misunderstandings and political issues as well as actual doctrinal differences, many in the Eastern Christian world rejected these two councils. The Church of the East became a separate entity when many of the Syrian Christians rejected the Third Ecumenical Council. This group has historically been located in what is today Iraq and has been called “Nestorian” by Western historians. It once had a great missionary fervor (taking Christianity as far as China by the year 700), but more recently it has been decimated by Arab domination, and most of its adherents have fled to the United States. The Oriental Orthodox Churches rejected the Fourth Ecumenical Council. They were, and still are, primarily located in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, and Armenia, and they have retained a vibrant Christian presence in the face of hostile political regimes for the last 1500 years. They are called (inaccurately, in my opinion) “Monophysites” by Western historians.

The Fifth through Seventh Ecumenical Councils did not lead to any further major splits, but the Chalcedonian Christian world was soon plagued by divisions between its Greek and Latin sections. These divisions gradually led to a split (dated at 1054, but really not final until 1204) into what we today call the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox Churches (or simply “Eastern Orthodoxy”) and the Roman Catholic Church. And of course, we are very familiar with the sixteenth-century split in the Western Christian domain which separated the various Protestant groups from the Roman Catholic Church (and from each other).

Eastern Orthodoxy, then, is one of the major historic branches of those professing the Christian faith. It emerged in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire, and it has long dominated the religious landscape of Greece, Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and other areas of East-Central Europe. The Churches in this family affirm the same major creeds (The Nicene, Apostles, and Athanasian) that we do. They are in fellowship with one another and were in fellowship with Western Christianity until about 800 years ago. Because of the unrest fomented by the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe a century ago, many Eastern Orthodox people fled to
the West, and they have small but noticeable communities in most major cities of Western Europe and North America. This issue of Areopagus Journal will deal with various aspects of the theology of the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox Churches.

THE ROOTS OF EASTERN ORTHODOX THEOLOGY
Two of the articles in this issue were written by Eastern European evangelicals—one Greek and the other Ukrainian—who have had extensive interaction with the Orthodox. Kantartzis’ article deals primarily with the Orthodox understanding of the fall, and Lytvynenko’s with the Eastern understanding of salvation, or what is called theosis or “deification” in Orthodoxy. There are noteworthy points of contact between these articles. Both point to the Orthodox understanding of God (in particular, a strange idea called the “essence/energies distinction”) as a key source of differences between Eastern and Western thought. Both articles also see problems with the modern Orthodox understanding of the fall as a failure to achieve deification, rather than an actual departure from a state of blessedness. Furthermore, both articles point to the need in modern Orthodoxy for a more personal understanding of God (as a fellowship of three persons) and of humanity’s relationship to God (as a sharer in that fellowship, rather than just as a participant in God’s qualities). Kantartzis finds such a personal approach in some of what contemporary theologian John Zizioulas writes, and Lytvynenko points our attention to the earlier history of Eastern theology and the thought of the great fourth-century theologian Athanasius in order to find such a personal, relational understanding.

In order to help the reader understand the discussions of these ideas in the two articles that follow, I would like sketch some of the historical roots of modern Orthodox theology. Within the early church, there were various strands of thought about God, about humanity, and about the relation between the two before and after the fall. I suggest that without too much oversimplification, one may see these strands in terms of two major tensions. First is the tension between whether salvation is primarily a downward action of God toward humanity or an upward ascent of the human soul to God. Of course, most theologians include both of these emphases, but whether one sees the drama of salvation primarily in the first way or predominantly in the second way shapes one’s approach to Christian life dramatically. The second tension is between a view that sees the believer’s union with God or participation in God (what the Eastern church calls “deification”) primarily in terms of God’s qualities (such as holiness, incorruption, immortality, etc.) or mainly interms of God’s intra-trinitarian fellowship (that is, our sharing in the Father’s relationship to the Son). Again, one may certainly include both of these elements, but I suggest that most Eastern theologians since about the fourth century have gravitated toward one side or another of this tension. To illustrate this suggestion (and to set the stage for the two articles that follow), I will examine two major shapers of Orthodox theology, Origen of Alexandria in the third century and Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth.²

Origen of Alexandria and the
Ascent of the Soul to God
Early Eastern Christian writers (especially Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century) exhibited both sides of these tensions, but in the early third century, the great Alexandrian thinker Origen leaned dramatically toward one side on both of them. He saw Christian life primarily as the upward ascent of the human soul toward union with God in his qualities or characteristics.

