With regards to Ecumenism, the “zealot” Old Calendarists react to its very name and appearance with panic-stricken fear, defending themselves against it solely through blunt rejections, condemnations, and “anathemas.” The true Church of Christ, however, responds to this challenge in a manner that is evangelically responsible and soteriologically active; that is, she discerns in the phenomenon of Ecumenism—albeit often misguided—the searching of Western Christians for lost unity, and therefore she participates in and cooperates in ecumenical dialogue, in order to bear witness to the Truth before the world. For, according to the words of the holy Apostle Peter: “Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready with meekness and fear…,” so that one may grow “to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”—and this is the fullness of the Church (Eph. 4:13; 1:23).
For the Old Calendarists there is no such growth, no history of the Church, no dramatic dialectic of the relationship between God and humanity, God and the human race. Everything lies in some past; everything has already been—there is nothing that is becoming, nothing that is happening. The decisions of the Councils and the Fathers, the dogmas and the canons, are testimonies and records of a living experience with the Living God. Yet this experience is not finished, not given once and for all; rather, it is continually lived anew, re-lived, and expressed (that is, reinterpreted). Ancient formulas come alive not through conservative repetition, but through ascetic, grace-filled experience within the Church. Mere dogmatic unanimity is not sufficient, nor an intellectual or psychological agreement with dogmas and canons, if there is no living, grace-filled communion and immersion in the very Mystery of the Church, in fellowship with the One Holy One and with All the Saints.
For this reason, the holy Apostles and the holy Fathers never ceased to live, to participate, and to act within the great Mystery of the Church, par excellence in her Liturgy—the Eucharist. Whenever we serve the Divine Liturgy, we concelebrate with the holy Fathers to Christ, in the Holy Spirit; and this is our conciliar, ecclesial communion and fullness, of which the Apostle Paul speaks in Ephesians 3:14–19.
The Church of the Living Christ the Saviour, our Hope, knows that His divine desire and prayer is “that they all may be one,” according to the image of the unity of the Holy Trinity (John 17:21–23), for the Church truly is an image of the Holy Trinity. Such an attitude is not something recent, nor is it connected with the calendar question, nor with the modern “ecumenical movement,” as the so-called Old Calendarists claim.
It would be far too extensive here even to list all the dialogues conducted by Orthodox theologians, Fathers, and Teachers of the Church throughout the centuries with heretics and groups separated from the Church. For the Church of Christ has never ceased to exercise evangelical care for heretics; in some manner they remain “marked” by their relationship to the Church, and therefore they can be restored to ecclesial communion—sometimes through akribeia, and sometimes through oikonomia, that is, condescension. The holy Councils and their canons very often have precisely such persons—heretics and schismatics—in view, since many canons concern the restoration of broken communion (koinonia) with the Church. This applies especially to those who were not leaders of heresy, but were led or deceived into heresy, or were born into such groups or peoples.
Examples of such relationships, encounters, conversations, and dialogues exist from every period of Church history, and only the ignorant can deny this. How great were the apostolic labours of a Basil the Great in the fourth century to heal the nearly complete rupture that had arisen between East and West! And how many were the labours of so many great ecclesial figures—pastors and theologians of the Church—for the preservation or restoration of ecclesial unity: during Arianism (the entire fourth century is filled with this struggle), Nestorianism (the well-known patience of St. Cyril of Alexandria and the acceptance of the “Formula of Union” of 433), Monophysitism and its offshoots of Monoenergism and Monothelitism (fifth–seventh centuries), Iconoclasm (eighth–ninth centuries), the Romano-Frankish schism and separation; and thereafter dialogues with Anglicans and Protestants, and on several occasions in earlier centuries, as well as recently, renewed dialogue with the Monophysite Anti-Chalcedonians (from the time of St. Photius his two famous letters to the Armenians are preserved; then discussions with them in Byzantium in the twelfth century, and in the Russian Church in the nineteenth century).
The Fathers and Teachers of the Church, as eminent champions of Orthodoxy and living witnesses of the Living God-Man Christ, the Saviour of the whole world and of all people, did not desist—like the Apostle Paul—from bearing witness to Christ even before those who proclaimed “another Christ” or “another Gospel” (2 Cor. 11:4; Gal. 1:6–9). They were champions of the unity of the Church of Christ, the unity of all in Christ, in which divine unity alone there is salvation, as St. Ignatius of Antioch teaches (Epistle to the Ephesians 13, 14, 20; Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8). They were people of faith and trust, of love and hope, not people of suspicion and distrust, of exclusivism and hatred—such as, more or less, all “zealots” are (and the present ones are in this respect the narrowest, most constricted, and most limited of all).
