The age of ecumenical councils covers three major controversies that hit the Church: the Trinitarian heresies, the heresies about Christ, and the persecution of Christians who venerated iconography. Many people gave up their life for these doctrines. The councils didn’t always reach the right verdict the first time but there were victories that were at very crucial times supported by the state or the prevailing cultural tide at the time. What is important about each of these theological successes is that it involves the Orthodox teaching of personalism. The Trinity is one God in three persons, not the same person. Christ is a person who is perfect in his humanity and perfect in his divinity. Icons reflect holy persons who have been deified and who are praying ceaselessly for us all to be saved individually. In Holy Orthodoxy personal theology doesn’t sacrifice technical, abstract, or philosophical understanding. They are integrated. A faith that isn’t rational isn’t really faith in anything but ignorance. Rationalism shouldn’t be confused with rationality that has been given to us as a part of every human creature. Our mind can grasp through the senses what is beyond our sensate world. That is a gift of God’s wisdom to us that we are free to pursue or not to help us practice and seek wisdom and the glory of the virtues, which is how we can participate in Christ. A large part of the debates in the ecumenical councils revolve around trying to articulate and maintain the teaching about Christ’s personhood and the one Godhead. Those debates had to include Christ’s incarnation and its connection to physical bodies, matter – the stuff that is used to paint icons. The “restoration of all” of humanity and the individual choice of each person doesn’t seem to negate each other in Orthodoxy.
There seems to be a very widespread misunderstanding about the goodness of humanity and the Holy Trinity in the western world that seems to go unnoticed. Many Christians think and behave as if we are "self-enclosed individual substances” and an independently, “metaphysically simple” creature like the Holy Trinity. Especially related to this idea of every soul for himself is that evil and sin, by extension death, are inherently part of us. That is impossible in Holy Orthodoxy and it’s contrary to Orthodox teaching. Passions are foreign growths in humanity that are not consubstantial with human nature. Our human relationships and web of interconnectedness, our history of associations, cultural learning, our memories and attachments to friendships are so subtly treated nowadays as all some kind of “defiling entanglement.” This is not to contradict ascetical and monastic Christian literature, because they too struggle to be truly free in relationship to other people. By analogy, we are reflections of the Holy Trinity’s love in our relationship to other persons. Persons require other persons to exist. Solus Christianus nullus Christianus, Metropolitan Hilarion has explained in these volumes.
There are summaries of the characters, conclusions, contradictions of each of the major ecumenical councils that will bring us to a fuller and more mature understanding of how canonical structure and history of the Church unfolds.
The fathers used a Greek term, hypostasis, to indicate person while “essence” meant the unknowable and “inscrutable” nature of God to human beings. We are required to “honor and accept” the ecumenical councils that were later integrated by “consensus” after much reflection by holy fathers of the Church. But not all of them were honorable or acceptable. For example, one of the councils of Chalcedon was later considered a “robber council.” All of these councils were convoked by the Roman emperor in Constantinople with the participation of the Pope in “the West,” actually on the Italian peninsula, with his legates. But it often didn’t include the whole inhabited world. These ecclesial convocations and decisions didn’t always reach the Christians of Persia, India, Ethiopia, or Armenia until fifty, sixty, seventy or more years later. Monarchies, not necessarily identical to empires, since democracies can also be imperial like classical Athens, tend to be conservative, long-term strategizing, future oriented in behavior; resources tend to be preserved as privately owned land. St. John of Damascus reminds us that the Church and state have separate roles. He teaches, “It is not for emperors to legislate for the Church … Political good order is the concern of emperors, the ecclesiastical constitution that of pastors and teachers … We submit to you, O Emperor, in the matters of this life, taxes, revenues, commercial dues, in which our concerns are entrusted to you. For the ecclesiastical constitution we have pastors who speak to us the word and represent the ecclesiastical ordinance” (80). It’s one thing to discuss the issues of power, and it’s another to view culture and Christian practice together. There hasn’t been very strong voices that argue for a separation of culture and religion. That would seem unnatural. Social relationships and historical experiences makes us who we are, and our cultural identity doesn’t have to be uniform or singular. Often monarchies incorporated many diverse peoples and languages and religions, even if they existed in the minority. State really implies questions of power, military, human justice, and economy. The Church has always recognized a higher, divine kingdom without disparaging or escaping this current life, and our particular circumstances.
Metropolitan Hilarion reminds us that many of the theological and dogmatic victories of the Church didn’t happen without the direct intervention and help of the Christian emperor and the Pope of Rome. In fact, the Popes of Rome often stood up against the emperors who weren’t Orthodox in faith and especially the iconoclastic emperors. Metr. Hilarion, then, concludes that the highest authority in the Church isn’t a council or conciliarism as many Orthodox might think, nor is it papal supremacy and infallibility of the Pope of Rome, as Roman Catholicism teaches today. But ultimate authority is the local Church who is in communion with other local Churches headed by one bishop who can call councils and make decisions that must be reconciled with the history of the Church in its liturgical life. Christ is the Head of the Church and it is guided by the Holy Spirit. Ironically, the best example of Orthodox Church authority is the Church in Rome when it was unified with the rest of the eastern patriarchates during the age of the ecumenical councils. The Roman bishop convened its own local councils, declared its own teachings, it stood up to heretical emperors, it defended iconography and tempered the interference of the emperor into ecclesial affairs and doctrines. Rome was a bulwark of the Orthodox faith in the age of the ecumenical councils. The next chapter deals with the rise of monasticism and ascetical literature, which have made one of the biggest impacts on Orthodox theology.