The great challenge that confronted the Church in the second and third centuries came from Gnosticism, a belief system that regarded the physical realm as unredeemable and that was intensely fatalistic, insisting that people were born into one class or another and their salvation depended on which class they belonged to. In opposition to this idea, Origen’s entire system developed in his work On First Principles (written sometime prior to the year 231)³ is based on his robust defense of human freedom, a defense that leads him to believe that any differences in the way God treats people must stem from what those people have previously done to deserve praise or blame.⁴

Origen of Alexandria
Origen (AD 185 – 254) was an early church father and apologist. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt during a time in which Christianity was persecuted. His father, Leonides, died a martyr for the Christian faith when Origen was 17 years old. Origen desired to turn himself over to the Roman authorities and follow in his father’s footsteps, but his mother prevented him doing so by hiding his clothes.

Origen was highly educated, being a student of Greek philosophy and the Bible. By some accounts he studied for a time under the famous church father Clement of Alexandria (AD 150 –215). Soon after his father’s death, he became a teacher of Greek literature in order to support his mother and younger siblings. The next year he was appointed by the local bishop to lead the Christian Catechetical School in Alexandria. Origen is known to have lived an extremely ascetic life, even to the point of castrating himself in obedience to a literal interpretation of Matthew 19:12. Near the end of his life Origen was severely tortured during the persecution under Emperor Decius. He died from his injuries three years later at the age of 69, finally following in his father’s footsteps to martyrdom.

Among Origen’s written works are the Hexapla, a massive Old Testament in six columns (one in Hebrew, five in several Greek versions); On First Principles, a description of the Christian faith using ideas from Greek philosophy; and Against Celsus, an apologetics treatise aimed at refuting the criticisms of Christianity made by a Neoplatonic philosopher. Origen ably defended major Christian beliefs, not least of which were the deity of Christ and the trinity. But he also
held some controversial viewpoints such as the pre-existence of human souls and the allegorical interpretation of Scripture.

Commenting on God’s love for Jacob and hatred of Esau even though neither had yet done anything worthy of praise or blame (Rom. 9), Origen insists that their souls must have pre-existed, so God acted toward them based on the way their souls had acted before their physical conception.⁵ This postulate of the pre-existence of souls becomes the starting point for Origen’s grand (and very problematic) cosmology, in which all human souls were pre-existent, and all but the soul of Jesus sinned in the pre-existent state. The fallen souls were then cast down into the physical universe (created to accommodate them), and they were united with bodies so that in their embodied state they could aspire to reunion with God from whom they had originally come.⁶

Origen’s rejection of Gnostic fatalism pushes him, ironically, toward a dualism somewhat like that of the Gnosticism he is fighting. He postulates a cosmos in which
the very existence of the physical realm is a result of sin. The material realm is not evil (as in Gnosticism), but it would not have been necessary if the souls had not sinned. The physical world is the place where the souls can work their way up to God. In such a cosmos, the pre-existence of the souls gives those souls a kinship with God that the bodies, created later, can never have. This in turn prevents him from seeing human beings as whole persons, and thus makes it difficult for him to see salvation in personal terms. As a result, in Origen’s system, salvation becomes the task of the human soul to achieve union with God. This strong emphasis leads Origen to view participation in God primarily as sharing in God’s holiness, wisdom, and other qualities, not as sharing in his personal fellowship. For
example, while discussing the activities of the three Trinitarian Persons, Origen writes:

God the Father bestows on all the gift of existence; and a participation in
Christ, in virtue of his being the word or reason, makes them rational. From
this it follows that they are worthy of praise or blame, because they are
capable alike of virtue and wickedness. Accordingly, there is also available the
grace of the Holy Spirit, that those beings who are not holy in essence
may be made holy by participating in
this grace.⁷

Notice here that the participatory language is tied to qualities of God, and the personal element of participation is missing.

Origen later develops his idea of participation by making a famous distinction between “image” and “likeness.” Noting that Gen 1:26 includes both of these words (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”), but that the following verse includes only the word “image,” Origen asserts that human beings are given the image of God at creation but are called to aspire to the likeness of God.⁸ He then cites John 17:21–24 (Jesus’ prayer that believers may be one, as he and he Father are one), and he explains what he understands this likeness to be: “Here indeed the likeness seems, if we may say so, to make an advance, and from being something similar to become ‘one thing (unum)’; for this reason, undoubtedly, that in the consummation or end God is ‘all in all.’”⁹ Origen goes into a long discussion of what kind of oneness believers will have with God at the consummation of history. It is noteworthy that this discussion includes no element of personal communion at all. Instead, Origen focuses on the question of whether human beings will still have bodies in the consummation, and he concludes that we will not have bodies since the God with whom we become one is an immaterial spirit. In fact, a major part of his reasoning is his belief that immateriality is the dominant characteristic of God and thus the main thing that we will possess by participation in him.¹⁰ For Origen, to participate in God, to acquire the divine likeness, has little to do with personal fellowship with God. Instead, it has to do with achieving union with God in his qualities, and in the process, transcending the material nature human beings now possess.