If frightened “zealots without understanding” fear even the very word Ecumenism (which they almost never utter without some pejorative epithet), Orthodox sons of the Church do not fear any word as such; rather, they strive even to rescue words misused by heretics and to endow them with salvific content and meaning. Thus, we have long freely spoken of the existence of an Orthodox ecumenism, and of Orthodox ecumenists—not as a novelty—namely, people who are universal, as we call the Three Holy Hierarchs “Ecumenical”; people not of exclusivity, but of inclusivity and comprehensiveness, as St. Nikolaj of Žiča said already in his youth, or people of conciliarity (sobornost), as Father Justin of Ćelije expressed it. For the Orthodox are truly catholic—that is, conciliar—and the Orthodox Church is the Conciliar-Catholic Church, a small leaven that leavens the whole lump of the universe and all creation (Matt. 13:33).
In order not to go too far back and cite earlier Fathers (Athanasius, Basil, Cyril, Photius), we shall present the example of a more recent Holy Father of Orthodoxy, St. Mark of Ephesus. Here are his “ecumenical” words at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1439), delivered in his greeting to Pope Eugene IV:
“Today is the beginning of joy for the whole world; today the rational rays of the sun of peace rise upon the entire universe; today the members of the Lord’s Body (that is, the Church), long ago broken and torn apart from one another, hasten towards mutual union. For the Head, Christ God, will no longer tolerate standing over a divided body, nor, being Love, does He wish the bond of love among us to be utterly severed. Come then, most holy Father, receive your children who have come to you from afar, from the East; embrace those who for a long time were separated from you and now have fled to your bosom; heal the scandalized; command that every obstacle and hindrance to peace be removed; and say to your angels also, as an imitator of God: prepare the way for my people, make the paths straight, remove the stumbling stones (Isa. 57:14). How long shall we, who have the same Christ and the same faith, fight against one another and devour one another, until we destroy each other (Gal. 5:15) and until external enemies reduce us to nothing? Do not allow this to happen, O Christ the King, nor let the multitude of our sins overpower Your goodness; but even now, through these Your servants, who have proclaimed nothing dearer than Your love, unite us with one another and with Yourself, and grant that the prayer You uttered when You were going to Your Passion may be fulfilled and realized, when You prayed: ‘Father, grant that they may be one, as We are one’ (John 17).”
Saint Mark Eugenikos believed in this High-Priestly prayer of Christ to God the Father for the unity of all Christians in the Church, according to the unity of the Holy Trinity, because the Church is the living image of the Holy Trinity. Saint Mark repeated the same conviction at the opening of the council in Ferrara in 1438, when he again addressed Pope Eugene with words of love and respect flowing from true faith and true zeal for it (and not, as the “zealot” Old Calendarists think, that love or zeal for Orthodoxy is manifested through hatred and cursing of the pope and others separated from the Church):
“Behold, He (Christ) has raised you up, first among His priests, to summon us here, just as He raised up our most pious emperor and our most holy pastor and patriarch… Is not all this clearly accomplished by God’s power and judgment, and is it not all a sign of a good and God-pleasing outcome?”
The Metropolitan of Ephesus, Saint Mark, therefore believed in the possibility of good fruits arising from ecumenical encounters and dialogues. In doing so, he neither loved nor defended Orthodoxy any less, nor did he, through courteous words addressed to the Roman pope, acknowledge innovations in faith (Filioque) or an uncanonical primacy of power in the Church; for he clearly stated: “We consider the pope to be one of the patriarchs—if he were Orthodox” (PG 17, 320).
Let us come closer to our own time and cite the words of the Eastern Patriarchs from their well-known Encyclical of 1848, which was wholeheartedly welcomed and accepted by all the Orthodox Churches, and whose words sound unmistakably Orthodox and ecumenical:
“The brotherly love earnestly commanded to us by the common Teacher—By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love among yourselves (John 13:35)—whose document and agreement the papacy first tore apart…, this love continues to act even today in the souls of Christ-named peoples and especially in their leaders (the Bishops). For we boldly confess before God and before men that the prayer of our Saviour to God and His Father for universal love and the unity of Christians in the One, Holy, Catholic (conciliar), and Apostolic Church, in which we also believe—that they all may be one, as We are one (John 17:22)—is at work in us.”
Another Encyclical, of pan-Orthodox significance, issued by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Holy Synod in 1895, likewise speaks in an Orthodox ecumenical language:
“Every Christian heart ought to be filled with the desire for the union of the Churches, and especially the entire Orthodox oikoumene, inspired by the true spirit of piety, in accordance with the divine purpose of the founding of the Church by the God-Man Christ our Saviour, rightly desires the union of the Churches in one rule of faith and on the foundation of apostolic and patristic teaching, where the Cornerstone is Jesus Christ Himself” (Eph. 2:20).
This Encyclical was likewise addressed to the Roman pope in response to his invitation to the Orthodox to unite with Rome. The reply was given in the spirit of Orthodox Ecumenism—in response to Rome-centered ecumenism. Orthodox Ecumenism at the beginning of the twentieth century is also expressed in two encyclicals of the great Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III, issued in 1902 and 1904, to which all the Orthodox Churches at that time responded positively and continued to respond to this challenge of the age.
In a similar manner, and perhaps with even greater love, Saint Nektarios of Pentapolis of Aegina responded to the same “ecumenical invitation” of the Roman pope in his two-volume work A Historical Study of the Causes of the Schism, a work full of love and zeal for the truth, yet without hatred or anathemas.
It is well known that Greek “Old Calendarists” are divided in their attitude towards Saint Nektarios of Aegina, ranging from acceptance to anathematization, just as Serbian “zealots” are divided with regard to Saint Nikolaj of Žiča. Some would like to claim that Nikolaj “intended to establish a zealot Church” and that he therefore allegedly “already during the time of the communist Patriarch Germanus broke communion with the Belgrade Patriarchate,” and that for this reason he “went to the Russians abroad in America,” while others publicly revile and slander him.
We respond to these falsehoods and slanders solely for the sake of innocent and uninformed listeners and readers: Saint Nikolaj in fact restrained zealot extremism already within the Bogomoljački movement before the war in our country, and in America he restrained the loud agitator, Hieromonk Arsenije (Tošović) of Jordanville, from creating schism within the Serbian Church. He maintained normal communion with the Patriarchate in Belgrade, as well as with the patriarchal Bishop Dionisije. When he went to the Russians, he did so not in order to break communion, but in order to teach and serve as rector at the Theological Seminary of Saint Tikhon, and not with the Russian Church Abroad, but with the Russian Church in America. Bishop Nikolaj maintained good and normal Orthodox ecclesial relations with all Russians, as well as with all other Orthodox Churches, both Old and New Calendar alike.
As for Nikolaj’s attitude towards Ecumenism, the Saint, as an Orthodox bishop and theologian, participated in ecumenical meetings and dialogues between the two world wars, and after the war, in America, he was present at the assembly of the World Council of Churches in Evanston in 1954. Saint Nikolaj evaluated that assembly positively, especially the participation and stance of the Orthodox, and on that occasion wrote the following:
“The unity of the Church cannot be achieved by mutual concessions, but only by the acceptance by all of the one true faith in its entirety, as it was handed down by the Apostles and formulated at the Ecumenical Councils; in other words, by the return of all Christians to that one, unique, and undivided Church to which the ancestors of all Christians throughout the world belonged during the first nine centuries after Christ. And this is the Orthodox Church… When principles of faith and the concept of the Church are at stake, the Orthodox have neither the right nor the need to change their position… The Orthodox Church recognizes neither right-wing (zealot) nor left-wing (Protestant) categories.”
As for the attitude of Father Justin towards Ecumenism, it is true that his book The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism was published; however, it must be stated at once that in this work he has in view non-Orthodox, heretical Roman and Genevan, that is, Roman Catholic and Protestant Ecumenism, whereas his entire theology of the Church (and especially the third volume of his Dogmatics, written afterwards) represents a striking example of Orthodox testimony to the all-embracing character, that is, the conciliarity, of Orthodox God-manly, conciliar-catholic ecclesiology—that is, of Orthodox Theohumanism (in contrast to the shallow humanism of the West and to such an Ecumenism), concerning the pan-human and pan-cosmic liturgical All-Unity of all creatures and of the entire world in Christ the God-Man, in His heavenly-and-earthly Church, the Church of the Holy Trinity.