From these brief passages we can see that Origen’s theology leans toward one side of the tensions I sketched earlier. His focus on the free human action to ascend to God, in contrast to a paradigm in which God’s downward action is the primary focus, promotes a view of Christian life in which our action is the key to union with
God. His depiction of salvation as participation in God’s qualities creates a climate in which the personal dimensions of salvation are underemphasized. And his insistence that the final state of believers (and indeed, of all creatures) will be immaterial paves the way for a view of salvation that comes dangerously close to blurring the distinctions between individual creatures, and even the distinction between God and all creatures.

“FIXING” ORIGEN: TWO BASIC APPROACHES
It was widely recognized in the patristic period that Origen’s thought was problematic,¹¹ and one of the Eastern Church’s primary tasks was finding appropriate ways to solve the problems created by Origen and/or his followers. To oversimplify, one may speak of two basic ways to “fix” Origen: a “maximalist” fix and a “minimalist” fix. The maximalist fix involved re-thinking the entire basis for Origen’s system and re-casting the drama of redemption in ways that most of us would regard as more biblical. This involved a stronger insistence on the goodness of the whole person (body and soul), a greater attention to the incarnation as the central element in redemption, and a view of salvation as participation in God the Son’s relationship to the Father, not just in God’s qualities. A significant strand of thought in Eastern patristic theology followed this line of thought, and some of the major figures associated with it are Athanasius and Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century, and Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth. Lytvynenko’s discussion of Athanasius later in this issue demonstrates the value of this way of approaching deification.

In contrast, the minimalist fix focused on the most obviously-problematic element in Origen’s system, his assertion that the human souls had pre-existed before the creation of the physical realm. In this minimalist fix, the pre-existence of souls is rejected, and the creation of soul and body is brought into the realm of space and time. But in other ways, the major aspects of Origen’s system are left intact: People are created in the image of God and called to rise up to the divine likeness, and deification is understood primarily as participation in God’s qualities, not in a personal relationship. In the fourth century, perhaps the major figure to follow this minimalist fix was Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius (early sixth century), Maximus the Confessor (seventh century), Simeon the New Theologian (tenth century), and Gregory Palamas (fourteenth century) all followed a similar trajectory. It is these theologians (more than the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph who attemped the maximialist fix of Origen) who have shaped the course of modern Eastern Orthodoxy. While it would be helpful to examine all of them, I will content myself with looking at Palamas, whose thought has been most influential on contemporary Orthodox theologians such as Lossky (whom Lytvynenko discusses).

The Great Schism

For many centuries the churches of the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire saw themselves as united by a
common faith and, to some degree, a common organizational structure. But there were some doctrinal differences that created
increasing tension between East and West. There were three that stand out:

1. Disagreement over the use of images. There had always been some use and some oppositions to the use of images
in Christian worship. Those who opposed them were called iconoclasts. Most iconoclasm was in the East. In the West a
large majority favored the use of icons. In 842, the Eastern church officially returned to the use of icons, but the alienation between East and
West was never truly healed.

2. Filioque Clause. The one great event that is often said to be the cause of the East- West Schism is the addition to the Nicene
Creed of the Latin word filioque (“and from the Son”). In the 8th or 9th century, some Western churches began to use this addition
to teach that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but from the Son as well. All agreed that the divine Persons
of the Son and the Holy Spirit are eternally begotten or generated from the Person of the Father, but the Western churches
thought that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son together. In 809, the Western bishops declared the Eastern formula
without the filioque to be heretical. And in 867, the East said the same about the Western formula.

3. The Authority of the Roman Bishop. The bishops/pastors of the early churches saw themselves as equals. However, because
of his position in the Roman capital, the bishops of Rome gradually gained power and influence. At first this influence
took the form of a “first among equals,” but by the time of Leo the Great (440 – 461) many of the bishops of Rome came
to see themselves as the “vicar of Christ,” the head of the entire church. Gradually the churches in the West came to accept
papal authority, but the Eastern churches resisted it strongly.

The final straw in East-West tensions came in 1054. Pope Leo IX sent a delegation to Constantinople to settle a dispute over
clerical celibacy and the use of unleavened bread in communion. The delegates, however, exchanged sharp insults with the Eastern
Patriarch Michael Cerularius. Finally, on June 16, 1054, when Michael was preparing to celebrate communion, the delegates placed
a sentence of excommunication from Leo IX on the altar. Michael soon returned the favor. Thus began the Great East-West Schism.