And yet, even in the aforementioned book Father Justin writes at the very beginning:
“Ecumenism is a movement that from itself gives birth to numerous questions. And all these questions, in fact, spring from a single desire and return to a single desire. And that desire wants one thing: the True Church of Christ. And the True Church of Christ bears, and must bear, the answers to all the questions and sub-questions that Ecumenism poses. For if the Church of Christ does not resolve the age-old questions of the human spirit, then it is not even necessary… Among beings, man is the most complex and most enigmatic being. That is why God descended to earth and therefore became man… For that reason He also remained entirely on earth in His Church, of which He is the Head, and it is His Body. She—the True Church of Christ, the Orthodox Church: and in her the entire God-Man with all His glad tidings and all His perfections”
By this Father Justin shows that the God-manly, unique event and reality—Church = Christ—is salvation also for contemporary ecumenical searches and wanderings, the only Hope of the fallen world and humanity. His criticism, towards the end of the book, is directed against “humanistic Ecumenism,” that is, Rome-centered, papocentric Ecumenism (the reduction of the Church to the person of the Roman pope), and against the Genevan-Protestant understanding of Ecumenism (namely, the uniting of all incomplete and defective ecclesial communities, according to the so-called branch theory, into a single alliance, congregation, “confederation,” etc., regardless of more or less incomplete or distorted faith and an abstract understanding of the Holy Mysteries and sacred ministry). [6]
Likewise, in that book Father Justin called Ecumenism a pan-heresy, and we recall that this same term (panairesis) had already been used by Patriarch Germanos II of Constantinople (1222–1240)—the very one who issued to Saint Sava the Tomos of autocephaly of the Serbian Church—for the Latin errors-heresies of his time. [7] Yet it must be borne in mind that this was preceded by the Fourth Crusade and the occupation of the Orthodox Church in Byzantium by the Latin hierarchy (except for the small Nicaean Empire), as well as the holding of the papal “robber council” at the Lateran in 1215 (where Thomas Morosini was installed as the Latin “Patriarch of Constantinople”). And yet Patriarch Germanos II nevertheless conducted dialogue with the Latins on two occasions, at Nymphaeum and Nicaea (1233–1234), and sought the convening of an Ecumenical Council, as later did the hesychast Fathers (the holy Patriarchs of Constantinople Callistus and Philotheus; the disciple of Palamas Joseph Bryennios, and his disciple Mark of Ephesus).
Father Justin, who, while studying in England (1916–1919), did not have the opportunity to participate in ecumenical encounters and dialogues, nevertheless knew that Bishop Nikolaj had done so, and despite this he already during his lifetime regarded and called him a Saint. He also knew of the ecumenical witness of his acquaintance and theological kindred spirit Fr. Georges Florovsky, and he did not doubt him either, just as he did not doubt the young and “deepest theologian,” as he himself called him, John Zizioulas, when the latter, still a layman, visited him at the Monastery of Ćelije.
We know the venerable Father Justin well and personally; we know that he never broke communion with any Orthodox Church or with any bishop or patriarch, not even with Serbian Patriarch German (1958–1990)—as Serbian “zealots” shamelessly lie—nor even when Patriarch German was one of the “presidents of the World Council of Churches” (a purely honorary title, without any binding obligations or tasks, just as was the participation of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the WCC). [8] As a free and responsible member of the Church of Christ, Justin prophetically admonished when necessary and also criticized in writing, but he never created schism; on the contrary, he said that “schism is easily created, but very difficult to heal” (which is why he was also opposed to the imprudently provoked and deepened “American Schism,” as well as to the “Macedonian Schism”).
In the same way, we know that Father Justin, in contrast to Rome-centered, papal ecumenism and the Genevan Protestant understanding of ecumenism, approved of us younger theologians when we spoke and wrote that there exists also an Orthodox, conciliar Ecumenism, with the goal of the unity of all Christians in the Truth—Christ—and in the grace of the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the conciliar character and fullness of the Church of God—the One, Holy, Catholic (conciliar), and Apostolic Church.
From the book The Delusions of Schismatics and Old Calendarists
Bishop Athanasios Jevtić (2004)