Palamas and Deification as the Vision of Divine Light
In Eastern theology in the later patristic period and the Byzantine period, the concept of deification was subsumed under a broader concept, that of divine light, and the centrality of divine light in Eastern thought was given its greatest expression in the writings of Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. Palamas was involved in a controversy with a Greek-Italian monk named Barlaam, who argued that Eastern mystical practices (focusing on divine darkness and unknowability) led to absolute ignorance of God. In contrast, Palamas insisted that on the far side of the darkness, we are brought to the uncreated light of Christ our God. We are able to see God and thus to experience him in a mystical sense.

For Palamas, the two biblical events that provided the paradigm for Eastern spirituality were Jesus’ transfiguration (Matt. 17, Mark 9, Luke 9) and Paul’s vision of the third heaven (2 Cor. 12). He insisted that at the transfiguration, it was not Jesus who changed, but rather Peter, James, and John. Jesus remained who he always
was—the divine Son of God. But the disciples’ hearts were purified so that they could see him as he really was. The light that shone forth from Jesus’ clothes and his face was the uncreated light of God. Eastern spirituality is devoted to the purification of the mind, soul, and body, so that one can behold this eternal light. Palamas writes, “He [Christ] was divine before, but He bestowed at the time of His Transfiguration a divine power upon the eyes of the apostles and enabled them to look up and see for themselves. This light, then, was not a hallucination but will remain for eternity, and has existed from the beginning.”¹²

Similarly, Palamas takes the inexpressible things that Paul saw and heard in his vision (2 Cor. 12) to be a revelation of the divine light:

This most joyful reality, which ravished Paul, and made his mind go out from every creature but yet return entirely
to himself—this he beheld as a light of revelation, though not of sensible bodies; a light without limit, depth,
height or lateral extension. He saw absolutely no limit to his vision and to the light which shone round about
him; but rather it was as it were a sun infinitely brighter and greater than the universe, with himself standing in the
midst of it, having become all eye.¹³

One should note here that as Palamas interprets Paul’s vision, Paul himself is reduced to an eye, to the one who sees. He is no longer an actor in the drama, but rather he is the one who is bathed in God’s light. To see this light is to be ravished, to be full of joy. This is the goal of the Eastern Orthodox, and the ascetical practices they follow are attempts to prepare themselves to see the divine light in this way. Notice also that the image of light is an impersonal one. Union with God is understood not in personal, relational terms, but primarily in terms of light, of receiving and reflecting the qualities of God. Palamas and the Essence-Energies Distinction During the controversy with Barlaam, Palamas repeatedly insisted that what one saw in the vision of divine light was not the essence of God. For example, he writes that the human mind “will attain to that light and will become worthy of a supernatural vision of God, not seeing the divine essence, but seeing God by a revelation appropriate and analogous to Him.”¹⁴ Later he asserts, “God, while remaining entirely in Himself, dwells entirely in us by His superessential power; and communicates to us not His nature, but His proper glory and splendour.”¹⁵ And during one of his many discussions of Paul’s vision in 2 Corinthians 12, Palamas writes:

But in attaining this condition, the divine Paul could not participate absolutely in the divine essence, for the essence of God goes beyond even nonbeing by reason of transcendence, since it is also “more-than-God.” But there is also a “not-being by transcendence” spiritually visible to the senses of the soul, which is definitely not the divine essence, but a glory and radiance inseparable from His nature, by which He unites Himself only to those who are worthy, whether angels or men.¹⁶

In spite of the difficult terminology Palamas uses in these passages, it is clear that he is making a distinction between God’s essence and some aspect outside of his essence, in which God allows us to participate. He describes this participable element of God as an analogous revelation, as power, glory, splendour, and radiance. He insists that it is here, in this radiance or power which is distinct from the essence and yet not separate from the essence, that people can be united to God. This
participable element is called God’s energies. Elsewhere Palamas writes:

Neither the uncreated goodness, nor the eternal glory, nor the divine life
nor things akin to these are simply the superessential essence of God, for God
transcends them all as Cause. But we say He is life, goodness and so forth,
and give Him these names, because of the revelatory energies and powers
of the Superessential. . . . But since God is entirely present in each of the
divine energies, we name Him from each of them, although it is clear that
He transcends all of them.¹⁷

And near the end of his discussion, he concludes: “Do you not see that these divine energies are in God, and remain invisible to the created faculties? Yet the saints see them, because they have transcended themselves with the help of the Spirit.”¹⁸ Notice that Palamas tries to do three things in these passages. First, he wants to distinguish the essence of God from his energies, as he has sought to do throughout his writings. Second, he attempts to show that the essence of God is beyond his energies and is their cause. Third, he seeks to demonstrate that although the energies are logically secondary to God’s essence, they are nevertheless uncreated and eternal, and they exist in God. It is these energies which one sees when he or she has ascended to God and thus enabled to see the divine light.

What then are the essence and energies of God? In Eastern Orthodox thought, God’s essence is his inner divine life, about which we can know nothing and to which we cannot be united. His energies are his outer life, the light by which he reveals himself to those who have prepared themselves to see. Orthodox thought seeks not to peer into the mystery of God’s inner life, but rather to rejoice that he has granted us to share in his outward life as we are united to him in his energies.

Conclusions
This brief sketch of Origen and the “minimalist” way of fixing the problems with his thought should be sufficient to help the reader follow the discussions of modern Orthodoxy in the articles by Kantartzis and Lytvynenko. Because this strand of Eastern thought has focused on our upward ascent to God, it has redefined its understanding of the purpose of the incarnation (although it has certainly not underemphasized the incarnation itself). Instead of saying (as we would) that God has come down to bring us to himself, modern Orthodoxy says that God has come down in order to open to us a way of ascent to him. Likewise, by focusing so much on deification as participating in God’s immortality and various qualities he possesses, and especially by thinking of God in terms of essence and energies, this strand of thought has partially obscured the personal dimension of salvation as a sharing in God’s triune fellowship. These problems of emphasis have led to the
aspects of modern Orthodox thought with which Kantartzis and Lytvynenko take issue.

At the same time, the Eastern Christian tradition has much to teach us, and the articles by Kantartzis and Lytvynenko indicate this as well. The way of fixing Origen that one finds in Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas is not the only one, and another strand of Eastern thought (hinted at in some of what Zizioulas affirms—as Kantartzis points out, and spelled out more fully in Athanasius much earlier) may prove very fruitful for Western evangelicals to study and appropriate. In this strand of thought, God is understood primarily in terms of the relationships between the three Persons, and salvation (or deification) is wrought by the downward movement of God the Son to make us adopted sons and daughters of God.¹⁹ Modern Orthodoxy affirms this as well (although not nearly as prominently), but both they and we Western Christians might do well to explore this strand of thought more fully.

Donald Fairbairn is the Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has lived and taught in Soviet Georgia and Ukraine, and he still teaches frequently in Eastern and Western Europe. He is the author of Eastern Orthodoxy through Western Eyes, Grace and Christology in the Early Church, Life in the Trinity, and Understanding Language, as well as two books published only in Russian.

Notes
1We should recognize, however, that many indigenous Christian movements in Africa and Asia in the last 200 years are essentially independent of all the
historic streams of the church.
2 Some of the arguments I develop in this article are adapted from more detailed treatments in two previous articles. See Donald Fairbairn, “Eastern
Orthodox Mystical Theology,” in Mysticisms East & West: Studies in Mystical Experience (Carlisle, England: Paternoster Press, 2003), 146-65. Also, see Donald
Fairbairn, “Patristic Soteriology: Three Trajectories,” in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50:2(June 2007): 289-310.
3 The best English translation of this work is in Origen, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (London: S.P.C.K., 1936), and quotations in this article are from that translation.
4 See On First Principles 3.1.10 (Butterworth, 172).
5 See On First Principles 3.1.21 (Butterworth, 204).
6 See On First Principles 1.8.1 (Butterworth, 66–8).
7 On First Principles 1.3.8 (Butterworth, 38).
8 On First Principles 3.6.1 (Butterworth, 245).
9 On First Principles 3.6.1 (Butterworth, 246).
10On First Principles 3.6.1 (Butterworth, 246–7).
11In fact he was eventually condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in AD 553.
12Palamas, Triads 3.1.15, in Gregory Palamas: The Triads, edited by John Meyendorff, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1983), 76.
13Palamas, Triads 1.3.21 (Meyendorff, 38).
14Palamas, Triads 1.3.4, (Meyendorff, 32).
15Palamas, Triads 1.3.23, (Meyendorff, 39).
16Palamas, Triads 2.3.37, (Meyendorff, 66).
17Palamas, Triads 3.2.7, (Meyendorff, 95-6).
18Palamas, Triads 3.3.10 (Meyendorff, 107).
19For a much fuller exposition of this strand of patristic thought, see Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church
Fathers (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2009).

(First published in Areopagus Journal Volume 12 No. 3 – Eastern Orthodoxy)